William Fishman
The history of the Victorian East End is more susceptible to myth-making and exaggeration than most. The horror of contemporaneous politicians, do-gooders and the popular press made it hard for the Victorian Middle Classes to establish facts about ‘the Great Wen’, ‘the Abyss’, ‘the City of Dreadful Night’. If life there were other than an endless round of gin-fuelled prostitution, crime, miserable labour and early death, then the respectable Victorian was hardly going to visit to find out. And for the modern reader, fuelled on endless speculation about the identity of Jack the Ripper and blood-curdling images of sweatshops and brutality towards women and children, a real picture of East End lives can be similarly hard to establish.
William Fishman went a long way to putting this right with his 1988 book* looking at the East End of exactly a century before. 1888 was a significant year. Income from the docks was collapsing (the lifeblood of many East End families), while the previous decade had seen an influx of people from Essex and East Anglia, driven by the agricultural depression of the 1870s. Workers’ and radical movements were sweeping Europe, and the tumult the authorities feared had erupted in the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Trafalgar Square the year before. The protest against the abolition of trial by jury in Ireland had struck a chord with many east London workers, one of whom had been killed by police in the demo. A parade of 120,000 people was to follow the funeral cortege from the West End to Bow Cemetery in December of 1887, hearing William Morris deliver the eulogy to martyr Alfred Linell.
Significantly too, the very term ‘East End’ had recently been coined ‘about 1880 … [and] was rapidly taken up the new halfpenny press … a shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor … the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an “East Ender”. The box of Keating’s bug powder must be reached for and the spoons locket up’. The East Enders, then, were a race apart.
East End 1888 tried ‘to present an overall picture of life among the labouring poor of East London in Victorian times. To achieve focus, I concentrate on a single year, 1888, and a single borough, Tower Hamlets.’ The picture Bill Fishman paints in an elegant, scholarly, but above all compellingly readable book is no less horrible than the ’shock, horror’ stories of the yellow press of the day. The Reverend Samuel Barnett, who was to be instrumental in so many improvements in the East End, including the founding of Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Library and Art Gallery, feared for the moral well being of children daily exposed to the public slaughter and ill-treatment of animals in Spitalfields. Fishman writes that ‘Aldgate, city entrance into Whitechapel, is plagued by open slaughterhouses in the main and side streets … with blood and animal innards spattered on the sidewalks.’
Of course the horrors were real, not simply aesthetic, and many East Enders were treated little better than animals themselves. Slums like the Jago and Old Nichol saw families crowded into filthy, pestilent and often subterranean rooms, with no light and often only body heat. Carving through this netherworld, the vast new arches of the railways coming in to Liverpool Street and Broad Street - themselves bringing in new East Enders from East Anglia - dwarfed the dwellings (while the developments made many more homeless, people who then had to squeeze into ever-more crowded accommodation). Attempts to improve things with the ‘new improved dwellings’, and clean, modern tenements often involved the clearing of more slums - whose occupants could not afford the rents in the new flats - and so the process continued.
‘East End 1888 was not the sort of place where one might live long … many lives would be very brief and death could be quite public,’ and the dehumanisation didn’t stop there. The London Hospital (itself as feared as the workhouse, as once in you were unlikely to return) had no mortuary. Bodies, including those of children, were housed in a shed. The disposal of ‘excess’ cockneys was equally brutal. We have children of nine ‘consenting to emigrate to Canada’ - the process was called ‘disposal’. Some found it difficult to discern humanity here at all. Professor Julian Huxley opined ‘I have seen the Polynesian savaging and in his primitive condition, before the missionary … got at him … He was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.’ Beatrice Webb initially found many East Enders ‘low looking, bestial, content with their own condition’. Yet there were many more who sought not to blame, but to change the environment that led to such social evils. Fishman focuses on Samuel Barnett, the Reverend Osborne Jay and unfashionable heroes such as Dr Barnardo, Frederick Charrington and General Booth - people who tried to change things for the better.
