Please note: Kate Bardel will not be presenting her paper at the conference.
"I propose to record the result of a journey ... into a dark continent
that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office. The
wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily
as those savage tribes for whose benefit the Missionary Societies never
cease to appeal."
-- George Sims, How the Poor Live (1889)
Although England's nineteenth century explorations are often considered only in foreign terms, the latter half of the century saw an increasing number of domestic expeditions into poverty-stricken, crime-ridden areas of the country. London's East End drew particular attention. Conditions were indeed grim in the East End, much more so than most affluent, confident defenders of the Empire realized. The novelists who set out to show the plight of the East End waned to educate the wealthy sectors of British society. They created a new kind of literature, a distinctly urban literature which hoped ultimately to provoke change in the conditions it portrayed.
With a new set of intentions came a need for new methods and images. East End novelists drew heavily on travel literature for a new idiom. Travel memoirs and adventure stories were published in ever-increasing numbers in the nineteenth century, and it was from these stories that the novelists designed a new approach. Using travel narratives not only expressed the widespread feeling that the East End was alien but also emphasized that the British Empire's responsibility was to its own people as well as to its colonies overseas.
The association of London's poorer districts with foreign parts was an old one, dating back to at least the seventeenth century, but in the late nineteenth century exploration, specifically, became the theme of East End writing. Using the language of imperialism and foreign adventure to describe London's poorest areas ("a great and marvellous country", "a new and different race", "colonies of heathens and savages", etc.) brought the burden of empire to bear on the East End, successfully, as West Enders sought to change and to improve conditions in the East End.
East End novels contained specific geographic directions, like the works of H. Rider Haggard and other adventure novelists. Readers were encouraged to use maps and landmarks to navigate the cultural divide in London. The novels also presented the language of the East End in the same way that travel writers offered transcriptions and translations from their experiences or imaginations. Many examples support these comparisons.
Viewing the East End's geography, culture and language as foreign encouraged West End readers to become curious about the East End and ultimately to accept its culture as equivalent to that of African peoples, for instance. By the turn of the century, increased knowledge had encouraged "missionary work" in the East End (slum workers were called missionaries just like their foreign counterparts) and several serious attempts to save the East End from its cycles of ignorance and poverty. What journalists had attempted in the 1860's without success, novelists were able to achieve in the 1880's and 1890's by capitalizing on the popularity of travel narratives. Made exotic, presented as foreign, the East End became a compelling cause in a way that it had not been when it was simply the poor side of London.
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