East End 1888

‘East End 1888′ is essential reading for anyone interested in social history and the history of London. Professor William Fishman shows what life was like for the laboring poor in the year of Jack the Ripper and the Matchgirls’ strike, when poverty, crime, disease, and social unrest were at their height. The communal life of the street, pubs, and clubs softened the brutality of the daily grind, where the sweatshop, the ghetto, the poor tenement—and the threat of the workhouse–were ever present in an age of genuine “Victorian values.”