by Koven, Seth
18. By beginning my study with Greenwood and the 1860s, I am following the periodization of E. P. Hennock, who argues for the “close relation of the social thought of the 1860s and that of the 1880s.” “Poverty and Social Theory in England: The Experience of the 1880s,” Social History (January 1976): 89.
19. Neil Bartlett, in his provocative and insightful biography of Oscar Wilde and the “forging” of gay selfhood, claimed that despite intense competition among journalists, including Mayhew and Greenwood, “to expose the worst evils,” sex between men was conspicuously and completely absent from their writings. See Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988), 143–145.
20. His books were usually collections of previously published articles.
21. On the pose of the “gent” in relation to the “swell,” see Peter Bailey, “Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday: Comic Art in the 1880s,” History Workshop Journal 16 (Autumn 1983): 13.
22. For an extended history of Greenwood’s family, see Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette, esp. ch. 12.
23. Edmund Yates, Fifty Years of London Life, Memoirs of a Man of the World (New York: Harper and Bros., 1885), 197. On Yates’s editorial career, see Joel Weiner, “Edmund Yates: The Gossip as Editor,” in Joel Weiner, ed., Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985): 259–274. On the cultural and social milieu of London’s bohemian journalists, see P. D. Edwards, Dickens’s ‘Young Men,’ George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates, and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997); Christopher Kent, “The Idea of Bohemia in Mid-Victorian England,” Queens Quarterly 80 (1973): 360–369. Jerrold Siegel places journalists at the heart of Bohemian Paris at mid-century. See Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830– 1930 (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).
24. The year after “A Night,” Greenwood scored another major journalistic coup about sex with his exposé of the “Wrens of Curragh,” a community of female prostitutes attached to the barracks in Curragh. He initially published his findings in the Pall Mall Gazette, October 15–19, 1867, and later in a pamphlet. Greenwood noted that the community of wrens admitted unattached, homeless women who were not always engaged in prostitution. See Maria Luddy, “An Outcast Community: The ‘Wrens’ of the Curragh,” Women’s History Review 1, no. 3 (1992), 341–355. My thanks to James Adams, whose unpublished graduate seminar paper, “The Wrens of the Curragh” (May 2003) vastly expanded my knowledge of this controversy.
25. See James Greenwood, “The Wren of the Curragh. No. 1,” Pall Mall Gazette (October 15, 1867), 9. Greenwood also explicitly linked this exposé to “A Night” by criticizing the horrors of the local workhouse and explaining the women’s aversion to it.
26. For Greenwood’s age and date of death, see B. I. Diamond and J. O. Baylen, “James Greenwood’s London: A Precursor of Charles Booth,” Victorian Periodicals Review (Spring/Summer 1984): 42.
27. For a vivid recreation of low haunts and depressed state of Lambeth at this time, see Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).
28. “Private Correspondence Column,” Birmingham Journal, supplement (January 27, 1866), 4.
29. Stead, “Character Sketch,” 144.
30. Frederick Greenwood as quoted in B. I. Diamond, “A Precursor of the New Journalism: Frederick Greenwood of the Pall Mall Gazette” in Joel Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 27.
31. On the cotton famine’s impact on the theory and practice of poor relief, see Lynn Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 7.
32. Passed on a provisional one year basis in 1864, it was made into permanent law in 1865.
33. See Metropolitan Houseless Poor Act, 27 & 28 Vict. c. 116 (1864); 28 & 29 Vict. c. 34 (1865).
34. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law Policy (London, 1910), 97.
35. In 1866, the government of London remained extremely chaotic and highly localized. Each workhouse had its own board of guardians who served as trustees of the institution and involved themselves with the supervision of paid staff and regular inspection of the premises. London’s vestrymen were responsible not only for poor relief, but also for most other local government functions such as education and roads.
36. On tensions between local guardians and the emergence of more centralized government in London see David Owen, The Government of Victorian London, 1855–1889: The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982); On the politicization of London vestries, see John Davis, Reforming London: The London Government Problem, 1855–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23–24.
37. As the history of “A Night” makes clear, Thomas MacKay was wrong to claim that the effect of the Metropolitan Houseless Poor Act was “instantaneous: all the metropolitan boards, with one exception, provided, for the most part adequately, the accommodation required by the Act.” Thomas MacKay, History of the English Poor Law, vol. 3 (New York, 1900), 379.
38. See Louisa Twining, Recollections of Workhouse Visiting and Management during Twenty-Five Years (London: C. K. Paul, 1880). Twining alludes to, but never mentions by name, “A Night.” She goes out of her way to establish that women had entered the field of workhouse reform before men. For Millicent N., see Victoria Magazine for Women (September 1866), 463.
39. Nightingale wrote to Gathorne Hardy, president of the Poor Law Board, that she was “as stern a political economist as any man and I would make the able bodied pauper either really work or starve.” See Nightingale to Gathorne Hardy, February/March 1867, AdMss. 45787, ff 131, Nightingale Papers, British Library.
