by Koven, Seth
Karen Halttunen’s analysis of what she calls the “pornography of pain” in humanitarian appeals in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides insights into understanding Hancorne’s affidavit and Reynolds’ decision to reproduce it verbatim in his pamphlet. Halttunen shows how the sympathy provoked by the sight of suffering and its representation emphasized the “moral dangers of watching cruelty” and contained an erotic charge. “The humanitarian sensibility,” she concludes, “fostered an imaginative cultural underground of the illicit and forbidden … at the center of which was a flogging scene.”96
Barnardo’s photographs of ragged children amplified “the moral dangers of watching cruelty” by making the suffering person they depicted appear more unique, specific, and physically real than nonphotographic representations. For most of Barnardo’s contemporaries, the “realism” of photography narrowed the gap between representation and reality and thereby further intensified the ambivalent intimacy that philanthropic appeals strove to foster between their readers and the objects of benevolence.
Reynolds’s published account of Reed’s experiences as a Barnardo boy compresses the temporal distance separating the moment Reed was photographed from his flogging by narrating them one immediately after the other and thereby encourages readers to see the two events as successive scenes in a single, obscene drama.97 The flogging episode recapitulates, albeit in a sadistic key, the initial scene of disfigurement, dressing and undressing at the photographic studio. Flogging, the epitome of the “pornography of pain” in the nineteenth-century imagination, becomes an almost inevitable culmination of the violations Reed suffered from the moment Barnardo photographed him. Contrary to the wishful message proclaimed by the photographic “contrasts,” we see Reed degraded, not uplifted, by the Christian benevolence of Barnardo’s institutions.
Barnardo’s version of the events surrounding Reed’s photograph and his treatment at the home were dramatically different. He successfully discredited claims that Reed, or any other boys, were subjected to abusive punishments.98 To justify ripping Reed’s clothes, he relied on his arguments about the artistic nature of his “representative” photographs, which in turn were compatible with evangelical distinctions between “truth” and “fact.” He acknowledged tearing Reed’s clothing, but only because Reed’s original clothes were so tattered and verminous that they had to be immediately destroyed upon his arrival at the home.99 Actions that Barnardo’s antagonists chose to depict as the promiscuous derangement of a helpless young boy’s clothing, Barnardo described as an inadequate attempt to re-create for the benefit of the camera the horrible “truth” of Reed’s degraded condition.
If the threat of indecency surrounded the case of Reed, anxieties about child prostitution and miscegenation lurked just beneath the surface of the investigation into Barnardo’s photograph of three naked black children entitled “Out of the Depths.” Barnardo wrote a lengthy and moving account of the circumstances surrounding his discovery of the children, Eleanor, Annie, and John, and their virtuous widowed mother, Elizabeth Williams. Barnardo introduced their story as a “narrative of the rescue of three mulatto children.”100 His deliberate choice of the word “mulatto” drew upon widely held cultural assumptions about race and sex relations between African and British populations in the British Caribbean. Barnardo’s readers would have assumed that these children (or, as we later learn, their father) were the product not of a legitimate marriage, but of exploitative sexual relations between a white man and a black woman. Barnardo’s representation of the children as mulattos recalls this presumably immoral union.
By entitling his photograph “Out of the Depths,” Barnardo must have expected some viewers to link the image to a controversial novel by that exact title published in 1860. The novel, an evangelical recasting of Moll Flanders, purported to be the autobiography of a servant girl who descends into prostitution only to be rescued by a handsome young clergyman. Its climax and most shocking passage eerily adumbrated one of the central issues raised not only by the Barnardo Arbitration but also by public discussion of William Gladstone’s celebrated midnight rescue work on the streets of London: did men, whom society praised for their Christian work rescuing the fallen, clandestinely engage in immoral sexual acts? The passage details the clergyman’s entrance into the young woman’s bedchamber, ostensibly to have sex with her. When he attempts to assure her that he has not come to “do you the great wrong you may expect” because he is married and a clergyman, she replies cavalierly, “Oh, bless you! Clergymen and married men come here quite as often as others.” While the novel leaves no doubt about the purity of its hero, it nonetheless did intimate that other men were not what they appeared to be.101
As Barnardo’s written narrative accompanying the photograph unfolds, we learn that their mother, Mrs. Williams, is a hardworking Christian “negress,” tragically widowed when her husband was mauled by a shark in the waters of the Caribbean. Barnardo watches her monotonously “stitch, stitch, stitch” sack after sack to keep herself alive and is stunned to discover three utterly naked children concealed among the heaps of sacks. Mrs. Williams acknowledged that her “great struggle was to keep them from the street. ‘Any way and any how,’ she said to us with streaming eyes, ‘away from sin and wickedness!’” The distant miscegenation on the fringes of empire threatens to be reenacted on the streets of the Christian metropolis in the 1870s. To save them from this seemingly inevitable fate, Barnardo intervenes: “I have a Home for such; I will take them.”102
The penultimate paragraph of the leaflet contained Barnardo’s version of how he photographed and rescued them.
