Whitechapel
From "The Palace Journal" (April 24, 1889)
A DOZEN graphically-written descriptions
of Whitechapel, by people who have never seen the place,
but have heard as much about it as most have, would
probably be as amusing in the reading, to those
acquainted with the district, as the most extravagant of
the fables once so frequently quoted as articles of
current French belief in the matter of English manners
and customs ever were to the English people themselves. A
horrible black labyrinth, think many people, reeking from
end to end with the vilest exhalations; its streets, mere
kennels of horrent putrefaction; its every wall, its
every object, slimy with the indigenous ooze of the
place; swarming with human vermin, whose trade is
robbery, and whose recreation is murder; the catacombs of
London darker, more tortuous, and more dangerous than
those of Rome, and supersaturated with foul life. Others
imagine Whitechapel in a pitiful aspect. Outcast London.
Black and nasty still, a wilderness of crazy dens into
which pallid wastrels crawl to die; where several
families lie in each fetid room, and fathers, mothers,
and children watch each other starve; where bony,
blear-eyed wretches, with everything beautiful, brave,
and worthy crushed out of them, and nothing of the glory
and nobleness and jollity of this world within the range
of their crippled senses, rasp away their puny lives in
the sty of the sweater. Such spots as these there
certainly are in Whitechapel, and in other places, but
generalities are rarely true, and when applied to a
district of London so large as that comprised under the
name of Whitechapel, never. For Whitechapel, as
understood colloquially, goes some distance beyond the
bounds set by the parish authorities of St. Mary, and
includes much of Aldgate and Spitalfields, besides a not
inconsiderable fragment of Mile End. Any visitor with
preconceived notions of the regulation pattern,
traversing the whole length of this region by the main
road, from Houndsditch and the Minories to the London
Hospital, is apt to be surprised. The place might be
Borough High Street, except that it is wider and airier
and busier. In the stretch of road mentioned are four
railway stations, and the road itself forms a crowded
omnibus and tramcar route. On the right, as we leave the
Minories, is the Aldgate Meat Market, a row of shops used
by butchers from time immemorial. Says Ralph, in Beaumont
and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle":-
"Ancient, let your colours fly, but have a great
care of the butchers' hooks at Whitechapel; they have
been the death of many a fair ancient." Hundreds of
carcases hang here in rows, and dozens of waggons loaded
with hides stand in the roadway. Just along here, in the
middle of the road, four days in the week the great hay
market is held, and the neighbourhood is full of
misplaced-looking countrymen. Nearly opposite Hill's
(once Newton's) the old gabled public-house, which looks
as little like a public-house and much like an office or
warehouse as possible, that realistic old deceiver, De
Foe, tells us he lived during the Great Plague, and
watched the terrified nobility making all haste from the
City away from the infection into Essex.
The line of
stalls along the south side of the road is worth
studying. A number of them are bookstalls in the
proprietorship of misanthropic men of gloomy and grim
appearance, who seem incessantly brooding over the
decline in the book-stall trade of late years, since the
second-hand booksellers who keep shops have increased in
numbers and business shrewdness, and leave little
saleable to the humble stalls. Now-a-days chances are
considerably against one's finding unique first editions
in the streets, and these lowly brothers of Quaritch are
impelled to label "Blair's Sermons" and odd
volumes of "Bell's Poets" as being
"rare" and "curious," although
inconsistently included in the batch marked, "all
these 3d." But Whitechapel need not be
ashamed of its bibliographical features, for further down
the road, nearly opposite each other, are George's and
Gladding's second-hand book shops, which most
book-hunters know. Old Mr. Gladding's premises (old Mr.
Gladding must be very old now) were specially built for
the trade when people lived in Mile End who would be
horrified at the suggestion of living anywhere near it
now. Mr. George is known for his wholesale purchases.
There are many other evidences of the commercial
respectability of Whitechapel. One of its best known
establishments must be by a long period the oldest
business in London - probably in England. This is Mears
and Stainbank's bell foundry, established in 1570. The
several other business houses in the neighbourhood, whose
ages run into three figures, retire into new-fledged
juvenility by comparison with the hoary seniority of the
concern with day-books for three hundred and eighteen
years. The sweater and vamper in Whitechapel work side by
side with houses of quiet, good old English uprightness
and independence. If we were in want of any piece or
pieces of cabinet-work of the very best quality and most
conscientious workmanship possible, we would, rather than
anywhere else, go to a certain unpretending and
unproclaimed old firm in Whitechapel - not in the main
street either.
