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Answering the ‘Bitter Cry’: Urban Description and Social Reform in the Late-Victorian East End

G.A.C. Ginn School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics

The University of Queensland

The amorphous urban landscape of the ‘East End’, stretching out north and

east beyond Aldgate, dominated late-Victorian discussions of urban poverty and its

possible amelioration. The notion that London’s ‘West End’ had become intensely

conscious of conditions to the east of the metropolis was simplistic, but it provided

the basic metaphor that came to characterise the alleged ‘social awakening’ of the

middle years of the 1880s. James Adderley of Oxford House, for example,

overlooked several decades of reforming activism when he recalled that the

phenomenal publicity generated in late 1883 by the penny pamphlet ‘The Bitter Cry

of Outcast London’ had ‘successfully directed the attention of the West End to the

East’1. One social workers’ journal launched in 1884, Eastward Ho!, elaborated on

the metaphor; it was to be a ‘medium of thought between East and West - a magazine

through which east-end workers, women, doctors, clergy, employers, mechanics in

the dark half of the vast disk of London, might make their ideas, schemes, hopes,

plans, wants and wishes known in influential circles.’2 A significant number of late-

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Victorian Londoners regarded the ‘East End-West End’ divide as the key to how the

capital should be ‘read’ and its social divisions understood.3

Yet East London’s urban landscape had a mythic presence in late-Victorian

discussions about metropolitan poverty that was as elastic as it was powerful. As ‘a

reservoir of constant fantasy’4, the district could be comprehended and presented

according to the specific needs of a range of contemporary anxieties and

preoccupations. The neighbourhoods of the inner ‘East End’, those of Shoreditch,

Bethnal Green, Whitechapel and the dock precincts of St. George’s in the East,

conformed to ‘the Victorian view of slums’, a mythologised landscape that

‘combined a squalid environment, social isolation, and pathological behaviour in a

tidy, almost synthetic, concept’5, the almost inevitable setting for the Whitechapel

murders of 1888. The journalism, charity pamphlets and popular fiction generated in

the ‘Outcast London’ alarm of the mid-1880s exploited a gallery of compelling

images to depict this setting: crowded and squalid ‘rookeries’ and tenements, brutal

street violence fuelled by cheap drink, the grotesque vice of the ‘Maiden Tribute’, the

elusive horror of the Ripper himself. Such images served to encapsulate the late

Victorian East End and proved durable, underlining Jonathan Raban’s comment that

cities and their occupants both ‘fall easy prey to that impulse, which besets almost

everyone who writes about urban life, to find a fixing synecdoche, to substitute a

simple lurid part for a bafflingly complex whole.’6 Consequently modern historians

such as W.J. Fishman are obliged to refute the enduring notion that the late-Victorian

East End was an urban morass of squalor, sensational depravity and unmitigated

misery.7

But late-Victorian urban commentators often failed to discriminate clearly

between the ‘East End’ proper and the broader geographical notion of ‘East London.’

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Representations of London’s east as a whole could project a more generalised view of

urban life and mass poverty: the formless sprawl of Hackney, Mile End, Stepney and

Bow; the tedium and monotony of daily labour and unfettered industry, and the

squalid materialism of daily life and leisure could also be held up for reformist

consideration. This was a view that had its own stylistic precedents: the urban

monotony of ‘streets all very like one another…inhabited by people equally like one

another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the

same pavements’ was the essence of ‘Coketown’ in Dickens’ Hard Times.8 Such

views of the industrial towns of the north could be echoed in accounts of the ‘dreary

villadom’9 of Victorian suburbs such as Holloway, Camberwell, East Ham and

Shepherds Bush at all points of the compass. While the repetitive landscape and daily

tedium of such neighbourhoods were a commonplace of Victorian urban description,

such themes were downplayed in the literature of the ‘social explorers’, whose

pamphlets and slum reports generally presented scenes of lurid depravity played out

in the hellish and labyrinthine urban settings of ‘Outcast London’. But when the

pioneer ‘slummer’ Edward Denison lived near Commercial Road in Stepney during

the distress of 1867, he was struck not by any horrific brutality and deprivation, but

by a ‘uniform mean level’ of daily subsistence:

Now about this East of London. What is so bad in it is, not what ‘jumps at the eyes,’ as the French say. No; this summer there is not so very much actual suffering for want of food, nor from sickness. What is so bad is the habitual condition of this mass of humanity - its uniform mean level, the absence of anything more civilizing than a grinding organ to raise the ideas beyond the daily bread and beer, the utter want of education, the complete indifference of religion, with all the fruits of this, viz., improvidence, dirt, and their secondaries, crime and disease.10

This sense of East London’s ‘mean uniformity’ was revived two decades later

to confront directly the sensational East End images disseminated during the ‘Outcast

London’ alarm. This paper discusses how, in competition with the familiar accounts

of lurid slum poverty, an alternative version of East End life and conditions was

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offered in the mid-1880s that drew attention to less shocking features and problems.

Rather than emphasising the conventional linkage of decrepit slum dwellings,

overcrowding and moral depravity, key reformers such the clergyman and social

worker Samuel Barnett and the novelist Walter Besant asserted that the visual

monotony of the landscape and the soulless tedium of life endured by most residents

were also essential and defining features of London’s east. These features, they

argued, provided an equally compelling contrast to the glittering wealth and culture

of the ‘West End’ as did the conventional slum sensationalism, and were equally in

need of reformist attention.

Representing East London

By the 1880s, it was a commonplace observation that members of respectable

society had little direct experience of metropolitan poverty. There was indeed a ‘deep

gulf in experience and values between observers and observed’11 whenever

respectable Londoners attempted to plumb the life of the East End and its labouring

poor. The ‘slumming’ phenomenon, that peaked in this period as ‘an indispensable

method of gathering knowledge about urban poverty’12, underlines how important

direct experiences of urban ‘slum’ conditions were in shaping efforts at benevolence

and amelioration. But for every active slum visitor, many hundreds more late-

Victorians relied on eyewitness accounts and depictions of slum conditions to

apprehend the reality of urban poverty. In this context, prose descriptions of ‘Outcast

London’ provided frames of reference for the broader discussion and comprehension

of social problems. Yet the ‘terrible pictures [of] starving children, suffering women,

overworked men; horrors of drunkenness and vice; monsters and demons of

inhumanity; giants of disease and despair’13 that characterised the ‘Outcast London’

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debate and prompted Charles Booth’s social research in the East End were not

generated by published fiction. They came, rather, from journalism and the publicity

pamphlets of active reformers. Newspaper correspondents such as George Sims

responded to the demand for accounts of urban poverty; their reports, as Alan Mayne

has argued, worked on an ‘imaginary schism’ between reader and object by

rhetorical devices such as slum stereotypes and other formulaic motifs.14 Many of

these devices were also wielded to dramatic effect in the sensationalist exposés of

pamphleteers and social activists dedicated to slum benevolence and active charity

work in the late-Victorian metropolis.

Formulaic descriptions of urban poverty were as fundamental to the

pamphlets and charity appeals as they were to the newspaper accounts, but their

objective purposes were quite different. The arresting imagery of moral lapse

presented in one charity-worker’s description of Commercial Street can be cited as a

general example:

It was evening. The streets were crowded with labouring men, and men who seldom labour save unwillingly. The gin-shops, with flaring lights and showy fronts, were doing a roaring trade, the pavement was thronged by silent and shrinking (for some few seemed to feel their shame), or gaudy, brazen, and loud-voiced sisters of sin and vice. The tempters sought their prey, temptation blazed from the pretentious shops; but in the shady archways of the numerous courts lurked those unsavoury men who, while companions in sin, are also its Nemesis - those whose occupation it is to rob the sailor when stupefied by drink and beguiled by the temptress.15

Here the very life of Whitechapel’s streets is imbued with moral failure, from the

‘loafers’ crowding the streets to the shameless prostitutes and “pretentious shops”,

and the threat of violence and outrage is never very distant. Other reformers such as

Octavia Hill, addressing the National Health Society in the mid-1870s on the need for

open spaces to relieve urban crowding, composed their urban interpretation in a

different key. Hill’s description of a “narrow court near Drury lane or

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Clerkenwell…on a sultry August evening” highlighted alternative aspects of the

environment of poverty.

