The bad old East End

‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L. P. Hartley’s famous opening is used by Gilda O’Neill as an epigraph to her delightful foray through 19th-century murder and mayhem, but in truth, as she shows in The Good Old Days, the past is our native country. Things were not different then: they were exactly the same. Mass murder has not disappeared; nor has the sale of women and children for sex; nor has robbery, nor street crime, nor mindless violence.

The East End of London is O’Neill’s real focus, and she writes of it with the passion and understanding of an insider. She was born there, as were her parents, themselves the children of Victorian East Enders, with a great-grandmother working in the Whitechapel music halls. Her father still spoke East End cant, yet the world he was born into was already receding as O’Neill was a child. She could not understand how so many generations could have lived in the tiny terraced house he spoke of. They couldn’t all have fitted in there, surely? ‘ “Course we didn’t, daft,” was my father’s reply. “We had the Harrises living upstairs.” ’

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To recapture this world, to pin it down before it vanishes from living memory, she has mixed the stories of her family with assiduous research in local newspapers and contemporary reports. Her reach is wide. At one end of the spectrum is Spring-heeled Jack, an early 19th-century bogeyman, with eyes that glowed fire, breath that licked out flames, metal claws for hands and the eponymous springs that enabled him to leap over fences higher than a man’s head. At the other end is the all too real Jack the Ripper. O’Neill is especially good at describing the blighted lives of his victims, the desperate alcoholic women who had nothing to sell but themselves, itemising the entire contents of Polly Nichols’ pockets on the night of her murder: a comb, a handkerchief, and a broken piece of looking-glass.