The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885-1914 (review)

Ever since the 1880s, when sensationalist writings like The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) began a moralistic exposé of conditions and Charles Booth countered with the early volumes of his classic survey, the East End of London has been the subject of controversy, at first polemical and political, latterly historiographical. Marc Brodie's volume in the Oxford Historical Monographs series continues this debate and challenges historians who have, he implies, exaggerated the debased, poverty-stricken character of the East End and the rootlessness and atavism of its politics. He rejects the view that the Conservative tone of much (but not all) of East London politics until 1914 was due to demoralising poverty, labour casualization and seasonality, social inadequacy, ignorance, and exploitation by outsiders.

Disaggregating the area to focus on a number of wards and constituencies, Brodie emphasises the continuing strength of Liberalism in the East End, especially in municipal elections, and the tendency for the more comfortably-off, over-represented on the electoral register, to vote Conservative. He emphasises factors of class gradations, residential status, and religion in an East End, which, like Booth, he depicts as socially diverse rather than monolithic. One locality had different politics from another, and the overall picture is more complex and nuanced than the received images of the larger area would suggest. Conservativism, where it was prominent, owed much to Anglicanism, vestigial protectionism, employer paternalism, and the self-interest of (among others) brewery and Woolwich Arsenal workers. Brodie suggests, in one of the more original and perhaps fragile sections of the argument, that local politics could have a strongly "moral" tone, with a prevailing respect for "personal character" having some political weight. Even the politics of race were confused: the animosity between Jews and the Irish meant that Home Rule controversy could attract Jews to Conservatism, while anti-alien campaigns could appeal to the Irish and dent their Liberal loyalties. One feature does stand out: in parliamentary elections at least the Liberal vote fluctuated far more than the relatively stable Conservative one, so that the decisive factor was usually not any surge in right-wing views, atavistic or otherwise, but the shifting balance between enthusiasm and abstention among habitual Liberals.

Brodie's conclusion that "we can understand politics, and the formation of political attitudes . . . only through a very detailed examination of specific localized community and workplace structures" is one that most historians of Victorian London will now be inclined to accept (205). More specifically, he has given substance to the case for regarding the area's Conservative politics as a matter of social substance and sense rather than of rootless irrationality. A few quibbles and queries remain, though. Given the emphasis here on the differential impact of the franchise according to local patterns of housing occupation and tenancy, it is not always clear how far Brodie's conclusions about political attitudes relate to whole districts and their cultures or only to the minority electorate. Most of the negative evaluations of the East End generalised about more than just electoral behaviour. Second, there are problems, which perhaps Brodie recognizes only to minimize, over the relative importance of issues and local structures. For all the stability of that Conservative vote, the fluctuations in Liberal turnout were surely a matter of the waxing and waning of particular and highly contested issues. Brodie's overall emphasis on more permanent structural factors may be pushed too far.

Another problem lies in the connections between local politics, on the one hand, and national trends and alignments, on the other. For all the virtues of a Booth-like atomization of East London into districts and sub-districts, the fluctuations of its parliamentary election results often followed national trends. How distinctive were the East End and its localities? Finally, the relationship between municipal and parliamentary politics, though explored here in places, remains opaque. Parts of the East End regularly voted Progressive in...