Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  The essence of COS reforms consisted in perfecting technologies of information collection, surveillance, and investigation to produce accurate case records of each individual applicant for charity. These highly factual case records, based on systematic inquiry into the past and present lives of applicants and their families, were centralized to prevent enterprising applicants from cajoling relief from one charity and then turning to another to get even more relief. Any evidence that suggested the applicant was responsible for his or her destitution, such as intemperance and indolence, was grounds to deny charitable relief. Case records were the literal form into which the COS crammed the life stories of its clients. Evangelicals preferred “true narratives” that underscored the interplay of human error and sinfulness with divine omnipotence and moral redemption.33 If past lapses in moral judgment, no matter how serious, did not disqualify a person from receiving Jesus’s redemptive love, why then should such errors disqualify that person from receiving something so much less valuable—charitable relief? Evangelical preachers, especially those recruited from the ranks of the poor, paraded past sins rather than concealed them. Their ability to overcome a vice-ridden past only amplified the wonders of God’s saving grace in their lives while narrowing the distance separating them from their plebian audiences.

  FIGURE 2.3. This image of Barnardo’s Central Office and Boys’ Home in Stepney Causeway accentuated the solidity and orderliness of the institution. The building is mostly detached from its actual surroundings in the slums except for the locomotive on the elevated tracks, one person walking on the clean and quiet street, and a woman leading a child up the front steps. (From T. J. Barnardo, “Something Attempted, Something Done!” 1890.)

  The COS and Barnardo seemed to have adhered to profoundly different visions of rationality because they sought such different outcomes from their charitable work. Evangelicals aimed to save souls by sharing the central truths of the Gospel. The conduct of their labors among the poor flowed logically out of these premises. Thus, it made perfect sense to expend effort to save a drunkard on his deathbed despite the unlikelihood of reaping earthly benefits. For the COS, in contrast, people who had demonstrated previous moral failings were simply too risky and unworthy an investment of scarce resources. Economic efficiency went hand in hand with moral rectitude.

  Although the arbitration clarified the differences between the COS and Barnardo’s brand of evangelical philanthropy, it also exaggerated them by obscuring their similarities. Evangelicals no more formed a rear guard opposed to all forms of “rational” charity than the COS was populated exclusively by secular and heartless reformers.34 Lord Shaftesbury, for example, was the leading evangelical social reformer of the age and a supporter of Barnardo’s work as well as an early vice-president of the COS. Barnardo himself was receptive to the application of social scientific principles to rescue work. Despite his claim to assist all who sought his help, Barnardo annually admitted less than one quarter of the applicants to his institutions. Those he did admit were subjected to a rigorous investigation into the root sources of their destitution. Sounding remarkably similar to members of the COS, Barnardo explained that “the story of every boy’s and girl’s life is established upon a basis of certitude once for all.”35 Barnardo also tried to keep up to date with the latest ideas about scientific charity. In 1876, he addressed the Social Science Congress about his work on “preventive homes” in East London, but, his performance must not have comforted his critics within the COS. It revealed the strain he felt in attempting to combine the statistical language of social science with the heart truths of his faith: analysis of statistics on juveniles in common lodging houses gave way to unabashed personal exhortation and self-promotion intended to stimulate the emotions of his audience.36

  If Evangelicals had deep connections to political economy and the scientific practice of charity, many prominent early members of the COS, including the housing reformer Octavia Hill and Rev. Samuel Barnett, were committed to the value of religious thought and institutions. The diaries of Charles Stewart Loch, the COS’s secretary from 1875 to 1913, show us a man of Christian faith and compassion who turned to 1. Corinthians, rather than to Social Statistics, in seeking guidance about the nature of true charity. He defined “practical charity” as “all acts of loving kindness” that “spring from sympathy, the suffering with those to whom the loving act is done.” Loch’s sensitivity to human frailty in his private meditations seems incompatible with his defense of the COS’s refusal to assist those who had failed to live up to its standards of moral conduct. The daily work of running the Central Office of the COS was, he lamented,

  like a python winding around resolutions, enthusiasm, willing work, and suffocating them and after long months of sleepy digestion, passing out a few useless morsels—the hair and the hoofs—the vain relics of possible good,—the hair which will clothe none, hoof on which no creation will every walk or step.37

  What is so striking about Loch’s diary is his resistance to the seemingly logical imperatives of modern bureaucratic rationality with which his own work and that of the COS are so closely identified. Loch’s ambivalent musings about his COS duties capture the dilemmas felt by many rank-and-file members of the COS, whose personal contacts with the poor as friendly visitors engaged their sympathies in ways that sometimes made it difficult for them to adhere to the scientific guidelines disseminated by the COS’s Central Office. During the course of the Barnardo arbitration, more and more of the public came to share Loch’s private doubts and condemned the COS for believing that “none but the strong-minded, the harsh, the suspicious, and the ultra-systematical, can be worthy dispensers of private or public benevolence.”38

