The Imagination of Class: Masculinity and the Victorian Urban Poor (review)

This study of masculinity and the impoverished class in Victorian England, by Dan Bivona and the late Roger Henkle, analyzes the role that representing the urban poor played in constructing masculinity during the era. As the writers assert, "our central contention here is that many of the images that [the Victorians] constructed served the purpose of self-definition of an emerging—and largely male—professional class" (4). Both fictional and nonfictional accounts constitute representations "that may tell us at least as much about what it meant to be male and middle class in the nineteenth century as they tell us about what it meant to be poor" (5). In particular, investigating the urban poor could be construed as "a new sphere of manly adventure" (6). This manly adventure, however, had one compelling and disturbing consequence: "The urban poor are hemmed in by the limitations formulated by bourgeois discourse itself. Discourse effectively keeps alive masculine fantasy" (20).

Bivona and Henkle study a wide range of canonical and lesser-known texts to advance this thesis, including works by James Greenwood, Charles Dickens, Beatrice Webb, Margaret Harkness, Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Jack London, and W. T. Stead. New techniques of investigation, led by Stead's "great innovation, the personal interview" (49), provided representations both vivid and sensational. Stead promoted Andrew Mearns's tract The Bitter Cry of Outcast London of 1883, with its harrowing accounts of overcrowding, incest, and degradation, and in the same year he became editor of The Pall Mall Gazette. In 1885, he published his series about juvenile prostitution, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. The East End was a "labyrinth" (9), "a land of enervation" (23), a "terra incognita" (27), its life "increasingly . . . a feminized landscape" requiring "redemption" (23). The connections between East End women and West End men, and the exercises in male hegemony enacted, are represented in a work like Harkness's A City Girl (1887). The protagonist, seamstress Nelly Ambrose, is seduced by West Ender Arthur Grant who, as Bivona and Henkle note, "is a socialist and a novelist and, ironically, a devoted family man" (88). In this novel, praised for its truth by Friedrich Engels, "manly adventure" has ruinous consequences for the victimized woman.

Ten years later, Somerset Maugham's Liza of Lambeth (1897) recounts the life of a factory girl who is seduced, made pregnant, and dies of complications from a miscarriage brought on by a fight with her lover's wife. As Bivona and Henkle note, Liza is a more substantial creation than Nelly Ambrose, "sharing of the same desires that any lower middle class girl might" (123). An example of "the cockney school of novel," Maugham's protagonist "enacts the myth that the lower classes share bourgeois English traits" (123). Hence, such subjects "could be brought within the hegemonizing of middle class culture" (123). Depictions of East End life could thus preserve middle class male prerogatives while presuming to be accurate representations of the poor. The product of redemption is abandoned.

The 1890s prove of special interest in considering the proposition by Bivona and Henkle that representations of the poor were part of the construction of middle-class masculinity. Added to its otherness, exoticism, complexity, and danger, noted by previous investigators, the East End was by this time also a source of "sexually available males" (140). The authors note that at Oscar Wilde's 1895 trial, "the dramatic testimony of the three East End rent boys . . . clinched the case against him" (139). About The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the authors briefly note that Lord Henry is the "detached experimenter" (138). An extended discussion of that novel, however, in the contexts of the boulevardier and of social investigators, would have been welcome. Bivona and Henkle provide an intriguing assessment of Wells's dystopic novel The Time Machine (1893), where the Time-Traveler "is presented as a courageous scientist/journalist" (155). The Time...