Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End, by Heidi Kaufman

Abstract

An exciting work of research that is partly a story of the investigative process itself, Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End by Heidi Kaufman both documents and theorizes the tension between insider and outsider status in Victorian depictions of the East End. Kaufman documents archival materials offering traces of what the East Enders themselves thought and wrote about their neighborhoods as insiders within their community but marginalized by ethnicity, class, gender, education, religion, and civic liberties. Their accounts offer glaring contrasts to the more canonical, readily available, and largely negative representations of the East End by well-known figures such as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, who are outsiders in the East End community, but much better connected to the privileges of mainstream English culture according to the same categories. After first presenting the construction of our still pervasive but stereotyped and incomplete notions of the East End, this book brings to light a robust set of previously unknown collections of materials by Victorian East Enders themselves. One goal is to augment their “voices of dissent, dissonance, and resistance, many of which have been occluded by narratives from the periodical press and popular novels that tend to flatten the East End’s qualities with images depicting universal poverty and pervasive crime” (5). Another is to reveal a burgeoning but overlooked intellectual culture thriving within the generally reviled community. These aims are accomplished in the subsequent chapters through a series of case studies of separate and distinct archives that are interestingly linked through unexpected historical circumstances. In addition, Kaufman has created a corresponding set of digital archives (https://eastendarchives.net) to continue her intervention in the prevailing reductive views of the East End and to demonstrate how building freely accessible online archives can offset enduring damage.The introduction lays out the project’s unusual focus on what might seem an obscure topic (though one I’m very interested in myself): the difficulty in learning with any certainty much about an early Jewish woman writer, in this case the first Anglo-Jewish novelist, Maria Polack. She is the linchpin that unites all the apparently disconnected parts of this investigation. What often begins as a seemingly fruitless exertion becomes the story itself when a small archival victory (such as finding Polack’s name mentioned as the author of a passage recited by a schoolgirl) becomes the breakthrough that signifies not just a detail about Polack but the beginning of a whole trend: in this example, discovering that supposedly ignorant East End Jewish schoolgirls—stereotypically perceived as poverty-stricken and unschooled—routinely received institutional scholastic accolades for their performances of poetry. Indeed, recounting such moments as part of the book’s project makes Kaufman’s approach an unusually refreshing mode of scholarship: an autobiographical narrative of inquiry, missteps, frustration, coincidences, surprises, persistence, and exciting realizations, all wrapped up in a careful theorization of how archival research works and a redefinition of what constitutes an archive. Meanwhile, supported by abundant evidence, Kaufman demonstrates that the Jewish East End of London in the nineteenth century has been mischaracterized and that Polack, about whom we know so little, was part of a network of authors and intellects that spread across two continents.Chapter 1 explores the historical shifts in what constitutes the East End (not labeled with capital letters until around 1860) and lays out its reputation in canonical texts as poor, illiterate, and crime-ridden, a frightening cesspool that swiftly became “a powerful emblem of modern urban life” (26). Drawing on contemporary periodicals, fiction, illustration, and sociological studies, Kaufman first documents the nearly monolithic representation of this portion of London and highlights the racist, xenophobic, and antisemitic tropes employed. An example is John Fisher Murray’s 1843 comment in his essay “The Jewish Quarter,” “Here, every face is of the shape and somewhat of the complexion of a turkey egg; every brow penciled in an arch of exact ellipse; every nose modelled after the proboscis of a Toucan” (35). The chapter moves on to offer counternarratives by East Enders whose own careers in authorship belie the stereotypes of benighted illiteracy, such as John Hollingshead, Charles Booth, and Arthur Morrison. Their works offer an insider’s perspective (and data to support it) to correct the broad strokes of outsider depictions with more nuanced analyses: yes, the East End is poor, but not poorer than other distressed areas of London so that perhaps its special status as a symbol of degeneracy is connected to the racism and xenophobia mentioned above rather than to poverty alone. The insider look reveals a community full of artists, writers, and students unlike the prevailing notion that the area’s inhabitants are nothing but grimy prostitutes, cutthroats, and thieves.Kaufman repeatedly invites the reader to share her excitement and delight when a seeming dead-end turns into a moment of discovery and astonishment. The remaining three body chapters of the book foreground such moments, each focusing on a perceived failure to find what she sought in traditional archives that became, upon reflection, a path to open up her investigation in unanticipated ways and leading to a new kind of archive to investigate.Chapter 2 describes her confusion over a paratextual discrepancy in the version of Polack’s novel held at the British Library and all the other extant copies (only a handful worldwide): a different title page and a printed subscription list. What this suggests is that before being picked up by a commercial publisher, the novel’s publication was funded by a group of people who supported the work by preordering copies. This list, Kaufman realized, constitutes a record of Polack’s supporters and possible acquaintances, including well-to-do families both inside and outside the Jewish community. Using online visualization and mapping tools, Kaufman has created an online archive that distinguishes a variety of factors (such as all subscribers versus female subscribers), modeling at a glance both the particularities and the breadth of Polack’s influence. Here Kaufman expands our understanding of the geographical reach that might be expected of so obscure a literary contribution.Chapter 3 likewise recounts a moment of serendipity: a chance encounter with a descendent of Emma Lyons, the first self-identified Anglo-Jewish woman poet, whose Miscellaneous Poems came out in 1812. This mattered to Kaufman because Emma Lyons Henry was a subscriber to Polack’s novel. Complete with dialogue from the conversation Kaufman enjoyed with the poet’s distant relative en route to a charitable graveyard restoration mission in Jamaica, the chapter details the process of accessing an exciting find through her newfound acquaintance: permission to view a set of diaries kept by Emma Lyon’s brother, A. S. Lyons (who had lived just a few blocks from Polack). The diaries had been kept for generations in what is essentially a very small private family archive. A. S. Lyons offers an exceptional and very personal picture of his own quotidian life in London’s East End until he emigrated to Kingston in 1839. This discovery inspired Kaufman to create an online archive digitizing not only the diaries with their stories of East End circumstances but also many related texts, visualizations, podcasts, and maps.Chapter 4 details the story of Kaufman’s efforts to understand the educational opportunities afforded Polack’s community, leading her to find a boiling controversy in the 1850s about the Jews’ Orphan Asylum, located in Polack’s neighborhood. The case involved allegations of child abuse, cover-ups, and false accusations, with teachers, students, administrators, and authors contributing evidence and counterevidence in a series of investigations, punishments, and exonerations meted out at every level. This fascinating case study again significantly documents and amplifies our understanding of academic life in the East End, giving us access to otherwise forgotten voices—some halting, some erudite—and adding tremendous nuance to the flattened vision afforded in outsider descriptions of the area.Readers of Victorians Institute Journal will find Kaufman’s Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End a valuable resource providing a fuller grasp of nineteenth-century British life. It expands our knowledge about the networks of women writers while convincingly providing a corrective to often unrelentingly negative depictions of the London’s East End communities, both in contemporary publications and in the scholarship that followed. Because Kaufman tells a personal story of scholarly detection, the book’s appeal spreads to a wider audience than historians, English professors, and Jewish studies scholars, inviting all those who are interested in theorizing archives as “speculative sites of learning or as a kind of fiction born from material fragments situated in both public and private spaces” (163). It also serves as a meaningful digital humanities contribution in the creation of two linked online archives that massively expand the accessibility of the materials Kaufman has discovered in the process of researching and writing this book. Not everyone will find the digital mapping useful to their own research, but I certainly will be employing this book and its digital archives in mine as I dig deeper into other authors who may or may not have known Polack personally but who certainly interreacted with some of those in the network Kaufman has presented so vibrantly here.