Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  Despite mountains of evidence, the whole truth about Dr. Barnardo remains infuriatingly opaque. We will never know the answers to all the questions raised about him during the arbitration. From his first days as a medical student in London, Barnardo impressed some of his peers as the consummate hypocrite. They were mistaken. The concept of hypocrisy tells us surprisingly little about Barnardo, and I suspect, about the earnest Victorian world he has come to exemplify. Sharing with his fellow Evangelicals an acute sense of the pervasiveness of human sinfulness, Barnardo never for a moment imagined that he himself was free from sin. His wife Syrie offered a particularly insightful assessment of him. She believed that an immense “desire he could not suppress” lay at the very heart of that “forcing house of his white hot passion to save the souls and care for the bodies of ragged children.”135 To suggest, as I have, that erotic desires mingled with religious and philanthropic impulses in the language of virtue Barnardo deployed on behalf of poor children neither diminishes his achievements nor impugns his integrity. Victorian reformers and philanthropists understood that what made the “morality” they proclaimed so powerful was in part its capacity to inflame and contain the unruly possibilities and passions of the “imagination” to which it was so intimately bound. In Barnardo’s “artistic fictions,” the ragged child constituted the point where evangelical, philanthropic, and sexualized gazes converged and made visible the erotics of benevolence in Victorian London.

  FIGURE 2.11. Save the Children Fund Image Guidelines, c. 1995. (Courtesy of Save the Children.)

  Chapter Three

  THE AMERICAN GIRL IN LONDON: GENDER, JOURNALISM, AND SOCIAL INVESTIGATION IN THE LATE VICTORIAN METROPOLIS

  IN NOVEMBER 1893, a young American woman called Elizabeth Banks—without wealth, social connections, or conspicuous beauty—had overnight taken London by storm. To be more accurate, she adroitly had placed herself at the eye of a storm of her own creation. According to George R. Sims, Banks was “the charming lady journalist, who has made the biggest score out of the disguise business since the days of the Amateur Casual” nearly three decades earlier. This was exceptionally high praise coming from Sims, arguably London’s most accomplished master of cross-class masquerades, who was renowned for his empathic evocations of the London poor. The female journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette who signed her column “Autolycus” declared that Miss Elizabeth Banks, the “American Girl in London,” was the “heroine of the town.” Banks had masqueraded “courageously” as a servant and insinuated herself into the very fabric of a proper English home. In a series of articles published in the Weekly Sun, she laid bare to Londoners the unhappy relations between upstairs and downstairs, between mistresses and their housemaids. “Her strange, wild, and curious adventures,” Autolycus begrudgingly acknowledged, were “the common theme of conversation in thousands of English homes.” In the months ahead, Banks cashed in on the success of her articles on domestic service by publishing accounts of herself disguised as a flower girl, crossing sweeper, laundress, dressmaker, strawberry picker, and American heiress in search of introductions into English aristocratic society. While Banks’s highly theatrical investigative reporting captured the public’s attention, she had not won its uncritical admiration. Some insisted that her superficial treatment of the servant problem demonstrated not only her incompetence as a journalist but her failings as a woman. Without apology, Banks had amused her readers with incidents that revealed her ignorance about how to wash floors and clean candlesticks. Echoing the complaints of many readers of the Weekly Sun, Autolycus indignantly wondered whether “there actually breathe[s] a woman in whom the domestic instinct is so dead as this?”1 Only a week later, Autolycus moved from ambivalent remarks about Miss Banks to a short summary of the debate over “what is unwomanly” then raging in the press.2

