CHAPTER VI.
The difficulty of getting that element of picturesqueness into these chapters which is so essential to success with a large class of English readers becomes more and more apparent as I and my travelling companion explore region after region where the poor are hidden away to live as best they can. There is a monotony in the surroundings which became painfully apparent to us, and were our purpose less earnest than it is, we might well pause dismayed at the task we have undertaken.
The Mint and the Borough present scenes awful enough in all conscience to be worthy of earnest study; but scene after scene is the same. Rags, dirt, filth, wretchedness, the same figures, the same faces, the same old story of one room unfit for habitation yet inhabited by eight or nine people, the same complaint of a ruinous rent absorbing three-fourths of the toiler's weekly wage, the same shameful neglect by the owner of the property of all sanitary precautions, rotten floors, oozing walls, broken windows, crazy staircases, tileless roofs, and in and around the dwelling-place of hundreds of honest citizens the nameless abominations which could only be set forth were we contributing to the Lancet instead of writing a book—these are the things which confront us, whether we turn to the right or to the left, whether we linger in the Mint or seek fresh fields in the slums that lie round Holborn, or wind our adventurous footsteps towards the network of dens that lie within a stone's throw of our great National Theatre, Drury Lane.
The story of one slum is the story of another, and all are unrelieved by the smallest patch of that colour which lends a charm to pictures of our poorest peasantry. God made the country, they say, and man made the town; and wretched as is the lot of the agricultural labourer, the handiwork of Heaven still remains to give some relief to the surroundings of his miserable life. Field and tree and flower, the green of the meadow and the hedge, the gold and white of buttercup and daisy, the bright hues of the wild cottage garden—it is in the midst of these the pigsties of the rustic poor are pitched, and there is scope for the artist's brush. But in the slums he can use but one colour; all is a monotone—a sombre gray deepening into the blackness of night. Even the blue, that in the far-off skies seems to defy the man-made town to be utterly colourless, is obscured by the smoke belched forth from a hundred chimneys; and even the sun, which shines with systematic impartiality on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, is foiled in its efforts to get at these outcasts by the cunning builders, who have put house so close to house that even a sunbeam which had trained down to the proportions of Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt, and then been flattened by a steam-roller, could not force its way between the overhanging parapets with any chance of getting to the ground. So what sunshine there is stops on the roofs among the chimney-pots, and is the sole property of the cats of the neighbourhood, who may be seen dozing about in dozens, or indulging in a pastime which they have certainly not learnt of their masters and mistresses, namely, washing their faces.
The cat-life of the slums is peculiar. Dogs are rare, but the cats are as common as blackberries in September. Not over-clean and not over-fat, the cats of the slums yet seem perfectly contented, and rarely leave the district in which they have been reared. They ascend to the roof early in the day, and stay there long after darkness has set in, and in the choice of a local habitation they show their feline sense. The rooms of their respective owners offer neither air nor sunshine, and when 'the family' are all at home it is possibly the inability of finding even a vacant corner to curl up in that drives Thomas to that part of a house which the people of the East consider the best, but which the people of our East have never sought to utilize.
The cats of the slums are certainly domesticated: they marry and have families, and the kittens are the only really pretty things we have seen since we started on our explorations.
The young of most animals are interesting and picturesque; but a kitten is perhaps the prettiest of all; and a painful contrast is there between the sallow dirty face, the sunken eyes and wizard features of a baby we see sitting on a doorstep nursing one, and the dainty face, blue eyes, and plump, pretty figure of the kitten. The mother of the latter has set an example in the matter of philoprogenitiveness and domestic forethought which the mother of the former would do well to imitate.
There are not wanting those who believe that for the present generation of poor little can be done—I mean, of course, the poor who are sunk in the misery and degradation of slum life. Dirtiness is ingrained in them, and if they had decent habitations provided for them to-morrow, they would no more live in them than a gipsy could settle down under any but a canvas roof.
