But a glance at one of Charles Booth’s ‘poverty maps’ quickly disabused any false optimism. Black marked ‘lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal’, while dark blue registered ‘very poor, casual. Chronic want’. Even the people of the stratum above, coloured light blue, were obliged to live on 18 shillings to a guinea a week. The East End was the heart of darkness, over a third of its population living below ‘the margin of poverty’. Conditions may indeed have improved since the 1840s and 1850s, but the very poor felt more deprived in comparison with others. An economist, J. A. Hobson, wrote in 1891: ‘the rate of improvement in the condition of the poor is not quick enough to stem the current of popular discontent’.
If the problem was not one of individual fecklessness, or even of bad luck, the blame was laid upon that increasingly popular term, ‘the system’, with a new recognition of, or concern for, ‘unemployment’. Trafalgar Square became the centre of meetings and demonstrations on behalf of this new element in the state. A Mansion House fund for the relief of the unemployed was established, but it could do ameliorative work only. The ‘unemployed’ became the shadow world to be regarded with trepidation. No one knew what to do with them. There was an even lower category, ‘the residuum’, which spread contagion everywhere. But the unemployed remained at the forefront of public consciousness.
The plight of the ‘labouring poor’ or the ‘deserving poor’ was not yet to be alleviated by collective means; there were some 700 philanthropic societies that worked in a generally uncoordinated and ad hoc manner. Certain streets, certain districts, even certain individuals became the focus of concern in a society which had no ‘safety net’ to catch those who had fallen out of the system. Instead there had been in place since 1869 the Charity Organisation Society which Henry James believed to be ‘so characteristic a feature of English civilization’. It was as practical and pragmatic as any other English society, but it did try to bring together the multifarious charities which were in danger of bumping into each other in the street.
Lothair, the titular hero of Disraeli’s novel published in 1870, remarked that ‘it seems to me that pauperism is not an affair so much of wages as of dwellings. If the working classes were properly lodged, at their present rate of wages, they would be richer. They would be healthier and happier at the same cost.’ The same insight had occurred to other enthusiasts for ‘model dwellings’, some of whom were rich philanthropists who began a course of slum clearance and new building still to be found in English cities.
The queen travelled to the East End in the spring of 1887 to open the ‘People’s Palace’, which was a concert room, a library and a singing gallery all in one. She heard what she called ‘a horrid noise (quite new to the Queen’s ears) “booing” she believes it is called’. Salisbury told her, in way of an apology, that ‘London contains a much larger number of the worst kind of rough than any other great town in the island … probably Socialists and the worst Irish.’
The East End of London had also become in the popular mind a place of mystery and of darkness. It was ‘the abyss’; it was ‘darkest London’ and ‘the nether world’. It was the city of dreadful night. It came to represent the essence of Victorian London and has been seen as such in a thousand television dramas. In the summer and autumn of 1888, however, it became the object of more particular attention. Two industrial disputes made a powerful impression, as if they were heavy with the weight of the future like dark clouds prophesying rain. The girls who worked in the Bryant and May match factory in Bow walked out of their jobs when two girls were dismissed for insubordination at the beginning of July 1888. The girls went on strike, and achieved some very prominent support. Their dismissal drew attention to their working conditions in a positively unhealthy environment. White phosphorus used in the manufacture of lucifer matches, for example, provoked a debilitating condition known as ‘phossy jaw’. They were the pale and unhealthy slaves of the industrial process. Seven hundred of them walked out of their place of employment, the Fairfield Works, and the factory was closed. They were vigilant for their cause, and their first protest march was to Fleet Street rather than to Westminster. They gained the support of journalists, MPs and the members of the various socialist parties that operated in the capital.
A prominent unionist, Tom Mann, wrote later:
the girls were soon organised into a trade union. Their case was conducted with great skill. A club was formed, which was used as an educational and social centre, and a spirit of hopefulness characterised the proceedings. The girls won. They had a stimulating effect upon other sections of workers, some of whom were also showing signs of intelligent dissatisfaction.
Most of the girls were of Irish ancestry and their shared culture was of great effect in the East End. And it was a defining moment for English trade unionism itself, and set the terms for a great dockers’ strike in the East End of the following year. Engels described the activity of the match-girls as ‘the light jostle needed for the entire avalanche to move’, soon to be demonstrated.
Meanwhile a shadow had fallen over the East End which claimed the nation’s attention. The brief reign of Jack the Ripper, from August to November of that year, aroused popular terror on an unprecedented scale. It was as if all the presumed darkness of the area had become concentrated in this elusive anonymous figure, and the fact that he was not captured led to the fugitive suspicion that the neighbourhood itself had killed the women. It was a catalyst for the nervous worn-out excitement that characterized the period.
Strike followed strike in the context of popular socialism and the demand for ‘democracy’ of some form or other. By 1887 the various unions in the cotton trade came together. A strike for a nine-hour day among engineering workers was successful even without the intervention of trade unions. In the same year Ben Tillett, a working docker, formed the Tea Operatives and General Labourers Union at Tilbury Docks. These working men became central in the emergence of what became known as the ‘new unionism’. It was designed to organize those trades which the old unionism had neglected or forgotten, under the principles of a legal minimum wage and a compulsory eight-hour day. The old unions, known as ‘the aristocracy of labour’, had ignored the poorer workers, the sweated labour, the unskilled workmen. John Burns and Tom Mann of the Social Democratic Foundation accused their own union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, of ‘selfish and snobbish desertion’ of the poor workers. In that year, too, the Labour Electoral Association urged: ‘working men must form themselves … as centres to organise the people’.
In 1888 the Miners’ Federation was formed. When Will Thorne started the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers Union at Beckton Gas Works in the early summer of 1889, he recalled that ‘the news spread like wildfire in the public houses, factories and works in Canning Town, Barking, East and West Ham, everyone was talking about the union’. To their surprise their demand for an eight-hour day was conceded without a struggle. The Great London Dock Strike took place in the same summer, when the dockers walked out for the sake of the ‘dockers’ tanner’; they were part of the wave of action which had begun with the match-girls in the year before. Ben Tillett had organized the poorer-paid employees of the dock, and when he called them out on strike they were soon joined by workers on both sides of the Thames. Their demands were a wage of sixpence per hour and a minimum of four hours for those unloading cargo.