As Bill Fishman observes in his landmark work ‘East End 1888′, the area may only recently have got its name (’coined about 1880′) but the mythologised horror of the area had swiftly taken root. This vision of an abyss, a netherworld ‘was rapidly taken up the new halfpenny press … a shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor … the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an “East Ender”. Dirty, feckless, amoral and above all criminal, the East Enders were different.
Fishman carefully and methodically strips away the hype by focusing on life as it was actually lived by our forebears. Significantly, once we’ve dealt with ‘The Image and Reality’, the first chapter proper is ‘Housing, Health and Sanitation’. If people weren’t sleeping rough, and most East Enders at least had a roof over their heads, then the reality was that accommodation was getting worse in the 1880s. Millions of people poured into London in search of work but there was no concerted programme of housebuilding to match, so subletting was the answer: families crammed into single rooms, with a subsequent increase in squalor and disease. Sharp investors cashed in with the lodging houses. Middle class investors employed wardens to police these houses, and the wardens themselves were often abusive of their power. The investors themselves were often blissfully unaware (or chose to be). They might only be a mile or two away in the West End, but they were unlikely ever to set foot east … and returns were good. For the poorest there wasn’t even that option - there wasn’t enough return in letting to those at the very bottom.
The Oxford English Dictionary first listed the word ‘unemployed’ in 1882, ‘unemployment’ entered its pages in our year of 1888. It’s a fair bet the words had been in currency in the East End for a while before that. ‘The Unemployed and the Sweated’ captures the desparate condition of East End labour. The docks, the garment factories, breweries and bakeries to feed all the new bodies … all had grown from nowhere to employing many thousands of East Enders (and all putting pressure on existing building stock of course). But there was no employment legislation. Casual labour meant a worker didn’t know, on finishing work on Monday night, whether there would be another payday on Tuesday. This fear lead to ’sweating’: a workshop with poor, unhealthy and unsafe conditions, rates of pay being ever driven down, as hours got longer and longer. Argue and you’d be out of a job.
Meanwhile politicians and priests were lecturing the East Enders on their lack of providence, of failing to save, of failing to build a decent future for their children. The East London Observer reacted with fury to the dismissive attitude of Lord ShaftsburyMargaret Harkness (a sympathetic observer) wrote: ‘First they grow reckless, then become hopeless, finally they take to drinking … to let thousands of men and women in enforced idleness is dangerous’. Here lay the great fear, that revolution was brewing. As the East London Advertiser wrote: ‘If our governors do not settle the question soon, the governed will adopt measures of their own to solve it.’
Meanwhile people fell - into the workhouses or ‘Bastilles of the poor’, or onto the street. In our year, East London ‘proper (Tower Hamlets, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney) had 17,000 in the workhouse. Harkness describes Jo in Out of Work. Arriving at the workhouse he is stripped naked, washed in a common bath, and led to a cell measuring 8ft by 4ft. There, written on the walls, is scrawled ‘I’ve served my Queen and country for 15 years, and this is what I’ve come to.’
Of course there is ‘Leisure’ too. ‘To portray the East End as one sombre mass of unmitigated woe would be a travesty,’ admits Fishman. Even the much-maligned pubs sold wholesome food, and would hire out backrooms for piano concerts and dances. The new mutual and friendly societies would meet in these de facto village halls - while MPs might lecture and hector, many East Enders were already embracing ’self help’. The political parties would hold their meetings in the pubs and clubs; there were even Bible classes. And though there is a particularly gruesome description of a bunch of lovable urchins beating a cat to death with sticks, there were healthy outdoor pursuits too. The new ‘lads clubs’ were organising trips out to take the greenery of Epping Forest and the healthy salt air at Southend, and ‘muscular Christians’ in the Oxbridge settlements were teaching young East Enders to box and play football. Fishman fully recognises the contribution of these often-mocked do-gooders.
East End 1888 by William J Fishman, Five Leaves, £14.99, ISBN 0907123856