Seth Koven. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. ISBN: 978-0691128009. Price: US$19.95.

This book’s title bears thinking about. Under the heading of “slumming,” one might have expected to encounter anecdotes and analysis about men and women of privilege venturing into lower-class areas for the guilty pleasures of a frisson-laden leisure activity; but Koven is not much interested in slumming as a pastime (with a long tradition). Most of the people he writes about in his massively researched (80-plus pages of endnotes), painstakingly argued, and very insightful study descended the social ladder for vocational purposes – either as journalists (as in the subjects of chapters 1 and 3) or as social reformers, charity workers, and other sorts of do-gooding toilers in the gritty vineyard of the Victorian underclass (chapters 2, 4, and 5). These are, to be sure, appropriate subjects for a book of this title, but it is worth noting what’s not included and where Koven has chosen to place emphasis. The sort of disreputable motives that led, for example, the Queen and two duchess accomplices to “disguise[] themselves as ‘country lasses’ at Bartholomew Fair” in 1670 are not, for the most part, Koven’s subject (5). And this brings me to the subtitle, for the ordering of words we find there accurately expresses the priorities that drive Koven’s inquiry and that are eventually asserted to be one of his work’s original contributions to historiography. To the extent that they can be separated, the sexual tops the social pretty consistently throughout this book. The result is a study in which a subset of the apparent topic gets the lion’s share of attention. “As I immersed myself deeply in the sources,” Koven writes, “I found it impossible to keep sex, sexual desire, and sexuality out of their story” (4). One notes here the recursivity that characterizes much critical work, as the trope of “immersion” so commonly found in accounts of “descent” into the London underworld is picked up and applied to the scholar’s labor among those accounts. A similar thing could be said about the “insistent eroticization of poverty” that Koven finds in middle-class slumming experience (4). So determined does the author appear to find transgressive sex everywhere, so readily does he tip the category of the homosocial over into the zone of not-yet-emerged-but-everywhere-emergent dissident sexualities (as Sedgwick herself tends to do in The Epistemology of the Closet), that one can begin to worry about the self-fulfilling prophetic nature of his enterprise. In the book’s best chapter, Chapter One, “Workhouse Nights: Homelessness, Homosexuality, and Cross-Class Masquerades,” Koven sensitively reads James Greenwood’s notorious exposé “A Night in a Workhouse” (from 1866) for the “sodomitical subtext” (57) that hinted that the authorities charged with poor relief had, in setting up the sordid, sex-segregated “casual” wards, used “public money to create the conditions that encouraged the most vicious male members of the metropolitan underclass to engage in sodomy” (27). Koven’s treatment of Greenwood’s article and his situation of it in an ever-expanding circle of fretful representations (by Jack London, Orwell, Doré and Jerrold, Matthew Arnold, J. A. Symonds, Edwin Chadwick, and many others) are masterful and nuanced. By Chapter Four, though – “The Politics and Erotics of Dirt: Cross-Class Sisterhood in the Slums” – Greenwood’s reticient, slyly hinting text has become referable-back-to as containing a “revelation of sodomitical orgies” (187). The painstaking labor of delineating Greenwood’s possible meanings seems negated by such an unambiguous characterization. When the category of the homosocial, so rich with ambivalences, starts to function exclusively as the way station on our inevitable path toward that of the homosexual, a blunting of the instruments of criticism has occurred. Elsewhere (in Chapter Four), in …