The children, how they swarm! The ground seems alive with them, from the neglected youngest crawling on the hot stones, clawing among the shavings, and potato-peelings, and cabbage leaves strewn about, to the big boy and girl ‘larking’ in vulgarest [sic] play by the corner. The sun does not penetrate with any purifying beams to the lower stories of the houses, but beats on their roofs, heating them like ovens. The close staircase is sultry, the dust-bins reek, the drains smell, all the dirty bedding smells, the people’s clothes smell. The wild cries of the thirsty, heated, irritated, crowd driven to drink, the quarelling children’s voices echo under the low and narrow archway by which you enter the court. Everyone seems in everyone’s way.16

Riddled with stereotype and convention, and so clearly phrased in order to

recommend a particular panacea or ameliorative scheme, such passages recur

throughout the literature of late-Victorian social activism.

In seeking public support for their improving schemes, slum reformers were

thus virtually obliged to interpret the urban settings of metropolitan poverty if their

proposals and schemes were to prosper. More directly than the social novelists, and

more authoritatively than the opportunistic newspaper correspondents, these

countless and largely unremembered social activists ‘read’ London’s urban

landscapes diagnostically in their public appeals, descriptive pamphlets, reports,

speeches and sermons. They used these vehicles to rouse a potentially-supportive

charitable audience and ensure its benevolence was directed towards specific

measures to ameliorate the conditions and problems presented. The presentation of

urban drama was thus central to their enterprise. Koven comments that active

reformers and charity workers ‘knew only too well that slums were real places of

monotonous material deprivation and quiet human suffering….[but] [a]t the same

time, when elites wrote about slums, they tended to romanticize and exoticize them as

sites of spectacular brutality and sexual degradation to which they were compulsively

drawn.’17

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In the case of Samuel Barnett, the respected vicar of St. Jude’s Whitechapel

and a stalwart East End social worker, the authority of his prolonged residential

experience there was readily translated into compelling word pictures. ‘As a result of

eight years residence in the heart of an East London district,’ he told a congregation

in the second half of 1881 on the subject of ‘East End Needs’, ‘I can only tell you of

what we have seen and for what we hope. I can only try to put you in my place so that

with me you may face [the] problem which we face.’18 Thus Barnett turned his hand

adeptly to the task of urban representation. With deliberate immediacy, he described

the sights that confronted him on summer evening walks in Whitechapel:

The doors of the houses were all open, and lights from rooms threw their glare on to the roadway. The door steps and curb stones were crowded with men and women. Here a few of the younger [ones] were romping with shouts of uncontrollable laughter, here in groups [they] were gathered to watch a fight, and the heavy thud of a man’s fall reached my ears amid a volley of ugly language which cheered the victor. As the chorus to the whole came the broken scraps of empty, foolish talk from the spectators lounging over the gutters.19

Clearly, this depiction draw upon the same stock as the passages provided above:

moral failure and vulnerability, the glare of artificial light, a crush of people, the

scene dominated by casual threats, brutality and harsh voices.

Scholarly interest in the visions of East London presented in fiction20 or in

‘slum journalism’21 can thus be complemented by a parallel attention to more

ephemeral sources, produced in a context of practical activity for social reform. When

considered together, the sermons, periodical essays, reports and public statements of

the period’s active reformers suggest the broader discursive context in which the

mythologising of East End conditions occurred, and suggest the highly contested

nature of this process. It also demonstrates the close fit between the various diagnoses

of urban dysfunction put forward in these accounts and the programmes of

amelioration and reform that emerged and were offered to ‘West End’ philanthropic

opinion. In the case of Samuel Barnett and Walter Besant, the two late-Victorian

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interpreters of the East End setting considered here, their accounts emphasizing the

district’s monotony (rather than its depravity) were not only intended to refute the

sensational visions of the slum literature. They also dovetailed neatly with proposals

for moral amelioration and social reconciliation grounded in the benevolent gift of

culture from rich to poor, from the ‘West End’ to the ‘East End’. Both men were

closely associated with cultural philanthropic schemes in East London, most notably

in Barnett’s Whitechapel parish work and at Toynbee Hall, but also in Besant’s

commitment to the People’s Palace at Mile End, opened in 1887.22 Both schemes

appealed for public support. For both men, as for other active reformers, the depiction

of ‘East End’ conditions was inescapably a diagnostic exercise that accompanied and

underpinned their practical reforming efforts.

Sensational visions

Late-Victorian pamphleteers and slum correspondents alike generally

depicted East End poverty in highly sensationalised terms, particularly in the middle

years of the 1880s. Stedman Jones has described how, as economic depression

exacerbated existing social problems, ‘lurid and sensational impressions of London

slum life proliferated in the ensuing barrage of pamphlet literature, Parliamentary

investigation, and press reportage.’23 Their sensationalist tone was endemic to the

atmosphere of urgency that surrounded the ‘Outcast London’ debate: topics such as

the overcrowding that forced the ‘honest poor’ and the dissolute ‘residuum’ together

in dense slumland enclaves; the drunkenness, violence, incest and prostitution that

was held to be of everyday occurrence; and the failure of relief and improvement

agencies were central to the discussion. Some detected press cynicism at work, and

certainly the commercial imperative remained important. ‘Representing the modern

city was the biggest news story of the nineteenth century,’ according to Mayne, ‘and

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sensationalism sold copy.’24 F.W. Brockett observed in 1886 that the ‘Outcast

London’ craze ‘came about in the journalists’ slack season’, when in the absence of

newsworthy items,

poverty-stricken London was made to go through a series of sensational performances before an hysterical audience. For the thousandth time the people who wear fine clothes and live in great houses and eat good dinners were reminded of the existence of those who suffer in slums and rags, and to whom a morsel of bread is not infrequently a luxury.25

Nevertheless, as the metropolis was re-confirmed in the mid-1880s as a place

of ‘deep mysteries and sensational wickedness’26, the new reportage was

accompanied by a range of new concerns and anxieties. It is clear that while ‘most

earlier writings about the poor had sought to meet the taste of Londoners for stories

of low-life haunts, this literature [of the 1880s] set out to demonstrate, frequently in

melodramatic terms, the implications for society of great poverty in the midst of

plenty.’27 Foremost was the suggestion of moral and even biological regression, and

the threat of social disorder. The ‘East End’ provided the topography for late-

Victorian anxieties about a degenerate urban underclass, a ‘residuum’ colourfully

described as ‘the drift of London, the human refuse of the whole land, drunken and

idle, dissolute and basely immoral, a class which, if it is not often openly violent, is as

cunning as a fox, as libidinous as a goat, and with lusts that are unnameable.’28

Stedman Jones has commented that ideas of urban degeneration provided ‘a

mental landscape within which the middle class could recognize and articulate their

own anxieties about urban existence.’29 Working in this vein, Livesey has shown how

the ‘character’ of individual slum dwellers was deduced by social reformers and then

transcribed for a broader readership.30 The role of dominant representations of the

physical landscape of urban poverty in the efforts of social reformers should also

have a place in this enquiry, simply because reformist interventions in the East End

were commonly accompanied by prose representations of the district’s urban

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topography to justify and recommend their work in the public realm. Faced with an

evident public apathy, in composing these representations active reformers and

charity publicists commonly turned to the time-honoured tropes of urban description

to represent urban poverty in urgent, dramatic terms. The East End novelist Arthur

Morrison (himself no stranger to the conventions) identified the key features of this

genre, that thrived on lurid stereotypes of East End districts such as Whitechapel:

A horrible black labyrinth, think many people, reeking from end to end with the vilest exhalations; its streets, mere kennels of horrent putrefaction; its every wall, its every object, slimy with the indigenous ooze of the place; swarming with human vermin, whose trade is robbery, and whose recreation is murder; the catacombs of London....Others imagine Whitechapel in a pitiful aspect. Outcast London. Black and nasty still, a wilderness of crazy dens into which pallid wastrels crawl to die; where several families lie in each fetid room, and fathers, mothers, and children watch each other starve...31

This sensationalist imagery could be most clearly traced to the published work

of two men: the journalist George Sims and nonconformist minister Andrew Mearns

were arguably the two most effective late-Victorian publicists of London poverty.

