by Koven, Seth
In the years following Oscar Wilde’s trials and Ashbee’s break with Toynbee, Barnett had continued to pursue his goal of mingling love and learning while remaining ever vigilant to the imperative to maintain sexual purity at the settlement. To achieve true “fellowship in pursuit of knowledge,” Toynbee Hall established a students’ union and club room and two residential hostels catering to university extension students: Wadham House, named after Barnett’s alma mater, and Balliol House, in homage to the ties binding together the renowned college and settlement. Barnett hoped that these residence halls would form the nucleus of “a great democratic university, as popular and as far-reaching as the medieval universities were.”168 Like Toynbee Hall itself, Wadham House was designed to appeal to men longing to free themselves from the suffocating decor and norms of respectability.
Why, it seemed to its founders, should not men engaged in business—school masters, clerks, artizans—fly from the Inferno of London lodgings—from muslin curtains and antimacassars, and enlarged portraits of the dear deceased—from cheerless tea and toast and the pipe of solitude—to a social life which would brace their energies and feed their intellects and souls? … Each man has his private room—small but not afflicting to the artistic soul. The community share a common room. The place is to a large extent self-governing—much more so than an Oxford college, though it rejoices in the paraphernalia of warden, dean, and censor of studies.169
The writer’s lighthearted tone implies that Wadham House was intended to provide refuge for men of modest means and bohemian cast of mind.
H. H. Asquith, the future Liberal prime minister, visited one of the residential hostels, which he hoped would become a “nursery of great ideals, the training school in which men should be disciplined to be strenuous and valiant servants.”170 However, daily life at the residential hostels was both more prosaic and less virtuous than either the Barnetts or Asquith had expected. In 1896, Samuel Barnett nearly incited a rebellion among the residents of Balliol House when he expelled a member for getting drunk.171 More disappointingly, virtually no working men—neither skilled artisans nor mechanics—resided at the hostels, in large measure because the weekly charge for room and board of 18–19 shillings was beyond the means of even well-paid laboring men in East London.
Wadham House residents proved themselves to be at least as unconventional as their varsity counterparts at Toynbee Hall. The residents created and circulated privately among themselves the “Wadham House Journal,” which mischievously chronicled the activities and interests of house members.172 The journal is self-consciously and exuberantly a product of aestheticism, a work determined to parody all forms of high mindedness and its own literary-artistic pretensions. It is not a document that can or should be read too literally, although its entries appear to have corresponded loosely to events in the life of the house and in the broader community. Its creators mingled poems with journalistic satires of current events and mock extracts from house committee deliberations; photographic images vied with drawings of neochivalric emblems (figure 5.6).
In both its form and content, the “Wadham House Journal” of 1905 displays one of the distinctive features of Toynbee Hall in its first decades—the overlap of aestheticism, social reform, and dissident sexuality. Its dominant mode is double entendre; its dominant themes are invasion, contamination, and imminent moral corruption. Nothing means quite what it says; each entry seems calculated to confuse any reader who is not already privy to the secrets shared by house members. While claiming to sound a cautionary note, the contributors celebrate the decay of morals of various residents. Reworking the homoerotic tone and tropes of A. E. Housman’s Shropshire Lad (1896), the author of a fictional piece entitled “Musings upon a Blighted Life” recounts the degeneration of John Burgis, a Wadham House resident and erstwhile “Berkshire lad,” whose early life was “bright and gay,” “his morals sound and hearty too…. [N]o sin was he a party to.” After living with his fellow residents, the “seven devils” of Wadham House, the lad is now “lost in gloom,” his life “blighted.” Another poem, “Assossiette! Assossiette!,” parodies two Housman poems, “When the lad for longing sighs” and “On your midnight pallet lying.” It features a “pious youth” with “pale … cheek,” “bristling … hair,” “brow … sad with toil and care.” The poem impressionistically conjures up a mood of intense and eroticized mystery as the youth overhears through a bedroom door the “groaning” and “moaning” of an “alien” Frenchman who cries out in his sleep “this fearful word for thing so nice; / ‘Assossiette! Assossiette!’” Does “assossiette” refer to the way a Frenchman would say the English word “associate,” which was the technical term used by Toynbee Hall to describe the status of Wadham House residents at the settlement? Or does “assossiette” refer to a woman associated with Wadham House? The calculated indeterminacy of the poem and of the meaning of the “fearful word” “Assossiette” contributes to the sexually ambiguous masculinity put on view in the journal.
