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Fighting the good fight in the East End slums
Michael Wheeler enjoys tales of feisty clerics from London’s past
The Blackest Streets: The life and death of a Victorian slum
THE AUTHOR and reviewer Sarah Wise lives in London, and seems to enjoy exploring the darkest corners of the capital’s Victorian slums. Having looked at murder and grave-robbery in 1830s London in her award-winning The Italian Boy, she now moves on 50 years and focuses upon “the Nichol” in the East End, said to have been the most desolate and desperate slum of them all. Once past the rather clichéd opening sentences, which “plunge” us into “maze-like streets”, through the “bustle” of the main road, and down “canyons” of tall buildings, we are introduced to the sights, sounds, and smells of appallingly overcrowded houses owned by Establishment figures, and by vestrymen whose methods are those of their precursors in Oliver Twist. Indeed, one of the many evocative illustrations in this gripping book reproduces a Punch cartoon of 1884, showing an alderman and Bumble weeping over an attempt to create a single, unified council for the metropolis: “No westries! No beadles! No nothink!” Once the LCC was formed, five years later, the Nichol was swept away, to be replaced by handsome apartment blocks. Alas, only 11 of the 5719 evicted Nichol residents moved into the model housing; the rest shuffled off down the road, to the dismay of the neighbouring areas, carrying their lice with them. Those who enjoyed Nigel Scotland’s Squires in the Slums (Books, 21/28 December 2007) will find plenty to interest them in Wise’s lively account of the Church of England’s responses to the Nichol. She may not be as sound on Tractarianism as she is on housing statistics, but she tells a rattling good tale of clergy in-fighting, literal and metaphorical. The pugilistic Father Jay of the Nichol built a gorgeous Ritualist church, Holy Trinity, with a gymnasium (including boxing ring) downstairs. This succeeded with the male inhabitants, but upset his brother clergy. Anglo-Catholicism, then and now, grounds its social mission in the incarnation. As Henry Scott Holland said, “The more you believe in the incarnation, the more you care about drains.” Professor Wheeler’s latest book is The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in nineteenth-century English culture. To order this book email your details to CT bookshop |
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