London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  DEFINING THE EAST END

  Increasingly in the late nineteenth century the city was being identified as `a place of social danger: from the loss of customary human feelings to the building up of a massive, irrational, explosive force"' Nowhere was this more apparent than in the capital city, London. In London this danger was applied to the east of the metropolis to the area we have come to know as the East End. To some extent, like `Jack' himself the East End is a product of a complex meshing of perceptions and stereotypes and it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the `real' East End from that of myth and representation. According to Keating the East End was in many ways a creation of nineteenth-century writers, including novelists, reformers and journalists. `It was the creation of Edward Denison, Samuel Barnett, Charles Booth, Walter Besant, Arthur Morrison, and Jack the Ripper."' After 1880, according to the contemporary periodical Nineteenth Century, the negative association of the East End with poverty and crime was `rapidly taken up by the new halfpenny press, in the pulpit and the music hall' so that `it became a concentrated reminder to the public conscience that nothing to be found in the East End should be tolerated in a Christian country"' Since then we have had the additional overlay of the wartime `Blitz spirit' and the machinations of the residents of Albert Square in the BBC's long running soap opera, EastEnders.

  For the mid-Victorians the East End was somewhere that only occasionally required their attention. When cholera broke out or when a particularly nasty murder case reached the papers, as it did in 1811 on Ratcliffe Highway, the Victorian middle class shivered in their comfortable homes and held their noses lest they be infected by the pollutant to the east. Indeed it is the smell of the East of London that is most redolent in much of nineteenth-century writing. Thus in visiting the East End in 1841 the future Lord Shaftesbury discovered such `scenes of filth, discomfort, disease! [such] scenes of moral and mental ill ... No pen or paint-brush could describe the thing as it is. One whiff of Cowyard, Blue-Anchor, or Baker's Court, outweighs ten pages of letter press'20 Much of the association of the East End with nauseous odours reflects the area's industry and poverty. As London developed, the dirty trades were often located in the East. Here were the slaughterhouses and tanneries, here too many of the homes of the poor - close by the docks where so many Londoners were employed. The area south of Whitechapel High Street was full of butchers and slaughterhouses throughout the nineteenth century. The Poor Law report of 1838 uncovered some of the problems of disease associated with the trade:

  Dwellings thickly crowded with inhabitants stand all around the slaughter-houses [...] in the passages, courts, and alleys, on the very opposite side of the street from the houses of which there are no drains into the common sewer, fever of a fatal character has been exceedingly prevalent.21

  The contrasts between West and East had a long history and were clearly a subject for amusement. In 1840 one periodical reported that in response to the laying out of a park in the East End the `butchers of Whitechapel have resolved to christen it Hide-park, in order not to be behind the West-end in gentility and fashion. Anybody, moreover, who has visited the region in which the slaughter houses are situated, will know that they may easily have a "Rotten-row" of their own' 22

  Nineteenth-century Eastenders had to live among the dirty trades as they had done since the area had first been occupied. From Saxon times the east side of the capital had been clearly demarcated from the west and centre. The Romans had built their city of Londinium by the banks of the Thames and the Saxon invaders that arrived several hundred years later viewed the crumbling edifices of the Roman empire as the work of gods and giants and chose to set up their much more humble hovels to the west of the river Walbrook, forcing the defeated Romano-British inhabitants out towards the east.23 Notwithstanding that many of the place names that survive for East London reflect their Saxon origin: Stibba (Stepney), Waeppa (Wapping), Bilda (Bethnal), Deorlof (Dalston) and Haca (Hackney). As Peter Ackroyd has noted, since `the earliest periods of London history the eastern side has enjoyed a less enviable reputation than that of the west'.24 This was further emphasized from the eleventh century onwards as the city of Westminster grew into the seat of government and wealth.

