Hollingshead’s use of ‘Amateur’ to describe some of his adventures, including an expedition in a sea-diving bell, indicated a reporter could find out about a subject by appropriating another identity through appropriating the clothing of that occupation.179 ‘Amateur’ conveys the idea of a gentleman playing a role. Hollingshead was not a diver by profession: he was ‘trying on’ the identity temporarily before returning to his usual occupation. The most extreme example of an ‘amateur’ who temporarily assumes another identity for the purposes of investigation is James Greenwood’s series on workhouse casuals in the Pall Mall Gazette. The PMG was a newly established, quality evening newspaper in London aimed mainly at middle and upper-middle-class gentlemen, and priced at 2d. The editor, Frederick Greenwood and his reporter brother, James, however, had worked their way up from the compositors’ room. As J. W. Robertson-Scott recounted in his history of the PMG, Frederick Greenwood was faced with disappointing sales for the new venture and needed something
new to galvanize its circulation.180 Inspired by the Lancet’s investigations into workhouse infirmaries, Greenwood thought of a novel experiment. Instead of seeking permission to visit infirmaries, he asked his brother to disguise himself as a vagrant, gain admission to the casual ward of the Lambeth workhouse, and spend a night there.
The result was James Greenwood’s best-known piece of investigative writing. The three articles were published unsigned in consecutive numbers on 12, 13, and 15 January 1866. The name under which they were afterwards republished, the ‘Amateur Casual’, first appeared in a reference in the PMG on 18 January. All three articles appeared after the popular ‘Occasional Notes’ section of the paper and ran to the very end of the page, leaving the reader waiting for more. They continued the tradition of anonymous investigative writing but Greenwood went further by deliberately concealing his identity and class from those around him. In keeping with the PMG’s target readership, Greenwood presented himself as a ‘gentleman’ who took considerable trouble with his disguise as a vagrant, though this was not without irony: when he gave his occupation to the first official he met as engraver ‘to account for the look of my hands’, he chose the trade he had actually performed prior to becoming a journalist.181
James Greenwood, according to Edmund Yates in the Morning Star, had already been investigating the subject of how the very poor lived: ‘Mr James Greenwood has written many descriptive papers of curious experiences of thieves, tramps, Jews &c., in the old days of the Illustrated Times, and has always shown a great talent for reproducing his impressions in a thoroughly vraisemblable manner’.182 Yates had guessed the identity of the author though he warned other journalists that the ‘sensation journals’ would try to persuade ‘liners’ (freelancers) into similar ventures. Three years after the Lambeth Workhouse piece,
180 John William Robertson-Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 145.
181
[James Greenwood], ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12 January 1866, p. 10. 182 ‘The Flaneur’, Morning Star, 22 January 1866, p. 4 (original emphasis). Robertson-Scott mentions Frederick Greenwood also had a connection with the Illustrated Times, p. 117.
James Greenwood published the Seven Curses of London, with lurid descriptions of various classes of criminality, which clearly fascinated and repelled him.
Robertson-Scott’s comment that Frederick Greenwood would have much preferred to have concentrated on fiction than editing a newspaper is interesting because the account of the casual ward that the brothers constructed for the newspaper is stylistically closer to fiction.183 The sensation novelist’s checklist is evident: disguise, personal danger, unsavoury characters, and, finally but by no means inevitably, escape and the restoration of normality. Greenwood’s use of lurid detail and cliff-hanger endings for each instalment exploited the fashion for sensationalism that was transforming the novel. Donovan and Rubery’s reproduction of the cover for the reprinted cheap edition of the articles for mass consumption shows similarities to the style of Stead’s cross-heads for ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ in the use of short, sharp language and exclamation marks, as well as the deliberate emphasis on the most shocking details.
Next page:
Fig. 1: Title Page of the 1d Pamphlet Reprint of ‘A Night in a Workhouse’
(By permission of Peter Higginbotham Collection/Mary Evans Picture Library)
183 Robertson-Scott, p. 121.
The account was deeply personalized with the reporter’s experience of being in disguise as much a feature of the story as what he uncovered. For example, James Greenwood’s fear for his personal safety was almost tangible. In the first article (12 January), he described the process of entering the casual ward, the foul bath, and the inedible piece of bread. He emphasized the kindness of ‘Daddy’ who brought him an extra rug (it was snowing in London), and who also realized he had never spent a night in an outside ward before. There are references to semi-naked men smoking ‘foul pipes’ and using obscene language but many vagrants are rolled up in the rugs, trying to sleep.
