The Great Acceptance: The Life Story of F. N. Charrington

Chapter I

THE GREAT ACCEPTANCE

In the year 1882 the most popular novelist of his day wrote as follows about the East End of London—

"Two millions of people, or thereabouts, live in the East
End of London. That seems a good-sized population for an
utterly unknown town. They have no institutions of their own
to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no
municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no
picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera,—they have
nothing. It is the fashion to believe they are all paupers,
which is a foolish and mischievous belief, as we shall
presently see. Probably there is no such spectacle in the
whole world as that of this immense, neglected, forgotten
great city of East London. It is even neglected by its own
citizens, who have never yet perceived their abandoned
condition. They are Londoners, it is true, but they have no
part or share in London; its wealth, its splendours, its
honours, exist not for them. They see nothing of any
splendours; even the Lord Mayor's Show goeth westward: the
City lies between them and the greatness of England. They
are beyond the wards, and cannot become aldermen; the rich
London merchants go north and south and west; but they go
not east. Nobody goes east, no one wants to see the place;
no one is curious about the way of life in the east. Books
on London pass it over; it has little or no history; great
men are not buried in its churchyards, which are not even
ancient, and crowded by citizens as obscure as those who now
breathe the upper air about them. If anything happens in the
east, people at the other end have to stop and think before
they can remember where the place may be."