ABSTRACT
The journalist Robert Sherard was committed to reworking the familiar slum-exploration narrative into a self-consciously crafted, even lyric genre. Guided by his identification as a bohemian aesthete, he employed high-literary allusions to elicit readers’ compassion for the poor. When he moved from the early industrial exposé of The White Slaves of England to projects less focused on specific trades and their locales, he was forced to cover wider geographic ground and work on a tighter schedule. Granted less time to get to know poor locals, he felt wary and vulnerable among them, forgoing incognito slumming after briefly attempting it. Sherard resorted to a more conservative judgment of the poor, devising a set of signs by which to read and interpret their morality from a distance. In particular, he revived the mid-Victorian concept of moral character as a tool for understanding and justifying their degradation. At the heart of Sherard’s slum writing is the tension inherent in flâneurie in practice: the desire to achieve an incisive observation of the crowd and a resistance to being subsumed in it. Ultimately, his slum prose reflects his struggles as he sought to reconcile his identities as an investigative journalist, an urban flaneur, and an aesthetic prose stylist.
