Ward Slum

The Victorian Slum: An Enduring Myth?Author(s): David WardSource: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp.323-336Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American GeographersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2562473 .Accessed: 10/04/2013 11:43

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THE VICTORIAN SLUM: AN ENDURING MYTH? DAVID WARD

ABSTRACT. The term slum is a loose definition of the environs and behavior of the poor. Isolated from the remainder of society, slum residents are presumed to live a deviant life either by preference or cultural predisposition, or as a consequence of their deprivation. This synthesis of spatial isolation and social deviance was an inextricable element of changes in attitudes to poverty in the early nineteenth century, and has been remarkably persistent. The concept of the "Victorian Slum" has been questioned in relation to modern cities, but the concept also ap- pears to lack validity in Victorian cities.

FOR well over a century the term slum has been an evocative and durable description

of the squalid environs and pathological social conditions of the residential quarters of the poor. There has been considerable debate as to whether crowded and dilapidated quarters are a consequence or a cause of pathological social conditions, and whether all slum societies are in fact disproportionately ravaged by pathological behavior. In contrast, there has been general agreement that the isolation or segregation of the poor from the apparently civilizing influences and opportunities of the remainder of society has perpetuated in slum areas a different style of life which to some au- thorities is distinctive enough to be described as a separate culture. The formation of slums has long been associated with the "uprooting" experience of the cityward movement upon the traditional patterns of life of rural people. Al- though rural migrants must have clustered in miserable quarters from the very beginnings of urban settlement, the term slum became frequent to describe the environs and behavior of the poor only in the middle nineteenth century. During this period the accelerated rate and new scale of urbanization created cities in which the poor, removed from their familiar traditional world and completely isolated from the elevating example of their moral and social superiors, were assumed to live a sordid and deviant life in districts known as slums. The poor had long been classified according to their worthiness for charity, but once isolated from their social superiors it was believed that

Dr. Ward is Professor of Geography at the Univer- sity of Wisconsin in Madison, WI 53706.

the worthy poor would rapidly be degraded by the contaminating influences of the most depraved and discontented among them.'

In keeping with these views about the social implications of the isolation of the poor, slums became inextricably linked to descriptions of the new industrializing cities as dichotomous social orders with the rich and poor occupying distinct territories.2 When this segregated social geography was described as two nations the slums gained unambiguous recognition of their identity and of their potential to be an insurgent state. This social geographic or almost geopolitical perspective was enhanced by the frequent use of exploration narratives to reveal to the affluent the unknown, foreign, threatening, and exciting world of the slums. A geographic style provided a convenient and graphic means for novelists, journalists, reformers, and social theorists to portray the alarming consequences of the spatial separation and cultural inde- pendence of the poor. Curiously, however, this identification of slums with the social problems

1 R. Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideol- ogies of Management in the Course of Industrializa- tion (New York: John Wiley, 1956), p. 70; W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid- Victorian Generation (New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 225-92 and 296; and H. Perkins, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (Toronto: Univer- sity of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 173-83.

2 B. I. Coleman, ed., The Idea of the City in Nine- teenth Century Britain (London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), contains excerpts from Dis- raeli, Engels, Chalmers, and many other contemporary observers. For the United States: T. Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), pp. 97-128.

ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS Vol. 66, No. 2, June 1976 ( 1976 by the Association of American Geographers. Printed in U.S.A.

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3244DAVID WARD June

of industrialization and urbanization occurred almost simultaneously in several western coun- tries at a time when there were substantial variations in their levels of urbanization and social geographic patterns. Although most commen- tators were familiar with conditions in the new industrial cities in England, this simultaneous concern with the spatial separation of rich and poor in Britain, the United States, and conti- nental western Europe suggest that conditions other than or in addition to accelerated urbanization and pronounced social segregation were involved.3

The common usage of the term slum, in fact, coincided with a period of extraordinarily radical changes both in attitudes and in public policies toward poverty, not only in the growing towns but also in the increasingly commercial- ized countryside. Although viewed with concern and often hostility as a sign of moral unworthiness, poverty had long been considered endemic, providential, insoluble, and perhaps even necessary. During the early nineteenth century these pessimistic attitudes to social problems were severely questioned. It was con- fidently asserted that poverty and other disabil- ities could be reformed not by charitable relief or welfare, but by removal of the poor to institutions which were designed to instruct them in the ways of sobriety and self-discipline and to serve as an example of the orderly management of human affairs to the rest of society. Endemic social problems which antedated the rapid growth of cities were now viewed as manifestations of deviant behavior which was capable of reform. The need for reform in public policies toward the poor was dramatized by complaints about the effects of social isolation; later the failure of reform was attributed to the uncontrolled growth of slums where the poor had established and perpetuated their own deviant pattern of life. Under these circumstances many geographical descriptions of Victorian cities depended more upon changing ideas about poverty than upon any demonstrated relationship between urbanization, social seg-

3 C. Tilly, "The Chaos of the Living World," in C. Tilly,. ed., An Urban World (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), pp. 86-108; C. Tilly, L. Tilly, and R. Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930 (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1975), pp. 268-88; and W. Fischer, "Social Tensions at Early Stages of Industriali- zation," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 9 (1966), pp. 64-77.

regation, and the formation of slums. Those radical changes in early nineteenth century attitudes to poor relief which identified poverty as a reformable deviance have been reevalu- ated extremely skeptically.4 It seems appropriate and necessary to reexamine equally skeptically the social geographic assumptions upon which the need for reform and its failure were based.

PERSISTENT ASSUMPTIONS

A reexamination of Victorian ideas about slums also has modern implications, since many assumptions have been retained. Indeed, the environmentalism of later Victorians has been modified more than the social geographic or urban geopolitical thinking of early Victorians. Although the social isolation of the poor continued to excite attention, their apparent deviance increasingly was attributed to the behavioral, physiological, and even genetic effects of overcrowded living conditions.5 Since most efforts to reduce overcrowding by demolition made quite inadequate plans to provide improved housing at low rents, the displaced poor simply increased overcrowding nearby, and the self-evident benefits of reduced congestion and improved living conditions were never convinc- ingly demonstrated until well into the twentieth century, by which time the tenets of environmentalism were severely under question. Hous- ing standards for most people rose in relation to gains in real income, but urban renewal does not appear to have diminished and may well have increased the insecurity and discomfort of the poor. Quite apart from justifiable skepti-

4 D. Rothman, The Discovery of Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971), pp. 155-79 and 237-64; R. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783-1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 63-65 and 159-66; R. Pinker, Social Theory and Social Policy (London, England: Heinemann, 1971), pp. 59-84; N. Huggins, Protestants Against Poverty (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1971), pp. 3-82 and 163-201; and Bender, op. cit., footnote 2, pp. 189-94.

