City of Dreadful Delight

Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London

Judith R. Walkowitz

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226081014
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction.Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and
asserted their presence in the public domain.An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press.A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.

ONE

Urban Spectatorship

When Henry James arrived in London in 1876, he found the city “not a pleasant place” nor “agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach.” He found it “only magnificent . . . the biggest aggregation of human life, the most complete compendium in the world.” It was also the “largest chapter of human accidents,” scarred by “thousands of acres covered by low black houses of the cheapest construction” as well as by “unlimited vagueness as to the line of division between centre and circumference.” “London is so clumsy and brutal, and has gathered together so many of the darkest sides of life,” that it would be “frivolous to ignore her deformities.” The city itself had become a “strangely mingled monster,” the principal character in its own drama: an “ogress who devours human flesh to keep herself alive to do her tremendous work.”¹

Despite its brutalities, London offered James an oasis of personal freedom, a place of floating possibilities as well as dangers. Alone in lodgings, James first experienced himself in London as “an impersonal black hole in the huge general blackness.” But the streets of London offered him freedom and imaginative delights. “I had complete liberty, and the prospect of profitable work; I used to take long walks in the rain. I took possession of London; I felt it to be the right place.” As an artist, bachelor and outsider, James aestheticized this “world city,” the “center of the race,” into a grand operatic panorama of movement, atmosphere, labyrinthine secrets and mysteries. London’s “immeasurable circumference,” argued James, gave him a “sense of social and intellectual elbow room”; its “friendly fogs,” which made “everything brown, rich, dim, vague,” protected and enriched “adventure.” For the “sympathetic resident,” such as James, the social ease of anonymity was matched by an ease of access to and imaginative command of the whole: one may live in one “quarter” or “plot” but in “imagination and by a constant mental act of reference . . . [inhabit] the whole.”²

James celebrated the traditional prerogatives of the privileged urban spectator to act, in Baudelaire’s phrase, as flaneur, to stroll across the divided spaces of the metropolis, whether it was London, Paris, or New York, to experience the city as a whole. The fact and fantasy of urban exploration had long been an informing feature of nineteenth-century bourgeois male subjectivity. Cosmopolitanism, “the experience of diversity in the city as opposed to a relatively confined localism,” argues Richard Sennett, was a bourgeois male pleasure. It established a right to the city—a right not traditionally available to, often not even part of, the imaginative repertoire of the less advantaged. In literary and visual terms, observes Griselda Pollock, “being at home in the city” was represented as a privileged gaze, betokening possession and distance, that structured “a range of disparate texts and heterogeneous practices which emerge in the nineteenth-century city—tourism, exploration/discovery, social investigation, social policy.”³

A powerful streak of voyeurism marked all these activities; the “zeal for reform” was often accompanied “by a prolonged, fascinated gaze” from the bourgeoisie. These practices presupposed a privileged male subject whose identity was stable, coherent, autonomous; who was, moreover, capable through reason and its “science” of establishing a reliable and universal knowledge of “man” and his world.⁴ It was these powers of spectatorship that Henry James ascribed to his “sympathetic resident” who, while residing in one quarter of town, was capable “in imagination” of inhabiting “the whole” of it.

At odds with this rationalist sensibility was the flaneur’s propensity for fantasy. As illusionist, the flaneur transformed the city into a landscape of strangers and secrets. At the center of his art, argues Susan Buck-Morss, was the capacity to present things in fortuitous juxtapositions, in “mysterious and mystical connection.” Linear time became, to quote Walter Benjamin, “a dream-web where the most ancient occurrences are attached to those of today.” Always scanning the gritty street scene for good copy and anecdote, his was quintessentially “consumerist” mode of being-in-the-world, one that transformed exploitation and suffering into vivid individual psychological experience.⁵

James’s affectionate portrait of London, that “dreadfully delightful city,” is dominated by the flaneur’s attention to the viewer’s subjectivity and by the capacity of the city to stimulate. In James’s “strangely mingled monster,” activities of manufacture, trade, and exchange were overshadowed by rituals of consumption and display. Extremes of wealth and poverty aroused the senses, for “the impression of suffering was part of the general vibration,” while London’s status as repository of continuous culture and national heritage—its “great towers, great names, great memories”—served as a further stimulant to his own consciousness and memory: “All history appeared to live again and the continuity of things to vibrate through my mind.”⁶

