If Men Do These Kind of Journalistic Feats…: Elizabeth L. Banks and Woman’s Work

Seaber, Luke

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_6

Luke Seaber⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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Abstract

This brief chapter explores the 1890s work of the American journalist in London Elizabeth L. Banks, which created a new subform of incognito social investigation, one focusing on domestic service and ‘woman’s work’. It is shown how Banks makes herself the subject of her writing, and how the purpose of her texts, nominally instruction, is in fact entertainment. We also see how ‘the poor’ are a social and cultural category rather than an economic one.

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Notes

1.
Schriber, Mary Suzanne and Abbey Zink. 2003. Introduction. Banks, Elizabeth L. Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Late Victorian London. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. vii_a–xliv_a, pp. viii_a–ix_a.
2.
Ibid., pp. ix_a–xi_a.
3.
Ibid., pp. xv_a–xxii_a.
4.
Ibid., pp. xxiv_a–xxv_a.
5.
Ibid., p. xxv_a.
6.
Originally published as: Banks, Elizabeth L. 1894. ‘How the Other Half Lives: The Crossing-Sweeper’. Illustrated English Magazine 11, pp. 845–50; Banks, Elizabeth L. 1894. ‘“How the Other Half Lives”: The Flower Girl’. Illustrated English Magazine 11, pp. 925–31. There was a third Banks piece published in this series (Banks, Elizabeth L. 1895. ‘How the Other Half Lives: The Dressmakers Apprentice’. Illustrated English Magazine 13, pp. 539–45); all of what is said here regarding the republished pieces applies, mutatis mutandis, to this.
7.
Banks, Elizabeth L. 2003 [1894]. Campaigns of Curiosity: Journalistic Adventures of an American Girl in Late Victorian London. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, p. xiv.
8.
Ibid., p. 131.
9.
Ibid., p. 140
10.
Ibid., p. 133.
11.
Ibid., p. 129.
12.
Ibid., p. 130.
13.
Ibid., p. 137.
14.
Ibid., p. 138.
15.
See Schriber and Zink, Introduction. Banks, Elizabeth L. Campaigns of Curiosity, pp. xx_a–xxiv_a for further analysis of the role that humour plays in Banks’s work, although the focus is somewhat different from that adopted here.
16.
Although not all: her encounter (p. 137) with the prostitute who is the only person to give her any money whilst street-sweeping and her lack of comment upon the other woman other than to note that prostitutes are those who give street-cleaners the most money I would suggest are instances of genuine emicity.
17.
Banks, Campaigns, pp. 150–1.
18.
Ibid., p. 151.
19.
Ibid., pp. 151–2.
20.
Schriber and Zink, Introduction. Banks, Elizabeth L. Campaigns of Curiosity, p. xx_a.
21.
Ibid., pp. xxi_a–xxii_a.
22.
Leslie, Marion. 1894. ‘An American Girl in London: An Interview with Miss Elizabeth Banks’. Young Woman 3, pp. 58–62, p. 58.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Ibid.
25.
Banks, Campaigns, p. 3.
26.
What Banks does not point out is that any knowledge of servants’ working conditions that she gleaned from her own employee was likely to be anything but representative, insofar as her housemaid, Dinah Moore, was an African-American with a relationship with her mistress that, at least as portrayed by Banks, was far more informal than the late Victorian standard would desire. Banks, Elizabeth L. 1902. The Autobiography of a ‘Newspaper Girl’. London: Methuen & Co., pp. 52–60.
27.
Banks, Campaigns, p. 9.
28.
Ibid., p. 20.
29.
Orwell, George. 1997 [1933]. Down and Out in Paris and London [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 1]. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 16–7.
30.
Banks, Campaigns, p. 21.
31.
Ibid., p. x.
32.
Ibid., p. 45.
33.
Banks, Autobiography, p. 86.
34.
See Davison, Peter. 2000. ‘Publication of Down and Out in Paris and London’. In George Orwell, A Kind of Compulsion: 1903–1936 [The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, vol. 10]. London: Secker & Warburg, pp. 299–300.
35.
Ibid., p. 300.
36.
Banks, Campaigns, p. 9.
37.
Leslie, ‘An American Girl in London’, p. 60.
38.
Banks, Campaigns, pp. 1–3.
39.
Banks, Autobiography, pp. 66–7.
40.
Banks, Campaigns, p. 3.
41.
Banks, Autobiography, pp. 65–6.
42.
Ibid., p. 94.
43.
Ibid., p. 66.
44.
Ibid., p. 93.
45.
Ibid., p. 95.
46.
Banks, Campaigns, p. xiv.
47.
Ibid.
48.
Ibid.

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Centre for Languages and International Education (CLIE), University College London, London, United Kingdom
Luke Seaber

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Seaber, L. (2017). If Men Do These Kind of Journalistic Feats…: Elizabeth L. Banks and Woman’s Work. 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_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50962-4_6
Published: 29 March 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-50961-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-50962-4
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