East London

by Walter Besant

The New Whitechapel Art Gallery.
(The building to the right is a free library.)

These are general terms. In order to carry out its work in detail, the Helping Hand looks after the children in their homes, while the Board-school looks after their teaching; it provides cases for the hospital, and aids the parish authorities during sickness in the home; it introduces the social side into the lives of the better sort; it devises attractions for the young people who stand at the parting of the ways, where temptation is strong and the primrose path is bright with flowers; it teaches the lads a trade, and the girls a love for the quiet life; it wages war with the public house and the street; it endeavors to bring back the lowest strata to a sense of religion which they have come to think the peculiar and rather unaccountable property of “class”; it brings friendliness among folk who have only known the order of the policeman.

These are some of the functions which to-day are exercised by the Helping Hand. In East London we can see the hand at work with greater energy, wiser supervision, and in directions more varied than in any other city of Great Britain. I do not venture, for the obvious reason of ignorance, upon comparison with American cities, but I should think that we have in East London, with its vast population of working-people of all kinds, ranging from the highly-paid foreman to the casual hand, the lad of the street, the wastrel, and the wreck, a mass of humanity which is not paralleled anywhere, and a corresponding amount of philanthropic endeavor which it would be impossible to equal elsewhere.

In this immense multitude there are many slums of the worst kind; but they are now much fewer, and they are much less offensive, than they were; the most terrible of the plague spots seem to have been improved away; to find the real old slum, the foul, indescribable human pigsty, one must no longer look for it in East London. That is to say, there are, I dare say, a few of the old slums left, but the places—there were then many of them—into which one peered, shuddering, twenty years ago, have now vanished. The police, the clergy, the ladies who go about the parish, can still take the visitor into strange courts and noisome tenements, but he who remembers the former state of things feels that light and air and a certain amount of public opinion, with some measure of cleanliness, have been brought to the old-fashioned slum by the modern Helping Hand.

If the American visitor to London desires to see a real old-fashioned slum—one where all the surroundings, physical and moral, are, to use the mild word of the day, absolutely “insanitary”—I would recommend him not to try East London, where he would have to search long for what he wants, but to pay a visit to Guy’s Hospital on the south side of the Thames and to seek the guidance of one of the students through the courts of crime and grime which still lie pretty thickly round that fortress of the army of health.

If you read novels of the day describing things brutal beyond belief, it will be well to suspect that the situations are a little mixed. Art must exaggerate; art must select; art must group. In this way it is quite possible that a picture tendered as of to-day may really belong to twenty years ago. There is still plenty of misery left in East London—we need, in fact, no exaggeration; I could fill these pages with lamentable histories; the people are still very much “down below”; some of them are a long way down; they are not only suffering for the sins of their fathers, they are busily piling up by their own sins sufferings for their children. Terrible has been their own inheritance; more terrible still will be the inheritance of the children.

Among these people, being such as they are, a whole army is at work continually. Let me now, in such short space as is at my command, consider in detail some of the more important methods by which this army is at work. It is not yet an army completely drilled and subdivided and commanded; some of their work overlaps, or hinders, other work. Perhaps it is not to be desired that this army should be completely drilled and organized. We do not ask for the crystallized methods of French education, or the iron drill of the Prussian sergeant. Let us leave some room for individual choice. Given certain principles of action, the element of personal freedom in carrying out these principles becomes of vital importance.

I have spoken of the revolution in opinion as to the responsibilities of the better educated and the wealthier toward those below them. Perhaps the situation may be illustrated by considering the change that has passed over us in our conception of what civilization should mean. The view of the eighteenth century was that civilization, culture, the pursuit of art, reading, learning of all kinds, science, the power, as well as the right, of government belonged essentially to the upper classes. When the good people of Spalding, for instance, in the year 1701, founded a literary society they called it the “Spalding Gentlemen’s Society”—only gentlemen, you see, could be expected to take any interest in things that belong to civilization. It was further considered that it was impossible to expect civilizing influences to bear upon the working-classes. They were kept in order by discipline, by the prison, and by the lash. To open the doors of education, to give them access to the tree of knowledge, would be a most dangerous, a most fatal, mistake. Even at the present day one hears, at times, the belated cry that the working-classes need no more than the barest elements of learning.

In certain circles the distinction between the cultured class and those outside was marked by artificial notes of manner and of speech. The limits were intolerably narrow; outside these circles there was no leadership, no statesmanship, possible.

But apart from the pretensions of the eighteenth-century aristocracy it was considered by the middle class and the professional class alike dangerous to interfere with Providence; the working-class were born to do service; let them learn to do it. Religion, of course, they could have if they wanted it; the church was there, the doors were open every Sunday, anybody might go in; the clergyman would visit the sick, if he were invited; the children were baptized in the church; some of the people were married in the church; all the people were buried in the churchyard, with the service of the church by law established. That was all; there were very few schools; education, even if the parents wished it, was not to be had, and the folk were left altogether to their own devices. They had been forced out of the City to make room for warehouses and offices; they lived in their own quarters, especially along the riverside and in Whitechapel, and they were left quite alone to their own devices.