5 H. W. Pfautz, ed., Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 3-46; G. Sted- man-Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relation- ship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, England: The Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 127-51; and R. Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890- 1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), pp. 217-56.


1976 THE VICTORIAN SLUM 325

cism as to the material improvements attained by renewal and relocation, physical planning does not solve the more immediate predicament of the poor-their poverty.

This disenchantment with environmentalism was based not only upon the limited effects of the relocation of the poor upon social problems, but also upon the discovery that, in spite of adverse material conditions, the residents of some slums expressed satisfaction with their neighborhoods and objected, usually unsuc- cessfully, to renewal and displacement. In these districts social isolation was assumed to have encouraged the development of a local solidarity based upon dense reciprocal kinship and friendship networks and other distinctive customs and values which more closely resembled the social life of the traditional and largely rural world than that of the modem city.6 Relatively frequent laudatory comments upon the cleanliness of homes, the strength and vitality of family ties, and surprisingly low rates of sickness and death were viewed as exceptions as long as the cityward movement and the slum environment were associated with social disorganization.7 Eventually adequate, even elaborate, social organizations were identified in some slums, and criminal patterns of life once equated with social disorganization became viewed either as different bases of organization or as alternative routes of economic advancement when discrimination or limited opportunities blocked more conventional forms of social mobility.8 Those distinctive patterns of slum life often identified as "urban villages" were most emphatically displayed when they were occupied by ethnic groups who main- tained the provincial or national idiosyncrasies of the more broadly based customs of the tra-

6 H. J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class Life of Italian-Americans (New York: The Free Press, 1962), pp. 45-73; M. Fried, The World of the Urban Working Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 13-14; and C. Rosser and C. C. Harris, The Family and Social Change (London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 24.

7 D. Ward, "The Internal Spatial Structure of Im- migrant Residential Districts in the Late Nineteenth Century," Geographical Analysis, Vol. 1 (1969), pp. 337-53.

8W. F. Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 255-76; and R. F. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 161-94.

ditional world.9 Although these positive and relativistic evaluations reject many Victorian assumptions about the damaging social and physiological effects of isolation in an overcrowded urban environment, the concept of the urban village does retain the basic Victorian assumption of the persistence of a separate way of life under conditions of social isolation.

The identification of these traits as urban villages has also emphasized the apparent hope- lessness of those slums which continue to be the source and scene of social problems. Dis- cussions of slums of despair have affirmed that, notwithstanding major changes in material circumstances, social conditions and individual behavior alien and disturbing to the rest of society persist because they are learned within a "culture of poverty."'0 This culture can apparently withstand absolute reductions in its defining characteristic of poverty and consequently, relative deprivation with respect to the host society may be a more critical definition than absolute levels of impoverishment. Limited resources and low expectations are presumed to heighten interpersonal tensions and to increase mutual antagonisms, because individual advancement is perceived to be possible only at the expense of other slum residents." Cooperation or indigenous organization to reduce poverty is rarely possible, but paradoxically these same slums are viewed with alarm as sources of potentially revolutionary and certainly irrationally disruptive threats to the remainder of society.'2 This assumed political volatility is in striking contrast to the passive and benignly corrupt political behavior implied by the concept of the urban village.

9 The term "urban village" will be used in this paper to embrace all efforts to capture the distinctive social arrangements of those slums which are organized, and it is not restricted to Gans' definition in The Urban Villagers.

10 0. Lewis, "The Culture of Poverty," Trans- Action, Vol. 1 (1963), pp. 17-19; M. Clinard, Slums and Community Development: Experiments in Self- Help (New York: The Free Press, 1970), pp. 1-23; and W. B. Miller, "Lower Class Culture as a Generat- ing Milieu of Gang Delinquency," Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 14 (1958), pp. 5-19.

11 C. Jayawardena, "Ideology and Conflict in Lower Class Communities," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 10 (1967-68), pp. 413-46.

12 A. Portes, "Rationality in the Slum: An Essay in Interpretative Sociology," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 14 (1971-72), pp. 268-86; and Jayawardena, op. cit., footnote 11.


326 DAVID WARD June

Much of the discussion of nineteenth and early twentieth century slums is a record of the urban experience of people from the European countryside either in Europe or in areas over- seas, especially the United States, where Euro- peans settled. In retrospect this experience is now contrasted favorably with that of the slum residents of the rapidly growing cities of the less developed world and of the minorities who occupy the persisting slums of the developed world.13 This persistence of slum conditions is occasionally related to the absence of those hopeful characteristics identified as the urban village which eased the urban adjustment of newly arrived immigrants, provided the means of upward social mobility, and continue to be a source of satisfaction for those whose advancement has been less spectacular. Although originally formulated to question the relationship between urbanization, social disorganization, and adverse material circumstances, the concept of the urban village or the organized poor has redefined the long established distinctions of the worthy and unworthy poor. Distinctions between the organized and disorganized poor imply not only that there are un- derlying cultural bases of worthiness, but also that an assumed separation of the worthy and unworthy poor made it possible for urban villagers to avoid the more pessimistic prophesies of Victorians about the contaminating influences of the most depraved.

