From its inception in the 1960s and 1970s, urban history has always been concerned with the governance of unruly spaces, marginal subjects and deviant practices. This concern is amply evident in the historiography of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, beginning with H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff's collection, The Victorian City: Images and Realities (1973), and extending into countless studies since.Footnote ¹ We now know a great deal about practices such as prostitution, vagrancy and petty thieving, and the people and places they brought into play. But despite this accretion of scholarship, there remains a significant area of neglect: common lodging houses (CLHs). Unlike other unruly urban spaces, like pubs and music halls, CLHs have yet to be studied as discrete sites of governance and freedom. Still too little is known about the particular problems they posed and the kinds of society they housed.

This neglect is surprising, if only because CLHs provided nightly accommodation for precisely those marginal members of urban society – thieves, beggars, prostitutes – whose history has otherwise been so well documented. Furthermore, CLHs were popular institutions. In 1853 there were reportedly 3,300 CLH keepers operating in the metropolis, catering for some 50,000 nightly lodgers.Footnote ² The number of CLHs in London seems to have diminished from the 1850s, but even in the mid-1880s the Metropolitan Police recorded a figure of just over 1,100, with room for 31,000 lodgers; an investigation published in 1906 estimated there were still ‘about 1,000’.Footnote ³ Significant numbers were reported elsewhere. Glasgow's CLHs apparently accommodated 15,000 persons every night during the late 1890s, while in 1892 Liverpool and Manchester were reported to contain 878 and 234 CLHs respectively.Footnote ⁴

This neglect, it should be emphasized, is by no means total. Yet the scholarship which exists is fragmented, scattered across accounts with differing historiographical agendas. Broadly speaking, CLHs have been examined (often briefly) from two perspectives: on the one hand, by historians of urban housing and the underclass, inspired by an empirical sensibility;Footnote ⁵ and on the other, by historians of urban representations, equipped with a more cultural sensibility.Footnote ⁶ In short, the relatively thin historiography of CLHs which exists is structured by a binary distinction between the real and its (imaginary) representation. As its title suggests, this distinction informed Dyos and Wolff's collection and it still informs a great deal of current historiography.

The study of CLHs which follows is based on a variety of sources: social investigations, statutory guidelines, council records and contemporary articles. Much of this source-base relates to London, by far Britain's largest city throughout the period in question. The focus is thus the CLHs of London, but reference to other cities will also be made by way of gesturing towards commonalities across cities. However, in utilizing these sources the goal is neither to recover the ‘reality’ of Victorian and Edwardian CLHs, nor to focus on their ‘representation’. Rather, it is to reconstruct something of the dynamic assemblage of forces – discursive and non-discursive; moral, mental and physical – which CLHs both provoked and exercised.

In so doing, the article assumes that the distinction between the real and its representation is unhelpful; put another way, that to govern involves both knowing and acting, and that the two cannot be dissociated. None of the sources used in this article can be considered ‘neutral’ representations: they were part of the governance of CLHs, written from a particular perspective, and designed to bring about certain effects (public outrage, greater legislative actions). They were sites of power and force, interventions concerned with ordering. Nor, however, can they be considered ‘imaginative constructions’, conjured up by their authors: that they came into being was only because of the various powers and forces (smells and noises, bodies and actions, words and gestures) concentrated in CLHs.

In sum, the assumption this article makes is that the historian is always dealing with multiple translations of force and power, in all their varied forms: of bodies into texts, texts into actions, and so on. These translations generate meaning, but they elide any neat distinction between the real and its representation. The perspective adopted here is that the two are always in a process of struggle and negotiation, ceaselessly operating on one another, but with neither ‘winning’ – that is, wholly capturing or determining the other. It is not, then, a matter of choosing between, or even privileging, either the real or its representation, but of considering evolving relations of force and power.Footnote ⁷

In seeking to overcome the binary dualism of real/representation, the article aligns itself with current attempts by historians to move beyond the linguistic turn.Footnote ⁸ It also aligns itself with recent work in urban historiography which has emphasized the multiple and contradictory nature of modernity. Three aspects of this emerging sensibility might be highlighted. The first is a readiness to embrace the tensions and paradoxes of modernity, which are now seen as intrinsic and constantly in play (as opposed to temporary and open to dialectical resolution). Patrick Joyce's work on the modern city might be seen in this light, focusing as it does on the ways power and freedom, ostensible opposites, actually played off, and into, one another to fashion the liberal subject.Footnote ⁹

The second aspect is an appreciation of urban modernity as a many-stranded set of processes, comprising multiple spaces, temporalities and logics, which by turns contradict and complement one another. Interest in disciplinary, panoptic spaces has accordingly been replaced with an interest in localized, heterotopic spaces which resist dominant mechanisms of social ordering by staging their own rules and rituals.Footnote ¹⁰

Finally, there is an acknowledgment of what might be termed the haunted nature of modernity: the way modernity constantly reinvents its past, and in so doing remains haunted by people, places and experiences opposed to ‘progress’, and often designated as ‘barbaric’ and ‘evil’. Lynda Nead's work on mid-Victorian London is an exemplary instance of this. She writes of a ‘mixed’ metropolitan modernity where improvement engendered only new problems and anxieties; of a modernity that was constituted by, and as, the recurrence of various ‘others’ it sought to consign to the past. To give just one example, the introduction of gas light generated a profoundly ambiguous experience of the modern city: a technology of rationality and light, it also stimulated quixotic explorations of urban strangeness and dislocation.Footnote ¹¹

These developments suggest a new orientation within urban historiography: an orientation which, eschewing the temptation to reduce urban history to a single logic or process, instead embraces the existence of multiple logics, as well as multiple points of tension, provocation and uncertainty – in short, which foregrounds both the abundant and antagonistic nature of modernity. Accordingly, such an orientation also shares a suspicion of strict binary schemas, in this case those schemas central to conventional narratives of modernity: power/freedom; order/flux; disenchantment/enchantment; sacred/secular; rational/irrational. The assumption is that it is a case of both/and, rather than either/or: of power and freedom, order and flux, rather than one or the other.

