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In and Out of the London Abyss: Dressing ‘Down’ by Victorian and Edwardian Social Investigators

La descente dans le gouffre londonien : un motif de l’enquête sociale victorienne et édouardienne
Nathalie Saudo-Welby

Résumés

Plonger dans les bas-fonds de Londres est une pratique qui s’est développée au cours de la période victorienne, et était particulièrement en vogue pendant la période édouardienne. Les philanthropes, les journalistes et les réformateurs et travailleurs sociaux visitaient les taudis, mais cette activité était aussi pratiquée par curiosité par des membres des classes aisées. Cet essai analyse leur pratique comme une ébauche d’observation participante – une méthode sociologique par laquelle l’observateur franchit les frontières de l’espace, de race ou de classe pour collecter des informations directes. Pendant une première phase d’entrée, l’enquêteur se déguise afin de se faire passer pour un membre d’une autre catégorie. Franchir les frontières de classe opère en effet un changement de perspective qui procure des impressions précieuses. Dans la littérature des bas-fonds, cette phase de déguisement s’apparente à une vignette, qui nous renseigne sur la façon dont les enquêteurs envisageaient leur pratique et sur les effets qu’ils cherchaient à avoir sur leurs lecteurs et lectrices. Cet essai porte sur les écrits d’Elizabeth Banks, Mary Higgs, James Greenwood, Jack London et d’autres enquêteurs qui ont plongé dans le gouffre à des fins d’exploration.

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  • 1 ‘[Jack London’s] guise as working class explorer is both foundational and performative’ (Swafford 2 (...)

1Urban flânerie, the practice of immersing oneself in a crowd and wandering in a labyrinthine capital in quest of new sights, novel sensations and anonymity, can be traced to the early dandies and Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin 856‒79, Bivona and Henkle 137‒39). Being a form of protest against modern imperatives of productiveness, it was generally leisurely and aimless. In the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, urban flânerie extended its range beyond the wealthy neighbourhoods and turned into an exploration of the urban nether world, as the well-to-do began visiting the poorer quarters not only for professional and reforming purposes, but also for recreation. As Seth Koven has shown, ‘slumming’ was a leisure activity among some gentlemen curious to know how the poor lived, and eager for adventure and transgressive experiences that involved self-performance and gender experimentation. Even women of middle- and upper-class origin, yielding to the ‘magnetic pull’ of the poorest urban districts of Britain, ‘forsook dinner parties, balls, and picnics, and headed instead for the slums’ (Ross 1). Their practice was at the overlap between travel, self-discovery, sociology and ‘yellow’ or investigative journalism. Some late Victorian and Edwardian urban explorers chose to descend into lesser-known spaces as undercover investigators. By disguising themselves as members of a class or group generally lower than their own, the explorers crossed barriers of space and class, and became insiders who could gather intimate knowledge of the unfamiliar environment. As Peter Keating’s and Ellen Ross’s anthologies demonstrate, Victorian and Edwardian social explorers came in many kinds, but they all expressed a desire for knowledge and an ambition to get at the truth. Some viewed themselves as discoverers, detectives and even blank slates, eager for new experiences and impressions. Recent scholarship has emphasized another aspect of the practice of dressing ‘down’ (more rarely dressing ‘up’): the fact that it was also often a form of self-performance involving elements of self-construction, deliberate transgression and theatricality1 (Koven).

2This essay focuses on the experiences of revelation and personal transformation recorded by the explorers who crossed social boundaries. Using the theoretical tools and terminology belonging to the method of participant observation, it will examine the epistemological and methodological aspects of incognito social investigation. Participant observation, as theorized in the USA in the 1920s and ’30s, is a qualitative method of personal, microsociological research, covert or otherwise, comprising different stages such as ‘gaining entry’ and ‘establishing rapport’. It is necessary for the participant-observer to carefully negotiate these phases because boundary crossing raises a number of practical and ethical difficulties, which have an incidence on the nature of the written reports.

3The first section of this essay maps out the site of ‘the Abyss’ in late-Victorian and Edwardian accounts of social exploration. Following on Ellen Ross’s intuition that ‘many texts of social observation can be read as both literary and historical documents’ (10), I will then focus on how observers reported the way they gained entry into their fields. It will appear that their experience of crossing social boundaries and blending with their subject was a conventional episode in the literary genre of slumming narratives, as well as a moment of realization that allowed the observer to gather original knowledge. That these two literary effects are not mutually exclusive is made possible by the literary nature of the accounts.

Mapping out the Abyss

4The description of the nether world was standard literary practice in Victorian realist fiction, and it was an essential component of the fictional sub-genre known as ‘condition of England novels’. Following a tradition established by Charles Dickens, George Gissing wrote several novels about urban poverty. The Nether World came out in 1889, the year Charles Booth published the first volume of his sociological inquiry into London poverty. In the novel’s last lines there looms a ‘protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world’ (Gissing 392). As they stand on the edge of this vortex, readers are invited to take a closer look at the depths of the abyss for themselves and to join in the reformers’ efforts. Describing, understanding and alleviating the ‘brute forces’ of society were components of the Victorian social explorers’ project. Social explorers and reformers were early sociologists navigating the border between quantitative and qualitative research. Charles Booth used census data, and the information collected by his team-members during interviews. He commented that most fictional accounts were untruthful, but he made an exception for George Gissing’s Demos (1886), which had just been published. He also used personal immersion as a method to gather some knowledge of the London poor.

