infamous Arkell map with the accompanying book

The first American edition of The Jew in London. The first British edition was published in London in the previous year.

The infamous Arkell map of the Jewish population in the East End of London with the accompanying book by Charles Russell and Harry Samuel Lewis. George Edward Arkell (1857-1926) was the cartographer responsible for the production of Charles Booth's famous poverty maps of London, which were used as the basis for the map offered here, originally produced in 1899. This map may be held up as an example of misleading statistical cartography: there is little doubt that the mapmaker made an effort to emphasise the 'problem' of recent Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe.

Fleeing the resurgence of pogroms in eastern Europe and the Tsarist persecution in Russia, many Jews had arrived in London in the second half of the 19th century. At that time Britain had no restrictions on immigration and estimates suggest that by 1900 the Jewish population of London's East End had risen to 135,000. In 1905 the Aliens Act was passed, designed specifically to halt Jewish immigration. The dark blue colour on the map indicates an area with a concentration of 95-100% of Jewish population; Arkell used the same dark blue colour in Charles Booth's 'London poverty maps' for areas of 'vicious, semi-criminal poverty.' This implicitly overstates the social and economic condition of the Jewish residents: in the third series of Booth's poverty maps, published just a year later, those same streets shown here with the highest density of Jews were marked as 'poverty and comfort mixed' - the middle level of Booth's categories ranging from 'wealthy' to 'lowest class' (Bryars & Harper, p.25).

Arkell's map may have 'fuelled the racism that led to the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at reducing Jewish immigration to a trickle. In fact, at the time the overall Jewish presence in Stepney was only 18% and it never seems to have exceeded that percentage' (Barber).

First American edition; large chromolithographic map titled 'Jewish East London', hardbacked and framed, map size: 43.5 x 60 cm; framed size: 63.5 x 80 cm; book: 8vo, (19 x 12.5 cm); publisher's blue cloth boards with gilt title to spine, edges slightly rubbed, some marginal chips, light worming and browning to page edges, not affecting text; half-title, title, vii-xlv, [3], A, 2-238 pp.

Barber (London: A History in Maps, 2012), p.236; Bryars & Harper (A History of the 20th Century in 100 Maps, 2014), pp. 22-25.