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Representing the slum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Alan Mayne
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Extract

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been ‘reading’ streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were ‘reflected’ in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volume The Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade after The Victorian City's first publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 17 , May 1990 , pp. 66 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes

1 Darnton, R., The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984).Google Scholar I use the term ‘text’ in a general sense to encompass a multiplicity of leads for texting the urban past: land holdings, buildings, monuments; fixed and moveable technologies and artefacts; illustrations, maps; and the written and printed word.

2 Dyos, H.J. and Wolff, M. (eds), The Victorian City. Images and Realities (1973).Google Scholar

3 I use the term to denote the successful interpretation, as well as the comprehensive identification, of historical sources. It therefore signals a hermeneutic method in textual-contextual analysis. This method differs from those of historians who seek to ‘appropriate’ historical relevance from the broader context of their texts. It also eschews the cosy assumption that historical interpretation is grounded in a sense of ‘empathy’ which historians bring to their subject matter.

4 The term is used in the following analysis to describe an abstraction, the ‘back-slum’. It was conjured up by the city press (see Barth, G., City People. The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1980), chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar) in pursuit of sensational news with which to boost sales and advertizing revenue. The term Slum is thus a representation, not a reflection, of the socio-spatial forms of inner city districts.

5 In the following analysis, I draw upon Sydney's three main daily newspapers: the Evening News, the largest circulation paper, which cultivated a reputation as a respectable working-man's paper; the Sydney Morning Herald, the city's ‘quality’ newspaper; and the racy new Daily Telegraph, which overtook the Herald in sales late in the 1880s.

6 Walters, J. Cuming, Scenes in Slumland: Pen Pictures of the Black Spots in Birmingham (1901).Google Scholar Riis, J., How The Other Half Lives: Studies Among The Tenements Of New York (1st ed, 1890).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See Mayne, A.J.C., Fever, Squalor and Vice. Sanitation and Social Policy in Victorian Sydney (1982).Google Scholar

8 My approach has been influenced by the anthropologist Victor Turner. For an overview of his writings, see Turner, V., On The Edge Of The Bush. Anthropology as Experience (1985).Google Scholar

9 Turner, V., From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play (1982).Google Scholar See also Turner, V. and Bruner, E.M., The Anthropology Of Experience (1986).Google Scholar

10 See Meisel, M., Realizations. Narrative, Pictorial, And Theatrical Arts In Nineteenth-Century England (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 This last phrase is found in the Evening News, 25 January 1883, ‘City rookeries’. Numerous variations upon this and the other expressions are found throughout the newspaper stories.

12 For example see Lees, A., Cities Perceived. Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (1985).Google Scholar See also Davison, G., Dunstan, D. and McConville, C. (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne. Essays in Social History (1985).Google Scholar

13 For example Evening News, 17 May 1881, ‘Another sanitary crusade’.

14 Daily Telegraph, 10 May 1881, ‘The rookeries of Sydney’.

15 Evening News, 17 May 1881.

16 I have been influenced here by Geertz, C., Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983).Google Scholar

17 Daily Telegraph, 12 August 1884, ‘Condemned buildings’.

18 Ibid., 29 April 1884, ‘The rookeries on the rocks’.

19 See Wohl, A.S., The Eternal Slum. Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (1977), 5Google Scholar; Dyos, H.J., ‘The slums of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, 11, 1 (09 1967), 7–8.Google Scholar

19a Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1889, ‘Some city rookeries’.

20 Daily Telegraph, 1 February 1881, ‘The rookeries of the city’.

21 Evening News, 9 July 1885.

22 Ibid., 27 May 1880, ‘Through the styes[sic] and stews’.

23 Daily Telegraph, 6 June 1882, ‘Inspection of rookeries’.

24 Daily Telegraph, 7 January 1881, ‘The rookeries of the city’; ibid., 3 October 1881.

25 Evening News, 30 July 1884, ‘Sydney slums and rookeries’.

26 Ibid.

27 Daily Telegraph, 26 August 1885, ‘Among the rookeries’.

28 Evening News, 26 June 1885, leader: ‘Sanitary reform’.

29 Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1878, editorial leader. See Mayne, , Fever, 98–100.Google Scholar

30 Daily Telegraph, 13 June 1882, ‘Inspection of rookeries’; Evening News, 15 February 1881, ‘More rookeries condemned’; Daily Telegraph, 21 February 1881, ‘The city rookeries’.

