Slumming

by Koven, Seth

• ISBN13: 9780691128009
• ISBN10: 0691128006
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-07-24
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS	xiii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS	xv
INTRODUCTION Slumming: Eros and Altruism in Victorian London	1	(22)
Slumming Defined	6	(4)
Who Went Slumming? Sources and Social Categories	10	(4)
Eros and Altruism: James Hinton and the Hintonians	14	(9)
PART ONE: INCOGNITOS, FICTIONS, AND CROSS-CLASS MASQUERADES	23	(158)
CHAPTER ONE Workhouse Nights: Homelessness, Homosexuality, and Cross-Class Masquerades	25	(63)
James Greenwood and London in 1866	31	(5)
Reading "A Night in a Workhouse"	36	(10)
Responses to "A Night in a Workhouse"	46	(24)
Homelessness as Homosexuality: Sexology, Social Policy, and the 1898 Vagrancy Act	70	(4)
Postscript: Legacies of "A Night" on Representations of the Homeless Poor	74	(14)
CHAPTER TWO Dr. Barnardo's Artistic Fictions: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child	88	(52)
Facts, Fictions, and Epistemologies of Welfare	94	(9)
"The Very Wicked Woman" and "Sodomany" in Dr. Barnardo's Boys' Home	103	(9)
Representing the Ragged Child	112	(12)
Joseph Merrick and the Monstrosity of Poverty	124	(5)
Conclusion	129	(11)
CHAPTER THREE The American Girl in London: Gender, Journalism, and Social Investigation in the Late Victorian Metropolis	140	(41)
Journalism as Autobiography, Autobiography as Fiction	142	(9)
Gender and Journalism	151	(4)
An "American Girl" Impersonating London's Laboring Women	155	(22)
Conclusion	177	(4)
PART TWO: CROSS-CLASS SISTERHOOD AND BROTHERHOOD IN THE SLUMS	181	(101)
CHAPTER FOUR The Politics and Erotics of Dirt: Cross-Class Sisterhood in the Slums	183	(45)
Cross-Class Sisterhood and the Politics of Dirt	184	(14)
"There will be something the matter with the ladies"	198	(6)
"Nasty Books": Dirty Bodies, Dirty Desires in Women's Slum Novels	204	(18)
Conclusion: "White Gloves" and "Dirty Hoxton Pennies"	222	(6)
CHAPTER FIVE The "New Man" in the Slums: Religion, Masculinity, and the Men's Settlement House Movement	228	(54)
The Sources of "Brotherhood" in Late Victorian England	231	(5)
"Modern Monasteries," "Philanthropic Brotherhoods," and the Origins of the Settlement House Movement	236	(12)
Religion and Codes of Masculinity	248	(11)
"True hermaphrodites realised at last": Sexing the Male Settlement Movement	259	(17)
A Door Unlocked: The Politics of Brotherly Love in the Slums	276	(6)
CONCLUSION	282	(7)
MANUSCRIPT SOURCES	289	(4)
NOTES	293	(86)
INDEX	379