Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London’s East End by Heidi Kaufman (review)

Reviewed by: Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End by Heidi Kaufman Keith Wilson (bio) Strangers in the Archive: Literary Evidence and London's East End by Heidi Kaufman; pp. xvi + 221. U of Virginia P, 2022. $60.95 cloth. IN HER approach to recovering and contextualizing Fiction without Romance, or The Locket-Watch (1830), the only novel known to have been written by Maria Polack, the first English Jew identifying as Jewish to publish a novel, Heidi Kaufman set herself two primary tasks. The first was to track down all that she could discover about Polack's life, work, and environmental influences, a task to which the archival, the quasi-archival, the anecdotal, and the serendipitous all made their contributions. The second was to use what she discovered to both theorize and politicize the unique status of archives as spaces "whose boundaries, provenance, infrastructure, and selected/saved content work to recover, shape, and sometimes silence East End voices," and, by extension, the voices of other marginalized groups. This necessitates reading absences as much as presences, exclusions as much as inclusions—in short, adducing as evidence, albeit of a very speculative kind, what cannot be found in archives as well as what can. In the first part of that mission, she succeeds admirably. While her research has brought to light little substantive new information about Polack, it leaves the grounds for our relative ignorance of her on clearer view. Through assiduous work in the London Metropolitan Archives and allied resources, and the good fortune that the British Library copy of Fiction without Romance retains its printed subscription list, Kaufman has been able to assemble surprisingly detailed information about Polack's probable social networks, from which she establishes plausible connections in not only London's East End but also [End Page 166] London (and England) more widely, Ireland, and, particularly fruitfully, the West Indies. While this does not lead to one of the main ends for which Kaufman came to hope—discovery of a firmer association between Polack and her contemporary Emma Lyon, the Jewish poet—it does lead, via the most serendipitous element in her researches, to a diary kept intermittently in London, Barbados, and Jamaica by one of Emma Lyon's brothers, Abraham Septimus Lyon. Thanks to Kaufman's energy and diplomacy, the Lyon Archive (including a digital copy of the diary) and the Polack Archive (including a digital copy of Fiction without Romance) now form the core of the East End Digital Library (eastendarchives.net). Some of the Kaufman-created ancillary materials in this archive seem, to this reviewer at least, to have more questionable claims on our attention. For example, "student exhibit essays, and a soundscapes map that imagines what A.S. Lyon might have heard on his daily journeys from the East End to the West End of London" (89) seem to have less to do with illuminating A.S. Lyon's diary or Kaufman's findings than with advancing the increased institutional imperative to involve undergraduates in research. But these reservations notwithstanding, Kaufman has provided a valuable service to historians and literary scholars, in a range of areas, in constructing this digital archive. The conclusions Kaufman comes to from long immersion in these materials are somewhat less satisfying than her revelation of their existence. One argumentative hare started by the presence on the subscription list of names with West Indian connections raises the taint of Polack family implication in slavery—without question a discovery worth pursuing. But if that pursuit leads only to the claim that five people out of a subscription list of 147 owned slaves, while two more participated in West Indian slave economies (when, arguably, anyone in Britain who, for example, ate sugar or drank rum was participating in West Indian slave economies), is that in itself sufficient to support the conclusion that "the system of slavery [drives] the novel's funding and marketing strategies" (68)? Special pleading advances from mere unwise hyperbole to absurdity in an accompanying endnote: While the novel does not directly mention Atlantic slavery, it does still include metaphoric references to the institution of slavery. For example, characters mention being "enslaved by ideas." In...

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