Introduction

Summary

One late afternoon in London, at the end of the 1890s, the well-known socialist, novelist, and campaigner Robert Blatchford went for an excursion with friends from the centre of the metropolis into the neighbourhood of Whitechapel in the East End. For Blatchford, editor of the Clarion newspaper, the experience was a ‘painful dream’, or perhaps a nightmare. ‘Street after street, mile after mile, district after district … and still the same dense streams of hurrying souls, each wrapped up in self – each with heart steeled and eyes hardened against all the tragedy, sorrow, anxiety, weariness, of all the rest.’ In an earlier chapter of the collection of essays, Dismal England (1899), the author made explicit at least one root cause of the profound dislocation that Blatchford, himself no stranger to poverty, experienced during his brief time in Whitechapel – the presence of the diasporic ‘other’:

We entered the Ghetto. The children of the ghetto swarmed about us. They were swarthy, yet had in their faces the unwholesome pallor peculiar to London … Jewish they all were, but of different nationalities: the prevailing language, my companion said, was Yiddish. It was a strange experience: within half an hour's walk of the City boundaries we were in a foreign country.

Thus one leading figure in the socialist movement reported an encounter with the ‘new’ East End, an area in which it seemed that English had been displaced as the lingua franca of the streets, where an old (and in fact mythical) ethnic homogeneity had been succeeded by a disorientating cosmopolitanism.

The years between 1889 and 1912 were a key transitory stage in the evolution of the British left. The strikes of 1888–1889 heralded the birth of an aggressive and proactive socialist-led trade union movement that organised workers in unskilled occupations. This was followed by a coalescence of some of these forces in the early twentieth century around what would become the Labour Party. In turn there was a fragmentation in the explicitly Marxist left in 1911–1912, and by the end of the period a build-up of momentum in the workers’ movement that would come to fruition after the First World War.