Thrift they do not understand, and are too old to be taught; and ordinary decency is a thing of which they have about as much conception as they would have of the aestheticism of Mr. Oscar Wilde or the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer.
I am not of the school which says that the regeneration of the masses is hopeless, but I freely confess that the great chance of bringing about a new and better order of things lies among the children who are to be the mothers and fathers of the future. In the old Biblical times water and fire were the elements which solved the knotty problem of regenerating a seething mass of humanity sunk in the lowest abysses of vice and degradation. The deluge that shall do the work now must come of the opening of the floodgates of knowledge. Already, in tiny rivulets as yet, the waters are trickling even into the darkest corners of our great cities. The flood can never rise high enough to cleanse those who have grown up ignorant—at best it can but wet their feet; but the children cannot escape it—the waters will gather force and volume and grow into a broad glorious river, through which the boys and girls of to-day will wade breast high until they gain the banks of the Promised Land. It is this river of knowledge which the modern wanderers in the wilderness must ford to reach the Canaan which the philanthropist sees waiting for them in his dreams.
The first working of the Education Act was fraught with countless difficulties. It was no light task to catch the children of a shifting race, to schedule street Arabs and the offspring of beggars and thieves and prostitutes. But in the course of a few years almost every difficulty has been conquered, and now there is hardly a child above a certain age—no matter how wretched its condition may be—that is not brought within the beneficial influence of education.
True that many of them come shoeless, ragged, and starving, to learn the three 'R's,' to burthen their scanty brains with sums and tasks while their stomachs are empty and their bodies weakened by disease and neglect; but they have at least their chance. Let us take a school where, perhaps, the poorest children come—a school recruited from such homes as we have familiarized you with in previous chapters—and see the little scholars at their dainty tasks.
Here is a child who is but one remove from an idiot. The teacher has a hard task, for the Government inspector expects all the scholars to make the same progress. This poor waif—the offspring of a gentleman whose present address is Holloway Gaol, and a lady who has been charged seventy-three times with being drunk and incapable—must pass a certain standard before she can leave school; in her case, if she lives, she will pass out by age, for statistics show that no system can make this class of intellect retain a lesson. It is sowing seed upon a rock, and there will be no harvest; but the child has just sufficient intelligence to escape the asylum, and between the asylum and the school there is no half-way house.
Some benefit, at least, she derives from the discipline, the care, and the motherly sympathy of a kind head-mistress, who takes a strong personal interest in her little charges.
For so many hours a day at least the child escapes the ghastly surroundings of the den which is her 'home.'
Side by side with her sits a pretty, intelligent little girl of nine. This child's eyes are bright with intelligence, the features are pleasing and regular. As she is called forward, she rises and smilingly comes towards us. There is none of that stolid indifference, that mechanical obedience to a command which distinguishes too many of the little ones who are here in obedience to the laws. This girl learns quickly, and has had all the better qualities brought out. She is neat, and takes a pride in her personal appearance. She has learnt to be ashamed of dirt, and she is ambitious to be high up in her class. Ambition is the one quality which will help above all others to lift the poor out of degradation. The older race have it not; hence they are content with their present positions, only seeking to gratify their daily appetites, and caring not a fig for the morrow. This child will do well, whatever she undertakes; and it is such as she who will survive in the battle of life, and become the mothers of a better and more useful class.
Yet hers is a sad enough story. Her father was a boatman, and in a drunken rage struck his wife down with a boat-hook.
Hers was the common offence of asking for money. The blow injured the woman's brain, and from that day to this she has been in a lunatic asylum. The father disappeared after the crime, and the child's grandmother took the orphan with living parents in, and out of her scanty earnings kept her. One day this year the old lady passed some men carrying a body found in the river to the dead-house. Curiosity induced her to go in with the crowd, and the face of the dead man was that of her son.
A back-street tragedy—common enough, with a varied plot and incidents in these parts, but, as it stands, the life-story of this child.
