Pictures of Poverty

The Works of George R. Sims and Their Screen Adaptations

Lydia Jakobs

• Publisher: John Libbey Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780861967520
• eBook ISBN:
  9780861969852
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist to George Sims's How the Poor Live, illustrated accounts of poverty were en vogue in Victorian Britain. Poverty was also a popular subject on the screen, whether in dramatic retellings of well-known stories or in 'documentary' photographs taken in the slums. London and its street life were the preferred setting for George Robert Sims's rousing ballads and the numerous magic lantern slide series and silent films based on them. Sims was a popular journalist and dramatist, whose articles, short stories, theatre plays and ballads discussed overcrowding, drunkenness, prostitution and child poverty in dramatic and heroic episodes from the lives and deaths of the poor. Richly illustrated and drawing from many previously unknown sources, Pictures of Poverty is a comprehensive account of the representation of poverty throughout the Victorian period, whether disseminated in newspapers, illustrated books and lectures, presented on the theatre stage or projected on the screen in magic lantern and film performances. Detailed case studies reveal the intermedial context of these popular pictures of poverty and their mobility across genres. With versatile author George R. Sims as the starting point, this study explores the influence of visual media in historical discourses about poverty and the highly controversial role of the Victorian state in poor relief.

1

Historical Perspectives

1.1 George R. Sims – Eminent Victorian?³⁶

George Robert Sims was born in London in 1847, ten years after Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and he died there in 1922, twelve years after Victoria’s grandson had been crowned King George V. Strictly speaking then, George R. Sims lived only two thirds of his life as a Victorian author, although he probably reached the height of his fame in the 1890s and early 1900s following the publication of his Dagonet ballads, pieces of investigative journalism and theatrical successes. Still, adaptations of Sims’s ballads and stories – first for the magic lantern and later the cinema screen – made sure that Dagonet remained a household name well into the 1920s.

By 1839 the term “Victorian” was used matter-of-factly to refer to that epoch but, as historians Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam point out, after 1901 its use increased to denote and frequently deride a certain mindset:

It meant earnestness, prudery, hypocrisy, overly ornate and elaborate design, bold entrepreneurialism, double standards, snobbery, sentimentality, utilitarianism, imperialism, narrow mindedness, cosy but stifling family life, rote-learning, extreme religiosity, racism, respectability, corporal punishment, hard work and drudgery.³⁷

The adjective “Victorian”, in turn, “came to describe a sepia-tinted age that trumpeted high ideals and Christian virtues but presided over an underworld of poverty and prostitution”.³⁸ For George R. Sims this was not necessarily a contradiction. As a journalist, he wrote extensively about the metropolitan poor (How the Poor Live, 1883; Horrible London, 1883) and described London’s criminal underworld and prostitution schemes in Watches of the Night (1907) and London by Night (1910). As a dramatist, he put the East End onto the stage in his famous, wildly successful play Lights o’ London (1881). Sims also repeatedly appealed to the Christian charity of his readers and regularly asked them to donate to the Referee Children’s Dinner Fund and other charitable causes in his weekly column.

The periodization of the Victorian era is approached differently by the two disciplines most relevant to this study. Literary history commonly situates it between the earlier Romantic era and the advent of Modernism around the turn of the 20^th century and characterizes it primarily as a period of literary realism and naturalism dominated by the success of the novel form.³⁹ George Sims’s journalistic and theatrical works were certainly influenced by Victorian realism but he also wrote a number of humorous and farcical plays early in his career (Crutch and Toothpick, 1879; Mother-in-Law, 1881; The Member for Slocum, 1881), and ventured into more fantastical and symbolist writing in the 1900s (Mysteries of Modern London, 1905; The Devil in London, 1908).⁴⁰

