Abstract
The chapter examines the terminological problem of what to call the object of this study, settling on ‘incognito social investigation’. In order to define the field, we look briefly at its history pre-1866, examining the strange career of Charles Cochrane, who in the late 1820s pretended to be a wandering Spanish minstrel. The various subtypes of incognito social investigation are then listed, and mention is made of two forms that, although related to incognito social investigation, will not be examined here – living with Gypsies and enlisting in the ranks.
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Notes
- 1.
See Koven, Seth. 2004. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. This is a major study and of great importance, but its very choice of ‘slumming’ as a name for the phenomenon in question points to its problem: it does not distinguish enough between different types of slumming, and analyses settlements of the Toynbee Hall type alongside accounts such as that of Greenwood as if disguise and an incognito status were mere details.
- 2.
Pittenger, Mark. 2012. Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present. New York and London: New York University Press, p. 4.
- 3.
For an excellent overview of passing of all types, see Sánchez, María Carla and Linda Schlossberg (eds.). 2001. Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion. New York and London: New York University Press.
- 4.
Gold, Raymond L. 1958. ‘Roles in Sociological Field Observations’. Social Forces 36:3, pp. 217–23, pp. 219–20.
- 5.
Freeman, Mark. 2001. ‘“Journeys into Poverty Kingdom”: Complete Participation and the British Vagrant, 1866–1914’. History Workshop Journal 52, pp. 99–121.
- 6.
Valverde, Mariana. 1996. ‘The Dialectic of the Familiar and Unfamiliar: “The Jungle” in Early Slum Travel Writing’. Sociology 30:3, pp. 493–509.
- 7.
Stooks Smith, Henry. 1973. The Parliaments of England: From 1715 to 1847, ed. F.W.S. Craig. Chichester: Political Reference Publications, p. 470.
- 8.
Winter, James. 1989. ‘The “Agitator of the Metropolis”: Charles Cochrane and Early-Victorian Street Reform’. London Journal 14:1, pp. 29–42, p. 36.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Mayhew, Henry. 2009 [1861–1862]. London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work. New York: Cosimo, vol. II, pp. 253–75.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 275. Mayhew uses the term ‘scavaging’ to refer to street cleaning.
- 12.
All biographical information taken from Winter, ‘The “Agitator of the Metropolis”’, except the year of Basil Cochrane’s death, taken from Burke’s Peerage.
- 13.
Winter, ‘The “Agitator of the Metropolis”’, pp. 39–41.
- 14.
‘Law Report: Cochrane v. Young’, The Times 22/06/1848, p. 7.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
‘A Westminster Elector’ [Charles Cochrane]. n.d. [1847]. An Address to the Business-Like Men of Westminster on Their Present Candidates with a Review of Mr. Cochrane’s Work ‘Juan de Vega’. London: Longman and Co., pp. 9–11.
- 17.
Anon [Charles Cochrane]. 1830. Journal of a Tour Made by Señor Juan de Vega, the Spanish Minstrel of 1828–9, through Great Britain and Ireland, a Character Assumed by an English Gentleman. London: Simpkin and Marshall, vol. I, p. 1.
- 18.
Winter, ‘The “Agitator of the Metropolis”’, p. 30.
- 19.
Cochrane, Journal, vol. I, pp. 3–4.
- 20.
See Finnegan, Ruth. 2011. Why Do We Quote?: The Culture and History of Quotation. Cambridge: Open Book, pp. 91–2 for details of this practice.
- 21.
Cochrane, Journal, vol. I, p. 28.
- 22.
‘The General Election: Westminster’, The Times 29/07/1847, p. 2.
- 23.
Cochrane, Address, pp. 9–11.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 19.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 20.
- 26.
Cochrane, Journal, vol. I, p. 126.
- 27.
Ibid., vol. I, p. 3.
- 28.
Ibid., vol. II, p. 399.
- 29.
See Stevenson, David. 2004. ‘“The Gudeman of Ballangeich”: Rambles in the Afterlife of James V’. Folklore 115:2, pp. 187–200.
- 30.
Stevenson, ‘“The Gudeman of Ballangeich”, p. 289. The type that Stevenson classifies as ‘recreational’ covers Cochrane’s experiences rather well.
- 31.
The exonym ‘Gypsies’ is used to mark the fact that many of the social investigators in question were interested in a romantic construction of the ‘Gypsy’ rather than ‘real’ Romanis.
- 32.
Above all Lawrence, T.E. 1955. The Mint: A Day-Book of the R.A.F. Depot between August and December 1922 with Later Notes by 352087 A/c Ross. London: Jonathan Cape.
- 33.
Although I have not looked at texts of this sort, the title of this book nonetheless draws on a work related to them. See Lawrence, T.E. 1962 [1926]. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 581.
- 34.
The field of incognito social investigation has hitherto received only partial attention from critics and historians. The most important work published so far is an anthology (Freeman, Mark and Gillian Nelson (eds.). 2008. Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Lambertville: The True Bill Press), examining only the Victorian and Edwardian periods; its introduction is to date the only serious academic overview of the field. However, it refers to a far smaller corpus than that examined here, and offers only a historical survey, with no analysis of the texts themselves. There are also two important anthologies including (with some very basic commentary) incognito social investigation texts alongside other types of journalism. These (Keating, Peter (ed.). 1976. Into Unknown England 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers. N.p.: Fontana; Donovan, Stephen and Matthew Rubery (eds.). 2012. Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism. Peterborough: Broadview Press) have on the one hand a wider focus than incognito social investigation alone and on the other a narrower focus in time, thus limiting their usefulness. The only serious attention paid to post-Edwardian texts regards 1930s texts: see Cunningham, Valentine. 1988. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, passim.
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Seaber, L. (2017). Certainties in Degradation: An Introduction to Incognito Social Investigation. In: Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_1
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