Neither of these contrasting descriptions of presumably generically different slums con- forms exactly to the Victorian view of slums, which combined a squalid environment, social isolation, and pathological behavior in a tidy, almost synthetic, concept. Nevertheless, both the conception of slums as urban villages and as a culture of poverty retain the most basic of Victorian assumptions about slums: the poor or slum residents are defined as a distinctive social group which, once established in social and spatial isolation from the rest of society, persists as a culture or subculture. The territorial and cultural notions which are implicit in the urban village and explicit in the culture of poverty reveal the remarkable persistence of Victorian thinking and arouse the most vehement critical commentary. Most of these critical commentaries, however, have stressed

13 Clinard, op. cit., footnote 10, pp. 24-48.

the inappropriateness of this perspective to the current predicament of the poor, whereas a de- finitive reexamination demands careful historical treatment. These revisions of the cultural definitions of slums do question persisting Vic- torian ideas in a contemporary context, however, and consequently some issues may have retrospective implications of value for an as- sessment of the validity of Victorian ideas about Victorian slums.

CONTEMPORARY REVISIONS

In spite of some refinements, most cultural definitions of poverty and slums have retained the Victorian notion that a different way of life is nurtured under circumstances of social and spatial isolation from the rest of the city. These ideas have enjoyed great longevity but they have rarely been held with unanimity. Espe- cially during periods of mass unemployment, poverty is attributed to structural problems of the economy rather than to the personal faults or cultural predispositions of those who are poor. Family instability, crime, and other traits frequently regarded as deviant are treated as temporary adaptations to economic insecurity, low status, and a sense of failure rather than as permanent commitments to values which are incompatible with material advancement.14 Many deviant traits are also specifically associated with the behavior of adolescents, which is particularly intensified but not confined to impoverished districts. Many manifestations of a different style of life are no longer viewed as consequences of aspirations different from the remainder of society, since many traits regarded as deviant are also inevitable and hopefully temporary adaptations to deprivation.1-5 These adaptations are, moreover, increasingly identified as extreme levels of social isolation created by the stressful and uncertain environment of the slum rather than as immoral and illegal activities.16 Family instability and criminal ac-

14 C. A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter Proposals (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1968), pp. 98-140.

15H. Rodman, "The Lower Class Value Stretch," Social Forces, Vol. 42 (1963), pp. 205-15; and E. Liebow, Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), pp. 208-31.

16 D. Ley, The Black Inner City as Frontier Outpost: Images and Behavior of a Philadelphia Neighborhood, Monograph No. 7 (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers, 1974), pp. 121-78.



tivities have a high visibility in the slum, but these problems occur too frequently, if less openly, in the rest of society to be defining at- tributes of the culture of the slum. Indeed, it is the confrontation of the poor with a wide range of values and behavior within and without the slum that not surprisingly makes their commit- ment to ideals dominant among the affluent somewhat relaxed.17

Recent geographical investigations of slums have revealed great internal complexity in areas frequently assumed to be homogenous socially.18 Striking local variations in perceptions of stress and uncertainty and in degrees of individual isolation and mutual suspicion appear to be related to levels of impoverishment or deprivation. In districts where deprivation is least severe mutual suspicions are relaxed enough to make possible voluntary organizations designed to confront the wider society with local problems. In contrast, chronic dis- putation and uncertainty make formal political and social organization almost impossible among the most deprived except when an ephemeral solidarity is spontaneously aroused to support essentially expressive rather than instrumental political activities.19 The collective violence of deprived minorities increasingly is viewed as a manifestation of their political awareness and organization rather than as the irrational and purposeless outbursts of disori- entated individuals.20 Slums which are frag- mented into tiny, mutually suspicious, blocks are most unlikely to be rapidly coordinated into threatening masses. Fragmentation may limit the access of slum residents to adjacent but similar districts more effectively than their deprivation limits their access to more distant sections of the city. Like other social areas in the city, these neighborhoods are defined by local perceptions of degrees of safety, respect- ability, and cleanliness, but the most apparent

17 S. B. and J. Van Til, "The Lower Class and the Future of Inequality," Growth and Change, Vol. 4 (1973), pp. 10-16.

18 Ley, op. cit., footnote 16; and W. Bunge, Fitz- gerald: Geography of A Revolution (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1971).

19Jayawardena, op. cit., footnote 11. 20 J. R. Feagin and H. Hahn, Ghetto Revolts: The

Politics of Violence in American Cities (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 47-55.

differences to outsiders need not be the dominant local bases of differentiation.21

Voluntary organizations are often viewed as manifestations of the vigor of local community. In slum districts their influence is greatly diminished by fragmentation into tiny neighborhoods and by the extreme individuation of life in a stressful environment, but modest levels of organization arouse nervous murmurings about the creation of an insurgent state.22 When voluntary organizations display volatility or militancy they are no longer viewed as stable community institutions but as symptoms of social disorganization and antisocial behavior.23 The great emphasis placed upon the breakdown of the family or the persistence of modified extended family in slums has also obscured the relationships between voluntary organizations, collective violence, and the social organization of deprived minorities. Voluntary organizations are not persisting arrangements from the traditional world, but are adaptations to urban life, whereas the well-publicized family arrangements of urban villages are viewed as a rural or primordial inheritance. As long as the Victorian notion of the social demorali- zation of urban immigrants prevailed any forms of social organization that were unexpectedly identified among the poor were not interpreted as indigenous urban behavior but were attributed to the apparent indestructability of rural or primordial patterns of life. Thus family arrangements with an apparently rural ancestry rather than the more adaptive extrafamily relationships preoccupied investigations into the social life of slums.

The maintenance of a modified extended family system in a district where material conditions and social problems might have been expected to destroy utterly any kind of domes- ticity aroused particular admiration. These ar-

21 G. D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 45-67.

22 Ley, op. cit., footnote 16, pp. 43-55; and J. Adams, "The Geography of Riots and Civil Disorders in the 1960's," Economic Geography, Vol. 48 (1972), pp. 24-42.

23 P. Craven and B. Wellman, "Formal Voluntary Organizations: Participation, Correlates and Interrela- tionships," Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 43 (1975), pp. 89-122; and J. R. Feagin, "Community Disorganiza- tion: Some Critical Notes," op. cit., footnote 23, pp. 123-46.