The second article, published on 13 January, built up the horror of the experience beyond physical deprivation. The men behind Greenwood’s pallet bed spat and told stories ‘so abominable that three or four decent men who lay at the farther end of the shed were so provoked that they threatened, unless the talk abated in filthiness, to get up and stop it by main force’.184
Greenwood said the scene reminded him of the fate of Sodom. In the next few paragraphs, he described a fifteen-year-old called Kay whose appearance pleased him but was completely at odds with his foul language, criminal history, and future plans. The
PMG was not published on Sundays, which meant that readers had to wait two days to find
out what happened to the author, thus building up suspense before the next instalment.
Seth Koven raises a number of objections to Greenwood’s narrative, including the suppression of the fact that he was accompanied by a friend, something that was only mentioned years later by Frederick Greenwood and W. T. Stead. Knowledge that he had a companion would have lessened the reader’s perception that he was under constant threat. Koven also notes that Greenwood teases the reader with self-censorship, hinting at details he cannot publish, which is a form of titillation rather than outrage.185 He contends that Greenwood’s main purpose in writing the piece was to expose a situation in which public
184 ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, PMG, 13 January 1866, p. 10.
185 Koven, Seth, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 46.
money was spent on wards that were used as male brothels, rather than to petition against the treatment of vagrants (p. 27). At the end of the first piece, Greenwood wrote:
Here I must break my narrative. In doing so, permit me to assure your readers [presumably addressed to the editor as a device to distance the author from the
PMG] that it is true and faithful in every particular. I am telling a story which
cannot all be told— some parts of it are far too shocking; but what I may tell has not a single touch of false colour in it.186
The last sentence of the final part included an offer for Mr Farnall, the inspector, to hear ‘horrors [...] infinitely more revolting than anything that appears in these papers’.187
Koven’s interpretation, based on his view of the Victorians’ psycho-sexual relationship to slums and poverty, is persuasive if we read the articles in relation to contemporary attitudes to homosexuality and male prostitution. Greenwood’s depiction of the young and good-looking former convict, Kay, shows him to be both fascinated and repelled. Nevertheless, Greenwood’s allusions to homosexuality were part of a range of sensational devices designed to draw the reader’s attention to the failures of the system in much the same way that descriptions of women in the collieries in 1842 employed accusation of immorality for propaganda purposes. Both emphasized the distance between writer and subject by depicting ‘outcast’ humans, removed from the rest of the population by poverty, appearance, and morality.
The articles provided Frederick Greenwood with ammunition to write editorials calling for reform. The Greenwood brothers were aware that this sensational exploit had the potential to capture the public’s imagination far more than the revelations of the squalid living conditions reported by the Lancet. In October 1867, the Pall Mall Gazette explicitly commented on the inability of government to reform public administration until journalists
186 ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, PMG, 12 January 1866, p. 10. 187 ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, PMG, 15 January 1866, p. 9.
moved public opinion to create an outcry, citing the ‘Amateur Casual’ as an example.188 James Greenwood’s reconstruction of his experience existed in a dialogic relationship with his brother’s more conventionally phrased editorials. The story also had a life beyond the three instalments in responses from readers, editorials, and follow-up articles in newspapers and periodicals, and in the dramatization of scenes from the articles in London theatres. Like Dickens, Greenwood emphasized the personal, but his focus on disguise contrasted with ‘The Uncommercial’, who waited to be invited into the homes of the poor. The ‘Amateur Casual’ emphasized his vulnerability as an undercover journalist as much as the casuals’ plight. As a result, he revealed his terror of descending into the abyss of the ‘unrespectable’. Sensationalism was carefully deployed, however, and mostly absent from the third and final instalment. This contained more personal details such as the one-legged man whose hat was taken and destroyed, whose very individual plight parallels Dickens’s use of the pauper- freemason at the end of his Wapping Workhouse article. Another example of Greenwood’s sophistication in retelling his experience is the shift of emphasis in the opening of the second article. It began with a comic song repeatedly sung by the last entrant to the casual ward that night. The words of the song did not offend Greenwood but he was haunted by the constant, raucous repetition of ‘its bestial chorus shouted from a dozen throats’.189 The word ‘bestial’ suggests it seemed inhuman or savage, characteristics he assigned several times to some of the inmates. He sensed aggression in the volume and relentlessly repetitive singing and increasingly feared that aggression could be turned against him. Another explanation (and an acknowledgement that this is a literary experiment) may be that its reference to ‘Pall Mall’ reminded him of the newspaper and heightened his fear of discovery, especially as it began just after the ward was locked for the night.