What follows is undertaken in just this interpretive spirit and seeks to highlight how the governance of CLHs generated myriad ambiguities and instabilities. Above all, it seeks to shows how CLHs – and those of London in particular – provoked the limits of urban governance. On the one hand, their governance involved drawing lines and establishing relations of inclusion and exclusion: of demarcating the limits of civilization and who or what fell outside of it. On the other hand, there were definite limits, so to speak, to drawing and acting on these limits: common lodgers were not easily conceptualized, nor were CLHs easily reformed.

Outcasts and the genre of social investigation

In basic terms, CLHs were hotels for the poor and were otherwise known as ‘low lodging houses’, later ‘dosshouses’. They were private, commercial operations, distinct from both the casual wards run by poor law authorities (‘spikes’) and the refuge shelters provided by philanthropic organizations. They charged anything between 1d and 1s a night, and overwhelmingly catered for those dubbed the ‘outcast’ of society. One ‘classification’ of their regular clientele made in 1852 by a London police superintendent reads: ‘common thieves from the neighbourhood; suspected persons, generally on the tramp; low prostitutes; beggars of all sexes – all ages; hawkers of petty articles . . .; begging letter-writers; smashers; ballad singers; travelling tinkers; china menders; umbrella repairers and ticket-writers’.Footnote ¹² To this we might add dockers, navvies, sailors, orphaned children, circus troupe and soldiers. However, it seems casual labourers, prostitutes and petty criminals provided the mainstay of custom through to the Edwardian period.

Quite how many, and for how long, remained attached to a particular CLH is unclear: some lodgers stayed for only one night, some for as long as a year. Normally the number of common lodgers diminished during the summer. Some left cities to look for work in the countryside (hop-picking, pea-shelling); others, like ballad singers, left to embark on their annual tour of market towns; others still, simply to roam elsewhere and enjoy the cost-free experience of sleeping in a field or barn.Footnote ¹³ Raphael Samuel has speculated that the number of people embarking on ‘tramping circuits’ declined from the 1870s, but their impact was still being noted in the late 1890s. A report for the London County Council (LCC), published in 1897, suggested that the number of common lodgers in the capital declined by ‘some 25 or 30 per cent’ during the summer. Much, however, depended on the common lodger's ‘occupation’: the report went on to note how prostitutes tended to remain throughout the year.Footnote ¹⁴

Precise numbers are elusive: contemporaries relied on estimates and so must historians. But contemporaries did adhere to a consistent mode of depicting this shifting mass of people. Along with ‘outcasts’, other terms included ‘dregs’, ‘waifs and strays’, ‘pariahs’, ‘the odds and ends of humanity’, even ‘the entire debris of the social structure’.Footnote ¹⁵ Each term has a dynamic of its own, but all convey the manner in which common lodgers were regarded as displaced, residual figures, whether as exiles or human rubbish. Accordingly, CLHs were characterized as ‘sinks’, ‘receptacles’ and ‘human sewers’. Common lodgers were thus the ‘lowest of the low’: when, in 1889, the first instalment of Charles Booth's monumental study of London was published, it was specified that most were drawn from ‘Class A’, Booth's ‘lowest’ classification.Footnote ¹⁶

Terms such as this provided a useful repertoire of images and associations with which to conceive of common lodgers and their way of life; already a form of governance, these images paved the way for other expressions of power. However, further conceptualization often faltered, revealing contradictions and ambiguities within ostensibly respectable, empirical reasoning. Before turning to examine this, it is necessary to introduce the discursive genre which did most to translate CLHs and common lodgers into an (unstable) governmental problem – the genre of social investigation – and the complex assemblage of perspectives, discursive conventions, norms of conduct and logics it comprised.

Social investigation emerged in the 1830s and embraced what Peter Mandler has termed the ‘civilizational perspective’.Footnote ¹⁷ This perspective incorporated Enlightenment ideas regarding the historical evolution of society and anthropological ideas regarding ‘savage’ cultures and races. As such, social investigation was underpinned by a temporalized conception of urban society, including a sense of its future progressive possibilities. The civilizational perspective also entailed a particular empirical agenda which, in the case of CLH investigations, included the environment, the physicality of lodgers, together with their ‘habits’ and modes of speech. However, in line with the general tenor of Victorian and Edwardian social thought, there was no application of strict Darwinian thinking post-The Origin of Species (1859).Footnote ¹⁸ ‘Race’ and ‘struggle for existence’ were commonly deployed terms in social investigations, yet the central preoccupation remained ‘character’; and while it was accepted that this bore some relation to physical variables (especially the environment) none of the authors of texts on CLHs embraced biological determinism.

This underlying perspective was in turn modulated by various discursive conventions which defined social investigation as a particular genre. Two conventions, more or less evident in any given text, might be highlighted: first, a concern to emphasize the opacity of urban life; second – and much in the manner of the pathological anatomist – a concern to spatialize urban society by correlating particular ‘social ills’ with particular locales and houses. Thus, rather than depict the whole of a city, social investigations preferred to focus on notorious districts, where CLHs could be found in abundance. By the mid-century, districts like this were part of all major cities, but London's were the most infamous (areas like The Mint in Southwark and Jacob's Island in Bermondsey).

Social investigation was further distinguished by its incorporation of various moral and physical norms of conduct. Once again, these were more or less pronounced in any given text, but a basic core can be identified, which persisted from the early Victorian period through to the Edwardian era. This core included: sobriety; physical cleanliness; assiduous domestic economy; and independence from poor relief – in short, a basic core of norms which equated ‘civilization’ with what Mary Poovey, after Michel Foucault, has termed ‘disciplinary individualism’.Footnote ¹⁹

Social investigation thus mobilized a temporalized conception of society, a spatializing way of knowing and a certain normative model of individualism. Combined, these elements – already expressions of force themselves – provided the conceptual means through which the forces and powers comprised by common lodgers could be translated into discourse, and so ordered; or in this case, ‘othered’ and situated on the margins as outcasts. Yet this order was at best provisional. To help explain this instability, two logics might be identified.

