ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1887 Britain and the Empire celebrated the Queen’s Golden Jubilee with due pride, pomp and pageantry. To the crowds who cheered the processions of visiting European monarchs, Indian princes and African chiefs it seemed that the world paid homage to the richest and most powerful nation on earth, the leader in industry and trade and the centre of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen. The Jubilee celebrated half a century of astonishing progress, not only in material things but in the arts and sciences, in education and democracy – in short, in civilization. Yet painful and disturbing contrasts were all too close at hand for those who dared to penetrate ‘Darkest England’. Along the Victoria Embankment one of ‘General’ Booth’s officers counted 270 homeless persons sleeping out and a further ninety-eight in and around Covent Garden Market. 1 In the same year as the Jubilee the unemployed paraded their plight in marches to St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, pitched ragged bivouacs in Trafalgar Square and cheered Socialist propagandists under their banners, ‘Work, Not Charity’. To a contemporary observer, the heart of the Empire had become ‘a dreadful place, a civic quagmire…. Instead of a mere place of nightly shelter, the lodgers made it their home all day. It was a convenient central position for displaying their bitter lot, and exceptionally well situated as a rallying ground for begging forays’. 2
