CHAPTER XIV
LONDON; THE EAST END
As interesting as any days that I spent in London were two in the East End, though I am sorry to add more drabby details to those just narrated. All my life I had heard of this particular section as grim, doleful, a center and sea of depraved and depressed life.
“Nothing like the East End of London,” I have heard people say, and before I left I expected to look over it, of course. My desire to do so was whetted by a conversation I had with the poet, John Masefield, who, if I remember rightly, had once lived in the extreme East End of London, Canningtown. He had talked of the curious physical condition of the people which he described as “bluggy” or stagnant. Little intelligence in the first place, according to him, seemed to be breeding less and less intelligence as time went on. Poverty, lack of wits, lack of ambition were fostering inbreeding. Such things are easy to say. No one can really tell. Even more interesting to me was the proffered information concerning East End amusements—calf-eating contests, canary-singing contests, whiffet races, pigeon-eating contests. I was told it would be hard to indicate how simple-minded the people were in many things and yet how low and dark in their moods, physical and moral. I got a suggestion of this some days later, when I discovered in connection with the police courts that every little while the court-room is cleared in order that terrible, unprintable, almost unbearable testimony may be taken. What he said to me somehow suggested the atmosphere of the Whitechapel murders—those demoniac crimes that had thrilled the world a few years before.
I must confess that my first impression was one of disappointment. America is strident and its typical “East Side” and slum conditions are strident also. There is no voiceless degradation that I have ever seen in America. The East Side of New York is unquestionably one of the noisiest spots in the world, if not the worst. It is so full of children—so full of hope too.
I was surprised to find how distinctly different are the two realms of poverty in New York and London.
On my first visit I took the subway or tube to St. Mary’s Station, Whitechapel, and getting out, investigated all that region which lies between there and the Great Eastern Railway Station and Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. I also reconnoitered Bethnal Green.
It was a chill, gray, January day. The London haze was gray and heavy, quite depressing. Almost at once I noticed that this region which I was in, instead of being strident and blatant as in America, was peculiarly quiet. The houses, as in all parts of London, were exceedingly low, two and three stories, with occasional four- and five-story buildings for variation, but all built out of that drab, yellowish-gray brick which when properly smoked has such a sad and yet effective air. The streets were not narrow, as in New York’s East Side,—quite the contrary; but the difference in crowds, color, noise, life, was astounding. In New York the East Side streets, as I have said, are almost invariably crowded. Here they were almost empty. The low doors and areaways oozed occasional figures who were either thin, or shabby, or dirty, or sickly, but a crowd was not visible anywhere. They seemed to me to slink along in a half-hearted way and I, for one, experienced no sense of desperado criminality of any kind—only a low despair. The people looked too meek—too law-governed. The policeman must be an immense power in London. Vice?—yes. Poverty?—yes. I saw young boys and girls with bodies which seemed to me to be but half made up by nature—half done. They were ambling, lackadaisical, weary-looking. Low?—yes, in many cases. Filthy?—yes. Savage or dangerous?—not at all. I noticed the large number of cheap cloth caps worn by the men and boys and the large number of dull gray shawls wrapped slatternwise about the shoulders of the women. This world looked sad enough in all conscience, inexpressibly so, but because of the individual houses in many instances, the clean streets and the dark tiny shops, not unendurable—even homey in instances. I ventured to ask a stalwart London policeman—they are all stalwart in London—“Where are the very poor in the East End—the poorest there are?”
“Well, most of these people hereabouts have little enough to live on,” he observed, looking straight before him with that charming soldierly air the London policemen have—his black strap under his chin.
I walked long distances through such streets as Old Montague, King Edward, Great Carden, Hope, Brick Lane, Salesworthy, Flower, Dean, Hare, Fuller, Church Row, Cheshire, Hereford,—a long, long list, too long to give here, coming out finally at St. John’s Catholic Church at Bethnal Green and taking a car line for streets still farther out. I had studied shops, doorways, areas, windows, with constant curiosity. The only variation I saw to a dead level of sameness, unbroken by trees, green places or handsome buildings of any kind, were factory chimneys and endless charitable institutions covering, apparently, every form of human weakness or deficiency, but looking as if they were much drearier than the thing they were attempting to cure. One of them I remember was an institution for the orphans of seamen, and another a hospital for sick Spanish Jews. The lodging-houses for working-girls and working-boys were so numerous as to be discouraging and so dreary looking that I marveled that any boy or girl should endure to live in them. One could sense all forms of abuse and distress here. It would spring naturally out of so low a grade of intelligence. Only a Dickens, guided by the lamp of genius, could get at the inward spirit of these, and then perhaps it would not avail. Life, in its farthest reaches, sinks to a sad ugly mess and stays there.