Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London

Author by : Seth Koven
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2006-08-13
Publisher by : Princeton University Press

ISBN :

Description : 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."...

Author by : Seth Koven
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2016-04-19
Publisher by : Princeton University Press

ISBN :

Description : How two extraordinary women crossed the Victorian class divide to put Christian teachings into practice in the slums of East London Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism. In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe—Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall—Gandhi's London home in 1931 and Britain's first "people's house" founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliation—and sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship. The Match Girl and the Heiress probes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal....

Author by : Alan Mayne
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2023-08-25
Publisher by : Oxford University Press

ISBN :

Description : ""Slum" is among the most evocative and judgmental words of the modern world. It originated in the slang language of the world's then-largest city, London, early in the nineteenth century. Its use thereafter proliferated, and its original meanings unraveled as colonialism and urbanization transformed the world, and as prejudice against those disadvantaged by these transformations became entrenched. Cuckoo-like, "slum" overtook and transformed other local idioms: for example, bustee, favela, kampong, shack. "Slum" once justified heavy-handed redevelopment schemes that tore apart poor but viable neighborhoods. Now it underpins schemes of neighbourhood renewal that, seemingly benign in their intentions, nonetheless pay scant respect to the viewpoints of their inhabitants. This Oxford Handbook probes both present-day understandings of slums and their historical antecedents. It discusses the evolution of slum "improvement" policies globally from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It encompasses multiple perspectives: anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, politics, sociology, urban studies and urban planning. It emphasizes the influences of gender and race inequality, and the persistence of subaltern agency notwithstanding entrenched prejudice and unsympathetically-applied institutionalized power. Uniquely, it balances contributions from scholars who deny the legitimacy of "slum" in social and policy analysis, with those who accept its relevance as a measuring stick of social disadvantage and as a vehicle for social reform. This Handbook does not simply footnote the past; it critiques conventional understandings of urban social disadvantage and reform across time and place in the modern world. It suggests pathways for future research and for alleviative reform"--...

Author by : Geoffrey A. C. Ginn
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2017-04-21
Publisher by : Taylor & Francis

ISBN :

Description : Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- 1. A good young man in a shiny top hat -- Notes -- 2. Sources and explanations -- Notes -- 3. Social work, sweetness and light -- Notes -- 4. One by one in Whitechapel -- Notes -- 5. An impossible story in Mile End -- Notes -- 6. Social duty in South London -- Notes -- 7. Places, spaces, audiences -- University charm and domestic elegance in Whitechapel -- Palatial nobility in Mile End -- A centre of bright and pleasant social life' in Bermondsey -- Illuminating the 'Centres of Light' -- All sorts and conditions? -- Notes -- 8. Uniting sentiment, common feeling -- Settlement lectures and evening classes -- Classes and lectures at the People's Palace -- A 'common life' in clubs and associations -- Club life at the People's Palace -- 'At home' at the settlements -- 'Attractions innumerable' at the People's Palace -- Policing gender at the People's Palace -- Crowd behaviour at the People's Palace -- Notes -- 9. The gift of culture, properly understood -- One gospel of music for rich and poor -- The true artist paints for all -- Notes -- Additional bibliography -- Index...

Author by : Jörg Requate
Languange Used : de
Release Date : 2013-10-24
Publisher by : Walter de Gruyter

ISBN :

Description : Vom 19. Jahrhundert als einer Mediengesellschaft zu sprechen, erscheint als ein Anachronismus. Der Begriff sucht den Bedeutungsgewinn und die Diversifizierung der Medien in der Gegenwart zu erfassen und damit nicht zuletzt heutige von früheren Gesellschaften abzugrenzen. Die Annahme, dass Medien in früheren Gesellschaften nicht ebenfalls eine zentrale und spezifische Rolle zukam, wäre jedoch irrig. So war das 19. Jahrhundert nicht nur vom Aufstieg ein Vielzahl einstmals neuer Medien geprägt, sondern auch dadurch, dass sich die Gesellschaft über öffentliche und mediale Kommunikation erst konstituierte und ausdifferenzierte. Der Band macht es sich zur Aufgabe, ineinander greifende zentrale mediale und gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen für Deutschland und für Frankreich in einer übergreifenden wie vergleichenden Perspektive vorzustellen. Open Access: Dieser Titel steht Ihnen zum Download als PDF zur Verfügung....

Author by : David Kuchenbuch
Languange Used : de
Release Date : 2014
Publisher by : Böhlau Verlag Köln Weimar

ISBN :

Description : ***Angaben zur beteiligten Person Kuchenbuch: David Kuchenbuch ist Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Historischen Institut der Universität Gießen....

Author by : Hans-Christian Petersen
Languange Used : de
Release Date : 2019-04-15
Publisher by : Böhlau Köln

ISBN :

Description : Was wissen wir über die städtischen Armutsviertel der Welt und die Lebenswelten der Menschen, die in ihnen wohnen? Welche Auseinandersetzungen gab es seitens der Benachteiligten der Gesellschaft mit den sie umgebenden Verhältnissen, welche Deutungen und Aneignungen des städtischen Raums, um sich individuell und gemeinschaftlich gegen die eigene Randständigkeit zur Wehr zu setzen? Das Buch geht diesen Fragen am Beispiel der russischen Hauptstadt St. Petersburg nach – einer Metropole der Moderne, die im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert rasant wuchs, zugleich aber auch Schauplatz von Aufwertungs- und Verdrängungsprozessen war. Es eröffnet den Blick hinter die gängigen Bilder städtischer Armutsviertel und fordert dazu auf, sich den Menschen hinter den kollektiven Zuschreibungen zuzuwenden. Petersburg was a rapidly growing metropole of modernity during the latter half of the nineteenth and during years leading up to 1914. As a metropole it allows a window into the ups and downs, transformation processes, social tensions, of negotiation of modernity. While focussing on Petersburg between 1850 and 1914 the book addresses questions of urbanisation and global modernity at large by zooming into the daily lives of the less privileged strata of society. How did the less privileged navigate and interpret urban live in Petersburg? How did they resist positions of marginality in their urban environment? These are the driving questions behind Petersen's analysis....