Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (review)

Ellen Ross’s Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 combines a meticulously thought-out introduction with primary documents depicting a wide-ranging array of social conditions amongst the urban poor, introductions to individual contributors, a map, glossary, and subject guide. Taken together, this material provides a fascinating window into middle- and upper-class women’s involvement in social reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ross notes that four scholarly studies informed her thinking in preparing this volume: Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women (1985), Judith Walkowitz’s The City of Dreadful Delight (1992), Deborah Nord’s Walking the Victorian Streets (1995), and Seth Koven’s Slumming (2004). She could have also added Diana Maltz’s British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Class (2006) and, of course, her own Love and Toil (1993) to this list. All of these studies, with their combined treatment of class and gender, literature and history, have added more complex and nuanced readings to our appreciation of the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, in particular, and the period identified by Ross in this text, 1860 to 1920, in general. Each of these works relies on primary documents to make its arguments. With Ross’s new book we now have easy access to some of the voices on which these arguments are based.

Slum Travelers takes as its point of departure the “magnetic pull” that the poorer districts of London held for many middle- and upper-middle-class women (1). There are entries, ranging from 1878 to 1919, written by twenty-four different women. The subtitle, Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920, demarcates a broader period of concentration, and it is this period that is also addressed in the lengthy and extremely useful introduction. Ross skillfully positions these writings in the context of social history. Her analysis extends from a consideration of the new visibility of women in public, to questions of genre, men’s and women’s writings, the public and the private, motivations and antecedents, religion (interestingly, many of these contributors were the daughters of Anglican clergymen), imperialism, and dress, among others.

Ross notes thematic and stylistic (and questionable, I think) differences between men’s and women’s writing—women are more “anecdotal” and “euphemisms . . . abound” in their writing (13)—as well as differences between aural and visual representations to suggest that women privilege the aural. When I first read this point I was intrigued (women are so often positioned as listeners in their various social roles), and yet this distinction is not reflected in the literature itself. To take only two well-known instances: Henry Mayhew provides extensive dialogue in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62)—arguably one of the most influential precursors to the material collected in Ross’s volume—and George R. Sims, writing in the 1880s and 1890s, also relied on dialogue and aural details to animate his descriptions of slum life (Edith Hogg’s gruesome entry on fur-pulling included in this collection, moreover, is very close to Sims’s earlier depiction of the same subject). Indeed, while Ross is clearly familiar with the history of what she aptly calls “chroniclers of poverty” (12), she leaves out some key figures in this introduction. The rise of the statistical sciences, in particular, receives short attention here. Charles Booth also does not get the attention he merits, given his direct and indirect influence on so many writers in this collection.

In addition to her introduction, Ross provides generous and helpful accounts of each contributor. They depart from the typical introductory biography in the flare of the writing and the impression that Ross herself is not following a formula (X was born here, schooled there) but rather improvising and adapting as she goes based on the contributor in question. She has a keen ear for the telling and memorable detail. She provides a comment...