by Koven, Seth
He [Fitzgerald] has been corresponding with me as a single man and also promised me marriage which has resulted in the birth of a child…. I have neither seen nor heard from him since till [sic] last Saturday when I met him accidentally as he was going to Oliver Terrace [Barnardo’s home and site of his first photographic studio] when he gave me half-a-crown and he told me he was coming to you to get some more money and he would send me some more money and he would send me some Monday, but I have neither seen nor heard from him since. I appeal to you as a Christian gentleman to ask your advice as I do not wish to take it into court as it would be such a slur on the Mission and he has threatened me if I take any proceedings against him he will make you turn my children out of the Home. He has taken me from a good home and all my friends have turned their back on me and I am at present in a state of starvation.56
Lacking leverage with Fitzgerald himself, Mrs. Andrews’s only apparent power lay in threatening to destroy the reputation of the boys’ home by exposing Fitzgerald’s perfidious abuse of his authority. She portrays herself as an injured victim of male lust and chicanery and as a canny opportunist. Barnardo and his former servant Fitzgerald, already closely associated with one another as partners in their nocturnal adventures, now both stood accused of leading duplicitous lives and engaging in illicit sexual conduct.
During the two years leading up to the arbitration, Barnardo’s detractors, especially Charrington and the leaders of the COS, sought out and paid money to Fitzgerald in exchange for information about Barnardo. The surviving evidence suggests that Fitzgerald was intoxicated by the sense that he had the power to preserve or destroy the reputations of eminent men in public life. The day that Barnardo fired him, he told his replacement at the boys’ home that he intended “ruining” his former master.57 In the end, however, he learned a bitter lesson: once he served his purpose, each of his well-to-do patrons abandoned him to his fate. Fitzgerald disappears from the historian’s view as a penniless inmate in the Lowndes Ward of the Consumption Hospital in Brompton in late November 1877. Fitzgerald explained to Reynolds that Barnardo’s lieutenants had come to extract a deathbed confession from him. To entice Fitzgerald, they offered to admit his legitimate children into the Barnardo homes. “This was too much for me,” Fitzgerald raged, “you ought to see me then with passion, the blood came from me nought I could not speak…. Just fancy the idea to have my children to exhibit them to every fool who gives him money.” Frantic to communicate with his wife and family, his letter ended, “P.S. I should be grateful for a few stamps as I have not one penny in the world to get one.”58 What galled Fitzgerald the most about Barnardo’s offer to “care” for his children was the prospect that they would become part of Barnardo’s spectacular menagerie of ragamuffins and be forced to exhibit themselves to anyone willing to pay Barnardo’s price.
FIGURE 2.5. This photograph, “The Raw Material as We Find It,” depicts not only a group of homeless boys, but also the beadle, Edward Fitzgerald, Barnardo’s erstwhile assistant before he was fired for gross immorality. Since this photograph was clearly taken during the daytime, the bull’s-eye lantern in Fitzgerald’s hand functions both as a reminder that he usually rescued boys at night and as a metaphor for Barnardo’s rescue work, which brought the “light” of Christian teaching to the dark corners of the metropolis. The arched shape of the photograph and the rubble scattered at the boys’ feet suggest a decayed ruin from the classical past, secreted in the back alleyways at the heart of the British empire. The photograph also unintentionally captures a moment of loving solidarity among the seated boys, whose bodies touch one another, and their separation from the standing Fitzgerald. (Image courtesy of Barnardos Photographic Archive.)
Fitzgerald’s letter begging Reynolds and Charrington to save his wife and six children from starvation is a chilling reminder that disgrace and loss of employment for a poor man could mean life or death for his family. Like Mrs. Andrews, whose bitter desperation he had caused and which he was forced to share, Fitzgerald refused to play the part of silently deferential member of the proletariat. Laboring men, women and children in the Barnardo arbitration emphatically did have strong voices as individuals, which they were quick to use in trying to get what they could from their “betters.” They willingly stepped forward to criticize Barnardo and his methods of rescue. At the same time, it was Andrews and Fitzgerald and their families—and not their social superiors—who paid the highest price for the entire affair. The power of their voices, vividly captured in the pathetic letters that constitute the sole surviving record of their own words, could not offset the vulnerability of their precarious economic status.
