Marc Brodie's primary goal in The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London, 1885–1914 is to complicate our understanding of the politics of the East End in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in this he succeeds admirably. Brodie argues that the image of the East End found in many historical works differs little from the simplistic view of a massive, undifferentiated urban slum that was created in the days of “outcast London” in the nineteenth century. In contrast to this view, Brodie demonstrates that the socioeconomic situation in the East End was more diverse than is usually allowed, showing that there were significant numbers of skilled workers and even professionals residing in the area. Casually employed manual workers made up only a small percentage of the East End's working population.

The main target of Brodie's revisionism, however, is the notion of an “East End Conservatism” that has been put forth by a number of historians of the area. While it is true that four central East End constituencies (Limehouse, Mile End, St. George’s-in-the-East, and Stepney) regularly returned Conservative MPs in the period examined by Brodie, he points out that in the other seven constituencies in the East End the Conservatives performed rather poorly compared to similar districts elsewhere in London. The main focus of Brodie's analysis is on those four seats that were predominantly Conservative, and he vigorously disputes the conventional explanation for Conservative success—that the poorer residents of the East End were attracted to the Conservative Party due to a combination of protectionist impulses, imperial jingoism, and anti-Jewish xenophobia.

The title of the book is somewhat misleading, as one of Brodie's main points is that East End politics was not “of the poor” at all. In addition to demonstrating that many East End constituencies, particularly those where the Conservatives were successful, had a large number of more prosperous voters, he also shows that these voters often dominated the electoral rolls. The poorest residents of the East End were significantly underrepresented. Thus Brodie aims to explain the voting behavior of these more prosperous East Enders and argues that East End politics cannot be understood through a focus on the major political issues of the day. Instead he examines how these issues were filtered through very specific local attitudes and concerns. He argues that it was the “personal” that was most important in shaping political behavior, a concept that for Brodie somewhat clumsily includes both the local factors that influenced political attitudes and the importance of individual character in working-class evaluations of political figures. Brodie argues that the local view of a candidate's character could be decisive and believes that historians need to pay more attention to issues such as religious affiliation and the role of women (as the purveyors of neighborhood gossip) in influencing voting patterns.

The greatest strength of Brodie's work lies in his ability to show how specific local conditions influenced electoral behavior. For example, Brodie examines the case of Millwall, an area dominated by unionized dock workers that regularly elected Conservatives in this period. Brodie argues that this can be explained by the nature of employer-employee relations in the Millwall docks, which were generally cooperative. In addition, the paternalist employers of the area often provided a social outlet for the residents of what was a relatively isolated section of the East End. These very specific local factors, Brodie argues, helped produce the seemingly paradoxical Conservatism of the area. Perhaps the most startling example of his localized revisionism is the argument that the strong Conservative vote in districts with a large number of Jewish immigrants, such as St. George’s, was not dramatically helped by anti-alien sentiment. While such sentiment did exist, Brodie argues that it was actually the support of a significant section of the Jewish community that was more important to Conservative success. This was due to the local influence of wealthy members of the Jewish community over those who had the vote and was also helped by the fact that the Conservatives often ran Jewish candidates in these East End seats.

Brodie's arguments are based on painstaking research into electoral rolls, housing patterns, and a close scrutiny of specific electoral contests. Through a careful examination of his sources Brodie is able to pinpoint groups of voters and the specific local issues that influenced them. Brodie does not seek to replace any of the previous explanations of East End politics with a new totalizing model and, in fact, argues that no such model is possible. Instead Brodie argues that East End politics, and indeed urban working-class politics in general, can only be understood though an examination of very localized factors such as residential patterns and workplace structures. Brodie's reluctance to offer a new model is understandable, given how effectively he has undermined the previously favored explanations for Conservative success in the East End. However, some discussion of the larger theoretical implications of his work would have been welcome, for if it is impossible to generalize beyond the narrow confines of specific neighborhoods, where does that leave the historian attempting to identify larger trends or patterns in working-class political behavior?