The third article gradually refocused attention away from Greenwood to the system that needed reform. The work required to ‘pay’ for the night’s lodging was poorly overseen and many of the ‘casuals’ avoided it if they could: ‘so the game continued — the honest fellows
188 [Anon.] ‘Curiosities of the Public Service’, Pall Mall Gazette, 24 October 1867, p. 1. 189 ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, PMG, 13 January 1866, p. 10.
sweating at the cranks, and anxious to get the work done and go out to look for more profitable labour, and the paupers by profession taking matters quite easy.’190
In the Seven
Curses of London (1869), Greenwood expounded his attitudes towards the ‘deserving’ and
‘undeserving’ poor. The phrase ‘paupers by profession’ indicates a view of these men as a largely criminal and degenerate underclass below the ‘honest’ labourer and one to which he — an amateur pauper — felt superior.
Public reception focused on the sensational details and the characters that Greenwood described, including ‘Daddy’, who oversaw the ward, and the adolescent ‘Kay’. The articles had a short-lived positive impact on the paper’s circulation, were reprinted in several morning daily newspapers and in the regional press, and reissued the same month as a pamphlet. ‘Daddy’ became a minor celebrity and a hero to working-class readers because of his kindness to the casuals.191 The Daily News conducted its own investigation, corroborating Greenwood’s description. It was also validated by The Times, which reprinted extracts. However, the immediate impact was to criminalize the casuals, since they were soon required to register with the police before gaining admission. Moreover, whereas the
Lancet acknowledged Twining and the Workhouse Visiting Society, the Greenwoods
emphasized the novelty of the undercover methods they had used to gain access.
Other journalists concentrated on verifying Greenwood’s experiences and findings. J. C. Parkinson advertised in The Times on 23 January 1866, for ‘any Casual Pauper who slept in the Casual Shed in the labour-shed of Lambeth Workhouse on the night of Monday, 8th January’ to contact ‘T. Thompson’ at a post office in Wandsworth Road.192
According to the account Parkinson published in Temple Bar in March 1866, one correspondent was able to supply enough details to convince Parkinson that he had been in the casual shed on the same night as James Greenwood. The ‘Real Casual’ confirmed the bed-sharing, but the nakedness
190 ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, PMG, 15 January 1866, p. 10. 191 Koven, p. 63.
192
J. C. Parkinson, ‘A Real Casual on Casual Wards’, Temple Bar, March 1866, 497-517 (p. 497). Parkinson comments that he had been investigating and writing about vagrancy for two years but the Amateur Casual revealed ‘a depth of shameless mismanagement’ that he ‘had never fathomed’.
of the men worried him far less than their filthy state. Parkinson, like the Greenwoods and like Dickens in his Wapping Workhouse article, criticized the inconsistencies of the parochial boards and called for a ‘uniform poor rate’ for London.