40. Frederick Greenwood, “Birth and Infancy of the Pall Mall Gazette,” Pall Mall Gazette (April 14, 1897), 2.
41. The seeming disinterest of the press in discovering his actual name suggests that journalists were not particularly concerned about his fate as an individual, but rather saw his death as an opportunity to draw attention to a social problem and sell papers.
42. My thanks to Louise Yelin for suggesting this source for “A Night.” For example, see “A Walk in a Workhouse,” Household Words (May 25, 1850). Dickens’s depiction of the workhouse in Oliver Twist and Fagin’s relations with his “street arabs” constitute yet another set of his influence on the sorts of themes treated by Greenwood.
43. See Eve Sedgwick, “Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend,” in Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), ch. 9. On Dickens’s use of disguise, and more generally, the history of disguise in Victorian literature, see John Reed’s suggestive analysis in Victorian Conventions (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975), ch. 13.
44. In a sermon preached for the benefit of the bishop of London’s Fund, the Bishop of St. David’s elaborated on the unique status and claims of London on the nation. “It is the seat of government, of legislation, of the supreme and permanent administration of justice; the main storehouse of the national wealth, material and intellectual; the depository of the most precious treasures of art and knowledge; the chief laboratory of all the inventions which contribute to cheer, adorn, and ennoble human life; the mart of all productions which minister to every kind of desire; the centre in which every ambition finds its highest aim.” Lord bishop of St. David’s, Connop Thirlwall, The Wants of the Great City: A Sermon Preached at Whitehall Chapel, May 13, 1866 (London, 1866), 2, 3.
45. See Keith McClelland, “England’s Greatness, the Working Man,” in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation, Class, Race, Gender, and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Ca
mbridge University Press, 2000), esp. 96–102.
46. See José Harris, “Between Civic Virtue and Social Darwinism: The Concept of the Residuum,” in David Englander and Rosemary O’Day, eds., Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in England, 1840–1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).
47. According to W. T. Stead, James was “greatly assisted by the independent observations of [Bittlestone] his companion. Four eyes were better than two, and one memory assisted the other.” Stead, “Character Sketch,” 144.
48. Ibid.
49. At this point in Greenwood’s story, he used the pronoun “he” to describe the gentleman slummer. Once he reveals the fact that he is the slum investigator, he used the first person singular pronoun.
50. These terms figure prominently in the first annual report of the COS. See Meeting of the Society for Organising Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicity, Held at Willis’s Rooms, on March 30th, 1870 (London, 1870), esp. 6–8.
51. As Nina Auerbach has argued, amateur theatricals were immensely popular among the well-to-do, precisely those people whom the PMG hoped to capture as readers. See Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
52. See Gail Ching-Liang Low, “White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism,” New Formations (Winter 1989), 93.
53. See Harry Cocks, “The Trials of Sodom: Sodomy Trials and the Regulation of Male Homosexuality, 1830–1885,” unpublished paper presented to the North American Conference on British Studies, Chicago, 1996. Cocks discusses the use of disguises and entrapment within the broader problem of policing sodomy and using evidence provided by the police in various prosecutions for homosexual offences in Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), ch. 2. He examines the use of disguises—and forms of cross-dressing—by men seeking sex with other men in ch. 3.
54. See C. W. Craven, A Night in the Workhouse (London, 1887), 5. Craven’s narrative sticks very closely to Greenwood’s and ends with his claim to have been an “amateur casual” for an evening.
55. Striptease did not emerge as widespread form of erotic dance until the early twentieth century. My thanks to Judy Walkowitz for pointing this out to me.
56. See Louis Chevalier’s analysis of Sue in Laboring Classes, Dangerous Classes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). See also Edward R. Tannenbaum, “The Beginnings of Bleeding-Heart Liberalism: Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 3 (July 1981), pp. 491–507.
57. According to Stead, in its early days the Pall Mall Gazette was believed to be a paper “for gentlemen by gentlemen.” Stead, “Character Sketch,” 141.
58. “Legalized Abominations—The Christian Hells of England,” Reynold’s Newspaper (January 21, 1866), 3.
59. The Poor Law Board had met during the first week of January 1866 to establish uniform standards of food and work requirements for workhouses. See Lambeth Board of Guardians, minute book, 1865–1866, Greater London Record Office.
60. See David Armstrong, The Political Anatomy of the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) for a general framework about the relationship between disease, social hygiene, and shifting attempts to regulate bodies.
61. George Woolcott, Public Baths and Wash-Houses: Suggestions for Building and Fitting Up Parochial or Borough Establishments (London, 1850); E. T. Bellhouse, On Baths and Wash-Houses (Manchester, 1854), 4, 13. The pamphlet was reprinted from the Transactions of the Manchester Statistical Society for June 1854.
62. For a vivid account of the cholera epidemic of 1865–1866 and its links to anxieties about fouled water and East London squalor, see Norman Longmate, King Cholera: The Biography of a Disease (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966), ch. 20.