For three separate periods I have taken up quarters, each time for several weeks, where I was not known, and as a lodger have shared the lives of people who would figure in my schedules as belonging to classes C, D and E. Being more or less boarded, as well as lodged, I became intimately acquainted with some of those I met, and the lives and habits of many others came naturally under observation. My object, which I trust was a fair one, was never suspected, my position never questioned. The people with whom I lived became, and are still, my friends. (Booth 158)

5Charles Booth does not reflect at great length on the modalities of his practice of covert investigation. He does not go into the practical aspects of what passing for someone else implies. He can sense that some ethical issues are involved but he does not delve into them, as if the reforming and fact-finding aims of his project justified the means. Booth is nevertheless anxious not to build too much on his ‘slight experience’ (160). He was particularly aware of the fact that those who tried to come closer to the poor always brought their own biases with them. The chapter entitled ‘Point of View’ opens with the following comment:

East London lay hidden from view behind a curtain on which were painted terrible pictures: starving children, suffering women, overworked men; horrors of drunkenness and vice; monsters and demons of inhumanity; giants of disease and despair. Did these pictures truly represent what lay behind, or did they bear to the facts a relation similar to that which the pictures outside a booth at some country fair bear to the performance or show within? This curtain we have tried to lift. (Booth 172)

6The unfamiliar environments to be explored were not only spatially and socially distant but also psychologically remote, being separated from the explorers themselves by a veil of prejudice and misconceptions.

  • 2 The section ‘Social explorers’ of the excellent site workhouses.org.uk/explorers/ provides links to (...)

7Journalism played an important role both in the development of covert investigation and in shaping the representations of the Victorian poor. The desire to gather material for copy or fiction was a driving force among many Victorian urban explorers. The earliest Victorian covert investigation into London poverty is considered to be a series of articles written by James Greenwood at the request of his brother, who was then the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette (Seaber). Basing himself on a single night he spent in the Lambeth workhouse, James Greenwood wrote three articles, entitled ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, published on January 12, 13 and 15, 1866, under the pseudonym ‘The Amateur Casual’.2 Greenwood’s colourful and melodramatic style satisfied the readers’ voyeuristic desire to peep into scenes of squalor. His narrative was read by all sorts and conditions of people, reedited in several forms and adapted after it met with fascination and outrage. It created a ‘mania for workhouse sojourns’ among politicians, journalists and charity workers (Koven 51), and initiated the tradition of incognito investigation among yellow journalists in England and across the Atlantic. William T. Stead, who is credited with the invention of ‘New Journalism’, personally investigated child prostitution in London in 1885 and served three months in prison for procuring a 13-year old girl while he was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette (Robinson).

8By the turn of the century, the word ‘Abyss’ had become a classic trope to describe the predicament of the homeless, placed on the brink of a social descent that some feared was an irreversible fall. The Abyss represented a world of its own, it mapped out areas of poverty and destitution that were geographically close but mentally remote. The description of the London Nether World was almost a literary form, characterized by excess, sensationalism and powerful metaphors. In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) by the Salvation Army General William Booth contains a chapter entitled ‘On the Verge of the Abyss’ drawing an analogy between ‘Darkest Africa’ and the London slums (Keating 141‒42, 146). In From the Abyss (1902), Charles Masterman’s account of his immersion in Camberwell, the South-East London district is compared to a tropical forest, a wilderness swarming with insects. The singular in the subtitle Of Its Inhabitants by One of Them suggests a personal account but the London poor are systematically designated by a plural pronoun. They are compared to rats, and their dwellings to ‘ant-hills’, ‘hives’ and ‘warrens’. Jack London played an important role in the exploration of the American and English nether worlds. After his mission to investigate the Boer War was cancelled in 1903, he promptly made up his mind to make his own descent into the London Abyss so as to gather material for copy. His lively report, illustrated by his own photographs, was serialized in a magazine and later published by Macmillan under the title The People of the Abyss in 1903.

9In the years after the publication of Jack London’s book, the English social worker Mary Higgs started to gather the firsthand experience that allowed her to write her own Glimpses from the Abyss (1906). Higgs had been engaged in rescue work and had personally provided shelter to vagrant women and prostitutes. She remained convinced of the necessity of getting a closer knowledge of the lives of the thousands of homeless women in large English towns who lived in temporary lodgings. So, on several occasions, when Higgs was in her early fifties, she dressed as a tramp and presented herself, with a female companion, at the door of different types of accommodation, such as tramp wards, Salvation Army shelters and privately-owned lodging houses, in London, and Southern and Northern England. Her account of her experiences was first published in The Contemporary Review and the Daily News, and then gathered in a book. Despite the fact that Higgs’s title echoes Jack London’s, the book does not contain a single reference to her literary precedents, and her measured style contrasts with the efforts of her predecessors, as if she was deliberately trying to take a distance from this tradition. Gaining an intimate knowledge of her subject gave her the legitimacy to criticize the provisions that were made for homeless women in forceful terms. In her conclusion, she called for no less than the suppression of tramp wards and the creation of decent accommodation for migrant workers.

