| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2004)

SLUMMING is a provocative, insightful study of one set of contradictions embedded in the ideology underlying Victorian middle- and upper-class relationships with the poor. Koven has already revealed his talents as a cultural interpreter, for example in his superb essay "How the Victorians Read Sesame and Lilies," in Deborah Nord's edition of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (Yale 2002). Here he brings his reader to the heart of his subject through his definition of slumming: "activities undertaken by people of wealth, social standing, or education in urban spaces inhabited by the poor." (9) The term, Koven points out, was almost always used in a pejorative sense, to condemn the motives of other people, not oneself. Victorians identified themselves as Christian rescuers, investigative journalists, or philanthropists. But inevitably, though usually unconsciously, they were also "slumming." Slumming, as Koven defines it, involves "some sort of 'descent', across urban spatial and class, gender and sexual boundaries." (9) In consequence, the middle- and upper middle-class individuals and organizations whose mixed motives are the subject of Koven's study all too often positioned "the poor as erotic objects of elite spectatorship." (283) It is the objectification and the eroticization, the frisson aroused by verbal and visual depictions of dirt and misery that constitute Koven's subject: "Slumming."

This is a book about the themes of eroticized horror and homoerotic voyeurism that Koven believes connect the historical examples on which he focuses, beginning with James Greenwood's series Night in the Workhouse (1866) and continuing with child rescuer Dr. T.J. Barnardo, Joseph Merrick (the "Elephant Man"), the Anglo-American journalist Elizabeth Banks, and male and female settlement house workers.

Like Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight (1992), Carolyn Steedman's Strange Dislocations (1994), or Lynda Nead's Myths of Sexuality (1988), to all of which Koven refers, Slumming is a work of what is now defined as "cultural history." As with all such studies, the success of Slumming rests on how convinced we are as readers that the author is at home with his historical material, on the extent to which the textual analysis expands our understanding, and finally on its persuasiveness. On the first two counts, Slumming is a resounding success. The depth of Koven's research and his knowledge of the historical context are impressive and his insights are vivid and thought-provoking. I am less convinced of the persuasiveness of Koven's overriding hypothesis.

For instance, take his discussion of Dr. Barnardo. Dr. Barnardo has been presented — for example in George Behlmer's excellent Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870–1908 (1982), a book Koven draws on and cites enthusiastically as responsible for "the largest and best known" of the late Victorian 'child rescue' agencies. (58) Koven does not dispute this interpretation of Barnardo's importance. For Koven he remains "one of the Victorian age's most luminous do-gooders." But "at the same time," Koven says, his "appreciation for Barnado's achievement is tempered by a keen sense of their costs." (94) Through an extended discussion of the clash between Barnardo and the Charity Organization Society [COS] in 1877, Koven demonstrates that the evangelical Barnardo used the new technology of photography to become an entrepreneur of philanthropy. Thus, the dispute between the COS and Barnardo was not simply "a clash between secular modernity and religious conservatism." (103) Through an analysis of the "before and after" photographs of children that the Barnardo organization employed, Koven sheds light on the contradictions inherent in slumming. At times Koven overplays his hand, as when he tells us that raggedness, specifically "ripped and torn clothing" was not only an effective visual marker of poverty but could also be a disturbingly erotic sign and offers as corroborating evidence C.L. Dodgson's putatively erotic photos of Alice Liddell. (118) The problem with this approach is that Dodgson's erotic interest in Alice became obvious only to a post-Freudian sensibility. Koven is on safer ground when he asserts that the part "sexuality played in the sympathy Barnardo excited was neither explicit nor intentional." (130) Such caution takes nothing away from his illuminating insight that whether it was Greenwood's sensational journalism or Barnardo's verbal and visual narratives, modernist slumming involved arousing the sympathy of the public by depicting the poor as members of an exotic, outcast group, and these strategies did contain an element of the erotic.

One of the few instances where Koven offers Victorian evidence for his sub-textual analyses involves Greenwood's 1866 Night, first serialized in the Pall Mall Gazette. Greenwood, he maintains, cannot simply see the men and boys huddled together in the shed at the Lambeth Workhouse, where they sleep on this January night, as cold and hungry. In his brilliant extended reading of this text Koven emphasizes quite convincingly the "masquerade" in which Greenwood engaged. But he also emphasizes homoeroticism. We are, says Koven, introduced to "many homoerotic themes" though he acknowledges that it is "easy to miss them if we so choose." (46) Like Koven, I have on my shelves Peter Keating's Into Unknown England 1866–1913, Selections from the Social Explorers (1976), which begins with Night. When I read Koven, I am intrigued, and almost convinced. But when I read Greenwood himself, I fail to find evidence that Greenwood was evoking a" male brothel." (47) On the other hand, here's one place where Koven has evidence from the Victorians themselves. It appears that Night had a "volcanic impact" on no less a Victorian than John Addington Symonds. Greenwood's "erotic subtext," Koven convincingly demonstrates, caused Symonds to recognize his own same-sex desires.

I have merely touched on some of the issues Koven considers. One impressive feature of this book is the extent of its range. For example his treatment of the now-almost-forgotten American Elizabeth Banks, who made her living as an investigative journalist in England and in the United States, illuminates an important aspect of the journalistic trade. Koven points out that Banks was frank about the fact that she engaged in slumming, a word she actually used about her activities, because it paid. Her crass com-modification of poverty, he suggests, is one reason that social and cultural historians have ignored her and remembered instead such undoubtedly more worthy investigators as Clementina Black.

Koven is explicit about the fact that his insights have relevance to the present. Poverty, in the southern hemisphere but also in developed countries like Britain, the United Sates, and Canada, remains a pressing problem: in fact, a scandal. As Koven points out, the Victorians didn't solve it, but Victorian approaches are still with us. Readers of Koven's book will all be familiar with the appeals that come through the mail. Whether it's OXFAM, Doctors Without Borders, or Save the Children, all worthy causes, the photographs are there to tug on our heartstrings, just as the Barnardo photographs of more than a century ago were designed to do.

In conclusion, then, Koven has written more than a fine contribution to the historiography on Victorian poverty: this is a book that makes one think, about the present as well as the past.


Deborah Gorham Carleton University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.