by Koven, Seth
In the final analysis, very poor men, women, and children like the Real Casual had the most at stake in the controversy surrounding “A Night,” so it is worth asking what, if anything, they thought about it. Within a few days of its publication, the class “usually termed the ‘lower’” was avidly reading and discussing “A Night.” “We have seen it in the hands of ragged boys,” one newspaper reported, “scarcely able to spell over its contents; we have seen it conned over by a group of persons looking not much unlike casuals themselves.”147 When the poor read “A Night,” apparently many saw themselves—not Greenwood, Daddy or K.—as its beleaguered heroes.
Greenwood’s articles spurred some to rebel against the indignities meted out to them by the workhouse and its officials. The South London Journal claimed that “A Night” had made casuals “saucier and more defiant than ever.” The incidence of reported cases of workhouse inmates tearing up their clothes increased dramatically in the last two weeks of January as the casual poor themselves read, heard about, and discussed “A Night.” For the destitute poor, “tearing” or “breaking” up their clothes was at once a pathetic gesture of defiance and a practical response to their situation. It allowed inmates to vent outrage over their treatment and forced officials to provide them with a new and valuable suit of clothes. Given the minute resources the poor law made available to workhouse inmates, tearing up was a perversely logical and effective way for paupers to claim some control over their own lives. When two eighteen-year-old women were sentenced to a month’s hard labour for “tearing up” their clothes, they responded by singing “a requiem over their rent garments, ‘Here we are, here we goes; we are the —— what tears up our clothes.’” Their performance inspired one observer to conclude that “the Houseless Poor Act has developed in such as these an exuberant vileness, which shocks us the more as it also classifies with them the honest destitute wayfarers.”148 Notice that it is the act which is blamed both for developing the “vileness” and for failing to adequately classify populations dependent on the state for food and shelter.
“A Night” stimulated officials to wonder how they could keep order in workhouses if inmates preferred prison to the casual ward. Such questions puzzled the lord mayor of London a few days after the publication of “A Night” as he attempted to decide how to punish a lad named William McIntosh. The boy had ripped up his workhouse clothes in front of the superintendent when he was told to dress in the morning. Alluding to “A Night,” the lord mayor said that “if all we read be true the prisoner would be treated better in gaol than he is in the workhouse…. It was utterly useless to send [him] to prison.” His hands tied, the lord mayor needed more time to find an appropriate punishment and remanded the boy to the custody of the workhouse.149 It would be easy to dismiss the lord mayor’s indecision as a trifling matter. In itself, the case of the boy McIntosh was inconsequential. But in such gestures of overt insubordination by the poor and in the paralysis of judgment they induced in the lord mayor, the British elite confronted the limits of their own authority, the undisguised hostility of the poor, and the circumscribed power of local and central government. What made “A Night” so terrifying was its depiction of a nightmarish world bereft of the coercive sanctions and effective instruments of state classification needed to control the real and imagined social, economic, and sexual forces of London’s underclasses.
