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Answering the 'Bitter Cry': Urban Description and Social Reform in the Late-Victorian East End

Abstract The sensational imagery that was commonly used by social explorers and charity activists to depict the East End during the 'Outcast London' controversy of the 1880s has proven durable. The lurid accounts of slum conditions and human depravity presented in the period's journalism and pamphlet literature established the district as the quintessential Victorian slum. But local trade and manufacturing interests actively resisted this depiction, and were joined by social reformers uncomfortable with the sensationalized accounts of the district and its features. The latter offered other depictions of the East London urban landscape to recommend their own ameliorative measures. This article examines the deliberate effort undertaken by clergyman Samuel Barnett and novelist Walter Besant to directly challenge the prevailing mythology. Both presented the East End as a place of relentless toil pervaded by a 'dreary, weary monotony.' This alternative vision of the district and its problems was, nevertheless, carefully framed to elicit a response among 'West End' audiences. Barnett and Besant's rhetorical strategies in depicting the East End urban landscape highlight the discursive pragmatics of urban representation and reform in the late-Victorian metropolis.