Kaufman, Heidi. Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End. Victorian Literature and Culture Series. Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0813-94737-2.
Reviewed by DaQuon Wilson
Heidi Kaufman opens her book Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End with an excerpt detailing the discovery of the mutilated body of a woman murdered by Jack the Ripper. This scene, Kaufman argues, defines how London’s East End is represented in popular media. Dominant narratives of the East End imagine the area as rife with poverty, depravity, and foreign danger. These reductive narratives, often written by outside onlookers, obscure the voices and perspectives of residents from the East End. Despite periodicals depicting the East End as a site of danger and complete abjection, a narrative that has long endured, Kaufman finds that the East End has been the site of a rich intellectual community. Kaufman traces the construction and evolution of the East End identity and highlights the voices of “insiders” whose stories challenge the stereotypical imagination of East Enders (p. 5). She argues that narratives by outsiders who visited the East End, such as those written by Pierce Egan or Charles Dickens, privilege “imagined objectivity” and “effectively [bury] other perspectives of East End identities through … [their] endorsement of racist stereotyping” (p. 31). Using a wealth of archival resources, Kaufman demonstrates how “the East End’s identity emerged in this period through voices of dissent, dissonance, and resistance” (p. 5).
The text is largely a recounted narrative of Kaufman’s work in the archives. Her interest in the nineteenth-century Jewish East End emerged from her research on Maria Polack—cited by Anglo-Jewish literature scholar Cecil Roth as the first Anglo-Jewish woman to publish a novel (p. 2). Despite this achievement, there are few extant archival materials on Polack’s work and life. Kaufman discusses the possible reasons for this, including the values of institutions and archivists, and historical factors such as the destruction of Polack’s synagogue during the Blitz (p. 16). After encountering a strange copy of Polack’s 1830 novel Fiction without Romance, or The Locket-Watch at the British Library, Kaufman went looking for other archival materials that might provide insight into the context of the intellectual and cultural life of London’s East End that surrounded and influenced Polack. By examining the subscription list included with Polack’s manuscript, Kaufman was able to map Polack’s larger social network. This network shows that support for Polack’s novel was not limited to just the East End. Instead, Polack’s influence reached as far as Jamaica. Kaufman argues that these subscriber lists from East End Jewish writers like Polack—and from Emma Lyon, who was “the first self-identified Jewish person to publish a book of poetry” (p. 83)—challenge notions of the East End being isolated and demonstrate how the East End is intertwined with globalized networks. Kaufman uses these two “Anglo-Jewish literary firsts” (p. 83), among other Jewish writers from the East End, to illustrate the broader cultural context of literary activity in the Jewish East End.
Because Lyon and other members of her family could be found on Polack’s subscription list, Kaufman searched for connections between the two writers to better understand Polack’s intellectual and artistic community. A chance encounter with a descendant of the Lyon family led to Kaufman getting access to and digitizing the diary of A. S. Lyon, brother of Emma. Kaufman thus uses Emma Lyon to think further about what is missing from Polack’s archive. While the subscriber list shows Polack’s geographical relationships, it misses the affective registers of her life. Kaufman writes, “[A. S. Lyon’s] entries evoke the missing story of how Polack came to see herself as an individual with a past and future” (p. 124). Lyon’s diary served not only as “a window into East End cultural activities” but also as a way for Kaufman to speculate what she “might have learned about Polack had one of her diaries have been saved” (p. 96). Kaufman’s engagement with Lyon illustrates how scholars can listen to what stories are told by the archive while addressing which stories are missing or excluded. Kaufman pushes scholars to go beyond their intended research subjects and examine the broader community that these subjects were engaging with and responding to.
The strength of Kaufman’s work comes from her engagement with the archives, evident through her treatment of both individual archival materials, as well as archival theory. Kaufman draws on theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Jacques Derrida to theorize how the archive as an institution creates silences while producing stories. Kaufman structures her narrative by pairing critical analysis with glimpses into her archival research process. These peeks behind the curtain provide a level of transparency that characterizes Kaufman’s archival approach. Kaufman employs the image of a bull’s-eye lantern, particularly French illustrator Gustave Doré’s “The Bull’s-eye” (1872), as a metaphor for the traditional approach to archival research. In the image a policeman shines a light on what he deems important “while the rest of the East End is cast in darkness” (p. 2). Like many researchers, Kaufman went into the archive with questions that narrowed her focus. However, in doing so, Kaufman’s focus obscured anything else the archive could offer. Kaufman writes, “The questions for which I sought answers were coming from my bullseye lantern and not from the extant papers or the archival structures that shaped them” (p. 11). While Kaufman was unsuccessful in creating a comprehensive account of Polack’s life, Kaufman’s work suggests that scholars do not always need to limit their scope to creating a single, complete narrative. A common struggle many scholars face when doing archival research, especially about marginalized communities, is a lack of recorded or surviving evidence. However, “[r]ather than see that fact as a limit or end to questioning,” scholars should engage with and theorize these “archival silences and gaps” with an attentiveness to how the form and history of an archive can distort or obscure truths (p. 89). By weaving together fragmented material from the archives of Polack and her community, Kaufman was able to outline a rich intellectual network in the East End that challenges dominant narratives about its residents. As such, Kaufman abandons the story her “outsider” perspective wants and instead begins to tell a story that can only be found inside the archives.
Kaufman challenges stereotypical narratives about London’s East End and provides an insightful addition to the historiography of Jewish life in the Victorian era. Her balance of analysis and storytelling is engaging and makes the text accessible to non-Victorianists. Kaufman’s work could be helpful as a pedagogical tool for archival research methods courses. Strangers in the Archives would therefore be of interest to scholars of the Jewish East End and those who conduct archival research on marginalized communities. Her method of reading the archive “as a kind of fiction” challenges scholars who conduct archival research to consider how narratives formed by archival materials both “hide and preserve truths” (p. 163). Additionally, Kaufman’s framing of her own challenges in the archive can inspire other researchers of marginalized communities to employ her approach—to read the archive through absence and consider how our position as “strangers in the archive” obscures the broader world of the subjects we study.
DaQuon Wilson is a PhD student in the Department of English at Rice University. Their research explores themes of memory, access, and futurity in Black children’s literature and the construction of Black childhood in the archives.
Cover image: From the Archive of the British Library, Shelfmark P.P.7611 volume 93
This review was solicited by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. A review copy of Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022) was provided by the publisher.