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Abstract
Writers of working-class memoirs in the twentieth century recalled the psychological ways that respectable individuals managed their relation to London’s most disreputable streets. The Victorian social cartographer Charles Booth had colour-coded these streets as black on his poverty maps, ascribing not only penury but also criminality to them. Into the twentieth century, locals continued to internalise a mythology of rough versus respectable areas. Yet daily they experienced the untenability of these constructed social divides. Some children living on the blackest streets were successfully sheltered from the corruption around them. Others perceived a porousness between infamous and more decent streets. Over on respectable streets, some children observed their parents’ complicity in ‘fiddles’ – illicit ways of earning cash through small illegal ventures. Here, fathers insisted on their honour, even accusing others of immorality. Such an ethics relied upon an internal management of criminal and respectable codes that were complexly interwoven and shaped by family and community ties.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ross Forman, Seth Koven, Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Richard Menke, Tom Ue, Nadia Valman, and Sarah Wise for their generous assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bryan Magee, Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood (London: Pimlico, 2004), 26.
2 The Old Nichol was known as ‘The Sweaters’ Hell’ for the number of people reduced to taking piecework to survive. See: Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London: Vintage, 2009), 7. On tenants trapped in substandard housing, see: Flore Janssen, ‘“Not What It was Made Out”: Health, Hygiene, and Moral Welfare in the Old Nichol, 1890–1900’, in Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End, ed. Diana Maltz (New York: Routledge, 2022), 97–115.
3 In this regard, aspects of my article resonate with arguments in Thomas R. C. Gibson-Brydon’s recent The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-But-Respectable (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). Gibson-Brydon reveals the anxiety among the respectable poor to uphold their class status, which they enacted by renouncing the very poor. His thesis is that working people sustained a hierarchical understanding of social relations.
4 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 44.
5 Young and Willmott were not seeking evidence of criminal or anti-social behaviours per se, being more broadly interested in family and neighbourhood sharing among conventional respectable working-class families. See: Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
6 Charles Booth frequently uses the word ‘semi-criminal’, an ambiguous term that he never overtly defines. Although it sounds like it would mean half-criminal/part-time criminal, Samantha Pegg, looking to Victorian legal texts, defines this more as proto-criminal, and applies it to juvenile crime. See: Samantha Pegg, ‘Juvenile Criminality and Semi-Criminality: Learning from Victorian Perceptions and Responses’, Liverpool Law Review, 28 (2007), 425–448. This idea of Class A as comprising would-be criminals may explain Booth’s later qualification, ‘Class A must not be confounded with the criminal classes. … There are many of Class A who are not criminals’. Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People: Volume 1: East London, 3rd edn (London, 1891), 595. The gist we get is that semi-criminals are simply loafers who cadge off friends and passersby to sustain their drinking and gambling habits; that said, they are not above petty theft when the opportunity arises (203). Given that Booth combines ‘criminals and semi-criminals’ in one sentence only reinforces the fogginess here, as he distinguishes between them but also clusters them (37).
7 G.H. Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/352, Charles Booth Archive, London School of Economics Library, 107.
8 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/352, 107.
9 G.H. Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/349, Charles Booth Archive, London School of Economics Library, 29.
10 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/349, 33.
11 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/352, 71.
12 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/352, 91.
13 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/352, 87.
14 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/349, 33.
15 Duckworth, Police Notebook, Booth/B/349, 33.
16 I pursued census research by identifying original names on Old Nichol streets in the 1891 census through findmypast.co.uk. I then checked these names against 1901 and 1911 census records of Campbell Road in Islington and Wilmer Gardens in Hoxton and discovered no correlations at all. Many of the names appeared in 1901 and 1911 census records of Shoreditch and Bethnal Green. I am grateful to Sarah Wise for sharing notes and insights during this process.
17 James Alfred Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Routledge, 1986), 34.
18 Sarah Wise, ‘Arthur Morrison: A Child of the Jago (1896)’, in London Fictions, ed. Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2013), 60–61. See also: Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago, ed. Diana Maltz (Peterborough, OT: Broadview, 2013).