That was conclusive, and they came; or rather we took them, wrapped up by the kindly hands of the landlady and their own mother in some of the sacks with which they had been invested. Off the next morning we carried them in a cab, and in the studio of our photographer laid them and their sacks down in a heap, much as they had been the day before in their mother’s dingy room; and thus, in a few brief seconds, preserved for future years a picture of the state in which we found them. Then, away again to the Girls’ Home in a cab, which waited at the door. How glad they were for the delightful luxury of a warm bath and clean clothing and … some warm soup … given by the matron to each.
If Barnardo can be believed (and this was of course a key question throughout the arbitration), only the loving hands of females (their mother, the landlady, and the matron) touched or saw the naked bodies of the children.103
The photograph “Out of the Depths” works with and against Barnardo’s written text (figure 2.8). It ostensibly corroborates Barnardo’s narrative by proving that three naked black children (of remarkably indeterminate age and sex) covered only by burlap sacks actually did exist. It makes literal the ubiquitous Victorian trope that the very poor constituted a separate and distinctly bestial race who both were and were not British.104 But the photograph also raises questions about the narrative and draws attention to gaps in the sequence of events as Barnardo recounted them.
If, as Barnardo tells us, the children were not photographed until the next day, then surely the photograph is evidence that someone must have stripped them once again. But who? St. John Wontner relentlessly pursued the answer to this question during his interrogation of Barnardo’s photographer, George Collins. To St. John Wontner’s question “Who took the partial clothes off?” Collins replied evasively “I don’t remember any clothes being taken off, I simply did the mechanical part…. [T]hey were arranged. I believe Dr. Barnardo posed them, or if not positively posed by him he was present.” Collins’ convenient lapse in memory consigned the precise conditions surrounding the moment of disrobing to his listeners’ imaginations.105
The photograph itself unintentionally represented this second “undressing,” which was arguably more disturbing than their original nakedness. The harsh lighting that oddly whitens the children’s faces (and hence makes them appear to be more mulatto-like) and the backdrop of the photograph in
dicate that this undressing took place not in the shadows of their slum room before their mother but in the glare of a well-lit photographic studio in the presence of male strangers. The literary text shows Barnardo fulfilling his Christian duty by clothing the naked; the photograph reverses this trajectory by memorializing a disturbingly voyeuristic moment of undressing. Reading the photographic text in relationship to Barnardo’s written narrative initiates a dialogue between them that challenges the reassuring closure of the written story alone.
JOSEPH MERRICK AND THE MONSTROSITY OF POVERTY
Barnardo’s photographs of the Williams children were potent reminders to good Christians of the obligations of empire. Distant acts on far away shores—the violent death of the children’s father in the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean—imposed urgent burdens on those living in ease at the heart of the empire. Less than a decade later, Londoners confronted another set of shocking photographic and textual images of a desperately poor youth called Joseph Merrick. His life, like those of the Williams children, collapsed the distances separating home and empire, East and West London, rich and poor, the bestial and the civilized, science and sentiment. Born in dire poverty in Leicester, Merrick was Victorian Britain’s most celebrated beneficiary of metropolitan charity by the time he died in 1890 in carefully appointed rooms in London Hospital, the institution from which Barnardo had begun his own career. To his contemporaries and to the wider public today, he remains best known as the Elephant Man, so named because of his grotesque deformities.
