East End in Fact and Fiction
We will think about how imaginative fiction and historical fact intertwine to create local legend.
Who is this course for?
For informal learners with curiosity and an appetite for reading and for sharing your insights. No previous skills or knowledge required.
What can I expect?
Teaching will be delivered as a lecture followed by interactive discussions. Participants are strongly encouraged to present their own works on any of the fictions or subjects that are of interest.
Practical information
Participants will need a pen and paper or a laptop for taking notes. Participants are encouraged to read the texts discussed. Extracts will be suggested if there is no time to complete an entire book. Most of the books can be purchased relatively inexpensively or borrowed from a public library.
Among the authors we will take as our tour guides are Charles Dickens, GWM Reynolds (author of the best-selling ‘Mysteries of London’), Walter Besant, Margaret Harkness, George Gissing, Israel Zangwill, Henry Wood Nevinson, Arthur Morrison, LT Meade and Thomas Burke.
We will read extracts from these works and set their artistic visions of the East End alongside the historical processes that were taking place across a tumultuous 100 years of change. Using maps and images, we’ll explore areas including Stepney, Poplar, Shoreditch, Limehouse, Wapping and Bethnal Green.
Very detailed with excellent booklist. It has improved my knowledge of London in every aspect.
Need to Know
You will learn
- The key authors and works associated with the East End
- How works of fiction have contributed to the image of the East End over time
- The social and economic historical background to each work of fiction.
Meet the Tutor
Sarah Wise
Sarah Wise teaches 19th-century social history and literature to undergraduates and adult learners and is visiting professor at the University of California’s London Study Center. Her debut, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. It was the inspiration for Sky’s The Frankenstein Chronicles.
Her follow-up, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum, was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, and was the basis for the BBC’s series The Victorian Slum. Her most recent book, Inconvenient People, was shortlisted for the 2014 Wellcome Prize.
She contributed a chapter to ‘Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps’ -- the best-selling illustrated book by Thames & Hudson/London School of Economics. Her TV work includes providing background material for BBC1’s ‘Secret History of Our Streets’, and BBC2’s ‘The Victorian Slum’, and she has twice been the history expert on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Most recently she appeared on Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time’, speaking about the work of Charles Booth.
Dates and Times
East End in Fact and Fiction
, 4:32
