The Bitter Cry of Outcast London

Abstract

In the autumn of 1883 a small, anonymous penny pamphlet bearing the provocative titleThe Bitter Cry of Outcast Londonappeared in the London bookstores. Its impact was so immediate and cataclysmic that it must be considered one of the great pieces of Victorian reform literature. According to contemporary opinion the pamphlet provoked an “immense interest” in and “drew attention universally to the subject” of the dwellings of the working classes, and by the winter of 1883 it was unanimously agreed that urban slum conditions had “assumed the dimensions of a primary question” and had become “the subject of the day”. Alfred Spender, the editor of theWestminster Gazette, stated in 1913 that it was almost impossible to recapture “the sensation which such a pamphlet as ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ made when it was first produced”. Suddenly, almost overnight, it seemed, England awoke to the grim facts of the slums. “The revelations concerning ‘Outcast London’”, commentedReynolds Newspaper, “cause a tremendous sensation and thrill of horror through the land…” In January 1884 thePall Mall Gazettewrote thatThe Bitter Cryhad been echoing from one end of England to the other, and commented, ”We shall have to go back a long time to discover an agitation on any social question in England which has produced so prompt, so wide-spread, and, as we believe, so enduring an effect.” Two years after its publication it was reported thatThe Bitter Cry“rang through the length and breadth of the land. It touched the hearts of tens of thousands, and awoke deep feelings of indignation, pain, and sympathy in every direction.”

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