The literary construct of the metropolis as a dark, powerful, and seductive labyrinth held a powerful sway over the social imagination of educated readers. It remained the dominant representation of London in the 1880s, conveyed to many reading publics through high and low literary forms, from Charles Booth’s surveys of London poverty, to the fictional stories of Stevenson, Gissing, and James, to the sensational newspaper exposes by W. T. Stead and G. R. Sims. These late-Victorian writers built on an earlier tradition of Victorian urban exploration, adding some new perspectives of their own. Some rigidified the hierarchical divisions of London into a geographic separation, organized around the opposition of East and West. Others stressed the growing complexity and differentiation of the world of London, moving beyond the opposition of rich and poor, palace and hovels, to investigate the many class cultures in between. Still others among them repudiated a fixed, totalistic interpretive image altogether, and emphasized instead a fragmented, disunified, atomistic social universe that was not easily decipherable.

Historians and cultural critics have linked this contest over and “crisis” in representation to a range of psychological and social crises troubling literary men and their social peers in the 1880s: religious self-doubt, social unrest, radical challenges to liberalism and science, anxiety over imperial and national decline, as well as an imaginative confrontation with the defamiliarized world of consumer culture “where values and perception seem in constant flux.”⁷ Equally crucial may have been the psychic difficulties produced by the imperatives of a “hard” physical manliness, first developed in the mid- and late-nineteenth century public schools and then diffused among the propertied classes of the Anglo-Saxon world. The hallmarks of this “virile” ethos were self-control, self-discipline, and the absence of emotional expression.⁸ Whatever the precipitating causes, the public landscape of the privileged urban flaneur of the period had become an unstable construct: threatened internally by contradictions and tensions and constantly challenged from without by social forces that pressed these dominant representations to be reworked, shorn up, reconstructed.

Middle-class men were not the sole explorers and interpreters of the city in the volatile decade of the 1880s. On the contrary, as the end of the century approached, this “dreadfully delightful city” became a contested terrain, where new commercial spaces, new journalistic practices, and a range of public spectacles and reform activities inspired a different set of social actors to assert their own claims to self-creation in the public domain. Thanks to the material changes and cultural contests of the late-Victorian city, protesting workers and “gents” of marginal class position, female philanthropists and “platform women,” Salvation Army lasses and match girls, as well as glamorized “girls in business,” made their public appearances and established places and viewpoints in relation to the urban panorama. These new entrants to the urban scene produced new stories of the city that competed, intersected with, appropriated, and revised the dominant imaginative mappings of London.

Before tracking the progress of these new urban travelers and their social visions, let us first examine the tradition of urban spectatorship embodied in Henry James’s alter ego, the “sympathetic resident.” As a cosmopolitan, the “sympathetic resident” could take up nightwalking, a male pursuit immortalized in urban accounts since Elizabethan times, but one that acquired a more active moral and emotional meaning for intrepid urban explorers in the Victorian period. Whereas Regency dandies of the 1820s like Pierce Egan’s characters, Tom and Jerry, had experienced the streets of London as a playground for the upper classes, and interpreted streets sights and characters as passing shows, engaged urban investigators of the mid- and late-Victorian era roamed the city with more earnest (if still voyeuristic) intent to explain and resolve social problems. Frederick Engels, Charles Dickens, and Henry Mayhew were the most distinguished among a throng of missionaries and explorers, men who tried to read the “illegible” city, transforming what appeared to be a chaotic, haphazard environment into a social text that was “integrated, knowable, and ordered.” To realize their subject, their travel narratives incorporated a mixture of fact and fancy: a melange of moralized and religious sentiment, imperialist rhetoric, dramatized characterization, graphic descriptions of poverty, and statistics culled from Parliamentary Blue Books.⁹

As early as the 1840s, these urban explorers adapted the language of imperialism to evoke features of their own cities. Imperialist rhetoric transformed the unexplored territory of the London poor into an alien place, both exciting and dangerous. As Peter Keating notes, urban explorers never seemed to walk or ride into the slums, but to “penetrate” inaccessible places where the poor lived, in dark and noisy courts, thieves’ “dens,” foulsmelling “swamps,” and the black “abyss.” To buttress their own “eye of power,” these explorers were frequently accompanied by the state representative of order, a trusty policeman: in the 1860s, the journalist George Sims made excursions to East End taverns frequented by sailors and prostitutes, accompanied by a detective or professional “minder.” As a master of disguise, the journalist James Greenwood felt comfortable enough to dispense with this latter precaution: “A private individual,” he insisted, “suitably attired and of modest mien, may safely venture where a policeman dare not show his head.”¹⁰

