Abstract

RAPHAEL SAMUEL, East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding. Rout- ledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. xi + 355 pages, illustrations, index. £11.50 (cloth); £6.95 (paperback) . What the social investigators who exposed the horrors of the Victorian slums could not tell was what it felt like to live in those conditions. The role of sympathetic observer was itself a barrier, and often their informants' talk was conditioned by shrewd guesses as to the kind of thing the 'gent' was after, just as today strikers, when interviewed, often warp them- selves into cliches in their desire to conform to an appropriate level of discourse for television: 'No comment!' Raphael Samuel, by patiently tape-recording a single informant over a period of six years, has overcome this barrier. Of course there are others: every man fictiqnalises his own past, and Arthur Harding is no exception. But it is as true as 'he can make it, and as true as we are likely to get. His account of life in The Nichol (the area of south-westBethnal Green, near Spitalfields, sensationally presented in Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago) confirms all that the observers reported about the district's vicious- ness,