Policing Gender, Class And Family In Britain, 1800-1945

Front matter

Policing gender, class and family

Women’s History

General Editor June Purvis Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth

Contents

N WN OH A W N e

Acknowledgements

The child-savers: the terrain of contestation Child-saving institutions

Index

166 171 203 213

To my father Douglas Rupert Mahood

To the memory of my grandmother Nancy Mahood (1904-89)

Ss

Acknowledgements

In May 1992, following a request that I had placed in a local Scottish newspaper for information about reformatories and industrial schools, I received a letter from a “78 year old person”, who chose to comment on the documentary about girls’ homes that I had worked on with BBC Scotland some months earlier. The letter warned: “If you are going to write stories and make films, try and get your facts right first. Your film . . . was disgusting, all lies . . . [It] did not upset people who know the facts . . . Try and do something useful with your talent.” My first piece of “hate mail” disturbed me for a number of fairly obvious reasons. What it confirmed, though, was that there continues to be a wide range of emotions and contested interpretations surrounding these particular institutions of the social. I would like to begin, therefore, by expressing my sincere gratitude to the women and men who graciously permitted me to interview them for this book.

The research was supported by a number of sources that enabled it to grow from a thesis into a book. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship, the Committee of the Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom Overseas Research Scholarship and the University of Glasgow Postgraduate Scholarship supported it during its dissertation phase. In the summer of 1990 a grant from the University of Saskatchewan allowed me to do some additional interviews and to present some early results at the International Sociological Association World Congress in Madrid. Financial assistance from the Dean of the College of Arts and Science and the University of Lethbridge Research Fund enabled me to participate in the BBC

Vil

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Scotland documentary, Washing away the stain, to extend my study of homes for girls and women called magdalene asylums into the twentieth century, and to examine some newly discovered documents. The material in Chapter 3 appears in an abridged form in my “Family ties: lady child-savers and girls of the street, 1850-1925”.! Chapter 7 draws heavily on L. Mahood & B. Littlewood, “The ‘vicious’ girl and the ‘street-corner’ boy: sexuality and the gendered delinquent in the Scottish child-saving movement, 1850-1940”.2 My interpretation of the material has benefited significantly by collaboration with Barbara Littlewood on this and other projects. Many people supported me during my period in Glasgow, where I arrived in 1985. At Glasgow University, John Eldridge, Paul Littlewood, Ruth Madigan, David Frisby, Bob Miles and Eleanor Gordon gave me early support, but, most especially, my deepest appreciation goes to Barbara Littlewood, whose example and encouragement opened up the possibility for me to pursue an academic career. I am also very grateful to Janet Nobel and Hugh Corrigan, who always made room and time for me while I was collecting data in London. On the other side of the Atlantic there are also a number of people who I met while an undergraduate and later an instructor at the University of Saskatchewan (some have since scattered) who continue to help me in various ways: B. Singh Bolaria, Terry Wotherspoon, Bernard Schissel, Nancy Poon, Kathy Kendall, Kiran Bolaria (an excellent research assistant) and Vic Satzewich, who has read and commented on every draft. At Lethbridge University, I would like to thank Carol Tomomitsu for her secretarial assistance with this manuscript and various faculty and students, especially Dr Patricia Chuchryk, Dave Brown and Diane Clark, Robin Bright, Ann Moritz, Jeff Ross and Natasha Cabrera, who became good friends. This book would not exist without the patience and support of my entire family, especially Lucy (born during the literature review) and Jack (born during the conclusion). Olga Satzewich’s devotion to her grandchildren continues to enable me to interchange domestic responsibilities and academic commitments without worry. But it is Vic’s strength, commitment to scholarship and gentle prodding that enables me to do it at all.

Linda Mahood University of Guelph, Canada vili

Chapter 1 <s

My brothers always would say to me, “Don’t tell anybody we came from a home.” Pd say, “Whats wrong . . . I’m not ashamed of being brought up in a home...” It was a very good thing.!

You didn’t need to get up to a hell of a lot to get put in one of these places . . . whatever problem they had they solved it by puttin’ you out of the road.*

There were thousands of kids . . . who should never have been in places like that, but rather than the government of the time spending money on proper activities they’d rather capture the kids and put them into a place where they could contain them.?