Sims’ evocative newspaper articles for the Pictorial World during 1883 (latter

reissued as the compilation How the Poor Live32) and Mearns’ epochal pamphlet ‘The

Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ have been well-studied and do not require re-

examination here. But it is valuable to note the essential consistency of their

rhetorical tone. The urgent immediacy of Sims’ prose, his detailed attention to

individual alleys and courts to depict London’s ‘Povertyopolis’, made his essays

masterpieces of sensationalist slum description. They animated the microscopic detail

of ‘Outcast London’, ‘the “rags, dirt, filth, wretchedness,…rotten floors, oozing

walls, broken windows, crazy staircases, and tileless roofs” of the slums,’33 but rarely

specified the precise locations or extent of the districts described. When he turned

from the detail to the panorama, Sims revelled in metaphors of light and shade that

marked the London slums as an ‘other-world,’ an earthly hell shrouded by chimney-

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smoke, where all was ‘a sombre gray deepening into the blackness of night.’34 ‘The

Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ presented similar testimony. Despite all charitable and

relief efforts, Mearns’ pamphlet began, ‘the churches are making the discovery that

seething in the very centre of our great cities, concealed by the thinnest crust of

civilization and decency, is a vast mass of moral corruption, of heart-breaking misery

and absolute godlessness...’35 He took his readers to the threshold of a typical room in

one of these ‘pestilential human rookeries…black with the accretions of filth’: ‘It is

exuding through cracks in the boards overhead; it is running down the walls; it is

everywhere. What goes by the name of a window is half of it stuffed with rags or

covered by boards to keep out wind and rain; the rest is so begrimed and obscured

that scarcely can light enter or anything be seen outside.’36 He insisted his account

was not selective, but indicated rather ‘a state of things which is found in house after

house, court after court, street after street.’ Like Sims, Mearns felt no obligation to be

any more specific. His main examples were drawn from the infamous Collier’s Rents

building in Bermondsey, and to describe East End districts such as Ratcliff and

Shadwell, the reader was assured, ‘would, in the main, be but to repeat the same

heart-sickening story.’37

Thus the parameters of ‘Outcast London’ and its implied geographic

counterpart the East End became precisely defined in the public imagination.38 East

of Aldgate, it seemed, lurked an outcast slum society of the abject poor, degenerate

and criminal, eking out a miserable existence amid fearful conditions of degradation,

brutality and ignorance. As the debate on Mearns’ exposé intensified in W.T. Stead’s

Pall Mall Gazette and elsewhere, East London newspapers recognised a dangerous

tendency to consider the ‘The Bitter Cry’ as a specific depiction of the condition of

the East End: ‘as is usually the case,’ noted the East London Observer, ‘many of the

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comments on the subject have assumed that it is the East of London that is the

locality pointed out, whereas the statements that are made about the condition of the

poorest of the poor apply with emphasis to all parts of London.’39 Two months later,

with the controversy raging on, the newspaper was less circumspect:

it has become the fashion to regard the East End as a barbaric waste, filled with crime, destitution and ignorance. Descriptions of it are daily used for the extraction of money from good, easy people, and members of the aristocracy figure as heroes on West End platforms because they have ventured down the Whitechapel-road. The folly would be more amusing if it were not mischievous.40

But the impression remained sufficiently strong to be discussed at the Housing of the

Working Classes Commission from March 1884, before which both Mearns and Sims

were called as witnesses. ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ had left the very strong

impression, so Mearns was told by the Bishop of Bedford, William Walsham How,

that such conditions were not isolated, and that his ‘very harrowing and very terrible’

descriptions applied to large areas of the capital. Mearns conceded that he had singled

out special neighbourhoods41 for the pamphlet, and it was not representative of large

districts: ‘The largest extent I found,’ he went on, ‘was in the east of London, but I

did not find such depths of misery there as I found in other parts of London.’42 As the

Bishop Suffragen for East London, with a certain responsibility to clarify the mattter,

How seized his opportunity to direct the same question to Sims, whose essays were

also, in fact, largely based on visits to south London.43 The journalist explained

somewhat evasively that he ‘took the districts that wanted attention drawn to them.’44

‘There is exaggeration in all this’

How’s questions to the two writers highlight the protracted struggle for a

balanced representation of East London conditions that accompanied the ‘Outcast

London’ alarm of the 1880s. As a dedicated East End clergyman and active promoter

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of social reform, How regarded the sensational imagery that slanted perceptions of

the district with distaste. The concessions he gained were small victories in the long

campaign waged by his ilk for a realistic presentation of East End problems, free

from sensational exaggeration. It was an uphill battle; Dyos notes that the ‘fusillades

of pamphlets’ that followed ‘The Bitter Cry’ into print ‘came more readily from slum

missionaries of other denominations who feared being overlooked than they did from

those wanting to corroborate it.’45 Nevertheless, many ‘missionaries’ and social

workers were actively hostile to this rising tide of sensationalism. Like How, many

found the sensational descriptions of ‘Outcast London’ distasteful, and directly

rebutted the suggestion that the worst cases represented a common pattern. ‘Let it be

said at once that there is exaggeration in all this,’ responded one activist to Mearns’

pamphlet in late 1883. ‘There are no streets of hovels such as are here described,

there is no special district given over to evil courses, there is no Sahara in London

destitute of all that supports the higher life…’ Yet the pamphlet did represent a form

of ‘truth’, principally because ‘there are cases such as are described [by Mearns], and

these grouped with artist skill into a picture call attention to facts too often ignored.’46

Other reformers regretted the exaggeration and distortion inherent to this

‘truth’. Samuel Barnett, for example, resented both the alarmist visions of endemic

degradation, and their counterpart in the highly sentimental depictions of the ‘honest

poor.’ ‘They exaggerate...,’ he sighed, ‘the symptoms likely to strike an impatient

imagination, they pour in a double portion of popular sentiment and they give readers

impressions which do not bear the test of experience. How often I have heard visitors,

who had come to Whitechapel, after reading some tale or some appeal, complain

“Things are not so bad as we expected.”’47 He reflected upon the practical

implications of such representations for those inclined towards charitable work:

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They have so dwelt on wretchedness, that any home which does not reach the lowest standard of wretchedness is not regarded as poor; they have so enforced the need of food that the visitor to East London expects to see only starving people; they have been so sentimental in their description of ‘little Nells’ and ‘tiny Tims,’ of the long-suffering and the patience of the poor, that even the suggestion of selfishness and coarseness is enough to destroy the whole picture.48

While acknowledging that sensational accounts helped raise public awareness and

assisted in the formation of voluntary bodies for social work, Barnett countered that,

in his experience, the gains thus achieved were adversely outweighed ‘by increase of

impatience, by sacrifice of originality, and by narrowness.’49 Similarly, social

workers adhering to the doctrine of ‘scientific charity’ had little regard for a

philanthropy that only responded to lurid sensationalism. A writer in the Charity

Organisation Society journal remarked that ‘hideous caricatures of vice and crime,

coarse exaggerations of physical want, living pictures of rags’ in the sensationalised

appeals only provoked ‘the morbid sympathies of satiety.’50 As the ‘Outcast London’

hysteria gathered pace in late 1883, the COS organ argued that it threatened to derail

effective social work in two ways. In the first place, ‘those to whom the subject is

new become violently indignant, but with a fire too fierce to last’ and would

contribute little, while on the other hand the ‘terrible pictures’ drawn in the pamphlets

and appeals may provoke the conclusion ‘that our civilisation is a failure, that we are

going from bad to worse, and that the whole problem is hopeless.’51 Scientific charity

had no place for sentimentality or emotive alarmism alike.

