Crime, poverty, vice, sexual transgression, drugs, class-conflict and multi-cultural encounters and fantasies involving Jews, Chinamen (and women) and Indian immigrants are major themes.
His godfather had a sail making business in Limehouse, and he based the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) on a public house still standing there.
[3] Arthur Morrison (1863–1945), a native East-Ender, wrote A Child of the Jago (1896) a fictional account of the extreme poverty encountered in the Old Nichol Street Rookery.
Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1898) was a notable detective story set in the East End, and was adapted for the screen three times.
Baron's The Lowlife (1963), set in Hackney, is dubbed as "a riotous, off-beat novel about gamblers, prostitutes and lay-abouts of London's East End".
[5] However, arguably the most famous novel documenting the Jewish existence in the East End is Journey Through a Small Planet (1972) by Emanuel Litvinoff.
The autobiographical novel contains a series of stories first broadcast on the radio in the 1960s, that document the young Litvinoff's experiences in the East End and those of his community.
As demonstrated above the area has been productive of much local writing talent, however, from the time Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray the idea of 'slumming it' in the 'forbidden' East End has held a fascination for a coterie of the literati.
A colder eye on contemporary gentrification of the area and the rise of the yuppie is cast by Penelope Lively in Passing On (1989) and City of the Mind (1991) and by P. D. James in Original Sin (1994).
[6][7] Brick Lane is set in Whitechapel and documents the life of a young Bangladeshi woman's experience of living in Tower Hamlets in the 1990s and early 2000s.
’TWAS August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look’d thrice dispirited;
I met a preacher there I knew, and said: ‘Ill and o’erwork’d, how fare you in this scene?’ ‘Bravely!’ said he; ‘for I of late have been Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.’