[The Lochburn Home was for girls] who were taken away from their own parents . . . They had special frocks they had to wear and one or two of them had their heads shaved . . . We knew that they were bad girls, but I didn’t know what that meant!*

The memories of women and men who were inmates of Scottish juvenile reformatories and industrial schools in the early twentieth century reveal a range of confusing and bitter experiences. Such accounts suggest that the historical investigation of “youth” allows us to examine children as both the subjects of culturally constructed definitions and the clients of institutional practices.

The late-nineteenth-century child-saving movement was part of a massive intervention into private life whose strategies, institutions and consequences are still being debated by historians and social scientists. Then, as now, children were frequently the targets of theories and practices aimed at the wider regulation of family life.’ Certainly, since the late nineteenth century public interest in children has been the wedge used to prise open families.* The current public outrage over issues such as domestic violence and child abuse, juvenile crime, homelessness and well-publicized cases of the apparent “failure” of child protection agencies has its roots in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century child-welfare ideologies and institutional regimes.

This study of child-welfare institutions in Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brings together research from a number of social science disciplines and feminist frameworks that are often separate within the academic division of labour: criminology and social control, education, women’s studies, men’s studies and the sociology of the family. This book raises unique historical and social theoretical questions concerning child-welfare policies and social institutions.

Studies of the historical construction of social order” have documented the emergence of new social institutions, such as the police, an organized judiciary, prisons, poorhouses, schools and asylums in Britain by the late nineteenth century. The social control function of these institutions is widely recognized in the literature. According to some, the creation of the modern penitentiary in the 1840s was the “apex of this system, serving as a model of the new discipline and forms of regulation meant to bring a social and moral transformation to labouring women and men”.® Others argue that the compulsory education of children in the 1870s was the pinnacle of social control. “Supervised by its trusty teacher, surrounded by its playground wall, the school was to raise a new race of working people — respectful, cheerful, hardworking, loyal, pacific and religious.”? In addition to formal state institutions such as the prison and the school the mid-nineteenth century also witnessed the establishment of numerous statutory and nonstatutory “pre-prison” institutions. The history of these institutions is not so widely known, although their legacy remains with us today, embodied in the juvenile detention centre, the “lock-up” and the “secure unit” for young offenders.

Victorian penitentiaries for children and adolescents went by a variety of names, notably, houses of refuge, reformatories, industrial schools, certified industrial training ships, industrial day schools for truants and magdalene asylums, which were shelters for women and girls. These “child-saving”!° institutions traversed the disciplinary continuum. Some were soft-end minimum security institutions while others were cruel and resembled adult jails. The establishment of child-welfare institutions raises a number of general historical questions: why did they emerge when they did? who ran them? how were inmates recruited? what regime of rehabilitation did they use? An examination of the histories of these institutions will form the framework of this study.

Complementing these general historical questions regarding child-saving institutions are a series of sociological questions concerning how these institutions are to be conceptualized: were they prisons, were they schools, or were they something else? According to Michael Ignatieff, a new social history of the control institution has begun to be written. He argues that the “new social history of the total institution” can be distinguished from the “timid empiricism” of the “history of an institution” because the former is a history about the “living battles of the confined against their suffering, and about the new professional classes [who] tied their social assent to the new institutions”. This new social history analyzes the institution not as an “administrative entity, but as a social system of domination and resistance, ordered by complex rituals of exchange and communication”. !!

