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 me129 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 criminality130 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 drearier131 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.
one of the places that i came upon in my perambulations was a public washhouse, laundry and bath, established by the london county council, if i remember rightly, and this interested me greatly. it was near winchester street and looked not unlike a low, one-story, factory building. since these things are always fair indications of neighborhoods, i entered and asked permission to inspect it. i was directed to the home or apartment of a small martinet of a director or manager, quite spare and dark and cockney, who frowned on me quizzically when he opened his door,—a perfect devil of a cheap superior who was for putting me down with a black look. i could see that it was one of the natives he was expecting to encounter.
“i would like to look over the laundry and baths,” i said.
“where do you come from?” he asked.
“america,” i replied.
“oh! have you a card?”
i gave him one. he examined it as though by some chance it might reveal something concerning me. then he said if i would go round to the other side he would admit me. i went and waited a considerable time before132 he appeared. when he did, it was to lead me with a very uncertain air first into the room filled with homely bath closets, where you were charged a penny more or less—according to whether you had soap and towel or not—and where the tubs were dreary affairs with damp-looking wooden tops or flanges, and thence into the washroom and laundry-room, where at this time in the afternoon—about four o’clock—perhaps a score of women of the neighborhood were either washing or ironing.
dreary! dreary! dreary! ghastly! in italy, later, and southern france, i saw public washing under the sky, beside a stream or near a fountain—a broken, picturesque, deliciously archaic fountain in one instance. here under gray skies, in a gray neighborhood, and in this prison-like washroom was one of the most doleful pictures of life the mind of man could imagine. always when i think of the english, i want to go off into some long analysis of their character. we have so much to learn of life, it seems to me, and among the first things is the chemistry of the human body. i always marvel at the nature of the fluids which make up some people. different climates must produce different kinds, just as they produce strange kinds of trees and animals. here in england this damp, gray climate produces a muggy sort of soul which you find au naturel only when you walk among the very poor in such a neighborhood as this. here in this wash-house i saw the low english au naturel, but no passing commentary such as this could do them justice. one would have to write a book in order to present the fine differences. weakness, lowness of spirit, a vague comprehension of only the simplest things, combined with a certain meaty solidarity, gave me the creeps. here they were, scrubbing or ironing; strings tied around their protuberant stomachs to keep their skirts up; clothes the color of lead or darker,133 and about as cheerful; hair gray or brownish-black, thin, unkempt; all of them flabby and weary-looking—about the atmosphere one would find in an american poorhouse.
they washed here because there were no washing facilities in their own homes—no stationary tubs, no hot or cold water, no suitable stoves to boil water on. it was equally true of ironing facilities, the director told me. they came from blocks away. some women washed here for whole vicinities—the more industrious ones. and yet few came here at that—the more self-respecting stayed away. i learned this after a long conversation with my guide whose principal commentary was that they were a worthless lot and that you had to watch them all the time. “if you don’t,” he said in cockney english, “they won’t keep things clean. you can’t teach ’em scarcely how to do things right. now and then they gets their hands caught.” he was referring to the washing-drums and the mangles. it was a long story, but all i got out of it was that this was a dreary world, that he was sick of his position but compelled to keep it for financial reasons, that he wanted as little as possible to do with the kind of cattle which he considered these people to be and that he would prefer to give it up. there was a touch of socialism in all this—trying to do for the masses—but i argued that perhaps under more general socialistic conditions things would be better; certainly, one would have to secure more considerate feelings on the part of directors and some public approval which would bring out the better elements. perhaps under truer socialism, however, public wash-houses would not be necessary at all. anyhow, the cry from here to bond street and the houses of parliament and the stately world of the lords seemed infinitely far. what can society do with the sad, shadowy base on which it rests?
134
i came another day to another section of this world, approaching the east end via aldgate and commercial road, and cutting through to bethnal green via stepney. i found the same conditions—clean streets, low gray buildings, shabby people, a large museum whose chief distinction was that the floor of its central rotunda had been laid by women convicts!—and towering chimneys. so little life existed in the streets, generally speaking, that i confess i was depressed. london is so far flung. there were a great many jews of russian, roumanian and slavic extraction, nearly all bearing the marks of poverty and ignorance, but looking shrewd enough at that, and a great many physically deteriorated english. the long-bearded jew with trousers sagging about his big feet, his small derby hat pulled low over his ears, his hands folded tightly across his back, was as much in evidence here as on the east side in new york. i looked in vain for restaurants or show places of any kind (saloons, moving pictures, etc.). there were scarcely any here. this whole vicinity seemed to me to be given up to the poorest kind of living—sad, drab, gray. no wonder the policeman said to me: “most of these people hereabouts have little enough to live on.” i’m sure of it. finally, after a third visit, i consulted with another writer, a reputed authority on the east end, who gave me a list of particular neighborhoods to look at. if anything exceptional was to be detected from the appearance of the people, beyond what i have noted, i could not see it. i found no poor east end costers with buttons all over their clothes, although they once existed here. i found no evidence of the overcrowded home life, because i could not get into the houses to see. children, it seemed to me, were not nearly so numerous as in similar areas in american cities. even a police-court proceeding i saw in avon square was too dull to be interesting.135 i was told i might expect the most startling crimes. the two hours i spent in court developed only drunkenness and adultery. but as my english literary guide informed me, only time and familiarity with a given neighborhood would develop anything. i believe this. all i felt was that in such a dull, sordid, poor-bodied world any depth of filth or crime might be reached, but who cares to know?
