Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation by Luke Seaber

Abstract

Reviewed by: Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation by Luke Seaber Rebecca Nesvet (bio) Luke Seaber, Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (London: Palgrave, 2017), pp. viii + 274, $99.99/£67.99 hardcover, $79.99/£53.99 ebook. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (Strand, December 1891), London newspaper reporter Neville St. Clair accepts an assignment that pitches him headlong into a double life. Commissioned to write "a series of articles upon begging in the metropolis," St. Clair tries "begging as an amateur" (636). He aims to "get the facts," but also rather improbably acquires a lucrative haul and consequently makes incognito panhandling a regular gig (636). When Holmes unmasks him, he confesses his terror that his children will learn his secret. This premise was hardly Doyle's invention. In 1866, journalist James Greenwood masqueraded as an indigent at the request of his brother Frederick, the Pall Mall Gazette's first editor. The resulting expose, "A Night at the Workhouse," inaugurated a literary genre that Luke Seaber calls "incognito social investigation," of which "The Man with the Twisted Lip" is the "best-known fictional representation" (131). As Seaber's monograph shows, Victorian and later incognito social investigators struggled to represent experiences alien to them. They "often sought certainty," Seaber proposes, "but the ambiguities and contradictions of the texts that they produced degrade those same certainties" (13). This problem is central to the realist mode and to Victorian periodical journalism. Enlisting anthropology's lexicon, Seaber argues in his second chapter that "A Night at the Workhouse" differs from sociological exposés such as Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by pursuing emicity, or, in Seaber's tweaked definition, writing told from the point of view of the collective subject—in this case, the poor. Greenwood fails at this pursuit because, judging his workhouse fellows in deeply negative ways, he refuses to truly identify with them. Instead, his account demonstrates emicity's antithesis, eticity, or, the target audience's social consciousness, which alienates the subject (19). Despite this methodological failure, Greenwood quickly attracted imitators. For instance, later in 1866, W. H. Stallard sent a female reporter to research and partly ghost-write an exposé of female indigence, The Female Casual. As Seaber argues, her unattributed contribution stands out in part because she is less judgmental than Stallard. So are several subsequent Greenwood emulators who peripatetically studied "tramping." Seaber begins the third chapter with an impressive recovery of the tramping experiment of David Railton, Vicar of Margate, who was responsible for the concept of the "Unknown Soldier" monument. In a now-lost 1921 lecture, Railton discussed his incognito social investigation of First World [End Page 357] War veterans' experiences of tramping. Unlike Greenwood, Railton "felt a very strong personal drive" to learn how his research subjects lived and felt (61, emphasis in original). However, this chapter's true focus is George Orwell's (that is, Eric Blair's) Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), in which Orwell "live[s] the wandering life of the homeless" (63). According to Seaber, this work is the genre's first genuine masterpiece. In documenting Orwell's debt to Victorian writing, Seaber builds on his previous monograph, G.K. Chesterton's Literary Influence on Orwell: A Surprising Irony (Mellen, 2012). Down and Out, Seaber argues, transcends the eticity of the Greenwood model of social incognito investigation yet disdains to pursue emicity. Not attempting to blend in with his social subjects, he emphasizes his difference from them, and, via that emphasis, achieves credibility (67). As an actual down-and-outer pretending to be a poverty tourist, Orwell created what Seaber calls the "ne plus ultra" of the Greenwoodian tradition (73). Seaber further develops his study of tramping in the fourth chapter. He briefly surveys several Edwardian tramping tales, "even though they complicate the book's chronology," to show that tramping, as a pursuit of freedom, was an upper-middle-class Edwardian "pastime" (85). Seaber then leaps across time and the Atlantic to focus on the manuscripts of a mid-twentieth-century American, Harry A. Franck, in the collection...