Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T03:52:10.768Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Accommodating the outcast: common lodging houses and the limits of urban governance in Victorian and Edwardian London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2008

TOM CROOK
TOM CROOK*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, Tonge Building, Gypsy Lane Campus, Headington, Oxford, OX3 0BP
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , December 2008 , pp. 414 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Dyos, H.J. and Wolff, M. (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vols. I and II (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

2 Copy of a Report Made to the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Captain Hay, One of the Commissioners of Metropolitan Police on the Operation of the Common Lodging-House Act (London, 1853), 1.

3 The Homeless Poor of London: Report of a Special Committee of the Charity Organisation Society, June 1891 (London, 1891), Appendix K; T.W. Wilkinson, ‘“Dosser-land” in London’, in Sims, G.R. (ed.), Living London, vol. II (London, 1906), 151Google Scholar.

4 G. Maconnachie, ‘Common lodging-houses and their bye-laws’, The Sanitary Record, 27 Aug. (1897), 224; Common Lodging House Mission, The Rescue Magazine: On Behalf of the Helpless and Fallen, Apr. (1892), 36.

5 Wohl, A.S., The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London, 1977), 74–5Google Scholar; Rose, L., ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’: Vagrant Underworld in Britain, 1815–1985 (London, 1988)Google Scholar, chs. 7 and 9.

6 Mayne, A., The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities (Leicester, 1993), Part 2Google Scholar; Marcus, S., Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, 1999), 104–7Google Scholar.

7 On this post-structuralist orientation towards discourse see Massumi, B., A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA, 1992), ch. 1Google Scholar.

8 Spiegel, G.M., Practising History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

9 Joyce, P., The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003)Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., ch. 5; Nead, L., Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (London, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Hetherington, K., The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Nead, Victorian Babylon, Part Two.

12 Copy of a Report Made to the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Captain Hay, 13.

13 R. Samuel, ‘Comers and goers’, in Dyos and Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City, vol. I, 127–8, 152–3.

14 London County Council, Accommodation of Women and Children in Common Lodging-Houses and Shelters in London (London, 1897), 1Google Scholar. LCC/PH/REG/1/24.

15 Chalmers, A.K. (ed.), ‘Common lodging-houses’ [1889], Public Health Administration in Glasgow: A Memorial Volume of the Writings of James Burn Russell (Glasgow, 1905), 244Google Scholar.

16 Booth, C., Life and Labour of the People in London (First Series, Poverty: East, Central and South London) [1889/2nd edn, 1902] (New York, 1969), 210Google Scholar.

17 Mandler, P., ‘“Race” and “nation” in mid-Victorian thought’, in Collini, S., Whatmore, R. and Young, B. (eds.), History, Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 224–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Harris, J., ‘Between civic virtue and Social Darwinism: the concept of the residuum’, in Englander, D. and O'Day, R. (eds.), Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840–1914 (Aldershot, 1995), 67–87.Google Scholar

19 Poovey, M., Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995)Google Scholar.

20 This is a point frequently made, and in a variety of ways, within post-structuralist thought.

21 Douglas, M., Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

22 Mayhew, H., London Labour and the London Poor, vol. I [1861–62] (New York, 1968), 1Google Scholar.

23 Ibid..

24 Ibid., 1–2.

25 Spencer, E., ‘Artisans' and labourers' dwellings’, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science: 1881 (London, 1882), 602Google Scholar.

26 Pick, D., Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848 – c. 1918 (Cambridge, 1989), 209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 George, H., Progress and Poverty (New York, 1880), 10Google Scholar.

28 Higgs, M. and Hayward, E. E., Where Shall She Live? The Homelessness of the Woman Worker (London, 1910), 107–9Google Scholar.

29 Wohl, A.S. (ed.), The Bitter Cry of Outcast London [1883] (Leicester, 1970), 55Google Scholar.

30 A Lady (M. Higgs), Five Days and Five Nights as a Tramp among Tramps (Manchester, 1904), 6.

31 Masterman, C.F.G., The Condition of England (London, 1909)Google Scholar; London, J., The People of the Abyss [1903] (London, 2001)Google Scholar.

32 Beames, T., The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective [2nd edn, 1852] (London, 1970), 2Google Scholar.

33 Rev.Davis, C. Maurice, Mystic London: Or, Phases of Occult Life in the Metropolis (London, 1875), vii.Google Scholar

34 Rawlinson, R., ‘On the sewering of towns and draining of houses’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 21 (Mar. 1862), 287Google Scholar.

35 London, The People of the Abyss, 22, 151–2.

36 Chalmers (ed.), ‘Common lodging-houses’, 244.

37 Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity.

