Some twelve years ago I was the editor of a weekly sheet called the “People’s Palace Journal.” In that capacity I endeavored to encourage literary effort, in the hope of lighting upon some unknown and latent genius. The readers of the “Journal” were the members of the various classes connected with the educational side of the place. They were young clerks chiefly—some of them very good fellows. They had a debating society, which I attended from time to time. Alas! They carried on their debates in an ignorance the most profound, the most unconscious, and the most self-satisfied. I endeavored to persuade them that it was desirable at least to master the facts of the case before they spoke. In vain. Then I proposed subjects for essays, and offered prizes for verses. I discovered, to my amazement, that, among all the thousands of these young people, lads and girls, there was not discoverable the least rudimentary indication of any literary power whatever. In all other towns there are young people who nourish literary ambitions, with some measure of literary ability. How should there be any in this town, where there were no books, no papers, no journals, and, at that time, no free libraries?
Another point may be noted. Ours is a country which has to maintain, at great cost, a standing army of three hundred thousand men, or thereabouts, for the defense of the many dependencies of the Empire. These soldiers are all volunteers; it is difficult, especially in times of peace, to get recruits in sufficient numbers; it is very important, most important, that the martial spirit of our youth should be maintained, and that the advantages which a few years’ discipline with the colors, with the subsequent chances of employment, possess over the dreary life of casual labor, should be kept constantly before the eyes of the people. Such is the wisdom of our War Office that the people of East London, representing a twentieth part of the population of the whole country, have no soldiers quartered on them; that they never see the pomp of war; that they never have their blood fired with the martial music and the sight of men marching in order; and that in their schools they are never taught the plain duties of patriotism and the honor of fighting for the country. In the same spirit of wisdom their country’s flag, the Union Jack, is never seen in East London except on the river; it does not float over the schools; the children are not taught to reverence the flag of the country as the symbol of their liberties and their responsibilities; alone among the cities of the world, East London never teaches her children the meaning of patriotism, the history of their liberties, the pride and the privilege of citizenship in a mighty empire.
A Typical Street in Bethnal Green.
What appearance does it present to the visitor? There is, again, in this respect as well, no other city in the world in the least like East London for the unparalleled magnitude of its meanness and its monotony. It contains about five hundred miles of streets, perhaps more—a hundred or two may be thrown in; they would make little difference. In his haste, the traveler who walks about these streets for the first time declares that they are all exactly alike. They contain line upon line, row upon row, never-ending lines, rows always beginning, of houses all alike—that is to say, there are differences, but they are slight; there are workmen’s houses of four or five rooms each, all turned out of the same pattern, as if built by machinery; there are rows of houses a little better and larger, but on the same pattern, designed for foremen of works and the better sort of employees; a little farther off the main street there are the same houses, but each with a basement and a tiny front garden—they are for city clerks; and there are dingy houses up squalid courts, all of the same pattern, but smaller, dirty, and disreputable. The traveler, on his first visit, wanders through street after street, through miles of streets. He finds no break in the monotony; one street is like the next; he looks down another, and finds it like the first two. In the City and in the west of London there are old houses, old churches, porches that speak of age, courts and lanes that have a past stamped upon them, though the houses themselves may be modern. Here there seems to be no past; he finds no old buildings; one or two venerable churches there are; there is one venerable tower—but these the traveler does not discover on his first visit, nor perhaps on his second or his third.
As are its streets, so, the hasty traveler thinks, must be the lives of the people—obscure, monotonous, without ambition, without aims, without literature, art or science. They help to produce the wealth of which they seem to have so little share, though perhaps they have their full share; they make possible splendors which they never see; they work to glorify the other London, into which their footsteps never stray. This, says the traveler, is the Unlovely City, alike unlovely in its buildings and in its people—a collocation of houses for the shelter of a herd; a great fold in which the silly sheep are all alike, where one life is the counterpart of another, where one face is the same as another, where one mind is a copy of its neighbor.
The Unlovely City, he calls it, the City of Dreadful Monotony! Well, in one sense it is all that the casual traveler understands, yet that is only the shallow, hasty view. Let me try to show that it is a city full of human passions and emotions, human hopes and fears, love and the joys of love, bereavement and the sorrows of bereavement; as full of life as the stately City, the sister City, on the west. Monotonous lines of houses do not really make or indicate monotonous lives; neither tragedy nor comedy requires the palace or the castle; one can be human without a coronet, or even a carriage; one may be a clerk on eighty pounds a year only, and yet may present, to one who reads thought and interprets action, as interesting a study as any artist or æsthete, poet or painter.
Again, this city is not, as our casual observer in his haste affirms, made up entirely of monotonous lives and mean houses; there are bits and corners where strange effects of beauty can be seen; there is a park more lovely than that of St. James’s; there are roads of noble breadth; there is the ample river; there are the crowded docks; there are factories and industries; there are men and women in East London who give up their lives for their brothers and their sisters; and beyond the city, within easy reach of the city, there are woods and woodlands, villages and rural haunts, lovelier than any within reach of western London.
It will be my task in the following pages to lay before my readers some of the aspects of this city which may redeem it from the charges of monotony and unloveliness. Do not expect a history of all the villages which have been swallowed up. That belongs to another place. We have here to do with the people; humanity may be always picturesque; to the philosopher every girl is beautiful because she is a girl; every young man is an object of profound interest because he is a man, and of admiration because he is young. You have no idea how many girls, beautiful in their youth; how many women, beautiful in their lives; how many young men of interest, because they have their lives before them; how many old men of interest, because their lives are behind them, are living in this city so monotonous and so mean.