The main empirical focus of this book is the child-saving movement in Scotland in the period roughly from the passing of the Youthful Offenders Act in 1854 to the passing of the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Acts in 1932. The year 1932 marked the beginning of a new administrative era for the institutions, in that management passed from the Home Office to the Scottish Education Department and certified industrial schools and reformatories were renamed “approved schools”.'* The historical framework of this book locates the activities of the child-savers in the social, economic and political changes of the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and the inclusion of some data from the 1940s provides a context for transformations in child-welfare practices after the Second World War. Of course child-saving was not unique to Scotland. Parallel systems for dealing with young offenders developed in England, Ireland and Wales, but many significant initiatives began in Scotland in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In Scotland most of the initiatives were undertaken by philanthropic individuals, magistrates and prison officials at a local level, whereas in England, influential social reformers such as Mary Carpenter and Matthew Davenport Hill formed the Reformatory and Refuge Union in 1851 and lobbied at the national level. Scotland’s main contribution to the treatment of delinquency was the development of day industrial feeding schools, or “ragged schools”, which aimed at preventing children from becoming delinquent rather than reforming those who had already committed crimes. Scotland also pioneered the juvenile reformatory; some of the largest and oldest institutions were in that country. Historian E. A. G. Clark argues that the “Scotch system” of ragged and industrial schools was adopted in at least 15 English towns. In 1862 an industrial school inspector stated that “we cannot have a better model for our English Industrial Schools than those of Scotland”.!3 In 1917 Mossbank Industrial School for Boys in Glasgow was described as “undoubtedly the most progressive in Great Britain”. The Chief Inspector for Industrial Schools declared: “Its spirit I should like to see in the management of every school.”!* By the early twentieth century the 48 reformatories and industrial schools in Scotland were dealing with nearly 7,000 girls and boys.

Policing the population

Michel Foucault argues that the key features of the great transformations in the crime and deviancy apparatuses of Western societies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are: increasing state involvement; increasing efforts to categorize deviant populations and to isolate them in separate institutions (“thieves into prisons, lunatics into asylums, conscripts into barracks, workers into factories, children into schools”!*); the emergence of a new professional body of experts, technicians and professionals to administer the new system of corrections; and the shift from publicly punishing the body to making the mind, the “psyche”, or character of the individual the object of discipline. These changes do not suggest that society became more liberal, but rather that punishment took new

POLICING THE POPULATION forms. The goal of the new rational system of punishment was not to inflict pain but to reform and rehabilitate. The new forms of corporal discipline included large dosages of scripture, prison labour, and moral education, which replaced a cluster of physical punishments directed at the body used in the previous centuries. Under the new regime talk of satanic temptation was replaced by assessment of the individual’s lack of moral judgement and self-control. The magistrate replaced the priest-executioner, judging something other than crime, namely, the individual’s potential to reform. The final judgement and sentence were diffused among a whole technology of experts: doctors, psychiatrists, parole officers, educationalists and social workers, whose responsibility it was to rehabilitate the offender and administer the system.

Behind changes in the perception of crime and the treatment of offenders, which Foucault outlines in Discipline and punish (1979), was a wider more general change in the perception of social life which he develops in The history of sexuality (1980). Foucault argues that the most significant advance of the period was the development of the scientific study of populations, in which Malthusian economics and social Darwinism became central. State officials began to perceive that they were not dealing simply with subjects or “people”, but with a “population” whose characteristic economic, political, health, moral and welfare problems necessitated statistical analysis and social action. This developed, in part, into the formation of “a whole grid of observations regarding sex”. The sex lives of the citizenry became a matter of governmental concern. “Sex was not something simply to be judged”, however; “it had to be managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function to an optimum . . . Sex became a police matter.” 1”

Moral statisticians established links between “sexual perversion” and racial degeneration. This demanded new agents of social control and new disciplines of medical psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, social work and a discourse on sexuality which focused on the “surveillance of dangerous or endangered children”.'? It is this theme of the “colonization of children’s bodies” that Jacques Donzelot develops in The policing of families (1979), where he argues that from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century doctors put together a series of texts attacking folk medicine, lay healers, wet-nurses and home remedies. These were directed to a popular reading public concerning the rearing, education and medical care of bourgeois children. The chief result was an alliance between social medicine and bourgeois women. It centred on the spread of household medicine: knowledge and techniques designed to enable the bourgeois classes to rescue their children from the harmful contact with servants and to place them under their mother’s observation. !? The organic link between the doctor and the bourgeois mother had profound repercussions on family life. It not only marked a privileged alliance with the doctor and the other family members, but it also paved the way for the profession’s establishment within the existing structures of church, hospital court, and school.”°

