The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers among ...

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path-finders and trail-clearers, living sign-posts to all the world, and bestowers of first aid to bewildered travellers—unhesitat- ingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Tibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way! 6 While England gloried in its expanding Empire and spread "civilization" throughout the world, it forgot or never knew the hungry, unemployed, and poorly-housed denizens of its own cities. Jack London reminded his readers what and where the East End was: if the Empire never saw the setting of the sun, he quipped, the East End was that place over which the sun seldom rose. The domestic social reformer who made his dependence on the African example most explicit was General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. In the summer of 1890 an explorer named Stanley—of Stanley and Livingstone fame—had published In Darkest Africa, an account of his jour- ney across the "Lost Continent." Later that same year General Booth came out with a book outlining his plan for the allevia- tion of poverty in Great Britain: he called it In Darkest England and the Way Out. Booth begins this work with an account of Stanley's heroic entry into the "almost impenetrable" tropical forests of the Congo and his discovery of its predatory and godless population, and then interrupts his narrative to ask the inevitable question: "As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? . . . May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest?" 7 He introduces the already familiar analogy much as George Sims and Jack London did, but he takes it a step further by equating the Arab ivory raiders who exploit African forest dwellers with those Englishmen (he singles out pub-owners) who prey on the vulnerabilities of slum dwellers and unwit- tingly reduce them to criminals, drunkards, and layabouts. Booth suggests that the Englishman's guilt goes beyond mere ignorance of his poorer neighbors: he causes eternal misery, "brooding sullenness" and "dull despair"; he is a slave-driver 125
and an agent of godlessness. It is clear from these examples of the 1880s and 1890s that the language of domestic social investigation cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of England's place in the constellation of world politics, that England's national con- cerns—and the way they were discussed—were inseparable from its international ones. London had become the center of an empire, the docks of East London the conduit through which the Empire entered Britain; and the capital took on an aura of new and literal—not just metaphorical—internation- alism in these decades. Waves of immigrants gravitated to London's central districts while native Londoners tended to spread out into the new suburbs and outlying areas. The "distant tribes" had more than an analogous relationship to Lon- doners: they had become Londoners, as London came to reproduce in miniature the world of the Empire. When Mar- garet Harkness wrote a novel about the Salvation Army, she quite appropriately followed the lead of General Booth by calling her book In Darkest London, further narrowing the fo- cus of Booth's own title from benighted nation to benighted city. She opened the novel with a description of Whitechapel Road on a Saturday night: There one sees all nationalities. A grinning Hottentot elbows his way through a crowd of long-legged Jewesses. An Algerian merchant walks arm-in-arm with a native of Calcutta. A little Italian plays pitch-and-toss with a small Russian. A Polish Jew enjoys sauer-kraut with a German Gentile. And among the for- eigners lounges the East End loafer, monarch of all he surveys, lord of the premises. 8 The East End thoroughfare has become a Babel, a world in microcosm. The Jew, the Eastern European, or the Med- iterranean is as alien to the Englishman as the Hottentot or the Pygmy; and each nationality is perceived as a cluster of stereotypical traits, each individual foreigner a caricature. The Empire brought with it into England the ironic coupling of great riches and great poverty; in this way it reproduced the dichotomy of West End luxury and East End squalor. The literary convention of comparing the urban poor of England with Africans or other non-Western peoples was not, 126
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