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85. J. H. Stallard, The Female Casual and Her Lodging: With a Complete Scheme for the Regulation of Workhouse Infirmaries (London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1866), 12. Ellen Stanley’s reports of her visit were first published in serial form and widely reprinted in London. See for example “The Female Casual at Whitechapel, Pt. 1,” East London Observer (September 1, 1866), 2. These articles did not come close to matching the sensation accompanying Greenwood’s initial revelations.
86. Northumbrian [pseud.], “Legalized Abominations—The Christian Hells of England,” Reynolds’s Newspaper (January 21, 1866), 3.
87. Times (January 29, 1866), 2–3.
88. The Observer’s first critical notice of “A Night” appeared in an article on January 14 and focused on Farnall’s, not Greenwood’s, findings.
89. “Midnight Visits to the Casual Wards of London, No. 3,” Observer (February 11, 1866), 5.
90. For the most part, Observer articles detailed facts in straightforward prose about casuals wards (their dimensions; the numbers of inmates; the character of the bedding and clothing provided; the condition of the bathwater) and highlighted local variation in their management. However, the Observer was forced to acknowledge conditions in the workhouse of St. James, Clerkenwell, were even more horrible than what the Amateur Casual had discovered in Lambeth. But, unlike the PMG, it refused to specify what its reporters had seen. “Midnight Visits … No. 4,” Observer (February 18, 1866), 5.
91. “Midnight Visits … No. 1,” Observer (January 28, 1866), 5.
92. This was the argument developed in “Home, Sweet Home,” All the Year Round (April 7, 1866), 303.
93. I explore the relationships between news as commodity, slum investigation, and gender in detail in chapter 3, “The American Girl in London.” For a superb study of the relationship between gender, sex, and scandal in the emergence of the press in New York city, see Amy Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
94. The best introduction to debates about the history of New Journalism is Joel H. Wiener, ed., Papers for the Millions: The New Journalism in Britain, 1850s to 1914 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). See especially B. I. Diamond’s contribution, “A Precursor of the New Journalism: Frederick Greenwood of the Pall Mall Gazette.”
95. See the Observer (February 11, 1866), 5.
96. See Jim Davis, “A Night in the Workhouse, or The Poor Laws as Sensation Drama,” Essays in Theatre 7, no. 2 (May 1989): 111–126.
97. Ibid., 118. The prompt copy contains one page of “speeches to be omitted,” which include phrases such as the “guardians of the poor are but their oppressors.”
98. Note written on ms. prompt copy of The Casual Ward original in the Frank Pettingell Collection of Plays, University of Kent, Canterbury; microfilm from “The Popular Stage: Drama in Nineteenth Century England,” series one, part 1, reel 11, in the same collection.
99. South London Journal (February 3, 1866), 4.
100. “An ‘Amateur Casual’ in Trouble,” Lloyd’s Weekly (January 28, 1866), 7.
101. South London Journal (February 3, 1866), 4
102. Stallard, The Female Casual 2, 37, 47. For a more extensive treatment of this investigation, see ch. 4, “The Politics and Erotics of Dirt.”
103. Farnall’s official inspection on January 13 immediately halted the use of the crank shed as a sleeping place and set in motion the installation of hot and cold running water for the baths to replace the old system of carrying pails of water by hand. He also demanded that Lambeth Workhouse officials send casuals who could not be accommodated in the regular wards to a nearby licensed lodging house at the expense of the newly established metropolitan-wide common fund. However, beyond noting Farnall’s recommendations and Sir Richard Mayne’s offer that the police should act as relieving officers, the minute book of the Lambeth guardians for January and February 1866 betrays neither traces of the scandal surrounding the guardians nor evidence of any discord among the guardians. See Minute Book, January 16 and January 23, 1866, LaBG 133/30, Lambeth Board of Guardians.