  The Central Office of the COS was acutely aware that it had to contend not only with many external critics of its untrusting and ungenerous vision of relief, but also with the challenges posed by its own members, some of whom bridled under the restraints of COS principles and procedures.39 Nothing demonstrates more vividly the diversity of principles and practices flourishing among local branches of the COS during its first years than the relationship between the Deptford office of the COS and the evangelical child rescue worker J.W.C. Fegan. In the 1870s James William Condell Fegan was the person whose background, religious and philanthropic interests, achievements, and methods most closely resembled Barnardo’s. Born in Southampton in 1852 to a devout, middle-class Plymouth Brethren family of Irish extraction, he studied at the City of London School for four years before entering a firm of colonial brokers in the city in 1869.40 Like Barnardo, he was initially interested in medicine but ultimately decided to pursue a “mercantile life,”41 which was only brought to an end by his complete immersion in missionary work among ragged street children.42 Like Barnardo, he assumed sole responsibility for all aspects of his children’s home and also staged before-and-after photographs to encourage sympathy and charitable donations for his scheme.

  Given the striking similarities between Barnardo and Fegan, why did he escape unscathed during the Barnardo arbitration? To begin with, he was a less influential figure than Barnardo, and his field of operations, Deptford, was less crowded with competing philanthropists and attracted less public notice than East London. He also was more inclined than Barnardo to acknowledge that prominent benefactors provided him with personal financial support. Most crucially, he, unlike Barnardo, had initiated his scheme as a member of the COS and with the financial support and oversight of other members of the Deptford COS. The Deptford COS, even after it had ceased to have formal links to Fegan, offered him staunch protection in response to inquiries made to the Central Office between 1875 and 1880.43

  The warm ties between Fegan and his fellow evangelical workers within the Deptford branch of the COS suggests that friendships and personal connections could sometimes smooth over the differences in first principles that proved so intractable in Barnardo’s case. Fegan’s relationship with the Deptford COS also underlines the heterogeneity of COS practices amon
g its various branches. COS branch offices asserted considerable freedom from the centralizing and homogenizing influence of the central committee. In fact, letters about Barnardo from district offices to the central committee during the years leading up to the arbitration amplify this. The Shoreditch COS had long urged the Central Office to investigate and denounce Barnardo.44 In contrast, Ralph Ellis, secretary of the Bow and Bromley COS, was very favorably impressed by Barnardo’s entire establishment and worked well with him until the “inquiry commenced.”45 In the tense weeks between the end of the arbitration and the announcement of the decision, the Kensington COS staged a smallscale insurrection against Ribton-Turner and the central committee for arrogating too many powers to themselves and falsely speaking in the name of the entire organization without first consulting the quasi-representative council.46 Because existing histories of the COS have too often been written from the perspective of the central committee and its secretaries, they have uncritically accepted the central committee’s rather exaggerated sense of its ability to control and impose uniformity on local branches. Fegan’s relations with the Deptford COS in the 1870s as well as the responses of individual branches to Barnardo’s troubles point to the need to rewrite the COS’s history with an eye to the diversity of both its members’ ideologies and the practices of local branches. It is fair to say that in attempting to discipline Barnardo, the Central Office of the COS may well have hoped to tighten its control over its own members and local branches throughout the metropolis.

  The imbroglio between Barnardo and the COS is not another chapter in the unconvincing story about the clash between secular modernity and religious conservatism in the nineteenth century. As we shall see, Barnardo’s enthusiastic embrace of that most radically modern technology of representation—photography—disturbed his contemporaries more than anything else he did. It seems plausible that because so many of Barnardo’s actual practices resembled those fact-finding procedures advocated by the COS, the COS felt all the more determined to convince the public that its fundamental principles were incompatible with Barnardo’s. Barnardo’s rift with Charrington and his battles with the COS serve as reminders that what people have in common can deepen their perception of differences rather than bring them together.

  “THE VERY WICKED WOMAN” AND “SODOMANY” IN DR. BARNARDO’S BOYS’ HOME

  The conflict between Barnardo and the COS took place amidst a host of accusations and rumors about the sexual conduct of Barnardo, his staff, and the boys in his homes. Most of these rumors and accusations never entered into the public record of the case reported by the press, in large measure because only one of George Reynolds’s several dozen charges submitted for arbitration against Barnardo was explicitly sexual. However, the surviving files of the COS on the arbitration contain explosive depositions and letters detailing supposed incidents of drunkenness, adultery, illegitimacy, blackmail, spying, and sodomy at Barnardo’s homes. These files leave little doubt that all the parties directly involved in the case—including the local poor and many within the evangelical-philanthropic community—knew about these sensational charges. Rumors of sexual misconduct seeped into every aspect of the arbitration and help to explain the depth of passions the controversy unleashed. If the case against Barnardo arose from personal antagonisms among erstwhile friends and from differences about what constituted the truth and true charity, it also must be understood as a sex scandal manqué.

