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This chapter attempts to put into context the electoral evidence from the East End constituencies in this period. It shows that that voting patterns in the East End should be seen as more closely representative of the views of the most prosperous within each area of East London. But there was also an overall consistency across areas in the economic circumstances of voters, which suggests that the obvious variations in electoral results between constituencies or wards may be best explained by localized or other factors rather than broad economic or class circumstances. This is further emphasized by the shorter time that voters remained on the registers in this period, particularly a significant group of poorer voters who gained the vote quite late in age. This suggests, as well, that politics in the Victorian and Edwardian East End should be considered clearly in the context of a much more tenuous level of party allegiance.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the focus of the book, which is the poor of the East End of London. The East End is defined as the area covered by the post-1900 London boroughs of Stepney, Poplar, Bethnal Green, and Shoreditch. It then discusses occupations and forms of employment in the East End, the politics of the London working class, and local government elections.

This chapter focuses on explanations of the apparent Conservatism amongst the East End working class. In many ways, this has meant a simplified emphasis upon factors possibly acting to dilute the expression of the ‘existing’ political tendencies of the working class. But clearly the evidence does show, on a number of occasions, that voting abstention seems to have distorted an underlying majority progressivism amongst the more prosperous working class in some areas. The smaller number of poorer working-class voters seems on occasion to have seized upon ‘scandal’ to randomly, but actively, reject middle-class candidates of whatever party, with political results that are difficult to measure.

The progressive vote in some areas of the East End often fell well short of its potential. But of course voter abstention by itself could not deliver a seat to an opponent. The Conservatives still collected a large number of votes in these areas. The arguments above do not deny that factors such as an interest in ‘sectional’ benefits, and the impact of a range of political issues, could gather working class support for Conservatives in the East End. It is difficult to determine the precise effect of any such individual concerns. This chapter suggests that it remains more important to look at the overall milieu of voters in understanding their motivations, and that the ‘occupational’ assumptions made by many historians regarding politics in the East End have been much too simple.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that the image of a populist Conservatism and a political apathy growing in the late Victorian and Edwardian period out of an abjectly poor East End is wrong. The examination of ‘models’ put forward by historians to support this idea has suggested that few were built upon a solid base of evidence, and that they often relied heavily upon superficial and unjustified assumptions regarding poverty, race, and religion. The politics of the East End working class were far more complex than these models allow.

Andrew Reed was called to the New Road Independent Chapel in the East End of London in 1811. Moving from an early adherence to high Calvinism into evangelical Calvinism, his pastoral ministry saw great success. The church was rebuilt in 1831 on a nearby site as Wycliffe Chapel to accommodate the growing congregation. Reed was active in a range of political causes of concern to conscientious Dissenters, including that of education, but his most notable activity was in the realm of social concern: he helped found three orphanages, a home for mentally handicapped children, and the Royal Hospital for Incurables. He believed that humanitarian compassion should override sectarian divisions, an approach facilitated by his evangelical Calvinism.

This chapter presents a brief survey of the crime scene—Whitechapel—as constructed by both contemporaries and historians. To affluent West Enders, Whitechapel was a breeding ground for criminals, prostitutes, and layabouts; a center of depravity, degradation, and disease. At times, it seemed like a remote colony of the imperial city, if not a foreign country. Filled with pride over the quality of English civilization, most West Enders regarded Tower Hamlets (the core of the East End) as an embarrassment—a vast Cimmerian den populated mainly by degenerates and troglodytes. The chapter discovers that the small but palpable presence of West Europeans and East Asians made Whitechapel a colorful mix of ethnicities, accents, cuisines, and customs, especially after 1880, when hordes of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe began to arrive.