328 DAVID WARD June

rangements were assumed to be strikingly different from the dominant nuclear form of more affluent sections of the population.24 Recently, however, it has been suggested that differences in the density, frequency, propinquity, and content of contacts between relatives are not strongly related to socioeconomic status, and that the distinctiveness of family arrangements which are central to the concept of the urban village may have been exaggerated.25 Irrespec- tive of socioeconomic status, both immediate and distant relatives play a role in the adjustment of most urban migrants whenever they are accessible.26 The greater resources of the affluent support lines of mutual dependence between generations over large distances. When- ever residential satisfaction is recorded in slums, it is attributed to social interaction and lines of mutual dependence with neighbors who might be relatives or friends rather than the exclusively kinship relationships.27 Gans' de- finitive study of the urban village did not relate close-knit family arrangements to primordial patterns of behavior, but argued that although these kinship attachments overlapped with most intense social and personal interaction, personal criteria for inclusion were always involved.28 The vigor of voluntary organizations may also depend upon a modest range and in- terspersal of people from a broad range of lower social strata, whereas most discussions of "urban villages" have emphasized the extremely limited social range of a peer group society. The intensity of family or neighborly

24 p. Wilmott and M. Young, Family and Kinship in East London (London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 76-118; E. Bott, Family and Social Network (London, England: Tavistock Publications, 1957), pp. 112-26; and E. C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1958), p. 85.

25 Especially several articles republished in E. Shanas and G. F. Streib, eds., Social Structure and the Family: Generational Relations (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1965), pp. 62-112; Rosser and Harris, op. cit., footnote 6, p. 233; and M. Aiken and D. Goldberg, "Social Mobility and Kinship: A Reexamination of the Hypothesis," American Anthro- pologist, Vol. 71 (1969), pp. 261-70.

26E. Litwak, "Extended Family Relations in a Democratic-Industrial Society," in Shanas and Streib, op. cit., footnote 25, pp. 290-323; and C. Tilly and C. H. Brown, "On Uprooting, Kinship and the Auspices of Migration," International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Vol. 7 (1967), pp. 139-64.

27 Fried, op. cit., footnote 6, pp. 106-20. 28 Gans, op. cit., footnote 6, pp. 74-103.

relationships may thus be a response to the eclipse of voluntary organizations with the departure of the upwardly mobile rather than a persisting pattern of life. Whatever their ancestry, the modified extended family arrangements of the poor are probably far closer to those of the remainder of the city than to the classical extended family of the traditional world.

These findings have also been interpreted in such a way that the social organization of slums is viewed as an adaptation to the complexities and scale of urban life, whereas in their search for socially homogenous suburbs the affluent aspire to recreate the more imagined simplicity and harmony of a traditional community.29 Although a modified extended family arrange- ment may have flourished in some poor neighborhoods, most residents had many more nonfamilial social relationships than in the "purified" community of the homogenous sub- urb, where community interaction and participation rarely attain their anticipated richness. Perhaps the tendency to identify and almost romanticize patterns of life in the slum as cultural persistences from the traditional world was rooted in a more general disenchantment with modern social life and an elusive search for a lost community solidarity in an imagined and idealized past. This historical myth of dis- appearing community solidarity not only as- sumes that human groups ought to live in solidary communities, but also hampers the analysis of changes in the bases of social solidarity.30

Voluntary organizations, frequently based upon political, religious, or group loyalties, and without clear roots in traditional societies, may have played the most critical role in the emergence in some slums of a well-defined sense of identity and satisfaction. Neighborhood organizations draw the attention of the remainder of society to the specific and local needs of the district. In plural societies, where these organizations are based upon minority group identities, they provide for the first time the voluntary basis of broader loyalties and an

29 R. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Iden- tity and City Life (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 50-84.

30 C. Tilly, "Communities," in Tilly, op. cit., footnote 3, p. 187; R. Williams, The Country and The City (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 231; and Sennett, op. cit., footnote 29, pp. 227-49.



affirmation of group dignity amongst migrants whose territorial and social loyalties had pre- viously been extremely local.3' Voluntary organizations encouraged the maintenance of the historic customs and extolled the achievements of a group, and thereby tended to support the persistence of group traditions, but the voluntary institutions, which served as patrons of these cultural activities, were clearly adaptations to urban life. The persistence of rural traditions, especially when they are enriched by contrast and competition in plural societies, imparts an exotic cultural content to slums, but without voluntary organizations, which have no genealogy in these cultures, the traditions would probably have withered away. The inter- relationships between group identity and the social organization of slums is clearly complex, but all groups have attempted with varying degrees of success to counter the extreme social isolation of the most deprived by voluntary organizations. Future investigation must deter- mine whether there are greater propensities to organize on the basis of culture or of antece- dent experiences, skills, financial resources, and discriminatory treatment of different groups.

These observations suggest that the concepts of the urban village and culture of poverty do not necessarily describe generically different kinds of slums, but rather are attempts to confront the paradox that the poor are either disorganized and deviant or organized and traditional. Slum areas display a range of conditions varying from extreme individuation and insecurity to precocious levels of voluntary activ- ity made all the more remarkable by the limited resources available to sustain them. Neither the problems of individuation nor propensities to support voluntary organizations appear to be cultural traits, although different minority groups may have comparative advantages or disadvantages. Patterns of deviant behavior associated with the culture of poverty and modified extended family arrangements attributed

31 R. Breton, "Institutional Completeness of Ethnic Communities and the Personal Relations of Immi- grants," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 70 (1964), pp. 193-205; J. F. Barton, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians and Slovaks in an American City 1890-1915 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1975), pp. 64-90; H. Nelli, The Italians of Chicago: 1880-1930 (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1970), pp. 156-200; and Craven and Weller, op. cit., footnote 23, pp. 89-122.