  Under the caption “The Very Wicked Woman and Her Story” in his pamphlet Startling Revelations, Reynolds claimed that Barnardo had lodged, openly escorted home “arm-in-arm,” and had immoral relations with a drunken prostitute, Mrs. Johnson.47 Before the arbitration began, Barnardo had successfully demonstrated his innocence in this matter. Reynolds’s own testimony during the arbitration suggests that while he maliciously continued to spread the accusation, he himself had long since ceased to believe it was true. In light of its wholly insubstantial basis, why did so many still seem willing to believe that Barnardo had consorted with a prostitute? Did its persistence reflect suspicions about the motives and sexual conduct of male Evangelicals engaged in slum philanthropy? Did it stem from the specificities of Barnardo’s public and private image in East London? Or from peculiarities of his social and sexual status?

  Surviving evidence suggests that all these factors may have contributed to the dogged persistence of the rumors. Religious enthusiasm had long been associated with sexual excess and disorder in nineteenth-century Britain.48 Ambiguities in Barnardo’s sexual persona in East London contributed to the confusing ways in which others perceived him. During his first years in East London, Barnardo’s peers noted his utter lack of interest in women. His fellow medical students remembered Barnardo as a “queer fellow” and a “dark horse” who, unlike many other students, shunned the readily available pleasures of drink, music halls, and women in East London. They dismissed his religious enthusiasms as “eccentric,” “extravagant,” and “hypocritical.”49 But this initial image of Barnardo as the self-denying, celibate young man must be counterbalanced by the impression produced by his outward appearance and mannerisms by the time of the arbitration. He often dressed more like a dandy, that sexually ambiguous outlaw, than a dévot. For all their apparent differences, there were also powerful affinities between the ascetic male slum worker and the dandy as competing masculine personae in Victorian culture (a theme to which I will return in chapter 5). Each defied social conventions and yet remained, as James Eli Adams explains, “abjectly dependent on the recognition of the audience he professes to disdain.”50 The male slum worker may have eschewed the physical comforts of the dandaical life, but he found ample compensation in a world of physical sensation and exotic excitations.

  Playing on the perception of Barnardo as dandy, Reynolds released and distributed a three-quarter-length photograph of him as a man about town suggestively holding a walking stick in ungloved hands (figure 2.4a). The stick, which cuts and protrudes beyond Barnardo’s body just at his groin, is the focal point of the image. The portrait, which Barnardo decried as that “miserable photograph” and “wretched caricature,” had been stolen from Barnardo’s office by a disgruntled employee and given to his enemies.51 Anticipating the central role contrasting photographs of child waifs would play during the arbitration, Barnardo quickly countered and circulated a half-length portrait showing him as a bespectacled, earnest do-gooder52 (figure 2.4b). Unlike the purloined image, which depicted Barnardo in motion and echoed contemporary British and French images of the flâneur, the second portrait used its subject’s stillness to suggest his trustworthiness; and, of course, the half-length portrait showed his body above, not below, the waist. This battle of competing cartes de visites demonstrates just how canny Barnardo and his rivals were to the power of photographs in conveying moral messages in visual form.

  FIGURE 2.4. By the 1870s, photographic cartes de visites were a ubiquitous feature of bourgeois sociability. Barnardo, always meticulous about his physical appearance, was infuriated when the photo (figure 2.4a) was stolen from his studio and displayed for sale in nearby shops next to a “carefully executed” photograph of his archrival, Frederick Charrington. Charrington was a scion of one of East London’s wealthiest families, whose fortune derived from their brewery. Barnardo countered by releasing a portrait of himself (figure 2.4b), which conveyed the high seriousness of his Christian mission and was compatible with his standing as husband and trustworthy paterfamilias within his private home and within the homes he superintended for ragged children. (Images courtesy of Barnardo’s Photographic Archive.)

  The debate over Barnardo’s public sexual persona entered into the formal proceedings of the arbitration. Alfred Thesiger, Barnardo’s gifted legal counsel who took on the case at the behest of the evangelical lord chancellor, Lord Cairns, offered his own explanation for rumors about Barnardo’s relations with women.53 Thesiger insisted that it was normal for an able and appealing young man like Barnardo to “attract the attention
of young females whilst engaged in work of this kind.” While dismissing all the rumors as “entirely mythical,” he was surprised there were not “more stories about” since he expected sexuality to play a role in popular perceptions of an evangelical slum worker’s relations with his community.54

  Barnardo was not the only member of his organization beset by rumors of sexual impropriety. Sometime in the early autumn of 1876, Barnardo fired his boys’ beadle, Edward Fitzgerald, on grounds of habitual drunkenness and gross immorality. For years, he and Barnardo had roamed the backstreets and alleyways of London after midnight, with Fitzgerald leading the way with his bull’s-eye lantern, in search of their nightly catch of street waifs (figure 2.5). Fitzgerald, a former policeman, used his knowledge of the criminal classes quite effectively in playing the role of a double agent for several months as he passed information and documents about Barnardo to his enemies.55

  Fitzgerald’s escapades came to an abrupt halt in the early autumn of 1876. On September 13, 1876, a Mrs. Andrews, the mother of several children in Barnardo’s Boys’ Home, sent Barnardo a letter. Mrs. Andrews claimed to have given birth to Fitzgerald’s child out of wedlock the previous August. Her letter paints a shocking picture of Fitzgerald’s duplicity. It is at once plaintive, desperate, and threatening. “For some time past,” Mrs. Andrews wrote,