FIGURE 5.6. The “Wadham House Journal” and its predecessor, the “Interhouse Journal” (begun in 1893 for Wadham and Balliol Houses), were created both to contain information about the collective life of the two student halls and as aesthetic objects. The cover of the “Wadham House Journal” is decorated with a neoheraldic drawing of a helmet and sword in red and green. The table of contents page of the 1905 journal, shown here, is whimsical in its use of odd angles and a pastiche style that self-consciously strives for an “aesthetic” effect.
A satiric prose entry offers another version of the events described in “Assossiette, Assossiette” and suggests that vice in general, and dissident male sexuality in particular, constitute the “open secret” (the phrase comes from the journal itself) of life at Wadham House. It records the invasion of Wadham House by “aliens,” including a stout anarchist Finn and “a heathen Frenchman, the most disreputable of the lot, who has already succeeded in bringing down by several grades the moral tone of the House and would achieve its total corruption if such a thing were possible.” During the Easter vacation, “most self-respecting residents fled away,” leaving those “obliged to stay” to “whisper … their experiences.” The writer disingenuously concluded with a bit of titillating provocation that played upon the sexualizing of secrets between men. In an extended footnote to a section of text recorded only as blank underlining, the editor explained that “we have thought it our duty to the homes in which this Journal is honourable known, to hush down into honest silence the whispers of our correspondent’s friends.”173 The selfcontradicting formulation “honest silence” captures the mock-serious tone of the journal as a whole, which made fun of several contemporary anxieties: the impact of the invasion of “aliens,” that is, Jews in Whitechapel; and fears about links between aestheticism, male homoeroticism, and immorality. Whereas the authors of the journal explicitly ascribe the source of “contamination” at Wadham House to the foreignness of its residents, the texts themselves point to other, unnameable misdeeds and desires.
The notices about Wadham House published during 1905 in the Toynbee Record, the official organ of the settlement and its many branches, make no allusion to the presence of either Gallic invaders or the “moral corruption” of the house. We learn instead that several members of Wadham House fared well on civil service examinations and that William Beveridge—who along with his future brother-in-law, Richard Henry Tawney, served as university extension lecturers during the spring term—was subwarden of Toynbee and censor of studies at Wadham and Balliol Houses. One cannot help but be struck by the vast discrepancy between what the official, published records tell us about this philanthropic offshoot of Toynbee Hall and the unauthorized history of its inner life revealed, albeit in fragmentary glimpses and self-mocking language, by the chance survival of the house journal.
If, as I have argued throughout this book, the slums of London were sexed spaces in the Victorian cultural imagination, settlements were themselves places were young
men could try on new masculine styles and explore dissident sexual desires while basking in the limelight for their altruistic sacrifices. Intent on explaining the men’s settlement movement as a paradigmatic response to the crises between labor and capital of the 1880s, scholars have failed to notice that settlements were not only apt sites for reckoning with class alienation and segregation, but also for experimenting with new conceptions of masculine subjectivity. The aesthetic young men of Toynbee Hall, the ascetic would-be slum clergymen of Oxford House, and London’s celibate High Church slum priests never achieved the iconic notoriety of the insurrectionary New Woman. Nor should they have. The cultural burdens they bore were much less restrictive than those confronting the New Women of the ’80s and ’90s, and their rebellion against these burdens correspondingly less far-reaching.174 Their defiance of prevailing gender and sexual norms was accompanied—and perhaps to some extent, also concealed—by their socially sanctioned tasks of bringing social peace and religious instruction to the poor at a particularly anxious moment in the history of the metropolis. Their philanthropic labors made it possible for these men to moralize all sorts of desires—to bind the wounds of a class-divided society and to free themselves, at least for a time, of the manacles of bourgeois respectability.