State intervention in working-class families went through other channels. At the poorest extreme of the social body, what was denounced was the administration of institutions for orphans and deserted children. Statistics revealed that 90 per cent of the state’s orphans died before having been “made useful to the state”, which got no return for the cost incurred in their upkeep during childhood and adolescence. The importance of these children as a natural resource did not go unnoticed and public discussion of the problem demonstrated the advisability of saving them for eventual service in national institutions like the military and the Navy, “for which they would be perfectly suited owing to their lack of constricting family ties”.?! The strategies for the working class aimed at diminishing the social cost of their reproduction and assuring an optimum number of workers at minimum public expense; this would be achieved by what Donzelot critically calls philanthropy.** Philanthropy, in his view, was not an apolitical pastime of Victorian gentlefolk, but a deliberate act of authority that created a dependent relationship between rich and poor.” It was a political act intended to depoliticize poor communities, at the same time that it effected an increasing insinuation of non-familial agencies into the family nexus.”* Philanthropic activities reflected a wider concern over the creation of future citizens, workers and sexualities, all to be selfdisciplining and self-regulating.

Donzelot discusses the different strategies directed at middle- and working-class mothers, and the different destinies envisioned for their children: supervised freedom for bourgeois children and surveillance for working-class children and their care-givers. His use of concepts such as policing, regulation and discipline require some

THE DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY: THE SOCIAL explanation. Policing, for example, refers not to a truncheon-wielding constable, but to the administration of public welfare. Regulation refers to the moral regulation? and administration of individual bodies, desires and pleasures at the level of the social aggregate, or what Foucault calls bio-politics.*” The concept of discipline is equally important. Disciplinary techniques “centre on the body as a machine, optimizing its capabilities and integrating it into systems of surveillance”.”® For families, this entailed the increasing intervention by outside agencies. In her study of Scottish truancy Fiona Paterson argues that the family “is a practical target, being the focus of a series of interventions aimed at securing an upbringing for the future adult population which will reinforce the existing social order”.*? Thus, under the impact of the juvenile court, social workers and psychiatrists, the institution of the family is encircled, suffocated and invaded.2° Donzelot refers to the French case as “the policing of families” and Christopher Lasch calls the American case the “proletarianization of parenthood”.*!

The disciplinary society: the social

Any critical history of such institutions has to place itself in relation to what Foucault has called the emergence of the disciplinary society and must respond to his claim that increasing surveillance and regulation actually created its own domain. Donzelot calls this new domain “the social”, and defines it as a space midway between the private world of home and family and the public sphere of work and commerce. The social is closely linked with administration, ideology and discipline of new social institutions. The principal result was the emergence of a new social sector, comprising institutions, qualified personnel, legal apparatuses and relational norms that sought to take control of childhood and to police (albeit differently) middle-class and working-class family relations. It signifies the intensification of social discipline of private life in the nineteenth century and the increasing intervention in family life by outside agencies.

Recent studies of early social welfare programmes and practices support Donzelot’s view that the totality of these movements and practices reflected the emergence of a qualitatively different sphere of society. In Anti-social policy (1990) Peter Squires examines the link between the administration of social welfare policies and disciplinary modes of social control. He argues that the social sphere contains both institutions and ideologies. It is his thesis, however, that the social has a dark side. The paradox of the social lies in the very forces that give birth to this constellation of principles, practices and ideals. While it promises “welfare”, each wave of reform produces increasingly punitive, coercive and oppressive policies. According to Squires social policy becomes anti-social policy: when the “repressive, exploitative, or sectarian features of the welfare state intensify and develop to a sufficient level, they risk overwhelming the state’s claims to welfare altogether”.

Drawing on the work of socialist feminist scholars like Michéle Barrett, Mary McIntosh and Nancy Fraser, this book will critically evaluate the concept of the social. In The anti-social family (1982) Barrett and McIntosh take issue with Donzelot. In their view Donzelot locates the blame for the demise of the patriarchal family on the middle-class women whom he claims collaborated with the physicians, experts and technicians. The bourgeois wife was to be the instrument who would stamp out the spirit of independence in the working man. They also claim that The policing of families is a “thoroughly functionalist”? text, a criticism that can also be applied to Anti-social policy. Squires argues that the social is constantly in flux.*4 “Social divisions giving rise to ideological disaffection . . . is indicative of . . . [the] failure . . . of the society’s mechanisms of integration and its normative commitments to democratic citizenship.” Although he recognizes that there were conflicts in the social he does not develop this observation other than to say that it was the site of professional rivalries.