On the one hand, social investigation embodied what is often referred to as the logic of exclusion and inclusion; that is, the logic which dictates that any attempt to exclude on the grounds of universal norms and truths (such as those of ‘civilization’), must also, by virtue of this same universality, include, thus making for an interplay of difference and sameness.Footnote ²⁰ On the other hand, social investigation embraced the symbolic logic of the taboo, as described by Mary Douglas in her classic anthropological investigation, Purity and Danger.Footnote ²¹ Her argument is that ‘dirt’ is whatever, within any given culture, does not fit: dirt is ‘matter out of place’, and tabooing and condemning dirt helps shore up a sense of social order. However, she also describes the way in which primitive cultures conflate the taboo and the holy, the sacred and the unclean. Taboo forms, she suggests, be they natural or human, are endowed with mysterious powers, which, while deemed dangerous, are also thought to open on to an aspect of the divine. Thus, this symbolic logic dictates that what is rejected also returns to function as a source of fascination and reverence.

This latter logic is especially revealing. It is well known that the Victorians and Edwardians sacralized cleanliness not filthiness (‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’). But as we shall see, while common lodgers and CLHs were regarded as filthy and obscene, they were also regarded with ambivalence and endowed with mysterious qualities. In this respect we have a double haunting of modernity: not only the persistence of ‘other’ people and spaces, but also the persistence of an ‘other’ symbolic logic within a self-consciously civilizing society.

Locating outcasts in the time and space of the city

One consistent source of discursive instability regarded the location of outcast lodgers and CLHs within the time and space of the civilizing city. Henry Mayhew's mid-century London Labour and the London Poor provides one instance of this. Mayhew's inquiry into London's ‘street-folk’, which was quite explicit about its anthropological ambitions, opened with the following declaration: ‘Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, there are – socially, morally and perhaps even physically considered – but two distinct races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers – the vagabond and the citizen – the nomadic and the civilized tribes.’Footnote ²² He went on to state that London's outcasts were distinguished by particular moral (improvidence, irreligion) and physical characteristics (‘lozenge-shaped faces’, extended jaw bones), and a fondness for linguistic obscurity.

But where did such people stand in relation to civilization? On the one hand, they were clearly opposed to civilization, outside its bounds. Yet their status was far from straightforward, for on the other hand, as Mayhew acknowledged, they were also inside civilization, gnawing away, parasite-like, at its roots: ‘Moreover, it would appear, that not only are all races divisible into wanderers and settlers, but that each civilized or settled tribe has generally some wandering horde intermingled with, and in a measure preying upon, it.’Footnote ²³ Mayhew went on to note that, like the civilized denizens of London, Hottentots, Fellahs and Kafirs suffered from ‘hordes of vagabonds and outcasts’. In so doing, he affirmed the disturbing notion already implicit in his talk of universal ‘civilized or settled tribes’: that Britain was on a par with various African tribal societies otherwise thought of as lower down the cultural evolutionary chain.Footnote ²⁴

Conceptual instabilities also plagued the question of whether outcasts were merely remnants of an earlier stage of history, sure to pass away, or the more recent product of civilization, destined to remain and prosper. Put another way, whether they were a ‘pathological’ or a ‘normal’ part of civilization. For those who read evolution in optimistic, Lamarckian terms, outcasts were nothing more than a pathological ‘fringe’ which would disappear via the workings of natural law. In 1881, one delegate of a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science saw fit to quote a newspaper editorial which had declared: ‘We are dealing with the broad rule of the survival of the fittest, a rule against which it is as idle to fight as against the law of gravitation. As civilisation progresses it becomes more and more difficult for a vagrant population to hold its own.’Footnote ²⁵

Optimism was by no means the preserve of those who put a teleological gloss on Darwin. Evangelicals like William Booth were convinced that outcasts might be ‘delivered’ from their pathological state and rejoin (Christian) civilization. Others, however, were decidedly less sanguine, especially those who spoke of social ‘degeneration’. In the 1880s, the leading socio-biological thinker Henry Maudsley entertained the idea that the evolution of society was characterized by a ‘double flux’ of movement in which degenerative forces were just as strong as the progressive.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, political radicals like the American Henry George, who was widely read in Britain, spoke quite explicitly of the way poverty was ‘engendered by progress itself’; he was thus able to claim that the tramp was the necessary, rather than incidental, complement of the locomotive.Footnote ²⁷

Such views destabilized the idea that outcasts were, in any straightforward sense, an abnormal part of civilization, and their general thrust registered in social investigations undertaken by those directly engaged with CLHs. In 1910, the Oldham-based civic activist, Mary Higgs, published a collection of essays on the condition of homeless women. Deploying evolutionary metaphors, she described CLHs as ‘organs’ adapted to the life of towns to help manage the ebb and flow of migratory workers. Evincing too the growing tendency, established during the late Victorian period, to talk in terms of ‘poverty lines’ and ‘standards’, she went on to note the depressing number of ‘floating units in our social system’, adding: ‘So far from civilisation decreasing this class, it appears to be a product of it, as dust is of the highway. A foothold on life becomes increasingly precarious as the standard of living rises.’Footnote ²⁸

Outcasts, then, might be regarded as both pathological and normal: as both opposed to civilization and as a natural product of its ongoing development. A related set of instabilities pervaded characterizations of those city districts where CLHs could be found, sometimes in isolation, but often clustered together. Once again, there was a marked sense of difference, or otherness; yet translating this difference into a stable set of images proved elusive. One common discursive strategy was to create a sense of depth: of barbaric spaces hidden beneath the surface of civilization. Perhaps the most famous social investigation of the 1880s, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), relied on just such a strategy, informing readers of ‘the discovery that seething amidst the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of civilization and decency, is a vast mass of moral corruption, of heart-breaking misery and absolute godlessness’.Footnote ²⁹

