Mean Streets

This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city...a shocking place...an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on...gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.

-Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets

The East End of London was, in Victorian England, a place