Slumming
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171. See Times (March 15, 1898), 6.
172. Angus McLaren discusses the link between vagrancy and male sexual deviance in The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16–18. Louise Jackson notes the application of the act to police sex between men in Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), 105.
173. See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longmans, 1981). Matt Cook argues that “what the 1898 provision [of the Vagrancy Act] did was to heighten the significance of behaviour that was not explicitly sexual [such as make-up and the way a man walked] … and of places that had a reputation…. The police did not arrest because sexual acts had actually been committed but on the basis of a judgment they had made about the propensity of an individual to commit them.” See Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44.
174. On Ellis’s objections to the “gross indecency” clauses of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, see Sexual Inversion, 209–211.
175. Michel Foucault focused on the period between 1870 and 1900 as crucial to the emergence of sexual categories and identities. For one influential analysis of “essentialist” versus “constructionist” accounts of homosexuality, see David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. 43–45. Rictor Norton, by contrast, does not view the late nineteenth century as particularly foundational for the making of homosexuality and homosexual identities. Rictor Norton has elaborated his stance in a variety of published works including Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992) and The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London: Cassell, 1997).
176. See Deborah Nord, Walking the Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Nord’s account begins with London in the 1820s and Pierce Egan’s famous “Tom” and “Jerry.”
177. See Frederic Harrison, Fortnightly, November 1867, as reprinted in ed. Carl Dawson and John Pfordesher, eds., Matthew Arnold, Prose Writings: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 226; see James MacDonell, Daily Telegraph, September 1866, as reprinted in Critical Heritage, 165–166.
178. The South London Journal described Greenwood as the “The Exquisite” (February 3, 1866), 4.
179. Arnold thought of these two works as forming a whole, and from the 1883 American edition onward, they were usually published in a single volume.
180. See “My Countrymen,” in Complete Prose Work’s of Matthew Arnold, vol. 5, Culture and Anarchy with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1965).
181. See “Dedicatory Letter,” in Complete Prose Works, vol. 5, Culture and Anarchy with Friendship’s Garland and Some Literary Essays, 351. See also his letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, January 17, 1866, which compared the appalling state of workhouse infirmaries to conditions in schools. See Matthew Arnold, “Mansion House Meeting,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 4, Schools and Universities on the Continent, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 11.
182. “Dedicatory Letter” in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
183. See Stefan Collini, Arnold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), ch. 5.
184. They began work on London in 1869, but its completion and publication was delayed until 1872, after the Franco-Prussian War.
185. Blanchard Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré (London, 1891), 185.
186. Lloyds commented extensively on “A Night” in January and February of 1866. See especially January 21 and 28, and February 4, 1866.
187. Jerrold and Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (London: Grant, 1872; rprt., New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 142.
188. On Arnold’s love of masquerade, see Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 353.
189. Blanche Roosevelt, Life and Reminiscences of Gustave Doré (New York: Cassell, 1885), 350.
190. Jerrold noted with pride that he had accompanied Prince Charles Bonaparte and the Marquis de Bassano on a night tour of the East End on February 5, 1872. See Jerrold and Doré, London, 148.
191. Ibid., x, 5.
192. Ibid., 143.
193. Griselda Pollock provides a probing examination of London: A Pilgrimage as a representation of the city “as a matrix articulating an array of ideologies in contest, expressed through anxieties about the country-versus-city conflict, the threat of criminal classes and the residuum, the dread of pauperism, the scourge of alcoholism, inventions of schemes of social control and surveillance, investigation, and classification.” She observes that in London, “proximity and sexuality, those recurrent concerns of bourgeois writers criss-cross and deposit an array of unspecified meanings fixating upon bodily corruption, degeneration, and reproduction.” Pollock notes that Doré and Jerrold’s expedition was “an adventure” in slumming “in the manner of James Greenwood, rather than Henry Mayhew,” but she fails to note the sexual themes of “A Night.” See Pollock, “‘Vicarious Excitements’: London: A Pilgrimage by Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, 1872,” New Formations (Spring, 1988): 26, 35, 36.
194. Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré, 153–154.
195. See also Doré’s “Mixing the Malt,” which celebrates the physical prowess of half-naked malt men working in a huge vat. Jerrold and Doré, London, 130. Alan Woods describes Doré’s visual rhetoric as “Gothic romanticism.” See Alan Woods, “Doré’s ‘London’—Art as Evidence,” Art History 1, no. 3 (1978): 356.
196. Several scholars have noted a literary tradition linking Greenwood to London and Orwell, but none have commented on the role of sexuality in their narratives. See P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 38; and Nord, Walking the Streets, 239.
197. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937; rprt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 121, 124. (Citations are to the Harcourt edition.)
198. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1958; rprt., with a new introduction by the author, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 289–290. Citation is to the Columbia edition.
199. See Andrew Sinclair, “A View of the Abyss,” in Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, ed., Critical Essays on Jack London (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1983). See also, Robert Barltrop, Jack London: The Man, the Writer, the Rebel (London: Pluto Press, 1976), ch. 6. See also Joseph McLaughlin, “Writing London, East End Ethnography in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss,” in McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlotteville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000).