A sense of spatial depth was amplified through the use of narratives of exploration in which a threshold was crossed and the civilized world left behind. ‘We cut ourselves off from civilization on Monday’, wrote Higgs, of the morning she and a friend set out on a five-day investigation of CLHs.Footnote ³⁰ Journeys like this were commonly imagined in terms of a ‘descent’ or ‘fall’ into a dark and indeterminate zone of potentially limitless dimensions: the image of an ‘abyss’ was regularly used during the Edwardian period, featuring, most notably, in the work of Charles Masterman and Jack London.Footnote ³¹ It was less a matter of traversing than of plunging into and penetrating space. The physical density of these districts was often evoked: many spoke of ‘labyrinths’, ‘mazes’ and ‘warrens’. Another common term was ‘rookeries’, which, as the clergyman Thomas Beames pointed out in The Rookeries of London (1852), was not without significance: ‘Other birds are broken up into separate families – occupy separate nests; rooks seem to know no such distinction. So it is with the class whose dwellings we are to describe.’Footnote ³²

Beames' London was haunted by its medieval and early modern past, of which its rookeries and CLHs were the last, lingering manifestation. For Beames, rookeries were spaces steeped in English history and the actions of its kings and queens, heroes and villains. But while some deployed images of spatial density, and some again, like Beames, established a sense of historical depth, others did quite the opposite. A case in point is Reverend Charles Maurice Davis, who, in 1875, published Mystic London. The title, he explained, was meant to signify his ‘initiation into some of the more occult phases of metropolitan existence’.Footnote ³³ Significantly, when it came to describing his experience of London's outcast districts – Seven Dials in the west, Bethnal Green in the east – Davis used the image of a desert; accordingly, he spoke of ‘London's Arabs’ and ‘nomad hordes of Bedouins’. Like the term ‘abyss’, ‘desert’ implied a potentially limitless expanse and a radical absence of civilization. But ‘desert’, the mystical space par excellence according to Christian mythology, also conveyed a sense of potential spiritual revelation; it suggested a space where, precisely because it was void of civilization, history and spatial complexity, one was closer to the divine. Certainly Davis felt himself to be pursuing an unorthodox spiritual journey: subsequent chapters described séances, mesmerist meetings and madhouses.

The use of alternate images – sometimes complementary, sometimes not – of ‘deserts’ and ‘labyrinths’, ‘wildernesses’ and ‘warrens’, intersected with other conceptual inconsistencies. It was entirely common for observers to associate such districts with a generalized languor. Yet it was just as common to depict these districts as riven with a dangerous, anarchic energy, which might, such was its power, engulf society. In 1862, the engineer Robert Rawlinson noted the success of laws passed in the 1850s to improve CLHs and surrounding areas. Of the preceding decades, he said: ‘I can only say that our civilization resembled those volcanic regions where the internal fires of destruction made the earth tremble beneath the feet of the dwellers on the treacherous surface – a sudden outbreak might at any time take place, and overwhelm all in ruin.’Footnote ³⁴

After the 1880s, few investigators invoked the spectre of revolution. Yet ambivalence remained and conflicting impressions were sometimes generated within the same text. In The People of the Abyss (1903), Jack London stated: ‘They [‘the people’] are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them.’ Later on, however, he depicted street thieves as ‘a breed of city savages’, who might exercise a ferocious, ape-like strength as they robbed an unfortunate victim. ‘The slum is their jungle, and they live and prey in the jungle.’Footnote ³⁵ Languorous, yet dangerous; depressed, yet vigorous: such districts somehow managed to comprise both extremes of moral and physical energy.

Common lodging houses as heterotopias

The meaning ascribed to outcast common lodgers and the districts they inhabited was thus varied, provisional and inconsistent, occasionally reversible (in that one could argue that outcasts were both normal and pathological); there was more than one logic at work guiding – and undermining – their conceptualization. A similar play of power and discourse ensued when investigators ventured inside and sought to depict CLH life. The binary schema of civilization/barbarism provided a basic means of mapping this culture. In a lecture delivered in 1889, James Russell, Medical Officer of Health (MOH) for Glasgow, began by recalling the city's CLHs prior to their reform: ‘The worst form of barbarism is that which gathers at the base of civilization, and here we had it in perfection.’Footnote ³⁶ For their investigators, CLHs represented the absolute antithesis – the consummate ‘other’ – of respectable bourgeois domesticity.

But the struggle to translate CLH life into a stable and consistent set of discursive characterizations suggests that it was more than simply opposed to dominant forms of disciplinary individualism; that is, more than simply a marginal chaos to a hegemonic liberal order. It suggests, more positively, that CLHs were heterotopic spaces. Kevin Hetherington has provided the most astute analysis of this particular kind of space.Footnote ³⁷ His assumption is that all space is constituted by power. Opposing the tendency to romanticize the liminal and the deviant, Hetherington thus distinguishes heterotopias as places of ‘alternate ordering’. Such spaces may be opposed to the normal, but they are not only spaces of freedom, for they comprise rules and rituals of their own. Produced by social ordering, heterotopic spaces also stage modes of ordering unique to themselves.

However, what Hetherington neglects to incorporate into his analysis is Douglas's insight regarding the unclean and the taboo: namely, the sense of strange, occult power which pervades that which is at odds with the dominant social system. CLHs were regarded in just this fashion and for some their investigation doubled as a ‘pilgrimage’.Footnote ³⁸ It was common to speak of the ‘mysteries’ they contained, or of how they contributed to a more general atmosphere of urban mystique. One investigation published in 1874 elevated the CLH into a key metropolitan ‘institution’ and added that it played ‘no unimportant part in the “mysteries” of Modern Babylon’.Footnote ³⁹