'And your granny keeps you now?' says the teacher, as she concludes the little history, and turns to the girl.
'Yes, teacher; and when I grow up I'm going to keep granny.'
So may it be!
There are some hundred girls in the room. Some of them come from decent homes, and some from cellars; many of their histories are romances; but they are romances which mostly tend one way—to show the misery, the guilt, and the poverty in which they have been reared; and to recount them would be but to dwell upon a note which perhaps I have touched too often already.
There are brighter stories, too, to be told of their parents, but none so bright as they will be able to tell of themselves when, after years of discipline and culture, they go forth to lead lives which with their fathers and mothers were impossible.
Close to the school where the elder girls are educated, and in the same building, is the department for infants. Here the children under seven are prepared to pass into the upper department.
Directly we enter we are struck with the appearance of these children. Bad faces there are among them—bruises and scars, and bandages and rags—but the bulk of these younger children have a generally better appearance than their little neighbours.
There is a theory in the school, and it is borne out to a certain extent by fact, that some of the youngest and best-looking are the children of girls who just got the benefit of the Education Act before they were too old, and who in their young married life have reaped the benefit of those principles of cleanliness and thrift which the Board School inculcates. The young mothers are already a race far ahead of the older ones in this district, and the children naturally benefit by it. It must be borne in mind that the girls of this class marry or take a mate at a very early age. Many of them have three or four children by the time they are twenty, so that they would have been brought under the influence of the present Education Act. These young women, too, live in a better way; their room is tidier and cleaner, there is a little coquetry in them, and they have a sense of shame which renders them excellent service. They are anxious about their children's education, they recognise the advantage the discipline and instruction have been to them, and the general tone of their lives is every way a distinct advance on the old order of things.
I quote these facts because they so fully bear out the theory that Education must be the prime instrument in changing the condition of the poor for the better, whatever results it may have later on upon the condition of the labour market, and the political and social questions of the future. The many theories which are put forward about the result of educating the masses, it is not my province here to discuss; nor need I consider those doctrines which are closely akin to Socialism, and which are the favourite arguments of a school of advanced thinkers when discussing the future condition of the masses.
I have only to confine myself to the facts before me, and I think this great improvement in the children of the young mothers a most important one.
The best examples are in a room which is a kind of crèche. Here the babies can be left by the mothers who have to go out to work, and the tiny mites are looked after with motherly care by a kind-hearted creature whose lot I do not envy. Fancy forty infants, some of them little over two years old, to take care of for eight hours a day! Mothers will appreciate the situation better than I can describe it.
Look at the babies at dinner. They have brought their bread and butter with them, and they sit at the little low table enjoying it thoroughly. In the winter, when work is scarce, alas! baby's bread and butter is not always so thick as it is today. Sometimes baby has only a dry crust. But there is a lot of the best sort of Christian character knocking about in the Great City, and an excellent society, which provides dinners for poor Board School children, has done much to alleviate this painful state of things. A starving body, a famished child; there is no fear of imposture here; and if anyone who reads these chapters wishes to support a truly admirable movement, where there is no fear of abuse, he or she may imitate Captain Cuttle, and, having found a good thing, make a note of it.
In addition to the dining and play-table there is a long bed in the room. There the tired babies sleep eight or ten in a row sometimes, and forget their baby troubles. The crèche is a boon and a blessing to the poor woman who going out to work has a choice of keeping an elder girl at home to nurse the baby and be summoned for it, or locking the said baby up alone in a room all day with the risk to its life and its limbs inevitable to such a course, not to mention the danger of fire and matches and fits.
It is therefore with grief I hear that there are to be no more built in Board Schools, and that the cost of maintaining those existing must in future be defrayed by voluntary contributions. The Government objects to the crèche department on economical grounds.
The lady who manages the infants old enough to learn has no easy task, but the order is perfect, and the children drill like little soldiers. Here, too, the stories of many of them reveal a depth of misery not often sounded except in the police-courts.