This problem had specific ramifications in the East End, where active clergy

and social workers sought to counter the sensationalism that, they argued, had twisted

the public imagination. They argued it was a misconception to believe that the whole

‘East End’ subsisted in conditions of depravity and squalor that were in reality

confined to isolated pockets. The Bishop Suffragen for East London himself

undertook to point out that the ‘residuum’

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is taken by many, who know little or nothing of the general life and character of East Londoners, as typical of the whole district. There could not be a greater blunder. The vast majority of the inhabitants live quiet respectable lives of hard work, and deserve no more to be called vicious and degraded than the inhabitants of Mayfair.52

Other East End clergy and social workers were also keen to deny these commonplace

prejudices. J.F. Kitto, the Rector of Stepney, told the East London Union for

Advanced Education that after seventeen years in the district he was puzzled by the

‘Bitter Cry’ revelations; he had never noticed that his neighbours were as miserable

and steeped in vice as they were represented there.53 Others refuted suggestions of

endemic violence in the district. Henrietta Barnett confessed to being tired of being

asked whether she was afraid to walk in East London, and insisted that ‘the wide East

End of London (which the indolent think of only as revolting) contains at a rough

calculation, say, twenty of the worthy poor to one of the degraded poor.’54 One East

End rector claimed that local problems were simply ‘more visible, and therefore

people infer we are far worse than others…drunkenness and immorality are simply,

from the nature of the houses and crowding of the people, public. Every one knows

what in the West [End] it is easy to conceal.’55

Others such as the vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch (immortalised in

Morrison’s A Child of the Jago) endorsed the sensational imagery, but only in its

application to specific areas. A. Osborne Jay’s spirited accounts of his East End

social work also thrived on vivid details of wretchedness and squalor, but he

explained that ‘there is a danger of describing one area and being taken to mean a

whole district. The east-end has portions which are really delightful: parts of South

Hackney, Victoria Park, Bow, and perhaps also Bromley and Poplar, leave nothing to

be desired…’56 But his attention and active efforts were focussed on neighbourhoods

such as Shoreditch’s infamous ‘Old Nichol’ (the basis for Morrrison’s ‘Jago’57),

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‘parts which contain such congested masses of ignorance, hopelessness and irreligion

as cannot be found elsewhere.’58 His insistence upon a necessary precision when

presenting images of the East End echoed the Rev. Dr. Kennedy of the Stepney

Meeting House, who had argued years before that ‘the mistake made was to imagine

that what was true of a few poor miserable parts of the East of London was true of the

whole district.’59

Reformers could also counter that individual areas of infamy were showing

marked signs of improvement. Shortly after his investiture as Bishop Suffragen for

East London in 1879, How himself had heard an American temperance orator

describe conditions on the East End’s Ratcliff Highway. He confessed that the

description of daily violence, murder and epidemic levels of public drunkenness

caused him some alarm, but a subsequent tour of the Highway with local clergyman

Harry Jones revealed little of sensationalist interest. How reported: ‘I have been

through Ratcliff Highway at all sorts of hours since, and, though I have met one or

two noisy and quarrelsome Lascars there, yet I never met with the slightest incivility,

or saw anything to shock me...’60 Others insisted that regular wages, trade union

membership and the rational use of recreation time had improved the character of

groups such as the Millwall ironworkers and the Shoreditch cabinet-makers. The

moral progress of the former was in evidence, one reformer stated, ‘as they march

once a year from Millwall to the City, to take the train for their annual outing…they

make as respectable a show as any body of workmen need, and their return at night

has been for the last few years as orderly as their start in the morning.’61 Alongside

such particular examples, the general picture was similarly one of improvement.

Newman concluded:

Taking the poorest classes of East London, they are fed, clothed, housed, and educated better than they were twenty years ago. No one who has lived amongst

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them for that period, or longer, can doubt that their morals, too, have improved. There is less drunkenness and less violence. The bulk of the men are more reasonable, and they have in some measure improved their tastes and sentiments.62

Defending East London

Social workers, clergy and active reformers were not alone in refuting the

sensational visions of the ‘Outcast London’ literature. Local newspapers throughout

this period also sought to correct the alarmist visions of East End conditions that were

generated in ‘West End’ press reports and charity pamphlets. After Henrietta Barnett

raised the case of a lady ‘slummer’ who had expected to find East Londoners living

‘not exactly in tents, but in huts, old railway carriages, caravans, or squatted against a

wall’63 in the Fortnightly Review, East London opinion responded indignantly. The

East London Leader opined fiercely that ‘this aristocratic lady would be more

astonished than ever to learn the East Londoners not only read the daily papers, the

magazines and reviews (such as the Fortnightly, where her own folly is exposed to

vulgar as well as to aristocratic gaze) but also support five or six newspapers of their

own.’64

As would be expected, the ‘Bitter Cry’ controversy of late 1883 saw local

efforts to correct the misrepresentation of East London intensify. The East London

Observer led the way, quickly pointing out the error of assuming that the revelations

related directly to East London alone.65 In subsequent editorials, articles and

published correspondence headed ‘In Defence of East London’ the newspaper

repeatedly denied that the district suffered the scale of squalor and misery that was

commonly depicted in sensational pamphlets and articles.66 It had become, the

Observer felt, ‘quite wearying and irritating…to hear the talk, and see the printed

eloquence that has been gushing about for the last few weeks, and threatening to

upset all received notions of political and social economy…’67 In the months and

18

years that followed, East London newspapers led by the Observer maintained their

campaign to correct notions of the district.68 Although ‘show places of evil repute’

remained in East London, it was asserted that ‘professional philanthopists who have

got possession of them make the most of them.’69 Fears were voiced that the

continued dissemination of fallacies about East London threatened to aggravate

existing problems and encourage further social segregation. ‘We trust it has at length

occurred to many of our teachers and preachers,’ the newspaper stated in January

1884,

that if they silently allow the generalities current about ‘Outcast London’ to pass entirely unchallenged, they will run the risk of aggravating the evil they would desire to cure, since if the general depreciation of East London be persisted in, it may have the effect of bringing about the migration of many of the remaining residents of position, who are valuable factors in the local account, both as regards the mere sentimental status which their presence gives, and the more practical influence which they exercise in social, religious, and political circles.70

Arguments on the subject continued as long as the breathless imagery of ‘Outcast

London’ remained in vogue. A letter published in the East London Observer in

February 1885 expressed the prevailing view that the ‘prejudice sustained by working

men through this wholesale libelling of the district in which they live has done more

harm than a legion of these speculative and amateur philanthropists could ever do

good.’71

Trade and manufacturing interests in East London were also uneasy with the

district’s runaway reputation for infamy, and local manufacturers, professionals and

tradespeople also sought to defend the district from the exaggerated claims. This

grouping achieved some measure of formality with the formation of the ‘East London

Defence Alliance’ at a Mile End meeting in November 1886. According to its willing

mouthpiece the East London Observer72, the Alliance was formed ‘for the purpose of

refuting and counteracting the injurious effects of the false statements repeatedly

19

made regarding the condition of East London.’73 One member, T.G. Scott, expressed

the aim in more urgent terms:

Briefly, its object was neither to denounce, annoy, or cause irritation, but simply to endeavour to stop the eternal word painting which had been going on, picturing East London, as it did, as little more than a Sodom or Gomorrah; pens were dipped into the blackest of ink, and human nature as it existed there was pictured at its worst.74

According to its secretary John Richardson, the Alliance sought to ensure ‘that land,

property, trade and commerce and the respectable character of the inhabitants [of East