Most accounts focused on two spaces: the kitchen, which formed the social hub of a CLH, and the sleeping area, which may or may not have been divided up into bedrooms (a great many contained open dormitories, some of which reportedly accommodated over 300 people).Footnote ⁴⁰ What emerges most strongly in CLH investigations is a sense of transgression; more specifically, the transgression of those distinctions which structured respectable morality and whose boundaries were carefully policed in the name of civilization. On the one hand, there was a confusion of opposites amidst intense ‘overcrowding’. Men and women, boys and girls, young and old, humans and animals all mixed freely. On the other hand, there was an inversion of opposites: of women assuming the qualities of men (as when fighting and swearing) and humans assuming the qualities of animals (as when eating). ‘Here, Nature has her full scope’, wrote one account of the ‘sinks of London’ (1848), and it seems clear that CLHs were also distinguished by a remarkable mix of characters, which included a number who had previously been of good reputation (doctors, clergymen and City bankers).Footnote ⁴¹

Not everyone, however, was welcome within a CLH. Lodgers were notoriously suspicious of ‘outsiders’, forcing many investigators to don tramps' attire and venture forth incognito. Nor were CLHs without rules and rituals of their own. ‘Unless the new arrival is willing to join in the drinking and singing, and pay for a share of the beer, a seat is only found for him grudgingly’, noted Birkenhead's MOH of the kitchens.Footnote ⁴² Five features of the alternate ordering staged by CLHs might be noted; that CLHs staged an alternative admixture of freedom and power to that of respectable society can be discerned in the inconsistencies of contemporary investigations and the way CLH life eluded precise binary conceptualization.

1. 1. Ignorance/intelligence: CLHs were depicted as barbaric spaces of ignorance and criminality, where languages, dialects and obscure, vernacular slang terms mixed in a barely comprehensible fashion. They were ‘Babel-like’, as it was often put, places of confusion and incoherence. Yet such characterizations were compromised by evocations of a lively culture of story-telling and discussion. Howard Goldsmid's Dottings of a Dosser (1886) described lodgers ‘discoursing eloquently against religion’, debating politics and dwelling on the injustices of the world.Footnote ⁴³ It was also common to describe CLHs as ‘centres’ or ‘headquarters’ of local criminal activity and intelligence. Such terms jarred with descriptions elsewhere of immoral disorder, and betrayed the way in which CLH society might be well organized. There was great anxiety over the fate of children precisely because CLHs were sites where ‘juvenile delinquents’ were actively ‘bred’, or ‘trained’, in a systematic fashion.

2. 2. Idleness/industry: Common lodgers were routinely demonized as averse to regular labour. Many texts noted the way some spent their days reading papers, smoking pipes, exchanging betting tips or languishing in the kitchen. Yet accounts might generate quite the opposite impression: that is, of CLHs as sites of intense industry. One account of London's ‘dosser-land’ published in 1906, which otherwise conveyed a picture of depressing languor, described a veritable hive of ingenious industry: ‘Paper flowers, sand bags, toasting forks, miraculous corn cures, “novelties” of all kinds are made before your eyes. Old worthless seeds are converted in a twinkling into the sweet scented lavender of commerce. A penny-worth of scent from the chemist's effects the transformation.’ Such was the variety of ‘vagrant industry’ it afforded ‘an unlimited field for investigation’.Footnote ⁴⁴

3. 3. Animosity/affection: CLHs were presented as violent, unfriendly places. Fights were regular occurrences. Numerous accounts told of lodgers who would ‘offer someone out’ for no particular reason. Investigators also noted the suspicion with which lodgers regarded one another, and how closely they guarded what little property they had for fear of being robbed. But at the same time common lodgers were renowned for their intensely loyal friendships: ‘your professed vagabonds always associate in pairs, like the solider with his comrade, and the sailor with his mess mate . . . the cadger and his mate sleep together, mess together, and share each other's good and bad luck’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, while food might be meagre and consumed alone, it might also be abundant and shared, and some accounts depicted impromptu ‘feasts’.

4. 4. Decadence/Godliness: CLH kitchens were notorious spaces of blasphemy and debauchery. Accounts dwelt at length on the drinking, dancing, swearing and card-playing which went on. CLH kitchens were sometimes compared to Hell itself. But amidst a morass of decadence and irreligion, there occasionally erupted signs of religious affiliation and faith. Scenes were recalled in which Irish-Catholic lodgers, suddenly and aggressively, attacked the Anglican Church. Nor was it unusual for hymns to be sung, sometimes shortly after a comic song, making for strange juxtapositions, which clearly registered with investigators. ‘I wished almost that we had stayed below to ascertain what led to the singing of “Jesu, Lover of my Soul”’, wrote Higgs of one night in a CLH. ‘It sounded odd, sung lustily by lips so full of profanity.’Footnote ⁴⁶ On other occasions religious rituals might be relatively formal. In those CLHs targeted by missionaries, the kitchen served as the venue for Sunday services, complete with hymnbooks, prayers and sermons.

5. 5. Bodily indifference/affirmation: Contemporary accounts suggested that lodgers were distinguished by a marked indifference to the health and condition of their bodies. Equally, however, lodgers were distinguished by a positive affirmation of the body as a readily available site of sexual pleasure. Many CLHs doubled as brothels, while flirting and the solicitation of partners for the night were routine kitchen rituals amongst males and females, young and old. Bodies were fought over but also shared. ‘Sometimes there are loud quarrels and revilings [sic] from the jealousy of boys and girls, and more especially of girls whose “chaps” have deserted or been inveighed from them’, wrote Mayhew. ‘At others, there is an amicable interchange of partners and the next day a resumption of their former companionship.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Likewise, although common lodgers were depicted as physically weak and decrepit, so also were they depicted as exuding strange, almost inhuman physical powers. Some were compared to Hercules and were said to possess ‘Atlas-like shoulders’.Footnote ⁴⁸

CLH life was opposed to the lifestyle embraced by respectable society. It was a difficult existence, characterized, above all, by an inability to plan for the future; little could be relied upon, which made for fleeting excitement and abject misery in equal measure. When CLH life did embody aspects of respectable society, it did so in perverse ways: devious urban knowingness instead of enlightened knowledge; intense, inventive labour instead of regular employment. Accordingly, while CLH life was placed on the pathological margins of society, fixing it there with any precision or consistency proved difficult. Discursive ambivalence and instability remained, and brings into relief the alternate social ordering staged by CLHs. They were ‘other’ to the order embraced by civilized society, yet they were not necessarily places of chaos or anarchy.

