The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among ...

of a different "tribe." Ethnologists seemed to have solved the
problem of considering "uncivilized" races abroad: they could
embrace non-Western peoples on the grounds of the essential
unity of mankind and yet they could explain apparently dis-
turbing differences in customs and beliefs by theories of social
evolution and of adaptive behavior. If this feat could be ac-
complished in regard to South Sea Islanders and African
tribes, then surely there was a way to approach the urban
slum-dweller as an object of study and not merely as an object
of disapprobation, revulsion, or amusement.
NOTES
1. This paper was first presented as part of a multi-disciplinary panel
on Western views of non-Western cultures at the Society of Fellows
in the Humanities, Columbia University, April 1981.
2. Margaret Harkness ("John Law"), In Darkest London: A Story of the
Salvation Army (London, 1891), pp. 67-68.
3. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), p. 220.
4. See Peter Keating's introductory essay in Into Unknown England: Se-
lections from the Social Explorers (Manchester, 1976). I am indebted to
Keating's collection of the writings of social explorers and to his The
Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (New York, 1971).
5. George Sims, How the Poor Live (1883), excerpted in Keating's Into
Unknown England, pp. 5-6.
6. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (1903), excerpted in Keating,
p. 224.
7. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), excerpted
in Keating, p. 145.
8. Harkness, p. 3.
9. See Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1852-3), Ch. IV.
10. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans.
W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner (Stanford, 1958), pp. 35-36.
11. See E.P. Thompson's introductory essay, "Mayhew and the Morning
Chronicle," in The Unknown Mayhew, ed. E.P. Thompson and Eileen
Yeo (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1971).
133