31 Ibid., 7 January 1881, ‘The rookeries of the city’.

32 Ibid., 17 September 1881, ‘Sydney rookeries’.

33 See ibid., 23 February 1889 and 13 June 1882, ‘Inspection of rookeries’.

34 Evening News, 10 December 1880, ‘City building surveyor's report’; Daily Telegraph, 28 February 1881, ‘The rookeries’; Evening News, 30 August 1886, editorial leader. The MOH likewise labelled the ‘wretched hovels’ of central Sydney ‘a disgrace to the City’, Letters Received, Sydney City Council, 1880 vol. 6, no. 1425.Google Scholar

35 Mayne, , Fever, 111, 136–8.Google Scholar

36 Evening News, 18 February 1881, leader.

37 Daily Telegraph, 2 May 1891, ‘Australian cities’.

38 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 January 1883.

39 Evening News, 7 November 1883, ‘City inspection’.

40 Echo, 20 October 1883, ‘Street improvement and the City Improvement Board’.

41 Evening News, 12 June 1882, ‘City inspection’.

42 Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1880, ‘The City Improvement Act’.

43 Ibid.; Evening News, 17 May 1881, ‘Another sanitary crusade’; Sydney Morning Herald, 29 April 1884, ‘Condemnation of tenements’.

44 Evening News, 10 September 1884, ‘The slums of Sydney’.

45 Evening News, [?] April 1881, ‘Mayoral inspection of dilapidation’; Daily Telegraph, 7 January 1881, ‘The rookeries of the city’.

46 Ibid.; also 29 April 1884, ‘The rookeries on the rocks’.

47 Evening News, 24 April 1888, ‘Filth, depravity, and vice. A horrible den’.

48 Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1884, ‘The rookeries on the rocks’. Evening News, 16 September 1884, ‘Among the rookeries’.

49 Ibid., 17 May 1881, ‘Another sanitary crusade’; Daily Telegraph, 13 June 1882, ‘Inspection of rookeries’; Evening News, [?] April 1881, ‘Mayoral inspection of dilapidation’.

50 Daily Telegraph, 9 February 1889, ‘Some city rookeries’.

51 Evening News, 16 April 1888, editorial.

52 Ibid., 13 April 1888, ‘A fever bed’.

53 Ibid., 1 May 1888, ‘The Chinese curse’.

54 Ibid., 1 February 1881, ‘Human styes[sic] in Sydney’.

55 See Daily Telegraph, 1 February 1881, ‘The rookeries of the city’.

56 See Fitzgerald, S., Rising Damp. Sydney 1870–90 (1987).Google Scholar

57 Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1885, ‘Among the rookeries’.

58 Australian Churchman, 13 January 1881, ‘Cleanliness next to godliness’.

59 Ibid., 29 November 1883, ‘Homes for the poor’.

60 Evening News, 18 August 1880, ‘Improving the city’.

61 Ibid., 14 January 1884, ‘Inspection of rookeries’.

62 Daily Telegraph, 21 February 1881, ‘The city rookeries’; ibid., 17 September 1881, ‘Sydney rookeries’.

63 The Reverend Paterson, R.G., quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, 4 08 1877Google Scholar, ‘Sydney ragged schools’. Evening News, 10 September 1884, ‘The slums of Sydney’.

64 Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1884, ‘The rookeries on the rocks’.

65 Evening News, [?] April 1881, ‘Mayoral inspection of dilapidation’.

66 Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1884, ‘The rookeries on the rocks’.

67 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 1883, ‘Our American letter’.