Abstract
This article argues that Henry Mayhew and other Victorian moralists, who visited penny gaffs or penny theaters in the slums of London and recorded their observations for middle-class readers, were engaged in discursive practices that can be properly described as ethological. Ethology, in this context, is the science of the formation of character, as sketched out by John Stuart Mill in 1843. Mill’s claim was that human character was something that could be made into an object of scientific observation and that, if the process of the formation of character could be understood, it could also be more effectively controlled. As this article argues, Victorian moralists viewed the penny gaff as a sort of ethological observatory, a place to which one could go to observe the character of the poor in the process of its formation and development. They also considered the penny gaff to be an educational apparatus, an institution that shaped the moral character of the poor and would therefore need to be taken in hand and controlled in order to produce a “better,” more bourgeois character among the London street folk. To describe this ethological discourse, Michel Foucault’s archaeological method is employed.