Can we go so far as to claim that these ascetics and aesthetes in the slums were “New Men?” Certainly, this is what James Adderley came to believe about himself. In 1896 Adderley embarked on nearly six weeks of tramping, preaching, and begging in London and southern England as part of his missionary work as superior of the fledgling Society of the Divine Compassion. Dressed in a dark cowl and sandals and sleeping in six-pence “doss” houses night after night, Adderley was subjected to considerable ridicule. In his slumming diary, he recorded that he was frequently taunted with the cry, “The New Woman! The New Woman!” Sometimes he was even called, “The New Man!” Far from objecting to the epithets, Adderley reflected that the phrase “New Man” aptly expressed “just what I am trying to be!”175 Two years earlier, the New Man had appeared in the humor magazine Punch. Playing on the theme of sexual and gender inversion, Punch decided that the “New Man” was, in a word, “Woman.”176 The sexual ambiguities that were such an important part of the public personae of men like Adderley, Dolling, Ashbee, and Winnington Ingram contributed to the public’s confusion about who or what these New Men were.177
Even in Barnett’s first tentative exploration of the settlement idea in his draft speech, “A Modern Monastery,” we can detect a tension between monastic self-denial on the one hand, and a celebration of the power and beauty of art and culture on the other. The contrasting interior and exterior designs of Oxford House and Toynbee Hall and the masculine personae fostered by each settlement were symptomatic of deeper differences in the way each settlement expressed the relationship between religion, social reform, and masculinity. The early settlers’ keen attention to the way they represented themselves—the distinct sense of style they conveyed—was one important though subtle means by which Oxford House and Toynbee Hall men expressed their differences from one another. While contrasting views about religion provided the initial justification for the creation of Oxford House, different conceptions of masculinity, which were embedded in ideological and aesthetic beliefs, came to be just as important in distinguishing the two from each other.
At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate these differences. The men of Oxford House and Toynbee Hall fed off and responded to the same set of social, economic, religious, and sexual anxieties. Many residents were neither aesthetes nor ascetics; still others were drawn toward and actively supported both institutions. The opposition between the “aesthete” and the “ascetic” belies the porous character of the boundaries separating these masculine personae. The aesthete and the ascetic in the slums were oscillating modes of masculinity, at once opposed to one another and yet part of a shifting continuum of masculine subjectivities and behaviors.
It is clear that the innovative masculine personae forged by male settlers and slum priests in the late nineteenth century were related to the contemporaneous emergence of the homosexual as a distinct medical, sexual, and social category of persons. But how? Let me answer this question by beginning with what we know with certainty and then moving to more speculative or suggestive approaches to it. Considerable evidence demonstrates that the most outspoken defenders of “Greek love” between men and of homosexual rights in Victorian Britain were drawn to slum benevolence in general and to Toynbee Hall in particular. Oscar Browning, who had been sacked from Eton amidst rumors of sexual scandal and was an ardent defender of platonic love between men, served on the original Cambridge Committee for the University Settlement that became Toynbee Hall.178 Edward Carpenter supported the Barnetts’ work and corresponded with C. R. Ashbee as he developed his ideas about comradeship and craftsmanship. The homosexual scholar of the Renaissance John Addington Symonds told members of the Elizabethan Literary Society at Toynbee Hall that he “sympathise[d] deeply with your work at Toynbee Hall. I congratulate you heartily on the success you have achieved.”179 Carpenter’s and Symonds’s enthusiasm for men’s settlements is hardly surprising given the central role of cross-class love between men in their own sexual and social ethics.180
