9
The London Poor

My time in London was nearly over, and I was filled with panic at the idea of leaving without learning everything I could. Each new piece of information led to another, and the more I was finding out, the more I wanted to know.

The day after the visit to the Guildhall Library I asked the hotel for a wake-up call. By seven o’clock I was on the Tube with the other early risers, on my way to Aldgate East and Christ Church Spitalfields. According to the Mormon website, Wiseman had married there in 1799. He was twenty-one. His bride was Jane Middleton, age unknown, described as ‘a spinster of the parish of Stepney Spitalfields Christ Church London’. That entry might not be accurate, but in the absence of other information—and the time to find it— I was going to act as though it was.

Christ Church Spitalfields was on page 87 of my now dog-eared London A to Z. Whitechapel Road, familiar from the Monopoly board of my childhood, was around the corner. The church was made of white limestone, the blurred creamy stone piled up in blocks and arches and columns, a child’s building-block tower. Inside, gloomy grandeur; columns going up and up and vanishing into a high dimness. A splendid marble floor. Altar steps broad and gracious. Everything on a palatial scale.

I’d done some reading in my guidebook about Spitalfields. When the Wisemans wed there (if they did), it was the centre of the highly skilled silk-weaving trade, and was relatively affluent. Marriage to Jane Middleton might have been a small step up in the world for Wiseman, as the family story suggested. Perhaps it wasn’t a love match, but a cold-blooded bit of self-improvement.

It might make sense of a wife being pushed down the stairs thirty years later.

In the year 2000 it looked as though prosperity had come and gone in Spitalfields several times. In some streets it was on its way back. Narrow old houses with wooden shutters and many-paned windows were being gentrified, front doors gleaming with fresh paint.

But in other streets there were glimpses of squalor. Crooked cobbled alleys where the light from the sky didn’t reach the ground. The slots of houses all pushed together. How cold the light must be in their small mean rooms. Everywhere I looked I saw windows mended with cardboard, piles of rubbish, black fibrous muck heaped against walls.

This wasn’t tourist territory. These poky streets were jammed with trucks loading and unloading, Indian men standing outside shops, teenage boys slim in tunic and pants trotting along the footpaths with clothes on hangers. Where workers once went blind weaving silk, the sweatshops of the garment trade now churned out cheap clothes for the markets in Brick Lane.

I was feeling conspicuous. Men in doorways wearing Nehru jackets and Astrakhan caps stared. A boy pulling a rack of gaudy dresses across the road watched me all the way to the other side, his head turning so he wouldn’t lose sight of me. Was I the only woman out on the street?