Historians disagree on the boundaries of the Victorian period often arguing that it extended beyond the actual dates of Victoria’s reign (1837–1901). Many include the earlier reform years of the late 1820s and 1830s, others subsume it within a long 19^th century that starts around the time of the French Revolution and ends with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. While historian Colin Matthew claims that, “nobody then or now would include the 1900s as ‘Victorian’”, others have argued that the societal changes of the Edwardian Age including women’s suffrage and welfare reforms followed developments of the previous century, “making any notion of a decisive break with the past in 1901 questionable”.⁴¹ Historians have questioned many of the widely held assumptions about the Victorian age: The notion that an Industrial Revolution fundamentally transformed English society to form a Victorian age characterized by the rise of the middle class and the prevalence of manufacturing, for example.⁴² Richard Price has repeatedly argued that instead, a continuity of “basic structures” of society existed from the late 17^th to the late 19^th century and denied that the notion of Victorian England makes sense.⁴³ This leads Victorianist Martin Hewitt to conclude that, “the Victorian period has been shaped by a scholarship that has either moulded the terminal dates of Victoria’s reign to its own ends, or prefaced studies of the period with the apparently obligatory admission that it doesn’t really exist”.⁴⁴ Another tendency of Victorian Studies pointed out by Boyd and McWilliam is that contemporary influences and issues are reflected in the constantly changing approaches towards the Victorians. Thus, the focal point of influential texts in Victorian Studies has shifted from class-based approaches influenced by Marxist theory in the 1950s and 1960s to studies of gender, race and the nation from the 1980s, often based on concepts developed by Michel Foucault.⁴⁵

1.2 Key Concepts in Victorian Culture

New Media and Poverty

Historian Martin Hewitt has sought to establish a distinct “cultural identity” of the Victorian period by defining five assemblages, “compounds of technologies, practices, institutions, knowledges, meanings, values, and ideologies”, that allow him to identify “a number of interrelated characteristics of the Victorian as period”.⁴⁶ Hewitt argues that developments at the start of the Victorian period, most notably the construction of the railways with their high-speed views of landscapes and people in the 1830s and the invention of photographic processes in the late 1830s and early 1840s, “gave the Victorians a fresh visual engagement with the world”.⁴⁷ Literary historian Renate Brosch states similarly that Victorians witnessed “an explosion of visuality during which new optical devices, new entertainments, new subjects and techniques in representation were accompanied by enormous visual changes in everyday urban life”.⁴⁸ Legal reforms and new technologies alike enabled this “explosion of visuality”, which encompasses the rapid expansion of exhibition cultures (following the Great Exhibition of 1851), performance cultures (the rise of the music hall and melodrama) and an emerging mass market for printed material (illustrated magazines, daily newspapers, multi-volume novels), all of which interacted in various ways.⁴⁹

Representations of the urban poor had been popular since before the Victorian print explosion but from the 1830s in particular, “journalists, painters, illustrators and photographers penetrated urban areas that they found full of unknown phenomena, strong contrasts and shocking experiences”.⁵⁰ With their first-hand reportages, detailed illustrations, realist paintings and shocking photographs, “[t]hey catered to the public of the new (urban) media”.⁵¹ From the 1880s, attempts at systematic classification of poverty and early sociological enquiries were conducted by Charles Booth (Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 volumes, 1889–1902) and Seebohm Rowntree (Poverty: A Study of Town Life, 1901), who introduced the concept of the poverty line and showed that almost one third of Londoners and 30 per cent of the inhabitants of York lived in poverty.⁵² As historian Seth Koven has pointed out the term poor “spanned a considerable spectrum from the homeless to sweated workers [...] to seasonally employed unskilled laborers to regularly employed skilled artisans”.⁵³ And as historians Andreas Gestrich, Steven King and Lutz Raphael state, Victorian attitudes towards poverty, state welfare and charity were likewise situated on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Historical Perspectives
• Chapter 2: Modes of Depicting Poverty
• Chapter 3: The Popular Poverty Works of George R. Sims and Their Adaptations
• Chapter 4: Newspapers As Sources – Towards A Digital Source Criticism
• Chapter 5: Case Studies
• Perspectives
• Appendices
• Bibliography