This first chapter sets the scene with a brief historical introduction. It looks at the East End’s immigrant history, at the Bengalis’ Sylheti background, at the first links through lascars in British merchant ships, at the role of Bengali professionals and students, at the enlargement of the community with the arrival of families and through natural growth, at the impact of immigration legislation, and at the development of Bengali neighbourhoods. It gives an introduction to the growing importance of Islam and to the perennial problems around the shortage of housing and the competition this creates. It gives a broad outline of the types of employment Bengalis have taken up, the problems of racism, and the particular and evolving situations and constraints facing Bengali women and young people. It includes statistics from the 2011 census, and ends with a look at recent changes in the area and the impact of gentrification.

This chapter discusses the concept of internal exile, which can be found in Sinclair's 2005 non-fiction text, Edge of Orison. It studies the issues of marginalisation, suffering and exile that are addressed in Rodinsky's Room, Sinclair's collaborative text with Rachel Lichtenstein. These issues are also located in the history of the Jewish East End, a place that plays a special role in Sinclair's imagination of London. This chapter also studies his ‘democratic’ emphasis on walking the city.

Ruskin's teaching of Oxford undergraduates, and in particular the Hinksey road-diggings he encouraged some of them to engage with, helped to inspire into action many of the key participants in the foundation of the university settlements as well as the social and civic interventions and social scientific research which they helped to pioneer. Ruskin's financial support of Octavia Hill's model housing scheme in London also helped to encourage the development of a form of pioneering social welfare. At Toynbee Hall, in Whitechapel, the culture in which university graduates engaged with the poorest members of the community, by living among them, leading by example, and learning in a process of mutual exchange, was influenced by a common sense of indebtedness to Ruskin. Furthermore, the University Settlement at Ancoats in Manchester grew directly out of the Art Museum established by the philanthropist, Thomas Coglan Horsfall, in reverence to Ruskin.

This chapter focuses on the double event—the murders of Stride and Eddowes. It discusses that the one by-product of the double event was the growing conviction that panic in the East End might lead to mob violence against Jews unless the killer was caught. For this reason, as well as from the need to prevent another murder, the police stepped up their patrols. While scores of constables and detectives scoured the streets and alleys of Whitechapel for clues and suspects, the Liberal and Radical press raised the volume of their diatribes against Warren and Matthews for bungling the investigation. More reporters roamed through Whitechapel in search of background material, and editors used bigger headlines as well as crude illustrations and maps of the murder sites to attract more readers.

From the mid-nineteenth century through to the First World War, the Jewish world was re-shaped by mass migration resulting from a combination of factors—demographic and economic as well as the impact of persecution and discrimination. It was a part of a wider global shift in population from south to north and east to west that reflected the (uneven) impact of a new economic age and the forces of modernity that accompanied it. Britain, in spite of the large numbers settling there, has not featured prominently in Jewish historiography. Within the capital itself the focus has been largely on the East End at the expense of communities that developed in the West End and south of the river. This chapter provides alternative and critical narratives, thereby challenging those who limit Jewish migration to particular times and places. The dynamics of Jews on the move between and within countries and continents are far too multi-layered and intensive to be encapsulated in one story, even if as epic as the Lower East Side. It is only by incorporating the impact of Jewish migration where and when it is, perhaps, least expected that its full complexity and scope can be appreciated.

This chapter examines Margaret Harkness’s novel A City Girl (1887). It describes the emergence of the Model Dwellings Movement, and considers Harkness’s time living in a model dwelling in London’s East End: Katharine Buildings. This chapter studies the fictional representation of Katharine Buildings in A City Girl to engage with questions about the social effectiveness of model dwellings movement and its program of ‘capitalist philanthropy.’

The late 1880s is characterised as the era of ‘New Unionism’ as workers from various trades and industries banded together to demand higher wages and better working conditions against a background of growing socialist feeling. The East End of London was the setting for many of the most notable disputes, such as those occurring in 1888 at the Bryant and May match factory in Bow, in March 1889 at the Beckton gasworks, and later the same year at the docks. This chapter surveys the range of responses to the dispute from theatrical establishments in the East End, and the performativity of the strike itself, especially the daily processions each day during the strike. The lines of marching men physically and symbolically penetrated the nation’s financial centre. At a time of growing concern about the lawlessness of the underclass in the East End and fears of contagion from its hordes, the presence of the disciplined ranks of marchers performed a counter-narrative of dignified but oppressed labour.