The literature of urban exploration also emulated the privileged gaze of anthropology in constituting the poor as a race apart, outside the national community.¹¹ Mayhew, for example, introduced his investigation in London Labour and the London Poor by linking the street folks of London to the ethnographic study of “wandering tribes in general,” arguing that, like all nomads, costermongers had big muscles and small brains, and were prone to be promiscuous, irreligious, and lazy;¹² even Engels, who went to great lengths to expose the “culpability” of the bourgeoisie for the slums, still retained, according to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “an essentialist category of the sub-human nomad: the Irish.”¹³

Mid-Victorian investigators represented the urban topography of the “gaslight era” as a series of social juxtapositions of “high” and “low” life. Observers in the 1860s and 1870s frequently reproduced a Dickensian cityscape of dirty, crowded, disorganized clusters of urban villages, each with its own peculiar flavor and eccentricity, where the Great Unwashed lived in chaotic alleys, courts, and hovels just off the grand thoroughfares. In the 1860s, for instance, James Greenwood began his tour of “Low Life Deeps” with a visit to the “notorious Tiger Bay” of the East End’s Radcliffe Highway, but he soon moved westward to “Jack Ketch’s Warren” in Frying Pan Alley, Clerkenwell, and then to a “West End Cholera Stronghold.” Henry Mayhew also moved from place to place in his study of the urban poor, although he noticed a difference between the laboring classes in the East and the West: “In passing from the skilled operative of the West-end, to the unskilled workman of the Eastern quarter, the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.”¹⁴

Mayhew’s observations portended an important reconfiguration of London as a city divided into East and West. Mid-Victorian explorations into the terra incognita of the London poor increasingly relied on the East/West opposition to assess the connecting links between seemingly unrelated parts of society. One of the most powerful and enduring realizations of this opposition, Doré and Jerrold’s London: A Pilgrimage (1872), envisioned London as two distinct cities, not of capital and labor, but of the rentier and the impoverished criminal. It juxtaposed a West End of glittering leisure and consumption and national spectacle to an East End of obscure density, indigence, sinister foreign aliens, and potential crime.¹⁵

This bifurcated cityscape reinforced an imaginative distance between investigators and their subjects, a distance that many urban explorers felt nonetheless compelled to transgress. Cultural critics Stallybrass and White offer a Bakhtinian explanation of the cultural dynamics at work in this “poetics” of transgression. In class society, they argue, the repudiation of the “low” by the dominant “top” of society was paradoxically accompanied by a heightened symbolic importance of the “low Other” in the imaginative repertoire of the dominant culture.

A recurrent pattern emerges: the “top” attempts to reject and eliminate the “bottom” for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover not only that it is in some way frequently dependent on the low-Other. . ., but also that the top includes that low symbolically as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity.

For this reason, Stallybrass and White argue, “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central. . . . The low-Other is despised, denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoire of the dominant culture.”¹⁶

Urban investigators not only distanced themselves from their objects of study; they also felt compelled to possess a comprehensive knowledge of the Other, even to the point of cultural immersion, social masquerade, and intrapsychic incorporation.¹⁷ James Greenwood, for example, prided himself on his improvisational skills, on being able to mingle as “one of the crowd”: as “The Amateur Casual,” he achieved journalistic fame for gaining admission to a workhouse casual ward dressed as a “sly and ruffianly figure marked with every sign of squalor.”¹⁸ In his investigations of the London poor, Henry Mayhew also played a number of roles, including stage manager and director/voyeur. At a public meeting, he encouraged impoverished needlewomen who had been forced by economic distress to resort to the streets to “tell their own tale.” Each recounted “her woes and struggles, and published her shame amid the convulsive sobs of the others,” while Mayhew and one other gentlemen observed the scene, “scarcely” visible in the “dimly lighted” meeting place.¹⁹

No figure was more equivocal, yet more crucial to the structured public landscape of the male flaneur, than the woman in public. In public, women were presumed to be both endangered and a source of danger to those men who congregated in the streets. In the mental map of urban spectators, they lacked autonomy: they were bearers of meaning rather than makers of meaning. As symbols of conspicuous display or of lower-class and sexual disorder, they occupied a multivalent symbolic position in this imaginary landscape.²⁰

The prostitute was the quintessential female figure of the urban scene, a prime example of the paradox, cited by Stallybrass and White, that “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.” For men as well as women, the prostitute was a central spectacle in a set of urban encounters and fantasies. Repudiated and desired, degraded and threatening, the prostitute attracted the attention of a range of urban male explorers from the 1840s to the 1880s. Leonore Davidoff assesses the “close affinity” among a long line of urban voyeurs and social inv...