The People of the Abyss

[Brenda]

Harry,
Your body was able to reject it because you had other, more comfortable, options for sleeping. If draping over a rope were your only option, it might seem like a comfortable one. Certainly it is not an old wives' tale if reports of it were written in newspapers of the time?

[harry]

If the position was so comfortable,as someone has remarked,then perhaps the thousands of homeless sleeping rough,should be given an introduction to the method.Now I have fallen asleep draped over the back of a chair,but not for long,just a few minutes before the body adjusts and rejects the unnatural situation,as it would if a rope were used.It's an old wife's tale.It's a wonder Jack London didn't invent a giant clothes peg,to peg them in position.I'll believe it if I ever see it.

[Natalie Severn]

History is made of primary sources, without primary sources, its guesswork. According to Natalie's logic, some primary sources can be dismissed because they were recorded by middle class people.Without Mayhew we would not hear their voices, these anonoymous working class people deserved to be heard.Their experience, taken together present a reality.
Mayhew is not difficult to read, its a dip in, not a cover to cover.
By Natalie's reasoning, in a hundred years time, voices of holocaust victims would be considered suspect, and the only version of truth would be of a historian in a hundred years time.
Miss Marple

Primary Sources can be the recordings of perceptions by outsiders---which those quoted were.They were outsiders by birth and privilege.Ofcourse they would have been horrified at what they saw having been brought up to expect much more by way of material needs.
Professor William Fishman is the son of an immigrant Jewish Taylor brought up by those who lived in the East End during the Victorian and Edwardian period.He is 86 years old.He is visiting professor of the University of the East End,Queen Mary"s College,Mile End and Fishman NEVER relies on just ONE primary source but several,which is how history is required to be taught in UK schools and has been since the late 1980"s.You need to constantly cross reference[otherwise we would have only one version of the Battle of Hastings----the victors whereas ,today quotes have been found by Anglo Saxon monks that give a very different version of events.
Among Fishman"s "primary sources" are "Arbeter Fraint" as well as about 60 other Articles sources and diaries
His work uses accounts of the Jewish radical socialist and Libertarian movement as well as the conventional press and other local records at Toynbee Hall which is rich beyond belief in archived materials----weekly minutes of meetings held by working men in their big hall etc etc .

And no,Miss Marple,I would never distort what happened in the Holocaust.
Cheers
Norma

[miss marple]

primary sources

History is made of primary sources, without primary sources, its guesswork. According to Natalie's logic, some primary sources can be dismissed because they were recorded by middle class people.Without Mayhew we would not hear their voices, these anonoymous working class people deserved to be heard.Their experience, taken together present a reality.
Mayhew is not difficult to read, its a dip in, not a cover to cover.
By Natalie's reasoning, in a hundred years time, voices of holocaust victims would be considered suspect, and the only version of truth would be of a historian in a hundred years time.
Miss Marple

[Robert]

The Penny Press, Minneapolis, Dec 21st 1895 and The St Louis Globe-Democrat, Nov 14th 1886.

[Sam Flynn]

Philip, I say both,because the feat is impossible. I have yet to hear of anyone that has accomplished it.

... you obviously haven't seen commuters snoozing on their feet whilst holding onto a rope or a rail in a subway train. The practice of "sleeping on/over the rope" in doss-houses is attested-to several times by independent authors.

[smezenen]

Yes Harry it is possible to sleep standing with your upper torso draped over a rope it can also be done in a sitting position this is the more prefered method and is actually quite comfortable. I have fallen asleep in that position many times when i was assigned as an airborne soldier and awaiting a jump from a crowded aircraft.

[John Bennett]

George Orwell, from Down and Out in Paris and London:

"The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was more comfortable than it sounded - at any rate, better than bare floor. There are similar shelters in Paris, but the charge there is only twenty-five centimes (a halfpenny) instead of twopence."

[John Bennett]

But hey---Harry says more in a phrase than any of us------in short "Were you there?"

No.

Jack London was. And Charles Booth & his assistants. Frederick CHarrington. And Henry Mayhew. And plenty of others were there too.

Not meaning to put down their superb works, but Jerry White, William Fishman, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Wright most certainly weren't.


That of course, doesn't mean to say they don't know what they're talking about.

[George Hutchinson]

Hi Harry.

With all due respect, you are using subjective opinion as historical revisionism.

PHILIP

[Natalie Severn]

Dear Chris George,
It is too easy,in my opinion,to cite Jack London and Booth as the most reliable source material on the East End in Victorian times-1888 etc.They were both remarkable and compelling chroniclers and Booth especially has left us a clear account of the dire poverty a third of the East End faced at that time.
But there have been many more people who are acknowledged experts and academics researchers into those times such as Professor Jerry White,[Rothschild Buildings,Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920], Iain Sinclair, [London: City of Disappearances/ White Chappell,Scarlet Tracings] ,Patrick Wright,[A Journey Through ruins,The Last Days of London ].
These writers have at various times and in various books questioned Jack London"s emphasis on the "pervasive" horror of it all ,noting that though he and Booth may have lived among the poor of Whitechapel in Victorian times they were both essentially middle class Victorian male "outsiders" whose writing was from a specific experience as "observers" whose own internal perspective had been coloured by their nurture ie the aspirations and desires of their own class.This is even ,as may be the case with Jack London,the writer rejects his own class and its comforts to write on the East End from an "inside" as HE experiences it, and even if,as Jack London does ,he writes with compassion and imaginative empathetic understanding.Booth was certainly objective,in reporting his statistics, but he did not speak of the dialectics that were in operation within the largely Jewish /Irish communities whose level of income/poverty he recorded.
A read through "East End 1888" and" East End Jewish Radicals"by William Fishman,quoting from various historical political accounts in the radical press as well as conventional press sources,reveals another side to the story which tells of the vitality, collective enterprise and the immense,informal support networks among many ordinary men and women without which many more would have died of starvation.Much was being done by East Enders themselves to try to change things as well as philanthropists such as the Rothschilds being engaged in huge slum clearance and new building works, which began prior to 1888.

But hey---Harry says more in a phrase than any of us------in short "Were you there?"

[harry]

Philip,
I say both,because the feat is impossible.I have yet to hear of anyone that has accomplished it.
Miss Marple,
As my grandfather was born in the mid 1860's,and his life and mine overlapped by nearly 30 years,and my father and mother were born before the turn of the twentieth century,as were many aunts and uncles,I do not need to read authors of that time,to get a fair idea of what it was like.Have you seen anyone standing sleeping,draped over a rope?

[miss marple]

The sleeping on a rope is true, Harry, not fiction. It was an alternative, if you lacked the fourpence for a bed.
I would suggest, that you do some background history reading on conditions in Victorian London. All newbys should at least have Henry Mayhew as a background reference, first hand reportage of the life of the working class and criminal underworld. 1860s plus of course Jack London and Charles Booth.All of which are contemporary accounts.
Miss Marple

[George Hutchinson]

^ Harry - care to expand? Your post is ambiguous. Are you saying it is almost too hard to believe, or that you actually do NOT believe it?

PHILIP

[harry]

When a person writes of individuals standing sleeping on a rope stretched across a room,it seems more a case of fiction than fact.