Many parts of this main road seem fragments of the
High Street in some busy, old-fashioned country
market-town, and the presence on market-days of the hay
wains and their attendants heightens the illusion. The
row of gabled shops on the north side, opposite the
obelisk, is the most noticeable of these parts.
Down near the London Hospital, and opposite the
Pavilion Theatre, is a terrace of shops called The Mount,
so called for a very good and plain reason, but one that
would scarcely be guessed. Indeed, some of the
shopkeepers themselves might be astonished to know that
upon the ground under their premises, as comparatively
late as well into the last century, there stood a fort or
redoubt, bearing the name of their terrace, and
constructed for the defence of London.
But let us get out of the main road. Turn back toward
the stalls again, but before plunging into any dirty
alley, look at this grinning Italian with a white rat.
With the aid of a square bit of rag, the cultured rodent
is rapidly made to, assume the successive characters of
an old woman, a monk, and a stiff, pink-nosed corpse.
Then he is stood on a board, covered up, and made to
disappear altogether, turning up, upon investigation, in
the cap of the most amazed boy among the onlookers. This
having been accomplished without a word, but with a great
exhibition of white teeth on the part of the impresario,
an expeditious evaporation of the surrounding boys is the
first indication that the hat is coming round, and almost
before his hand can drag it from his head, poor Giuseppe
is alone. Bless you, Giuseppe, take these coppers; not
given in the sacred name of charity, but in the hope that
they may induce you to keep your rat, and not, at this
angry moment, resort to the aid of a barrel-organ to
extort that which your unobtrusive performance fails to
earn! [See
"An East End vicar and his work" (1895) for
another reference to the nuisance of barrel-organs.]
Further along a female compatriot of Giuseppe -
Marina, perhaps - very clean as to her white head-gear,
and very bedraggled as to her skirts, stands by a wire
cage of lovebirds, and waits for the pennies that rarely
come to procure the coloured paper "fortunes"
lying in the little box inside the cage. Along the gutter
from Giuseppe to Marina a dozen stalls contain the most
surprisingly miscellaneous assemblage of celery and comic
songs, hairbrushes and fish, ribbons and roasting-jacks,
door-keys and cabbages, trousers and tenpenny nails in
existence.
We make a small excursion into Mansell Street, which
is quiet. All about here, and in Great Ailie Street,
Tenter Street, and their vicinities, the houses are old,
large, of the very shabbiest-genteel aspect, and with a
great appearance of being snobbishly ashamed of the odd
trades to which many of their rooms are devoted.
Shirt-making in buried basements, packing-case, or,
perhaps, cardboard box-making, on the ground-floor; and
glimpses of very dirty bald heads, bending over cobbling,
or the sorting of "old clo'," through the
cracked and rag-stuffed upper windows. Jewish names -
Isaacs, Levy, Israel, Jacobs, Rubinsky, Moses, Aaron -
wherever names appear, and frequent inscriptions in the
homologous letters of Hebrew. Many of these inscriptions
are on the windows of eating-houses, whose interior
mysteries arc hidden by muslin curtains; and we
occasionally find a shop full of Hebrew books, and
showing in its window remarkable little nick-nacks
appertaining to synagogue worship, amid plaited tapers of
various colours.
Beyond these streets, toward the end of Leman Street,
in Goodman's Fields - they were fields two hundred years
ago, and old Stow, earlier still, used to buy three pints
of fresh milk for a half-penny at Goodman's dairy -
Goodman's Fields Theatre stood, in which Garrick made his
first London appearance, and took the town by storm.
"There are a dozen dukes of a night at Goodman's
Fields sometimes," the poet Gray remarked in a
letter to a friend describing the wonderful success which
attended Garrick's early efforts.
We are tired, perhaps, of all this respectability.
Petticoat Lane is before us when, in returning, we regain
the corner of Mansell Street, and along Petticoat Lane we
disappointedly make our way. For Petticoat Lane isn't
Petticoat Lane at all, but Middlesex Street, and, this
afternoon, as the dusk comes, it is very quiet, and has
actually most responsible-looking offices and warehouses
all along the right-hand side of its clean and regular
width. As Hog Lane, with its sunny hedgerows and one or
two pleasant citizens' houses; as Petticoat Lane, with
its thievery and squalor and old clothes; and as
Middlesex Street, with its warehouses, this thoroughfare
has lived through a chequered existence. Nowadays, we
fear we must reluctantly confess the most enthusiastic
slummer could scarcely achieve the memorable and once
proverbial feat of entering Petticoat Lane with his
pocket handkerchief safely in its appointed place, and,
half-way through, observing it gracefully fluttering from
the door-post of a clothes shop, with its marking neatly
picked out, because, even if, with patience and
perseverance, he succeeded in getting it stolen, there
isn't a shop where handkerchiefs of any kind hang at the
door in all Petticoat Lane. But one may still enjoy the
consolation of having something stolen in Petticoat Lane
if a visit be made on Sunday, when the road and pavement
is still put to its traditional uses.