The PMG’s main rival in the London evening news market commented on its journalistic scoop with a satiric reversal of the theme of cross-class disguise. The penny Evening Star was the organ of progressive liberalism and the late-day counterpart to the Morning Star. The Evening Star’s target audience was less socially exclusive than that of the PMG and its fictional account concerned a costermonger who infiltrated high society and was shocked by its behaviour and manners. The author, Richard Whiteing, an apprentice engraver, admired the novelty of the ‘Amateur Casual’ and competed with a friend to produce a satirical version. Whiteing sent the article speculatively to the Star, where it was accepted by the editor, Justin McCarthy. The resulting series was republished as Mr Sprouts: His Opinions. Whiteing was a left-wing writer in contrast to the socially conservative PMG and underlined his satiric intent by writing the stories in a broad Cockney dialect, much stronger than anything reproduced by Mayhew or Dickens.193
Despite deliberately stoking notoriety, the PMG committed itself to reform in its first-page editorials criticizing the management of workhouses. The story was topical, which gave legitimacy to the series: on the same day as the first instalment of ‘A Night in the Workhouse’, Frederick Greenwood’s editorial referred to the death of an elderly pauper in the Bethnal Green Workhouse as another example of the need for reform. As Koven says, the editorial played up the sensational aspects of the story by emphasizing that there were details too shocking to be printed — ‘what was done was worse than what was said, and what was said was abominable beyond description or decent imagination; and all this unutterable foulness of word and deed passed in a room where hideous ruffians stripped
193Richard Whiteing’s autobiography, My Harvest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), indicates he and Greenwood came from similar London working-class backgrounds. Both wrote for evening papers and were novelists. Whiteing became a foreign reporter and worked for the Manchester
naked were lying huddled up together for warmth for ten or twelve hours together.’194 However, having caught the reader’s attention, Frederick Greenwood argued such behaviour could only be expected given the way in which casual wards operated. He defended the undercover investigation by pointing out that it revealed abuses that would not have come to light through a guided tour, in effect questioning the Lancet’s determination to get at the truth. This would not be fair to the persistence of the Lancet team, however. On 9September 1865, for example, the Lancet reported on the tramp ward of St Martin’s in the Field: ‘the male tramp ward, in particular, struck us with horrified disgust. We scarcely had a fair glance at it on the occasion of our first visit, being accompanied by the visiting committee [...] but a few days since we revisited it, and the impression produced on our minds is that we have seldom seen such a villainous hole’ [my emphasis].195
The word ‘villainous’ captures Greenwood’s description of Lambeth exactly. The report added that when they visited, the commissioners saw the room being cleaned by ‘a very nasty-looking warder’ and described a ‘concentrated vagrant-stink that fairly drove us out’.
Frederick Greenwood’s editorials directly tied his brother’s articles to reform legislation, legitimizing the paper’s investigations: ‘the plain truth is that the guardians are determined to defeat the Houseless Poor Act, and that unless the most vigilant and constant supervision is exercised over them they will do it.’196
The newspaper sustained the issue beyond the articles by printing, and responding to, criticisms of Greenwood’s reporting. On 19 January, the PMG published a letter from John Smeaton, a workhouse governor, criticizing the ‘Amateur Casual’ for lying to gain entry to the workhouse (which obviously ignored his purpose in doing so). Smeaton defended the treatment of the ‘depraved’ inmates of the shed in contrast to better treatment meted out to the deserving poor, and queried the report’s description in a sly postscript asking how the writer could know the colour of Kay’s hair and eyes if it was so dark in the shed. The editor
194
PMG, 16 January 1866, p. 1.
195 ‘St Martin in the Fields Infirmary’, Lancet, 9 September 1865, p. 297. 196 PMG, 16 January 1866, p. 1.
responded that the reporter was there until eleven o’clock the next day, having plenty of time to get such details and refuting his excuse for the conditions: ‘Mr Smeaton thinks that if you have to provide lodgings for a parcel of ruffians there is no harm in putting them in a stye which is suited to the development of all their vices.’ 197
Greenwood could have chosen not to print the postscript or the letter but these gave him another opportunity to highlight ‘vice’ as a means of criticizing the poor law guardians. By meeting Smeaton’s insinuations with an accusation that his own policy promoted ‘vice’, the PMG continued to exploit public appetite for the sensational aspects of the story as well as bolstering its campaign.
As a journalistic project, the ‘Amateur Casual’ gained publicity for an emerging newspaper and gave it a reputation for daring reportage and fearless campaigning. The reporter took a physical risk in investigating the situation, while the editor followed up with leaders highlighting the need for legislative change. It was topical, addressing previous campaigning articles and current legislative debates. But it also achieved the feat of speaking in different registers to different readers, ‘whispering in the ears’ of the more knowing while functioning simply as an exciting escapade for others. Its effects were achieved by dispensing altogether