  Defining the East End is difficult. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica it `was that part of the walled City near the eastern gate, Aldgate' Others suggest it starts at `the point where Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road meet '. 25 Some have defined it socially and not simply geographically so that it takes in Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, and even East Ham and West Ham. We can perhaps settle on an area that is bounded on the east by the River Lea, to the west by the City wall, to the north by Clapton Common and to the south by the Thames. Paul Begg claims that `the real East End is the community just within and just beyond the eastern gates, primarily Spitalfields and Whitechapel' and this is a useful definition in the context of the 1880s.26 Alan Palmer restricts the East End to the `old London Boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets' while acknowledging that the area effectively extends to Hoxton, Shoreditch, West and East Ham and the recently gentrified Docklands.27 However, the real East End remains elusive, a construction built from nearly two centuries of writing. Much of this writing was negative; indeed we might view the rehabilitation of the East End in the depiction of the plucky cockney smiling-through in the face of repeated German bombings in the Second World War (however divorced from reality this situation might have been).28 As we shall see in the next chapter, philanthropists and new journalists were quick to point out the squalor of housing conditions in the area around Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and `slummers' could go and see for themselves `how the poor lived' Walter Besant characterized the East End itself as a 'huge cultureless void' into which thousands of desperate working-class people were falling to their doom.29 Besant declared that:

  Two millions of people, or thereabouts, live in the East End of London. That seems a good-sized population for an utterly unknown town. They have no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera - they have nothing. It is the fashion to believe that they are all paupers, which is a foolish and mischievous belief, as we shall presently see. Probably there is no such spectacle in the whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London ... Nobody goes east, no one wants to see the place; no one is curious about the way of life in the east. Books on London pass it over; it has little or no history; great men are not buried in its churchyards, which are not even ancient, and crowded by citizens as obscure as those who now breathe the upper airs about them. If anything happens in the east, people at the other end have to stop and think before they can remember where that place may be.3o

  In some respects Besant was wrong of course, the East End had a diverse culture with many places of worship, entertainment and trade and a long history. After 1888 everyone in the world knew where Whitechapel was and in many ways, as was touched on in the introduction to this study, the Ripper murders have obscured the reality of this part of London.

  So what lay behind this rhetoric? Manchester had long concerned observers with its rapid expansion from a rural hamlet to the prima facie industrial metropolis of the day, populated by a new and demanding working class; one that had carved out rights for themselves. In East London the working classes were seen as passive victims of the dynamic progress of the Victorian age - they were being left behind to become a burden on the rest of society.31 They had formed a dangerous `residuum' that needed to be raised up, rescued, reformed and rehabilitated to take their place in the new society that was growing around them. The debates about how this was to be achieved will be tackled in subsequent chapters but for now it is sufficient for us to remember that the construction of a mythic reality for the East End had as much to do with fears about the population of that area as it did about desires to help its inhabitants.

  In 1889 Charles Booth published th
e first of his series of studies of London poverty. This represented an attempt, as he put it, to lift `the curtain' and reveal the reality of life in the East End. Again, we shall return to Booth later but before we go on to think a little about the reality of the East End and how it was described in the popular press of the day we can finish this section with a quote from Booth:

  East London lay hidden from view behind a curtain on which were painted terrible pictures: Starving children, suffering women, overworked men: horrors of drunkenness and vice; monsters and demons of inhumanity; giants of disease and despair. Did these pictures truly represent what lay behind, or did they bear to the facts a relation similar to that which the pictures outside a booth at some country fair bear to the performance or show within?32

  We might reflect that in our twenty-first century world of instant media and popular television we are still being fed a constructed image of the East End, one that often bears little relationship to reality.

  THE PEOPLES OF THE ABYSS: THE DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES OF THE EAST END

  In a richly illustrated article of 1887 The Graphic offered its readership an overview of the people gathering in and around the Thames police office in East Arbour Street, `sandwiched, as it were, between the two great East End arteries, Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road East'. 33 Among those milling around waiting for their cases to be heard, or for news of loved ones or friends held overnight in the nearby police station, was a cross section of the area's population.

