Methodology and Sources

Like Paul Watt’s article ‘Buskers and Busking in Australia in the Nineteenth Century’, the present study also tries to move away from the typically highly London- or capital-centric focus of street music studies by looking at the whole of a country over a span of more than one hundred years (where records are available via the British Newspaper Archive (BNA)).Footnote ¹⁰ Digitized newspapers and the text-recognition function available with the BNA allows one to search for ‘women organ grinders’ and get thousands of results. The digitization is also particularly useful when looking for women’s stories, as, unlike perhaps for some other kinds of information, the appearance of women in a given article is often effectively random. Unlike certain technologies, publications, or events, women organ grinders were not obviously over-represented at certain times or in particular places, and so the search cannot be straightforwardly narrowed in other ways. In this sense, text searching can rapidly accelerate the unearthing of stories of named and unnamed women organ grinders. But I will echo several important points made by Watt about the significant limitations this approach also represents: two of the most critical are that the sample of newspapers which can be searched is of course limited to the ones which have been digitized by, in this case, the BNA, and that text recognition is vulnerable to many kinds of failures (owing, for example, to poor or degraded quality of the original print, scanning issues, or spelling variations and errors in original texts).Footnote ¹¹

The subject of digitized archives also evokes relevant criticisms raised by Benjamin Walton in his 2015 article ‘Quirk Shame’, which points out that the mass digitization of newspapers and other historical texts means one can now find virtually anything one wants to if one looks hard enough, and the novelty of often random, delightfully eclectic results can be a seductive distraction from telling more broadly representative and historically grounded stories.Footnote ¹² But the number of sources that already turned up in the early stages of my searching shows that women organ grinders were not an anomaly, or even a particularly surprising occurrence — at least not in the UK. A tour guide at Museum Speelklok, a mechanical music museum in Utrecht, asked me if I could provide her with some information about women organ grinders in the Netherlands, which has its own distinct and dominant street organ tradition. (In the Netherlands, the street organ or draaiorgel has had a greater cultural impact overall than the historical, Italian-diaspora-led barrel piano tradition which is the main subject of this article. Although street barrel pianos were also common in the Netherlands, they seem to have been somewhat overshadowed in cultural memory by the colourful and characteristic organs that still play in public spaces today.) I had nothing to offer at first, and after we searched together (online and in the museum library) for several hours, we had not found very much more than a couple of photographs of the wives and mothers of male street or fair organists who worked alongside their better-recognized counterparts, and a 1977 article from Nieuwsblad van het Noorden which reported with some surprise that (as the writer had apparently discovered from the German women’s magazine Emma) a German woman named Ingrid Thomas (‘thirty-eight, mother of two children’) had chosen the career of an organ grinder. The article goes as far as to say that it was ‘public opinion’ that organ-grinding was a profession reserved for men.Footnote ¹³

The difficulty in finding any information at all about women organ grinders in the Dutch context is another reason why the present study represents a contribution to knowledge; the availability of more published material on the topic of women organ grinders could help to stimulate and encourage further research into areas where women are still significantly underrepresented in literature. A 1923 article in the Dundee Telegraph observed that the London Census had recorded 276 street musicians, of which only twenty-six were women (about 9.42 per cent) — ‘a surprisingly low figure for the 1921 census, and one which seems to bear little relation to present-day facts’.Footnote ¹⁴ It’s possible that not all women organ grinders (whose numbers included young British girls whose presence in these communities was considered illegitimate and unacceptable by some) were recorded as such, and it’s also interesting that the writer found it self-evident that women were represented among street musicians and was taken aback to see such a low percentage on paper. Even at this seemingly particularly low point, nearly 10 per cent representation cannot be said to be only a ‘quirk’.

A further methodological issue concerns the clear need to approach the testimony of nineteenth-century newspapers with a pinch of salt. In addition to the ‘colour and vivacity’ and tendency to embellish warned against by Lucy Maynard Salmon and Watt, the newspaper reports this study draws upon also often contain, for example, multiple different spellings or versions of peoples’ names, suggesting straightforward errors in the recording of events.Footnote ¹⁵ One story, discussed in more detail later, appears in at least two different versions which clearly cover the same events, with two different names given for the Italian organ grinder concerned: Mana Rogga or Marie Korza. Of course, political and social partisanship (particularly a common bias against organ grinders) is also relevant, as is the proliferation of stories which appear to be fictional (for example, the ‘Pupil of Mascagni’, discussed later), reported alongside both more dryly factual news and anecdotes, which, if they hold a kernel of truth somewhere, appear to have been redecorated to the status of allegory (such as ‘The Lady and the Organ Grinder’, discussed later). Having said all this, and as Watt also noted, individual reports tend to corroborate more widely acknowledged trends (for example, generalized complaints about the ‘problem’ of women living in organ-grinder communities are backed up by specific reports of the same phenomenon). To borrow Watt’s words, due in part to its methodological approach the present study can be said to be ‘representative if not comprehensive’ — and given the greater difficulty of finding women organ grinders without text-recognition software, and the lack of published material dedicated to them, this seems like a good start.Footnote ¹⁶

A final orienting point involves acknowledging that ideas about class in Britain are not only deeply entrenched and pervasive, but also quite specific to the national cultural context. While there is a particular fixation with constructed social hierarchy in Britain, there have been many different approaches to articulating it. For the purposes of this article, significant distinctions are observed to have been drawn in the late nineteenth century between a sedentary working class, such as people who worked, for example, in factories or as domestic servants; a middle class, where people might have been more able to work from their homes (and also where one important distinction would be that it was common, up to a certain point, for married women not to have to work for money); and a separate class that could have included economically marginalized and impoverished people, some itinerant communities and travelling salespeople, and people who worked in informal economies such as street performance and sex work.

Women, Work, and Movement in Industrial Societies in the Global North

Central among the demands of women’s rights campaigners in the late nineteenth century were rights to and opportunities for greater independence in living and travelling. They wanted equal freedom to move (‘unharassed’) through public space. Nicole Schindler and Julia Oesterreich describe an 1894 Punch cartoon depicting a politically active, educated, and opinionated ‘modern’ or ‘New Woman’ (‘Donna Quixote’), who sits on a throne with legs apart in a masculine-coded pose, surrounded by books, and holding a key — the latter representing the desire of many women to be able to come and go from their homes according to their own wishes.Footnote ¹⁷ The theme of freedom to choose (within reason?) how to occupy space will recur throughout the discussions here of women’s agency and rights in relation to movement and mobility, accompanied by tensions between different ideas about which ways of being in public were appropriate, safe, or healthy for modern women. As Schindler and Oesterreich point out, the Punch caricature also featured a number of then-controversial foreign works of literature, which they suggest carries the implication that dangerous ideas about women’s liberation were being imported from abroad;Footnote ¹⁸ the national-cultural otherness of itinerant entertainers was also a factor in the suspicion with which their modes of living were regarded.