19 Morrison’s lurid representation of the slum did meet with resistance upon the book’s publication. For a review of this controversy, see: Wise, The Blackest Streets, 232–235; and Morrison, Jago, 20–22, 243–252. Magazines had also previously featured sympathetic interviews with Old Nichol residents by Clementina Black and James Greenwood, who were investigating sweated labour and slum housing, respectively. See: Clementina Black, ‘Matchbox-Making at Home’, The English Illustrated Magazine, 9 (May 1892), 625–629; and ‘One of the Crowd’ [James Greenwood], ‘“No Rent” at the East-End’, Daily Telegraph (15 October 1883), 2. Nevertheless, a prevailing belief in Old Nichol brutality endured until the 2008 publication of Sarah Wise’s The Blackest Streets.
20 These pastimes endured for decades, as White’s book testifies. The infamous faction fights of the 1890s do not appear in White’s account of Campbell Bunk in the 1920s, and we may attribute their absence to the success of boy’s clubs at the end of the century as well as the loss of men during the First World War. However, Tom McCarthy’s Boysie (Braunton: Merlin Books, 1986) cites respective gangs of Campbell Bunk boys and men (42, 43).
21 Booth, Labour and Life, 38.
22 Booth, Labour and Life, 594.
23 Mary Higgs, ‘Mankind in the Making’, Contemporary Review, 89 (June 1906), 830–842.
24 Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 97.
25 On women fighting with each other, see: Ellen Ross, ‘Fierce Questions and Taunts: Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870–1914’, Feminist Studies, 8.3 (Autumn 1982), 591–592; Ellen Ross, ‘“Not the Sort That Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods’, International Labour and Working-Class History, 27 (Spring 1985), 44, 48. Street fights did occur on respectable streets. For an example, see: A. S. Jasper, Hoxton Childhood (London: Readers Union, Barrie & Rockliffe, 1971), 51.
26 Booth himself had found troubling slippages between the first two categories, at one point admitting ‘they are mixed up, and … it is at times difficult to separate them’. Booth, Labour and Life, 39.
27 White, Worst Street, 2–3.
28 White, Worst Street, 102.
29 Wise makes a similar critique, noting the absence of black-edged streets in yellow districts, even though residents who committed white-collar crime would merit it. Wise, Blackest Streets, 179.
30 There is a substantial bibliography of historical research around respectability in Britain, although most has concerned itself with middle-class respectability. Scholarship related to respectable working-class identity begins with Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Re-Making of the Working Class’, Journal of Social History, 7.4 (1974), 460–508. Responding to Stedman Jones, Peter Bailey suggested that working-class respectability was situational and performative in: Peter Bailey, ‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up: Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability’, Journal of Social History, 12.3 (Spring 1979), 336–353. Research has significantly expanded since then, with scholars examining respectability in the context of specific social institutions such as sport, music hall, the racecourse, friendly societies, mourning practices, and fatherhood. Lower-middle-class respectability attracted focused attention in the late 1990s and 2000s. See, for instance: Peter Bailey, ‘White Collars, Gray Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited’, Journal of British Studies, 38.3 (July 1999), 273–290; and Rita Felski, ‘Nothing to Declare: Identity Shame, and the Lower Middle Class’, PMLA, 115.1 (2000), 33–45. My article moves in the opposite direction, down the social ladder into Charles Booth’s more marginal populace.
31 For instance, see: White, Worst Street, 182–187.
32 Raphael Samuel, East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 14, 21–23, 28.
33 Samuel, East End Underworld, 25; Wise, Blackest Streets, 65–66.
34 Samuel, East End Underworld, 17. Aunt Liza donated food to Harding’s family on the premise (or promise) that she would get paid when the money was there. See: Samuel, East End Underworld, 15, 23–24; Wise, Blackest Streets, 62–63.
35 On Mighty’s complicity in Arthur’s coining, see: Samuel, East End Underworld, 80. On Mighty as a moneylender, see: Arthur Harding, ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime: An Autobiography’ (Unpublished manuscript, Bishopsgate Institute Library), 157; Samuel, East End Underworld, 237. On her dealings with credit, see: Samuel, East End Underworld, 87.
