Quote from Seth Koven's Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London

"Many kinds of love, sexual and nonsexual alike, animated Britons' engagement with philanthropy. I investigate how the histories of sexuality and sexual desires usually associated with the private lives of individuals intersected with the public histories of benevolence to shape metropolitan philanthropy and social welfare. While I do not anachronistically impose the vocabulary of twentieth-century psychoanalysis on my nineteenth-century subjects, I do attempt to illuminate their psychological and sexual complexities. I examine the motives, representations, meanings, and consequences of their forays into the slums of Victorian and Edwardian London. At the same time, I reconstruct as best I can the responses of the poor to their uninvited visitors. The circumstances and survival strategies of the poor necessarily shaped their vision of the world and of their social betters.¹⁸ This book reveals the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories, overflowed their boundaries, affecting one another in profoundly consequential ways for our understanding of poverty and its representations, social policies, and emerging sexual and gender identities in modern Britain." (From Introduction)

I love Koven's approach, but I also wonder if I would need to be so subtle. I don't think erotics and sexuality informed slumming; I think it was the impetus for slumming. But then again, we're talking about different populations and places -- he's talking about Victorian London reformers and I seem to be talking about tourists.