Among these riots and alarms there was another group of immigrants who, if they stirred little outrage, excited even less sympathy. They were the Indians, the forgotten ancestors of the twentieth-century arrivals, who came to London as servants or slaves; some remained in employment, while others were summarily dismissed or ran away to a vagrant life. There were “hue and cry” advertisements in the public prints-a guinea for the recapture of “a black boy, an Indian, about thirteen years old run away the 8th ins. from Putney with a collar about his neck with this inscription, ‘The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’” Other advertisements were placed to discover an “East India Tawney Black” or a “Run-away Bengal Boy.” Other Asian servants were “discharged” or “dumped,” having attended their employers on their passage from India, so that they were reduced to a life upon the streets. One Indian visitor wrote to The Times in order to complain about the presence of Indian beggars who were “a great annoyance to the Public, but more so to the Indian gentlemen who visit England.” The Public Advertiser in 1786 observed that “those poor wretches who are daily begging for a passage back, proves that the generality of those who bring them over leave them to shift for themselves the moment they have no further occasion for their services.” These were the unwilling immigrants.
Although the general number of European immigrants increased throughout the nineteenth century, the Jews and the Irish remained the targets of public opprobrium. They were the object of derision and disgust because they lived in self-contained communities, popularly regarded as squalid; it was generally assumed, too, that they had somehow imported their disorderly and insanitary conditions with them. Philanthropic visitors to the Irish rookeries discovered such scenes “of filth and wretchedness as cannot be conceived.” Somehow these conditions were considered to be the fault of the immigrants themselves, who were accustomed to no better in their native lands. The actual and squalid nature of London itself, and the social exclusion imposed upon the Irish or the Jews, were not matters for debate. The question-where else are they to go?-was not put. Similarly the fact that immigrants were willing to accept the harshest and most menial forms of employment was also used as another opportunity for clandestine attack, with the implied suggestion that they were good for nothing else. Yet the Jews became part of the “sweated” system, in order to make enough money to move out of the unhappy situation in which they were placed. They no more appreciated the noisome conditions of Whitechapel than did philanthropic visitors. Their poverty became the object of pity and disgust, while their attempts to transcend it were met with hostility or ridicule.
The popular prejudice against another Asian group is representative. By the late nineteenth century the Chinese, of Limehouse and its environs, were considered to be a particular threat to the native population. In the newspapers they were portrayed as both mysterious and menacing, while at a later date the dangerous fumes of opium rose in the pages of Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. A cluster of associations was then reinforced. These particular immigrants were believed to “contaminate” the surrounding urban population, as if the presence of aliens might be considered a token of disease. Throughout the history of London there has run an anxious fear of contagion, in the conditions of an overpopulated city, and that fear simply changed its form; the fear of pollution had become moral and social rather than physical or medical. In fact the Chinese were a small and generally law-abiding community, certainly no more lawless than the residents by whom they were surrounded. They were also disparaged because of their “passivity”; the spectre of the eastern habit of opium-smoking was resurrected, but in fact the Jews had also been characterised as the “passive” recipients of scorn and insult. It was as if the native London tendency towards violence were somehow provoked or inflamed by those who eschewed violence in their daily intercourse. The enclosed nature of the Chinese community in turn provoked a sense of mystery, and suspicions of evil; there was particular concern about the possibility of sexual licence in their “dens of iniquity.” Once more these are characteristic of more general fears about immigration and resident aliens. They emanate in hostile attacks upon Russian Jews at the start of the twentieth century, against Germans during the world wars, against “coloureds” in 1919. These anxieties were directed against Commonwealth immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, and were in turn followed by hostility against Asian and African migrants in the 1980s and 1990s. The pattern changes its direction, but it does not change its form.
Yet with fear, on certain occasions, comes respect. This is nowhere more evident than in the sometimes grudging attention paid to the fact that a variety of immigrants retained their fidelity to a particular religion or orthodoxy. Their imported faith was in such contrast to the generally disaffiliated or frankly pagan inclinations of London’s native population that it was often a matter of remark. The faith of the Jews, for example, was regarded as providing a strong moral presence and continuity in the East End; ironically it was seen as one method with which they withstood assault and opprobrium from other Londoners. The Protestant faith of the Huguenots, the Catholic faith of the Irish and of the Italians in Clerkenwell, the Lutheran faith of the Germans: such religious practices were also considered a redeeming feature. “Then he would catch sight of one of the old, Jewish black garbed men, venerable and bearded”-so runs one narrative of the East End, The Crossing Point by G. Charles-“now so few in the quarter but occasionally to be seen, and his heart would lift with a kind of passionate nostalgia as if through such men he could still touch the certainty, the vitality, the rough, innocent, ambitious, swarming life of those early immigrants with so much before them of promise.” This passage evokes those other aspects of immigrant life which, in the context of great and overwhelming London, are often disregarded; there is “nostalgia” for the certainties of an old faith, but also a fascinated attention to that “vitality” and “ambition” which have helped to create the contemporary multiracial city.
The Notting Hill Carnival, of Trinidadian origin, takes place in mid to late August, exactly as the old Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield did. It is an odd coincidence which emphasises the equally curious continuities of London life, but it throws into relief one of the strangest stories of urban immigration when black and white confronted the mystery of each other’s identity within the context of the city. In sixteenth-century drama “the Moor,” the black, tends to be lascivious, prone to irrational feeling, and dangerous. His appearance upon the stage is of course a consequence of his entry into London, where colour became the most visible and most significant token of difference. There were Africans during the long existence of Roman London, and no doubt their successors by intermarriage continued to live in the city during its Saxon and Danish occupations. But sixteenth-century trade with Africa, and the arrival of the first black slaves in London in 1555, mark their irruption into the city’s consciousness. If they were heathen, did they possess souls? Or were they somehow less than human, their skin the mark of a profound abyss which set them apart? That is why they became the object of fear and curiosity. Although relatively few in number, most of them watched and controlled as domestic slaves or indentured servants, they were already a source of anxiety. In 1596 Elizabeth I despatched a letter to the civic authorities complaining that “there are of late diverse blackamoores brought into these realms, of which kinde there are already here too manie,” and a few months later the queen reiterated her sentiment “that these kinde of people may be well spared in this realme, being so populous.” Five years later a royal proclamation was announced, in which “the great number of begars and Blackamoores which are crept into this realm” were ordered to leave.