The chapter delivers the first detailed account of the activities of the Free Russian Libraryin Whitechapel, the services it provided to the local East European community and the relations which existed between its founder, the Russian revolutionary Alexei Teplov, his compatriots and a range of British intellectuals of the day. It provides a detailed examination of émigré activities in the East End of London leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution and identifies an important yet previously undiscussed source of Russian culture in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. There are few contemporary references to the existence of this remarkable institution which served, on the one hand, as a benevolent society for poor, often illiterate, Jewish immigrants, and on the other, as a revolutionary meeting place which found itself the centre of attention of the political police forces of St Petersburg, Paris and London.

This chapter examines L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895). This novel integrates generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement for its juvenile audience. In its representation of the protagonist’s experience living and working in various forms of settlement housing in London’s East End, the novel explores the degree to which a commitment to religious philosophy was necessary to effect meaningful social change.

This first interchapter tells the early history of ‘the Whitechapel Group’, the network of Russian Jewish artists and writers who grew up together in the East End of London. We tend to separate the members of this group into associations with different modernist sets—David Bomberg and Jacob Kramer with Wyndham Lewis’s vorticists, Mark Gertler with the Bloomsbury group, John Rodker with James Joyce and Ezra Pound, and Isaac Rosenberg with the war poets. When the Whitechapel Group’s collective identity has been considered, it has been almost exclusively in terms of the members’ Jewish ethnicity, but this chapter examines the significance of the other shared aspect of the Whitechapel Group’s heritage—that is, their families’ lives in, and departure from, the Russian Empire.

In spite of their limited numbers and altogether unthreatening character, the international anarchist groups in Britain came to play a significant role in the redefinition of the country's immigration and asylum policy. Both the presence of the anarchists and the use of police surveillance posed problems as they contradicted Britain's traditionally liberal asylum policy, a matter of great national pride, perceived as a pillar of national exceptionalism. The early 1890s witnessed the emergence of a loose ‘restrictionist’ party advocating stricter policing and limitations on immigration and asylums, basing its arguments on fears of economic and racial decline through the uncontrolled immigration of radical foreigners. In 1898, the international conference on the policing of anarchism held in Rome resulted in agreements which laid down the basis for Interpol; however, Britain and France refused to enter these in the name of national autonomy of action. The agreements were strengthened in 1902 and 1904, but Britain still refused to enter any formal arrangement. The turning point came in 1905, with the passing of the Aliens’ Act, restricting entry into the country for the first time since 1826.

This essay traces the shifting frameworks of affective reform proposed by Walter Besant in two of his novels about the East End, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886). While the cultivation of individual happiness based on bourgeois domesticity offers a strategy for reorienting working-class values in the former novel, the latter promotes a pursuit of communitarian values rooted in universal sisterhood, which supersedes familial bonds and class distinctions. Reading these two novels in conversation with each other reveals a narrative critique of rights-based individualism along the lines of revisionist liberal thought, and redirects affective attention toward fostering kinship associations for communal mutuality.

Of all of Shaw’s earlier plays, it is perhaps with Candida that gardens and libraries contribute the most to understanding some of the deeper nuances and implications of Shaw’s intentions in certain aspects of the play. The world of the play belongs to Morell, the off-stage settings being the parish which he serves and the parsonage (his habitat by virtue of his position as parish priest), and, on stage, his library. Shaw’s use of a part of London, Victoria Park, and its implications, as well as the on-stage setting of Morell’s library, which is an extension of the off-stage setting, clearly point to and help define Morell. In addition to being one of “the finest parks in the East End,” Victoria Park is also known as the “People’s Park” because it has always been a center for political meetings and rallies of all persuasions, surpassing even Hyde Park in this regard. This area of London, impoverished as it is, has a tradition of left-wing parties, and the radicalism of the East End contributed to the formation of the Labour Party. Morell’s social message is a part of the very fabric of such an area.