The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum [Hardcover]

` a staggering breadth of scholarly research with a very human insight ... cutting edge but sensitive'

`An affecting history of life in the crowded slums of 19th century London'
--The Economist

`A detailed, thorough and totally absorbing history... I'll be looking to see this one on the 2008 Samuel Johnson shortlist, at the very least.'

'both moving and engrossing...misery and despair is redeemed by Sarah Wise's light and occasionally humorous touch'

'An excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living.'
Peter Ackroyd

`Scrupulously researched and eye-opening... a revelatory book, tearing the roofs off the Old Nichol's festering tenements.'
Professor John Carey

'Sarah Wise is too clever and considered a historian simply to give us a lurid, one-dimensional Victorian melodrama.'
Sinclair McKay

'This engrossing work shines a light not only on a turbulent period in London's history but on humanity itself. Only the best histories can claim as much.'
Clare Clark

`Outstanding... A note-perfect work of social history, thoroughly researched, charitable in its sympathies.'
Ken Worple

'This is a book about the nature of London itself'

Spilling facts, lives, conditions, intolerable burdens and the spirit expressed by spontaneous dancing in the streets, The Blackest Streets is a little masterpiece'

* In 1887 Government inspectors were sent to explore the horrifying - often lethal - living conditions of the Old Nichol, a notorious 15-acre slum in London's East End. Among much else they found that the rotting 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords. Peers of the Realm, local politicians, churchmen and lawyers were making profits on these death-traps of as much as 150 per cent per annum. * Before long, the Old Nichol became a focus of public attention. Journalists, the clergy, charity workers and others condemned its 6,000 inhabitants for their drunkenness and criminality. The solution to this 'problem' lay in internment camps, said some, or forced emigration - even policies designed to prevent breeding. * Concentrating on the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period in London's history, when revolution was very much in the air - when unemployment, agricultural depression and a crackdown on parish relief provided a breeding ground for Communists and Anarchists. * Author of the prize-winning The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise explores the real lives behind the statistics - the woodworkers, fish smokers, street hawkers and many more. She excavates the Old Nichol from the ruins of history, laying bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire.

'Remarkable... This engrossing work shines a light not only on a turbulent period in London's history but on humanity itself.Only the best histories can claim as much' Clare Clark, Guardian

'The Blackest Streets is an excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living that respond to no design or directive... This is a book about the nature of London itself' Peter Ackroyd, The Times

In 1887 Government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. Among much else they discovered that the decaying 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords, who included peers of the realm, local politicians and churchmen.

The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period of London's history when revolution was in the air, and award-winning historian Sarah Wise skilfully evokes the texture of life at that time, not just for the tenants but for those campaigning for change and others seeking to protect their financial interests. She recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire.

'Sarah Wise has created an exceptional work, in that it is both scholarly and page turning - a genuine treat' Gilda O'Neill

'Sarah Wise is too clever and considered a historian simply to give us a lurid, one-dimensional Victorian melodrama. Through painstaking archival work and readable empathetic prose, she has instead sought to evoke the texture of life here'

Sinclair McKay, Daily Telegraph

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Sarah Wise is a freelance journalist and author of The Italian Boy. She has written for the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, the Literary Review, the Daily Telegraph and the Observer. She completed an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College in 1996.

Excerpted from The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise. Copyright © 2008. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
At four o'clock in the afternoon of a damp, chilly Saturday in November 1887, two men kept an appointment with each other at Shoreditch Railway Station. Both were Continental revolutionaries - one, a Communist, wished to reveal to the other, an Anarchist, the very worst face of poverty he had discovered in the East End during his stay in London.

The Communist led the Anarchist into the nearby Hackney Road, then turned south, plunging into the maze-like streets of the area known as The Old Nichol. The bustle of the main road suddenly ceased, and as the two walked southwards, the streets grew narrower and darker - canyons of two- and three-storey housing, stretching as far into the distance as the mist and drizzle allowed them to see. The Anarchist soon became disorientated by the repeated left turnings, right turnings, his friend was making, and felt strangely unsettled by the symmetry of the streets, the monotony of the blackened buildings and the repetitive vistas revealed on their convoluted journey. This appeared to him to be a world leached of colour: wherever he looked, all he could discern were various shades of grey. After five minutes of walking, the Communist took the Anarchist down a narrow passage (so narrow they had to turn sideways and move crabwise along) that ran between two houses, and into a tiny square, surrounded on all sides by tenement buildings. He motioned to a small mound of earth rising between pools of filthy liquid, and as bidden, the Anarchist took his stand upon the mound the better to survey the scene. There was no one in sight, and although they could make out the distant, subdued roar and rumble of the four busy streets that boxed the Old Nichol in, there was no sound nearby. There was not a blade of grass to be seen, but heaps of what looked like rubbish, broken furniture and the like; in one corner lay the carcass of a dog, and here and there a rag of grey linen on a clothes line hung motionless in the cold air. The stone steps leading to the tenement doorways were worn down by generations of feet; every window pane was cracked, some smashed; thin columns of smoke rose from a few of the chimneys and dispersed into the mist. The Anarchist thought that it looked `as though death had just passed in giant strides through these streets and touched all breathing things with his redeeming hand'. Redeeming: the Anarchist saw death as a blessing in such a place as this.

They returned to the street and walked down the middle of the roadway. They now noted shy, curious eyes following them, and interpreted the gaze as conveying half-fear and half-hatred, with another quality that they could only define as the look of starvation. They greeted a man kneeling in the gutter hammering at the wheel of a broken cart, and he did not reply; a ragged woman crouching in a doorway started in fright as they neared her, clutched her small, equally ragged child to her breast and rose to her feet as if to defend herself.

The two began to walk faster, feeling as though they were intruders, and guiltily conscious of their own comparatively well-dressed, well-fed appearance. The Anarchist had been shocked by the manifestations of destitution he had just witnessed, and had the sensation, as he later wrote, that he had suddenly stumbled upon `the secrets of a strange life', with codes of its own not to be understood by outsiders. He privately christened the fifteen acres of the Old Nichol `The Empire of Hunger'.

The Communist muttered to him that when the Worker State was established, this type of environment would be eradicated. Fear, hate, envy and hunger would disappear. Behaviours would change. The Anarchist did not agree, believing that only when all forms of government were abolished would humanity be able to self-govern, with wisdom and compassion. The reason such a place as the Old Nichol existed, he said, was because the State - Parliament, the Law - prevented these individuals from running their own lives wisely.

They walked on through the labyrinth until with immense relief they were back out again on a main thoroughfare, Bethnal Green Road, amid the roar of its Saturday market stalls, carts, carriages and cabs.