London] may, in some degree, be protected from current abuse.’75 East London

employers, middle-class residents and political representatives attended this first

meeting, and were informed by the M.P. for Stepney that ‘it was their bounden duty

to remove the stigma existing upon the residents of the East End; while they would

do nothing to stop the flow of charity there, they would endeavour by every means in

their power to prevent further exaggerated statements being made.’ Richardson

clarified this latter point by pointing out ‘that the Alliance was not intended to retard

in the slightest degree any true or genuine work of philanthropy, but only the work of

those whose philanthropy had degenerated into a mere business, and who cared no

more for the destitute than the man in the moon.’76

There is no evidence that the ‘Alliance’ extended to anything more than

occasional meetings and public statements challenging inaccurate statements of

fact.77 At best, this fragmentary campaign against misrepresentation achieved only

partial success, and had little recourse when the Whitechapel murders drove the

sensationalised accounts of East End conditions to further hyperbolic extremes. A

writer at the end of the decade confirmed with resignation that the East Ender ‘must

be content to hear his neighbourhood compared to Bedlam and his neighbours to

heathens.’78 Yet in their day the ‘Defence Alliance’, the local newspapers and various

East End social workers and active reformers alike sought to present the district in

20

more realistic terms: as a region of lively commerce and manufacture, with bustling

docks, shipyards, gasworks, brickworks, breweries and factories that were essential

drivers of national wealth. If the unprepossessing and industrial character of these

districts was acknowleged, it was counter-asserted that each offered its distinct

character. The Rev. Septimus Buss, for example, sounded this note in asserting that

the East End was no ‘undistinguishable mass of human beings…not merely one large

town, but consists in reality of several districts varying considerably from each other,

each with its own characteristics.’ He acknowledged, however, the drab functionality

that was one price of late-Victorian prosperity. ‘[T]hough you may find abundance of

life and motion,’ he continued, ‘the general aspect is grey in tone and depressing in

effect.’79

With the recovery of trade, ongoing slum clearances and the inevitable fading

of the ‘Outcast London’ hysteria of the mid-1880s, this latter emphasis became

increasingly common. The Rev. Dr. E.H. Bradby of the Whitechapel C.O.S. told the

International Congress of Charities, Corrections and Philanthropy in June 1893 that

the visitor to East London would be ‘agreeably disappointed’. He suggested that a

‘slummer’ would encounter broad, breezy streets busy with traffic, crowded with

shops and a life of ‘dull respectability’. ‘What will strike a visitor more than the signs

of anything like squalor is the general plainness and monotony, not to say ugliness of

the region: the absence of striking and important buildings, the lack of all those

suggestions of stateliness and antiquity and refinement, which we are apt to associate

with the idea of city life.’80 C.S. Loch, the doyen of the charity organisation

movement, recommended Bradby’s account to the Congress as ‘a plain unembellished

tale, and for that reason may be appreciated by those into whose ears have been dinned

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so many accounts of the romance of distress and degradation to which the East of

London has given rise.’81

Views from the ‘pulpit’: Samuel Barnett and Walter Besant

It has already been noted that the ‘romance’ of East End ‘distress and

degradation’ was contested vigorously by reformers and local interests during the

‘Bitter Cry’ controversy. Two key figures demand closer attention. In their separate

spheres, Samuel Barnett (1844-1913)82 and Walter Besant (1836-1902)83 challenged

the prevailing images of East End poverty in the mid-1880s with particular vigour.

When each took to his respective ‘pulpit’ (one clerical, the other literary), both

provided emphatic descriptions of the district to audiences with little or no experience

of its physical reality. Besant’s authorial voice, with its robust air of direct

observation and commonsense, invested his accounts of East End conditions with a

palpable authority. Barnett’s extensive practical experience of Whitechapel social

work and the lessons of his lengthy residence there had the same effect: ‘No man,

probably, has a more extensive acquaintance with the wants and needs of the East

End,’ commented one interviewer in 1886.84 Rejecting the sensationalist visions, both

men sought to compose and present a moralised landscape that defined ‘East End

problems’ in quite a different light, and in so doing recommended quite different

solutions.

Walkowitz mistakenly links Besant’s best-selling novel of 1882, All Sorts and

Conditions of Men, to the ‘melodramatic accounts of family disintegration, violence,

[and] biological degeneration’ that sensationalised East End conditions in terms of

‘extreme deprivation and violence’85. In fact, Besant’s representation of life in East

London was the opposite, and Peter Keating considers his vision of East London as

the ‘Unlovely City’ of tedium and oppressive monotony to be his ‘most original and

22

influential contribution to fiction’86. When the Rev. Harry Jones wrote in 1884 that

the ‘West of London....has read with interest about the monotonous streets, the weary

wastes of houses, where there is no ‘society’ and the places of worship are only half

filled’87, it was to Besant’s distinctive images of East London that he referred. Little

violence and few vices other than apathy and the occasional drinking spree feature in

Besant’s East End novels, and as a public speaker he continually stressed the absence

in most of East London of sensational vice and deprivation. As he told a magazine

interviewer in 1893, a ‘dreary, weary monotony pervades it all - pervades and

permeates the whole of this vast district, in which two millions of people are living

out a monotonous existence.’

‘Held down and crushed under the heel of the Giant of the Commonplace,’ I interpolated. ‘Exactly,’ replied Mr. Besant, with an eager vivacity; ‘you have described it to the life. It was that terrible monotony that had so fatal a fascination for me, and which really drove me to the writing of those books. Far more than the poverty.’88

In similar terms, Samuel Barnett’s sermons and lectures on East End

conditions took issue with the sensationalised accounts. One sermon, ‘East End

Needs,’89 directly addressed the prevailing revelations. ‘The mention of East London

always rouses interest,’ Barnett would begin. ‘Some who have worn out their

sensations on the horrors and ugliness of fiction look to find new excitement in the

poverty of real life. They ply us with questions regarding the habits of the poor, ask

to be shewn and offer to visit in the worst courts and seem disappointed that the

inhabitants retain some marks of humanity.’90 In an another sermon Barnett

maintained that, despite the efforts of the publicists, ‘the East is still unknown.’

Perhaps relying on sensational appeals you think it is haunted by starvation and vice; you picture men and women creeping from their hovels to eat the breakfast charity has provided, or children huddled in the corners seeking shelter and warmth; you think that respectable people need the company of a policeman, that it is [the] part of a wise man to leave his watch at home and of a wise woman to refuse to her daughter’s permission to visit in a place so dangerous. This is an entirely wrong idea.91

23

He too detected press cynicism at work, commenting that the lurid accounts that

gratified public taste usually appeared during the misery of winter, when newspaper

reporters deliberately sought out the narrow alleyways and overcrowded dwellings

that confirmed their expectations of hopeless poverty. The sort of room they arrived

at was ‘close and crowded, blocked with necessary furniture for eating and

sleeping...[and] so fits in with expectations, with [the] mean exterior and the dingy

crowds, that the one need of all East London seems to be relief, the means of

livelihood.’92 Like Besant, Barnett was keen to present an alternative picture to guide

reformist effort.

They began with the East End’s urban fabric. Both emphasised that the

narrow courts and crowded ‘rookeries’ made notorious by the pamphleteers and

press reports were exceptional, and that the general picture was much less grievous.