  Autolycus’s message was unmistakable. Banks’s cross-class masquerades and her articles about them were “unwomanly.” But beyond that, English lady journalists feared that Banks’s introduction of what they called American style women’s reporting to the London press might jeopardize their own precarious standing within the overwhelmingly male profession of journalism. Mary Billington, who made her name writing for the Echo and the Daily Graphic, rather wishfully and erroneously insisted in 1896 that “English lady journalists have not so far descended to any of the vulgar sensationalism and semi-detective business which has discredited the American reporteresses in too many instances.” “Happily our editorial methods and our own instincts as gentlewomen,” she concluded, “do not lead us to try being barmaids, or going out with costermongers on a bank holiday for the purpose of ‘getting copy.’”3 Three years later, however, Billington tacitly acknowledged the triumph of the new style of female journalism Banks had brought with her to London by disavowing the fad for “those startling undertakings” by women reporters which involved the “possession of some dramatic faculties and much make-up.”4

  Within little more than a year after her arrival in England in late 1892, Banks had propelled herself from an editorial position on the Baltimore Morning Herald into one of London’s best-known journalists. She had become a celebrity who not only gathered news but was herself newsworthy. But how did she do this? Why was the public so anxiously fascinated with Banks’s social investigations into female labor and their perpetrator? How can we make sense of the complex and seemingly contradictory ways in which English “lady” journalists like Autolycus and Billington responded to Banks’s practices and persona as an “American girl” and journalist? Banks, unlike the original Amateur Casual (James Greenwood) and socialist women slum explorers and journalists such as Margaret Harkness, notably shied away from acknowledging the sexual dimensions of her subject. Why is there no sex in Banks’s social reporting and in her writings about herself? The answers to these questions necessarily begin with Banks herself, who has left behind copious published traces of her “adventures” on three continents. But they also lead us away from Banks’ personal history toward several important issues in the late-Victorian Anglo-American world: the emergence of journalism as a profession for women and the gendered character of the press; middle-class women’s appropriation of the largely masculine tradition of cross-class incognito social exploration into the lives and labors of the London poor; and fin-de-siècle debates about national character and the status of women in the United States and Britain. The rise of the female undercover reporter in the slums coincided not only with the mania for slumming in late-Victorian London but with the emergence of the New Woman both as a subject of fiction and as a way to talk about newly emerging constructions of femininity. Were women journalists, like the growing army of female social workers and slum explorers, themselves a species of New Women? What part did women investigative journalists play in broader public debates about the sexual and social politics of London poverty and female labor? These panoramic themes as well as Banks’s individual role in their articulation are my subject.

  JOURNALISM AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS FICTION

  Near the end of Banks’s disarmingly shrewd memoir, The Autobiography of a “Newspaper Girl” (1902), she informs us that “up to the present I have been engaged mostly in writing about myself, and have, perforce, been my own ‘heroine,’ till finally I decided to write this, my journalistic autobiography.”5 At first glance, this is a damning admission. After all, her reputation rested on her supposedly factual exposés of conditions of female labor in London and later New York, not on her work as a memoirist. Banks’s elaborate descriptions of her costumed escapades accompanied by flattering studio portraits of her in disguise vied with the actual contents of her revelations for her readers’ attention (figures 3.1a and b). By the 1890s, photographers often accompanied reporters on their slum investigations. But their job was usually to capture the spectacular raggedness of the poor, a form of portraiture developed by Dr. Barnardo with his staged portraits of street children in the 1870s. Some journalists used the camera as Jacob Riis had in
New York City to convey the squalor and physical decay of slum environments, in particular tenement housing. Riis’s photographs powerfully advanced his arguments about municipal politics and social hygiene in New York and documented the effects of capitalist pursuit of profit unchecked by regard for human need. Banks, by contrast, used the camera to show us only Banks herself. She literally embodies the social problems she explores in her journalism by standing in for real servants, laundresses, and flower girls. We are never supposed to imagine that she actually is one of these girls. These photographs neither document the social realities of laboring women’s lives nor capture Banks in the midst of performing her cross-class impersonations.6 As studio portraits, the photographs of Banks bear no weight as evidence that Banks ever engaged in the labors she described in her newspaper exposés. Unlike the photographs the American writer Jack London staged to illustrate his descent into the “abyss” of London a few years later, Banks’s photographs do not even provide us a glimpse of real city streets, refuges, or workplaces as the backdrop for her impersonations. They are clearly a show, got up for the purpose of selling her literary work.7 We are meant to be charmed and intrigued by Banks’ portraits, not outraged by them or called to action.