36 Harding, ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime’, 308, 307.
37 Samuel, East End Underworld, 130; Wise, Blackest Streets, 60, 71–72, 94.
38 Samuel, East End Underworld, 24. Peter Bailey’s 1979 thesis on respectability as a performance has its limits here, for reasons I explain as the paragraph continues.
39 Samuel, East End Underworld, 24.
40 Samuel, East End Underworld, 52.
41 McCarthy, Boysie, 126–27.
42 McCarthy, Boysie, 129; Ellen Ross, ‘Survival Networks: Women’s Neighbourhood Sharing in London before World War I’, History Workshop Journal, 15 (Spring 1983), 14.
43 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 26–27. He is later robbed of half a crown in Wilmer Gardens (236–37).
44 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 16.
45 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 16.
46 Jan’s best friend Dave Pugh, from a better-off, religious Welsh family, lived at the nicer end, and Jan was dazzled by the quality of their diet and peace of their homelife. Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 76–77.
47 The exception was Rotherfield Street, which is north of the canal in Islington. The area surrounding Wilmer Gardens occupies two sheets of the poverty map, which can be accessed at: https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/download-maps/sheet5 and https://booth.lse.ac.uk/learn-more/download-maps/sheet6.
48 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 9.
49 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 13.
50 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 13, 14.
51 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 13.
52 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 37.
53 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 64.
54 McCarthy, Boysie, 12. Wise noted the absence of front doors in the Old Nichol (Blackest Streets, 5). Morrison used this in Jago (70).
55 McCarthy, Boysie, 7. This mythology of endangered police resonates with an identical story about the Old Nichol, even though five police officers resided in the Nichol. Wise, Blackest Streets, 100. McCarthy says here that the police officer who dared to patrol on his own in the Bunk was stuffed head-first down a drain; locals from the Old Nichol had bragged about a policeman having a fire-grate thrown down on him from an upper-story window. Arthur Osborne Jay, Life in Darkest London: A Hint to General Booth (London, 1891), 62.
56 McCarthy, Boysie, 111.
57 McCarthy, Boysie, 42–45.
58 McCarthy, Boysie, 43.
59 McCarthy, Boysie, 42.
60 McCarthy, Boysie, 83.
61 McCarthy, Boysie, 83.
62 McCarthy, Boysie, 87.
63 White, Worst Street, 88.
64 By contrast, Jerry White’s study draws on several oral histories from within Campbell Bunk and reproduces a wider spectrum of voices, attitudes, and remembrances: the pained memories of adult children haunted by parental abuse, the tenacious anger of the ‘unemployables’ who refused degrading work, and the boasts by former career criminals.
65 McCarthy, Boysie, 87.
66 McCarthy, Boysie, 98.
67 White, Worst Street, 2–3, 69.
68 White, Worst Street, 101.
69 White, Worst Street, 152.
70 White, Worst Street, 153.
71 White, Worst Street, 169.
72 White, Worst Street, 177.
73 White, Worst Street, 177–178.
74 Samuel, East End Underworld, 43.
75 McCarthy, Boysie, 109. He also served as a paid ‘dogger’, or lookout, for older traders who were unlicensed (110).
76 McCarthy, Boysie, 70.
77 McCarthy, Boysie, 69.
78 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 43.
79 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 63.
80 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 63.
81 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 63.
82 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 63.
83 It is notable that the examples I have cited until now are all boys. East End women’s autobiographies published in the 1970s and 1980s focused nostalgically on the everyday rituals of home, family, and schooling rather than dodgy street consolations and clicks (thefts). Dorothy Scannell and Grace Foakes, for example, recall their families’ strong sense of respectability and aspirationalism. Neither mentions having to circumvent streets like McCarthy and Jasper do. Given that they grew up in the respective neighbourhoods of Poplar and Wapping, which had longstanding stable maritime industries, Scannell and Foakes may not have had a version of Campbell Bunk or Wilmer Gardens to fear. Or, if they had, their mothers, determined to shelter them, may have steered them clear of such streets. See: Dorothy Scannell, Mother Knew Best: Memoir of a London Girlhood (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Grace Foakes, My Part of the River (Glasgow: Futura, 1988).