A lengthy fragment of an unsigned report in the COS files, probably written by another dismissed employee, John Hancorne, offered intimate details about widespread drunkenness, criminality, insubordination, and sexual immorality inside the boys’ home. According to this document, many of Barnardo’s workers “used to be constantly” in a local pub where their public brawling brought disgrace on the home. They sometimes returned to the home drunk and locked up boys in dank and dark cellars for long periods. The boys, for their part, were in open rebellion. They smuggled in a loaded pistol, gun powder, caps, and a jimmy to break into the superintendent’s locked office. One boy was severely punished for bragging that he “used to have criminal intercourse” with the gin-drinking schoolteacher, Mrs. Waller. This same boy was discovered “in the fact of Sodomany” with another adolescent inmate. Only four months later, the two boys were reunited in the home, where they “commenced the same game again.” This time, in order to rid himself of the boys, the governor of the home gave one of them a “good character” and helped him get employment. The other boy, “age 17, died from the effect of Bugery—a abscess in his fundement.” As with so much else in the Barnardo arbitration, we will never know whether any of these charges were true or malicious falsehoods. If they were fabrications, they were ingenious and plausible. Regardless of the document’s veracity, it disturbingly depicted Barnardo as amused and unperturbed by the sordid and immoral management of his institutions and contributed to the sexually charged atmosphere surrounding the arbitration.59
In the midst of the arbitration controversy, Barnardo published a long article in his periodical Night and Day that unintentionally echoed the sexual and social insubordination recounted in the unsigned deposition. Imitating James Greenwood’s famous incognito descent into the sodomitical world of the Lambeth Casual Ward, Barnardo decided to disguise himself as a tramp and sleep among the poor in a common lodging house for a single night.60 “For once,” Barnardo explains, he decided to “lose [his] identity, and become one of the great class known as tramps.” Barnardo informs us that he was tempted to enter the doss house by a “native” tour guide, Mick Farrel, “a little Irish lad who had often accompanied [him] on [his] nightly peregrinations.”61
Barnardo anticipated that his readers might misconstrue his motives and felt compelled to offer an elaborate justification for embarking on his most memorable night of slumming. The plain style of his justification bears no resemblance to the melodramatic narrative that follows.
No mere love of adventure led me to contemplate this visit. I had the following important objects in view:—First, to obtain by experience a truer and more exact knowledge of lodging-house accommodation and habitués; second, to influence in the early morning, any young people whom I might meet in the house, and whose mode of life would appear to be depraved or approaching the criminal; and third, to obtain an introduction into other houses through any chance acquaintance which might be formed during my visit to this one. In all this, the main desire of my life—to save poor boys from the life of the streets, by bringing them into our Homes, and thereby under the sound influences of the Gospel—was, of course, uppermost in my mind.62
This apology excites rather than stifles readerly expectations of fantastic revelation—expectations that Barnardo does not disappoint. We watch Barnardo enjoy the initial stages
of his masquerade as he dons lousy clothes and blackens his face with mud and dust to prepare for the part he has chosen to play. Forcing himself to lie in a disgusting bed surrounded closely by thirty-three naked boys (including his companion, young Mick), he removes most of his own clothes and falls into a terrifying dream world. In his dream, the recipients of his benevolence, the ragged street boys, enact revenge against him by painfully penetrating his body.