HOMELESSNESS AS HOMOSEXUALITY: SEXOLOGY, SOCIAL POLICY, AND THE 1898 VAGRANCY ACT
The publication of “A Night” had a volcanic impact on John Addington Symonds, the brilliant man of letters and scholar of Renaissance Italy. In spite of his own frank but as yet unconsummated passion for men, Symonds had married Catherine North in 1864 in an attempt to make himself into a “natural” man and gain the approval of his beloved father. Symonds was acutely aware of his own sexual love for men150 and the strain of living a false “double” life which outwardly conformed to social convention sickened him.151 In his autobiography, he elaborately set the stage for an impending crisis triggered by two episodes of metropolitan slumming. Overwhelmed by same-sex urges, he wandered through “the sordid streets between my home and Regent’s Park.” After encountering lewd phallic graffiti during his walk, his “vague and morbid craving of the previous years defined itself as a precise hunger after sensual pleasure, whereof I had not dreamed before save in repulsive visions of the night.” In his diary, Symonds explicitly connected this disturbing stroll with an event that transpired several weeks later, in mid-January 1866: “I also read Greenwood’s article ‘The Amateur Casual’ in an early number of the Pall Mall Gazette.” “This brought,” he explained, “the emotional tumour which was gathering within me to maturity…. Since then I have suffered incessantly from my moral trouble.”152
Symonds’s “repulsive visions of the night” merged into his experience reading Greenwood’s dark narrative. Greenwood’s articles pushed Symonds to go beyond a largely idealized and aestheticized love of “comrades” and fully satisfy his urgent need for physical sexual relations with men.153 Symonds was so stimulated by Greenwood’s erotic subtext that he believed his experience reading it altered the course of his sexual and conjugal life. A master of sublimation and self-censoring writing,154 he seems to have had little difficulty deciphering Greenwood’s homoerotic message and his apparent conflation of male same-sex desire with cross-class philanthropic social investigation. The Gazette articles inspired Symonds to write a long and passionate poem about cross-class love between men, “John Morden,” which included a lengthy section entitled “Kay,” in homage to Greenwood’s depraved but beautiful slum youth. Symonds’s appropriation and reworking of Greenwood’s text does not, of course, prove that Greenwood shared Symonds’s inclinations, but it does help to shed some light on the covert language necessarily deployed in discussions of same-sex desires. To his confidant, Henry Graham Dakyns, Symonds wrote a short, heretofore cryptic, letter: “As you cared for Kay, I send you the rest of John Morden. Please return him. It is an old moral put extravagantly.”155 The phrasing is intentionally ambiguous. Which “Kay” did Dakyns care for: Symonds’s, Greenwood’s, the real Kay and boys like him, or some combination of all three? To emphasize his sense of sharing Greenwood’s discoveries and perhaps to remind Dakyns to read the Pall Mall Gazette, he indicated that his return address was simply “Pall Mall G.”
For Symonds, benevolence was intimately wedded to eros. Symonds struggled to understand and justify his same-sex longings within an elevated moral and ethical framework that distinguished between different kinds of desires and between desire and sex acts.156 He disdained as impure the exploitative cross-class liaisons pursued by many of his acquaintances, such as Lord Ronald Gower, who regularly went slumming in search of soldiers and laboring men willing to trade sex for cash.157 His most satisfying relations were always with men of much lower social class whom he sought to educate and elevate through “Arcadian” love: “I’ve never been able to understand,” he opined, “why people belonging to different strata in society—if they love each other—could not enter into comradeship.”158 Philanthropy was both figuratively and literally the “love of man” in Symonds’s lexicon.
Symonds believed that if social conventions permitted free and full expression of the ideas prompted by his reading of the Amateur Casual, he would “have perhaps a subject there of transcendental ethics.”159 This subject was nothing less than the harmonizing of eros with altruism through cross-class brotherly love between men. In 1866, neither Symonds nor his contemporaries were prepared for such an undertaking. None of Greenwood’s readers (including those attuned to “A Night”’s sexual themes) seems to have suggested that the inmates of the Lambeth Casual Ward were part of group of persons defined by their sexuality. Rather, their behavior illustrated the ways in which the exigencies of extreme poverty—the need for human warmth in the absence of proper clothing and heat—intersected with criminality, immorality, and official incompetence and parsimony. Contemporaries frequently used th
e term “blackguardism” as a convenient albeit imprecise shorthand that included the indecencies Greenwood claimed to have observed, ranging from blasphemy, swearing, thievery, to same-sex acts. Kay and his admirers may (or may not) have committed unspeakable “abominations,” but it was their moral and economic status and undomiciled lives, and not their sexual identities, that defined them as a distinct class of persons: they were tramps or vagrants, not sodomites or mariannes.
