Slumming
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Victorian anthropologists’ fascination with the sexual practices of primitive peoples closely mirrored social reformers’ own obsession with working-class sexual promiscuity as a root cause of overpopulation, demoralization, and poverty.126 Given how widely both bourgeois and working-class people identified masculinity with economic independence and the male breadwinner, Greenwood and his readers were well prepared to discover that male workhouse casuals—who were by definition dependent and did not engage in manly labor—resembled other “savages” in their spectacular deviation from accepted norms of masculinity and sexuality. As Greenwood pithily remarked in his sardonic essay, “Mr. Bumble and His Enemy the Casual,” any man entering the casual ward “consign[ed] his manhood and his long-cherished self respect … to the grave.”127
While Greenwood and other writers deployed racial rhetoric in describing homeless tramps, contemporaries explicitly linked “A Night” to urgent issues of imperial rule. Throughout the winter of 1865 and 1866, articles about metropolitan workhouses and casual wards often shared the same page with disclosures about the British treatment of colored Jamaicans during and after the Morant Bay “insurrection.” The free mulatto George William Gordon, an articulate critic of colonial misgovernment and the supposed leader of the insurrection, had been summarily executed in a military court rather than granted the rights of a freeborn Englishman to a full trial. Hundreds of other colored Jamaicans were victims of the brutality of the British army and its military courts. In January and February of 1866, Londoners began to assimilate the results of the official commission of inquiry into the ruthless way in which Sir George Grey’s erstwhile protege, Governor Eyre, had suppressed the insurrection and the character of the justice meted out by hastily convened British military courts in its wake.128 The Pall Mall Gazette denounced the distant miscarriage of justice by British officials in Jamaica as “not only an outrage on the rules of law, but on the plainest dictates of natural justice and common good sense.”129
British conduct in Jamaica deeply divided champions of the rights and liberties of the working class in Britain and elicited some surprising comparisons to “A Night.” The Christian newspaper the Orb, for example, combined antipathy toward those who condemned Governor Eyre with ardent criticism of parochial indifference to the poor. In an extended editorial, the Orb belittled what it took to be the self-righteous stance of the liberal humanitarian supporters of Jamaican liberties who met at London’s famed Exeter Hall.
Exeter-Hall will have its May meetings in due time and we shall be invited to extend our sympathies to the blessed niggers—we beg pardon—men and brothers of colour in the West Indies…. True to their duty, the Lambeth rector and guardians will assuredly be there. Their sympathies are surely very warm towards the inhabitants of the Polar circle or the Esquimaux…. The guardians of the London parishes will still set at defiance the law which would secure a night’s shelter for the homeless, and the various Sodoms and pandemoniums of the metropolis will still flourish…. Still, Mr. Farnall will visit the workhouses, and still, the show-wards and show-beds will be ready for him, kept scrupulously clean and all right.
Infuriated by the hypocrisy that led clergy to weep for the mistreatment of blacks abroad but to defend the degradation of the English poor at home, the writer concluded with the sarcastic observation that “verily, we are a Christian people.”130
The Orb’s one-sided appropriation of the controversy surrounding “A Night” to chastise Exeter-Hall’s liberal humanitarianism was but one of many examples of the diverse ways in which contemporaries chose to extract lessons from the casual-ward scandal that served their own particular agendas. To a remarkable extent, contemporaries were unable or unwilling to act upon Greenwood’s claim that casual wards not only harbored dirty bodies but also the dirtiest and most unnatural form of male sexuality—sodomy. As the tidal wave of anxieties unleashed by “A Night” washed up on distant shores, its powerful source—the “hideous enjoyments” of the male casual ward—no longer seemed to matter.
Refusing to initiate a public debate about how to regulate sex between men, reformers and shapers of public policy returned to the much safer and more familiar terrain of workhouse infirmaries. All but eclipsed as an issue in January 1866, the workhouse infirmary campaign was ultimately the greatest public-policy beneficiary of “A Night.” Under the aegis of Gathorne-Hardy’s presidency of the Poor Law Board during the shortlived Conservative ministry that came to power in the summer of 1866, the movement made rapid gains. By February 1867, Gathorne-Hardy successfully introduced a measure to the House of Commons for “improving the management of sick and other poor in the metropolis.”131 The passage of the Metropolitan Poor Bill in March 1867 marked a quiet revolution in the way public authorities served the health-care needs of the London poor within their localities. It not only separated the healthy from the infirm but also established the Metropolitan Asylums Board to oversee the management of a fledgling system of state hospitals for the poor.
