An exciting work of research that is partly a story of the investigative process itself, Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End by Heidi Kaufman both documents and theorizes the tension between insider and outsider status in Victorian depictions of the East End. Kaufman documents archival materials offering traces of what the East Enders themselves thought and wrote about their neighborhoods as insiders within their community but marginalized by ethnicity, class, gender, education, religion, and civic liberties. Their accounts offer glaring contrasts to the more canonical, readily available, and largely negative representations of the East End by well-known figures such as Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, who are outsiders in the East End community, but much better connected to the privileges of mainstream English culture according to the same categories. After first presenting the construction of our still pervasive but stereotyped and incomplete notions of the East...
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