Construction built over two centuries For Drew Gray, writing in London’s Shadows: the Dark Side of the Victorian City: “The East End remains elusive, a construction built from nearly two centuries of writing.” see below History The Victorian ruling classes and their East End inventions Outsiders didn’t want to look too hard at the East End. Why would fashionable society want to look at what it had tolerated in the name of industry and profit? Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com BY JOHN RENNIE TOWARDS the end of the 1850s, essayist and art critic John Ruskin feared that the whole of rural England would soon disappear. With more than a hint of panic, he embraced the back-to-the-land movement alongside the likes of William Morris. Ruskin saw “the whole of the island… set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks”. He feared a London with no trees or gardens, with corn grown upon the roof tops, and no room even for roads, with Londoners travelling in tunnels or by viaducts. With the sun blocked by smoke, man would work by gas lamp. Ruskin hated too the railways which had carved so brutally through old London neighbourhoods, displacing and destroying many. But in truth he was suspicious of towns per se. Never mind that London had grown rich on trade and industry, agricultural labour was somehow superior to the industrial labour into which so many men and women had been forced. The Victorians loved the riches that came from trade but hated what it was doing to their once sylvan country. And while they needed plentiful factory fodder concentrated in the new cities (and the fodder were happy to desert the home counties for the plentiful jobs) they didn’t much like how the working classes behaved, spoke, drank and fornicated when they got together in large numbers. Nowhere was the ‘problem’ of the working man better (or worse) displayed than in that part of Middlesex that lay to the east of the City of London. In his excellent book, London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City, Drew D Gray argues that in the latter years of the 19th century the East End was “invented” by politicians, writers and ruling classes and then demonised. With a hefty dose of what we’d now call racism, it became a handy microcosm for all the ills of English society. Writer PJ Keating opined that the East End was the creation of 19th century novelists, reformers, journalists and others; “of Edward Denison, Samuel Barnett, Charles Booth, Walter Besant, Arthur Morrison and Jack the Ripper”. And by the 1880s, the idea that the East End was synonymous with poverty and crime was “rapidly taken up by the new halfpenny press, in the pulpit and the music hall”. A Victorian periodical, Nineteenth Century, declared the coverage “became a concentrated reminder to the public conscience that nothing to be found in the East End should be tolerated in a Christian country”. Visiting the East End in 1841, politician, philanthropist and social reformer Lord Shaftesbury made no attempt to hide his disgust – though it was with the conditions of living rather than the East Enders themselves. He found “scenes of filth, discomfort, disease. Such scenes of moral and mental ill… No pen or paint brush could describe the thing as it is”. Judgemental or not, it all added to the image of ‘the East End’ as a place of picturesque horror, and the smell of the place is mentioned time and again. Of course the stink trades were concentrated here – the slaughterhouses, breweries, butchers and tanneries, and the people lived cheek by jowl with their work. The Poor Law report of 1838 succinctly identified the dangers. “Dwellings thickly crowded with inhabitants stand all around the slaughterhouses… in the passages, courts and alleys… opposite the street from the houses of which there are no drains into the common sewer”. Little wonder than “fever of a fatal character has been exceedingly prevalent”. The fever – cholera – erupted every few years. Such epidemics caught the attention of those in the West End: disease was no respecter of social class, even if far more died in the Tower hamlets. The squalor was treated with humour (though few jokes age well over a centu- ry and a half). As Victoria Park was laid out, one contemporary paper jested that “the butchers of Whitechapel have resolved to christen it Hide Park, so as not to be behind the West End in gentility and fashion… they may easily have a ‘Rotten Row’ of their own”. Of course today people argue about the bounds of the East End. Author Paul Begg, a student of Jack the Ripper, argues that in the 1880s it would probably be limited to the community “just within and just beyond the eastern gates, primarily Spitalfields and Whitechapel”. Alan Palmer limits the old East End to the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, but admits it now probably covers Shoreditch, Hoxton, Docklands and West and East Ham. But for Drew Gray, writing in London’s Shadows: the Dark Side of the Victorian City, “the East End remains elusive, a construction built from nearly two centuries of writing”. And that writing was overwhelmingly negative, though the plucky Cockney did redeem himself by getting bombed out of house and home during the Blitz. The raffish and risque Cockney character invented on the music hall stage by Marie Lloyd, Harry Champion, Charles Coborn and the rest became (after losing the smutty jokes) the image of the East Ender given back to the world through newsreels, movies and radio. A construction certainly, but surely truer than the picture according to the novelist and historian Walter Besant –who seemed to declare that the East End and East Enders didn’t even exist. The East End was “a huge cultureless void”. Two million lived there in the late 1800s in “an utterly unknown town [with] no institutions... 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… Great men are not buried in its churchyards, which are not even ancient”. Some of it was fair: the East End was woefully unserved by amenities the West took for granted, and the mid-1800s onwards saw the belated provision of parks, schools, libraries and public buildings. But there was plenty of theatre and even opera had Besant known where to look. The truth was though, that many outsiders didn’t want to look too hard. Why would fashionable society want to look at what it had tolerated in the name of industry and profit? Charles Booth did more than most to “lift the curtain” (as he put it) on the East End. He wrote: “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?” Next week, we’ll draw back the curtain and look at the communities of that East End… and how they were parodied, villified and even threatened with extinction. London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D Gray is published by Bloomsbury Academic, £14.99. References London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D Gray Jack the Ripper, the definitive history by Paul Begg The East End: four centuries of London life by Alan Palmer All Sorts and Conditions of Men by Walter Besant A family living in the Old Nichol slum. By the 1880s, the idea that the East End was synonymous with poverty was “rapidly taken up by the new halfpenny press, in the pulpit and the music hall”. 20 – 26 OCTOBER 2014 N E W S F R O M T OWER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 13
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