Boundary Crossing and Dressing ‘Down’

10‘Class passers’ subverted cultural and social meanings by blurring class boundaries, but their accounts also judge and fix these social meanings. ‘Passing’ requires choosing the appropriate set of clothes, and this provides an opportunity for the author to present clothing as a symbolic system of social meaning. Selecting the clothes that are supposed to facilitate immersion builds on previous assumptions about the social meaning of clothes, and implies some previous knowledge of the nature of what is going to be explored. Undercover investigation is a process of discovery by an explorer whose mind is open to novel experiences; however, since the explorer always has previous expectations about what the requirements of the role are, performing the part to perfection means that one is acting on the basis of preconceptions that may be biased.

11Early sociological surveys contributed to reinforcing the systems they aimed merely to describe. Henry Mayhew’s survey of London poverty played an important role in fixing the codes of clothing: the style of dress of each trade is described in abundant and sometimes technical detail, and illustrated by an engraving, with the result of turning the individual worker into a type. The description of a protagonist’s clothes was an integral part of realist literary characterization, providing clues into professional and social status. In works of fiction the description of clothing also happens at a threshold. The characterization of Bob Hewett at the beginning of chapter 8 of George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) is preceded by a digression on the social meanings of collars. Such a subject could ‘offer much scope to an analyst delighting in subtle gradation’, but the author-narrator explains that he will limit himself to ‘the two great sections of those who do, and those who do not, wear collars’ (Gissing 69). The makeup of specific, distinguishable dress codes is transmitted through various cultural media. When it takes a textual form, there is an even greater impression that clothes are readable signs that can be invested with a wide range of cultural meanings, whether social or moral.

12The moment when the social boundary is crossed sometimes expands into a full episode, as the narration stretches to allow for reflection or for literary effects. In the first chapter of Jack London’s narrative of ‘descent’, a whole section is devoted to his purchase of old clothes in a second-hand shop. At this point, the author is comically mistaken for a ‘high class criminal from across the water’ trying to escape the police (London 5). When the moment comes to put on his ‘rags and tatters’, the narrative slows down, as Jack London describes in detail his mental reluctance, his body’s resistance and even the material difficulty he has in adopting his new identity: ‘the fair years and fat’ have made his ‘skin soft and brought the nerves close to the surface’, and the clothes feel as uncomfortable to him ‘as a hair shirt’ (6). The gold sovereign he sews into his singlet for him to use in case of emergency betrays the fact that he is unwilling to live the experience to the full. The boundary acquires a form of spatial thickness: it is no longer a line to be crossed but rather a threshold on which the explorer is pulled in two directions. Once London has donned his new clothes however, the effect appears to be abrupt, radical and manifold, allowing for dramatic contrasts.

No sooner was I out on the streets than I was impressed by the difference in status effected by my clothes. All servility vanished from the demeanour of the common people with whom I came in contact. Presto! in the twinkling of an eye, so to say, I had become one of them. My frayed and out-at-elbows jacket was the badge and advertisement of my class, which was their class. (London 6)

13The experience yields some interesting sociological observations. London observes that he is now being addressed as ‘mate’ and not as ‘Sir’ or ‘Governor’ by those around him. He rejoices that he can now encounter men ‘on a basis of equality’, and observes that his life has ‘cheapened in direct ratio with [his] clothes’ (7). He also describes how the experience affects him personally, in particular his satisfaction at no longer being taken for a wealthy American, and relief at being free of what he calls the ‘pestilence of tipping’ (7). The variety of effects produced by this passage makes it very much a literary text and not merely a historical document. The initial situation blossoms out into a whole episode of comic, autobiographical and sociological interest.

14The chapter ends on a note of victory but it is also dominated by Victorian perceptions of the East End as an indistinct, eroticized mass absorbing those who enter it.

And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it. The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it—with the one exception of the stoker’s singlet. (London 7)

  • 3 ‘for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear of the sea; and (...)

15These lines contrast with an earlier passage, also contained in a diary entry, in which Jack London expresses personal feelings that are substantially different.3 The felicitous blending described in the published text could thus be a piece of opportunistic rhetoric. London is playing ‘rhetorical tricks’ on his readers: he may have adjusted his notes (which he regularly gathered and revised in a flat rented out for the purpose) and adapted his impressions so as to produce the desired effects (Williams 438). The imposture that was at the core of early experiences of participant observation is closely intertwined with the craft employed in the recording of the experience. Both self-writing and class passing are cases of creative impersonation, and the closeness of the two practices accounts for the spirit of enjoyment and liberation which is communicated to readers. This explains why early accounts of undercover exploration, from the Amateur Casual to George Orwell’s experiences as a down-and-outer, remain pleasurable reading for today’s readers.

