Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London

by Seth Koven

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 slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their 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."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Victorian, London, Academic, World History, Sexuality

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a very interesting look at class and gender in the late Victorian period. If focuses on the way that wealthy and middle class people portrayed and interacted with the poor, particularly in the East End of London. The book does this by looking at the portrayal of poor people, their jobs, their homes, their apparance in newspapers, photographs and novels. In many ways the Victorian attitudes towards their portrayal of the poor reminded me of reality tv shows today. The book starts with Greenwood's report on the night he spent in a workhouse and the subsequent publication of that event. The book considers the strong homoerotic themes of the article as well as the different responses to it including the coupling of homlessness with homosexuality in the 1898 vagrancy act. Chapter two looks at Dr Barnados photographs of street children and the claims of sexualisation of them. It considers the way images were manipulated to play on the emotions of those that donations were being solicited from. Chapter three looks at the women journalism, particularly the writing of Elizabeth Banks and American journalist who reportedly said that she did her investiagitive journalism on the conditions of the poor not because she wanted to improve their lives but to earn her own living. The chapter was quite hard on Banks, she had a lot of negative things send, but later when she wrote something different, instead of saying that perhaps this was because her ideas had changed Koven seemed to indicate this just proved her unrealiability as a writer. However, there were some very interesting gender stereotypes between the UK and the US examined and I learned a great deal about women journalists.

Part two looked at "cross class sisterhood and brotherhood in the slums". This was divided into two chapters, one on women one on men. The methodology here was a little strange. When the women and their relationships were discussed it was entirely from the point of view of women philanthropists who wrote novels. When the men were discussed it focused entirely on the reality of two homes/charitable agencies Oxford House and Toynbee Hall. This seemed to present a little bit of a strange dichotomy. That said the chapter on women was fascinating, and reminded me once again that I really do need to read some more Vernon Lee. The chapter discussed her book, Miss Brown and L.T. Meade's Princess of the gutter. What was interesting was the portrayal of same sex attraction within these novels. Vernon Lee's book was dismissed as "dirty" even though it was the more restrained of the two. Meade, a devout evangelical Christian, had her two herioines making out in a prison cell and was considered terribly pure.

The only critisicm I had of this book was that it focused entirely on London. I think it would be interesting to expand the work that was done looking at the different portrayal of gender and class into the whole of the UK, particularly the North of England and to see what if anything was different in these accounts. But I would definitely recommend this book very highly.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The rhetoric is rather overblown--yes there were sexual issues, covert and overt; yes, people did not always leave their class behind them when they went slumming. It just seemed to me that it could have all been said more simply.

[Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an academic work about the missionary work to the poor. Some members of the upper classes thought going incognito to the slums would give them a fair idea of how the poor lived. Soon groups of them, mainly men, thought living among them would allow them to educate them and improve their lives. Setting up single gender residential facilities brought them closer to those they were trying to help. In some instances they were closer than legally prescribed at the time. The 'powers that be' were mainly concerned about men and their relationship to other men. Women were thought to be passionless so it was thought unlikely for them to develop 'illicit' relationships.
An interesting comment on page 170 that is true today as it was in the 19th century: "Americans put money before morals."

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author takes the general topic of slum exploration and charitable work in Victorian London to write a number of chapters focusing on various individuals whose work allows him to explore themes of sexuality and poverty. We follow a journalist whose disguising of himself as a tramp reaps huge rewards; follow a female crusader whose undercover work as a housekeeper similarly sees her achieving fame and fortune; and latterly, follow the relationships of the young upstanding Christian men who saw it their business to bring the light to the poverty-dwellers of the East End. It's well-reasoned work, far less dry than a stereotypical academic treatise.

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Koven unearths some great stories here, and is adept at tracing their progression and implications, but the unfortunate excess of postmodern academy-speak mars the book, as does some disorganization.

First, the stories. This book revolves around five stories about upper and middle class Londoners who forgo their domestic comforts to go "slumming," for philanthropic, pecuniary, or sexual reasons, amid the poverty of London's South or East End. Many of these stories are fascinating. Apparently the first notable "slumming" enterprise was James Greenwood's masquerade as a homeless "casual" in a poor Lambeth workhouse in 1866. Greenwood described the filthy bath he was forced to take before entering, the workhouse "Daddy" who showed him the ropes, and, with Victorian circumspection, the homosexual orgies that took place amid the naked men piled together for warmth. His three articles in the Pall Mall Gazette about his single night's sojourn started a raging national debate about London's slums that continued for decades. He also inspired others, like Jack London and George Orwell, as well as countless male and female reporters, in their future slumming.

The most interesting chapter, however, is on the settlement house movement. Samuel and Henrietta Barnett (who had previously started a movement to train poor girls as domestic servants, the "Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants." What a British philanthropy!), wrote a plan in 1883 for a "modern monastery," which would take male university youths to Whitechapel in the East End to administer a sort of pre-Raphaelite/Arts and Crafts guild, which in turn would bring aesthetic beauty and personal philanthropy to the masses. Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris suffused the project. Samuel Barnett urged his "settlers" to "make common what is best" and to strive till "beauty, knowledge, and righteousness are nationalized." Nationalized beauty! As Koven states, the British welfare's state's origins lie here, as is indicated by the number of important future politicians, from William Beveridge to Clement Atlee, who passed through the settlement house's well-crafted doors.

Koven does show that sexual politics and sexual fears were certainly more important than is commonly acknowledged in slum politics, but sometimes he uses a sort of slapdash freudianism to over-analyze actions which seem to speak for themselves. Much of the book is also taken up with a kind of confused literary analysis, which also seems to belabor the obvious. Still, there are stories here that one isn't going to find anywhere else, and for that it is worthwhile.

[Jane Walker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an odd book, and a somewhat annoying one. Koven is an academic and he structures the book like a PhD thesis, with long paragraphs explaining what he's going to tell us and what "questions" he's going to answer. He writes only about slumming in London, so ignoring everything going on in other big cities. But then, this book is not really about slumming. He selects particular people and, near the end, says, "I have focused on moments of particularly acute ethical ambiguity in their careers." But what he has actually done is look for sexual undertones in everyone. There is an erotic aspect to all their activities. This might be interesting for a few paragraphs, but his determination to see sex in everything becomes a little ridiculous.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting social history with particularly strong readings of individual texts. Koven certainly shows how slumming--the practice of visiting lower-class parts of London or other cities, for a variety of purposes--was central to Victorian literature and culture. The book also felt judicious towards the motivations of those who did so, acknowledging a genuine desire to help alongside more problematic hierarchical and erotic attachments.

[Jennifer]

I am admitting defeat. Call it summer, but I'm in no mood for belabored academic writing. The ideas are fascinating, the anecdotes are intriguing, but the dense prose is too much for me.

[Bianca · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot of interesting information in this book. It offers a different aspect than Victorian England. I guess I thought it would have been a little more grittier.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure that the individual chapters form a fully cohesive whole, but individually, they are interesting meditations on several issues in the Victorian world that I wasn't aware of.

[Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really interesting information, but style is dense. Illustrations are well-chosen.