Frictions between contemporary middle-class purity- or safety-oriented ‘feminisms’ and the lives of marginalized women emerge from conflicts of interest between bourgeois New Women in pursuit of particular kinds of freedom and other women who, the former held, were occupying and moving through space in transgressive and improper ways. At the same time, nineteenth-century reactions to reports of English women ‘running away’ from their husbands, families, or socially endorsed employments to live with Italian organ grinders seem to reflect contemporary fears that women, intoxicated by unseemly notions of liberty, would collectively abandon all of the responsibilities that their societies of origin depended upon them to fulfil. Organ grinders were among the groups seen as a negative cultural influence at a time when middle-class anxieties about the moral (and political, i.e. potentially revolutionary) condition of urban populations were prominent. Further layers of the more denigrating reactions to itinerant street performers clearly relate to contemporary ideas about national identity, race and belonging, class, economic status, and taste, and also, somewhat inextricably from the latter, about technology, performance, and skill.

‘That Is Not Music’: Value, Mendicancy, and Performing (Labour) in Street Entertainment

A recurring criticism of street organists comprised the claim that their playing was ‘not music’. The women’s rights campaigner and social reformer Laura Ormiston Chant was asked during an 1896 court case, in which she had brought charges against a woman organ grinder, why, since she was herself a composer, she took such exception to street barrel organs. Chant responded that she was indeed ‘passionately fond of music’ but insisted that ‘that is not music, it is simply noise’.Footnote ¹⁹ In fact, the notion that the people most incensed by street buskers must be ‘musicians’ (that is, middle- or upper-class people with formal classical music training) was popular at the time. One 1887 cartoon from the Dutch newspaper the Haagsche Courant shows an angry composer berating organ grinders for playing one of his own works ‘as if on a barrel organ’.Footnote ²⁰ In an 1896 anecdote cited by Arthur Ord-Hume, the composer Pietro Mascagni was visiting London and was distressed on overhearing the ‘Intermezzo’ from his popular opera Cavalleria rusticana played at the wrong tempo by a nearby barrel organist. Mascagni (the story goes) descended on the organist in protest, identified himself as the work’s composer and demonstrated the ‘correct’ speed at which to play it. Plenty of nineteenth-century jokes at the expense of buskers opened with this premise. The Mascagni vignette culminates in the return the following day of the same barrel organist, playing the same piece at the same (‘wrong’) tempo, but now proudly wearing a sign exclaiming ‘Pupil of Mascagni’.Footnote ²¹

Somewhat later, in the early 1920s, the author G. K. Chesterton, a self-identified ally of buskers and street vendors, conceded that perhaps he felt sympathetic towards them in part because he was not himself a musician.Footnote ²² Ormiston Chant’s complaints in particular are interesting here because, unlike Babbage and Bass, she was in some ways a progressive liberal reformer and an outspoken advocate for (certain groups of) women. However, as emerges in Judith Walkowitz’s work, Ormiston Chant’s vision of female freedom was intrinsically linked to forms of social control, ideas of individual discipline, and quite narrow notions of the proper attire and behaviour for women.Footnote ²³ In the end it can be seen that she used much the same mechanisms to disparage and discredit organ grinders’ creative agency, right to conduct their work, and entitlement to freedom of movement as Babbage (at best a moderate liberal, who feared the impact of the working-class vote), effectively precluding any feminist solidarity across social and cultural difference beyond the assessment that a female organ grinder’s husband was ‘a cowardly brute’ for leaving his wife to face charges alone.Footnote ²⁴ Ormiston Chant had already revealed the limits of her commitment to human rights when she blocked a motion for the Unitarian Church to publicly denounce lynching, causing the prominent Black feminist Florida Ruffin Ridley to criticize her in an open letter, naming her as an apologist.Footnote ²⁵ Feminist or not, for Ormiston Chant and Babbage alike, organ grinders were not legitimate creative actors, and women organ grinders were not a group of people who deserved advocacy or equal rights.

The conviction that playing a barrel organ is not the same as ‘playing’ or performing music implies that organ grinders were also not really ‘musicians’. In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, Michael Accinno writes that street barrel organists were often considered to be lesser than, for example, classically trained musicians — or even not acknowledged ‘as real musicians at all. Unlike legitimate musicians, […] organ grinders possessed untrained ears and uncultivated sensibilities; musicians developed finely honed manual abilities, but organ grinders needed only enough dexterity to crank a pedal.’Footnote ²⁶

Further, the idea of the organ grinder’s music having less worth can also be linked to notions of scarcity and value that were being theorized in the late nineteenth century. Around this time Marx wrote that the value of a commodity was contingent on the amount of human labour that had gone into producing it.Footnote ²⁷ In the case of street organ buskers, their music was not scarce, because their repertoire was popular, mainstream, and frequently a little outdated (due to the expense and hassle of having a barrel repinned),Footnote ²⁸ and because it could be heard in public thoroughfares throughout the day. It was not considered to represent valuable quantities of human labour, despite the visibly physical nature of the act of playing, because, as Accinno observes, the socially recognized skills associated with ‘legitimate’ musicians weren’t necessarily involved.Footnote ²⁹

Philip Auslander suggests that there is a necessary and constitutive distance, gap, or separation between a performer and a spectator, and frames this relation in terms of desire creation.Footnote ³⁰ It could also factor into the perception of a performance as a commodity, as something with exchange value in relation to an existing scarcity, where the spectator or consumer desires something which they themselves lack, because they themselves are not, or can’t do, or don’t have, the thing they’re observing. This in turn may partly explain the non-desire for the organ grinder’s performances expressed by many spectators — who seem to have felt, although the socioeconomic and cultural gap between themselves and the organ grinder may have been significant, that there wasn’t sufficient distance between their own skills and what the organist could do that they should view this performance as something of value. This devaluation is reflected in nineteenth-century newspaper anecdotes. A frequent jibe hyperbolizes the worthlessness of the barrel organist’s performance by insisting that discerning listeners would much sooner pay the organist to stop playing than compensate them for the fruits of their labours.Footnote ³¹ In another recurring trope, an indignant composer hears their own music being played ‘wrongly’ on a barrel organ and goes to tell the organ grinder how to do it ‘properly’. In the story mentioned above, a player who receives this kind of intervention from a popular composer knowingly advertises this added value the next time they return to the same spot to busk — playing in exactly the same manner as before, but now sporting a placard acknowledging their famous tutor.Footnote ³²

