Slumming : sexual and social politics in Victorian London / Seth Koven.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Koven, Seth.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poor--England--London--History--19th century.

Poor.

Slums--England--London--History--19th century.

Slums.

Sex customs--England--London--History--19th century.

Sex customs.

Voluntarism--England--London--History--19th century.

Voluntarism.

Charities--England--London--History--19th century.

Charities.

London (England)--Social conditions.

London (England).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (420 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey ; Oxfordshire, England : Princeton University Press, 2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the 1880's, 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."

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Slumming: Eros and Altruism in Victorian London

Part One: Incognitos, Fictions, and Cross-Class Masquerades

Chapter One. Workhouse Nights: Homelessness, Homosexuality, and Cross-Class Masquerades

Chapter Two. Dr. Barnardo's Artistic Fictions: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child

Chapter Three. The American Girl in London: Gender, Journalism, and Social Investigation in the Late Victorian Metropolis

Part Two: Cross-Class Sisterhood and Brotherhood in the Slums

Chapter Four. The Politics and Erotics of Dirt: Cross-Class Sisterhood in the Slums

Chapter Five. The "New Man" in the Slums: Religion, Masculinity, and the Men's Settlement House Movement

Conclusion

Manuscript Sources

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9781400843589

1400843588

9781306046091

1306046092

OCLC:

904735234