Smoked Salmon and Onions

Abstract

The East End had been the litmus paper of both Christian charity and socialist revolution. Here were the footprints of Octavia Hill, Stewart Headlam, Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, Charles Booth, Eleanor Marx, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, Beatrice Webb and Charles Bradlaugh. Lenin visited Whitechapel in October 1902 and 1903. In the East End were to be found the origins all those jumbled theories of Christian socialism and of sociology, of anarchism, of social democracy (Marxist communism) and trade union labourism. The area was the poorest in Britain and the strangest, filled with faces that were not merely alien because of race but alien because of temperament, a tipping-out point for everything shunned and benighted in Victorian culture and therefore all the more alluring to the do-gooder and the ardent social experimenter: it was the visible rebuke to the West End and the complacent of ‘Society’.