But perhaps more interesting is a related genre in which an upper-class and/or classically musically trained individual interferes with the organ grinder’s livelihood, heavily trading on the idea that the rich were aesthetically discerning and the poor were not. One 1876 item in the Otley News and West Riding Advertiser, titled ‘The Lady and The Organ Grinder’ (and seemingly considered a saleable yarn, as it appeared in multiple other newspapers as well), suggests that a wealthy woman was able to play pleasantly on what the writer describes as a ‘terribly bad instrument’ (which we were told moments earlier is actually out of tune), and encourages far more generous donations for the displaced street busker from bystanders, before departing, ‘laughing at her frolic’.Footnote ³³ In fact, in middle-class writer Frances Bourne’s account of her day spent in disguise as an Italian organ grinder, the author was quite open about the fact that she had never turned a barrel organ before, found that she could not play the pieces at the ‘correct’ tempo, quickly became physically exhausted from the work, and was uncomfortable occupying space as a performer in this context.Footnote ³⁴ The fact that street organists did have specialized knowledge and skills that could not immediately be replicated by incredulous observers is supported by comments from an Italian organ grinder interviewed by Henry Mayhew, who noted that, when looking for new recruits among young boys in Italy, padrones would ‘sooner have one who have been here before, because den they know the way to take care of the instrument, you know’. In addition the interviewee describes the different repertoires, audiences, and profits associated with different areas in town; points out which of the registers on his flute harmonicon organ were fastest to go out of tune; states how the instrument was routinely repaired; explains that it takes time to grow accustomed to the motion of turning the handle, when initially a full day of work would cause pain; and gives an overview of the different types of mechanical organ that had been popular since he arrived in London, and their origins (though he does also assert, ‘I don’t know music at all. I am middling fond of it’).Footnote ³⁵ Nevertheless, these kinds of notions of (lacking) skill, knowledge, value, and worth had implications not only for perceptions of the organ grinder’s music and of the legitimacy of the buskers’ status as musicians, but also the legitimacy of their status as professionals, citizens, and social actors in a legal sense. In addition, as will be discussed further later, the combination (in some observers’ views) of organ-grinding not being ‘proper’ work, not contributing anything culturally on a musical level, and allowing women to earn money while being mobile and having children present could have seemed galling on multiple levels to those with more conservative beliefs about gender (that women should have less autonomy and be primarily occupied in the domestic sphere) and labour (that there existed a ‘deserving poor’ and also non-deserving groups who did not conform to expectations of industriousness, subservience, and gratitude).

A related criticism levelled at the organ grinders, and an argument commonly made for arresting them for playing in public places, was the charge of illegal begging; Accinno’s article on disabled organ grinders and martial begging explores this issue in the context of the US.Footnote ³⁶ In some countries, legal exceptions to restrictions on organ-grinding were made or suggested only for individuals who were disabled and did not have the option to apply themselves to more socially endorsed forms of labour; in Berlin in the 1890s, a notable distinction was apparently observed between playing music in the street for the sake of ‘art’ (legal) and playing to make money (not legal).Footnote ³⁷ The organ grinders’ treatment by authorities in turn-of-the-century Europe and North America highlights the fact that there was, as now, not only strong ideological resistance to people not working, but also to people doing the wrong kinds of work. This is a concluding point of Zucchi’s study of Italian children brought overseas to work as street entertainers: that for the concerned philanthropists of New York, Paris, and London, the discomforting sight of children performing for money in the street was a motivator to action — but once they were simply out of view, or working equally punishing jobs behind closed doors in factories, the public enthusiasm for rescuing them largely died away.Footnote ³⁸

This also resonates strongly with observations by Georgina Boyes and Andrew Holden that in London and other major cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two desirable phenomena (from the perspective of those in a position of power) of middle-class philanthropy and a general acquiescence, quietude, or ‘improvement’ on the part of working-class and poor people were seen as intimately entwined.Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, it echoes Engels’s excoriations of the English bourgeoisie, a group he argued was only

The demonization of economically marginalized people, the devaluation of the products of machine automation, a strong suspicion of and hostility towards itinerant and migrant labourers, and ongoing constructions of legitimate and illegitimate forms of work and of a deserving and an undeserving poor are all at play in the background to reactions to organ-grinding communities in nineteenth-century cities.

Accinno’s article on disabled Civil War veterans in the US broadly describes how tensions about good and bad work were at play in public discourse around the dignity of injured former soldiers — many of whom were not eligible for more socially approved kinds of employment due to physical and psychological traumas sustained in the war — busking in the streets with hand-cranked mechanical instruments.Footnote ⁴¹ As mentioned previously, the street barrel organist found an ally in G. K. Chesterton, a proponent of distributism, a short-lived ‘third way’ between state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism involving the idea that private property ownership was a fundamental right, but also that wealth should be shared widely and equally.Footnote ⁴² In 1922 Chesterton weighed in to conversations about whether organ grinders should be considered liable under mendicity laws, insisting that street musicians were ‘not beggars, by any possible definition of begging’, because they were providing a tangible product.Footnote ⁴³ Discussing an earlier article that had argued for street musicians to be treated legally as beggars, Chesterton wrote:

An unnamed writer whose Fireside Magazine piece was reproduced in the Dundee Evening Telegraph in 1894 appeared similarly in sympathy with the street entertainers, insisting that ‘to call an organ grinder’s life an idle life or a lazy one is to show you know nothing at all about it’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Alongside acknowledging the hard physical conditions and the expense of trying to keep an organ in tune and the repertoire up to date, the writer emphasized the constant threat of punitive reactions from authorities, noting that an organ grinder ‘never forgets that there is a certain degree of shabbiness beyond which the police do not let him transgress’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this context, although many observers still refused to be swayed, the visible performance of labour at the barrel organ’s handle could be seen as part of a crucial set of defences against aggressive policing and charges of mendicancy.

Staying with the subject of work and (or as) performance, the barrel organ can be viewed from the perspective of the social construction of technology (SCOT). Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s 1998 study of the development of the Moog synthesizer frames the standardization of the inclusion of a keyboard as a social question; unlike Don Buchla’s synthesizer, developed around the same time, the Moog with its keyboard provided a familiar user interface and allowed people to immediately recognize what kind of a thing, or social object, this was.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the turn of the twentieth century, there were many different kinds of commercially available self-playing mechanical instruments for use in both public and domestic contexts. Although practical questions like weight, portability, volume, and expense certainly factor into the type of mechanism (fully or semi-automated) found in mechanical street instruments, there is also clearly a social function to the barrel organ’s handle: to facilitate the visible performance of labour. Since in the second half of the nineteenth century capitalism as an overarching ideology was becoming entrenched, the question of whether organ grinders were working hard enough for their pay is symptomatic of cultural expectations that were crystallizing at the time. The relevance of SCOT here hinges on the fact that aspects of the technology of a barrel piano and its affordances for users gave it crucial social meanings as a tool for work, an object of labour. This is important because it was at least possible — certainly by the late nineteenth century — to create self-playing instruments that did not need to be cranked by hand. The idea that barrel organs did not make real music, that using one was not hard (enough) work, and also that there was something unseemly about women partaking in this activity stemmed not only from the associations with socially marginalized migrant performers, but also from the identity and characteristics of the technology being used — two phenomena which must have fed back into each other as the forms of equipment used by travelling organists crystallized. Were street organists received in the ways they were because they played an instrument with a crank handle, or did barrel organs have a crank handle precisely in order to carve out and highlight the social function of barrel-organ playing? In what ways did this phenomenon facilitate (or render alarming) the presence of women among barrel organists? (For instance, some records and illustrations depict a woman playing a barrel organ with one hand and holding a baby with the other, or describe a child’s cradle being conveniently balanced on top of the instrument.) SCOT could help us to better understand this process.