‘The much talked of East London,’ Barnett pointed out to fellow-reformers at Oxford

in promoting his ‘university settlements’ idea, ‘is made up of miles of mean streets,

whose inhabitants are in no want of bread or even of better houses; here and there are

the courts now made familiar by descriptions. They are few in number, and West

End visitors who have come to visit their ‘neighbours’ confess

themselves…disappointed that the people don’t look worse.’93 In contrast to the

impenetrable mysteries of the urban labyrinth summoned by the sensational authors,

[t]he East End of London is for the most part composed of streets; fairly paved, unusually wide and with brick one storeyed houses. These houses are inhabited by working people who have food enough and clothes enough, and whose lives if less full are certainly not more vicious than those lived in the West. These miles of streets tho’, each like the other, are very depressing, offering to passers-by and inhabitants none of the refreshment of thought which variety calls out, suggesting to none thought outside their own narrow experience.94

Thus the district was described in terms that were inimical to concealed depravity;

with ‘unusually wide’ and open streets rather than the close alleys of popular

24

prejudice. It was the ‘means of life’ that East Londoners needed, Barnett suggested,

even more so than the material ‘means of livelihood.’ Attempting to describe the

desolate lives endured in this landscape of urban monotony, Barnett could only grope

for negative statements: ‘Trying to express that impression I say I am sensible of the

dullness of the people, of their want of interest. Amusements, politics, religion are

nothing to them. They have no union, no joy in society and membership, no rest in

God.’95 He urged social reformers ‘to work that the poor may have first the means of

life, that they may first feel the possibilities of being, their power to learn, enjoy and

admire [the] use of books and leisure and beauty. We don’t want the poor to repeat

the follies of the rich, we want [them to] rise to live a higher life.’96

Walter Besant’s novels of East End life (and especially All Sorts and

Conditions of Men) presented an urban landscape that shared these features, both in

the material fabric of the district and in the ‘weary existence’ of its inhabitants. A

population roundly estimated at two million, Besant suggested, inhabited a weird

urban purgatory, where all the expected and visible features of town life were absent.

‘They have no institutions of their own to speak of,’ the reader is told directly, ‘no

public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no

soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera - they have nothing.’ The novel

unveils a landscape uniquely abandoned and neglected, paradoxically spectacular in

its absolute want of interest. ‘Probably there is no such spectacle in the whole world

as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten great city of East London,’ Besant’s

account continues. Municipal and political identity is denied to its residents, its

history is unregarded, and the alive and dead alike suffer a pitiless obscurity:

They are Londoners, it is true, but they have no part or share of London; its wealth, its splendours, its honours exist not for them….They are beyond the wards, and cannot become aldermen; the rich London merchants go north and south and west; but they go not east. Nobody goes east, no one wants to see the place; no one is

25

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 the place may be.97

In Besant’s account, this curious obscurity enveloped even the physical streetscape of

East London. Far from providing piquant or lurid detail, the streets of his ‘Joyless

City’ were ‘mean and without individuality or beauty; at no season and under no

conditions can they ever be picturesque; one can tell, without inquiring, that the lives

led in those houses are all after the same model, and that the inhabitants have no

pleasures.’98 One authorial aside acknowledged that the Whitechapel Road was

historically notorious for public disorder, but countered that ‘the road is not worthy of

this reputation: it has of late years become orderly; its present condition is dull and

law-abiding’.99 Besant’s East London presented a repetitive vista of two-storied

dwellings, ‘all furnished alike; in each ground floorfront there are the red curtains and

the white blind of respectability, with the little table bearing something…to mark the

gentility of the family.’ The only conclusions that could be drawn concerning the

moral, civic and social life of this population echoed Barnett’s verdict on the more

impoverished quarters around Whitechapel. It was the ‘means of life’, and not the

‘means of livelihood’, that were absent.

Now, the really sad thing about this district is that the residents are not the starving class, or the vicious class, or the drinking class; they are a well-to-do and thriving people, yet they desire no happiness, they do not feel the lack of joy, they live in meanness and are contented therewith. So that it is emphatically a representative quarter, and a type of the East End generally, which is for the most part respectable and wholly dull, and perfectly contented never to know what pleasant strolling and resting-places, what delightful interests, what varied occupations, what sweet diversions there are in life.100

Besant’s fiction thus emphastically rejected the traditions of the urban

picturesque exemplified by Dickens’ London. One critic has described the London of

Oliver Twist as ‘the labyrinthine city...with all its horror, variety, excitement, passion,

mystery, danger and vice’; a setting so pervasive as to become internalised within his

26

characters’ psyche.101 For most of the nineteenth-century writers who followed

Dickens, London ‘could not easily be described in a rhetorical gesture of repressive

uniformity. On the contrary, its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness of

movement, were the most apparent things about it…’102 Besant’s version of East

London made a radical break with this tradition at the same time as it challenged the

sensationalism of the pamphlet literature and press reports. With All Sorts and

Conditions of Men, Besant emphatically declared that the conditions of life in

London’s east were the antithesis of those commonly presented in both traditions. As

Peter Keating comments, ‘Gone entirely are the dramatic slum descriptions of earlier

fiction, as are the colourful criminals of Ratcliff Highway.’103 Instead, with his

‘Unlovely City’ subsisting in a pervasive and suffocating monotony, the novelist

echoed the views of Edward Denison noted above. Denison’s account of the East End

in 1867 provided a precedent that Besant was eager to claim.104 ‘The place in which

he lived is still ugly and monotonous,’ the novelist pointed out seventeen years later,

commenting that the ‘vileness of the surroundings entered into [Denison’s] soul and

made him feel as if the men and women in the place, as well as their works, were all

alike, mean and sordid.’105

‘The City of the Busy’

In Barnett and Besant’s version of East London’s mean, osbscure and

monotonous urban landscape, the characteristic animating activity was unrelenting

work. A ‘hive of industry,’ the East End buzzed with the effort of an industrious and

productive working population. Like the ‘East London Defence Alliance’, they

directly challenged the misconception that the district was a parasitical social cesspit

that threatened the metropolis at large. For Barnett in particular, the unrelenting toil

of the district was nothing less than a ‘sacrifice’ to national prosperity. ‘The East is

27

the city of the busy,’ he told a Toynbee Hall gathering in 1889, ‘the pavements are

crowded by people too hurried to care how they look, the shops offer attractions

which are only cheap and useful, the main interest is in work and in the causes which

affect work.’106 He felt the loss of human individuality among ‘these thousands of

people all working at the same work, having the same income, having the same

interests, make life weary and monotonous’107 to be an indictment of the age.

Besant’s fiction similarly eschewed time-honoured stereotypes such as the

depraved criminal and the demoralised slum-dweller, both parasitic on the wealth or

charity of others. He emphasised, rather, the varieties of manufacture and commerce

conducted in East London to underline the district’s productivity and contribution to

the national wealth. His hero Harry Goslett enumerates for the reader ‘half-a-dozen

Breweries…chemical works, [and] sugar refineries’ as part of an impresive litany of

East London industry: ‘here are all the docks, then we have silk-weavers, rope-

makers, sail-makers, watch-makers, cigar-makers; we build ships; we tackle jute…we

cut corks; we make soap, and we make fireworks; we build boats.’108 One striking

passage in his East End sequel Children of Gibeon described Hoxton as an East

London centre of ‘the smaller industries and lesser ingenuities,’ where the essential

humanity of the population is reduced by their status as functional appendage to the

industrial process: ‘as regards the women they are all classified as ‘hands’ - nothing

else is wanted by a woman, not intelligence, or invention, or grace, or beauty, or

sweetness - nothing, but hands.’

There are bead hands, feather hands - who are subdivided into curling hands, improvers, mounters and aigrette hands - mantle hands, skirt hands, bodice hands, mob-cap hands, children’s pinafore hands, cape-lining hands, bead hands, butterfly hands, and tie hands, who are again divided into flat-work hands, back-stitchers, band hands, slip stichers, and front hands; they are black borderers, braiders and a hundred others.109

28

As he listed the varieties of manufacture of these everyday and essential objects,

Besant (following the ‘severely workful’ life of Dickens’ ‘Coketown’) encouraged

his readers to recognise the connection between East End toil and the wider wealth of

the nation, both in the smooth circulation of trade and commerce and in the

satisfaction of the West End’s taste for trifles and trinkets. Yet the consequence of

this unremitting productivity was an urban setting that denied the pleasures of life to

its inhabitants. ‘What we want here,’ declares Harry on behalf of his author,

as it seems to me, is a little more of the pleasures and graces of life. To begin with, we are not poor and in misery, but or the most part well off….See us on Sundays, and we are not a bad-looking lot; healthy, well-dressed and tolerably rosy. But we have no pleasures.110

Conclusion

Walter Besant and Samuel Barnett were foremost among the late-Victorian

social workers and philanthropists who were uncomfortable with the dominant image

of the East End as the sensationalised location of lurid poverty, degeneration and

depravity. Like others, they challenged the imagery that had placed ‘Outcast London’

so firmly in the public mind. They offered instead a version of the East End that drew

attention to other aspects of urban poverty that may have been less acute, but were

certainly more pervasive. Besant and Barnett sought to represent the district as the

home of an industrious and largely respectable working class, not as a fearsome

quarter of squalor and depravity; as a place characterised by daily monotony and an

unreflective materialism, not by vice and violence.

