In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, ...
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In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation." Slumming" allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. "Slumming" elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted - and continue to confront - in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
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Add this copy of Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian to cart. $7.73, like new condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Princeton University Press.
Add this copy of Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian to cart. $7.74, good condition, Sold by Bookmonger.Ltd rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hillside, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Princeton University Press.
Add this copy of Slumming Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London to cart. $17.00, very good condition, Sold by Michener & Rutledge Bookseller rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Baldwin City, KS, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Princeton University Press.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 0691115923. Name on front free endpaper, light crease to first 50 or so pages, otherwise text clean and solid; light wear to dust jacket with crease in front flap; 8vo 8"-9" tall; 392 pages.