But while CLHs can be usefully characterized as heterotopias which staged an alternate mode of ordering to that of respectable civilization, the boundaries between the two were always porous and uncertain. Partly this occurred at the conceptual level, where CLHs were figured as a form of barbarism at once inside and outside civilization. Conceptual conflations and border-crossings mapped on to those of a more social sort, not least when ‘gentleman slummers’, by day engaged in respectable pursuits, by night went in search of sex and drink in CLHs. Seth Koven's account of Victorian ‘slumming’ suggests that sexual desire even informed respectable attempts to engage with the outcast, where it mixed with philanthropic pathos.Footnote ⁴⁹

Whatever sexual desire – manifest or latent – inspired visits to CLHs, there were some who confessed to a different kind of seduction: the strange attraction of the nomadic lifestyle. One example is the police-court missionary Thomas Holmes. In his London's Underworld (1912), he spoke of a ‘mysterious, but all pervading world below’, and acknowledged that when he surveyed the ‘anomalies and queer contradictions’ of outcast society he was overcome with ‘strange and conflicting emotions’. Although he condemned common lodgers in the strongest possible terms, he was intensely aware of the liberties they enjoyed: ‘There is no rent-day coming round with dread certainty to the nomads . . . no life assurance agent marks them for his prey, and no income-tax tempts them to lie.’ For Holmes, the allure of this alternative lifestyle was a universal feature of human nature, afflicting the civilized as much as the barbarous: ‘But we are all tramps more or less; it is only a question of degree!’Footnote ⁵⁰

Statute law and common lodging houses

CLHs compromised not only urban civilization, but also attempts to understand urban civilization and map its precise limits and boundaries. This constituted one aspect of their governance, related to which was the no less compromised attempt to regulate CLHs via by-laws, mechanisms of surveillance and the building of ‘model’ houses. During the early nineteenth century, police officers had occasionally raided CLHs under the authority of local vagrancy acts and settlement laws. Something of a legislative watershed occurred in the 1850s, when two general acts were passed, the first in 1851, the second, modifying the former, in 1853. Both applied only to England and Wales, but unusually both were compulsory rather than adoptive. The 1853 Common Lodging Houses Act provided the basic template of powers through to the inter-war period; major statutes such as the 1875 Public Health Act simply incorporated the measures established earlier.Footnote ⁵¹ Glasgow seems to have engaged in CLH regulation as early as the 1840s, but Scotland as a whole had to wait until its own Public Health Act, passed in 1867, to exercise the formal powers available south of the border.Footnote ⁵²

Britain's local authorities were thus empowered to develop by-laws relating specifically to CLHs. Scrutiny by the Home Office and then the Local Government Board ensured the emergence of a roughly uniform set of national regulations. Three aims might be isolated. First, they sought to ensure greater accountability. CLHs and CLH keepers were required to register with local authorities, subject to formal inspections and character tests; certificates of approval, should they be granted, then had to be displayed in a conspicuous part of the premises. Sanitary inspectors and police officers were also allowed to enter CLHs at any time. Second, they sought to secure the integrity of sleeping bodies. Lodgers were entitled to at least 300 cubic feet of air whilst asleep, while single men and women, as well as married couples, had to be provided with separate sleeping quarters. Finally, they sought to encourage cleanliness. Keepers were charged with lime-washing the entire premises twice a year and maintaining adequate toilet accommodation and fresh bedding.

However, just as investigations of CLHs evolved within a shifting field of force and power, so too did these regulations. Once again it was a question of translation: of translating the formal powers enshrined in statute laws and by-laws into effective actions and obedient spaces, which in turn engendered further translations (forms, letters, reports). This particular field of governance shared some of the dynamics which animated social investigation, not least the manner in which it evolved in a critical, self-reflexive fashion. Agents of local government highlighted problems of administration with the same relentlessness as social investigators pointed to new zones of urban darkness; and this too made for an urban modernity haunted by that which it sought to overcome.

But this particular field also comprised dynamics of its own. First, there was a political dynamic at work; or rather, an attachment to liberal principles which privileged local agency and voluntary effort, while eschewing more draconian measures (in the Edwardian period, national labour colonies were mooted, but never implemented, as one solution to outcast Britain). CLH governance was thus mixed, comprising both public and private initiative, and proceeding in fits and starts across time and space. London is a case in point. Up to 1894, responsibility for regulating CLHs had rested with the Metropolitan Police. It henceforth passed to the LCC, which later, in 1903, began licensing all CLHs on an annual basis, then something of a rarity.Footnote ⁵³ Second, there was a dynamic of negotiation at work; that is, an ongoing struggle to work both with and against the agency of lodgers and CLH keepers, a struggle given greater scope by the liberal ethos just mentioned. Laws required translating into practice by localized agents, yet these laws were further reworked and resisted by those who were their object. Together, these two dynamics ensured that regulating CLHs was always fractious and contested, and comprised of multiple points of uncertainty.

One point of uncertainty concerned the powers set out in statute and who or what they applied to. The meaning of key terms was often in dispute, and while legal battles ensured that the law was properly applied and that rights were not infringed, it also enhanced the scope for evasion. Chief among these points of contestation was the meaning of the term ‘common lodging house’, which continued to evolve throughout the period. The 1853 Act failed to define the term, apparently so as to allow for local discretion. Subsequent legislation neglected to clarify the matter, and it was only in 1936 that a formal definition entered the statute books.