“Two-Days’ Dream”: The Characters of “A Night” as Instant Celebrities
From Greenwood’s memorable cast of characters, readers selected heroes who spoke to their specific concerns, needs, and aspirations. Hoping to enhance their own standing, most members of the press lionized Greenwood. “Daddy,” however, was the darling of the masses. Daddy was a workhouse pauper named Budge, who served as a warder in the casual ward in exchange for improved rations and sleeping quarters. Greenwood’s whimsical depiction of Budge made him a celebrity. G. R. Sims recalled that “songs were composed in [Daddy’s] honour, songs sentimental, comic, and serio-comic.”132 Daddy discharged himself from the workhouse and sat as a model for an “enterprising” photographer for five shillings, undoubtedly a princely sum for Daddy. Portraits of the blinking, almost dazed, old man sold briskly on the streets. A correspondent for the Daily Telegraph overheard women with “pretty eyes” and “pretty voices” wasting their money and their “benevolent feelings” on his photograph. “Half the sympathy evoked for ‘Daddy,’” the paper noted acerbically, “might have rescued a dozen families in Bethnalgreen.” A chastened Daddy, his photographic windfall squandered, returned to the Lambeth Workhouse a few days later.133 The magazine of humor and social satire, Punch relished the inversions and ironies of “A Night” and offered its own running commentary on the scandal in words and pictures. It naughtily imagined Daddy’s disconsolate attempts to compose verse “heppigrams” to commemorate his ignominious return to the Lambeth Workhouse:
Of Life’s extremes each towards other stretches,
Till houseless wretchedness this comfort hath;
That our C.P.’s (or casual pauper wretches)
Are all C.B.’s, Companions of the Bath.134
Daddy’s flirtation with fame was not yet over; nor had photographs of Daddy slaked the public thirst for irrefutable evidence that the people and scenes depicted in “A Night” were “true” and “real.” Several weeks after Daddy’s return to the Lambeth Workhouse, Joseph Cave hired him (supposedly at the salary of £2 per week) to play himself at the Marylebone production of A Casual Ward. Though Daddy said almost nothing, he was “greeted with a warmth many practiced actors might envy” according to the reviewer for the Era.135 Cave no doubt hoped to capitalize on the public’s love affair with Daddy, or rather, its infatuation with Greenwood’s depiction of him.
By making the “real” Daddy into a character in a stage melodrama, Cave satisfied, but also undercut, the urge to verify Greenwood’s account that led contemporaries to want to see Daddy for themselves. On the one hand, Daddy’s presence on stage made Greenwood’s experiences authentic by allowing the audience to meet for themselves someone Greenwood had encountered in the workhouse. On the other hand, Daddy playing Daddy confounded those who aspired to clear-cut distinctions between fictions and facts, artifice and social reality. Such confusion was part and parcel of Greenwood’s self-consciously theatrical decision to impersonate a tramp to learn the truth abou
t the workhouse.
Cave’s production and Greenwood’s articles both contributed to that “mania for realities” that ironically encouraged Victorians across the social spectrum to understand the lives of the poor as an ongoing series of dramatic performances. If theatrical conventions enabled the rich to distance themselves from the brutal realities of metropolitan poverty even as they claimed to confront them, such conventions offered the poor not only the consolation of pathos and humor but a sense of themselves as heroic agents of their own destiny.136
Long after Budge, the “real” Daddy, had been entirely forgotten, Greenwood’s Daddy remained an archetypal figure of kindness in the lore of the London slums and in music-hall ballads. In her naturalistic slum novel, Captain Lobe, written more than twenty years after “A Night,” Margaret Harkness expected her readers to recognize immediately her allusion to Greenwood’s story and to smile at the illustrious company Daddy now kept in East London:
“Waxwork Cosmorama and Panorama, programme one penny!” shouted a little girl at the entrance, … “containing our most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, Napoleon the Third, the Shah of Persia, Joan of Arc … kind Old Daddy of the Lambeth Casual Ward, made popular by a visit from a Lord, who, seeing the kindness of Old Daddy to the paupers, made him a present of a £5 pound note.”137
Daddy’s apotheosis as a wax figure in a slum novel constituted the final stage in the reproduction and commodificaton of his image for the financial benefit of others. Although the careworn old pauper had only been allowed to enjoy what Punch called “two-days’ dream” of celebrity, his image became an enduring “spectacular reality” in Victorian culture.
