Slumming

by Koven, Seth

  Spooner, William Archibald. Papers. New College, Oxford

  Talbot, Lavinia (Mrs. Edward). Diaries. Hagley Hall, Stourbridge, West Midlands, UK

  Tillyard, Frank. Papers. Shaftesbury, Dorset (in private hands)

  Tower Hamlets Library. Local History (cuttings, photographs, and newspaper clippings)

  Toynbee Hall. Papers and Misc. Correspondence. Barnett Research Centre, Toynbee Hall

  Toynbee Hall. Papers. London Metropolitan Archives (formerly the Greater London Record Office, GLRO)

  Toynbee Travellers Journal. Barnett Research Centre, Toynbee Hall

  Wadham House Journal. Barnett Research Centre, Toynbee Hall

  Women’s University Settlement. Papers. Women’s University Settlement, Blackfriars, Southwark, London (Note: most of these papers are now deposited at the Women’s Library, formerly the Fawcett Library, London Metropolitan University)

  Executive Committee Minute Books

  Helen Barlow Recollections

  M. E. King, Reminiscences and Notes on Acland Club

  Octavia Hill, Correspondence on housing

  Woods, Robert. Papers. Harvard University, Houghton Library

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  SLUMMING: EROS AND ALTRUISM IN VICTORIAN LONDON

  1. See Frank Owen, Tempestuous Journey, Lloyd George, His Life and Times (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1955), 63–64.

  2. Karl Baedeker, London and Its Environs (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1887).

  3. In 1892, Frederick Engels described the phenomenon of elite’s interest in East London as a “momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilatation of Socialism.” See Engels’s “Preface to the English Edition,” in Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1892 ed. of 1887 trans., reprinted with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm, London: Granada, 1969; repr. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1969), 34. Citation is to Academy edition.

  4. James Adderley, In Slums and Society: Reminiscences of Old Friends (London: Fisher Unwin, 1916), 26.

  5. T. P. Stevens, Father Adderley (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1943). The poem and dedication are in the unnumbered front pages of the book.

  6. Ibid., 5.

  7. The close attention I pay to individual men, women, and children—their actions, thoughts, feelings, and representations—differs markedly from the approach pioneered by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Harmondsworth Penguin, 1978), which is a history largely without historical actors or human agents. At the same time, my approach also draws upon Foucault’s work on “discourse,” “technologies of power and knowledge,” and their relationship to sexual and social institutions, ideologies, and identities.

  8. See José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler, After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1994).

  9. In conceptualizing the relation between sexual and social politics, I have benefited particularly from Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  10. Henry W. Nevinson, Changes and Chances (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), 121.

  11. On the interplay of the “imagined” and “real” slum in newspaper representations of slum life, see Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 (Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1993). On the role of the late Victorian press in covering social problems and in producing Jack the Ripper as a Victorian sensation, see L. Perry Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). See also Curtis’s important work on representations of the Irish in print and political caricatures, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971).

  12. For a provocative treatment of these issues in Chicago and New York, see Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

  13. Ann Douglas has brilliantly evoked the ways in which Harlem in New York City between the wars functioned as a similar site of benevolence, license, experimentation, and sexual and racial transgression in Terrible Honesty, Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995). Likewise, Christine Stansell captures the mingling of transgressive bohemianism and reformism in American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).

  14. Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Sixth Report, 1877 [c. 1745] 367–368. My thanks to Robert Bucholz for sending me this reference.

  15. See Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

  16. On the phenomenon of the attractions of those who are designated low or unclean to those occupying “high” or central locations in society, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986)

  17. Henry James, Princess Casamassima (New York, 1886; Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1977, rprt., 1985), 184–185 (Citations are to the reprint edition). On James’s debt to and rewriting of investigative slum journalism and surveillance of the poor, see Mark Seltzer, “The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction (March 1981): 506– 534.

  18. For a sensitive and panoramic reconstruction of the cultural and social logic underpinning the lives of the poor in Victorian London and their responses to the well-to-do, see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  19. Nor were Adderley’s criticisms misplaced. When Archbishop Benson presided at the opening of the University Club at Oxford House, he seemed disappointed in the “extreme punctiliousness and propriety” of the men, whom, he assumed were “the better sort of small shopkeepers.” He was surprised to learn they were bona fide laborers. Benson, diary, February 18, 1888, p. 49, Benson Diaries. See also A. C. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1899), 202.

  20. Adderley’s use of the word “slumming” retained some of its early- and mid-nineteenth-century connotations of fraudulence given by writers such as Pierce Egan and Henry Mayhew—of blackening newly counterfeited coins to pass them off as legitimate or forging false begging letters. See “slum” as noun and verb, and “slumming” in Eric Partridge, The Dictionary of the Underworld (London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1950; repr., Wordsworth: Hertfordshore, UK, 1995), 642–643. Citations are to Wordsworth edition.