Theatricality

16Victorian and Edwardian narratives of undercover investigators often exploited the dramatic and comic potential of the phase of boundary crossing. Disguise and its transformative effects are one of the familiar vignettes in the genre of slum narratives. Accounts of undercover exploration were generally published in middle-brow magazines: investigators wrote with their readers’ expectations and responses in mind, and made literary efforts to render their accounts more dramatic. The Amateur Casual’s inaugural report is a good case in point. The first article in the series starts with the description of a ‘neat but unpretentious carriage’ cautiously stopping in front of a public house in Lambeth. A ‘sly and ruffianly figure, marked by every sign of squalor’ comes out of it directly onto the road rather than onto the pavement, thus escaping attention (Keating 35). The description of this singular individual follows the canons of realist characterization. Each aspect of his clothes seems to carry some social or symbolic meaning that readers are expected to decipher. The ‘ruffianly figure’ is both singular and typical.

He was dressed in what had once been a snuff-brown coat, but which had faded to the hue of bricks imperfectly baked. It was not strictly a ragged coat, though it had lost its cuffs,—a bereavement which obliged the wearer’s arms to project through the sleeves two long inelegant inches. The coat altogether was too small, and was only made to meet over the chest by means of a bit of twine. This wretched garment was surmounted by a ‘bird’s-eye’ pocket-handkerchief of cotton, wisped about the throat hangman fashion; above all was a battered billy-cock hat, with a dissolute drooping brim. Between the neckerchief and the lowering brim of the hat appeared part of a face, unshaven, and not scrupulously clean. The man’s hands were plunged into his pockets, and he shuffled hastily along in boots, which were the boots of a tramp indifferent to miry ways. In a moment he was out of sight, and the brougham, after waiting a little while, turned about and comfortably departed. (Keating 34)

17The comically exaggerated gloom of the words used to describe the items of clothing (‘wretched,’ ‘dissolute,’ ‘bereavement,’ ‘hangman’), while suggesting the desolation of the scene and the possibility of pathos, wink to the alert reader that something else is going on. The lengthy, detailed description contrasts with the cab-driver and his passenger’s efforts to be as discreet as possible, and we can sense that something irregular is at stake. This opening in medias res parodies the beginning of sensational novels, in which a sense of mystery is deliberately created. In the next sentence, the author suddenly tears off the mask and upends the reader’s previous constructions: ‘This mysterious figure was that of the present writer’. Acting on his own perception of what a convincing down and outer should look like, James Greenwood has been staging his own entrance. The realist devices suddenly appear for what they are: illusion tricks. The technique is also reminiscent of Gothic fiction: part of the pleasure we feel in reading the rest of Greenwood’s account lies in our awareness that the narrator is successfully impersonating his own seedy double. We now understand why we have been spying on the scene: the author-impersonator is an undercover investigator, and the real truth of the episode lies in a deception.

He was bound for Lambeth Workhouse, there to learn by actual experience how casual paupers are lodged and fed . . . Much has been said on the subject,—on behalf of the paupers, on behalf of the officials; but nothing by any one who, with no motive but to learn and make known the truth, had ventured the experiment of passing a night in a workhouse and trying what it actually is to be a ‘casual’. (Keating 34)

18The narrative does hinge on the discovery of a secret reality after all. Seth Koven explains that Greenwood’s adventure was part of a ‘“mania for realities” that encouraged Victorians across the social spectrum to understand the lives of the poor as an ongoing series of performances’ (65). By pointing out Greenwood’s ‘duplicitous doublings’, Koven invites today’s readers to take a distance towards his narrative (36). The real-life warder of the Lambeth workhouse even went on to impersonate himself in a melodrama staged in Marylebone. We do not know whether ‘Daddy’ was good at performing his own part, but he was apparently acclaimed by all those present (Koven 63‒65).

19Undercover investigation involves the explorer in role playing and requires performing skills (Péneff 90‒91). Twenty-first century scholarship has brought to light the elements of performance and duplicity involved in the practices of early undercover investigators. Seth Koven has analysed cases of Victorian slummers who engaged in gender experimentation and personal adventure, and used deceptive practices. Writing about Jack London, Kevin Swafford argues that his book ‘defamiliarizes the image of the urban explorer by presenting it as a role that is played rather than as a subjective actuality’ (2015, 19). Jay Williams calls the account ‘highly theatrical’ (433), and argues that ‘the rhetoric of exaggeration is a fundamental tool for the theatricalization of socialist doctrine’ (434). On their side, female Victorian investigators might have been trying to escape the ‘spectre that haunted all women slum activists: the lady bountiful’ (Ross 23), when they attempted to experiment with new identities and to impersonate their own part in new, convincing ways.

Gaining Entry

20The first stage of participant observation consists in gaining entry into the field. The outsider negotiates her or his entry into the world to be explored. Theoreticians insist that significant information is conveyed during this crucial moment, and it is recommended to take notes throughout the experience so that even these first impressions are not lost (Dealt and DeWalt 87, Jorgensen 43, Lareau 157).

