East End of London - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

The East End has been the subject of parliamentary commissions and other examinations of social conditions since the 19th century, as seen in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (third, expanded edition 1902-3, in 17 volumes). Narrative accounts of experiences amongst the East End poor were also written by Jack London in The People of the Abyss (1903), by George Orwell in parts of his novel Down and Out in Paris and London, recounting his own experiences in the 1930s, as well as the Jewish writer Emanuel Litvinoff in his autobiographical novel Journey Through a Small Planet set in the 1930s. A further detailed study of Bethnal Green was carried out in the 1950s by sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott, in Family and Kinship in East London.

Themes from these social investigations have been drawn out in fiction. Crime, poverty, vice, sexual transgression, drugs, class-conflict and multi-cultural encounters and fantasies involving Jewish, Chinese and Indian immigrants are major themes. Though the area has been productive of local writing talent, from the time of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) the idea of 'slumming it' in the 'forbidden' East End has held a fascination for a coterie of the literati.

The image of the East Ender changed dramatically between the 19th century and the 20th. From the 1870s they were characterised in culture as often shiftless, untrustworthy and responsible for their own poverty. However, many East Enders worked in lowly but respectable occupations such as carters, porters and costermongers. This latter group particularly became the subject of music hall songs at the turn of the 20th century, with performers such as Marie Lloyd, Gus Elen and Albert Chevalier establishing the image of the humorous East End Cockney and highlighting the conditions of ordinary workers. This image, buoyed by close family and social links and the community's fortitude in the war, came to be represented in literature and film. However, with the rise of the Kray twins in the 1960s the dark side of East End character returned with a new emphasis on criminality and gangsterism.

The success of Jennifer Worth's memoir Call the Midwife (2002, reissued 2007), which became a major best-seller and was adapted by the BBC into their most popular new programme since the current ratings system began, has led to a high level of interest in true-life stories from the East End. Melanie McGrath's Silvertown (2003), about her grandmother’s life in the East End, was also a best-seller, as was the follow-up Hopping, about the annual East Enders’ ‘holiday’ hop-picking in Kent. A raft of similar books were published in the 2000s, among them Gilda O’Neill’s best-selling Our Street (2004), Piers Dudgeon’s Our East End (2009), Jackie Hyam’s Bombsites and Lollipops (2011) and Grace Foakes’ Four Meals for Fourpence (reprinted 2011). In 2012, HarperCollins published The Sugar Girls, a book which tells the true stories of women working at Tate & Lyle's factories in Silvertown since 1944. The authors commented that many of the East Enders they interviewed were unhappy with the way their neighbourhoods had previously been portrayed in books and on screen - as squalid and criminal, in the Dickensian vein - and as a result they were keen to emphasise the positive aspects of East End life and community. 2012 also saw the publication of Spitalfields Life, a book adapted from the very successful blog of the same name, in which ‘the gentle author’ (who is anonymous) writes about, and celebrates, the lives of the men and women who live and work in the East End community of Spitalfields.