The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London, 1885-1914.(Book review)

Historian, The, December, 2005 by Steffel, Vladimir

The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885-1914. By Marc Brodie. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 240. $95.00.)

The author of this study has returned to the nettlesome question of why East End Londoners tended to return Conservatives to Parliament. Marc Brodie reviews the central theses of Stedman Jones, Paul Thompson, and Henry Pelling, who argue that poverty made East Enders apathetic, anti-immigrant, and jingoist. Using the West End protectionist riots of 1886 as a case study, Brodie attempts to show that socioeconomic circumstances did not always correlate with political action.

After analyzing and comparing the Booth Papers and election registers, Brodie concludes that the "generally poorer occupational groups were not...

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