Two other members of the dramatis personae of “A Night” briefly shared the spotlight with Greenwood and Daddy: one of K.’s adolescent companions, a boy named Punch, as well as a “respectable” man in the Lambeth Casual Ward whose philological musings on the word “kindle” had impressed Greenwood. A few days after Greenwood’s visit, Punch had been expelled from the workhouse for destroying his regulation blue shirt—satirically called a “Lambeth silk” by inmates—and sent to prison for three weeks. A week later he surfaced at a supper for two hundred destitute boys hosted by the Boy’s Refuge in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The idea for the supper, according to the secretary of the refuge, William Williams, owed entirely to Greenwood’s “self-imposed penance” in spending a night in the workhouse. The ravenous boys, who had been recruited from casual wards, feasted on huge portions of roast beef, bread, coffee, and “large dishes of smoking plum pudding.” They were then treated to hymns and a speech by Lord Shaftesbury then handed four pence to pay for a lodging house.138 Twenty-four of the boys, including Punch, entered the refuge to be taught a trade and “helped on in the world.” The secretary, Mr. Williams, noted with joy that after only a few days in the refuge, Punch had become an altogether different boy: “It would have made your heart right glad had you seen [Punch] … as I did this morning, with his flesh clean and wholesome…. There he was sitting on the shoemaker’s seat, sewing away with a hearty good-will, contented and happy.”139 Williams’ message was unmistakable. Left in the hands of poor-law guardians, boys like Punch would become criminals and moral reprobates. Only private Christian charity could remake them into healthy and productive workers.
The story of the discovery of Greenwood’s “respectable man” owed much less to serendipity than to the ingenuity of J. C. Parkinson. Parkinson was a minor civil servant at Somerset House (home of the General Register Office and the Board of Inland Revenue) and sometime writer on social issues for various periodicals. During the two years preceding the publication of “A Night,” Parkinson devoted much of his leisure time to investigating and reporting on abuses in the administration of the Houseless Poor Act and on conditions in workhouses. In an essay published in June 1865 in Temple Bar, he detailed a day he spent in the Marylebone Workhouse with a poor-law inspector, possibly H. B. Farnall. “Impelled alike by duty and inclination to peer below the surface of this mighty London,” Parkinson entered “blind alleys and dark courts; … into dirty frowzy houses … where a stranger and an Englishman seldom penetrates.” He had carefully studied “the abodes, haunts, ways, manners, foibles, tastes, and pleasures of the criminal classes; the lurking-place of the professional mendicant, and the home of the swindling letter-writer.”140 Although Parkinson had a vast and intimate knowledge of the casual poor, Greenwood’s articles “revealed a depth of shameless mismanagement [he] had never fathomed” and made him anxious to learn “what the impression the horrors written of by the amateur had left upon the minds of habitual sleepers in workhouses.”
If the novelty of “A Night” lay in Greenwood’s masquerade as an “amateur” casual, Parkinson proposed an even more unprecedented scheme: to retell Greenwood’s story from the point of view of a “real” casual. He published a brief advertisement in the Times on the morning of January 23, 1866, and asked workhouse masters to spread the word among their inmates that he was willing to pay a sovereign to every man who could prove that he was in the shed of the Lambeth Casual Ward on the night Greenwood’s incognito visit.141 After verifying the claims of each of his respondents, Parkinson entered into an extraordinary correspondence with a man he called the Real Casual, an educated draughtsman sucked into the vortex of poverty by illness and misfortune and whom Greenwood had identified as a “respectable man.”