Immediate (non-statutory) clarification, however, was forthcoming. In October 1853, the General Board of Health issued a circular which contained the ‘opinions’ of two Law Officers of the Crown. The first opinion advised that the term ‘common lodging house’ referred ‘to that class of lodging-houses in which persons of the poorer classes are received for short periods and, though strangers to one another, are allowed to inhabit one common room’. Further elaboration suggested that it was not meant to apply to ‘hotels, inns, public houses or lodgings let to the upper and middle classes’. The second opinion stated that the use of the term ‘strangers to one another’ was meant to distinguish ‘lodgers promiscuously brought together’ from ‘members of one family or household’.Footnote ⁵⁴

The first opinion was still in use in the Edwardian period; one LCC pamphlet published in 1903 even claimed that ‘we know of no better description’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But not all local authorities chose to adopt this definition, at least initially. It was often complained during the 1850s that local authorities were still relying on a definition of a ‘public lodging house’ given prior to 1853 in the Town Improvement Clauses Act of 1847: namely, any house ‘in which persons are lodged for hire for a single night or for less than a week at one time’. Irish keepers, in particular, it was claimed, avoided registration simply by ensuring that all customers lodged for more than a week; apparently, over 500 houses in just one district of Liverpool escaped inspection in this fashion.Footnote ⁵⁶ It also seems clear that, in keeping with the legal advice given in 1853, local authorities overlooked those public houses which effectively functioned as CLHs: in the 1890s, one nuisance inspector made precisely this criticism.Footnote ⁵⁷

By the turn of the century, new problems had surfaced. Quite whether ‘block dwellings’ (tenement flats) and ‘Rowton Houses’ (up-market dosshouses) should be brought under CLH legislation, given that they posed much the same problems, was often debated, certainly in London. The legal status of refuge shelters was another point of dispute. In 1890, the LCC fought unsuccessfully to register a Salvation Army shelter as a CLH. The judge argued that it was distinct on two grounds: first, it was not run for commercial gain; second, it was not obliged to accept all comers. A further case was brought against The Harbour, as the shelter was known, in 1899, and was dismissed on the same grounds. On appeal, however, another judge ruled in favour of the LCC, overturning the original decision made in 1890. The non-profit status of the shelter was immaterial, as was the discretion it might exercise regarding admissions; it was far more significant that men of the ‘common lodging house class’ were brought together under one roof. It was primarily a question of sanitation.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this instance the LCC scored a victory, but evidence suggests that it encountered setbacks only shortly afterwards. A report published in 1909 noted that some 15 to 20 metropolitan shelters remained exempt from council inspection, and all because of another legal precedent set in 1905.Footnote ⁵⁹

Regulation, resistance and the provision of model houses

The relationship of words and things was one site of recurrent critique. The governance of CLHs, however, remained highly indeterminate, even when the relationship between these two elements had been stabilized in the form of a CLH registered as such in law. Indeed, objectively assessing the success of regulation is impossible, precisely because it was part of the governance of CLHs to put ‘success’ into question, animated as it was by a critical ethos that constantly identified new problems from a plethora of perspectives. The acts of the 1850s were hailed as an immediate success by some, who claimed they had resulted in improved cleanliness and greater order; yet even in the Edwardian period the state of CLHs was regarded as a national disgrace. Success was varied and provisional, and there was always room for improvement.

But if the effectiveness of CLH regulation is impossible to assess with any precision, it is possible to identify further points of recurrent struggle. There were, of course, keepers who were simply negligent, and who allowed all manner of transgressions to take place. Not all of these transgressions went unpunished. Between 1895 and 1900, the LCC successfully prosecuted 147 CLH keepers. Offences included neglect of cleanliness and failure to separate single men and women at night.Footnote ⁶⁰ Formal warnings were more frequently resorted to. Once a nuisance had been identified, sanitary inspectors tended to rely only on ‘preliminary notices of abatement’, coupled with their powers of persuasion; most viewed litigation as unnecessary. Formal warnings were also a constitutive feature of the LCC's licensing system: if certain conditions were not met, a licence would simply not be granted.

It seems that most local authorities entertained constructive dialogue with CLH keepers; negotiation, rather than legal confrontation, was the dominant mode of engagement. The records of the LCC suggest as much. When a licence was opposed the keeper was summoned before the LCC's sanitary committee; he was then informed of the grounds for opposition and given a chance to respond. Some keepers failed to show and some protested, but most promised to carry out whatever work was required. However, there were recognized limits – albeit contestable ones – as to what a keeper might be held responsible for. The right of lodgers to a degree of privacy meant that keepers were not necessarily complicit in activities like prostitution. ‘No one will suggest . . . that the person in charge shall interfere in any way with the freedom of the persons who come to that lodging house’, stated one LCC official when dealing with a keeper he suspected of operating a brothel. It was not the business of a keeper, he added, to inquire whether couples entering his house were married or not. Even so, the official deemed it necessary to withhold a licence until he had received ‘clear proof’ that the keeper was not ‘profiting by immorality’.Footnote ⁶¹

This particular case shows how difficult it was to prove criminal culpability. The keeper may well have been constrained by norms of privacy, but he may also have been turning a blind eye. Distinguishing between the two was not easy, as those keepers who practised the latter recognized. Resistance like this took the form of a canny knowingness with respect to what could and could not be proved, and played on the law's limitations. This was but one ruse among many. According to Goldsmid's Dottings of a Dosser (1886), even the registration certificate was exploited: ‘The lodging-house keeper might be compelled by his customer to provide cleanlier accommodation . . . if it were not for the fact that there exists a beneficent law which enables him to make his lodging-house the horrible den which it is, and then point to the notice on the wall and say, “I comply with the Act.”’Footnote ⁶²

The effectiveness of CLH regulation also depended upon inspection. Different regimes operated in different cities. In cities like Manchester, Sheffield and London (up to 1894), CLH inspection was carried out by police officers. Elsewhere, in the majority of cities, it was the responsibility of sanitary inspectors. However, both figures of authority were greatly mistrusted by keepers and lodgers, and throughout the period various tactics were employed to thwart the inspection process. Some CLHs operated look-out systems, thus depriving inspections of a critical element of surprise. A report for the City of London, circulated in 1860, noted how difficult it was to ascertain the true number of lodgers occupying a CLH: ‘for, as he [the inspector] is well-known to the keepers of these places and is constantly watched for, preparation is made for his visit directly as he enters the localities in which the houses are situated’.Footnote ⁶³

Evidently not all houses kept watch, and some lodgers simply made a dash for it. ‘If there is a back door, it must be watched, lest the surplus sleepers be hurriedly awakened and expeditiously ejected before the door is open to the inspector at the front’, noted a report published in 1898.Footnote ⁶⁴ A number of inspectors also suffered physical injury, and as one London police officer noted in the early 1850s: ‘There is constant risk of personal assault.’Footnote ⁶⁵ It was for this reason that CLHs were often visited in pairs.