to urban villages no longer seem to be con- vincing bases for a cultural definition of different types of slums. Elaborate taxonomies have been proposed to accommodate the range and complexity of social conditions among slum dwellers, but the more restrictive definitions would exclude urban villages.32 Urban villagers are defined as working class or lower strata people in regular employment who face impoverishment only under conditions of reces- sion. The term "lower class" has been reserved for those whose frequent unemployment ex- poses them to almost chronic stress. The social patterns of those in low-paid but regular employment are interpreted as being much closer to those of the affluent society than those of the improverished unemployed. This refinement is founded upon notions of employment and deprivation rather than culture, but nevertheless it maintains the persisting desire to identify a hopefully homogenous deprived group. Princi- ples of stratification, like those upon which social areas are based, tend to aggregate groups and districts on the basis of data which are insensitive to extremely local variations in the perceived and experienced stressfullness of the environment and in propensities to organize.33 It is not surprising that the internal spatial complexity of slums remains virtually unknown and, as in the early Victorian period, the unknown or unfamiliar attracts often altruistic geopolitical observations on the role of isolation in the perpetuation of a different way of life. Persisting Victorian conceptions of slums are clearly attractive and appealing to geographers, since they unambiguously relate social conditions to territorial patterns, but so many Victorian ideas about poverty and slums have been severely challenged that the social geographic assumptions upon which their ideas were based should also be skeptically re- viewed.34

RETROSPECTIVE IMPLICATIONS

A rejection of Victorian assumptions about poverty and slums on the basis of controversial

32 Clinard, op. cit., footnote 10, pp. 43-48; and S. M. Miller and F. Reissman, "The Working Class Subculture: A New View," Social Problems, Vol. 9 (1961), pp. 86-97.

33 Ley, op. cit., footnote 16, pp. 211-38; and Bunge, op. cit., footnote 18, p. 120.

34 E. Wolpert and J. Wolpert, "From Asylum to Ghetto," Antipode, Vol. 6 (1974), pp. 63-76.


330 DAVID WARD June

and incomplete observations of modern cities does not necessarily prove that Victorians were unjustified in their views about their cities. Any complete evaluation of the cultural bases of slums must examine the generational transmis- sion of well-defined traits which may have per- sisted for several generations and have been altered only in the recent past. For example, the culture of poverty may be most likely to flourish during the early so-called free enter- prise stage of capitalism when impoverished migrants form a majority of the urban population and when more rigid bases of social stratification and ethnic discrimination create more emphatic segregation. The appetites of today's poor would probably have contrasted more dramatically with the thrift ethic and restrained consumption of Victorians than with the ex- travagant consumption of contemporary society.35 Throughout the nineteenth century collective violence was disturbingly frequent, and it must have provided stronger grounds to be- lieve in the prospect of a potential insurgent state than would be justified today.36 The pio- neering centers of industrial capitalism re- cruited their migrants from a countryside that had been far less exposed to life in the new cities, and their migrants were more likely to retain unchanged elements of the traditional world than their successors whose lives were altered by the diffusion of urban influences long before they moved to the city.

These retrospective speculations are no more consistent with recent reinterpretations of Vic- torian views on the relationships between poverty, family organization, social stratification, and urbanization than they are with the revisions of persisting Victorian assumptions in relation to modern slums. In spite of variations in the rates and conditions of urbanization, the early and widespread acceptance within the western world of a close relationship between urbanization and social disorganization suggests that either early nineteenth century cities experienced a simple but universal social geographic change in which the poor were sud-

35 Miller and Reissman, op. cit., footnote 32, pp. 86-97.

36 C. Tilly, "Collective Violence in European Per- spective," in H. D. Graham and T. R. Gurr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Com- parative Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 4-45; and R. M. Brown, "Historical Patterns of Vio- lence in America," ibid., pp. 45-84.

denly deprived of the influence of their social betters or that these changes were inferred from new views about poverty and society which were widespread. The persistence of either a deviant and disorganized pattern of life or the maintenance of rural social patterns under conditions of social and spatial isolation as- sumes a chronological coincidence and related- ness of several critical social changes, increased rates of urbanization, and a radical restructur- ing of the social geography of the city. These chronological assumptions involved a drastic foreshortening of social changes which were started some three or four centuries before the industrial revolution. The world which early Victorians felt they had lost was that of the Middle Ages and they tended to assume that this world had been lost in their own lifetimes.37

To Victorians slums were a consequence of the presumably recent spatial and social isolation of the poor which resulted in the emergence of a deviant and threatening way of life. In short, a new social geographic pattern im- parted an alarming new dimension to poverty. Quite apart from the condescending assumption that social isolation deprived the poor of the moral influence of their social superiors, the affluent had established exclusive residential quarters long before the nineteenth century, not only in the growing towns but also in the countryside, where the rural poor had been "landscaped" out of view by estate improvement.38 The dominant change in the social geography of nineteenth century cities was not the separation of the tiny minority of the affluent and socially prominent from the vast majority of urban residents, but rather a complex, internal residential differentiation of the less affluent majority.39 This process had, however, scarcely started during the second quarter of the nineteenth century when the term slum and the related dichotomous social geographic patterns of the city were most frequently publicized. Although there were unquestionably con- centrations of extremely destitute people often

37W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 1; and P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (Lon- don, England: Methuen, 1965), pp. 228-40.

38 Williams, op. cit., footnote 30, pp. 60-67 and 96- 107.

39 D. Ward, "Victorian Cities: How Modem?" Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 1 (1975), pp. 135-51.



squatting on poorly drained land within the city or on the still undeveloped urban fringe, until quite late in the nineteenth century, far larger areas housed a mixture of lesser professionals, petty proprietors, master craftsmen, journey- men, laborers, and domestic outworkers.40 This weak residential differentiation of the vast mass of urban residents, who were neither chroni- cally destitute nor comfortably secure, may have involved some small-scale block by block or street and alley segregation but the diverse range of people in the lower social strata for whom Victorians had a plethora of terms certainly lived in frequent contact with one an- other.41

This residential pattern reflected in part the survival of traditional bases of social distinction which did not require the reinforcement of an appropriate address, whereas later in the century new uncertain bases of status encouraged residence in socially more homogenous districts. The persistence of and perhaps even the weakening of low levels of residential differentiation was also encouraged by the growing mutual interests of many traditional occupa- tional groups, whose status and security were threatened by industrialization, and those for whom the rewards of new industrialized employment were inadequate. This mutuality of interest or "class consciousness" was expressed not only by residential propinquity and inter- spersal of a broad range of less affluent occu- pations, but also by intermarriage and common membership of voluntary organizations.42 Nev- ertheless, the collective protests and violence which periodically erupted in early nineteenth century cities were often attributed to the criminal and dangerous classes who, in spite of their depraved and disorderly ways, were thought capable of sustained rebellion and possibly an insurgent state. Most of the leadership and

40 Ward, op. cit., footnote 39, pp. 143-51. 41 M. G. Himmelfarb, "Mayhew's Poor: A Prob-

lem of Identity," Victorian Studies, Vol. 14 (1971), pp. 308-20; and R. S. Neale, "Class and Class Con- sciousness in Early Nineteenth Century England: Three Classes or Five?" Victorian Studies, Vol. 12 (1968), pp. 24-42.