The Real Casual sent Parkinson a detailed treatise on the casual wards and charitable night refuges of London. He highlighted the extreme diversity of conditions among workhouses and widespread indifference to and violation of Poor Law Board regulations. Casuals not only spoke their own distinct language, they used casual wards as hubs in a thriving underground economy of information and goods.142 The Real Casual and many of his fellow travellers were remarkably knowledgeable about their legal rights and quite vocal, if not always successful, in demanding them. Far from being passive recipients of public welfare, they actively claimed their rights and sought to manipulate the system to their advantage. They abhorred being made into a spectacle by workhouse guardians who “examined us all intently [during breakfast], like so many wild beasts in an exhibition.”143 Lying and dissimulation were not only commonplace, they were virtually mandated by the way in which public casual wards and private soup kitchens were run. The poor never gave their real names or occupations for fear of being identified and turned away as habitual applicants. The incentives to lie infuriated the Real Casual. “You get a basin of pea-soup and a quantity of bread-and-cheese [from soup kitchens],” he observed bitterly, “proportionate to the number of lies you tell.” “If you say you are going out of town and have also a wife and children, perhaps a quartern loaf and a pound of cheese, may be your share—but if you tell the truth, and say you are going to stay in town to try and get employment, small, indeed, will be your quantity.”144 The moral of the Real Casual’s story was quite clear to Parkinson, who consistently linked the results of his slumming to the formulation of social policy:
We want uniformity of treatment in the refuges kept up by voluntary subscription, as well as in those prescribed by law; and this we shall never have until the central authority is strengthened, and some amicable understanding is established between the two…. Give London a uniform poor rate, and the rest follows; withhold it, and jobbing will be perpetuated, charity misplaced, and clamorous rogues lie and fatten, while the honest poor languish and starve.145
Politics and poor-law administration, not regulating sex, were the key issues for Parkinson.
The Real Casual did not dwell on what had happened on the night of January 8, 1866, in the Lambeth Casual Ward because Greenwood’s narrative was, he acknowledged, almost wholly correct. In a letter he wrote to Parkinson on January 23, 1866, three days before the Daily News published its exposé of the certified lodging house, the Real Casual lamented that the Lambeth “lodging-house accommodation [to which he had been sent as an overflow casual] … was a great dea
l worse than the crank—in truth getting out of the frying-pan into the fire.” Confirming the details of the sleeping arrangements that had appalled both Greenwood and the correspondent for the Daily News, he nonetheless took exception to Greenwood’s suggestion that obscene words necessarily implied obscene acts between men. The Real Casual’s description of a night he spent in the workhouse in Gray’s Inn Road notably lacks Greenwood’s sexualized treatment of a near identical scene in Lambeth.
In a few minutes after supper is demolished, a pauper inmate conducts us, by the aid of a lanthorn, down some stone-stairs, and at the bottom puts us in a room, and closing the door after him, not forgetting to lock it, leaves us in darkness…. I was laid among two more on a mattress on the floor, with nothing to cover us but a piece of sacking. It was a cold night in the later part of November, and I never in all my life suffered more from cold. My two companions and myself were perfectly naked—not even our shirts on (no one who knows workhouses will ever sleep in them with their shirts on, for fear of catching certain insects); and as I laid in the middle between the two, you may judge my position was not very pleasant. I might have been a little warmer if I had choosed to cling up to my companions, as they wanted me; but I would sooner have borne more than I did than do so, for two dirtier or more repulsive men I never saw. Not a wink of sleep did I have that night.146
This account is much less transparent than it might appear at first glance. According to the Real Casual’s own words, what made his “position” so unpleasant and prevented him from “clinging” to his bedfellows was aversion to intimacy with them not because they were men, but rather because they were repulsively dirty. This distinction opens up two different, though not necessarily incompatible, interpretations. On the one hand, it is possible that the Real Casual found nothing abhorrent about men sharing their bodies with one another. On the other hand, physical contact that a gentleman observer might choose to construe as sexual may well be merely an undesirable but sexless survival strategy from the perspective of a naked, freezing pauper. Whether acts are sexual rests not in the eye of the beholder, but rather in the minds of those involved. The queerness of “A Night” as a text and the casual ward as a space derive less from the putative intimate physical activities of the homeless men and boys, but more from the way in which some men—and not others—chose to interpret these activities.