21By contrast with the staged and controlled accounts of descent as a spectacle involving preparation, some investigators described going down as a one-off experience requiring resistance and adaptability, and laid particular emphasis on the obstacles and practical difficulties they met when progressing downward. Being admitted to workhouses meant passing through a number of checks, whose severity was ironically inversely proportional to the comforts of the place. To get into a casual ward, one had first to ‘obtain a ticket’ from the local police station.4 The routine was often described by our Victorian and Edwardian reporters, in a tone varying according to their status or agenda. What they were describing were the ‘rites of passage’ to what Michel Foucault calls a ‘heterotopia’, an ‘other place’ which lives by rules different from those of the world. Heterotopias, while produced by a society and usually physically localisable in or near it, are somehow outside the world of that society. Running the gamut from holiday resorts to cemeteries, heterotopias can take many forms, but two kinds in particular, both reserved for people a society has problems with, interested Foucault: what he calls ‘heterotopias of crisis’ and ‘heterotopias of deviation’ (25). Victorian and Edwardian workhouses and tramp wards, as well as the jails, lunatic asylums and brothel-houses visited by Mary Higgs, are on the borderline between these two kinds: their inmates had met with a crisis (homelessness, joblessness, loss, disease…), but as they moved in, their personal histories were erased and what remained was the fact that they did not fit in with the prevailing social norms, so that in practice what happened was that they were assigned a new deviant identity (‘pauper’, ‘vagrant’, ‘loafer, ‘cadger’ or ‘moucher’). The participant-observer too, going through the rite of entry, had to take on a new ‘deviant’ identity, only to have it ‘tamed’ or surrendered as a condition of being allowed in.

22Dressed as a tramp, Julia Varley visited several workhouses between Leeds and Liverpool and reported her observations in six installments published in the Bradford Daily Argus between October and December 1904. As a workhouse Guardian, Varley had contributed to the services she investigated, and her account is restrained in tone and style and measuredly critical.5 She describes in relatively neutral terms the phase of admittance, with rules and rituals that agree with other accounts: the applicants are first asked their place of origin, destination and profession; they must then hand out or deposit their belongings (in particular their pipe and matches in the case of men) and undress. Prior to putting on their workhouse clothes, the residents have to take a bath. Since James Greenwood’s account of the ‘mutton broth’, the bathing scene had become a purple patch of such accounts. ‘What, I wonder, is the extreme number of vagrants permitted to perform their ablutions in one lot of water?’ Wilkinson asked after his bath in the Dudley casual ward in 1897.6 After this rite of passage, which Koven calls a ‘parodic baptism’ (40), the visitor became dirty enough to thoroughly play the part and deserve the reader’s pity. Having provided their identity at the entrance, the residents thus had to surrender it before they could integrate the mass of the workhouse inmates. The destitutes deeply resented having to wear a uniform and giving up what little they had.7 The clothes worn inside the wards represented constraint and anonymity, and often meant irritation and infection. The visitor was then shown to his ‘cubicle,’ and evaluated the severe discomforts of the bed. Higgs describes the pillow as ‘a torture’ (123). The beds were often shared by several inmates. The explorer was then personally visited by vermin, which completed the process of degradation. The description of the night typically involved great thirst and ‘sounds’ that would not bear telling (Higgs 102). Breakfast meant gruel, water and salt, engendering an intense feeling of thirst. The thirst induced by the diet was a systematic complaint of the inmates.

23Those who were identified as gentlemen and ladies were sometimes granted preferential treatment but typically, the explorers chose to comply with the local rules and regulations and went through every single step of the whole experience, even if it was not considered necessary. The unnamed ‘Female Casual’ who followed in Greenwood’s steps is advised by a kind officer not to put on the workhouse clothes because they would make her dirtier (Stallard 32) and Greenwood is told after he has been in the bath that there was no need for him to bathe, because he looked ‘a clean and decent sort of man’ (Keating 36). The ‘Female Casual’ explains that some residents constantly pick out the vermin in their clothes, and sometimes take these clothes off. One woman became so irritated by her clothes that she ‘jumped up, and rushed about the ward, as if she were insane, crying piteously “I cannot bear it” . . . . Roaring with madness, she stripped herself entirely naked, retaining only her bonnet and a small shawl’. The female ward keeper then scolded her, ‘turned over the rags with her keys’ and, judging them clean, accused her of ‘devilment’ (Stallard 25‒26). Some residents are shown deliberately ripping up their clothes in rebellion, so as to be given cleaner ones or to be taken to prison, where treatment was thought to be preferable (Higgs note 25, p. 28; Koven 6970). Others seem to have done so in pure rage. In one case witnessed by Mary Higgs, a woman resident tears off her clothes because she can no longer bear the itching generated by the scratchy material and the vermin. Such subversive behaviour was difficult to categorize and the observers variously interpreted it as resistance, revolt, rage or painful agony. Higgs explains that to dress is synonymous with ‘to slaughter’ and to be able to have a proper bath and wear clean clothes means to ‘get free’ (243). Mary Higgs showed that tramp wards acted as a deterrent rather than as a relief system, and demonstrated that the sanitary conditions in systems of public accommodation were so appalling that they resulted in infection, contamination and contagion, leading to personal and general degradation.

