Technical topic -- The Regency East End

Someone asks --

In re the Regency East End ... Would you happen to have any book recommendations?




Indeed I do:

Berm, Chaim, London's East End, (mostly late Victorian Information.)

Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, Black London: Life before Emancipation.

Holmes, Thomas, London's Underworld.  here. 

Low, Donald, The Regency Underworld.

Victorian East London Dore

Mayhew, Henry, Mayhew's Characters.   (See also Quennell, Peter ed, London's Underworld.  This is a selection from Mayhew and available used and cheap.  Mayhew is written mid-century but info is earlier.  A lot of Mayhew's work is on the net. For instance --  here. )

Rose, Millicent, The East End of London. (I don't have this one myself, so I can't vouch for it, but I keep meaning to look it up in a library.)

Two Citizens, How to Live in London.  here.

Have a look at the maps here and here.


Here's a Victorian account:

We dismiss our cab: it would be useless in the strange, dark byeways, to which we are bound: natives of which will look upon us as the Japanese looked upon us the first European travellers in the streets of Jeddo. The missionary, the parish doctor, the rent collector (who must be a bold man indeed), the policeman, the detective, and the humble undertaker, are the human beings from without who enter this weird and horrible Bluegate Fields. 

We arrived at Whitechapel Police Station, to pick up the superintendent of savage London. He had some poor specimens - maundering drunk - in his cells already - and it was hardly nine o'clock. 

We plunge into a maze of courts and narrow streets of low houses - nearly all the doors of which are open, showing kitchen fires blazing far in the interior, and strange figures moving about. 

At dark corners, lurking men keep close to the wall; and the police smile when we wonder what would become of a lonely wanderer who should find himself in these regions unprotected. "He would be stripped to his shirt" was the candid answer - made while we threaded an extraordinary tangle of dark alleys where two men could just walk abreast, under the flickering lamps jutting from the ebon walls, to mark the corners.       Jerrold Blanchard, London: A Pilgrimage 1872

I feel like I gotta get up on one of my hobbyhorses here.

London workmen Victorian

The most important thing about the rookeries of London in 1802 -- and the Roman tenements in 79 AD and the slums of SE Washington DC in 1960 -- is that the denizens of the place were 'at home'.  They weren't dwelling in some landscape of horror. 

And they were ordinary folk.  The men and women in these stacked-up, decrepit buildings and dirty streets were ordinary, well-meaning, hard-working people, not monsters.  The violent gangs hanging out on street corners were a dangerous minority who preyed on and were hated by everyone else.  
 

Clothes sellers, late C19

When the heroine makes a wrong turn and ends up in a bad neighborhood, she hasn't fallen into a pit of vipers.  Those people passing her on the street, the ones living three flights up in every building, are no better nor worse than the well-dressed crowd she'd meet in Mayfair.  Her maidservant grew up a block to the left.  Her cook has a brother living down at the end of the alley and visits him every Sunday.  Your heroine's problem is not that the streets are populated with slavering hyenas.  It's that she's conspicuous. 

In My Lord and Spymaster I try to show the heroine as someone who comes from the mean streets, who understands them, who recognizes the dangers but doesn't see the place as some filthy hell filled with demons.

St Giles, in the Regency. See the streetlamp

The alley to the right was Dark Passage--and wasn't that a fine descriptive name?  To the left was Dead Man's Way.  Another piece of poetry.  When she was a kid she'd run this warren barefoot.  She knew these streets, knew every thin trickle of an alley that ran into Katherine Lane.  She'd been born in a grim little attic a dozen streets to the north.  Time was, she chatted friendly and easy with every beggar and pimp on the Lane.  She could have ducked into any of these taverns and been welcome to dry out by the fire.  Now she was a stranger.  Not Jess, any more.  Now she was 'Miss Whitby' and she didn't belong.  

and

From the outside, all rookeries look the same, but some are more dangerous than others. 
Ludmill Street was peaceable in its rough way.  Safe enough, if you knew what you were doing.  When a pair of Irishman approached, making monetary offers, she snapped back, sharp, in Italian.  They left her alone, thinking she belonged to the Italians.  There were lots of hot-tempered Italians in this section who didn't like even their whores approached by Irishmen.  A few hundred yards further on, she sent an Italian boy on his way with a Gaelic curse.  Lots of hot-tempered Irishmen in this quarter, too.  

When she got to the Limehouse, to Asker Street, it would be considerably more dangerous.  She'd be unwise to visit alone.   

Every illustration we have of the East End of London from the Regency period is someone from outside, making a point with his picture or his description.  Saying as much about himself as he does about what he's reporting.  Hogarth's Gin Lane is propaganda.  Propaganda from the good guys, but still, a selection of detail to make a point. Bob Dylan's 'Propaganda all is phony' sums it up.


How this relates to writing --  I'm good with 'she wandered into a bad section of town' trope as a reasonable way to put the heroine in peril.  But I regret when these scenes imply that the poor of London were a seething cauldron of evil into which she had incautiously been tipped.  I dislike the: 'they look like me and are well-dressed = good; They look different and are poor = rabid animals' equation because it strikes too close to attitudes from our own era. 

This is Bond Street.  Not as fancy as we imagine it.

If I wanted to research a scene in the East End in 1800 . . .   Yes, I'd go to books and learn the geography of the place and the physical conditions and the particular 1800-ish habits of the local criminals.   But I''d want to think about the bad sections of a modern city and the people who live there and how I'd represent the adventures of someone who walking into those streets.  When I exaggerate for high drama -- what am I saying about my character and myself?  When we're writing about the past, we're also writing about the present.

. . . much later ETA: 
I got a review on a short story of mine that said -- paraphrasing here -- "Your heroine falls on hard times and works in Whitechapel scrubbing floors.  I can't believe that.  Is 'scrubbing floors' supposed to be a euphemism?"
The implication is, all the thousands of young women in Whitechapel were whores.
The implication is, there were no respectable poor living in Whitechapel.
The implication is, poverty = depravity.

When we look at the past, we see our opinions and expectations reflected back at us.