  Banks was a master of disguise not only in her journalism but also in her voluminous writings about herself and her closest relationships. They are a rich but unreliable source of information for her biographer.8 What she chooses to tell us about herself cannot be taken at face value because her disclosures invariably serve to advance the particular argument she is making at any given moment.9 They sometimes contradict previously published statements and at other times appear to be patently false.10 Despite her craving for fame, Banks seemed determined to preserve for herself the exclusive right to tell her life story and to frustrate the historian’s attempt to tell a different one. “I earnestly request,” she wrote in her will, “my Executors to remove all inscriptions from my jewelry and to destroy all private papers and photographs.”11 Only a small number of her letters survive despite the large number of well-known people with whom she had frequent, though not close, contact.12 We do have a vast array of articles she wrote that spanned her entire adult life and were published in newspapers and periodicals ranging from the Oshkosh Northwestern Gazette in Wisconsin, the New York Times, and London Times, to the Anglo-American Times and the Referee. While Banks was in no sense a typical or representative woman, she incessantly wrote her life story using the cultural materials that lay close at hand. In studying how Banks constructed her life against the backdrop of her journalistic slumming, we stand to learn a great deal about her world.

  Taking into account Banks’s unreliability, I have still been able to piece together the general contours of her career. Born in New Jersey (in either 1865 or 1870), she was adopted at a young age by her childless aunt and uncle, who owned and worked a farm in Wisconsin that they ran on experimental but unprofitable principles of modern agriculture. Her biological and adopted parents remain nameless in her autobiographies, although she calls the latter “Uncle Josiah and Aunt Rebecca” in a witty Anglo-American Times article describing her departure from Wisconsin.13 Her supposed incompetence as a London housemaid—her inability to properly wash floors and clean candlesticks—was yet another pose she assumed to elicit commentary. As a member of her family’s servantless household, she became quite proficient in most areas of domestic economy. Despite their financial hardships, her aunt and uncle saved carefully for her higher education. In Banks’s account of her childhood, a bracing spirit of independence and self-help went hand in hand with strong community support and an unquestioned assumption that girls had a right to higher education. Banks lived more than forty years of her life in England (in or near London), but in her imagination she returned over and over to her Wisconsin childhood in seeking out those sources of her own independent spirit and of the “American girl” as a distinct national type.

  FIGURE 3.1. Banks’s flattering photographs of herself in various incognitos focus entirely on Banks herself. They provide no commentary on or glimpse of the lives of and conditions of labor for London’s working girls. Instead, they contribute to Banks’s determination to make her personal responses to working class life—and her femininity—into the chief commodity she sold in print to her readers. (From Elizabeth Banks, Campaigns of Curiosity, Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in London, London, 1894.)

  After graduating from Milwaukee-Downer College, she embarked on two years of journalism for Western papers in St. Paul, Minnesota, before accepting the post of personal secretary to John Hicks, proprietor of the Oshkosh Northwestern Weekly and U.S. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Peru. The weekly letters she published under the pseudonym Celia in the Oshkosh Northwestern from November 1889 until June 1890 provide a fairly detailed glimpse into her activities in Peru. Unwilling to be fettered by conventions governing the movements of foreigners, she passed for a native by donning the national dress of Peruvian women, the manta, and roamed the streets of Lima. She soon discovered that “robed in that garment” she might be mistaken for a “Peruvian girl who dared to be unconventional and go out alone,” thus suffering the insults of Peruvian gentlemen. Banks, for all her bravado, was quite anxious to avoid casual encounters with men on the street. Years later, when the editor of one of New York’s leading yellow newspapers asked her to be picked up as a prostitute on Broadway to show that the existing laws put respectable women at risk of being confused for their fallen sisters, she flatly refused.14 Unlike most male and some female investigative journalists in London and New York, Banks expressed no interest in exploring the sexual underworlds of the metropolis. As she explained to her literary agent, she would not “under any consideration” or for any amount of money write about the “‘seamy side’ of a woman’s journalistic life.”15 Banks’s unwillingness to investigate sexuality in her journalism was matched by her refusal to reveal anything to her readers about her own affective life. If she had any romances, no traces of them have survived.