How long I slept I do not know—not, I think, more than an hour—when I awoke suddenly out of a horrible dream, in which I thought I had been discovered by my bedroom companions and denounced as a spy, in punishment for which they had each inflicted vengeance on me by pricking pins all over my body, and then rubbing in pepper. I appealed against their cruelty: I struggled, but in vain; and now the pins came to my face, and it seemed as though in my eyes and nose the pepper was pushed; smarting, burning, almost maddening me! Aiming a blow at my assailants, I rolled out of bed, and suddenly awoke from my uneasy slumbers, to find that there was horrible reality in the brief vision; for while I lay now quite wakeful in the bed … the sensations I had just experienced in my sleep were found to be no mere fancies …. my hand and arm … were covered with blotches and weals…. the sheet was almost brown with myriads of moving insects, which seemed to regard my bed and my body as their rightful property.63
As Barnardo’s readers, we experience with him the disorienting obliteration of the boundaries between dream and reality, fantasy and fact. The story comes to a conclusion that inadvertently recalls the sexual confusion of the dream. “Reaching Mick’s bed, I shook him lustily” and the two of them flee the doss-house for the relative safety of the dark street. When he returns home, he cannot recognize the face, swollen and distorted by bites, greeting him in the mirror. What began as an imposture as a tramp concludes with his literal metamorphosis into a freakish monster. Mimesis terrifyingly produces nemesis.64
Barnardo’s narrative is both a richly self-revealing piece of evidence and one that must be interpreted with considerable caution. There can be no doubt, however, that it is a story Barnardo expected his readers to interpret and not merely accept on face value. Within protestant evangelical culture and within the body of Barnardo’s own writings, dream narratives function as allegories about larger spiritual issues or troubles. If it seems certain that Barnardo intended the dream to be read as an allegory, we still must ask how he intended his readers to construe it. Why would he deliberately publish a narrative about disguise and masquerade in the midst of a controversy that centered around claims that Barnardo and his photographs were not what they appeared to be?
As with so many of the questions raised during and by the arbitration, we can be certain of very little. However, Barnardo’s dream narrative can sustain several plausible interpretations. Barnardo probably expected his readers to applaud his willingness to sacrifice his personal well-being and safety for the benefit of ragged children. Evangelicals often emphasized the physical dangers they willingly confronted as they carried God’s message to an all-too-often scornful world. Their ministry to the poor, unlike those of their Church of England rivals, often involved very direct physical contact—a literal touching of bodies and souls in rituals of prayer and conversion. On one memorable occasion, Barnardo’s East London neighbors had jeered and jostled him, pinned him under a bar table, and danced on it until his ribs cracked. He may have hoped that his readers would see the merciless ingratitude of the boys in the dream as a veiled allusion to the way in which his selfless labors had been rewarded by devastating betrayals by fellow slum workers and employees. The story suggests that Barnardo feared that his benevolence had been misunderstood by the poor as merely another form of elite surveillance over their lives.
It is also possible to read the dream as a self-incriminating narrative that exposes the perversity of Barnardo’s moral imagination. Barnardo’s depiction of his experience during his night in the lodging house shockingly reverses his philanthropic project of remaking wild street waifs into productive workers by literally making him into a hideous beast. Its setting within an unlit, promiscuously overcrowded, unsupervised room full of naked boys combined with Barnardo’s helplessness in the face of physical torture and penetration make it possible to read the dream as a dark sexual fantasy. According to Barnardo’s own account, his body, like those of the ragged children sold into sex slavery every day in London, ceases to be his own. It becomes the “rightful property” first of the boys and then of vermin and insects.
Barnardo and his most zealous critics probably would not have understood, much less accepted, an interpretation of his dream so at odds with his purpose in recounting it. During the arbitration, none of his enemies attempted to introduce the story as evidence against him, although they were willing to stake key parts of their case on easily discredited rumors spread by disreputable men and women. Without anachronistically imposing contemporary ideas about dreams and sexuality on the past, we can say that Barnardo’s carefully crafted narrative reveals his keen appreciation for the bodily and psychological excitations of slumming which made it possible for him to voyage into unrespectable corners of the metropolis and his own imagination.
What role did sex or rumors about sex play in the arbitration? First, none of the charges about sexual misconduct against Barnardo, his employees, or his boys were proved to be true. We do know that Barnardo found the claims against his employees sufficiently convincing to fire them and that there was and is no credible evidence that Barnardo committed any sexual improprieties. It is also clear that many believed that Barnardo’s homes were sites of undifferentiated male lust and sexual danger for ragged children. Outwardly proclaiming social purity, Barnardo and his staff were, at least according to this version of events, “in truth” morally polluted sinners. Such views informed Barnardo’s relationship with the local community in East London and with the COS and shaped the ways in which many of Barnardo’s critics came to see his photographs of ragged children.