In the vastly different world of the 1890s, Symonds’s long deferred hope to take up his “subject of transcendental ethics” no longer seemed chimerical. In the three decades following the publication of “A Night,” Britons had been forced to confront the existence of cross-class sex between men in London many times, albeit within the context of scandals. The metropolitan press had feasted on sensational disclosures during the arrest and trial of the cross-dressers, Boulton and Park (1870), the aristocratic habitués of the Cleveland Street brothel (1889), and, most spectacularly, Oscar Wilde.160 With each of these sensations, Britons came closer to developing a vocabulary and an intellectual framework by which to understand the relationship between same-sex desires and behaviors on the one hand, and homosexual identity on the other. It was within this highly charged atmosphere that Symonds began to work with the young sexologist Havelock Ellis to write a psychological and historical analysis of “sexual inversion”—one of many terms developed by sexologists to refer to same-sex desire. Despite fundamental differences in their approach to the subject and their attitudes toward sexology as a science, Symonds and Ellis both sought to use their study as a battering ram to knock down the 1885 Labouchère amendment, which had made sexual contact between men subject to harsh criminal punishment.161 Their study drew heavily on case histories written by “inverts” who attempted to make sense of their own sexual histories.162 Symonds even contributed a loosely disguised fragment of his own sexual autobiography.163 To avoid legal obstacles in Britain, Ellis and Symonds’s work, Sexual Inversion, first appeared under joint authorship in German in 1896, three years after Symonds’s death.
The figures of “Kay,” the burly ruffians whose “doss” Kay shares, and the philanthropic gentlemen-observers seem to reappear, albeit in different guises, throughout the pages of Sexual Inversion. Many of the case studies submitted by their correspondents spoke about the ways in which class and race differences substituted for sexual difference as the axis of their desire. “M. N.,” for example, noted the “peculiar predilection shown by inverts for youths of inferior social position.”164 While this “predilection” was undeniably sexual, it could also provide “the motive power for an enlarged philanthropic activity” in which “morality” has “become one with love.”165 Here was an ethics of male same-sex love perfectly calibrated to Symonds’s values: a reimagining of the ennobling erotic ideals of the ancient world within the context of modern, class-divided, social life.
The widespread belief that unemployment unsexed a man may well have been an underlying assumption contributing to the ways in which Greenwood, his readers, and Ellis and Symonds chose to understand and represent the sexual practices of male vagabonds and casuals.166 After all, because success as a breadwinner was one of the defining characteristics of manliness, failure to be gainfully employed signaled deviation from acceptable norms of masculinity. Ellis and Symonds claimed that “sexual inversion” was particularly widespread among tramps and criminals and devoted an entire appendix, “Homosexuality Among Tramps,” to the topic.167 The appendix was written by an American sexologist/criminologist, Josiah Flynt, who himself had “lived intimately with the vagabonds of both England and the United States” in the 1880s and early 1890s.168 Most tramps, according to Sexual Inversion, were not aware of themselves as “real invert[s].” While homosexual practices were common “among lower races” and “among lower classes” (the authors felt no need to justify the way in which they blithely moved between “race” and “class”), few were true “homosexuals.”169 This exalted level of self-awareness, they contended, remained as yet largely the psychological achievement of men of genius and rank such as Symonds himself. By the turn of the century, the “hobo” had almost but not quite become the modern homosexual.170
The close identification between homelessness and sexual deviancy was soon to be codified into law by the British state, albeit in a manner utterly at odds with Symonds and Ellis’s own political and ideological goals. With virtually no debate, Parliament passed an amendment to the 1824 Vagrancy Act in 1898.171 While the main thrust of the 1898 amendment was to expand the state’s capacity to imprison bullies or pimps who lived on the earnings of female prostitution, it soon became one of the twin pillars of the Victorian state’s draconian regulation of all forms of sex between men.172 According to the act, “every male person who in any public place persistently solicits or importunes for immoral purposes shall be deemed a rogue and a vagabond and may be dealt with accordingly.” In practice, the law was applied only to men who “importuned” or “solicited” other men for sex.173 In the absence of any explanations or justifications by members of Parliament, the law seems misguided if not absurd. What does sexual behavior have to do with the status of being a vagabond, a person without a home?
