Observation, Surveillance, Voyeurism, and the Making of the Middle Class in Victorian England

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, the rise of industrialism and the accelerated enclosure of farmable land combined to drive England's rural population into rapidly growing urban centers. London, in particular, was ill-equipped to deal with the resulting population boom, and laborers and vagrants were forced into the twisting alleyways and hidden courtyards of the slums, where poorly constructed housing and a lack of sanitation created dangerous living conditions. The newly emerging middle class, anxious about their close proximity to crime and disease, was eager to both see into the hidden slums, and draw their inhabitants out into the light of day. This resulted in two social trends; first, civic establishments like parks and museums were opened to members of the lower classes where, it was hoped, they would observe and emulate the behavior of their “betters” and, in turn, become more readily observable themselves. The second trend was a proliferation of writers, whether social scientists, journalists, novelists, or philanthropists, who entered the slums to observe the circumstances of poverty for themselves. The newspaper articles, sanitation reports, guidebooks, religious tracts, novels, and political cartoons that resulted from these expeditions repeatedly engage in three ways of looking at the lower classes: observation, surveillance, and voyeurism. All this watching, reading, and writing resulted in an extensive body of text in which the middle class constructed an overview of poverty and the poor in London. Since much of this discourse is rooted in a fear-based middle-class imagination rather than firsthand knowledge of the lower classes, it can be said that the sensationalism and scare tactics that appear in many of these texts often reveal more about the writers than their subjects. By reading the negative space of these narratives—that is, reading the lower class as a depiction of what the middle class is not, or as what the middle class fears—we are able to elicit a greater understanding of how middle-class identity is formed, shared, and performed during the early- and mid-nineteenth century.