  They are of all aspects, an amphibious and fish-like aspect, a river-side Rogue Riderhood aspect, a Whitechapel thief-like aspect, and a stolid costermonger-like aspect; they are Saturday night faces that one sees not in Begravia. Here are men from the docks and wharves, broad, and burly, and fierce, with wonderful whiskers and fur caps; here are foreigners with rings in their ears and knives at their girdles; here is our old friend Fagin - and Fagin's old friends en masse, and a whole army of the `ragged fringe,' poor, poverty-haunted, criminal nondescripts.

  The author, F. W. Robinson, paints us a picture of the East End and its peoples complete with all the expected stereotypes (the use of `Fagin' to represent the Jewish community and the association of foreign sailors with knives) and prejudices. Elsewhere in the pages of the contemporary press we can visit the East End of the nineteenth century, although once again we must be aware that these are representations of the area, channelled through narrow foci for a largely middle-class readership. The Manchester Times described the central hub of East London, Spitalfields and Bethnal Green and the weavers that occupied the cleanest parts of the district. By the 1860s, when the paper printed an excerpt from Thomas Archer's The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict, the weavers of Spitalfields (who had done so much to draw immigrants to the area from the seventeenth century onwards) were reduced to a 'very deplorable condition' (in part because of competition from Manchester itself as well as its more traditional rivals, Germany and France). Despite this the weavers enjoyed a few luxuries ('baked potatoes, stewed eels' ... `fried fish and whelks' ... `all eaten with infinite gusto at a dozen stalls about Brick Lane and Shoreditch') and hoped for something better for their children.34 The Huguenot influence on Spitalfields was noted by a Daily News reporter in 1871 who saw the `French vivacity in some of the features' of the ragged school children who gathered in rapt attention to see the newly installed Christmas tree in Spicer Street.35 The French presence in the area is still clearly evident in the streets surrounding Hawksmoor's magnificent Christ Church, Spitalfields, in the shutters that adorn the houses in Wilkes Street and Fournier Street and others. The Huguenot weavers had fled persecution during the French Wars of Religion that had seen a bloody civil war divide Catholics and Protestants. They were not the last European minority to choose Whitechapel as a place of refuge. By 1885 the descendants of the original 15,000 or so silk weavers who had left France in the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had dwindled to a rump of perhaps 2,000 at best. These former immigrants had integrated themselves so effectively by the last decades of the century that they felt it necessary to create a Huguenot Society to help maintain their previous heritage.36

  The Huguenot weavers have left a lasting impression on Spitalfields but it was another ethnic group that dominated for most of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1887 the Pall Mall Gazette reported the deaths of 17 people in a public hall on Commercial Street as some 400 theatre-goers struggled to escape from a reported gas leak in the building. The drama in the paper's description of the panic is evident: `The scene at this time was one of intense excitement. Screams of terror and cries of appeal and advice mingled, while the mass wedged in the doorway struggled and surged'37 The list of victims, three of whom remained unidentified at the time the newspaper went to press, tells us a little about the ethnicity of this part of London:3R