By equating disorderly sexual practices between men with vagabondage, the Vagrancy Act of 1898 and the way officials chose to enforce it clarified and attempted to stabilize the cultural logic implicit in “A Night” and more fully developed in the sexology of Ellis and Symonds, who were themselves inveterate opponents of all such forms of state regulation.174 The extreme economic margin occupied by the tramp coincides with the space of extreme sexual marginality inhabited by the homosexual—at least in the eyes of the law and in the imagination of elite men whose parliamentary monopoly was just beginning to be challenged.
Some scholars have argued that during the three decades separating the publication of “A Night” and Sexual Inversion, the sexological categories and lived social identities of both the “homosexual” and the “heterosexual” first came into existence.175 Regardless of whether one accepts such a position, the period between the 1860s and 1890s incontestably constituted a watershed in the histories of sexualities, social welfare, and representations of the poor in Great Britain. Greenwood’s “A Night in a Workhouse” and the public’s responses to it are an important starting point for rewriting these histories in a way that recognizes how deeply they shaped one another. “A Night” mattered so much to its Victorian readers because it both helped to create and drew upon widely held fantasies and anxieties about poor men and their sexuality.
POSTSCRIPT: LEGACIES OF “A NIGHT” ON REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOMELESS POOR
Recovering the sexual and social politics of “A Night in a Workhouse” and readers’ responses to them is more than an exercise in historical archeology. Many others—men and women alike—self-consciously imitated Greenwood in seeking to discover the truths of metropolitan poverty. Greenwood routed their literal and imaginative footsteps along the path he had blazed. While “A Night” participated in a well-established genre of urban flaneurie,176 it also initiated quite new and unconventional ways of writing and thinking about slum dwellers and spaces. Today it opens up new ways of thinking about the history of slumming and slum narratives and offers opportunities to reconsider several canonical texts, each of which bears distinct though heretofore unacknowledged traces of the influence of “A Night.” I want to sketch out a tradition of writing about culture and society, poverty and sexuality which, using “A Night” as its point of departure, includes Matthew Arnold’s essays in social criticism written between 1866 and 1871; Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré’s collaboration, London: A Pilgrimage (1872); Jack London’s People of the Abyss (1902), and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), arguably the most popular slumming narratives of the twentieth century. Reading these well-known texts against “A Night” reorients our understanding of them by drawing attention to elements of each that might otherw
ise be overlooked.
At first glance, it seems improbable that the apostle of “sweetness and light,” Matthew Arnold, would have deigned to notice, much less comment on, Greenwood’s playful and prurient exploration of the dark environs of the casual ward. But we must remember that many of Arnold’s now canonical prose masterworks of the 1860s were first written as occasional pieces, often in response to passing controversies of the same ilk as “A Night.” Most of his essays of social criticism initially appeared in the Cornhill Magazine and the Pall Mall Gazette, both published by his friend George Smith. Like James Greenwood, Arnold thrived on witty, barbed public exchanges with fellow correspondents. If the name Matthew Arnold today conjures up “high seriousness,” he had a far different public persona in the 1860s. He was lampooned as an intellectual dandy who, along with Greenwood, affected an air of annoying “kidgloved” gentility.177
Despite the sensationalism of “A Night,” many of its themes were quintessentially Arnoldian: its carefully orchestrated encounter between an “exquisite” man of letters,178 the gentleman-journalist, and the repulsive dirt and anarchic power of the poor; the tension between the intellectual narrowness and financial mean-spiritedness of parish authorities and the ineffectual pleadings of state officials. As an inspector of schools in a nation still lacking a national system of education, Arnold was all too painfully aware of the limited powers of the British state to interfere in local affairs.