  In Banks’s experiences in Peru as a “girl diplomat” and her reports about them, we can find some of the roots of her later journalism in London and New York in the 1890s. In addition to her fondness for imposture, she also demonstrated a deep interest in exploring spaces, customs, and identities different from her own. Her observations about Peruvian social, religious, racial, and political structures spurred Banks to reflect upon what became an enduring preoccupation for her and for so many other American writers: defining what it meant to be an American. She left Peru in July 1890 and returned to the United States where she worked briefly in New York City before moving to the Baltimore Morning Herald. It was here that she became convinced that women journalists should not be treated the same as men and that women had distinct voices as journalists and specifically female tasks to perform for newspapers and their readers. Somehow, over the course of the next year, she accumulated four hundred dollars which she took with her as she embarked upon what she thought would be a trip of a few weeks to London in 1892. During the next four years, Banks made herself into a transatlantic celebrity through her witty and daring incognito investigations into the lives of laboring girls in London—exploits I will analyze closely later in this chapter.

  Banks returned to the United States in 1896 during the heat of the presidential campaign pitting William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan. Her arrival in New York was a media event, and she was greeted by scores of journalists. The New York Daily Tribune, for example, devoted half of its “The Only Woman’s Page” to an illustrated story about Banks entitled “She Is an American. The Wee Mite of a Woman Who Interviewed Li Hung Chang [a leading Chinese minister].” Several months later, William Randolph Hearst’s American Woman’s Home Journal devoted the entire cover page of its “Special Commencement Number” to photographs with captions of Banks.16 Ishbel Ross, one of the leading women reporters in New York in the 1920s, described Banks’s invasion of Park Row “in a
new Knox hat and a tailor-made suit of the latest cut. She carried camphor and smelling salts, an alligator card case and an ivory-handled umbrella with which she waved office boys out of her way.”17 Banks deftly manipulated interviewers to include a description of her dress and physical appearance as part of her strategy to make sure her public knew that she was an attractive and feminine woman. An interview she gave a woman journalist in London two years before her triumphant return to New York allows us to see how Banks accomplished this. “Now, do you think I look the bouncing, outrageous sort of person,” Banks disingenuously asked the interviewer, “which some people make me out to be?” Her question immediately set the agenda for the story the reporter offered the public by making newsworthy her appearance and behavior. Not surprisingly, the article began with a flattering description of Banks as “a slight, sensitive, delicate-looking girl … dressed in a dark blue gown prettily trimmed with cream lace.”18

  Why was Banks so intent to control her public image? Two answers come to mind. First, Banks was an unmarried woman who lived outside the supports and constraints of male authority and family. She was not a wife or widow, mother or daughter. “Spinster,” with its connotations of dependence, redundancy, and old maidishness, was the most readily available category into which contemporaries could have placed her. Banks’s resolve to be fashionably feminine and charming signaled her emphatic rejection of spinsterhood. She preferred to construct a new sort of female image, one which balanced her compulsive need to be “different from everybody else” with her determination to be an exemplary lady in her personal demeanor. “I am ‘queer’” she breezily declared in an 1893 article describing her harmonious domestic menagerie in London of Dinah, her African-American servant, and her beloved poodle, Judge, for whom she reserved her deepest affections (figure 3.2).19 Second, Banks understood that the contrast between her petite stature and the daring physical demands of her reporting was a key ingredient in her commercial success. Most of her social investigations end with a description of the “heroine” literally restored to a feminine position—prostrate in her cozy bed.20 In Banks’s astute gender performances, her every disruption of genteel feminine norms such as engaging in hard labor required a compensatory gesture of exaggeratedly feminine weakness.