‘Whitechapel.’ This word is always associated with the idea of incredible squalor and incredible suffering – the total antithesis of the lavishly wealthy West End of London. One need only mention Whitechapel and scenes of astonishing mental torpor and savagery sketched by Taine, Louis Blanc and others appear before the mind's eye. These scenes are very popular in Russia. Whenever one of our compatriots finds himself in London, he immediately inquires how to make his way to Whitechapel. He expects to see those ‘white savages’ about whom the German economist reported such horrific facts. ‘Their degree of culture may be seen from the following dialogues’, the above-mentioned author wrote: ‘Jeremiah Haynes, a boy aged twelve, asserted that four times four is eight. The king, in his words, is him, that has all the money and gold. Told we have a king, and that king is a queen, and that they call him the Princess Alexandra. Told that she married the King's son. A Princess is a man.’ A thirteen-year-old boy explained: ‘I don't live in England. Think it is a country, but didn't know before’. John Morris, age fourteen, explained: ‘Have heard say that God made the world, and that all the people was drownded but one; heard say that one was a little bird.’ A girl aged ten, who said instead of ‘God – Dog’, had an idiosyncratic notion of the devil: ‘The devil is a good person. I don't know where he lives’, and so on. So when they get to Whitechapel, our compatriots are liable to be slightly disappointed. It is not what they expected. They overlook the fact that Marx collected his evidence about forty years ago, and since then certain changes have taken place. Let us start with the fact that in 1841–48, 32.6% of the men and 48.9% of the women in England signed the marriage register with a cross due to illiteracy. In 1840, 40% of Londoners were illiterate, while in 1896 only 1½% were. In 1850, there were only 1844 schools in the whole of England, with 197,578 pupils, whereas in 1896, there were over six million pupils.