ABSTRACT
London was regarded as the Mecca of the dissolute, the lazy, the mendicant, ‘the rough’2 and the spendthrift. The presence of great wealth and countless charities, the unparalleled opportunities for casual employment, the possibility of scraping together a living by innumerable devious methods, all were thought to conspire together to make London one huge magnet for the idle, the dishonest, and the criminal. All the features of self-help that had begun to manifest themselves so strikingly in the north were conspicuously absent from the poorer quarters of London. As Beatrice Potter on a visit to Lancashire later noted in a letter to her father:3
One sees here the other side of the process through which bad workmen and bad characters are attracted to the large town. In East End life one notices this attraction, here one
Source: ‘Outcast London: a Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society’, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, extracts from pp. 12-16, 281, 284-97.
