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."
Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of ...the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings.The Match Girl and the Heiresspaints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism.
In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe-Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall-Gandhi's London home in 1931 and Britain's first "people's house" founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliation-and sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship.
The Match Girl and the Heiressprobes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal.
The preface reminds us just what a risky business it was for an untenured Columbia faculty member to treat as complex literary texts a medical doctor's animadversions on prostitution and an anonymous ...well-to-do pornographer's eleven volumes chronicling his compulsive "secret life" of sexual pleasure and danger. II.Sociology of Sex in the Sixties In the aftermath of the Kinsey Report's startling findings about the varieties and quantities of sex Americans purportedly enjoyed (37 percent of men, it claimed, had at least some overt homosexual experience to orgasm), sociologists-including one of Marcus's hosts at the Institute for Sex Research, John Gagnon-increasingly examined same-sex love and desire. Hooker notably refuses to pathologize gay men and instead documents the complex codes, mechanisms, and forms of connection-sexual and non-sexual alike-binding them together for a single night or a lifelong partnership. Heather Love eloquently argues that Gagnon and Simon's research on "deviance and social problems in the social sciences shaped queer studies' commitment to subculture, to non-normativity, and to a constructionist view of sexuality" (74).
This article argues that from circa 1845–1857, British colonial officials and administrators, abetted by Protestant missionaries and some so-called ‘native Christians’, attempted to replace ...Brahmanical regulation of everyday life with what I am calling ‘governance by conscience’ in British India. It uses the 1851 legal ruling in Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae, hailed by some for bringing ‘liberty of conscience’ and condemned by others as a wanton violation of Hindu personal law, to elucidate the connections between the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 (Act XXI) and education. My analysis highlights the centrality of Brahman wives and gender to debates about conscience, caste, property, and Christian conversion. During the violent summer of 1857, some condemned the Act and its use in deciding the case of Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae as provocation for the traumatic disorders then threatening to dismantle Britain's Indian empire.
Thomas Laqueur Koven, Seth
Public culture,
2013, 2013-00-00, 20130101, Volume:
25, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this interview, Thomas Laqueur ranges widely across his childhood in 1940s Istanbul and 1950s small-town West Virginia to his “crisis” as a social historian that propelled him to cultural history ...and the study of sexuality and to his attempt to understand the cultural work of the dead. Friendship emerges not only as a thread connecting his various intellectual enterprises but as his way of exploring and living in the world.
This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the ...claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.