84 May Hobbs, Born to Struggle (Plainfield, VT: Daughters, Inc., 1973), 5–6.
85 Hobbs, Born to Struggle, 6.
86 Hobbs, Born to Struggle, 141–156.
87 Hobbs ends her narrative with semi-comic sketches of thieves outside her own family—and indeed, these figures are more like archetypes than real people, as she makes up their names. With their criminal and Cockney slang, they recall figures in fictions by the late Victorian writers Clarence Rook and W.W. Jacobs and even evoke the crooks in Arthur Morrison’s comic short story collection Divers Vanities (1905). Because these accounts constitute such a break from her own narrative, it is arguable that Hobbs is revealing her own impulse to write the slum fictions she had claimed to abhor in her book’s preface, and that she is actually asserting her difference from such people. In this way, she may be establishing a more middle-class sense of self, embodying the tensions of subjectivity explored in Regenia Gagnier, ‘The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography, and Gender’, in Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender, ed. Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 115–130.
88 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 41.
89 Jasper, Hoxton Childhood, 36.
90 On this need to segregate oneself from the less respectable, see: Gibson-Brydon, Moral Mapping, 106–108, 164. As I mention above, it is ironic that Bill Jasper has not performed the self-discipline he would require of Gerry.
91 On Harding’s comparison of other streets to the Nichol, see: Samuel, East End Underworld, 54; Harding, ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime’, 117. Harding uses the term ‘villain’ frequently in his oral history, but hardly in his autobiography. See: Samuel, East End Underworld, 32, 39, 119, 150, 152, 154. In this regard, Harding may be complying with Samuel’s line of questioning and enjoying conveying his knowledge of the underworld. In the autobiography, he gives more space to criminals and convicts as victims of the justice system and refers to the seasoned ones as ‘old-timers’. See, for instance: Harding, ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime’, 79, 238. On Harding’s use of ‘terror’, see: Samuel, East End Underworld, 13, 85, 131–133, 147, 150. For the police identifying Harding as a terror, see: Samuel, East End Underworld, 118. Into the 1920s, ‘People were frightened of me. In a way I liked it, it was all excitement’. Samuel, East End Underworld, 207. It has been suggested that, throughout his line of questioning, Samuel pressured Harding to pursue a systemic critique of delinquency and thus affirm middle-class concerns. Sophie Scott-Brown, The Histories of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (Acton: Australian National University Press, 2017), 144–145.
92 Harding, ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime’, 118. The sentence on ‘human animals’ originates in Harding’s autobiography before re-appearing verbatim in Samuel, East End Underworld, 84. This invites us to query whether Samuel did have the upper hand in framing the oral history. Samuel copied whole paragraphs of Harding’s ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime’ into East End Underworld, arguably yielding narrative power to Harding. It is notable that Harding had absorbed outside points of view through his reading and popular media. He denounced his fellow lodgers through language redolent of Victorian beliefs in atavism; he engaged with Cesare Lombroso’s ideas throughout his autobiography, sometimes denying them and sometimes labelling acquaintances as ‘criminal types’. Harding, ‘My Apprenticeship to Crime’, 1, 56, 98. Given that he wrote the manuscript in 1969, his rant against his ‘low’ neighbours from 1904 may indicate his embourgeoisment after leaving the slum (as broadly theorised by Gagnier) or his continued maintenance of working-class hierarchies (as understood by Gibson-Brydon).
93 For a recent, penetrative reading of Harding’s self-perception and storytelling, see: Nadia Valman, ‘Afterlives of A Child of the Jago’, in Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End, ed. Diana Maltz (New York: Routledge, 2022), 137–156.
94 C.F.G. Masterman, From the Abyss; Or its Inhabitants, By One of Them (London: R.B. Johnson, 1902); Reginald Bray, ‘The Children of the Town’, in The Heart of the Empire, ed. C.F.G. Masterman (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901), 111–64. Bray followed up his essay with a full-length book: Reginald Bray, The Town Child (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907).
95 White, Worst Street, 82–90.
96 Morrison, Jago, 72.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Diana Maltz
Diana Maltz is Professor of English at Southern Oregon University, USA. She is the author of British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People (2006) and the editor of Critical Essays on Arthur Morrison and the East End (2022). She has also produced critical editions of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (2013) and W. Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (2022). Dr Maltz is Past President of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States.