104. Northumbrian [pseud.], “Legalized Abominations,” 3.
105. See report of Lambeth vestry meeting of January 18, 1866, in South London Journal (January 20, 1866), 4, 5.
106. Daily News (January 20, 1866), 4.
107. The outpouring of articles condemning vestrymen and poor law guardians was immense.
108. Daily News (January 26, 1866), 4.
109. Farnall’s surviving correspondence files for this period surprisingly contain almost no information about metropolitan casual wards. See PRO/MH12/12474. Farnall’s own shifting stance on workhouse reform was closely scrutinized, often unfavorably. The Journal of Social Science, a newly established organ for sanitary reform, commented sarcastically that “it must be a matter of surprise to every one to find that he has so suddenly [after the Lancet Commission and “A Night”] become the advocate for workhouse reform. For years he has been … the apologist for the very evils he now condemns.” Journal of Social Science 1, no. 10 (1865–1866): 553.
110. See C. P. Villiers, “Destitute and Houseless Poor in the Metropolis,” minute of the Poor Law Board, December 23, 1863, in the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Poor Law Relief, 1888, appendix 8, p. 140. See also “Report of Andrew Doyle, esq., Poor Law Inspector, to the President of the Poor Law Board,” Sessional Papers, 1866, vol. 35, Paper no. 3698.
111. Edwin Chadwick, “Administration of Medical Relief to the Destitute Sick of the Metropolis,” Fraser’s Magazine (September, 1866), 355.
112. John Wilson to secretary of Poor Law Board, January 22, 1866. PRO/MH25/17.
113. See Jeremy Bentham, “Offences Against One’s Self,” (1785), ed. Louis Crompton, first published in the 1978 summer and fall issues of Journal of Homosexuality.
114. For a critique of such night refuges in the aftermath of the publication of “A Night,” see J. C. Parkinson, “A Real Casual on Refuges,” Temple Bar (April 1869): 32–44.
115. Rev. John Llewelyn Davies, “The Poor Law and Charity,” Macmillan’s Magazine (December 1866), 131.
116. See chapter 2 for a lengthy discussion of the history of the COS and its monitoring of metropolitan philanthropy.
117. Thomas Murray Browne, honorary secretary of the Discharged Prisoners’ Relief Committee, had paid similar homage to Greenwood in his speech “Night Refuges,” given at the Conference of Managers of Reformatory and Industrial Institutions the year before in April 1869. Reprinted in Conference on Night Refuges Held at 15 Buckingham Street, Strand. June 8th, 1870 (London: Society for Organising Charitable Relief, 1870), 21.
118. C. J. Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887; repr., Montclair, New Jersey: Patterson Smith, 1972).
119. Pall Mall Gazette (January 29, 1866), 9.
120. Greenwood, Pall Mall Gazette (January 15, 1866), 9. On the concept of “anachronistic space”—the rhetorical invention of people and societies supposedly occupying a space in a time before civilization—and its racial, gender, and class dimensions, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40–42.
121. For a sampling of Greenwood’s writing about exotic savagery, see Curiosities of Savage Life (London: S. O. Beeton, 1864) and Low-Life Deeps: An Account of the Strange Fish to Be Found There (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), esp. 134, 173, 180, 267.
122. The immense popularity of Arabian Nights ensured that readers would immediately recognize Haroun Al Raschid and presumably also link his name and the term “street arab” to the complex erotic valences of that text’s representation of medieval Islam.
123. See G. R. Sims, My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1917) esp. chapter 29.
124. On vagrants as members of a “fraternity,” see “Report of Andrew Doyle,” 62–63.
125. For a reading of this short story against Mayhew’s journalism, see Audrey Jaffe, “Detecting the Beggar: Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Mayhew, and “the Man with the Twisted Lip,” Representations (Summer 1990).
126. On representations of the poor in relation to anthropology, see M. C. Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
127. James Greenwood, The Wilds of London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), 357–358.
128. On the links between parliamentary reform, race, and gender politics in Jamaica at this time, see Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See Bernard Semmel’s analysis of the impact of Morant Bay on British political debate in The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962).
