The ‘Queen’s Shades’ and a ‘Gothicized’ London

This chapter explores how Barnardo uses the Gothic narrative mode as a central mechanism to raise affect and thus engage potential supporters. The discussion draws on Jamieson Ridenhour’s work on the Gothicised cityscape to explore how Barnardo’s London reflects societal anxieties related to the past and the potential degeneration of British citizenry. It focuses on Barnardo’s treatment of one site in London, ‘The Queen’s Shades’ a site formed by mounds of detritus at the old Billingsgate Fish Market, first in a novel Barnardo wrote and serialized in his juvenile periodicals, and secondly in a supposedly non-fictional account for adults which narrativized the beginnings of his work in the 1860s. Both raise crucial questions about thresholds and liminality, about borders between inside/outside, animate and inanimate, indeed, between human and not-human. The chapter argues that Barnardo uses the Gothic in the child’s narrative to excite and engage interest while eliciting fear and shame in the adult version. Ultimately, ‘The Queen’s Shades’ operates as a powerful Gothic trope in which human sensations, corporal bodies and architectural detritus merge to reflect societal fears regarding the stability of the wider English social body.