Women’s Slum Journalism, 1885–1910

Abstract

In The Makers of our Clothes (1909), Clementina Black (1853–1922) and Adele Meyer (1862/1863–1930) wager that ‘[t]he average Londoner has, we believe, very little idea of the way in which the old villages of the outer ring are being transformed into slums of a peculiarly hopeless character’. The authors’ use of the word ‘slum’, as shorthand for the subject of their study, is strategic in that it efficiently conjures up a relatively new and yet fraught relationship between the classes. On the one hand, the term is clearly meant as a designation of geographical place, a noun, in reference to the ghettos on the outskirts (the ‘ring’) of what once was the ‘old’ city of London. On the other hand, the term would have also reminded readers of the verb ‘to slum’, or ‘slumming’, a fad among late Victorians interested in looking at and deriving ‘amusement’ from the urban ghetto and its residents. In keeping with today’s popular use of the term, ‘to slum’ was to engage in a self-serving and exploitative relationship with the poorer ‘Other’. In their use of the term, however, Black and Meyer aspire to a very different relationship with the city’s East End. Unlike the ‘average Londoner’, for example, Black and Meyer want to comprehend and therein actually recognize the ghetto, its people, and its ‘hopeless character’. Their turn to ‘investigative’ journalism is part of this new project in altruistic ‘slumming’: elsewhere, they write of their ‘investigation’ (‘Preface’), for example, and make repeated references to their ‘inquiry’ as well as to gathering ‘documentary evidence’.