madeinatlantis LONDON TRAVEL GUIDE THE EAST-END IF one side of London has become the chief scene of consumption, the other, lying beside its river port, was early destined to the duty of supply. Passing over the City, that makes a distributing agency between them, for a dingy contrast to the West-end let us turn eastward to swarming square miles of streets, docks, and factories, seldom visited by strangers, not often by fellowLondoners, unless in the way of business, philanthropy, or chance curiosity. The boroughs of this end, whose population might fill a dozen cathedral cities, have recently had some talk of dignifying themselves by the general title of Eastminster; but where is their minster? By rights it should be St. Dunstan's ancient church at Stepney. The main body of the East-end is composed of these nine Tower Hamlets--Wapping, Ratcliff, Poplar, Limehouse, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Bow, and Mile End Old and New Towns, now run together as populous divisions of Stepney, that port parish to which are said to belong all English children born at sea, as our early colonies east and west were fondly tacked on to the royal manor of East Greenwich. The termination of its name, originally Stebenhithe, seems exceptional in denoting not an island but a harbour. The most time-honoured structure at this end, which stands just upon the City edge, is the Tower, now dwarfed to a toy beside that lofty Tower Bridge that seems designed as a gigantic gateway and portcullis for the port of London. When a once formidable fortress was built here to overawe the City, the East-end could have been at no disadvantage in the way of fashion. For a time, William the Conqueror took his quarters at Barking, now the eastern terminus of the District Railway, then an independent fishing town upon its navigable creek. Edward the Confessor, whose Buckingham Palace was Westminster, had a Windsor in Essex at Havering-atte-Bower, which long continued to be a home for dowager queens. Mr. Loftie gives the style of the East Minster to the Abbey of St. Mary of Graces on Tower Hill, which seems not to have flourished long, and was turned into an Ordnance Office. It was on this side of the City that Mr. Pepys lived, close to the parish church where he is buried; and here he attended to his Navy business, till from his official home in Crutched Friars rising fortunes carried him to what was then the West-end, a street off the Strand; and he died at a Clapham retreat, such as long after his day might be built on the meadows of the Lea, now no site for eligible villas. Besant laments another vanished group of ecclesiastical buildings which might have served the East-end for its rallying point, St. Katherine's by the Tower, a noble church of King Stephen's reign, destroyed by nineteenth-century vandals, when its precincts were submerged in the deluge of docks, its hospital only being transplanted to the groves of Regent's Park, and its very name is now best remembered through his own novels, that make the most kindly guide to the East-end. Sir Walter Besant, who died while still busy on his monumental survey of London, was not a Londoner by birth, but a Portsmouth boy, eventually settled in London after some years of schoolmastering at Leamington and in the Mauritius. In that British conquest rather than colony, as it is, he got hints for beginning his literary life with studies of old French literature, from which he passed to more profitable success as a popular novelist, at first in collaboration with James Rice, Editor of All the Year Round. Those early rollicking stories are often spoken of as Besant's title to fame; but my vote is cast for some of the novels "with a purpose" which he wrote independently, while it may be confessed that at last the vein ran a little dry and thin. Our gloomy stirrers of problems and cackling hoverers on the verge of the improper have taught their public to sneer at Besant's hearty sentiment, which will recommend his best work long after more painful art is laid on dusty shelves. The spices that help to embalm fiction are style, which he had at least clear and careful, humour, in which his taste was not too fine for the average reader, and sympathy, that is akin to true humour as well as to pathos. Him who had taken all London as his province, the East-end touched to keenest sympathy, infused through his most characteristic books, All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of Gibeon, by which he sought to play the part of a practical reformer. What seemed to him the most crying evil of this region was its joylessness; and so catching was his zeal to meet such a want that the stately pleasure-house he decreed in imagination took shape and name as the People's Palace. But the materialization of his dreams proved somewhat of a disappointment to a spirit more Hellenic than were those he longed to benefit. The young men could not play billiards without betting; the maidens were more ready to romp than to dance with maidenly grace; and of all the proposed delights music proved the most thriving, hardiest and eldest among the sisters nine. The recreative side of this institution fell into the background, overshadowed by educational agencies pieced on to it; and I understand that Besant lost interest in his creation when it had sobered down to be mainly an East London College, worked under the patronage of a City Company. But so long as it stands, it will be a memorial to the father of a school of novelists who have roused our interest in the East-end by pictures of its hitherto obscure life. The Whitechapel Road holds on to become the Mile End Road, the Bow Road and the Stratford Road, a long line of monotonous meanness, often choked by heavy traffic and saddened by frequent funerals on their way to eastern cemeteries. To the north of this line stretch Shoreditch, Spitalfields, and Bethnal Green, where weaving seems the most characteristic industry, introduced by the Huguenot hive that swarmed here from persecuting France. They brought into our country both capital and profitable crafts, like the silk weaving of Spitlfields, where their descendants may still be found. But if we look into what was once the dignity of Spital Square, whose mansions cherish some carved fireplaces and mantels that may be the work of Grinling Gibbons, we shall see one corner of it taken up by a Jewish Synagogue; and not far off, only the other day, a Baptist Chapel was adapted to the worship of the same stubborn faith. It is well known how this area, on the side next the City, has been colonized by Jews of the poorer class, in late years recruited by numerous immigrations from Eastern Europe, an element of our population now sifted by law before being admitted to the asylum in which these down-trodden strangers soon learn to stand upright as freemen. It has been well said that every country has the Jews it deserves; and the poorest son of Houndsditch cuts a better figure than the greasy gaberdines of Poland and Galicia. As for the richer Jews, who flit to the West-end, or as far as Maida Vale, they have long ago learned to hold up their heads among neighbour Christians, under whose names some of them are apt to disguise their own; and their faith grows so compromising that latitudinarian reformers talk of amalgamating their inconvenient Sabbath with the national day of rest.		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