Slumming Reconceived: Empire, Oriental Imagery, and Middle Class Identity in Victorian London

Abstract

This PhD thesis is a critical engagement with the practice of slumming, which I will reconceive through considering questions of empire and the construction of middle class identity. The thesis explores how those who went slumming adopted racial rhetoric to bring not only the metropolitan poor but also colonial subjects to the fore. They were imaginatively constructed as inferiors positioned in symbolic hierarchies where the low were assumed to be a threat posed t o the religious and the social structure of the nation while at the same time assuring middle class authority and self image. The deployment of racial rhetoric also turned urban spaces into the far reaches of the British empire where a variety of opium establishments in the riverside districts of London came to the surface. The East End was thus rhetorically Orientalised as an Orient which was supposed to be employed by the empire for conquest and colonial domination of the Other, but which started to threaten and subvert the empire’s very existence. Situated at the heart of the empire, the Orientalised slums were best described as a series of displacements that worked in a metonymic chain to satisfy the middle class curiosity for colonial fantasies. This thesis also considers how those who went slumming used deceptive practices to pass unobserved in order to spend time among the poor and reveal the conditions that would otherwise remain hidden. Their stories of changing social roles, which hinged on the serial suspense of their attempts at immersion and sensational elements, were merely a series of self consciously theatrical performances. By playfully imitating those whom they investigated, the middle class observers surely amused the reader and the audience, but they also revealed the existing structures of social class that subsidised these fantasies.</p