REPRESENTING THE RAGGED CHILD
In August 1877, Barnardo finally took the stand on his own behalf. Through astute examination and cross examination of dozens of witnesses, Barnardo’s lawyer, Alfred Thesiger, had carefully laid out a compelling case demonstrating the deliberate malice of Barnardo’s detractors and the benevolent intentions of his client. But all his efforts threatened to be undone when Barnardo refused to reveal the real name of the pseudonymous Clerical Junius, the author of several intemperate assaults on Barnardo’s enemies published in various East London newspapers. Although his critics insisted that Barnardo’s silence was tantamount to a confession that he himself was Clerical Junius, Barnardo protested that he was honoring his gentlemanly vow to protect the anonymity of his over-zealous supporter. Amidst confusion and frustration the arbitration ground to a halt and the arbitrators were left to decide whether, under the extraordinary circumstances, they could pass judgement on any of the headings submitted before them.
Piqued by Barnardo’s obstinance, the arbitrators at first indicated their unwillingness to offer a ruling. Perhaps they recognized the disastrous consequences of a public trial for Evangelicals and their vast but uncoordinated system of charity; or perhaps they were convinced by Barnardo’s lawyer that the matter of Clerical Junius bore no relation to most of the key issues of the arbitration. In any case, the arbitrators reconsidered their position and promised to prepare a judgment. From August until mid-October 1877, Barnardo awaited the arbitrators’ decision in a state of near exhaustion and high tension while funds to provide food, shelter, and fuel for the children in his care dwindled to nothing. Then, on October 15, the arbitrators announced their award. To Barnardo’s immense relief and the outrage of his antagonists, the arbitrators exonerated him of most of the substantive charges against him. The Times assured the public that Barnardo’s homes were “real and valuable charities, worthy of public confidence and support.”65 The judgement was not, however, a complete victory. The arbitrators chastised him fo
r producing “fictitious representations of destitution” for “the purposes of obtaining money.” Throughout most of the award, the arbitrators’ language was guarded and reserved; however, on this heading, their censure was unambiguous. “This use of artistic fiction,” the arbitrators explained, “to represent actual facts is, in our opinion, not only morally wrong as thus employed, but might, in the absence of a very strict control, grow into a system of deception dangerous to the cause on behalf of which it is practised.”66 The press, including Henry Labouchère’s Truth and Frederick Greenwood’s Pall Mall Gazette, surpassed the arbitrators in the vehemence of their condemnation of Barnardo’s photographic practices.67
Barnardo’s “artistic fictions” consisted of a small number of photographs (probably less than a dozen out of many hundreds taken) in which he and his staff had staged or arranged the clothing of the child being photographed to convey information that was not strictly speaking accurate. For example, he posed a boy with a shoeblack’s box even though the boy had worked as a shoeblack only for a single day. In another case, the caption under the portrait of a child’s head described her as “only a little waif taken from the street.” In reality, her mother had threatened Barnardo that she would abandon her daughter to the street unless he admitted her to the home. Barnardo had not actually “taken” her from the streets, though he did save her from them. Most of Barnardo’s so-called photographic deceptions hinged on such fine points of fact or verbal semantics.
Why did these seemingly inconsequential violations of literal truth elicit such excoriating condemnation? One explanation lies in the fact that Barnardo was not only an aggressive outsider in London’s philanthropic circles, but also a daring innovator in his exploitation of photography’s as yet untested and wholly unregulated possibilities as a marketing tool for philanthropy. The controversy over Barnardo’s use of photographs was not merely another example of the dubious ethics of “truth” in advertising in the nineteenth century. Contemporaries expected philanthropists to use the materials they distributed to advertise their benevolent accomplishments, to stimulate donations, and to provide trustworthy information about the lives and conditions of the intended beneficiaries. Victorians were deeply invested in believing that Christian charity was a bulwark of integrity and honesty against the predatory machinations encouraged by their commodity culture and the free market. Some found Barnardo’s photographic practices so dangerous because they threatened to undermine public confidence in the disinterested and truthful character not just of his own schemes but of philanthropy itself.