Mark Butler’s study of ways in which performance is enacted in certain electronic music contexts covers a variety of examples of people moving and engaging with interfaces in a manner partly aimed at showing that what they are doing is a special event (or at creating this ‘eventness’ itself).Footnote ⁴⁸ In a way this is a parallel scenario, in that the interface of a barrel organ and of an electronic music performance set-up might not necessarily require or afford certain conventional movements that may in the past have been associated with performing music. It was seemingly not always the case that people playing a barrel organ in the street made a lot of additional movements, gestures, or other choices to highlight the performative nature of their occupation. Indeed, there are film clips, particularly from places where the street organ tradition outlived the nineteenth century by a longer margin, like the Netherlands, that show organ grinders turning the handle of the instrument without much additional theatre.Footnote ⁴⁹ Furthermore, the most recent stages of Dutch street organ performance often see the instrument, like a fairground organ, fully automated and not requiring any ongoing manual interaction at all. Having said this, although it is effectively impossible to fully rediscover the individual practice of nineteenth-century street organists, it is likely that some players would have tried to add a bit of drama to their act. This might have felt more imperative at a moment when there was a lot more musical performance in the street and there was greater pressure to compete with other buskers and traders.Footnote ⁵⁰ More in-depth studies of historical performances by organ grinders will require a different approach and scope from the current article; for the time being, it can be reasoned that there were strong potential motivations to perform the activity in a certain manner.

An observation that cropped up a number of times in newspapers in the 1890s was that, collectively, organ grinders were surprisingly wealthy. Describing opulent wedding ceremonies and fine Sunday clothes and jewellery, or remarking on the ease with which organ grinders in court were able to pay their fines, newspapers also commented on the frugality with which the musicians often seemed to conduct their lives and the apparent fact that many street buskers lived together and created mutual assistance networks, paying municipal fines from a communal fund.Footnote ⁵¹ However, earnings were by no means necessarily distributed equitably; several newspaper items describe women organ grinders who took former employers to court over the withholding of wages or similar economic abuses (sometimes accused of stealing from the padrone after having been long underpaid),Footnote ⁵² and in 1889 the Alcester Chronicle (along with a large number of other newspapers) reported that the ‘women organ grinders’ were on strike and had ‘made a united demand for increased wages’.Footnote ⁵³ Although some practices might have been seen as reflecting mutual assistance principles, it could also be the case that a padrone or employer would keep the majority of what was earned and pay a minimal amount to the grinders, or withhold promised wages altogether.Footnote ⁵⁴

But regardless of their earnings, the perceived threat posed by the organ grinders and their liminal existence can also be seen as economic in a broader sense. Not only were these economic migrants performing ambiguous and socially undesirable forms of labour and seemingly thriving on the margins of the emergent socioeconomic order, they also posed a threat in terms of their potential to destabilize domestic economies and lead young English women away from respectable positions as wives and servants to a different kind of life. Ideas about what women should be like were formulated and circulated both by socially privileged men and by socially privileged women in the nineteenth century. Two relevant forms of middle-class women’s engagements with organ-grinder communities around the turn of the century can be broadly categorized as masquerade and control. The first type of engagement was a kind of voyeurism, which its proponents might have framed more as a kind of ethnography, in which white, British, middle-class women writers would dress in stereotypical Italian clothes, sometimes painting or dyeing their skin darker in a parallel with contemporary blackface minstrel performances, and masquerade as street entertainers.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Laura Vorachek notes, many female journalists in the 1890s adopted an ‘incognito investigative technique’ which involved ‘costuming themselves not only as working-class but also as Italian, living the lives of organ-grinders for a day’.Footnote ⁵⁶ One such writer, Frances Bourne, whose 1900 article in the English Illustrated Magazine details her day as an ersatz street musician, quite openly framed her actions as a form of novelty- or pleasure-seeking:

The article’s illustrations accompany a text that describes the author’s activities and her feelings of both discomfort and a kind of illicit pleasure, inviting the middle-class female reader to identify with the writer’s giddy, guilty excitement and to delight in her transgressive exploits. Emotive and dramatic captions (‘I felt both self-conscious and awkward’; ‘I nearly fell against a dancing bear’) alongside these images clearly highlight the story’s purpose as entertainment, drawing out moments of high feeling and ‘unusual’ situations from Bourne’s text.

Here we can be reminded of the centrality of distance (and difference) in performance as theorized by Auslander. Significant gaps — economic, linguistic, social, and cultural — often existed between itinerant street entertainers and their audiences, and could create a sense of distance and lack that might be felt as desire. The actions of masquerading white middle-class women journalists like Bourne are in harmony with the notion that the Other is required to function across the gap of difference both as something exotic or appealing and something dangerous or disgusting simultaneously.Footnote ⁵⁸ And however many rich and socially privileged women were captivated or intrigued by street organ grinders, an equal if not greater number (perhaps many of the same individuals) wanted to police them out of sight, earshot, and mind.

Public Space, Mobility, Identity, Rules

A gendered dimension to the hypocrisy of the English bourgeoisie does not go unobserved by Engels, though it is not analysed as such. His chosen example is the following letter from the aforementioned ‘Lady’ to the Manchester Guardian:

Following this particularly noxious missive, he exclaims: ‘And so writes “A Lady”; she does well to sign herself such, well that she has lost the courage to call herself a woman! But if the “Ladies” are such as this, what must the “Gentlemen” be?’Footnote ⁶⁰ The complaints of this woman are pertinent here not only for how they express an assumption that token charitable gestures should be repaid by the erasure of visible poverty and suffering from public life, but in particular for the ways in which the writer implicitly appeals to some assumed threat to her personal safety and integrity as a respectable lady, evoking the ‘shameless’ conduct and ‘disgusting’ appearance of the poor, their ‘impertinent molestations’ and the need for women like herself to be ‘protected’ by the police. White middle-class women in the past and present have often tended to leverage a different kind of social power than white middle-class men in order to exert influence over how others are able to move through or occupy public space — namely, the weaponization of their distress, discomfort, or claims of feeling unsafe around marginalized people, including other women.Footnote ⁶¹

This brings us to Ormiston Chant, the previously mentioned social reformer and middle-class women’s rights advocate, and a well-known campaigner concerned with ideas about healthy, ‘proper’ living, with a strong moralistic streak. Walkowitz charts the small storm caused in the 1890s by Ormiston Chant’s lobbying against the successful Empire Theatre, largely motivated by the fact that it was a popular location for sex workers.Footnote ⁶² Ormiston Chant’s brand of purity-focused and notably anti-choice ‘feminism’, closely linked to the physical culture movement, drew on culturally contingent concepts of health, hygiene, athleticism, and sexual propriety.Footnote ⁶³ These concepts were also related to the contemporary development, as Walkowitz explains, of new ideas about the organization of outdoor space and what kinds of implicit rules and social contracts the public (which of course did not necessarily include everyone) could be expected to follow in return for certain kinds of freedoms.Footnote ⁶⁴ For Ormiston Chant, according to Walkowitz, women’s liberation was inextricable from notions of disciplined and purposeful ways of moving through space. For her, the dancers at the cosmopolitan Empire Theatre seemed indecent: physically and morally sickly, un-British, and sexualized in demeaning and unhealthy ways. Sex workers at the theatre contributed, in her view, to an unsafe environment for other — implicitly morally better — women, who should have the right to freely move through public space unharassed.Footnote ⁶⁵