Yet the gulf between the ‘two nations’ encamped at either end of the

metropolis continued to haunt them. In proposing the East End’s dreary monotony as

a legitimate concern for social workers and reformers, they suggested a strategy to

address both problems. Given that many of the chief needs of the district were non-

29

material, the ‘means of life’ rather than the ‘means of livelihood’, they argued the

former should be provided by reformist benevolence as a basis for social

reconciliation. Barnett’s ‘University Settlement’ and Besant’s ‘Palace of Delight’

would be places where the benefits of music, literature, the visual arts and refined

social intercourse could be freely provided as a gift across the social divide. Their

response to the ‘Bitter Cry’ sensationalism challenged the conventional imagery of

East End depravity; it was also carefully framed to elicit West End interventions to

heal the ruptured metropolis.

Endnotes This paper derives from a doctoral thesis completed at the University of Queensland in 2001, supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award and the FCO Chevening Scholarship. Grateful thanks go to my supervisors, Paul Crook and Daniel Pick, and also to Seth Koven, Gareth Stedman Jones, Anselm Nye, Chris Lloyd, Simon Devereaux, Andrea Mackenzie, Malcolm Thomis, Matt Foley and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. 1 J. Adderley, In Slums and Society, Reminiscences of Old Friends (1916), 16-17. See also R.A. Woods, ‘The Social Awakening in London’, Scribner’s Magazine 11 (April 1892) 401-24. For the ‘immediate and cataclysmic’ impact of the pamphlet ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, see A.S. Wohl, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, International Review of Social History 13 (1968) 189-245. 2 ‘The Editor’, ‘Introduction’, Eastward Ho! 1,1 (May 1884) n.p. 3 A. Briggs, Victorian Cities (1968), 314-17; D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe (eds.), The Pursuit of Urban History (1983), xxvii; W. Sharpe and L. Wallock, ‘From ‘Great Town to ‘Nonplace Urban Realm’, Reading the Modern City’, Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (Baltimore,1987) 16-25. Raymond Williams observes that a ‘social division between East End and West End, which had been noted by some observers from early in the century, deepened and became more inescapably visible’ from mid-century: The City and the Country (1985), 221. 4 W.J. Fishman, East End 1888: A year in a London borough among the labouring poor (1988), 1. 5 D. Ward, ‘The Victorian Slum, an enduring myth?’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66 (1976) 326. 6 J. Raban, Soft City (1974), 24. 7 Fishman, East End 1888, 36. 8 C. Dickens, Hard Times (New York, 1990), 22. 9 C.R. Ashbee, The Survey of London Vol. 1: The Parish of Bromley-by-Bow (1900), xiii. 10 B. Leighton, Letters and Other Writings of the Late Edward Denison, M.P. for Newark (1872) 47; journal entry of August 28, 1867. 11 Briggs, Victorian Cities, 315.

30

12 S. Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004), 5. Koven superbly dissects the impulses and practices of ‘slumming’ to reveal the entanglements of altruism, fraternal love and sexual identity in Victorian slum activism. 13 Charles Booth, East London (Life and Labour of the People in London Vol. 1) (1889), 6. For a sample of the ‘Outcast London’ pamphlet literature, see Dyos, ‘The Slums of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies 11 (1967) 18-20. 14 A. Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Represenation in Three Cities, 1870-1914 (Leicester, 1993), 9-12. 15 ‘Pearl Fisher’, The Harvest of the City, and the Workers of Today (1884), 90. 16 O.Hill, ‘Open Spaces’, in Our Common Land (and other short essays) (1877), 109. 17 Koven, Slumming, 4. 18 London Metropolitan Archives, Barnett Papers, F/BAR/504 Sermon Notebooks, ‘East End Needs’, first delivered May-December 1881 to a Marylebone congregation and later re-delivered on unspecified occasions in Manchester and at Balliol College Chapel. In this and other quotations from Barnett’s manuscript sources, his idiosyncratic abbreviations have not been reproduced in the interests of clarity. 19 LMA, F/BAR/504 Sermon Notebooks, ‘East End Needs’. 20 The discussion presented here, and particularly its concern with Walter Besant’s version of East End conditions, owes a substantial debt to Peter Keating. See his ‘Fact and Fiction in the East End’, in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City: Images and Realities (vol. 2) (1973), 585-602 and The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971), esp. chapter four, ‘Walter Besant and the ‘discovery’ of the East End’, 93-124. Critical textual approaches to Besant’s work such as J. Wolfreys, writing London: Volume 2 materiality, memory, spectrality (2004), 36-41, on the other hand, are not sufficiently contextualised to contribute significantly. 21 See Mayne, The Imagined Slum. 22 G.A.C. Ginn, ‘Gifts of Culture, Centres of Light: Cultural Philanthropy in the late-Victorian East End’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 2001). 23 G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (Oxford, 1971), 222-23. A summary of the main documents in this debate is provided in A.S. Wohl, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, 205-6. 24 A. Mayne, ‘Representing the slum’, Urban History Yearbook 17 (1990) 67. 25 F.W.Brockett, ‘The people and their friends’, Fortnightly Review 45 (March 1886) 311. 26 Wohl, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, 193. 27 D. Reeder, ‘Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, An Introduction’ Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889 London Topographical Society, Publication No.130, 1984, n.p. 28 G.S. Reaney, ‘Outcast London’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 40 (Dec. 1886) 688. For contemporary debates on the ‘residuum’, see for example Stedman Jones, Outcast London, chapter six ‘Casual Labour and Rural Immigration, the Theory of Urban Degeneration,’ 127-151 and Fishman, East End 1888, esp. chapter four. 29 Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 151. 30 R. Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 9, 1 (2004) 43-67. 31 A. Morrison, ‘Whitechapel’ from his Cockney Corners; repr. Palace Journal 3 (April 1889) 1022. 32 This was followed by the collection Horrible London; by 1889 the two were issued as a single volume. 33 Wohl, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’, 203. 34 G. Sims, How the Poor Live, and Horrible London (1889), 46. 35This and the following are from Andrew Mearns, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ (1883; repr. Portway Bath, 1969) 1-3, 20. 36 ibid., 4. 37 ibid., 2-3 (original emphasis), 19-20. 38 Judith Walkowitz has commented: ‘Most of the explicit anxieties and attention generated by Stead and others focused on the East End, a symbol of the social unrest born of urban degeneracy.’ City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 29. 39 ‘The London Poor’, East London Observer Nov. 3 1883, 5. 40 ‘In Defence of East London’, ELO Jan. 5 1884, 6. 41 ‘The little tract, ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’…took its facts very largely from South London, from a region where the London Congregational Union had one of its outposts.’ Woods, ‘The Social Awakening in London’, 402. 42 Parliamentary Papers 1884-85 (XXX c.44021-1), First Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Housing of the Working Classes Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, 181. Mearns had also clarified the relationship between his pamphlet and the East End in an earlier article. Answering charges of sensationalism, he wrote, ‘No one dreams of disputing the fact that in most quarters of the metropolis - not in the east end only - there are districts in which are to be found houses that are utterly unfit for human beings to occupy.’ (emphasis added). ‘The Outcast Poor II. Outcast London’, Contemporary Review 44 (Dec. 1883) 924. 43 G. Sims, My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London (1917), 136-37. 44 Parlt. P. First Report…into the Housing of the Working Classes, Vol II, 186. 45 Dyos, ‘The Slums of Victorian London’, 22. 46 B. Lambert, ‘The Outcast Poor - I. Esau’s Cry’, Contemporary Review 44 (Dec. 1883) 917. 47 S.A. Barnett, Perils of Wealth and Poverty, By the late Canon Barnett (V.A.Boyle ed.) (1920), 37-38.

