Part of
TCCE London Winter Walking Weekend  

Walk Guide: Dr Nadia Valman, Queen Mary, University of London

Duration: about an hour and a half

To mark the 150^th anniversary of the birth of the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill, this walk will use his extraordinary novel, Children of the Ghetto as a guide to Whitechapel.

First published in 1892 to great acclaim, Zangwill’s novel was the first to reveal the complex subculture of Jewish immigrant life in the ‘ghetto’ of London’s East End.

Set in the dilapidated terraced houses and raucous street markets of the Victorian East End, the novel evokes a Whitechapel that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us today.

In this walk, we will discover traces of Zangwill’s ‘ghetto’ in the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields and explore how its political, religious and social life was documented in his witty prose.