38 Goldsmid, H.J., Dottings of a Dosser, Being Revelations of the Inner Life of Low London Lodging Houses (London, 1886), 99Google Scholar.

39 Detector, A Week in a Common Lodging House (London, 1874), 3.

40 Ritchie, J.E., Days and Nights in London; or, Studies in Black and Gray (London, 1880), 117Google Scholar.

41 Anon., The Sinks of London Laid Bare: A Pocket Companion for the Uninitiated (London, 1848), 40.

42 Vacher, F., ‘On common lodging-house accommodation’, Transactions of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain, 1 (1879–80), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Goldsmid, Dottings of a Dosser, 32–3.

44 Wilkinson, ‘“Dosser-land” in London’, 153.

45 Anon., The Sinks of London Laid Bare, 40.

46 A Lady, Five Days and Five Nights, 13.

47 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 256.

48 Anon., The Sinks of London Laid Bare, 78.

49 Koven, S., Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Holmes, T., London's Underworld (London, 1912), 1, 36, 59–60.Google Scholar

51 Fry, D.P., The Lodging-Houses Acts: The Common Lodging-Houses Act, 1851, The Labouring Classes Lodging-Houses Act, 1851 and The Common Lodging-Houses Act, 1853 [2nd edn] (London, 1854)Google Scholar; Casson, W.A. (ed.), Knight's Annotated Model Byelaws [7th edn] (London, 1905), 39–57.Google Scholar

52 Maconnachie, ‘Common lodging-houses and their bye-laws’.

53 London County Council, Licensing of Common Lodging-Houses (London, 1903)Google Scholar. LCC/PH/REG/1/24.

54 Taylor, A., The Sanitary Inspector's Handbook (London, 1897), 263–6Google Scholar.

55 London County Council, Common Lodging-Houses Acts and By-laws Applying to London (London, 1903), 3Google Scholar. LCC/PH/REG/1/27.

56 Fry, The Lodging-Houses Acts, 65; Rathbone, T.W., ‘On the great importance of the uniform and general registration of common lodging-houses’, Transactions of the NAPSS: 1859 (London, 1860), 599Google Scholar.

57 Reid, G., Practical Sanitation: A Hand-Book for Sanitary Inspectors and Others Interested in Sanitation (London, 1892), 20Google Scholar.

58 ‘Law Reports: Lodgson v. Booth’, Public Health, 12 (1899–1900), 473–81.

59 London County Council, Report by the Medical Officer as to the Need for the Extension of the Power of Control over Premises Used by Persons of the Common Lodging House Class (London, 1909)Google Scholar. LCC/PH/REG/1/24.

60 Common Lodging Houses and Seamen's Lodging Houses: Register of Police Court Proceedings, 1895–1914. LCC/PH/REG/1/20.

61 ‘Verbatim reports of proceedings at special meetings of the Public Health Committee for the purposes of licensing common lodging houses’, 1903–04, 4–5. LCC/PH/REG/1/17.

62 Goldsmid, Dottings of a Dosser, 108, 117–18.

63 ‘Weekly report of the Medical Officer of Health for the City of London: overcrowding of common lodging houses, 14 Jan., 1860’, 7. CLA/006/AD/07/029/05.

64 ‘A day with county council lodging house inspectors’, London, 20 Oct. (1898), 671.

65 Copy of a Report Made to the Secretary of State for the Home Department by Captain Hay, 4.

66 A.E.D., ‘The municipalisation of common lodging-houses’, The Sanitary Record, 28 May (1903), 516.

67 ‘London County Council municipal lodging house’, The Builder, 20 Jun. (1891), 490–1; Harding, H.W., ‘Bristol municipal lodging house’, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute, 27 (1906), 585–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Gore, M., On the Dwellings of the Poor, and the Means of Improving Them (London, 1851), 28Google Scholar; Hollingshead, J., ‘Our London model lodging-houses’, in Wohl, A.S. (ed.), John Hollingshead: Ragged London in 1861 [1861] (London, 1986), 102–13, 112Google Scholar.

69 Short notice/no title, The Builder, 14 Feb. (1891), 122.

70 Roberts, H., The Tramp's Handbook (London, 1903)Google Scholar; Kennedy, B., A Tramp's Philosophy (London, 1908)Google Scholar.

71 Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 2.

72 Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, 216.

73 Holmes, London's Underworld, 99.

74 Ital. orig. Higgs, M., Glimpses into the Abyss (London, 1906), 214Google Scholar.

75 Higgs and Hayward, Where Shall She Live?, 119–20.