But long may Sandys Row remain for the benefit of the
disappointed pilgrim to Petticoat Lane. Why the other end
of Middlesex Street is called Sandys Row we cannot
imagine, unless the sprouting respectability of the
former disdains association with the humble grime of the
latter. For where Middlesex Street dwindles into Sandys
Row, the pavement is narrow and often encroached upon by
the stock of the shops, and the intrepid explorer slips
and staggers on the foul, greasy slime which carpets the
irregular cobble-stones of the roadway. In the murky,
dusty gloom of the old clothes-shops, no patch of the
walls can be seen, and all but a scant passage-way in
each shop seems a solid conglomeration of
unhealthy-looking stock. Jewesses of enormous
circumference block these passage ways, and unclean Jews,
of the very lowest class, with unkempt hair and rancid
complexions, keep a sharp look-out over the articles
which hang in heavy bunches in the street, occasionally
smoothing or re-arranging them with their black-nailed
paws. Old military stores and accoutrements, and reasty
mildewed saddlery, form a large proportion of the things
offered for sale, and who in the world buys them, and
what they do with them when they get them, are mysteries
we have never penetrated. Mangy busbies, battered
lancers' helmets, and even the three-cornered hats
Greenwich pensioners wore years ago - who can have any
possible use for these? And there are wooden
water-bottles in a state of defilement which would
prevent a pig drinking from them, and odoriferous
knapsacks and wallets over which no respectable slug
would crawl. Then there are equally enigmatic bundles of
rust-eaten bayonets, bundles of broken spurs, and
hammerless pistols of the most useless character. Who in
creation wants these things, and how do these shop
keepers extract a living from them ?
At the end we have Artillery Lane, Gun Street, and
Raven Row. Dirt, ragshops, and small beer-houses. Some
times a peep down a clogged grating, or over a permanent
shutter, into the contaminated breath of a sweater's
lair, where poisoned human lives are spun into the
apparel which clothes the bodies of wholesome men.
Through White's Row, or Dorset Street, with its hideous
associations, into busy Commercial Street, with its
traffic, its warehouses, its early lights, and the bright
spot in this unpleasant neighbourhood, Toynbee Hall and
Institute, and St. Jude's Church, whose beautiful
wall-mosaic of Time, Death, and Judgement has its own
significance here, in the centre of the scattered spots
which are the recent sites of satanic horrors.
Fashion Street, Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street,
Wentworth Street. Through which shall we go to Brick
Lane? Black and noisome, the road sticky with slime, and
palsied houses, rotten from chimney to cellar, leaning
together, apparently by the mere coherence of their
ingrained corruption. Dark, silent, uneasy shadows
passing and crossing - human vermin in this reeking sink,
like goblin exhalations from all that is noxious around.
Women with sunken, black-rimmed eyes, whose pallid faces
appear and vanish by the light of an occasional gas-lamp,
and look so like ill-covered skulls that we start at
their stare. Horrible London? Yes.
Brick Lane is a comparatively cheerful, although not a
patrician, thoroughfare. The Brick Lane Branch of the
United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association is
no longer here, and public-houses occupy the street
corners. Here German-Hebrew provision shops display food
of horrible aspect; greasy yellow sausages, unclean lumps
of batter fried in grease; and gruesome polonies and
other nondescript preparations repellant to look upon.
Very pleasant, no doubt, for those who have been brought
up on them, but not appetising to any person who has
never enjoyed that advantage.
Some years ago, it was fashionable to "slum"
- to walk gingerly about in dirty streets, with great
heroism, and go back West again, with a firm conviction
that "something must be done." And something
must. Children must not be left in these unscoured
corners. Their fathers and mothers are hopeless, and must
not be allowed to rear a numerous and equally hopeless
race. Light the streets better, certainly; but what use
in building better houses for these poor creatures to
render as foul as those that stand? The inmates may ruin
the cahracter of a house, but no house can alter the
character of its inmates.
by Arthur G. Morrison
Reprinted with permission of David Rich, Tower Hamlets History On Line.