In the 1896 court case mentioned earlier, Ormiston Chant brought charges against Mana Rogga (elsewhere named as Marie Korza), an Italian organ grinder who had been playing near Ormiston Chant’s house in Bloomsbury.Footnote ⁶⁶ According to a newspaper account, Rogga’s husband had stopped playing when asked by Ormiston Chant’s husband, following which Rogga said ‘go on’ and took the handle of the organ to continue playing. When the police arrived, Rogga’s husband ran away, to which Ormiston Chant reportedly said, ‘you are a cowardly brute to leave your wife to face this herself’. Ormiston Chant argued that the organ grinders were creating a disturbance while her husband was trying to sleep; however, she also insinuated that Rogga had mistreated the children in her care, asking the defence lawyer Mr Burnard whether he thought it was cruel to take children about the streets (to which he replied that he did not). Additionally, she claimed to have had a headache at the time.Footnote ⁶⁷ Perhaps Ormiston Chant’s husband was trying to sleep and perhaps she did have a headache, but her attitude towards organ grinders like Rogga was also highly consistent with similar culturally and nationally inflected ideologies to those that led her to attack the Empire Theatre — and specifically, to demonize more marginalized women and those who exercised their agency in ways seen as transgressive, in a bid to improve the lot of putatively more deserving (white, middle-class, British, ‘well-behaved’) women.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, an item in the Star four years later — reporting a case where Ormiston Chant’s son Clement had taken an organ grinder to court for not moving on when asked (only for the case to be dismissed because the law said that organ grinders must be given a reason for this request) — described Ormiston Chant herself as ‘waging war against street noises, and especially against piano organs’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Combined with her long-standing campaigns against people, including other women, who did not occupy public space in ways that she considered to be correct, Ormiston Chant’s complaints against Mana Rogga appear still more ideological than her testimony during the 1896 case might have openly expressed.

I have acknowledged questions around whether women at the time were widely understood to be free to choose to join organ-grinder communities. Agency is also a central issue when confronting Ormiston Chant’s mission to make public spaces more tenable for women like herself. Her social-purity ‘feminism’, based on an implied social contract where discipline and morality were rewarded with rights and relative freedoms, did not acknowledge the validity of all women’s rights to choose to be sex workers or organ grinders, or to choose to live, dress, or move however and wherever they wanted. Walkowitz defends Ormiston Chant against (at the time, typically conservative and anti-woman) detractors who framed her as an unsophisticated, small-minded, provincial killjoy and a bitter, sexually unattractive ‘prude’.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, as also emerges from Walkowitz’s article, Ormiston Chant in practice seemingly expressed little solidarity with or empathy for women who lived more marginal lives. The connections between Ormiston Chant’s social-purity ideals, suspicion of foreign influences, and veneration of the physical culture movement serve to highlight a link between her desire to police the movements of Italian organ grinders like Mana Rogga and the (at the time) unstable whiteness of members of the Italian diaspora, particularly poorer people from rural areas.Footnote ⁷¹ Ormiston Chant’s objections to the Empire Theatre, Walkowitz writes, seemed to stem in part from the feeling that it was un-British, the suspicious cosmopolitanism of the theatre being associated not only with licentiousness but also with an unhealthy foreignness.Footnote ⁷² Reactions to street organ grinders were also xenophobic and racialized, following familiar patterns of prejudicial tropes applied to groups of economic migrants and economically marginalized people, particularly those socially constructed as racial Others.

The racialized dimension of Ormiston Chant’s disapproval of ‘foreign’, cosmopolitan displays of ‘commercialized sex’ at the Empire Theatre, and of itinerant, immigrant street musicians, can’t be overlooked. Itinerant organ grinders were frequently treated as racial Others, as evidenced by the masquerading behaviour of women like Bourne, who dyed her skin darker in a parody of a more typically Italian complexion. Othering and ethnically discriminatory comments about Italian street entertainers were also reproduced in nineteenth-century newspapers.Footnote ⁷³ It seems that emergent discourses of nationalism and race also fed strongly into some ‘feminist’ reformers’ ideas about who exactly should or should not be allowed to have certain freedoms. The period in which Ormiston Chant and her peers were lobbying for (some) women’s increased liberty was also a period in which the structure of modern control societies (closed national borders, registration and intense surveillance of all members of the population, fairly strict rules about how public space can be occupied) was beginning to take more consistent shape. As Eric Hobsbawm explains, the later nineteenth century was a time when capitalism (the continued staying power of which at earlier points was by no means necessarily considered inevitable or even very likely) and its structures and norms were being cemented and established.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the second half of the nineteenth century, something fundamental had shifted after the ultimately unsuccessful revolutions of 1848:

Hobsbawm writes that ‘henceforth the forces of conservatism, privilege and wealth would have to defend themselves in new ways’, and that in order to do so — which the author describes as ‘the major innovation brought about by the 1848 revolutions’ — ‘the defenders of the social order had to learn the politics of the people’.Footnote ⁷⁶

This period was characterized by a move away from an old complacency about the acceptance of the ruling classes by the labouring classes towards an invigorated counter-revolutionary drive to monitor, understand, and more actively control the population — a drive that could in many ways all too easily accommodate the enthusiasm of (relatively) liberal feminist figures like Ormiston Chant for disciplined public conduct in the name of (qualified, relative) personal freedoms (for some).Footnote ⁷⁷ The peak of the organ grinders’ presence in various major cities of the Global North roughly coincided with the rapid establishment not just of capitalist socioeconomic norms but also of associated features of modern societies (surveillance and control). As such, many of the phenomena under discussion here can be seen as reactive and as related to (the desire for) new kinds of control and monitoring: the policing (also by supposed women’s rights campaigners) of what were at the time thought by some to be proper ways of performing gender; potential moral panic about the degradation of the heteronormative, patriarchal family as an economic unit; the emergence of certain commonly accepted rules for navigating urban space; hostility towards economic outsiders and migrants; and a suspicion of commodities whose actual or economic value was ambiguous. And as Loralee MacPike discusses, the economic unit of the family, with its gendered internal hierarchies (specifically around the concept of childbearing), could function as a powerful discursive weapon in the service of conservatism at this time, as it has at others.

Organ Grinders, Families, and Children

There is no question of presenting organ-grinder communities as utopian, liberatory spaces for women and girls (though a similar exoticizing fantasy could have underpinned the desire of some of the women who joined them). Women organ grinders were apparently still primarily responsible for childcare and could be financially abandoned by the fathers of their children, they were still underpaid and exploited, and there are still records of domestic and sexual violence against them. Organ-grinder communities were not spaces free from gendered oppression, by any stretch of the imagination. However, in terms of the agency of the ‘English girls’ who joined the organ grinders, it can still in some ways be seen as a radical move for them to forsake an original or expected ecology of obligation and to embed themselves in a new domestic, sexual, and economic context which, while it might have commonalities with their old one, was nevertheless a different environment and in many cases represented an active choice. Daring to forsake or deprioritize the potentially all-consuming demands of original familial or caregiving relationships could be something that women who joined organ-grinder communities and those who embodied the contemporary New Woman ideal had in common.

