BAVS @ Home: Violence, Vaccination, and Immigration in the Socio-Literary Imaginary
A BAVS@Home event that explores Violence, Vaccination, and Immigration in the Victorian Socio-Literary Imaginary
About this event
Speakers: Sarah Wise (University of California, London Study Center); Garth Wenman-James (University of Surrey); Seth Koven (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
Host: Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey)
Format: Via Zoom
Abstracts:
Sarah Wise (University of California, London Study Center), ‘“Enterprising realists”: tracing the influence of Charles Booth’s Life and Labour on slum fiction’
Booth’s attempt to map the socio-economic make-up of London gave a new note to late-Victorian re-imaginings of the urban poor. With regard to the fiction of Arthur Morrison in particular, a chronology can be traced of mutually influencing individuals visiting and writing about a particular London slum, the Old Nichol in central East London. Booth’s own sources for Old Nichol data were the same as Morrison’s – two churchmen who were active in the Nichol in the 1880s. Examining this timeline reveals a web of interconnecting attitudes towards the poor of the Nichol, and towards class relations in general. Booth’s impact is also, I shall argue, present – though oblique and diffuse – in the slum fictions of Margaret Harkness, Richard Whiteing and Clarence Rook, who, like Morrison, gained a new confidence from Life and Labour to introduce a sociological (or rather, pseudo-sociological) note into their work – classifying, typifying, and feeling free to include deeply shocking images of squalor and social dysfunction.
Garth Wenman-James (University of Surrey), ‘But I am not an alien. I am a pure Cockney’: Hybridity and the Cockney Jew in Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892)’
This paper will interrogate Israel Zangwill’s slum novel Children of the Ghetto (1892) to uncover its representation of East End life through Cockney-Yiddish dialects and the Cockney-Jewish identity of the novel’s protagonist, Esther Ansell. Zangwill himself identified as a Cockney Jew; in reflecting on Zangwill’s life, Joseph Leftwich (1952) highlights his repeated declarations that ‘I am a Jew, of course […] But I am not an alien. I am a pure Cockney’ (p. 86). Born to Jewish immigrants and raised in the East End, Zangwill’s self-proclaimed Cockney-Jewishness is a strategy that deconstructs ‘the binary opposition of racial and cultural groups [as a] homogenous polarized political consciousness’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 207). In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s Cockney-Jew identity is an integral element of his novel. Zangwill constructs Esther and the ghetto space in a manner that re-writes the narratives that surrounded East End Jewish communities in the turbulent period before the 1905 Aliens Act. Children of the Ghetto anticipates the Act by presenting Cockney-Jew hybrid identities as a method to resist attempts to alienate East End Jews. In doing so, Zangwill reflects on the role of slum fiction itself in constructing concepts of Jewishness in the cultural imagination of nineteenth-century London.
Seth Koven (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey), ‘Why so many of the Victorian poor were anti-vaccinators: a Victorian woman of letters on medical despotism and Christian conscience’
Koven’s talk foregrounds the centrality of Christian conscience in the literary and social activist writings of the Victorian feminist, poet, novelist, and anti-vaccinator, Mary Catherine Hume-Rothery. She and her husband William were among the most visible and outspoken leaders of the campaign to abolish compulsory smallpox vaccination while denouncing the Contagious Diseases Act for outraging the bodies of poor women. The Hume-Rotherys’ skill at articulating affective logics and mobilizing political emotions through their stories of state-mandated violations of the bodily integrity of women and the children of the poor fueled a robust grassroots anti-vaccination movement. Their arguments about gender, poverty, medical despotism and the state help to explain why so many of the Victorian working poor were such ardent anti-vaccinators.
This event is part of the BAVS@Home series hosted by the British Association for Victorian Studies. Tickets are free to all BAVS members and just £5 for non-members.
This post has been re-published by permission from the
BAVS Postgraduates Blog. Please see the original post at https://victorianist.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/bavs-home-violence-vaccination-and-immigration-in-the-socio-literary-imaginary/