In the last years of the nineteenth century, the social reformer Charles Booth set out to create a record of working-class life in Victorian London. “Life and Labour of the People in London,” as this undertaking was called, took nearly two decades to complete and ran to seventeen dense volumes. Central to the project was a poverty map that depicted the city’s wealth on a street-by-street level, from “Lowest Class.
Vicious, semi-criminal,” up through “Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings,” all the way to “Upper-middle and upper classes. Wealthy.
” The map was color-coded; each rank was assigned a different shade. In the North London neighborhood of Islington, the colors run up against one another. Deep blue (“Poor”) bleeds into pink (“Fairly comfortable”), and red (“Well-to-do”): the rich and poor living side by side.
If one were to lay Booth’s 1898-9 map over present-day Islington, it would not look too dissimilar. Home to wealthy intellectuals, writers, and liberal politicians—“champagne socialists,” if we’re generalizing—the borough also has one of the highest proportions of social housing residents in the capital. Walking through the area, the disparity is obvious; it is not unusual to encounter a large housing project near an immaculate garden square, bordered by rows of expensive terraced houses.
One such house—floor-to-ceiling sash windows; Aga range in the kitchen—belongs to Campbell Flynn, the doomed protagonist.