FIGURE 2.8. Barnardo, unlike most others engaged in slum rescue work in Victorian London, consistently included images of people of African descent along with children with various physical disabilities in his annual reports, books, and pamphlets, to underscore the inclusiveness of his work. Discussion of this photograph, “Out of the Depths,” and the various stories surrounding the tribulations of Mrs. Williams and her three children arguably marked the emotional climax of the arbitration hearing, and, according to press reports, elicited tears of sympathy and offers of cash assistance from listeners. (Image courtesy of Barnardo’s Photographic Archive.)
A vast amount has already been written about Merrick. We arguably know more about him than any other pauper in late Victorian Britain as he shuttled between freak shows, poorhouses, and poorhouse infirmaries.106 His life and death seem to invite reflection about universal struggles between good and evil; about inner beauty locked within outward ugliness; and about the triumph of the human spirit over extreme adversity. Those who have resisted the urge to transform him into the stuff of parables have focused on his freakishness to unlock Victorian and post-Victorian attitudes about deformity.107 Others have diligently searched archives and tracked his movements in an attempt to reconstruct his “real” life and disentangle it from the myths that enveloped it during his lifetime.
I do not have anything to add to the facts of Merrick’s life or to his complex posthumous life in Anglo-American culture in the twentieth century. Instead, I propose that we think about him as a severely disabled, ragged young person rescued from the slums of Whitechapel and cared for by a group of philanthropic medical doctors, many with close links to evangelical charity in the metropolis. I want to pursue the ways in which photographic and written accounts of Merrick participated in traditions of slum narratives, metropolitan philanthropy, and spectacular representations of the poor, particularly those pioneered by Dr. Barnardo.
At the height of the mania for slumming in 1884, an ambitious and talented young medical doctor named Frederick Treves learned that a freak of nature, a so-called Elephant Man, was on public display not far from where he worked at London Hospital. London Hospital had long been distinguished as an institution in which medical care and philanthropy were closely joined. Not only did it serve the poorest of the London poor, it was headquarters for a variety of philanthropic schemes such as the East London branch of the University Extension movement, which brought distinguished scholars to teach classes to laboring men and women. Treves himself was closely involved with a variety of evangelical schemes to succor the bodies and spirits of poor boys and attracted athletic young medical students who shared his social concerns. At the time Treves assumed responsibility for Merrick’s care in 1886, he had two students particularly distinguished by their commitment to missionary and medical work among the “rough lads” of Whitechapel: Wilfred Grenfell, destined to achieve international renown as the Labrador Doctor, and his housemate, Denis Halsted. Grenfell, whose father had served as chaplain of London Hospital in 1885, was an evangelical embodiment of muscular Christianity—a lover of sports, nature, God, male comradeship, and the poor. Treves, Grenfell, and Halsted formed Merrick’s inner circle of medical caretakers. When not tending to Merrick and their other hospital duties, Grenfell and Halsted devoted themselves to their club for poor boys located in the sparely furnished first floor of their home close by the hospital. The other residents of their unconventional household (Grenfell called it a “queer beehive”) included a Brahmin from India, a converted Jew, and an Afro-Caribbean man they met while he was preaching in East London’s largest park, Victoria Park.108 Halsted and Grenfell, like their university-educated neighbors living in colonies of philanthropic gentlemen in settlement houses, regularly took groups of Cockney boys on trips to the seaside for therapeutic encounters with nature and to practice the manly and moral “simple life” they espoused.109 Treves himself took Merrick on one such country holiday, although not as part of a larger group.
Treves probably heard rumors about the freak show from his students, many of whom (unlike the puritanical Grenfell) took advantages of the peculiar pleasures that East London offered gentlemen. Sir John Bland-Sutton, during his medical student days at London Hospital, recalled that on one of his frequent Saturday night visits to the Mile End Road “to see dwarfs, giants, fat-women, and monstrosities,” he first spied Merrick, whose “thick and pendulous” skin hung in folds resembling the hide of an elephant.110 For the price of a shilling, the freak-show proprietor granted Treves a private view of the “creature” in an abandoned storefront. In contrast to Bland-Sutton’s frank avowal of the delights of urban flâneurie, Treves insisted that the pursuit of scientific knowledge was his sole motive. Nonetheless, his description of the encounter (written with great rhetorical brilliance in 1922) is unabashedly voyeuristic: we peek through red curtains and threadbare pants before glimpsing Merrick’s naked limbs faintly illuminated by the blue light of a gas jet in the darkened room.
