Povertyopolis: Beyond the East-West Binary in the Late-Nineteenth-Century London Literary Imagination

Abstract

By siting social problems in the eastern half of the capital city, many writers (both fiction writers and those who purported to be reporting fact) in the final years of the nineteenth century collectively and separately assisted in the emergence of an imaginary London cityscape whose east-west axis (placing poverty physically apart from wealth) served to diminish the true nature of these problems. This crude binary of east versus west failed to represent the systemic, pervasive, pan-London (and in fact, pan-global) ill-effects of advanced capitalism. The east-west polarity acted to confuse and blur the full effects and meanings of how the unregulated labour and housing markets impacted on working-class Londoners wherever they lived in the city. It falsified actual, lived experience and needed to be jettisoned so that a more complex and meaningful picture of metropolitan life could emerge. The true process of ‘immiseration’ should no longer, these writers believed, be occluded by this mythopoeic East — which had become a lazy shorthand for a complex set of problems. In this article, I seek to return to the record the opposition to the east-west binary that, as PJ Keating observed, 1 had emerged in the early 1880s. This opposition was presented by fiction writers including George Gissing, Margaret Harkness and Richard Whiteing; philanthropist and campaigner for working-class girls Maude Stanley; and social investigators Robert Valpy and Arthur Sherwell. Each argued against the polarised vision of London’s socio-economic topography offered by most popular novelists and journalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by which the poor East was presented in contrast to the wealthy West.