129. The PMG’s assessment was reprinted in the Daily News (January 26, 1866), 2.
130. “The Great Crime Again,” Orb (January 25, 1866), 56.
131. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d series, vol. 185 (1867), 1862–1866.
132. G. R. Sims as quoted by P. J. Keating, introduction to Into Unknown England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 16.
133. “‘Daddy and the Photographer,” Daily Telegraph, as reprinted in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper (February 11, 1866), 7.
134. “Lays of Lambeth,” Punch (February 17, 1866), 66.
135. See Era (Feb. 18, 1866), as cited in Davis, “A Night,” 115.
136. See G. S. Jones treatment of the “culture of consolation” and music-hall songs in “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870– 1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class” in Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). In several path-breaking articles, Peter Bailey has probed deeply the social, cultural, and psychic resources of music halls as key constituents of popular culture. See Peter Bailey, “Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday: Comic Art in the 1880s,” History Workshop Journal 16 (Autumn, 1983): 4–31 and “Champagne Charlie: Performance and Ideology in the Music-Hall Swell Song,” in J. S. Bratton, ed., Music Hall: Performance and Style (Milton Keynes, England: Open University Press, 1986). On the meaning and uses of popular art in general, and music-halls and melodrama in particular, see Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), part 4.
137. See John Law [Margaret Harkness], In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of “Captain Lobe, A Story of the Salvation Army” (London: William Reeves, 1891), 143–144.
138. “A ‘Casual’ Supper,” PMG (February 15, 1866), 9. For Shaftesbury’s account of this supper, see Hodder, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, 613–614.
139. William Williams, letter to the editor, PMG (February 21, 1866), 3–4.
140. J. C. Parkinson, “On Duty with the Inspector,” Temple Bar (June 1865), 349. Temple Bar was edited by his close friend, Edmund Yates. Yates mentions Parkinson frequently in his autobiography, Fifty Years of London Life: Memoirs of a Man of the World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885).
141. The following is the text of Parkinson’s advertisement: A NIGHT IN A WORKHOUSE.—One Sovereign will be paid to any CASUAL PAUPER who slept in the labour-shed of LAMBETH WORKHOUSE on the night of Monday, 8th January, and who will communicate with T. Thompson, Post-office, Bradley-terrace, Wandsworth-road, S. See J. C. Parkinson, “A Real Casual on Casual Wards,” Temple Bar (March 1866), 497, hereafter cited as Parkinson, “A Real Casual.”
142. This theme is well developed in another story written by one of the “respectable men who slept in the Lambeth labour-shed on the same night as the ‘Amateur Casual.’” See “Told by a Tramp,” All The Year Round (April 28, 1866), 371–374.
143. Parkinson, “A Real Casual,” 509.
144. Ibid., 515.
145. Ibid., 517.
146. Ibid., 509.
147. South London Journal (January 27, 1866), 4.
148. Ibid. (February 3, 1866), 4.
149. “Police Intelligence,” Daily News (January 20, 1866), 3.
150. Symonds disliked the term “homosexual” and never used it to describe himself or others committed to what he instead called “Arcadian” or “Greek love.”
151. Given Symonds’s preoccupation with his own “double life,” he may well have been particularly intrigued by Greenwood’s use of an incognito to reveal the unintended but sexually dissident life of male casuals. Drawing heavily on Symonds’s autobiographical writings, Ed Cohen argues that “the representation of a constituent doubleness ‘within’ male subjects opened the possibility for signifying non-normative or even transgressive forms of male sexuality.” Incognitos made literal the performance of “a constituent doubleness.” See Ed Cohen, “The Double Lives of Man: Narration and Identification in Late-Nineteenth-Century Representations of Ec-Centric Masculinities,” in Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 111.
152. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (New York: Random House, 1984), 187–188.
153. Ibid., 188.
154. Symonds frequently changed pronouns in his published poems to conceal that a man was the object of his romantic longings.
