Abstract

Penny gaffs were shows put on by and for the poor in the slums of London throughout the Victorian Age. They were raucous affairs, "where dancing and singing [took] place," along with the occasional brawl, and where bourgeois taboos were openly flaunted. Performers dressed provocatively, told dirty jokes, and acted in plays that seethed with innuendo, if not outright obscenity. Middle-class writers who attended the gaff generally adopted the style and tone of travel writers and ethnographers. They styled themselves as travellers in "the undiscovered country of the poor," as "Pilgrims, wanderers, gipsy-loiterers in the great world of London," and as explorers of "regions dark and dolorous." In this essay, I employ Foucault's archaeological method in order to demonstrate that middle-class writings about the gaff belonged to an "ethological" discourse. Ethology, in this context, is the science of the formation of character, as sketched out by John Stuart Mill in his 1843 work A System of Logic. Mill's claim was that human character was something knowable, something that could be isolated as an object of scientific observation. And the penny gaff was, for middle-class moralists, a sort of ethological observatory, a place where one might go to observe the moral character of the poor in the process of being formed. And for this same reason, it was also an educational apparatus: for it was generally believed that if the process of the formation of character could be understood, then it could also be taken in hand and controlled so that a more desirable, more virtuous, more appropriately bourgeois type of character might be produced among the poor.