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The Resource Slumming : Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Seth Koven

Slumming : Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Seth Koven

Creator
Author
Summary
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."
Language
eng
Work
Instance
Label
Slumming : Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London
Title
Slumming
Title remainder
Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London
Statement of responsibility
Seth Koven
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
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."
Member of
Cataloging source
Midwest
http://bibfra.me/vocab/lite/collectionName
hoopla (Digital media service)
http://library.link/vocab/creatorName
Koven, Seth
Dewey number
  • 306.7/086/94209421
  • 306.7/086/94209421
Index
no index present
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
dictionaries
http://library.link/vocab/subjectName
  • Charities
  • Poor
  • Sex customs
  • Slums
  • Social sciences
  • Social sciences
  • Voluntarism
Target audience
adult
Label
Slumming : Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Seth Koven
Link
Instantiates
Publication
Distribution
Carrier category
online resource
Carrier category code
  • cr
Carrier MARC source
rdacarrier.
Color
multicolored
Content category
text
Content type code
  • txt
Content type MARC source
rdacontent.
Control code
MWT13281650
Dimensions
unknown
Extent
1 online resource.
Form of item
  • online
  • electronic
Governing access note
Digital content provided by hoopla
Isbn
9781400843589
Media category
computer
Media MARC source
rdamedia.
Media type code
  • c
Publisher number
MWT13281650
Specific material designation
remote
Stock number
13281650
System details
Mode of access: World Wide Web
Label
Slumming : Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Seth Koven
Link
Publication
Distribution
Carrier category
online resource
Carrier category code
  • cr
Carrier MARC source
rdacarrier.
Color
multicolored
Content category
text
Content type code
  • txt
Content type MARC source
rdacontent.
Control code
MWT13281650
Dimensions
unknown
Extent
1 online resource.
Form of item
  • online
  • electronic
Governing access note
Digital content provided by hoopla
Isbn
9781400843589
Media category
computer
Media MARC source
rdamedia.
Media type code
  • c
Publisher number
MWT13281650
Specific material designation
remote
Stock number
13281650
System details
Mode of access: World Wide Web

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