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Although Margaret Harkness’s novel In Darkest London (1889) primarily takes the reader through the most destitute slums of London, depicting the work of the Salvation Army with a focus on London’s East End, it also includes a “holiday” in Kent. As life and work amidst the squalor and sin in Whitechapel take a toll on Captain Lobe’s health, the protagonist eventually receives orders to accompany the London hop-pickers and recover in the Kentish countryside. The novel traces the hop-picking holiday, beginning with a four-hour journey that encompasses the train ride from London Bridge Station to a little village station in Kent followed by a five-mile walk to the hop gardens, and includes descriptions of the accommodation provided for the hop pickers, their workdays, and their pastimes. Unfortunately, no place names are mentioned in the novel, nor is anything known about Harkness’s connections to Kent.

For the thousands of hop-pickers from London, the seasonal work in Kent offers a welcome change and presents the closest thing they have to an actual holiday. In fact, the “young ’uns” often use the work as a mere pretext to enjoy themselves in the country, leaving it mostly to their parents to fill the bins. Many of them have never been outside of London, so the upcoming journey fills them with excitement. The first sight of the hop gardens brings astonishment and delight to the city dwellers, and the work under the open sky puts them in the best of spirits. While Captain Lobe observes how happily they laugh, sing, talk, and even refrain from scolding their children, he also realises with disappointment that the beauty of Kent’s nature, which has helped him find inner peace and hope, does not seem to have any positive influence on the morality of the London hop-pickers. Instead, after listening all day to their filthy songs and conversations about murder and seeing them drink all afternoon and all night at the village inn, he concludes that their low character becomes even more apparent than in the city:

“[T]heir faces looked to him more degraded than they did in the Whitechapel streets. Effects are produced by contrast. In the East End, where everything is hideous, these men and women seemed to fit in with their surroundings; but here, with nature, they appeared to him out of place, as if the devil had spat forth human beings to mar the beauty of nature, because he and his demoniacal crew could not bear to see this earth clothed with so much beauty” (161).

The sense that the seasonal workers do not belong there is reinforced by the behaviour of the local villagers, who took precautions prior to the nightly arrival of the hop-pickers in fear of theft and who set up their bins at a respectful distance, looking “askance at the scum of London” (160). Only the children briefly break the division between villagers and Londoners when some curious country children come to look at the Cockney infants lying between the rows of hops, only to find out that they look exactly like the country infants.

In addition to the generally rather negative perception of the Londoners by both the villagers and the Salvation Army Captain, the imagery Harkness uses to describe the hop-pickers in this context is also striking. Repeatedly referring to them as a “herd” of people and comparing them to livestock, the narrator places the London hop-pickers both literally and figuratively in an agricultural, rural environment and further accentuates the slum dwellers’ social devaluation. As the hop-pickers board the train from London to Kent, the narrator notes: “They are, in fact, cheaper to carry about than dumb beasts, for they can be packed closer together, and if one or two are suffocated on the journey no one claims damages.

The loss of a sheep is serious; but the death of a hop-picker matters to no one” (153). Building on the analogy between a herd of sheep and the group of hop-pickers as a seemingly indistinguishable mass without any individuality or agency, the narrator ultimately conveys social criticism of the treatment of the urban working class. Overall, the brief change of scenery from London’s East End to Kent’s countryside in Harkness’s In Darkest London further emphasises the social stigmatisation of the urban working class by contrasting the beauty and purity of nature with the perceived sinfulness of the city.

Bibliography

Harkness, Margaret. In Darkest London. Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2003.