SOURCE: "Ethnography in the East End: Native Customs and Colonial Solutions in 'A Child of the Jago,'" in English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920, Vol. 37, No. 4, 1994, pp. 490-501.

In the following essay, Kijinski explicates the connection between London's nineteenth-century poor and native peoples of Africa in the time of colonization and the anxiety both groups produced in the English upper classes because of their foreigness and "degradation."

One sign of the anxiety that many British citizens felt at the end of the nineteenth century about England's future position as an imperial power was the widely shared concern over how poverty and urban living conditions were debilitating the working classes. Recruiting problems during the Boer War had been unnerving: an alarmingly large number of working-class recruits were found to be unfit for service. In 1904, an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was established to investigate this problem. The question had...