Developments initially driven by New Musicology have continued to open up potential spaces for thinking about music more holistically, as a part of life that is not only practised and experienced hermetically, at a remove from things like physical pain and other bodily experiences, disability, ageing, economic obligations and inequalities, and social relationships. The tendency for older, canon-oriented forms of musicology, by virtue of an implicitly masculine-coded, rationalist, white racial frame, to presume the absence of children from almost any musical context worth studying might previously have led to some doubt about the relevance of a discussion of children and caregiving to a study of a musical performance tradition. (Zucchi’s invaluable study on Italian child street musicians was not conceived as a musicological project but was conducted within the remit of social history, discursive histories of ethnicity, and histories of migration.)Footnote ⁷⁸ But in the case of organ-grinding, in many instances children and caregiving are inseparable from this practice, both as a type of performance and as a type of work. Children’s presence in these musicking contexts, both in the care of adults and working as professional performers themselves, is undeniably central. Organ-grinding was also associated with women and children more generally. Despite apparently being widely unpopular among a vocal middle-class contingent across Europe and North America, the Italian Leiermann enjoyed favour (at least by comparison with the much-disliked native Werkelmann) among wealthy Viennese women in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁹ For Verlaine, the organ grinder’s tear-jerking music resembled ‘something we bashed out as children’, while displeased columnist L. F. Austin exclaimed in the Illustrated London News in 1903 that organ grinders’ popularity among ‘most women and all children in this city’ must be the primary reason why the practice had not been outlawed completely.Footnote ⁸⁰

Not all women physically can or wish to have children, and not all people who physically can have children are women. However, it was nevertheless the case that in the Global North in the nineteenth century, the question of responsibility for bearing children and caring for others was often inseparable from dominant and emerging ideas about what most women, or people who were socialized or presented as women, were permitted or expected to be and do according to their social background. The idea that ‘a woman’ is defined by having children (or by notionally having the physical capacity to have children) is still regularly weaponized against trans and non-binary people and other members of LGBTQIA+ communities by extremists such as trans-exclusionary feminists and fundamentalist religious groups. The source of multiple violences against multiple groups of people can be to some extent located in the notion that, within the social economy, bearing and caring for children should only or largely be done by cisgender women and is something that virtually all cisgender women should aspire to. The New Woman ideal, with all its limitations and shortcomings, grappled with childbearing and caregiving as social obligations that seemed to be an almost unstoppable force for the political and economic neutralization of women, despite the possibility (for some more socially privileged women) of certain new economic and lifestyle freedoms. Contemporary media perspectives on organ-grinding communities reflected the same anxieties and tensions, as women were reported to be running away from ‘respectable’ domestic service jobs, deserting husbands, abandoning their own original ecologies of emotional, familial, and community responsibility, and going off to do a different kind of work, often taking children with them.

In Vasily Perov’s 1864 painting ‘Organ Grinder in Paris’, a woman plays a crank organ with a child resting on top (see Figure 1). Working women’s lives, before and since Engels’s once-working man wept while darning his wife’s stockings, have given the lie to what MacPike dryly calls ‘the “natural” sexual division of labour’;Footnote ⁸¹ Perov’s painting shows a woman simultaneously performing the work of a mother or carer with one hand and the (more narrowly defined, and for MacPike’s traditionalists more ‘naturally’ masculine) work of economic necessity, turning the organ crank, with the other. Critics of organ grinders in the late nineteenth century, as amply evidenced by Zucchi, regularly seized on the impropriety of children’s presence in street performance contexts in the course of their criticisms. That the presence of children and babies alongside street organ grinders was commonplace is evidenced by the complaint of one ‘J. F. G. S.’, who in 1899 wrote to the Morning Post, ‘Sir — will any philanthropist confer a lasting benefit on long-suffering Englishmen by ridding our streets of all the instruments of torture […] and thus too bring relief to the brains of the organ-grinders’ babies?’Footnote ⁸² The writer’s semi-serious presumption that the role of a philanthropist was in fact to ‘rid’ public space of such nuisances further supports Engels’s diagnosis of hypocrisy in bourgeois charitable efforts. Middle-class expectations of the ability to proceed through urban areas unhampered by evidence of poverty were a source of loud indignation when these expectations were not met. Indeed, again echoing Zucchi’s conclusions, the presence of children in public organ-grinding performance contexts was often viewed as objectionable not (or at least not solely) on the grounds that it was assumed to be harmful to the children, but because it was perceived as an unwelcome attempt to evoke feelings of guilt and compassion in the observer. In 1911, a couple who were arrested for having their children with them while busking were defended by a judge with a more pragmatic outlook:

Figure 1. Vasily Perov, Organ Grinder in Paris, 1864, showing a woman, or a person dressed in typically feminine clothing, playing a barrel organ while a sleeping child rests on top. Gallerix via Wikimedia Commons (https://gallerix.ru/album/Perov/pic/glrx-515859985). Image is in the public domain. Reproduced with permission.

In this instance the presiding judge highlighted the arresting officer’s apparent prejudice in receiving the very presence of infants alongside a working couple (and perhaps also the woman’s temerity in refusing to be confined to the home) as an affront to public decency.

A similar picture emerges from Mayhew’s account of an Italian street busker who was alleged to have relied on the fact that his instrument was badly broken to elicit sympathy, and had no desire for it to be repaired. The description of the busker as ‘little’, ‘half-witted’, and an ‘idiot’ manages to denigrate the musician while simultaneously belying the cynical, suspicious tone of the passage, in which he is framed as a wily con artist. It’s unclear whether the writer wants this Other to be clever and conniving or pathetic and lacking agency; the discursive structures of otherness allow for both at once:

The class-loaded tone of mistrust and suspicion in these excerpts is already symptomatic of the attitudes of the ‘concerned’ English bourgeoisie, but we can see an additional layer of discomfort that might result from the nature of organ-grinding as a form of commodity production. Organ grinders, as Chesterton asserted, produced music — not nothing — in exchange for money. And yet, unless they were also selling sheet music at a set price, there was typically no fixed quantity (no minimum or maximum amount of time spent listening to the music, as in the case of a concert performance) or monetary value for the goods or services they offered. And if we believe the anecdote of Mayhew, the performance of performing could have been considered more important than ‘the (sounding) music’, to the extent that, far from playing an out-of-tune instrument or a gratingly repetitive set list, a busker might play a piano organ with only one string and still have the idea of entering into a social contract with bystanders that demanded some kind of compensation. As such, a performance designed primarily to elicit sympathy might have specifically been seen as an attempt to extort still more money from passers-by in exchange for a commodity whose actual value was, in the ears of many a suspicious detractor, already both quantitatively unfixed and qualitatively dubious. Although organ grinders often also sold sheet music for a set price,Footnote ⁸⁵ payment for the performance itself did not have a set rate, and was all the more ambiguous since bystanders would witness it in the first place, whether they wanted to or not, before any payment had been made.

