Amid growing concerns about the living conditions of the urban poor in the late nineteenth century, impoverished areas like London’s East End became focal points for philanthropists, social investigators, sensational journalists, novelists, and so-called slummers, who ventured into the depths of destitution and shared their experiences in the form of diaries, maps, sociological studies, newspaper reports, novels, or short fiction. Although they often blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, together they constructed the public image of the Victorian slum as a place of economic, cultural, religious, and moral darkness. Against the backdrop of British imperial expansion and the increasing popularity of travel writing, works such as George R. Sims’s How the Poor Live (1883) and William Booth’s In Darkest England (1890) emphasise pressing social problems in the heart of the British Empire by presenting the Victorian slum analogously to accounts of colonial exploration on the African continent as an uncivilised, largely unknown territory within the metropolis that requires intervention. Highlighting the intersection of urban poverty and imperial ideology, this chapter explores middle-class representations of London’s slums as bleak places of destitution and vice, inhabited by a primitive ‘Other’.