Playing the Part

24In his introduction to the Female Casual’s account of 1866, the editor, J. H. Stallard, explains how difficult it was for him to find a woman who would be willing and able to conduct an inquiry into the conditions of female tramp wards. The social and moral constraints that weigh on women make it more difficult for them to successfully impersonate what they are not:

A gentleman, having dressed to the part, descended from his brougham to the dirty gruel, and assuming the air and character of the casual himself, passed safely through the wards with little chance of insult; but no lady could be found to imitate the act, and if the attempt were made, no rags would disguise her character, no acting would conceal her disgust; discovery would be all but certain, and no one can scarcely tell where the disagreeables would end. (2)

25The masculine contention that the metamorphosis of lady into tramp was unachievable and that ‘no rags’ would disguise a lady’s character was contradicted by Mary Higgs’s Glimpses into the Abyss. Higgs does not go into detail over her choice of dress, which she does not view as a disguise, and she does not give the impression that she and the woman she takes with her as a companion have undergone a metamorphosis. Higgs’s idea of what she was supposed to look like was informed by previous experience. Her transformation is not dramatized and there is nothing funny about it. Higgs and her friend both dress shabbily, with ragged shawls, worn-out boots and Higgs’s hat ‘a certificate for any tramp ward’ (88). The smoothness of the transformation supports her later contention that ‘It is so surprisingly easy to become a tramp that it is strange it has not occurred to Guardians personally to test conditions by sampling each other’s workhouses, or at any rate by sending into them some trustworthy witness’ (138). On the second day however, Higgs makes a significant comment about how their tattered clothes influence men’s response to them:

We passed some men who were working in a barge; they shouted to us, and invited us to come to them. We walked away and took no notice, but repeatedly on our journey we were spoken to, and I could not help contrasting the way in which men looked at us with the usual bearing of a man towards a well-dressed female. I had never realised before that a lady’s dress, or even that of a respectable working-woman, was a protection. The bold, free look of a man at a destitute woman must be felt to be realised. (94)

26The way you dress modifies the way people, and in the present case, men address you. The repetition of the word ‘realize’ suggests that what is at stake is no less than a shift in perspective. Mary Higgs’s discovery is twofold: she learns that the social and moral significance of dress has an impact on people’s behaviour, and that assumptions about class play a large role in female vulnerability to sexual harassment and requests. A few days later, Higgs is mistaken for a prostitute, and her female companion asks her ‘piteously’: ‘Do I look like a prostitute?’ (142) Neither of them challenges the speakers, they simply accept the role they have been assigned, and had never planned on performing. The experience of being treated as a sexual object confirms the effectiveness of the transformation: Mary Higgs has become a full participant-observer, and she has even gone further than what she expected. This experience anticipates the book’s claims that workhouses manufacture prostitutes. For a woman, dressing ‘down’ has far-reaching implications, and the ties between dress and identity appear as a kind of mystery which must be explored further. This line of inquiry led Mary Higgs to uncover the relative meaning of clothes and their subversive social function. Her experience opens up the possibility of reciprocity: class passing was not limited to the middle-class investigator’s experience, it was a possibility that can be exploited temporarily for money-making purposes.

The ‘Clothes Philosophy’

27Mary Higgs’s investigations led her to relativize assumptions about the imprint of social conditions on women’s character and appearance. She observes that destitute women can undergo the opposite metamorphosis, by temporarily climbing out of the Abyss and blending with ordinary people. The women who want to go into service in respectable households break out of their dirty surroundings and emerge from the Abyss as entirely different people:

One woman was very coarse and fat, with an ugly scar on her shoulder, which she exhibited in the morning when she indulged in the luxury of ‘a good wash’, but was not clean. She put on a ragged bodice, the silk of which was hanging in shreds, and which had a big hole under the arm showing a great patch of bare flesh; yet over all she put a most respectable cloak, and a bonnet that would have done credit to a Quaker. I was astonished to see her emerge as almost a lady! Evidently the ‘clothes philosophy’ is well understood in Slumdom, for whatever purposes it is used. Indeed, it has given me somewhat of a shock to realise that many of these, even if dwellers in actual filth and disease, would not be distinguishable in any way from ordinary individuals. (225)

28In this reflexive moment, Mary Higgs realizes that the subjects she has imitated dress ‘up’ to suit their own purposes. Since the poor also use deceptive clothing practices, there is in fact no way of knowing the poor by their dress. Similarly, the first privately-owned lodging house visited by Higgs is described as above standard from the outside: ‘The building, a large, tall, better-class dwelling-house, set back in a front garden, looked almost too respectable for us, as we had donned our tramp’s attire’ (197). Appearances are deceptive, for the women of ‘all sorts and conditions’ who reside in the place are street-walkers who actually spend the day in and the evening or night out. The respectable appearance of the place is at odds with what is going on in the common sitting-room, where the residents are ‘all busy tidying themselves, rouging their faces, blacking their eyelids, and preparing to go on the streets. All this was done perfectly openly, and their hair was curled by the fireside. It was wonderful how speedily they emerged from slatterns into good-looking young women’ (198). Higgs’s insider’s view provides a glimpse into a reality which evokes the deceptive transformations of a Mrs Hyde prior to walking the streets of respectable London. Higgs does not exploit these literary possibilities, but she occasionally draws comical effects from the girls’ capacity for metamorphosis, such as when one girl ‘sportively’ asks another to lend her what looks like real hair, then takes a lock of it, and tries it on (213).

