Victorian London: A Newspaper Account

White chapel and Spitalfields are always interesting neighborhoods and recent events have made them decidedly more interesting. They have afforded startling illustrations of the dreadful possibilities of life down in the unfathomable depths of these vast human warrens. At all times one who strolls through this quarter of town, especially by night, must feel that below his ken are the awful deeps of an ocean teeming with life, but enshrouded in impenetrable mystery. As he catches here and thru a glimpse of a face under the flickering, uncertain light of a lamp - the face perhaps of some woman, bloated by drink and distorted by passion - he may get a momentary shuddering sense of what humanity may sink to when life is lived apart from the sweet, health-giving influences of fields and flowers, of art and music and books and travel, of the stimulus of interesting enterprise, the gentle amenities of happy hours and intercourse with the educated and the cultured. A momentary sense of what human nature may become may here and there flash in upon one as he gazes out upon the dark waters, but it is only when the human monster actually rises for a moment to the surface and disappears again, leaving a victim dead and disemboweled, that one quite realizes that that momentary scene is a dread reality. Just for a few days the mass of the people of Spitalfields and White chapel themselves seemed to be realizing the awful possibilities of the nature that belonged to them. Thousands of them were really shocked and sobered, by the last tragedy especially. One could see in the people's faces, and could detect in their tones and answers, an indefinable something which told plainly that they had been horrified by a revelation. Mr. George Holland, whose remarkable work has been going on for so very many years in premises occupying an obscure position in George Yard, White chapel - where it will be remembered one of these unfortunate women was found with thirty or forty stabs - says that the sensation has affected his institution very greatly. He has some hundreds of young women connected with his place, and many of them have been afraid to stir out after dark. He is under some anxiety, too, lest ladies who have been wont to come down there on winter evenings to teach and entertain his young people, should be deterred by this latest addition to the evil reputation of White chapel, and he is earnestly pushing on alterations in his premises which will give him a frontage out in the main road. On the other hand, Mr. Carrington, whose great place stands out boldly on the Mile End highway a blaze of light and cheerfulness, thinks that people have more than ever thronged out of the dark and silent byways and back lanes into the broad pavement and into the glare of light thrown upon it by shops and public-houses and entertainments, and the innumerable hawkers and salesmen of one sort and another who line the “waste” along the Mile End Road. Since these outrages the dark places of White chapel and Spitalfields have undoubtedly been a little darker and stiller, and more depressing. Some streets have presented, even to those familiar with them, quite a desolate and deserted appearance after nightfall. But the nine-day’ wonder has passed, the effect of the shock has visibly subsided, and people are beginning to move freely again.