The value-fluidity of this professional performance tradition based on voluntary donations reflects Chesterton’s identification of itinerant sellers as peculiarly or even anachronistically free (though he also acknowledges the intense police harassment experienced by street performers).Footnote ⁸⁶ In any case the author of a Boston Spa News article, after accusing organ grinders of using fake babies to gain additional sympathy, admits to having ‘never yet […] discovered the sham baby; only a real baby of flesh and blood’, and instead seamlessly moves on to admonishing the performers, who apparently can do nothing right, for indeed having a real live baby with them instead.Footnote ⁸⁷ The writer pleads:

Risks to children were not always imagined or exaggerated (and women organ grinders, with or without children, were not necessarily reported as being accompanied by men). In 1889 the South London Press recounted a road accident in which an (ultimately unharmed) infant in the care of a woman organ grinder was in some genuine danger. In contrast to the fraud-fearing flights of fancy relayed in the Boston Spa News, the unnamed woman is described as distraught, presumably at the thought of harm coming to the child:

Of course, a road collision could have happened to anyone who was using the road that day, not only an organ grinder. Nevertheless, newspapers around this time were peppered with worries about whether these communities were suitable contexts for raising children, or with the dangers to children posed by organ grinders. The Sussex Agricultural Express evoked concerns about the education of organ grinders’ children, reporting on an organ grinder named Harry Cossham who was summoned to court in 1889 for his child’s low school attendance; the School Attendance-Officer later remarked having received ‘no instructions’ with regard to the welfare of ‘the children of the Italians’, stating that ‘foreigners’ simply ‘came and went’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In this case, the itinerant nature of organ-grinder communities was at odds with the social systems in place, and members of the community were simply dismissed as incompatible. In 1883 multiple newspapers ran an item reporting that two Italian organ grinders, named as Antonio and Lorenzo Cabrieri, had attempted to kidnap a 9-year-old girl named variously as Lena Gounetz or Gormetz.Footnote ⁹¹ Zucchi’s book relates the tale of Giuseppe, a young boy who in 1873 escaped from an extremely abusive padrone in New York and whose story was circulated in the press.Footnote ⁹² Zucchi’s handling of this event recognizes the indisputable traumas suffered by the child. It also leaves room to imagine the relish with which this particular tale, like other stories of violence among migrant and itinerant communities, was retold, ostensibly being wielded against organ-grinding as a practice and by extension against Italian migrants as an entire demographic (as Zucchi notes, cruelty was experienced by some organ-grinding children, but it was not an inherent or inevitable aspect of the profession).Footnote ⁹³ An unnamed organ grinder interviewed by Mayhew described his experience with a padrone, who he had come to work for through his uncle, in a more positive light: ‘I dare say I make 10s. a-week for him; but he wor very kind to me, and give me to eat what I like. He was take care of me, of course. I was very young at dat time.’ The organ grinder later adds, ‘it is only the people say that the Italian boys are badly used: they are not so, the masters are very kind to them’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Mana Rogga, the Italian organ grinder taken to court by Ormiston Chant, had a child or children with her both when she was arrested and during the court case, according to the reports and illustrations published in the Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and Illustrated Police News in 1896. Ormiston Chant, whose own ‘little girl’ (‘quite as tall as her mother’) appeared as a witness, criticized the practice of taking children out with an organ:

In spite of her commitment elsewhere to increasing women’s social liberty and pushing back against certain entrenched norms, it seems almost as if Ormiston Chant tried here to mockingly dismiss Burnard’s authority regarding child welfare altogether on the grounds that he — unlike her, a woman and a mother — knew ‘very little about children’. Certainly, this would be in keeping with the ambivalent juxtaposition between progressivism and conservatism in Ormiston Chant’s ideals. In contrast to the ruling of Plowden in 1911, the judge in this case — a Mr Lushington — was convinced not only that Rogga had transgressed by refusing to move on when requested (despite having been encouraged to remain by another neighbour whose children enjoyed the performance), but also that ‘it was perfectly clear that the prisoner exhibited the children with the purpose of exciting sympathy’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Rogga was fined twenty shillings or ‘seven day’s’ for failing to move on when asked, and one shilling for having children present; the newspaper noted that ‘if she continued to expose the children further proceedings must be taken’.Footnote ⁹⁷

One 1877 story in the Huddersfield Chronicle strongly resembled the trajectory of late nineteenth-century ‘New Woman’ novels analysed by MacPike, in which improperly independent, overly educated, or free-thinking women met with unfortunate ends after straying too far outside the bounds of respectable feminine conduct. The 28-year-old Winifred Campbell, described as ‘highly educated’ and fluent in Italian, was abandoned by her first husband, ‘fell into very low circumstances’, and became involved with itinerant organ grinders in Bristol, for whom she would write letters in Italian. Campbell formed a relationship with an unnamed padrone; they travelled together for a short while and she had his child, but he abandoned her in Paulton, apparently in a fit of jealousy after seeing her talking to other men, about a fortnight after the baby was born. The paper reports that Campbell, financially destitute and left to care for the infant alone, experienced a mental breakdown. She told police that she had intended to drown both herself and the infant in the river, but had been unable to bring herself to commit suicide or harm her child. She left the baby in a waiting room at Bristol Temple Meads railway station and was herself later found in the Bristol Workhouse.Footnote ⁹⁸ As MacPike explains, progressive visions of women’s (relative) freedoms tended to fall at the first conceptual hurdle where children were concerned. In many cautionary novels, any departure from traditional (patriarchal) gender roles and norms spelled ruin for the family ecology surrounding the transgressing woman. Characters in this genre could either acquiesce or try to resist and suffer the consequences.Footnote ⁹⁹ Engels’s observation that perhaps the disturbance caused by role reversal in terms of the ‘natural sexual division of labour’ indicated that dividing work along these lines was already problematic seems to be reflected in the undercurrent of defensive panic surrounding the idea of women making different choices regarding their broad economic responsibilities.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In addition to their marked difference as socially constructed ethnic Others, organ grinders’ lifestyles, community structures, relationships to employment and earning, and apparently often irresistible appeal to young female members of the sedentary working and middle classes could be perceived as threatening normative gendered models of kinship and work in multiple different ways.

As already emphasized, organ-grinding in no sense represented a perfectly free system for living that could exist independently of the affluent urban centres where it thrived and on which the practice was essentially contingent. But there are aspects of the arrangement of organ grinders’ lives that pointed towards types of freedom or alternative ways of living that, while they did not necessarily subvert or abandon heteronormative gender roles and divisions of labour within the familial ecology, can nevertheless evoke ideas that were galvanizing and potentially dangerous for the status quo, especially in combination. What would happen if it was perfectly ‘natural’ to everyone that women could choose to forsake their original (broad) economic and familial contexts; that infants could be present with both parents in the work environment without (necessarily) coming to any harm; that work, for itinerant and sedentary communities alike, did not have to mean ‘being employed’ in a formal sense or to follow fixed ideas about exchange value; that profits from work could be shared across groups much larger than blood- or marriage-related families in systems resembling mutual assistance principles; that playing music and/or making noise or even just visibly being in need of help in the street could be a form of work, commodity, and/or performance for which it was reasonable to ask for remuneration, and which women and children seemed eminently capable of undertaking just as well as men? To deserve to be given money in exchange for an almost ritualized performance of dubiously productive labour seems not so far from deserving to be given money simply because you needed it, because you did not have enough to sustain yourself. That in turn was surely much too close to the idea that people deserve to be given money just for existing — a dangerous idea that could not be allowed to seriously take root. Organ-grinding can be understood as potentially threatening to an oppressive status quo without necessarily idealizing the alternatives it might have seemed to offer; the very fact of demonstrating the existence of an alternative could be enough. Organ-grinding could (though it certainly did not always) represent not a straightforward reversal but a reshuffling of sexual labour arrangements and modes of profit distribution. What if women, and indeed people of any gender in large numbers, chose communities that did not choose (what was considered to be) ‘legitimate’ work?