29The idea of posturing as a useful and transferable social skill is central to Elizabeth Banks’s exploration of passing in London society in the year 1894. In Campaigns of Curiosity Banks provided a lively, entertaining account of her undercover inquiries, which are made unique by the fact that she climbed the London social ladder down as well as up. Elizabeth Banks was an American journalist who made her own entry into the profession by investigating several money-making practices during a stay in London. She was following in the steps of the American Nellie Bly, who became famous for having herself locked up in a women’s lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island, today known as Roosevelt Island (Ten Days in a Mad-House, 1887). Banks had come to England to write about English life and customs for American readers, and finally wrote a series of articles about the London labour market. These were published in the English review The Nineteenth Century and reissued in 1894 as Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Victorian England. Banks advertised for positions, put on the appropriate disguise, and successively passed as a servant, a crossing sweeper, a flower seller, and a laundry girl. More remarkably, she also dressed ‘up’ as an American ‘looking for a pedigree’ and as a rich American heiress looking for an English chaperon to help her around the English marriage market. Banks’s writings allowed her to make a name as a professional woman journalist, but they fulfilled other purposes: she contributed to reforms and changes by denouncing the injurious conditions of laundry work and the ill-treatment of some servants. She also made the most of her ironical position as an American informing middle-class English readers about what was happening very close to them, even in their own households.

30Banks expressed her satisfaction that she could slip so easily into other identities, an experience described as a kind of rebirth, more passive than agentive:

It was wonderful what that change of costume had done for me! With the clothes I had donned, and the basket I carried, I seemed to have put on a new character and a different temperament. That day I felt like a flower-girl—not, certainly, like my coarse-voiced associates who were gathered across the way about the fountain, but like a meek lowly dealer in blossoms, with a strange sort of impression that, in some way, my daily bread depended on my selling those flowers.
Had I been my natural self when that policeman spoke to me, Piccadilly Circus would have been enlivened by a combat between an officer of the law and an angry maiden; but I was not myself—I was somebody else—and I received his rebuke mildly as a lamb, and returned to my position under the lamp-post. (146)

31Banks’s transformation seems to be sincerely felt, but the glimpse of the actual flower-sellers standing in a separate group relativizes its truthfulness. In fact, the book’s illustrations give the lie to her claim that she could effortlessly slip into another identity. Besides the engravings, which generally capture comical moments, there are a few posed photographs, showing the author as a flower seller, crossing sweeper or housemaid.

Fig. 1Elizabeth Banks as a Housemaid in Campaigns of Curiosity, p. 25.

Fig. 1—Elizabeth Banks as a Housemaid in Campaigns of Curiosity, p. 25.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

32The photographs highlight elements of self-performance and the role of preconceptions of the behaviour and dress of some female professional types. That Elizabeth Banks was able to dress ‘up’ or ‘down’ effectively and successfully merge into a new milieu was a powerful argument in her demonstration, as it implied that English social boundaries could be easily transgressed. Ironically, it was easier for Banks to pass as a credible American heiress than to be hired as a housemaid in an English household. Banks remains more discreet on the possibilities of class transgression involved in dressing ‘down’: ‘I have several times met my former mistress and her daughters on the street, and at the theatre we have often been near neighbours; but my change of costume proved a good disguise, and I doubt if they would know me unless I appeared to them in the garb of cap and apron’ (xii). Overall, Banks’s tone remains playful. Even though her own impostures have exposed elements of class porousness, she does not dig into their threatening implications.

33Evidence that the poor used deceit and fabrication to obtain assistance was quoted to demonstrate that the system of public relief and alms-giving encouraged dependence and parasitism. It helped sustain the enduring myth of the actor-beggar who lives on the charity of people more deserving than him- or herself. This myth was confirmed by an incognito journalist in the article ‘A Day as a Professional Beggar’ in Tit-Bits in 1891, and later turned into fiction by Conan Doyle in his short story ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1892). This explains why, by dressing as a crossing sweeper, Banks felt she was going into the ‘amateur detective service’ so as to ‘get at the bottom of things’ (131). However, her own experience leads her to disprove the legend of a pauper celebrity, ‘the wealthy sweep of Marylebone Road’ (133) who, dressed in a frock-coat and top-hat, allegedly succeeded in drawing a lot of money through his attitude and disguise (130). Her full day’s work brings her a mere three pennies’ profit. It is those who enjoy the privilege of a clean crossing without paying for it who truly deserve the names ‘paupers’ and ‘beggars’ (135‒36). Still, even if outright fabrication is rare, after trying to earn money as a flower seller, Banks realizes that to make a profit, it is necessary to attract attention and arouse sympathy by telling a few pathetic stories. Having adopted ‘a sorrowful, melancholy look’ in order to win over a kind-looking gentleman, Banks is relieved when her ‘look of woe-begoneness’ has its effect (147). It appears that it is impossible to make any money without impersonating the part of the wretched victim of circumstances. Banks revises the myth of the deceitful beggar by demonstrating that those whose survival depends on public generosity need to be clever story-tellers. Mary Higgs came to the similar conclusion that dissembling and concealment were common strategies in the lodging-houses she visited. The idea of impersonation thus becomes central to the very experience of being a pauper.

