This week traces the pre-history and emergence of social research in the Victorian era and explores how it was entwined with assumptions about class, gender and race.

Please note that in this week - as in others from here on in - reading duties will be negotiated! You will not be expected to read everything listed here - but rather a few short chapter/article length pieces which we will 'pool' in the seminar.

Seminar questions

• What was the point of 'slumming'?
• What was being investigated or measured in Victorian studies of poverty?
• Who was observing whom, and in what kinds of encounters?
• What trends do you notice in the historiography? How are questions of race, gender and class foregrounded over time and what factors do you think influence this?
• What kinds of records have Victorian social investigators left behind and how should we use them/how have they been used?

Reading

Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992/London: Virago, 1992) [e-book]

• Chapter 1, ‘Urban Spectatorship’, pp. 15-39

Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: women, class, and the state (Cambridge: CUP, 1980) [e-book]

• Chapter 2, 'Social science and the Great Social Evil', pp. 32-47

Seth Koven, Slumming: sexual and social politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) [e-book]

• Chapter 1, 'Workhouse Nights', pp. 25-87
• Chapter 3, 'The American Girl in London', pp. 140-180
• Chapter 4, 'The Politics and Erotics of Dirt', pp. 183-227
• Chapter 5, 'The "New Man" in the Slums', pp. 228-281

Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: from Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle: Agenda, 2018) [e-book]

• Chapter 3, 'Anglo-Saxon Empire and the Residuum', pp. 33-55

Chris Renwick, British Sociology's Lost Biological Roots: a history of futures past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) [e-book]

• Chapter 5, 'The origins and growth of the Sociological Society', pp. 123-146

Further reading

Eileen J. Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: relations and representations of class and gender (London: Rivers Oram, 1996)

Jeremy MacClancy, Anthropology in the Public Arena: historical and contemporary contexts (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013)

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995)

Lawrence Goldman, 'Victorians and numbers: statistics and social science in nineteenth-century Britain', in Plamena Panayotova (ed.), The History of Sociology in Britain: new research and revaluation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 71-100

Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method (Oxford: OUP, 2010), chapter 3, 'The challenge of technical identity', pp. 67-92

Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: childhood and the idea of human interiority, 1780-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 7, 'Children of the Street', pp. 112-129