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."
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 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.
John Ruskin'sSesame and Lilies,first published in 1865, stands as a classic nineteenth-century statement on the natures and duties of men and women. Although widely popular in its time, the work in ...its entirety has been out of print since the early twentieth century. This volume returnsSesame and Liliesto easy availability and reunites the two halves of the work:Of Kings' Treasuries,in which Ruskin critiques Victorian manhood, andOf Queens' Gardens,in which he counsels women to take their places as the moral guides of men and urges the parents of girls to educate them to this end.Feminist critics of the 1960s and 1970s regardedOf Queens' Gardensas an exemplary expression of repressive Victorian ideas about femininity, and they paired it with John Stuart Mill's more progressiveSubjection of Women. This volume, by including the often ignoredOf Kings' Treasuries,offers readers full access to Ruskin's complex and sometimes contradictory views on men and women. The accompanying essays placeSesame and Lilieswithin historical debates on men, women, culture, and the family. Elizabeth Helsinger examines the text as a meditation on the pleasures of reading, Seth Koven gives a wide-ranging account of how Victorians readSesame and Lilies,and Jan Marsh situates the work within controversies over educational reform.
Introduction Koven, Seth
Slumming,
07/2006
Book Chapter
For the better part of the century preceding World War II, Britons went slumming to see for themselves how the poor lived. They insisted that firsthand experience among the metropolitan poor was ...essential for all who claimed to speak authoritatively about social problems. To a remarkable degree, the men and women who governed church and state in late-nineteenth-and twentieth-century Britain and dominated social welfare bureaucracies and the emerging profession of social work felt compelled to visit, live, or work in the London slums at some point in their careers of public service. Even the fiery Welsh radical Lloyd George, champion