63. The appropriation of institutions of public hygiene as sites of male same-sex contact and desire in twentieth century London has been analyzed by Matt Houlbrook. See “The Private World of Public Urinals: London, 1918–1957,” London Journal 25, no. 1 (2000): 52–70. Houlbrook’s article turned my attention to the first queer guidebook to London. Its author, “Paul Pry,” the pseudonym of Thomas Burke, likewise playfully and ironically used the language of hygiene as a way to talk about queer sex in 1937. The guidebook opens with one of its two main characters, Mr. Mumble, searching the Sanitary World and Drainage Observer for information—ostensibly about public urinals but in fact about sites for illicit sexual contact between men. He literally uses London County Council drainage and sewer maps and his own map of London’s public conveniences to construct a map of public refuges for sex between men. See Paul Pry, For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to All Londoners and London Visitors, Overheard in The Theleme Club and Taken Down Verbatim (London: George Routledge, 1937).
64. Frederick Greenwood quoted by Stead in “Character Sketch,” 144.
65. See Ellen Ross on the “oatmeal wars,” in Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 36–37.
66. George Bernard Shaw, Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. 1 (New York: Dodd Mead and Co., 1962), 215.
67. John Timbs’s vast compendium of club life (Clubs and Club Life in London [London: Richard Bentley, 1866]) was published that same week and widely reviewed.
68. On the 1842 Mines Act and the committee report that preceded it, see Angela John, By the Sweat of Their Brow (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
69. See Anthony Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (Montreal, 1977); and “Sex and the Single Room: Incest among the Victorian Working Classes,” in Anthony Wohl, ed., The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).
70. See Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1887), 470. Shaftesbury was closely involved with all these campaigns. See also Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), Part 1.
71. The Weekly Dispatch of March 21, 1836, complained that the New Bastilles drove “men from the marriage bed to sleep with boys.” See Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 190.
72. See Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 102.
73. Thirty years later, Frederick Greenwood reiterated the unspeakable and unnamable character of the casual ward abominations as well as the teasing rhetorical strategy used to encourage readers’ dark imaginings. “All that might have been written after this visit to a casual ward was not written: could not be described in public print at that insufficiently advanced period of the century. But what was suppressed could be otherwise made known.” Greenwood, “Birth and Infancy of the ‘Pall Mall Gazette,’” 2.
74. While Greenwood’s slum explorations are saturated by sexual themes and images, homoeroticism is not an overarching characteristic of his total body of writings. There are, however, several other examples of Greenwood’s prurient-philanthropic fascination for handsome youths. In Seven Curses, he reproduced an advertisement published in a newspaper addressed to the “Aged and Unprotected” by “a young man, aged twenty-two, well-built, good-looking, and of a frank and affectionate disposition” desirous “of acting the part of a son towards any aged person or persons who would regard his companionship and constant devotion as an equivalent for his maintenance and clothes and support generally.” Was the advertiser a male prostitute seeking economic support in exchange for his frank affection and companionship? Greenwood’s commentary indicates that he was particularly intrigued by the advertisement and advertiser: “Although it is difficult without a struggle to feel an interest in this young gentleman’s welfare, we cannot help feeling curious to know what success his advertisement brought him. Is he still a forlorn orphan, wasting his many virtues and manly attributes on a wor
ld that to him is a wilderness?” Given the thousands of destitute men and women in London, it is not clear why Greenwood was so drawn to this case or why he cared to imagine what had become of the youth’s “manly attributes.” Seven Curses of London (1869; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 170.
75. Farnall’s entry to the Lambeth visitor’s book was reproduced in “The Houseless Poor and the Workhouse,” Daily News (January 15, 1866), 2.
76. For example, the journal for Barnardo’s work was named Night and Day to signify his vigilance at all hours, his commitment to rescuing children from the terrors of sleeping on the streets at night, and to indicate the ways in which philanthropy transformed the darkness of night into the healthy brightness of day for children.
77. On the construction and regulation of space based on the rhetoric of dirt and disease, see David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995).
78. The Harding Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains two broadside retellings of Greenwood’s “A Night”: Harding B, 13 (154) “A Night in a London Workhouse,” and Harding B, 13 (155) entitled “A Night’s Repose in Lambeth Workhouse.”
79. Frederick Greenwood, “Casual Wards,” Pall Mall Gazette (January 16, 1866), 1. Frederick’s editorial response to the Wrens exposé included a substantial analysis of “A Night.” He argued that both series of articles had revealed official incompetence and refusal to act to serve the public’s best interests. See Frederick Greenwood, “Curiosities of the Public Service,” Pall Mall Gazette (October 24, 1867), 1.
80. “A Night in a London Workhouse,” n.d. (Digby, St. Giles, London) Bodleian Library.
81. John Smeaton, “Workhouse Governors,” Pall Mall Gazette (January 19, 1866), 3.
82. James Greenwood, Seven Curses of London, 173.
83. Pall Mall Gazette (January 15, 1866), 5.
84. “A Ministerial Midnight Visit,” Tower Hamlets Express (January 19, 1866).