In the first decades of the twentieth century, novelists, psychologists, and sexologists alike increasingly viewed male settlement house and club work with boys in the East End of London as potential signs of homosexual desire. E. M. Forster, in his novel Maurice (written 1913–14), sent his homosexual protagonist Maurice fleeing to a college settlement in the south London slums after Clive, his erstwhile aristocratic lover, throws him over for a woman and marriage.181 Recuperating from sexual loss through slum benevolence, Maurice represses and sublimates but also gives vent to, his same-sex desires by playing football and teaching arithmetic and boxing to the rough lads living near the settlement.182 In 1927, T. A. Ross published “A Case of Homosexual Inversion,” which concerned a gentleman of culture and business acumen who was tortured by the belated discovery of his sexual feelings for men. Horrified by the romantic attentions of women, the gentleman “thereafter … occupied much of his spare time in philanthropic society … chiefly among boys in the east of London.” At first, “no trace of conscious sex feeling was aroused” by his contact with slum boys, but later “he began to realize that there were some constituents among his ideas concerning the male sex besides those of normal philanthropy.”183
At the same time, the evidence presented in this chapter strongly suggests that there is no reason to believe that the endeavors of settlers and slum priests, such as James Adderley, to become New Men in the slums were culturally constrained fumblings toward homosexuality. The opposition between “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” which gained currency in late-nineteenth-century Britain, is simply too crude, both descriptively and theoretically, to accommodate the kinds of masculine subjectivities that elite men like Scott Holland, Adderley, Winnington Ingram, and Dolling attempted to fashion for themselves through their cross-class fraternal philanthropy in the slums.184 The erotic ambiguities of Toynbee Hall aestheticism and Oxford House asceticism may well have made these settlements attractive to a small number of male residents and associates who actively pursued sexual relationships with other men. Ashbee’s self-revealing and self-serving archive of letters and journals provides the most compelling evidence in support of this supposition.185 However, Ashbee’s break with Toynbee demonstrates that while the leaders of male settlements encouraged the cultivation of loving friendships among men, they refused to tolerate any hint of sex between men. Most male settlers, unlike their female counterparts, ultimately chose to marry and seemed to have had little difficulty balancing their intense youthful attachments with other men with opposite-sex love and romance as mature adults. It would be misguided and unfair to identify men like Winnington Ingram, who so resolutely understood themselves through their devotion to celibacy, with the homosexual—a perso
n whom sexologists defined by and through sexual desires and acts.186 We are much better served placing the emergence of the “homosexual,” like the philanthropic “aesthete” and “ascetic,” as one of many fin-de-siècle masculine personae constructed at the interstices of new ideas about sexuality and gender, and religious and social-reform impulses.
A DOOR UNLOCKED: THE POLITICS OF BROTHERLY LOVE IN THE SLUMS
Just as the opposition between the aesthete and the ascetic was unstable, so, too, the distinctions between “agape” and “philia”—the sexual purity of the “true hermaphrodite” and the “unnatural depravity” of the homosexual comrade—were more subtle than most Victorians would have been willing to admit. We get a sense of the affinities drawing these seemingly opposed types of men together in C. R. Ashbee’s enthusiastic appreciation for Winnington Ingram, who invited Ashbee to dine with him in July 1901 at Fulham Palace, his London residence. On the face of it, they make an unlikely pair of dinner companions, the celibate bishop with a passion for purity and the married homosexual aesthete and guild socialist. But apparently the evening was a great success as the two men discussed their mutual love of East London and its people. Ashbee was charmed to discover that Winnington Ingram had converted the palace library into a sanatorium for his “East end friends” where he had installed two little slum children recovering from scarlet fever. In Ashbee’s admiring and perhaps envious eyes, Winnington Ingram was “the Bachelor Bishop with the heart of a boy” who had literally been taken out of his carriage by an East London crowd and been “shouldered by the mob for joy at his appointment” to the episcopal see of London. What Winnington Ingram lacked in intellectual cleverness he made up for with his candor and unaffected good fellowship. Winnington Ingram got what he wanted, Ashbee decided, not through sophisticated disquisition but merely by “put[ting] his arm around your neck,” precisely the sort of comradely gesture Ashbee adored. At first, Ashbee was puzzled how “so papistical a parson” could inspire such love from the people; but, upon reflection, he decided that, regardless of what Winnington Ingram himself believed, the appeal of ritualism was wholly “aesthetic.”187