42 J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Rev- olution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London, England: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1974), pp. 125-60; and S. B. Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), pp. 49-78.

much of the support of these collective protests were in fact provided by the most articulate and prestigous groups within the less affluent majority of urban residents.43

Even the volatile and unpredictable mobs of eighteenth century cities, which were more likely to have been composed of the most destitute and footloose elements than the more pur- poseful protests of the nineteenth century, were frequently reactions to specific issues rather than irrational and spontaneous eruptions. During the nineteenth century these "reactive" collective actions, which sought to maintain rights that were being eroded by social and economic changes, became "proactive" movements and claimed rights that had not previ- ously been enjoyed.44 Whereas most "reactive movements were founded upon local communities, "proactive" movements were based upon associations which federated on re- gional and often national scales. During the early nineteenth century, when the segregation of social groups first aroused concern, collective violence occurred most frequently in towns where long established local handicrafts re- acted to changes in industrial organization. These towns were the least likely to have developed the extreme social and spatial isolation of the poor to which the violence was in part attributed. Neither the uprooted newly arrived urban migrant nor the extremely destitute, long isolated from the moral influence of their remote social superiors, initiated collective protests; when these groups did partici- pate, they affirmed not their social isolation but their involvement in the affairs of state. The identification of these protests with so-called dangerous classes isolated from the civilizing and orderly ways of conventional society obscured not only notions of worthiness among the poor but also long established traditional distinctions among the lower social strata. Un- der these circumstances, the social geographic assumptions upon which new attitudes to the poor were based may be regarded as geopolitical myths. At a time when collective protest probably recorded the vigor of broadly based voluntary organizations, a dichotomous social

43 Tilly, op. cit., footnote 3, pp. 86-108; and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), pp. 491- 780.

44 Tilly, op. cit., footnote 3, pp. 50-51.


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geographic pattern provided a simplified model of social isolation which, to insensitive and compassionate observers alike, explained both the threatening disruptive potential and diminished worthiness of the poor.

THE DEVIANCE OF POVERTY

The placement of the poor in society had long been the subject of discourses. With the formulation of the term slum Victorians emphasized the spatial placement of the poor and used this placement as a partial explanation of poverty itself. If social and spatial isolation was not the most damaging predicament of most urban residents, how did notions of the deviancy of poverty become inextricably associated with direct consequences of social geographic changes? The most revealing suggestions are in recent reevaluations of changes in attitudes to poor relief during the early nineteenth century.45 Poverty and other social ills were no longer viewed as providential and endemic, but rather as self-afflicted and reformable deviances. During this same period, when reform of the poor law was debated, the effects of social isolation became a source of concern. The association of poverty with a whole range of other apparent deviances like insanity, immorality, disorderliness, insobriety, personal fail- ings, and moral unworthiness was, like the residential exclusivity of the socially prominent, long established before the nineteenth century.46 A concern with moral eligibility for relief dates back at least to the secularization of charity which began before the Reformation. Tolerant interpretations of worthiness were encouraged by the endemic nature of poverty and the necessity of charity for the salvation of the rich. Even secular political economists, who viewed cheap labor as the basis of national prosperity, were concerned with the need to guarantee the subsistence of the poor lest a re-

45 Rothman, op. cit., footnote 4; Mohl, op. cit., footnote 4; Pinker, op. cit., footnote 4; Huggins, op. cit., footnote 4; and Tilly, op. cit., footnote 3, pp. 86-108.

46 W. J. Courtenay, "Token Coinage and the Ad- ministration of Poor Relief During the Late Middle Ages," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3 (1972), pp. 275-95; R. M. Kingdon, "Social Welfare in Calvin's Geneva," American Historical Review, Vol. 76 (1971), pp. 50-69; N. Z. Davis, "Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy: The Case of Lyon," Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, Vol. 5 (1968), pp. 217-75.

source be lost by starvation. The distinction of the incapacitated or helpless worthy poor and the morally depraved but able-bodied unworthy poor was in practice of less consequence than residency. It was the nonresident poor, and especially vagrants, who aroused local hostility and faced eviction or detention.47

By the beginning of the nineteenth century there was growing impatience with the notions of the inevitability and necessity of poverty. Poor relief, which failed to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy poor and in- hibited labor mobility, was held responsible for the dependency of the poor upon charitable subsidies. Poverty was regarded as a freely chosen condition, and poor relief should be used as a deterrent rather than encouraging and subsidizing that choice.48 What has been described as "the discovery of asylum" repre- sented the confident expectation that self-discipline and self-reliance could be taught and in- firmities cured by removing social deviants, whether impoverished, insane, improvident, or sick, to appropriate public institutions.49 Al- though these ideals were never successfully or completely fulfilled, and although more modest aspirations aroused strong resistance, poor law reform acted upon the long established principle of moral eligibility for relief, and consequently poverty became the most frequently and heavily penalized form of deviancy.50

Moral judgments about the deviancy of poverty were not new to the early nineteenth century, but the assumed social isolation of impoverished deviants attracted much attention once poverty had been identified as a freely chosen and reformable rather than an endemic or providential condition. If the poor were reformable then the example of their social superiors would clearly supplement gains made by removal and correction, and the location of some of the new institutions in affluent sections of the city was viewed as a means of furthering

47 Rothman, op. cit., footnote 4, pp. 3-56; and P. Clark, "The Migrant in Kentish Towns, 1580-1640," in P. Clark and P. Slack, Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 (London, England: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 149.

