Abstract
Walter Besant’s novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, published in 1882 and 1883 respectively, stimulated middle-class interest in the urban slum as a separated community. Together with social surveys they contributed to a topographical imagination of the late-Victorian city, which, in Rosalind Williams’ terms, posited the slum as a subterranean social underworld inhabited by a dispossessed class. At a time when degenerationist theories were fashionable, the slum seemed to herald a collapse of civilization. Helen Dendy (later Bosanquet), a leading figure in the Charity Organisation Society, expressed a widely held view in describing its population as a ‘residuum’ characterized by lack of foresight and self-control. To middle-class reformers the slum constituted a challenge to address the spatial and cultural distances between prosperous and poor communities.