| Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London Subjects: Poor -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century; Slums -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century; Sex customs -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century; Voluntarism -- England -- London -- History -- 19th century; Charities -- England --; 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. Seth Koven is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and co-editor of Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States . He has written on a variety of topics, including gender and welfare states, museum politics, sexual politics, and social reform, disability, and child welfare. |