Introduction

In 1869, Charles Dickens, like the urban missionaries of the period, voyeuristically foraged with a group of friends into the East End of London. Dickens's observations resulted in his short story, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which portrays a sample of the depravity and primitive ways of imperial subjects lurking in the ‘lascars’ den’. The work's remarkable impact is obvious. ‘The opium den in which Jasper indulges his habit and entertains dreams is a world unto itself, peopled by “Chinamen” and East Indian Lascars.’ This scene contains all the Victorian nightmares of dangerousness and of the irredeemable imperial Other. As such, opium addiction is the fault of vicious oriental hordes, bound by the exoticism of India and of the Orient. The exotic Occidental account of the dangerous Oriental detracts from more sober description. Fortunately, there is a quite different contemporaneous account of this same lascars’ den which treats the occupants simply as working people, conducting crimes of survival. Situated in Victorian Court, in Bluegate Gardens, the ‘den’ was one of several that the moral guardians of the Strangers Homes for Asiatics regularly attempted to close. Eliza (portrayed vicariously by Dickens) is the common law wife of a lascar, She speaks Hindi, is an expert on her craft, opium-smoking and furnishes what some would regard as a necessary service for stranded lascars.

Dickensian perceptions and scenes provide a link between domestic crime, a kind of psychic division, and the politics of empire, ‘psychologically, the indigenous connects with the empire-like repressions that characterizes the “criminal intellect” in all of us’. Similarly, late Victorian detective novelists, such as Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, captured the essence of ethnic proclivities and the challenges these heathens, posed to imperial identity.