48 Huggins, op. cit., footnote 4, pp. 177-80; and Pinker, op. cit., footnote 4, p. 19.

49 Rothman, op. cit., footnote 4. 50 Pinker, op. cit., footnote 4, p. 19.



education by example.51 If the deviant ways of the poor were freely chosen then their social isolation would deprive them of contact with those who practiced self-dependence, and the growing appeal of impoverished life styles was attributed to an unfortunate social separation. The com- pression of the retrospective vision of early Victorians was most convenient. If the longevity of the social separation had been admitted, it would have been necessary to explain how the poor had contained their deviancies in the absence of moral example in earlier centuries. Instead social isolation, as an obstacle to reform, was assumed to be a dominant cause of the deviancy of poverty, and the term slum came to express the mysterious and fearful consequences of the social and spatial isolation of the poor and the dominant preoccupation of social reformers.

Neither removal and detention in correc- tional institutions which rapidly assumed a purely custodial character nor the strict appli- cation of moral principles of eligibility for relief reformed the poor or for that matter society as a whole. The slum came to symbolize not the direct personal responsibility of the poor for their deviance but the compounding effects of overcrowded quarters, unemployment, social injustice, ignorance of divine grace and salvation, and other circumstances beyond their control.52 Although efforts to coordinate charity, to reform housing regulations, to provide social insurance, and to evangelize a social or political gospel were rooted in different philosophical traditions and had distinctive ultimate objectives, all retained the basic Vic- torian assumption about the social isolation of the slum and the deviancy of poverty. Environ- mental improvement, administrative efficiency, and social benefits would be of minor consequence unless the poor were concurrently edu- cated in the ways of self-help or elevated by a gospel of salvation. Although many social reformers felt a personal responsibility for the

51 R. Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890 (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 22-23.

52A. F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press), especially pp. 17-19 and 244-45; R. H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in America (New York: New York University Press, 1956), pp. 70-129; and Stedman-Jones, op. cit., footnote 5, pp. 286-313.

immorality and indifference of society at large for the predicament of the poor, many also assumed that, once their reforms had been attained, persisting poverty would have to be treated as a behavioral deviance and subjected to sanctions if not detention. Those skeptical of the value of reform considered poverty to be the freely chosen preference of depraved people, and assumed that self-dependence was a universal endowment which had no need of moral education. Nevertheless, these skeptics still felt compelled to publicize their ideas in a manner which they hoped might arouse the poor from their sloth.53

The deviancy of the residents of Victorian slums was thus rooted in the social geographic assumptions of a radical shift in attitudes to poverty. These assumptions were retained in judgements about slums throughout the century in spite of great changes and a great diver- sity in reform objectives. Social geographic assumptions, which had had little validity when the new doctrines of poor relief were promul- gated, appeared prophetic as the increased residential differentiation of the less affluent isolated the poor from the not-so-poor. This belated synchronization of social geographic patterns and conceptions of poverty well might explain the persistence of early Victorian ideas. Although the isolation of a diminishing but persistent minority of slum residents continued to impress twentieth century observers, a new deviancy was identified in the slums which was quite different from that which had appalled Victorians for so long. Apparently, a social order existed in the slums which, in spite of its deviancy, commanded respect.

THE DEVIANCE OF PRIMORDIALITY

The departure of the economically secure and socially mobile from districts which had once housed a wide range of less affluent people tended to isolate the most deprived and least mobile segments of the population. The timing of this process was complicated by the rates and dimensions of upward social mobility and by the scale and circumstances of migration. The increased isolation of the most deprived was not, however, viewed in quite the alarming fashion that early Victorians speculated upon the assumed separation of the rich

53 Bendix, op. cit., footnote 1, pp. 99-116.


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and poor. Nevertheless, this more muted and later separation of the less affluent may have had critical effects upon the viability and effec- tiveness of those informal networks of voluntary organizations and mutual aid societies which played a far more important role in the social advancement of the poor than had the moral example of their remote social superiors.54 These extrafamilial networks, which were often decimated by the diminished range and size of their clientele, attracted less interest than did the density, propinquity, and longevity of contact among extended kin. To Victo- rian reformers the inevitable dissolution of the family under slum conditions had been one of the most shocking consequences of social isolation and adverse material conditions. In particular, justifications of reform speculated on the inevitable promiscuity of overcrowded conditions and intimated sexual abominations whose full dimensions were left to the imagination, since full disclosure would offend public decency.55 It was therefore comforting when it was dis- covered that the survival of the family had helped the poor withstand and cope with their discomfort and deprivation.56

In view of strong assumptions about the deviancy of slum residents, it was not surprising that conventional patterns of life would be overlooked in favor of the distinctive or pe- culiar. The strength, range, and density of family contacts within slums was assumed to be a modified form of the extended family of the traditional world, and thus the social life of the slum could be interpreted as being closer to that of the recent or remote rural ancestors of the poor than that of modern urban society.57 In short, social isolation may have pro-

54 Foster, op. cit., footnote 42, pp. 201-50; R. Q. Gray, "Styles of Life, the Labour Aristocracy and Class Relations in Later Nineteenth Century Edin- burgh," International Review of Social History, Vol. 18 (1973), pp. 428-52; Nelli, op. cit., footnote 31, pp. 156-200; and S. B. Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 167-68.

55A. S. Wohl, "Introduction," in A. Mearns, Bitter Cry of Outcast London (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), pp. 9-50.

56 W. T. Elsing, "Life in New York Tenement Houses as seen by a City Missionary," in R. A. Woods, ed., The Poor in Great Cities (New York: Scribners, 1895), pp. 42-85.