Conclusion

34The undercover observer was many other personae even before he or she dressed down as a destitute or a tramp. Lady and gentleman incognito investigators regarded themselves as explorers, adventurers, reformers, amateur detectives, scientists or aspiring journalists. The multiple levels at which their reports can be read are what make them preeminently literary texts and account for their enduring appeal to readers. In his review of Glimpses from the Abyss, William Beveridge praised Higgs for ‘carrying the stamp of truth’ (583), and realism is indeed the dominant note of the genre of slumming fiction. However, as in realist fiction, different strategies are employed so as to create an effect of truthfulness; and furthermore, the texts display aspects of self-performance and staging. So much was left unsaid or concealed that the situations also allowed for irony, as well as for moments of comedy. Some episodes evoke a world turned upside down, with farcical results or a salutary shift in perspective. Self-invention and self-construction sometimes took the researcher further than he or she anticipated or desired, and cases of pleasurable embodiments remain exceptional. One of these is to be found in Julia Varley’s account of her days as a tramp when, on her way to Prescot in early November, she expresses a moment of sudden delight and awareness:

I passed a churchyard, where the setting sun touched the tombstones, as with living gold, and I entered to rest. The evening air drew all the concentrated perfumes of flowers and trees, and the subdued hum of country sounds fell on my sense, until I felt something of the fascination that a tramp’s life must have for many of the regular visitors to the casual wards.8

35This rare instance of romanticizing on the freedom bestowed by a wandering life released from social constraints was made possible because Varley was, for a moment, outside the urban setting in which most of these experiments were conducted. Another, more extended example might be Stephen Reynolds who, in A Poor Man’s House (1908), recounts his life in a fisherman’s household in Sidmouth, Devon. He ended up staying with the family on and off for eleven years and when he was away, he always missed the warmth and merriment he found there. If he finds the initial physical discomforts hard to bear, they open the way to the deeper satisfactions he discovers in the world of the sea and, if the children are sometimes hungry, then the pleasure they take in their food is something children in more prosperous families will never know. Such joys are not easily conveyed to readers whose own lives are implicitly being called into question. The discomforts of the ‘Abyss’ certainly made for more comfortable and gratifying reading. Even today, following Victorian and Edwardian investigators there has remained enjoyable thanks to the dense and complex nexus of relationships it reveals, and for the class, gender and identity concerns which still trouble us and which, beside their historical and sociological interest, lend themselves so well to literary expression.

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Bibliographie

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Notes

1 ‘[Jack London’s] guise as working class explorer is both foundational and performative’ (Swafford 2006, 839).

2 The section ‘Social explorers’ of the excellent site workhouses.org.uk/explorers/ provides links to the accounts of those who visited workhouses incognito, including an anonymous social explorer who lived on workhouse diet for a few days in 1837.

3 ‘for the first time in my life the fear of the crowd smote me. It was like the fear of the sea; and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea, lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me’ (London 4).

4 T. W. Wilkinson, ‘On Tramp with a Ticket’ (1897) https://www.workhouses.org.uk/explorers/OnTrampWithATicket.shtml.

5 https://www.workhouses.org.uk/Varley/.

6 https://www.workhouses.org.uk/explorers/OnTrampWithATicket.shtml.

7 In George Orwell’s account of his tramping experience in London in the late nineteen twenties, his companions tell him that ‘the one thing really hated in the workhouse, as a stigma of charity, is the uniform; if the men could wear their own clothes, or even their own caps and scarves, they would not mind being paupers’ (199).

8 https://www.workhouses.org.uk/Varley/.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1—Elizabeth Banks as a Housemaid in Campaigns of Curiosity, p. 25.
Crédits Source: Wikimedia Commons.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/cve/docannexe/image/16201/img-1.png
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Nathalie Saudo-Welby, « In and Out of the London Abyss: Dressing ‘Down’ by Victorian and Edwardian Social Investigators »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 101 Printemps | 2025, mis en ligne le 08 avril 2025, consulté le 07 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/16201 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13qtb

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Auteur

Nathalie Saudo-Welby

Nathalie Saudo-Welby is a Professor at the University of Picardy in Amiens, France, where she teaches British Literature and translation. She has published some thirty articles on fin-de-siècle literature, women’s writing and the graphic novel, and a book on degeneration in late-Victorian fiction (Jack and Jekyll: la dégénérescence en Grande-Bretagne 1886-1914, ENS éditions, 2023). Her book on New Woman fiction, Le Courage de déplaire, was published by Classiques Garnier in 2019.
Nathalie Saudo-Welby est professeure à l’Université de Picardie à Amiens, où elle enseigne la littérature britannique et la traduction. Elle a publié plus de 30 articles sur la littérature fin de siècle, les écrits de femme et le roman graphique, ainsi que deux monographies : Jack and Jekyll: la dégénérescence en Grande-Bretagne 1886-1914 (ENS éditions, 2023) et un ouvrage sur la fiction de la nouvelle Femme Le Courage de déplaire (Classiques Garnier, 2019).

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