Yet there were some who came as missionaries into that darkness. As early as the 1860s men and women, impelled by religious or philanthropic motives, set up halls and chapels in the East End. The vicar of St. Jude’s in Whitechapel, Samuel Barnett, was instrumental in what was called “settlement work” where generally idealistic young men and women tried materially to assist the straitened or precarious lives of the East Enders. Arnold Toynbee declared in one of his lectures to the inhabitants of Bethnal Green: “You have to forgive us, for we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously … we will serve you, we will devote our lives to your service, and we cannot do more.” Partly as a result of his example, and his eloquence, various “missions” were established, among them Oxford House in Bethnal Green and St. Mildred’s House upon the Isle of Dogs. The tone of supplication in Toynbee’s remarks might also be construed as one of anxiety that those, who had been so grievously treated, might react against the “sinners” who betrayed them.
There was indeed much radical activity in the East End, with the members of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s and the Chartists in the 1830s meeting in the mug houses and public houses of Whitechapel and elsewhere, in order to promote their revolutionary causes. A radically egalitarian and anti-authoritarian spirit has always been rising from the area, in terms of religious as well as political dissent (if in fact the two can be distinguished). In the eighteenth century the Ancient Deists of Hoxton espoused millennarian and generally levelling principles, and there is evidence of Ranters and Muggletonians, Quakers and Fifth Monarchy men, contributing to the general atmosphere of dissent. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the political ethic of the East End was dominated by “municipal socialism.” George Lansbury in particular became associated with the movement known as “Poplarism,” a variant of populism whereby in 1919 the local Labour Party in control of the borough set unemployment relief at a level higher than the central government permitted. There was a confrontation, and the councillors of Poplar were briefly imprisoned, but the central demands of Lansbury were eventually met.
It was a characteristic episode, in the sense that the East End never “rose up,” as the civic authorities feared. It was always considered a potent ground for insurrection, as Oswald Mosley and his followers demonstrated in the 1930s, but like the rest of London it was too large and too dispersed to create any kind of galvanic shock. A more important revolutionary influence came, in fact, from the immigrant population. The communist and anarchist movements among the German and Russian populations have borne significant witness to the effect of the East End upon human consciousness. There was the celebrated Anarchists Club in Jubilee Street, among whose members were Kropotkin and Malatesta; opposite the London Hospital along Whitechapel High Street, a hall accommodated the fifth congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which ensured the preeminence of the Bolshevik Party. In a hostel in Fieldgate Street, Joseph Stalin was a welcome guest. Lenin visited Whitechapel on numerous occasions, and attended the Anarchists Club, while Trotsky and Litvinov were also frequent visitors to the area. The East End can in that sense be considered one of the primary sites of world communism.
No doubt the presence of political exiles from Europe is largely responsible for that eminence, but the prevailing atmosphere of the place may also have been suggestive. Blanchard Jerrold, in the 1870s, had remarked upon the fact that “the quaint, dirty, poverty-laden, stall-lined streets are here and there relieved by marts and warehouses and emporiums, in which rich men who employ the poorest labour, are found.” Already the startling contrast between the “rich” and the “poorest,” standing upon the same ground, is being revealed. The East End was also the image of the whole world, with “the German, the Jew, the Frenchman, the Lascar, the swarthy native of Spitalfields, the leering thin-handed thief … with endless swarms of ragged children.” International communism sprang from an international context.
But other visitors saw other realities. The Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek, observing the East End at first hand in the early twentieth century, suggested that in “this overwhelming quantity it no longer looks like an excess of human beings, but like a geological formation … it was piled up from soot and dust.” It is an impersonal force of dullness, the total aggregate of labour and suffering among the soot of ships and factories. It is a “geological formation,” perhaps, to the extent that the area itself seems to emanate waves of frustration and enervation. At the turn of the nineteenth century Mrs. Humphry Ward noticed the monotony of the East End in terms of “long lines of low houses-two storeys always, or two storeys and a basement-of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same smoke, every doorknocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner ‘public’ on either side, flaming in the hazy distance.” George Orwell noticed it, too, in 1933 when he complained that the territory between Whitechapel and Wapping was “quieter and drearier” than the equivalent poor areas of Paris.
This is a familiar refrain, but it tends to come from those upon the outside. The autobiographical reminiscences of East Enders themselves do not dwell upon monotony or hardship, but upon the sports and clubs and markets, the local shops and local “characters,” which comprised each neighbourhood. As one old resident of Poplar put it in a recent history of the area, The East End Then and Now, edited by W.G. Ramsey, “It never occurred to me that my brothers and sisters and I were underprivileged, for what you never have you never miss.” This is the experience of the East End, and of all other impoverished parts of London, for those who live in them; the apparent deprivation and monotony are never realised, because they do not touch the inner experience of those who are meant to be affected by them. Any emphasis upon the uniformity or tedium of the East End has in any case to be seriously modified by the constantly remarked “merriment” or “cheerfulness” of its inhabitants. There was “a valiant cheeriness full of strength,” Blanchard Jerrold remarked after reciting a litany of sorrowful mysteries to be found upon the eastern streets, “everywhere a readiness to laugh.” He also observed that “The man who has a ready wit will employ his basket, while the dull vendor remains with his arms crossed.”
Thus emerged the figure of the Cockney, once the native of all London but in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries identified more and more closely with the East End. This was the character heard by V.S. Pritchett with “whining vowels and ruined consonants” and “the hard-chinned look of indomitable character.” The creation of that chirpy and resourceful stereotype can in some measure be ascribed to another contrast with East End monotony, the music hall. The conditions of life in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and elsewhere may have predisposed their inhabitants to violent delights; the penny gaffs and the brightly illuminated public houses are testimony to that, as well as the roughness and coarseness which were intimately associated with them. But it is also significant that the East End harboured more music halls than any other part of London-Gilbert’s in Whitechapel, the Eastern and the Apollo in Bethnal Green, the Cambridge in Shoreditch, Wilton’s in Wellclose Square, the Queen’s in Poplar, the Eagle in the Mile End Road, and of course the Empire in Hackney, are just the most prominent among a large number which became as characteristic of the East End as the sweatshops or the church missions. By the mid-nineteenth century, the area roughly inclusive of the present borough of Tower Hamlets harboured some 150 music halls. It is perhaps appropriate that Charles Morton, universally if inaccurately known as “Father of the Halls” because of his establishment of the Canterbury in 1851, was born in Bethnal Green. In one sense the eastern region of the city was simply reaffirming its ancient identity. It has been mentioned before that two of the earliest London theatres, the Theatre and the Curtain, had been erected in the sixteenth century upon the open ground of Shoreditch; the whole region outside the walls became a haven for popular entertainment of every kind, from tea-gardens to wrestling matches and bear-baiting. So the music halls of the East End represent another continuity within the area, equivalent to its poor housing and to its “stink industries.”