It is just this type of functionalism that Nancy Fraser finds so disturbing in academic analysis of social welfare policy. She suggests that “such analysis often screens out ‘dysfunctional’ events like micro- and macro-political resistances and conflicts”.3° The conceptualization of the social that she develops in her book Unruly practices (1989), which interestingly comes from another intellectual tradition, is clearly most insightful. Like Donzelot, Squires and other writers, Fraser also recognizes that the emergence of the social is closely linked with the rise of professionalization of a new class of experts to administer it. She warns us, however, of the danger of functionalist arguments because they obscure the active side of social

THE DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY: THE SOCIAL processes. In her work on the modern American social welfare system, Fraser sees the social as the site of discourses about people’s needs, specifically about those needs that have broken out of the domestic and/or official economic spheres that earlier contained them as “private matters”.>” For Fraser the social is an arena of contestation and conflict, which is a much broader definition than that found in Donzelot’s or Squire’s work. It is a space where conflicts among rival interpretations of people’s needs are played out. “In the social”, then, “one would expect to find a plurality of competing ways of talking about needs. ”?8

Other helpful accounts of nineteenth-century family formation that have influenced my understanding of the genesis of the social are found in the growing body of sociological and historical literature on the family that place more emphasis on “agency” as a variable in family survival strategies. Anna Davin, for one, is sceptical about any alleged alliance between women and social work agencies. She suggests that “the philanthropist” was often perceived as an intruder by working-class families. While poor mothers participated in “free milk” programmes in order to get fresh milk for their children, many rejected the moralizing propaganda and the judgements that were being made about their “incompetence”.*”? Other examples are Sean Damer’s account of poor families in the tenements of Glasgow and Jane Humphries’s work on English families. Both authors have cast the proletarian family as an important historical agent. In the case of Scotland, Damer stresses that working-class “men and women acted creatively on their grossly unfavourable working and living conditions to construct a culture which is uniquely tough, resilient, warm and witty”.*° Humphries suggests that the proletarian family was a defensive institution that enabled working-class people to survive the rigour and brutality of capitalism.*! Linda Gordon questions the very notion of the invasion of the family. She indicates that what is referred to as “the family” is actually an institution of male/father domination and privilege. The problem of intervention, invasion or policing is more complex than first thought. “The critique of social control, both left and right, frequently points to the violation of civil liberties as evidence of the dangers of intervention into family privacy.”** But we must ask the question: whose privacy is being invaded? This point alerts us to the central contradiction of familial ideology. State intervention frequently breaks up traditional patriarchal power, the rights of the father to discipline his dependants, and replaces it with a more general state control of the rights of dependants, in other words, the rights of women and children. This is what several feminist scholars call the shift from private patriarchy to public patriarchy. Thus, “one man’s loss in privacy was often another’s (frequently a woman’s) gain in rights”,*? albeit someone else’s definition of what those rights should be.

There is a growing body of literature concerning “genesis of the social”** but few empirical studies of its operation. One of the ambitions of this book is to construct an aetiology of the social, using the child-saving movement in general, and residential schools in particular, as a case study. Through an analysis of the empirical data, three theoretical issues are brought to light that will provide a fuller conceptualization of the social than currently exists in the literature.

First, it is argued that the social is a material space. Other examples of new institutions for controlling working-class populations include workhouses, mental asylums and inebriate homes. Philip Corrigan, Bruce Curtis and Robert Lanning contend that while “the school, the prison, the park, the playground, the settlement house, the asylum, and other institutions were conceived by the ruling class as having an ‘educative tendency’ for the population they were also forms of police”.* In this study we will question the social “function” of the child-saving institutions and their roles in the moral regulation and sexual surveillance of working-class girls and boys.

Secondly, the social is also an ideological space. It is the arena, the terrain, and the site of a rubric of laws, regulations, rules, policies and institutions, or what Foucault calls technologies-of-power.*® It embodies the ideological practices, the conflicting expert discourses and the logic of the institution. The causes of juvenile delinquency were explained in terms of a familial ideology that espoused the virtue of the autonomous nuclear family headed by a male breadwinner, supported by his nurturing wife and their economically dependent children. This ideology established the parameters whereby the “normal” and “abnormal” family culture could be distinguished and families (by definition poor families) that deviated from this normative ideal were judged as deviant, pathological and productive of juvenile delinquency.