In this way, CLH governance was composed of endless, multiple provocations of power: tactics like inspection bred counter-tactics, which in turn engendered further counter-tactics. The frustrations of by-law regulation occasionally prompted calls for the ‘municipalization’ of CLHs and the establishment of complete council control.Footnote ⁶⁶ Such calls went unheeded and provision, like the broader economy of welfare, was always mixed. Amidst this mix could be found ‘model lodging houses’, which began to appear as early as the 1840s. London and Glasgow took the lead, and in 1847 model CLHs were erected in both cities by philanthropic societies. Further philanthropic effort meant that by the end of the 1850s London was home to five model establishments and Glasgow three, and in each city one house was set aside solely for women. The first publicly funded CLH appeared in Huddersfield in 1854 and by the early 1900s every major city provided at least one municipal house. These too accommodated large numbers: the LCC's first model house, built in 1892 and situated in the Drury Lane district, housed 240 lodgers; Bristol's model house, opened in 1905, accommodated 120.Footnote ⁶⁷

Regardless of whether they were privately or publicly funded, model establishments shared a number of features. Perhaps the key feature was the provision of dormitories partitioned into numbered ‘cubicles’. All cubicles contained a bed and lockable door; in some houses they also contained a sink. Model houses thus secured privacy. Yet they were also sites of surveillance, and a broader specialization of space in which all activities, not just sleeping, were accorded definite locations. Dormitories, as in the LCC's Drury Lane house, sometimes incorporated ‘boxes’ from which a warden could command the corridor running in between the cubicles. Ticket booths and offices were also strategically placed so as to afford views of dining rooms and day rooms. To ensure the effective eradication of dirt many of the larger establishments were equipped with laundries, ‘disinfection chambers’ and baths. Drinking and gambling were prohibited, while respectable pursuits were positively encouraged: a number of houses provided libraries and exercise yards.

In terms of their general decorum, model houses no doubt compared favourably to standard CLHs. However, model CLHs suffered from a crucial flaw: apart from being few in number, they were too expensive for the majority of outcasts. They were provided to effect moral reform, but they were also expected to be commercially viable, including those houses financed by philanthropists. The result was that the vast majority of model CLHs accommodated only the respectable working classes. An investigation published in 1851 noted that London's St Giles establishment catered mostly for ‘mechanics and citizens earning good wages . . . Small as is the sum paid at these institutions, it is more than many of the poor can afford.’ The journalist John Hollingshead launched a similar critique ten years later, lamenting that ‘No one seems to touch the lowest of the low.’Footnote ⁶⁸

The freedom of dossing

The fact that many common lodgers actively embraced their lifestyle constituted the ultimate limit of CLH governance. As contemporaries noted, even if financially possible, it was unlikely that many outcasts would have opted to live in model houses on account of their relative discipline. One architect in 1891, reflecting on a possible design for the LCC's first house, noted how its very appearance might deter prospective lodgers: ‘The elevations are certainly some of the most pleasing to be seen . . . but the respectability of the exterior would have, we fear, a deterrent rather than an inviting effect upon the class for whom this accommodation is intended.’Footnote ⁶⁹ It would be foolish to suggest that all lodgers entertained an articulate attachment to their alternative lifestyle. Much of their indifference to moralizing injunctions was surely a product of habit and ignorance, rather than conscious reflection.

Equally, for all the hardship involved, it would be wrong to overlook the fact that the nomadic lifestyle did provide an alternative form of freedom, one which was often romanticized at the time. Popular culture had long venerated rogues and outcasts, and this sentiment was still in evidence during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, when even the tramp was the subject of romantic celebration. Douglas' insight regarding the confusion of the sacred and the unclean is amply borne out. On the one hand, the tramp was elevated into an icon of danger and disease (especially smallpox). On the other hand, the tramp was thought to escape not only the cruelty of capitalist society, but also the boredom associated with middle-class suburbia. In both the fictional and functional literature dedicated to the art of vagrancy, the tramp was endowed with mysterious qualities of endurance and a singular capacity to see through the pretensions of modern civilization.Footnote ⁷⁰

It seems lodgers themselves were aware of the peculiar liberties of an outcast life. In the 1850s, Mayhew noted that those who ‘adopted the savage and wandering life’ rarely abandoned it.Footnote ⁷¹ Some 40 years later Booth's study of London spoke of common lodgers who regarded themselves as ‘rolling stones’.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, Holmes' London Underworld depicted common lodgers who begged, borrowed and thieved with alacrity, simply because, according to their ‘philosophy’, ‘All the things in the world belong to all the men in the world.’Footnote ⁷³

It was Mary Higgs who dwelt at greatest length on this particular limit and the tensions which defined it. On one occasion she wrote of the competing demands and forces which played on the prostitutes she sought to rescue from CLHs:

On another occasion Higgs wrote of the ‘camaraderie of vice’ prostitutes enjoyed and suggested that, in most cases, there existed a ‘bar’ which prevented them from returning to normal society. Higgs elaborated: ‘This may seem a strange saying, yet it is a fact. Society frowns on her [the prostitute]; but among those frankly and openly her equals . . . she finds what a woman craves – companionship, friendship and “life”.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Of course, this was Higgs' drama as much as the prostitutes': it was Higgs who wrote the text. But that she could write of such a drama, even begin to think it, testifies to the way in which this ‘other’ of respectable freedom remained dangerously proximate, outside yet also within. In this way, contra Higgs, the ultimate limit to the governance of CLHs was less a barrier (or ‘bar’) than a threshold – an uncertain line of both separation and connection.