Abstract
This thesis interrogates the Victorian slum novel and examines the ways in which
poverty is deployed to mediate desire. I describe this phenomenon as ‘poverty porn’.
Through an interdisciplinary analysis into the themes of spectacle, space, and
surveillance in the Victorian slum novel, this thesis considers the socio-cultural
implications of literary poverty porn and proposes that it functions as an extension of
slumming practices in which the richer classes entered impoverished areas as a leisure
pursuit. In identifying this relationship between the novel and slumming, I challenge the
apparently charitable intentions of nineteenth-century slum novelists. In ‘Chapter 1:
Spectacle’, I illustrate how Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837) and Margaret
Harkness’s In Darkest London (1889) present images that simultaneously evoke
sympathy for the poor while providing pleasure and entertainment for their readerships.
‘Chapter 2: Space’ considers the ways in which Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean
Streets (1894) and Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892) engage with spatial
relations in their representations of the slums, and critiques how each author constructs
slum spaces to articulate their own identities and beliefs. ‘Chapter 3: Surveillance’
discusses how Vernon Lee’s Miss Brown (1884) and Mary Elizabeth
Braddon’s Mary (1916) critique male philanthropic and artistic gazes and emphasise the
oppression of poor and working-class women under surveillance. In doing so, they reveal
poor women’s potential to enact social reform when they break away from the
scrutinising male gaze. Throughout these chapters, I explore how these texts are
informed by slumming practices and how they aim to produce various forms of pleasure
in their readerships. In doing so, this thesis also contextualises the slum novel in wider
nineteenth-century culture, uncovering relationships between poverty porn and
philanthropy, social class, gender, sexuality, immigration, identity, oppression, and
repression. This thesis thus offers new readings of both well-known and underdiscussed
slum novels while unearthing the implications of the various forms of poverty porn that
gripped the Victorian imaginary.