London writer Peter Ackroyd has long had an interest in East End characters and locations – his novels Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Hawksmoor each use fascinating, factionalised accounts of real events in East End history. And his string of biographies include those of famed Londoners Charles Dickens and William Blake.
But Ackroyd’s new work is possibly his most ambitious yet – a biography of the town of London itself. This vast, sprawling work, running to 800 pages, treats the metropolis as an organic, growing thing, and for fans of East End history there are tales to keep you coming back over and over again.
Tower Hamlets and stink industries
Particular chapters will fascinate Tower Hamlets readers. The section on the history of the East End is entitled The Stinking Pile and charts the historical poor-relation status of the regions east of the River Walbrook.
The area was poor in terms of its people anyway, if not in its industries. The factories that generated wealth for London at the same time as they despoiled its eastern reaches were appearing surprisingly early. A Lea Mills court in 1614 recorded the appearance of “Launcelot Gamblyn, lately of Stratford Langthorne, starchmaker, because of unlawful making of starch such a stink and ill favour continue and daily arise”.
We see the gradual overfilling of Tower Hamlets until, in the 1880s, the East End implodes. From being merely dirty, noisy and overcrowded, it becomes the abyss, a nether world. The west had long been talking about the East End with horror, as a foreign country. In 1812, we see Thomas De Quincy talking of Limehouse as a strange and frightening world, as he writes about the Ratcliffe Highway Murders.
Jack London in London
And yet, by the early twentieth century, it was still a mystery to most outsiders. When Call of the Wild author Jack London visited London in 1902, and wanted to pay a visit to Tower Hamlets, he went into Thomas Cook in Cheapside.
The startled office manager informed London: “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place.”
London might have found the Klondike more accessible. Still he found his way there, and went on to describe East Enders as The People of the Abyss.
As Ackroyd observes: “The West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt; there is leisure to the West and labour to the East.”
Cockney slang from Middle Ages
We see a split between the speech of the West and the East as early as the Middle Ages. East Enders shared their East Saxon-derived dialect with the people of Essex and would ‘walk down the strate’, while westerners spoke the West Saxon dialect of the Court and would use the ‘strete’.
Ackroyd unearths a mine of colourful cockney witticisms and put-downs, though some would now sound more at home in the Fast Show’s music hall skits than on any East End street. Have a banana, what a shocking bad hat, has your mother sold her mangle?, and who put a turd in the boy’s mouth – a conversation stopper from the fifteenth century. Ackroyd sees much of the cockney character defined in its speech. The great essayist, William Hazlitt, had a rather jaundiced view of East Enders’ manner of talking.
Cockneys, booze, suicide & prostitution
“Your true cockney is your only true leveller,” he wrote in 1826. “Everything is vulgarised in his mind. Nothing dwells long enough on it to produce an interest … He has no respect for himself and still less (if possible) for you. He cares little about his own advantage, if he can only make a jest out of yours. Every feeling comes to him through a medium of levity and impertinence.”
There are fascinating chapters on a host of London’s character traits – on the history of drink, the history of suicide, the history of silence and the history of light, as the town ages from the time of the Druids to the dawn of the twenty-first century.
We read of East Enders as traders, gamblers, merchants, soldiers, prostitutes, politicians and nobles. It all builds into an enthralling biography of a complex and often-contradictory character… London.
London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd; published by Chatto and Windus; ISBN 1-856-19716-6; £25.