‘Sweet Nothing Forever’: (Women’s) Economic Freedoms as a Threat to Work

MacPike argues that many radical thinkers of the late nineteenth century were unable to make the leap from considering women’s sexual liberation to conceptualizing women’s full economic freedom in relation to caregiving:

From this perspective, not only could organ-grinding be seen as threatening because it represented a sort of (apparent) structural freedom, as implicitly recognized by Chesterton, or because of its flexible relation to exchange value, or due to rumours of subversive, extra-familial mutual assistance economies, but also because it visibly allowed women with very young children to work and make money. Many of these women were indeed dependent on or subject to employers who apparently were almost always men (there were probably also women who were heavily involved in the organ rental business, but I don’t currently have any evidence of a female padrone). And furthermore, based on newspaper reports of court cases relating to unfair pay and withheld wages, this work could also be exploitative — but it was not necessarily or inherently so. With enough starting capital (which some young organ grinders saved up while initially working for a padrone), one could go and hire an organ from an organ rental firm without any particular connections, just like Bourne did, and start making money. The sight of women, potentially both with children and without men (as in Perov’s painting), working and earning independently could have tapped into contemporary anxieties.

The New Woman was threatening because she could get a job, travel to work, and make her own money, realizing her own previously untapped capacity for independence and agency. Organ-grinding could be threatening because it implicitly or explicitly transgressed all kinds of social and economic conventions: it could represent an opportunity for women to turn not only away from a socially endorsed marriage and towards work and other kinds of relationships, but also potentially away from their entire original familial ecology towards a different economic and cultural way of being. Organ-grinding was work — hard work — but it was also associated with transgressive and marginal relationships to labour and economy: the rumours of mutual assistance and non-traditional living arrangements; the allegations of suspicious frugality and surprising wealth; the (by no means complete) detachment, as Chesterton observed, from more formally recognized institutions and infrastructures; the apparent threat to or disruption of gendered economies; and a general sense of cultural outsideness and of unwillingness to conform to economic norms and social expectations.

The Isle of Man Times ran a story in 1894 in which William Alexander and Walter Fisher, a couple of organ grinders (described in the newspaper as ‘homeless labourers’), had been arrested for taking an organ from a rental firm without permission after the owner had refused to loan it to them.Footnote ¹⁰² The main point of the article, however, was to elaborate on the putatively novel detail that Alexander had been arrested in possession of a notebook filled with diary entries, reports on more and less profitable spots for busking, and creative thoughts and ideas in the form of prose and poetry. The newspaper — which subtitled the item ‘Doing Nothing Forever’ — reported with mirth that in one of his poems, the organ grinder had dreamed up a rhyming epitaph for a fictional woman who was so sick of incessant domestic work that she embraced death, wanting nothing more than to not have to do anything at all ever again:

William Alexander, the newspaper reported, ‘seemed to treat the matter [of his diary being read aloud in court] as a joke’; quite how he was expected to respond is unclear.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But his poem suggests that he definitively recognized women’s (domestic) work as a legitimate form of labour, as well as conceiving of work itself not as a moral good but as the bane of a person’s existence, to the extent that death might be welcomed.

As shown above, critics of organ-grinding frequently made reference to the impact on children’s welfare. Of course, this is inseparable from the fact that children really were being sold into labour, were introduced to work at what would today be seen as an unhealthily and illegally young age, and were in some cases badly mistreated and abused in the organ-grinding trade (though there’s no evidence that abuse was any more likely in the organ-grinding context than in other trades or situations, and one of Mayhew’s organ grinders insists that treatment was generally good). However, this disapproval was additionally closely linked, as Zucchi identifies, to a general middle-class disdain for the working-class and itinerant populations — and moreover, I would argue, also a highly gendered and implicitly racialized discomfort with alternative domestic-economic structures. Some people seemingly did not like to see women working outside of ‘respectable’ engagements (despite the fact that this was not an uncommon sight), and certainly not carers working accompanied by children; the officer from Plowden’s case found the visible presence of children alongside an organ-grinding couple to be an affront to public decency. As expressed above, MacPike suggests that even some of the most forward-thinking late nineteenth-century advocates for social liberalization, in the same breath as they argued for women’s sexual freedom in some form, could not conceive of a world where having children did not to some extent shut down a woman’s life, rendering her dependent on men, economically impotent, and politically irrelevant. Even in the case of Engels’s depressed house husband, there is the sense that a partnership (in these sources, presumed heterosexual and functionally monogamous) must always necessarily be asymmetrical, that at least one partner must bear an all-consuming responsibility for domestic, familial tasks while the other is compelled to act as a material provider. Childbearing and caring for children were still seen as profound and insurmountable stumbling blocks barring the way to women’s economic independence. But a lone woman playing a barrel organ with a child in tow could at least highlight the possibility that this was not necessarily the case, even though in practice a lot of these women were still variously economically beholden to husbands/partners and male employers. The fact that women organ grinders pushed for fair remuneration for their work and appeared in court to contest other injustices suggests that although they were still at risk of being exploited, women in this line of work exercised professional agency, demanded rights, and pursued tolerable working conditions.

The idea that caregiving would not necessarily render a woman economically impotent, i.e. that women could flexibly give care and work, could have been seen as dangerous because the responsibility of caring for others — to the detriment of other types of participation and influence — has arguably been a vital key to the oppression of women within interpersonal ecologies/economies (and in an ideal world, any rigid association of caring responsibilities with any one gender would surely be totally dislodged). The fact that organ-grinding was a profession that could potentially destabilize existing family economies, allowing women to work flexibly, without men, and with babies and children present, could have been a factor in contemporary reactions to these musicians. This was not a romantic, ideal freedom: even in highly privileged contexts today we see harmful consequences of the idea that women can ‘have it all’ by both shouldering the overwhelming bulk of caring work and providing for themselves and others economically (effectively taking on multiple roles, of which one alone could easily absorb 100 per cent of their time and resources). It’s clear that the freedom to (also) work for economic gain, however important, does not automatically bring freedom from socially entrenched inequalities in domestic and caring labour. Life for women in organ-grinder communities was not utopian or magical. But something intriguing that can exist alongside this problem, without purporting to solve it, is that (perhaps in part through professions like organ-grinding) various alternative economic-domestic possibilities were being visibly modelled for some women — and not only the most privileged ones — as hypothetical alternatives to the devil they knew. As MacPike writes: ‘The New Woman’s world is, in one sense, unimaginable. […] But what cannot be imagined can sometimes be lived out nonetheless, as many women’s individual lives have testified over the centuries.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