  21. Arthur Pillans Laurie, a resident at Toynbee Hall in the 1880s, could not bear the publicity and fanfare surrounding the settlement, although he did not hold the leaders of the settlement responsible. “We were supposed to be noble young men engaged in trying to do good to the poor. We did not feel noble and were quite incapable of doing good…. [Toynbee Hall] was very much in the limelight then, and irritating flocks of gaily arrayed young men and young women used to descend upon us from the West End.” With some friends, Pillans set up his own small colony in nearby Stepney Green. A. P. Laurie, Pictures and Politics: A Book of Reminscences (London, 1934), 74.

  22. See Louisa Hubbard, “Statistics of Women’s Work,” in Angela Burdett-Coutts, ed., Woman’s Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women by Eminent Authors (London: S. Low, Marston and Co., 1893), 364. See also Anne Summers, “A Home from Home: Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century,” in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 33–63. On women and philanthropy in nineteenth-century Britain, see Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). See also Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victoria
n and Edwardian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Ronald Walton, Women in Social Work (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); Kathleen Woodroofe, From Charity to Social Work in England and the United States (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). On women’s work in the Salvation Army, see Pamela Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), esp. chs.1 and 5. On Ranyard Bible women, see Frank Prochaska, “Body and Soul: Bible Nurses and the Poor in Victorian London,” Historical Research 60 (1987): 337–348; see also Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) ch. 2.

  23. His work The New Floreat explicitly addressed the public-school-educated boy as the audience for his message about social obligation. James Adderley, The New Floreat: A Letter to an Eton Boy on the Social Question (London: Wells Gardner Darton and Co., 1894). Likewise, a pioneering woman social investigator, Helen Dendy Bosanquet, blasted members of her own sex for their selfish pursuit of sensation through slumming. “‘Do show me some cases of unmitigated misery,’ is a request said to have been made by a young lady in search of sensation,’” Bosanquet recalled. See Helen Dendy Bosanquet, Rich and Poor (London: Macmillan, 1896), 5.

  24. The rector of the slum parish St. George’s in the East, the “rich and racy” Rev. Harry Jones, asserted that his “knowledge of the East of London” was “direct and connected.” “I have not dipped into it on philanthropical errands from the West,” he protested. Without trace of acknowledgement that he regularly transformed his observations of life among the poor into colorful anecdotes for his spirited dinner parties and the very article he had written, Jones insisted that he had not “hunted within its [East London’s] border for curious literary materials.” Harry Jones, “Life and Work among the East-London Poor,” Good Words 25 (1884), 50. On Jones and his wife’s life in East London and their style of housekeeping, see Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), 224. Likewise the novelist and writer on social problems, Cyril Gull, simultaneously lamented the tendency of novelists to “exploit” the East End for their own ends even while admitting that he sought out a slum philanthropist “hidden away … in the East End of London” because he seemed to present a “strange personality, and one offering considerable interest to a novelist.” See Cyril Gull, The Great Acceptance: The Life Story of F. N. Charrington (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1912), 2–3. Gull published his novels under the pseudonym Guy Thorne.

  25. “The Slums,” Link (October 20, 1888), 1. For another example of this pattern of discrediting slumming see “An East-End Worker: After Ten Years in Outcast London,” St. James’s Gazette (January 12, 1894), 4.

  26. Besant used a graphic description of slumming in Edinburgh to explain her transition from espousing radical individualism, free thought, neo-Malthusian birth control, and atheism to her more systematic critique of capitalism as a Fabian socialist. See Annie Besant, An Autobiography (1893; 2d ed., London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920), 308–311.

  27. William Beveridge to Annette Beveridge, January 10, 1900, IIa 41, Beveridge Papers.

  28. Henry Mayers Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 46–47.

  29. H. J. Dyos argued that the study of the slums “requires a sociology of language, for it was being applied with varying force over the period and with different emphasis at any one time by different social classes; it was being used in effect for a whole range of social and political purposes…. It is not possible now to invent a satisfactory definition of a slum, even a London one, in the nineteenth century.” H. J. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” in David Cannadine and David Reeder, eds., Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History by H. J. Dyos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 132. Dyos’s densely suggestive essay remains an excellent starting point for analyzing the concept and representation of the slum in Victorian culture.

  30. The OED (2004 on-line edition) did not bother to specify the social background of those who went slumming; that is, it assumes readers will know that only the well-to-do engage in this sort of activity. The verb forms “to slum” or “to go slumming” came into widespread usage only in the 1880s, although contemporaries felt free to use the term to characterize earlier philanthropic work. For example, an admiring biographical resumé of Lord Shaftesbury’s life in Good Words from 1887 noted that “he had taken tea hundreds of times in workmen’s houses; he had ‘slummed’ so far back as 1846, and the result was the Model Lodging House Act.” Presumably the word “slummed” was in quotations to indicate its newness and its status as slang. See John Rae, “Lord Shaftesbury as a Social Reformer,” Good Words 28 (1887), 238.