200. Jack London to Anna Strunsky, August 21, 1902, in vol. 1, 1896–1905, of The Letters of Jack London, ed. Earle Labor, Robert Leitz, and I. Milo Shepard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 306.
201. On the influence of People on Orwell, see Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 140.
202. See Clarice Stasz, Jack London’s Women (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), chapter 4.
203. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1903), 15.
204. Ibid., 39. London’s narrative closely parallels Greenwood’s in many respects including its playful account of his donning his disguise as a tramp, his mandatory bath in water made filthy by previous tramps, and his therapeutic ritual of bodily purification in baths for the well-to-do which end each episode.
205. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933; repr., San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1961, 1933), 129. Citation is to the Harcourt edition.
206. Ibid., 145.
207. Old Daddy figures prominently in the article version published as “T
he Spike” in The Adelphi (April 1931), reprinted in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 10, A Kind of Compulsion, 1903–1906 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1997–1998), 200. He is not mentioned in Down and Out.
208. There are six roller towels in the version of this scene he originally published as “The Spike,” in The Adelphi, Davison, Complete Works, vol. 10, 198.
209. Orwell, Down and Out, 147.
210. The closest Orwell comes to spending time with a Kay-like young man is the borstal boy named Ginger, “a strong athletic youth of twenty six” with whom he went hop picking in August and September 1931. Davison, Complete Works, Vol Ten, 216. He later explains that Ginger is aggressively homophobic and had helped to beat and rob a “Nancy Boy” in Trafalgar Square (218).
211. Copy of Down and Out given to Brenda Salkeld and annotated by Eric Blair (George Orwell). Annotations of fictitious changes published in Davison, Complete Works, vol. 10, 300.
212. Orwell, Down and Out, 159.
213. Driberg’s biographer Francis Wheen offers some comparisons between Driberg and Orwell. See Francis Wheen, Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), 86.
214. Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 75–76, 133–136.
215. John Worby, The Other Half: The Autobiography of a Tramp (New York: Lee Furman, 1937), 28–29, 184–189, 246–252, 266–303. Worby explained how he came to publish his tramp memoirs in Spiv’s Progress (London, 1939), chapter 24 and 25. While the second memoir contains lots of discussion of sex with women, it notably mentions no homosexual encounters. Matt Houlbrook suggests that neither homosexuality nor homophobia can help explain the sexual dynamics between working-class men and their better-off male sexual partners as their relationships sometimes moved between “intimate friendship and brutal assault.” “Intimacy, sex, blackmail, theft, and assault constituted a continuum within the same cultural terrain, all underpinned by dominant understandings of masculinity.” See Matt Houlbrook, “Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900–1960,” Journal of British Studies 42, no. 3 (July 2003): 362.
CHAPTER TWO
DR. BARNARDO’S ARTISTIC FICTIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY, SEXUALITY, AND THE RAGGED CHILD
1. Times (29 January 1866).
2. Blake Morrison, “Lost and Found: The Forgotten Legacy of Dr. Barnardo,” The Independent on Sunday (June 11, 1995), 6–11. The BBC documentaries shown in July 1995 highlighted issues about race and the pathos of separating children from the parents and siblings. In this way they extended the work of Gillian Wagner and Joy Parr on Barnardo’s philanthropic abduction of children from the hands of their impoverished—and sometimes Roman Catholic—parents. See Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), esp. 67–69; and Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).
3. See Raphael Samuel, “Mrs. Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values,” in T. C. Smout, ed., Victorian Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
4. See Gertrude Himmelfarb Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991); see also The DeMoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995).
5. Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Victorians Get a Bad Rap,” New York Times (January 9, 1995), A11; and “Remoralizing America,” Wall Street Journal (February 7, 1995), A26. Himmelfarb discusses some of the controversies that dogged Barnardo’s work and concludes that “the Barnardo Homes are a testimonial to a philanthropic impulse that survives in defiance of all predictions, and to social needs that are not adequately satisfied by the state.” See Poverty and Compassion, 230–234.
6. Some of the major biographies of Barnardo include A. E. Williams, Barnardo of Stepney: The Father of Nobody’s Children (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1946); J. Wesley Bready, Doctor Barnardo: Physician, Pioneer, Prophet (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930).
7. James Greenwood, Seven Curses of London (London: S. Rivers, 1869), 3, 11.
8. T. J. Barnardo, Night and Day (June 16, 1877), 83. Barnardo used his magazine Night and Day to publicize his work and raise money.
9. The Barnardo arbitration needs to be understood within the context of growing public outrage about the exploitation of children. For an excellent treatment of the movement to protect children, see George Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).