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48 Barnett, Perils of Wealth and Poverty, 38. 49 S.A.Barnett, ‘Sensationalism in Social Reform’, in S.A. and H.O.Barnett, Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform (1895), 228-34. 50 ‘Notes at the Picture Galleries’, Charity Organisation Review 3 (1887) 284. 51 Charity Organisation Reporter 12 (Oct. 25, 1883) 307. 52 W.W. How, ‘The East End’, Contemporary Review 54 (Dec. 1888) 797. 53 ‘In Defence of East London’, ELO Jan. 12 1884, 5. 54 H.O. Barnett, ‘Passionless Reformers’, Fortnightly Review n.s. 21 (Aug. 1882) 226. 55 Rev. A.J. Robinson, cited in How, ‘The East End’, 803. 56 A.O. Jay, A Story of Shoreditch (1896), 98. Jay also published Life in Darkest London, A Hint to General Booth (1891) and The Social Problem, Its Possible Solution (1893) to publicise his reforming efforts. 57 See P. Keating, ‘Biographical Study’, in A. Morrison, A Child of the Jago (1969), 23-26. 58 Jay, A Story of Shoreditch, 98. 59 ‘The East London Union for Advanced Education’ ELO Jan. 12 1884, 7. 60 W.W. How, ‘The East End’, Contemporary Review 54 (Dec. 1888) 795. 61 R. Newman, ‘Work and Wages in East London Now and Twenty Years Ago’, Charity Organisation Review 31,3 (July 1887) 271; paper read on June 1, 1887. 62 ibid., 275. 63 Barnett, ‘Passionless Reformers’, 226. 64 East London Leader and Tower Hamlets Record Sept. 2 1882, 3. 65 ‘The London Poor’, ELO Nov. 3 1883, 5. 66 ‘In Defence of East London’, ELO Dec. 29 1883, 5; ELO Jan. 5 1884, 5-6; ELO Jan. 12 1884, 5. 67 ‘In Defence of East London’, ELO Dec. 29 1883, 5. 68 See ‘East London Union for Advanced Education’, ELO Jan. 12 1884, 7; ‘Suburban East London’, ELO Aug. 30 1884, 6; ‘Elevating the Masses’, ELO Sept. 6, 1884, 3; ‘Distress in the East of London’, ELO Feb. 28 1885, 7; ‘Libelling the East End’, ELO May 23 1885, 5; ‘Exaggeration’, ELO Feb. 26 1885, 5; ‘Is East London as Black as It’s Painted?’, ELO May 8 1886, 6; ‘Libelling the East End’, ELO July 31 1886, 5; ‘More about East London’, ELO Aug. 21 1886, 5; ‘A Defence of East London’, ELO Oct. 2 1886, 3; ‘The Condition of East London’, ELO Oct. 2 1886, 6. 69 ‘In Defence of East London’, ELO Jan. 5, 1884, 6. 70 ‘In Defence of East London’, ELO Jan. 12 1884, 5. 71 ‘Distress in the East of London’, ELO Feb. 28 1885, 7. 72 Alliance secretary John Richardon ‘referred in warm terms to the excellent services rendered in bringing the Alliance into existence by the editor of the East London Observer who had brought the subject before public attention’ at the inaugural meeting. ELO Nov. 20 1886, 6. 73 ‘The East London Defence Alliance’, ELO Feb. 26 1887, 5. 74 This statement and those following was made at the inaugural meeting and reported in ‘Defending East London’, ELO Nov. 20 1886, 6. 75 ‘Defending East London’, 6. 76 ‘Defending East London’, 6. 77 A meeting in February 1887 was told that the Rev. Grattan Guinness ‘had not yet proved his statement that there was nothing else in the East End except dung carts and funerals;’ and that three children who had been philanthropically exhibited as ‘the waifs and strays of East London’ in order to raise donations for assisted emigration, ‘were as a matter of fact entitled to a large sum of money on coming of age.’ ‘The East London Defence Alliance’, ELO Feb. 26 1887, 5. 78 W.G.Thomas, ‘A Bright Side to East London’, East London Magazine 1,4 (Nov. 1890) 43. 79 S. Buss, ‘Aspects of East London’, Eastward Ho! 1,2 (June 1884) 81-83. 80 D.C. Gilman (ed.), The Organization of Charity; being a Report of the Sixth Section of the International Congress of Charities, Corrections, and Philanthropy (Baltimore, 1894), 258-59. 81 Gilman, The Organization of Charity, 251. 82 Vicar of St. Jude’s Whitechapel 1873-1893, and Canon of Westminster Abbey 1906-1913; see H. O. Barnett, Canon Barnett, His Life, Work, and Friends (2 vols.) (1918) and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Vol. 3 (Oxford 2004), 1029-30. The university settlement Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Art Gallery are the best known of Barnett’s many reforming efforts and schemes in Whitechapel over his thirty-two year residence there. 83 Novelist and president of the Society of Authors; see The Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant (1902), Dictionary of National Biography (Second Supplement, Vol. 1) (1912) 154-55, and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Vol. 5 (Oxford, 2004), 507-9. Besant’s proposal for an East End ‘Palace of Delight’ was developed by the Beaumont Trust from 1884-5 as the People’s Palace at Mile End (now Queen Mary College, University of London). 84 ‘The Dwellings of the London Poor, an interview with the Rev. S.A. Barnett’, Cassell’s Family Magazine (1886) 397. 85 Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 30. 86 Keating, ‘Fact and Fiction in the East End’, 589. 87 H. Jones, ‘Life and work among the East London poor’, Good Words (1884) 50-51. 88 R. Blathwayt, ‘Mr.Walter Besant and the East-Enders’, Cassell's Family Magazine (1893) 67.

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89 LMA, Barnett Papers F/BAR/504 Sermon Notebooks, ‘East End Needs’. 90 ibid. 91 LMA, Barnett Papers, F/BAR/498 Sermon Notebooks, ff.25-7; sermon delivered September 17, 1877 and repeated September 29, 1878 (f.33). 92 LMA, Barnett Papers F/BAR/504. 93 S.A.Barnett, Settlements of University Men in Great Towns (Oxford,1884); repr. as Appendix A in J.A.R. Pimlott, Toynbee Hall, Fifty Years of Social Progress 1884-1934 (1935), 271. 94 LMA, Barnett Papers, F/BAR/498 Sermon Notebooks f.25. 95 LMA, Barnett Papers F/BAR/504 Sermon Notebooks ‘East End Needs’. 96 ibid. 97 W. Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story (1894; orig. publ. 1882), 18. 98 ibid. 132. 99 ibid. 61. 100 ibid. 132-33, emphasis added. 101 F.S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (1979), 219. 102 R. Williams, The Country and the City (1985), 153-54. 103 Keating, ‘Fact and Fiction in the East End’, 590. 104 In an address to the 1884 Social Science Congress in Birmingham, Besant cited a revealing passage in Denison’s published correspondence: ‘My wits are getting blunted by the monotony and ugliness of the place. I can almost imagine the awful effect upon a human mind of never seeing anything but the meanest and vilest of men and man’s work, and of complete exclusion from the sight of God’s works.’ W. Besant, ‘Art and the People’, in his As We Are and As We May Be (1903), 246. 105 Besant, ‘Art and the People’, 246-47. 106 Lambeth Palace Library, Barnett Papers, MS1466, f.54. 107 LMA, Barnett Papers, F/BAR/498 Sermon Notebooks f.25. 108 All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 50. 109 W. Besant, Children of Gibeon (1887), 101-2. 110 All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 50.