  1. Isaac Levy, seventy years, 270, Brunswick buildings

  2. Gerty Levy, forty-seven years, 270, Brunswick buildings

  3. Solomon Krotofsky, fifteen years, 41, Pelham Street

  4. Lewis Krotofsky, thirteen years, 41, Pelham Street

  5. Rachel Levy, twenty-two years, 18, Myrtle Street, Commercial Road

  6. Reigna Moncadum, forty-five years

  7. Unindentified

  8. Esther Ellis, sixteen years, 4, Colchester Street

  9. Isaac Gubert, twelve years, 3, Chicksand Street

  10. Millie Gubert, thirty-six years, 3, Chicksand Street

  11. BetsyAizan, twenty-four years, 143, Hansbury [sic] Street

  12. Goa Marks, nine years, 36, Spital Street

  13. Janie Goldstein, twenty-four years, 143, Hansbury [sic] Street

  14. Esther Rosenfeld, twenty-one years, 5, Regal Place

  15. Katie Silverman, twenty-two, 27, Henage Street

  16. Unidentified

  17. Unidentified

  According to the newspaper nearly all those attending were Jews, or `foreign Jews' as they were described by the Gazette. The funerals were held at the Great Synagogue on Duke Street and a subscription list to help the bereaved families was opened by The Jewish Chronicle.39 The Gazette described the cultural differences of the Jewish funerals, with just a hint of anti-Semitism in the necessity for a police cordon and the lack of spoken English among some of the survivors who testified at the inquest in front of Dr Wynne Baxter (who was to have a busy autumn in the following year, 1888).4° The language used reveals long-held prejudices and a reliance upon well-worn stereotypes:

  The Jews were out in strong force in the Whitechapel-road, and took a keen and sympathetic interest in the funeral; red-eyed women encased in tawdry finery, women with flabby jowls, faces rouged and powdered, hair towzled [sic] and unkempt, their shapeless figures encased in shabby furs and threadbare velveteens, every hat carrying a nodding plume, of which an undertaker would be proud. The men were even stranger-looking, clad in indescribable garments, from the tattered overcoat of a modern Fagin to the reach-me-down finery of the East-end exquisite 41

  The author chooses to represent the East End Jew as the descendant of Dickens' Fagin; a character that many in Victorian society would have been familiar with, either through reading Oliver Twist, or from seeing Cruickshank's associated engravings. Dickens and Cruikshank, by contrast with Henry Mayhew's more sociological depiction, present Fagin `not as of a group or class, not martyr or victim, but Mephistophelean tempter of Christians'.42 Negative representations of Jews proliferate in the nineteenth century as `foreigners, moneylenders and crooks and these characterizations build upon previous denigrations of Jews in anti-Semitic outbursts from medieval accounts of the Crusades to Shakespeare's characterization of Shylock. Disraeli was described by the Socialist leader H. M. Hyndman (himself an anti-Semite) as a 'Spanish Jew' and so, presumably, unfit to lead an English political party. Even Beatrice Potter, so often sympathetic to the plight of the poor of the East End, was unable to resist falling back on racial slurs in describing East End Jews as grasping, `profit-seeking' g
amblers (as if the pursuit of profit in the golden age of capital was somehow something to be ashamed of).43 Across the Channel the military and government institutions of France were caught up in a long-running and embarrassing scandal over the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus for passing secrets to the enemy. Anti-Semitism was rife in late nineteenth-century Europe and London was not immune. Thus, the Pall Mall Gazette was, perhaps unwittingly, subscribing to `racialist representations that defined general cultural images of the Jews for better than a hundred years of English and European culture' since Dickens' novel had first appeared in 1838.44

  Racial slurs and stereotyping have been a feature of anti-Semitism throughout history and Arnold White, despite his defence of `common sense' and reasonable persona contributed to this in his depiction of East End Jews as dirty and insanitary. White, who went on to become an advocate of eugenics in the twentieth century, was challenged by Sir Samuel Montagu MP, the member for Tower Hamlets from 1885-1901, on the validity of this viewpoint. White had gathered together a group of Jewish immigrants to give evidence before a select committee and had clearly hand picked his `team' to demonstrate the poverty of morals and means of the new arrivals. The men White chose were `greeners, a slang term used to describe new arrivals from Eastern Europe. White had promised them help in returning home or in moving on to the USA in return for perjuring themselves before the parliamentarians.45 Unfortunately for Arnold White the committee saw through his crude device. Montagu neatly pierced White's facade with detailed information about ritual washing and the availability of public baths for the Jewish community of the East End of which the latter claimed to know little. White was merely propounding a common, and clearly false, criticism of foreigners and the `other' within society - that they were `unclean; they did not wash and they smelt bad.46