Colin LeBihan
Ian Stone
History of London
Ragged London
The neighborhoods which made up 19th century London’s East Side carried with them a reputation for housing “London's Darkest Side”, this largely ignored section of London was branded as a den of vice and squalor by the media, effectively transforming the East End into un lieu inconnu to respectable Londoners. Depictions by contemporary artists and writers painted the East End as a poverty stricken hub of foreign immigration, where rampant prostitution and disease created a sickening atmosphere of sin which turned most Londoners away from these neighborhoods completely. However the question still remains as to how much of this negative image was actually rooted in fact, versus how much of this image can be attributed to the fear mongering of an impoverished, predominantly immigrant neighborhood by Victorian Londoners.
East London’s sinister reputation was spurred by the neighborhoods slow economic decline in the 1870’s following the loss of major industries such as ship building, and the traditional French-Huguenot textile industry which had become a staple of the East End. These changes ushered in a visible transformation of the neighborhoods lived landscape, with dense slums and workhouses sprouting up in neighborhoods such as Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and Bethnal Green. In line with the East Ends economic decay, London’s population was experiencing continuous growth since the turn of the century, and by 1889 the East End boasted a population of roughly 891,000, a trend which led to massive overcrowding. Those misfortunate enough to not have shelter were forced to live outside, and during a trip to London, French writer Hippolyte Taine recounted seeing scenes, “where families, huddled together with drooping heads, shiver through the night…”. Vivid descriptions of the hardships like that of Taine became huge pulls for social reformers to come in and investigate the reality of what life was truly like in the East End. In an attempt to better understand workhouses in East London, social researcher Margaret Harkness documented over 200 workhouses in the Whitechapel area, a system which accommodated some 8,000 individuals every night in East London alone. However Harkness’s accounts of the workhouse captured the bleak reality that awaited those who entered the Whitechapel Union workhouse, “Doubtless this Bastile offers no premium to idle and improvident habits; but what shall we say of the woman, or man, maimed by misfortune, who must come there or die in the street? Why should old people be punished for their existence?”. Harkness’s heartfelt discontent with the workhouse conditions illustrates a shift in how Londoners were beginning to interact with the city’s poor, a visible issue which had for so long been the subject of taboo. However not all publicity is good publicity, and the works of contemporary writer such as Charles Dickens’s painted a sinister portrayal of London’s East End in his novels, including “The mystery of Edwin Drood”, who’s depiction of a crime ridden opium den further convinced Dickens’s audience that the East End was a place of vice and moral corruption. However what Dickens failed to inform his following was that the sad truth behind the East End’s slums was actually that they were the result of poverty, unemployment, social exclusion and homelessness.
In Charles’s Booth Poverty Map of 1898-99, Booth divided East London’s population into seven different categories, with each of his categories gradually rising by income. In Booth’s sample of 891,000 East Londoners his findings came to contradict the areas reputation of wholesale poverty, in fact Booth identified that “A, B, C, and D are the classes of poverty sinking into want, and add up to 314,000. or 35 per cent. of the population; while E, F, G, and H are the classes in comfort rising to affluence, and add up to 577,000, or 65 per cent. of the population”. Booth's findings shed light into the truth of the East End’s poverty, a reality in which more than half of the East End’s population was in fact living quite comfortably. However by no means were Booth’s figures meant to contrast to the swath of 100,000 that were sustained by less than “1d per day” (the d being a nod to the Roman penny, the dinar). In fact, as more and more research was conducted into London’s poor populations it became apparent that poverty was not simply an isolated East End issue, revealing that “poverty was spread thickly and fairly evenly all around the inner suburban districts…rather than being concentrated in the East End, as the late Victorian public was usually led to believe.”. Booth was successful illustrating that the East End’s sinister reputation had far superseded its lived experience, and his colored map identified the isolated rookeries/workhouses which housed the East End’s poorest residents.
One of the factors which contributed to the East End’s dismal reputation was the complete lack of sanitation which transformed neighborhoods such as Whitechapel into breeding grounds for cholera and other maladies. In August 1895, the East End of London was struck as what came to be known as a water famine, the cause of which was the disconnection of the water supply by the East London Water Company, a service which supplied 1,193,000 peoples. This water famine marked the second time that the ELWC had failed to provide residents of East London with the much needed water responsible for everything from the drainage of sewage, to the supplying of the home water supply. Contemporary reports on the month long outage predicted that, “Of the two, the summer failure is likely to be far more serious, chiefly on account of temperature condition and the general prevalence of zymotic disease, especially in poor and crowded localities.”. And in the crowded conditions of the slums of East London, diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox and influenza were more or less common throughout the late 1800’s, with small outbreaks sometimes erupting into epidemics in opportune moments, usually coinciding nicely with times of economic hardship. In fact the East Ends crowded conditions also meant that many lodgings were not directly linked to a water source, and instead water was collected at communal pumps, many of which had been contaminated by London’s open sewage which lead to recurrent outbreaks of cholera, such as one in February of 1832. Other matters of public and moral health was the relentless prostitution which became commonplace in the neighborhoods of the East End, and by 1888 it was estimated that there were roughly 1,200 active prostitutes in Whitechapel on a day to day basis.
However while prostitution has always been a staple in London’s complex culture, in the late 1880’s the question of what should be done to quell it became a very divisive topic amid Londoner’s. In 1885, Parliament passed the “Criminal Law Amendment Act”, debated as, “An Act to make further provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes.” The act also instituted the raising of the legal age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, and made homosexuality officially illegal in England. However this act did little to quell the practice, as many women who were documented as being prostitutes were only doing so for a short periods of time, often while in between jobs. This commerce sexuel saisonnier made tracking the number of prostitutes in the East End tricky at best as the number of prostitutes could vary greatly from day to day, and as the date grew closer to 1888 the general attitude of London’s police towards the visible prostitution in the East End was that of it being “safer to ignore prostitutes than to attempt to repress them.”. However this relaxed approach to policing played perfectly into the infamous 1888 Jack the Ripper killings in the East End’s neighborhood of Whitechapel, a series of murders which finally brought the public's attention to the terrible conditions in the East End’s worst slums.
The 1888 Whitechapel murders, eleven in all, heavily impacted Victorian society, and were responsible for an intense fear which spread across London. Aside from his gruesome murders, Jack the Ripper became an omen of the East End, and to many of London’s wealthier citizens the Ripper embodied the fears and prejudices which they had come to associate with the East End. It became popular belief that if the Ripper could cross the boundary that separated the crime and poverty stricken east, then so too could the large immigrant population of the East End. However the publicity surrounding the murders sparked the mass entrance of journalists and authors into the neighborhoods of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. In the last two decades of the Victorian era a rising number of missionaries, social relief workers and philanthropists made frequent visits to the East End slums to study how the poor lived. A number of these activists chose to take up temporary residence in the East End in order to collect data on the nature and extent of poverty and deprivation. In 1902 celebrated author Jack London spent six weeks playing the part of a stranded american sailor in an attempt to immerse himself completely into the culture of Whitechapel, an environment which he described as “a huge man-killing machine”. London and other authors spent nights in cheap “doss houses” sleeping with the masses which came to seek refuge at night, giving rise to a style of journalistic writing known as slum fiction, a genre which became incredibly popular outside London.