155. Symonds wrote two letters to Dakyns that day. This is the second and briefer of the two. John Addington Symonds to Henry Graham Dakyns, January 17, 1866, in vol. 1, 1844–1968 of The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert Schueller and Robert Peters (Detroit, 1967), 610.
156. See Morris Kaplan, “Who’s Afraid of John Saul? Urban Culture and the Politics of Desire in Late Victorian London,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 5, no. 3 (1999): 267–314. As Paul Robinson argues, the “central problem of Symonds’ life was to negotiate an accommodation between his moral convictions and his erotic needs. It found expression, above all, in his effort to rationalize homosexuality in terms of two powerful—and related—nineteenth century ideas, Hellenism and democracy.” Paul Robinson, Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8. On the role of cross-class erotics in the making of homosexual identity, see Stephen Donaldson, “Eroticization of the Working Class,” in the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne R. Dynes, 1990, 1405–1406.
157. See Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1964), 266.
158. Grosskurth, Memoirs, 116. Tramps and soldiers appear throughout Symonds’s poetry as figures of men who love other men. He longed for “the open road, field, ocean, camp, / Where’er in brotherhood men lay their heads. / Soldier with soldier, tramp with casual tramp.” This poem is quoted in Timothy D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest (London: Routledge, 1970), 13.
159. John Addington Symonds to Henry Graham Dakyns, January 17, 1866, in Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. 1, 610.
160. See Charles Upchurch, “Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case of the Queen vs. Boulton and Others” Gender and History 12, no. 1 (2000): 127–157, on the ways in which the eruption of public knowledge about male same-sex practices during the Boulton and Park trial led officials to stifle discussion of them which contributed to the acquittals of the defendants. Upchurch elsewhere argues that the mainstream press from the 1820s onwards, including the Times, powerfully shaped perceptions of same-sex desire and activity in its regular coverage of unnatural assault cases. He shows that newspapers did much more than provide information about sex acts and offenses but instead offered readers normative judgments about appropriate and inappropriate male social identities and same-sex behaviors. See Charles Upchurch, “‘… and every Solicitation, Persuasion, Promise, or Threat’: The Regulation of Male Same-Sex Des
ire in London, 1820 to 1870’ (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2003), esp. ch. 5.
161. On tensions within their collaboration, in particular Symonds’s critique of arguments based on heredity and neuropathy, see Joseph Bristow, “Symonds’s History, Ellis’s Heredity: Sexual Inversion” in Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, eds., Sexology in Culture, Labelling Bodies and Desires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 79–99.
162. Fear of legal problems led Ellis to publish the work first in German. The first English edition of Sexual Inversion appeared under both Ellis’s and Symonds’s name. See Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1975). When it was published in English, the British government prosecuted it as an obscene publication, which led Ellis to republish it and his other major studies of sexuality in Philadelphia. My citations will refer to the more widely available American edition that was published as the second volume of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex.
163. See Sexual Inversion, 85–90.
164. Ibid., 169, 170.
165. Ibid., 18.
166. On working-class and middle-class links between work, independence, and masculinity see Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), chapter 6.
167. See Ellis, Sexual Inversion, appendix A, “Homosexuality among Tramps,” by Josiah Flynt, 219–224. Jeffrey Weeks notes that homosexual slang overlapped with and was closely related to the language of tramps. Coming Out, Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1990), 42.
168. Josiah Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life (New York, 1907), 3. The first edition was 1893. Flynt’s chapters had appeared as essays in various periodicals during the preceding fifteen years.
169. Ellis, Sexual Inversion, 13.
170. On the status hierarchies, gender, and sexual systems structuring erotic relations between working-class “punks” (young men) and other men “exceptionally disengaged from the family and neighborhood,” such as “hoboes” (called “wolves”) in New York City, see George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), esp. 86–97. Chauncey underscores the ways in which gender structured sexual relations between men, many of whom conceived of themselves as deeply manly men in contrast to the effeminacy of the “fairy.” See also Lesley Hall’s analysis of the class basis of sexual categories in Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 3–4.