Here I see a bright, pretty, golden-haired girl of five who rather upsets my pet theory. She ought to be ugly and dull, if there is anything in breed. Her mamma is seldom out of prison for more than a week. Mamma, not having learned Latin, does not know the difference between meum and tuum, and is an incorrigible shoplifter and thief. When she is enjoying her liberty, too, she has a habit of tumbling about which is not conducive to health. She has fallen out of a window and damaged the pavement below, and once with a baby in her arms she fell down the stairs of this very school.
When they picked her up the baby's collar-bone was broken, but she was sound enough to exclaim, 'If it hadn't ha' been for that blessed baby I'd a broken my neck, I would.'
It isn't every mother who is philosopher enough to recognise the use of a baby in breaking her fall downstairs.
The father of this little girl is a respectable man; but he has to go a long way for work, and when papa is in the country and mamma is in gaol, some good Sisters of Charity have taken the child and found it a home.
We have made our notes, and the children file out of school to dinner and to play.
One sturdy little chap takes his sister's hand and leads her out like a little father. He has over half a mile to take her home. We are told it is a beautiful sight to see him piloting her across the great thoroughfares when the traffic sweeps wildly up and down, and never leaving go the little hand that is placed so trustingly in his till home is reached and the dangers of the streets are over. They are a pretty pair as they toddle ont hand in hand, and they form a pleasant picture in this brief sketch of the little scholars who come daily from the garrets and, cellars of the slums to get that 'little learning' which in their cases is surely the reverse of a 'dangerous thing.'
CHAPTER VII.
If I were asked to say off-hand what was the greatest curse of the poor and what was the greatest blessing, I think my answer to the first query would be the public-house, and to the second the hospital. Of course, I might be wrong. There are some people who will contend that in these islands the greatest blessing of the natives of all degrees is that they are Great Britons. Our patriotic songs bid us all rejoice greatly at the fact, and patriotism is not a class privilege. The starved outcast, crouching for shelter on a wild March night in one of the stone recesses of London Bridge, has a right to exclaim with the same pride as the Marquis of Westminster—=
```'Far as the breeze can bear the billows' foam,
```Survey our empire and behold our home.'=
His soul, for all we know, may rejoice greatly that Britannia rules the waves, and in spite of the fact that a policeman, spying him out as 'without the visible means of subsistence,' may seize him and consign him to durance vile, he—the outcast, not the policeman—may ponder with much national vanity on the fact that Britons never shall be slaves.
Out upon the parochial-minded disciples of the Birmingham school, who pretend that a nation can be very great abroad and yet very small at home! 'Survey our empire' is a noble line, and there is another about the Queen's morning drum which has a magnificent ring about it, and crops up in patriotic leading articles about twice a week all the year round. It is, however, just possible that the vast extent of British rule does not come home so pleasurably to my friend on the bridge as it does to the well-fed, prosperous citizen of Jingo proclivities who believes that Heaven's first command to an Englishman was, 'Thou shalt remove thy neighbour's landmark.' The poor wretch may 'survey' his 'empire' with a feeling of anything but contentment, and he may be tempted to wish that we had a little less empire to look after abroad in order that a little attention might be bestowed upon the place where charity begins.
Even at the risk of being pronounced unpatriotic, I shall, therefore, maintain my contention that the greatest blessing of the poor is the hospital—that noble institution of which Englishmen of all classes and all creeds may reasonably be proud.