10. George Reynolds, Dr. Barnardo’s Homes Containing Startling Revelations (London: Printed for George Reynolds, 1877) hereafter cited as Startling Revelations. Very little is known about George Reynolds besides what one can learn about him in connection to the Barnardo arbitration. His sprawling, ill-tempered attack on Barnardo, Startling Revelations, is the sole example of his writing to survive, an ironic testimony to how well-founded his jealousy of Barnardo was. He was minister of a small independent Baptist church in Stepney called the Cave of Adullum. Reynolds may well have resented the fact that some East Londoners attended religious meetings under Barnardo’s auspices instead of joining a regular church such as his own. He apparently lacked charisma as a preacher. Church membership remained so small that years after the arbitration, Charrington had to rescue it by including it under the umbrella of his own extremely successful operations.
11. On Charrington, see The History of the Tower Hamlets Mission double number of the The Witness: A Monthly Record (March 1880). The cover of the first biography of Charrington, An Oasis in the Desert, was subtitled, Fredk. N. Charrington, the Ex-Brewer and His Work in the East of London. His biographer, Guy Thorne, claimed that Charrington was Walter Besant’s model for his famous novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Guy Thorne, The Great Acceptance: The Life Story of F. N. Charrington (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912), 6. Several years after the Barnardo arbitration, the Duke of Westminster gently encouraged him to be more receptive to the People’s Palace under construction only a few hundred yards up Mile End Road from Charrington’s headquarters: “I believe Mr. Charrington had some little fear, I won’t say jealousy, but some little fear of competition to his own great scheme, but I believe from what I hear and from what he has told us, that there is ample room in this Mile End Road for two, or even more Institutions such as it is proposed to erect.” The Duke’s conciliatory words fell on deaf ears, and Charrington vigorously denounced the trustees of the People’s Palace for permitting drink on its premises and substituting the “varnish of modern culture” for the gospel of the Saviour.” Speech of Duke of Westminster, The Quarterly Record of the Tower Hamlet’s Mission (July 4, 1885), 7. To make matters worse, his cousin Mr. Spencer Charrington lavishly supplied the People’s Palace with free Charrington’s beer for its jubilee supper in 1887. Ironically, although Charrington was closely allied with the COS during its investigation of Barnardo, the COS questioned the principles by which Charrington ran his own organization in East London, the Tower Hamlets Mission. The COS vouched for Charrington’s personal integrity but for the next five decades secretly informed correspondents that it could not “recommend that support be given to the [Charrington’s] Mission on the ground of its material work.” COS report on Frederick Charrington’s Tower Hamlet’s Mission, November 13, 1877, A/FWA/C/D57/1, COS Files and Papers. Unaware of the COS’s long standing criticisms of his work, Charrington left the COS £5000 at his death. The Family Welfare Association (FWA) archives are the case files and records of the Charity Organisation Society.
12. We get a sense of Charrington’s desire to protect his philanthropic turf from Barnardo’s encroachment in an account of one of the shortlived attempts to reconcile Barnardo and Charrington. See copy of letter from Thomas Stone to W. E. Shipton, October 25, 1875, A/FWA/C/D10/2, COS Files and Papers.
13. Barnardo had initially played an active part in promoting Charrington’s work by introducing him to wealthy
and influential Evangelicals. On this aspect of their relationship, see East London Observer (September 8, 1877). Charrington’s love of publicity was lifelong. At age 65 he quietly entered the House of Commons, strode to the speaker’s chair, grasped the mace, and denounced the existence of a drinking bar for MP’s use in the nearby lobby as an example of the government’s complicity with the drink trade. See Illustrated Record of the Tower Hamlets Mission (Summer 1915), 5.
14. Notes taken by A. L. Baxter of interview with Edwin Kerwin, January 19, 1898, Charles Booth Papers, B183, ff. 103, 107. Baxter was one of Charles Booth’s assistants for his survey of religious life in London. Kerwin was Charrington’s longtime lieutenant and assistant.
15. The major histories of the COS include Charles Loch Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society, 1869–1913: Its Ideas and Work (London: Methuen, 1961); Helen Bosanquet, Social Work in London, 1869 to 1912, A History of the Charity Organisation Society (London: J. Murray, 1914); Madeline Rooff, A Hundred Years of Family Welfare: A Study of the Family Welfare Association (formerly COS), 1869–1969 (London: Joseph, 1972); Jane Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State, and Social Work in Britain: The Charity Organisation Society/Family Welfare Association since 1869 (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1995); and Robert Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity, and the Poor Law in Victorian England (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
16. Kathleen Heasman claims that “as many as three-quarters of the total number of voluntary charitable organisations in the second half of the nineteenth century can be regarded as Evangelical in character and control.” These included lavish coffee palaces and temperance tabernacles; shoeblack and woodchopping brigades; mothers’ meetings; seaside convalescent homes; bible and pure literature depots, etc. See Kathleen Heasman, Evangelicals in Action: An Appraisal of their Social Work in the Victorian Era (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 14. See also Donald Lewis, Lighten Their Darkness: The Evangelical Mission to Working-Class London (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) and J. Wesley Bready, England: Before and After Wesley, The Evangelical Revival, and Social Reform (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938).