At first, Merrick seems no different from hundreds of youths rescued by Dr. Barnardo: “[H]e was naked to the waist, his feet were bare, he wore a pair of threadbare trousers that had once belonged to some fat gentleman’s dress suit.” However, Treves’s language quickly positions Merrick as an exotic “creature” within a fantastic imperial bestiary, all too similar to the animals the London Zoo regularly sent to Treves for dissection. His description explodes with metaphoric excess—as if the sheer accumulation of analogies can recapture the horror of seeing Merrick for the first time. Merrick defies taxonomic categories and hovers between sexes, races, and species. He is a “creature,” “a perverted version of a human being,” an “elemental” and “primitive being,” “a monstrous figure as hideous as an Indian idol,” “a block of gnarled wood” with a hand resembling “a fin or paddle,” and a “lizard” with a dewlap suspended from his neck.111 Merrick’s sexuality figures prominently in Treves’s account. One arm, Treves explains, was a “delicately shaped limb covered with fine skin and provided with a beautiful hand which any woman might have envied.” But as Treves’s photographs of Merrick’s naked body (which circulated in a widely read medical journal) make clear, his penis was his other “normal” and unambiguously manly limb. Apparently, Merrick’s attraction to the opposite sex was unimpaired: “[H]is bodily deformity had left unmarred the instincts and feelings of his years…. He would liked to have been a lover.” Treves happily played the role of procurer for Merrick, one of the
many services he performed in demonstrating the power of cross-class friendship to cultivate humanity in even the most outcast of the bestial poor. “I asked a friend of mine,” Treves recalled, “a young and pretty widow, if she thought she could enter Merrick’s room with a smile, wish him good morning, and shake him by the hand.”112 While the Jack the Ripper murders made Whitechapel the epicenter of elite fantasies about sexual and social disorder, Merrick’s rooms constituted a site that was exotically horrible but reassuringly safe and domesticated. Merrick cherished the company of the endless stream of charitable lady visitors—including Alexandra, Princess of Wales—who put his rooms at London Hospital on the map as East London’s most popular philanthropic destination.
Like the Barnardo boy named Reed, Merrick was photographed upon his admission as a permanent resident to London Hospital and later photographed again in his Sunday best, visual proof of the transformative benevolence of those who cared for him.113 In Treves’s telling of the Elephant Man’s story, Merrick was an ideal recipient of elite philanthropy. Gratefully deferential, Merrick was the quintessential “mimic man” who wanted nothing more than to imitate the manners of a “dandy and a young man about town.” According to Treves, Merrick’s desire to no longer merely “mimic” but become a normal man led to his death.
He often said to me that he wished he could lie down to sleep “like other people” [who did not have to support massive heads]. I think on this last night he must, with some determination, have made the experiment. The pillow was soft, and the head, when placed on it, must have fallen backwards and caused a dislocation of the neck. Thus it came about that his death was due to the desire that had dominated his life—the pathetic but hopeless desire to be “like other people.”114
Mimesis once again produces nemesis. Treves’s account of the life and death of Joseph Merrick draws upon the political economy of the Victorian moral imagination. Twain’s pauper may look just like the prince but he neither can nor wants to become him; the black spots of Kipling’s leopard, like the black skin of Kipling’s Ethiopian, once gained, can never be washed away; Treves’ Elephant Man can never quite become a swell; the London poor can never truly escape the mark of their poverty, no matter how much they wish to be real ladies and gentlemen.115 Treves discretely did not reveal the ultimate fate of Merrick’s corpse: his grotesque form was preserved in a body cast, his tissues were sampled, his flesh removed, and his bones boiled down for display as a skeleton.116 The philanthropic and evangelical doctors at London Hospital put aside the claims of friendship and common humanity and asserted their traditional right to use the body of an outcast, impoverished man to serve the needs of science. It was an ending feared and reviled by the Victorian poor, for whom a proper burial was often the only luxury earned by a lifetime of hard labor. At once an object of scientific study, evangelical benevolence, and prurient curiosity, Merrick was, I have suggested, a sort of Barnardo-boy manqué, albeit one who thanked his rescuers rather than testified against them.