  31. Rev. Prebendary Rogers, rector of St. Botolph, Bishopgate, sermon preached in Balliol College Chapel, Sunday, February 4, 1883, as reported in Oxford Magazine (February 14, 1883), 75.

  32. The novelist Arthur Morrison constructed a complex web of authorial poses in his tales of slum life to complicate his relationship to his own working-class origins. He claimed insider knowledge of East London, not by virtue of being an East Londoner, but through the knowledge he gained as sympathetic outsider who had studied East End life. Morrison had researched carefully the slum district he immortalized in A Child of the Jago by working closely with Rev. Osborne Jay (discussed at length in chapter 5). In the preface to the third edition of A Child of the Jago, he wrote that he had “for certain years lived in the East End of London, and have been, not an occasional visitor but a familiar and equal friend in the house of the East Ender in all his degrees.” See Arthur Morrison, Child of the Jago, ed. Peter Miles (London: J. M. Dent, 1896; London: Everyman, 1996), 7. Citation is to Everyman edition.

  33. See Eric Hobsbawm on the “labour aristocracy” and divisions within the working class, in Eric Hobsbawm, “The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century England,” Labouring Men, Studies in the History of Labour (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964). Historians have wrestled with the problem of finding an appropriate language by which to describe and characterize social groups. For important contributions to this discussion, see Geoffrey Crossick, “From Gentlemen to the Residuum: Languages of Social Description in Victorian Britain,” in Penelope Corfield, ed., Language, History, and Class (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 150–178. José Harris offers a subtle and persuasive critique of “two class models” of late Victorian Britain. Harris takes into account “microdivisions and conflicts within class groups, as well as macro-divisions and conflicts between the two giant formations of capital and labour. Snobbery, class rivalry, and social differentiation cropped up at least as often between groups that were close to each other in status as between those that were far apart.” See Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, 8.

  34. As Ellen Ross explains, social “explorers used old and vague terms like rich and poor, gentleman and working man (or plurals or female forms of the latter pair). And these continue to make better sense in describing London’s mixed industrial, craft, and court society than do employers and employed, masters and hands, or proletarians and bourgeoisie. The poor themselves seem to have accepted this nomenclature, though more significant in their daily lives were gradations among the poor.” Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12.

  35. David Edwards, Report of Inspection of the Rose and Crown [on December 29, 1890] and Subsequent Administrative Proceedings, LCC/Min/10/855, GLRO.

  36. Ibid.

  37. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) on the impressive extent and depth of working-class reading.

  38. Beatrice Potter, “A Lady’s View of the Unemployed at the East,” Pall Mall Gazette (February 18, 1886).

  39. Ella Pycroft to Beatrice Potter, February 26,1886, II, (1), ii, 7 ff 467, Passfield Papers.


  40. Potter and Pycroft chronicled these ongoing struggles in “Record of the Inhabitants of Katherine Buildings,” Coll. Misc. 43, BLPES, as well as in Pycroft’s letters to Potter, II, (1), ii, 7, Passfield Papers. See Rosemary O’Day, “How Families Lived Then: Katherine Buildings, East Smithfield, 1885–1890,” in Studying Family and Community History, vol. 1, ed. Ruth Finnegan and Michael Drake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 129–167. Ruth Livesy offers a nuanced reading of these materials in “Domesticating the Slums: Lady Rent-Collectors and their Tenants, 1870–1914.” Unpublished essay in author’s possession. Aarons did write one surviving letter to Potter on March 2, 1886. II (1) ii, 8 ff 566–567, Passfield Papers.

  41. Herbert Spencer to Beatrice Potter, November 12, 1887, II, (1), ii, 1, Passfield Papers. Interestingly, we find these views echoed, albeit from a very different perspective in the memoir of George Acorn, a laboring man who frequented Toynbee Hall. The patent falseness of slummers’ pretensions to have become slum dwellers infuriated him. He acerbically commented that the philanthropist’s “heart and mind might be deeply concerned with the dreadful mystery, the inconceivable entanglement of it all; but he [unlike a real slum dweller] would not have the whole horizon of his life hopelessly encumbered with difficulties and obstacles and appearing at once narrow and insurmountable.” See George Acorn, One of the Multitude (London: Heinemann, 1911), xi.

  42. Potter had a great deal more at stake than sociological research in her masquerade as a sweated Jewish trouser fitter. She believed that she had Jewish ancestry, a putative lineage that fascinated and bothered her. Thus disguising herself as a Jewess was also a way for Potter to come to know better a hidden part of herself and her family’s past about which she had deep ambivalence. See Deborah Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165–170.

  43. Amy Levy, the Jewish poet of platonic love between women and of urban despair, captured well the demotic pleasures of seeing the city from the top of an omnibus in her “Ballade of an Omnibus.” See Amy Levy, The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993), 386.