57 Bott, op. cit., footnote 24, pp. 99-126.

tected some of the poor from the modernizing influences of the rest of the city. Their distinctiveness was based not upon their moral breakdown but the persistence of a different social order. Contemporary discussions of modern slums have questioned the primordial distinctiveness of their social arrangements. These doubts have been confirmed and elaborated by recent historical research. Reevaluations of the rural family patterns of western Europe suggest that even before and certainly during the industrial revolution, the classical highly sedentary extended family associated with the traditional world had already been substantially modified; nuclear arrangements were not unusual, and were especially prevalent among the poor.58 The dislocations of modernization were experienced by many rural settlements long before the acceleration in the cityward movement over the past century and a half. Modified extended families in slum districts had to be considered a revival of primordial arrangements rather than a direct cultural transplantation to the city.59

After generations of dislocations in the countryside and deprivation in the slums, modest gains in material security made the residential stability of the poor and the propinquity of their relatives possible. Primordial arrangements presumably emerged from these highly sedentary conditions which the slums shared with the villages of the remote past. In the absence of direct genealogical links between village and city, residential stability supported a primordial social order where earlier in the century, chaos and disorganization had prevailed. These changes have also been related to the diminution of the frequent collective protests and violent confrontations of the early and middle nineteenth century and the more cerebral but occasionally xenophobic political appetites of the turn of the century.60 The recent documentation of high rates of population turnover in nineteenth century cities has revealed that in the United States the poor moved frequently from city to city and were not "locked" in the same slum for generations, whereas in the twentieth century the highest rates of interurban mobility are among middle income people.6' The confinement of the poor

58 Laslett, op. cit., footnote 37, p. 21. 59 Rosser and Harris, op. cit., footnote 6, pp. 24-25. 60 Foster, op. cit., footnote 42, pp. 201-50. 61Thernstrom, op. cit., footnote 53, pp. 243-46.



to the same districts for generations would have been more consistent with mid-Victorian wor- ries about social isolation but without this confinement, family arrangements based upon residential stability could not have flourished. The reduction in population turnover rates among the poor might then account for the stabilization of family life.

This almost primordial association of the extended family with conditions of residential stability has been questioned by recent documentation of the intensification of kinship relationships during the uprooting experience of the cityward movement which frequently involved several distinct migrational compo- nents.62 For many urban migrants, kinfolk were a vital source of modest reciprocal aid and the dispersal of relatives far from destroy- ing old relationships provided a framework of destinations among which individual families could move with greater security. The advantages of reciprocal aid under circumstances of death, sickness, unemployment, or migration intensified the calculative economic meaning of blood relationships. Coresidency of two complete lineally or laterally related families was rare, but the frequency with which aged and young relatives coresided with nuclear families suggests that the family was an important and immediate form of insurance. Kinship links, as an adaptation to the insecurities and high mobility of urban residence, were not apparently restricted to the lowest strata, for among middle income families in late nineteenth century Chicago, those households with coresiding kin proved to be economically more successful and more adapted to the uncertainties of urban life than those with exclusively nuclear arrangements and relationships.63 The modified extended family arrangements of slums were more probably an adaptation to the circumstances of urban life than a primordial response to residential stability, since these arrangements were not confined to the most sedentary and impoverished social groups.

This primordial deviancy of slum residents retained long-established but questionable social geographic assumptions about social and spatial isolation and added to them equally du-

62 M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 136-79.

63 Sennett, op. cit., footnote 51, pp. 59-70.

bious spatial assumptions about the effects of the propinquity of relatives on family arrangements. The major unresolved interpretative issue is the effect of the reduction in rates of population turnover among the poor and their increased isolation from the vast numbers of less affluent people among whom they once lived. If high levels of population persistence and increased social homogeneity in slum districts was accompanied by a decline in extrafamilial relationships, then any further intensification of kinship linkages would represent not a continued adaptation to urban circumstances but the beginnings of that withdrawal or exclusion from full participation in urban society often described as alienation.4 The increased exclusivity of kinship relationships could aggravate mutual suspicion among neighbors and create the social isolation and stress associated with slums of despair. This emphasis on modified extended family arrangements sustained a more positive and sensitive perspective of slum life than that which had long assumed that poverty was a deviant way of life based upon criminality and depravity, but those slum residents with stable family arrangements were still regarded as a distinct group whose more acceptable deviancy was interpreted as a primordial response to residential stability in social isolation. The deviance of primordiality, however, rests upon two false assumptions, first, that residential propinquity and stability will alone support extranuclear family relationships, and second, that these familial relationships are the dominant ingredients of residential satisfaction under adverse circumstances of the slums.

The concept of the Victorian slum is based upon a sociospatial definition of the poor as a deviant group whose reform was obstructed by their isolation from the remainder of society. The synthesis of this concept was based upon new attitudes to poverty and assumptions about changes in the social geography of the city. The internal social and residential complexity of the less affluent majority of urban residents was obscured by the geopolitical simplifications of the new views of poverty. Whatever merits

64 Sennett, op. cit., footnote 29, pp. 50-84; R. E. Pahl, Patterns of Urban Life (London, England: Longmans, 1970), p. 34; and R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1971), pp. 10-33.


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this perspective may have for contemporary views of urban poverty, it had little validity at the time of its formulation in the early nineteenth century. Social and spatial isolation also strongly influenced the formulation of an ad- ditional but more flattering specification of the deviant life style of the slums. By the late nineteenth century the internal residential differentiation of the less affluent had resulted in the emergence of more homogenous social areas, but the newly defined distinctiveness of the poor was based primarily upon their modified extended family arrangements. Quite apart from the historical and contemporary reevaluations of this new identity, family arrangements are an unreliable basis to distinguish not only

the poor from the rest of society but also the worthy and organized poor from the disorganized and presumably unworthy poor. In stressing the broadest summaries of the social geography of modern cities we may unwittingly maintain a Victorian tradition which tended to relate imagined levels of isolation and homogeneity among the poor to assumptions about their deviancy. Revisions of the Victorian basis of our thinking about poverty have been mainly addressed to modern cities. In questioning these ideas in nineteenth century cities, this retrospective commentary suggests that Vic- torian ideas were no more appropriate to un- derstand their own slums than those of today.


Article Contentsp. 323p. 324p. 325p. 326p. 327p. 328p. 329p. 330p. 331p. 332p. 333p. 334p. 335p. 336

Issue Table of ContentsAnnals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp. 199-336Front Matter [pp. ]Climatology for Geographers [pp. 199-222]An Alternative Biogeography [pp. 223-241]Migration to an American Frontier [pp. 242-265]Humanistic Geography [pp. 266-276]Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld [pp. 277-292]Alternatives to a Positive Economic Geography [pp. 293-308]Magic and Space [pp. 309-322]The Victorian Slum: An Enduring Myth? [pp. 323-336]Back Matter [pp. ]

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