Thirdly, one cannot talk about policing families without talking about the disciplining of gender and sexuality. The role of incarcera-

THE DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY: THE SOCIAL tion in the social reproduction of labour is well documented in feminist studies of the prison.*” Throughout the nineteenth century women were subjected to new forms of policing that were specific to them, and numerous examples of what Stanley Cohen calls “diversionary institutions”‘® were set up with specific class and gender roles in mind. For example, my own study of shelters for “prostitutes” in Scotland suggests that carceral regimes deployed by these magdalene asylums were based on both class and gender ideology.” The moral regulation of young working-class women was the goal of the asylum, where the directors were not interested only in producing ideal proletarian subjects out of the undisciplined real subjects who presented themselves as inmates, or even proletarian subjects reconciled to their status; they were producing female proletarians who were to take up quite distinct positions in the class and gender order.

Research on children in penal institutions has only partially begun to establish links between the construction of gender and class subjectivity. Noline Williamson’s study of reformatory and industrial school girls in New South Wales between 1867 and 1887 demonstrates that reform school training was aimed specifically at devising an educational programme suitable for lower-class girls.°° Similarly, Kerry Wimshurst’s study of reformatory school girls in South Australia between 1871 and 1892 argues that “[t]here was never the least suggestion . . . that reformatory girls should aspire to the emerging professions . . . their futures . . . were seen solely as working-class wives and mothers”.>! But neither has compared the circumstances of reformatory girls with their male counterparts in boys’ reformatories.>*

In the 1990s we have seen the rise of men’s studies, as more male academics have begun to investigate the construction of their own gender experiences. Recent contributions in this field have begun to enhance our understanding of how the construction of gender roles shapes identities for men as well as women. But work such as Anthony Rotundo’s “Romantic friendship: male intimacy and middle-class youth in the northern United States, 1800-1900”? or Harry Hendrick’s recent book Images of youth (1990)°4 echoes what has long been found in feminist research. Rotundo basically follows Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s path-breaking study of middle-class women’s friendship,” while Hendrick admits his attempt to duplicate Carol Dyhouse’s Girls growing up in late-Victorian and

Edwardian England. The results, however, do not advance the debate.°® Simply substituting a “male” for a “female” gender-analysis fails to forge any new links in our understanding of gender socialization. Thus, our understanding of the process of social reproduction in some areas of gender and class analysis remains partial. The concept of the social as it is used by Donzelot and Squires also fails to locate the disciplining of gender within social institutions. While these authors recognize that classes are historically and socially constructed in the sense that people do not simply possess the roles and duties expected of them because of their class position, they portray the working class as genderless. This means that while class is regarded as a social construct, gender is a pre-existing trait. Gaps in the literature raise questions about the interrelationship between class, sexuality and gender. Put simply, what was happening to working-class girls and boys? Did they suffer repression and control (mainly) because they were working-class and regarded by the child-savers as morally corrupt? Or did the girls suffer “excessive drudgery and repression — not only because they were poor or ‘bad’ but also because they were female” ?*”

Few studies successfully integrate class, gender, sexuality and “race” in the interpretation of data and the elaboration of theory. Notable exceptions are Linda Gordon’s (1988) study of the history of family violence and its handling in Boston, Mariana Valverde’s (1991)°8 work on the Canadian social purity movement and Celia Haig-Brown’s (1989)°? study of Indian residential schools, also in Canada. These feminist scholars are sensitive to the “racialized” dimension of the interventions they document, a dimension that was evident in a rather different form in the Scottish context. The child-savers regularly referred to urban children as street “arabs” and to their parents’ “heathen” backgrounds, especially those from the Highlands, but there is little evidence of the systematic targeting or stigmatization of minority ethnic groups in relation to their family life or morality, in spite of the migration of the Irish (and Roman Catholic) to Scotland’s cities in the period considered here. Rather, a “racialized” discourse appears to float free of any anchoring in people’s perceived racial category, and the labels are used as indiscriminate signifiers indicating inferiority and otherness. In this case, “savages” were perceived to inhabit not only the far regions of the Empire and Continent, but more alarmingly, the streets and slums of