London: The Biography

It has been observed that the West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt; there is leisure to the West, and labour to the East. Yet in the early decades of the nineteenth century it was not singled out as being the most desperate source of poverty and violence. It was known principally as the centre of shipping, and of industry, and thus the home of the working poor. In fact the industry and the poverty steadily intensified; dye works and chemical works, manure factories and lamp-black factories, manufacturers of glue and of paraffin, producers of paint and bonemeal, all clustered in Bow and Old Ford and Stratford. The River Lea for centuries had been the site of industry, and of transport, but throughout the nineteenth century it was further exploited and degraded. A match factory on its banks lent the water a urinous taste and appearance, while the smell of the whole area became offensive. In all this, of course, we see the condition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries being expanded and intensified; it is as if the process continued with a momentum of its own. The industrial districts of Canning Town, Silvertown and Beckton were created between the Lea and Barking Creek, Beckton becoming particularly well known for its sewage dispersal system. All the filth of London crept eastwards.

But then, at some point in the 1880s, it reached what might be called critical mass. It imploded. The East End became “the abyss” or “the nether world” of strange secrets and desires. It was the area of London into which more poor people were crammed than any other, and out of that congregation of poverty sprang reports of evil and immorality, of savagery and unnamed vice. In his essay “On Murder, Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas De Quincey apostrophised the area of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1812 as one of the “most chaotic” and “a most dangerous quarter,” a “perilous region” replete with “manifold ruffianism.” It is perhaps important that a writer should inscribe the East End in this manner, since its subsequent and lurid reputation was to a large extent established upon the work of journalists and novelists who felt almost obliged to conjure up visions of darkness and horror as a way of describing the shadow which London itself cast. And of course the defining sensation which for ever marked the “East End,” and created its public identity, was the series of murders ascribed to Jack the Ripper between the late summer and early autumn of 1888. The scale of the sudden and brutal killings effectively marked out the area as one of incomparable violence and depravity, but it was equally significant that the crimes should have been committed in the darkness of malodorous alleys. The fact that the killer was never captured seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves; that the East End was the true Ripper.

All the anxieties about the city in general then became attached to the East End in particular, as if in some peculiar sense it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life. There were books written, the titles of which represented their themes-The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The People of the Abyss, Ragged London, In Darkest London, The Nether World. In that last novel George Gissing provides a description of “the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination; across miles of a city of the damned, such as thought never conceived before this age of ours; above streets, swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the unwonted light of heaven.” This is a vision of the East End as the Inferno, the city as hell, and it is not one confined to the novelist. The autobiographical narrative of “John Martin, School Master and Poet” was partly set in the purlieus of nineteenth-century Limehouse. “A mind is needed-black, misanthropic in its view of things, used to fearful visions of the night, to look with comprehensive and unflinching eye upon these scenes of sickly horror and despair.”

When Jack London first wished to visit the East End in 1902 he had been told by the manager of Thomas Cook’s Cheapside branch that “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 at all.” They knew nothing about it, perhaps, and yet everyone knew of it. In Tales of Mean Streets (1894) Arthur Morrison declared that “There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End?”