Sickness, disease, and accident enter very largely into the annals of the poor. Overcrowding and unsanitary dwellings—all the ghastly surroundings of poor life in a great city, which I have attempted feebly to describe in this book—render the masses peculiarly susceptible to illness in every shape and form. Epidemics of some sort or other are rarely absent from the poorer districts, and many painful diseases and deformities are transmitted regularly from parent to child. To be sound of limb and well in health in these dens is bad enough, but the existence of an invalid under such circumstances is pitiable to a degree. The hospitals are the heavens-upon-earth of the poor. I have heard little children—their poor pinched faces wrinkled with pain—murmur that they didn't mind it, because if they had been well they would never have come to 'the beautiful place.' Beautiful, indeed, by contrast with their wretched homes are the clean wards, the comfortable beds, and the kind faces of the nurses. Step across from the home of a sick child in the slums of the Borough to the Evelina Hospital, and it is like passing from the infernal regions to Paradise. To this noble charity little sufferers are often brought dirty, neglected, starving; and even the nurses, used as they are to such sights, will tell you their hearts ache at the depth of baby wretchedness revealed in some of the cases brought to them.
Passing from cot to cot, and hearing the histories of the little ones lying there so clean, and, in spite of their suffering, so happy, one is inclined to think that the charity is a mistake—that to nurse these children back to health only to send them again to their wretched homes is a species of refined cruelty. It were better in dozens of cases that the children were left to die now, while they are young and innocent, than that death should be wrestled with and its prize torn from it only to be cast back into a state of existence which is worse than death.
The children have some dim inkling of this themselves. Many of them cry when they are well, and cling to the kind nurses, asking piteously not to be sent back to the squalor and dirt, and often, alas! cruelty, from which they have been snatched for a brief spell.
The elder people doubtless appreciate the blessings of the hospital as much as the children. The poor generally speak in the highest terms of such institutions. They could not, as a rule, lie ill at home; care and attention would be impossible; and for a sick person the atmosphere would mean certain death. Doctors they cannot afford to pay. The class of practitioners who lay themselves out for business in these neighbourhoods are not, as a rule, much more than nostrum and patent-medicine vendors, and their charges are generally extortionate. If you could bring yourself to imagine truthfully the condition of the sick poor without the hospitals to go to, you would see a picture of human misery so appalling that you would cover your eyes and turn away from it with a shudder.
Yet there are such pictures to be seen. There are cases which, from varying circumstances, do not go to the hospital. There are men and women who lie and die day by day in these wretched single rooms, sharing all the family trouble, enduring the hunger and the cold, and waiting without hope, without a single ray of comfort, until God curtains their staring eyes with the merciful film of death.
It was such a case we came upon once in our wanderings, and which, without unduly harrowing up the reader's feelings, I will endeavour to describe.
The room was no better and no worse than hundreds of its class. It was dirty and dilapidated, with the usual bulging blackened ceiling and the usual crumbling greasy walls. Its furniture was a dilapidated four-post bedstead, a chair, and a deal table. On the bed lay a woman, young, and with features that, before hourly anguish contorted them, had been comely. The woman was dying slowly of heart disease. Death was 'writ large' upon her face. At her breast she held her child, a poor little mite of a baby that was drawing the last drain of life from, its mother's breast. The day was a bitterly cold one; through the broken casement the wind came ever and anon in icy gusts, blowing the hanging end of the ragged coverlet upon the bed to and fro like a flag in a breeze. The wind roared in the chimney, too, eddying down into the fireless grate with a low howling noise like the moan of a Banshee round a haunted house. To protect the poor woman from the cold her husband had flung on it his tattered great-coat—a garment that the most ancient four-wheel night cabman would have spurned as a knee-protector. 'He was a plumber,' she whispered to us in a weak, hollow voice; 'he had been out of work for a week, and he had gone out to try and look for a job.' One shivered to think of him wearily trudging the streets this bitter day, half clad and wholly starved; what must have been his torture as he failed at place after place, and the day wore on and brought the night when he would have to return to the poor dying wife with the old sad story?
As one realized the full meaning of this little domestic tragedy, and knew that it was only one of many daily enacted in the richest city in the world—the scene of it laid not a mile from the full tide of all the pomps and vanities of fashion, of all the notorious luxury and extravagances which is the outward show of our magnificence and wealth, it was hard to repress a feeling of something akin to shame and anger—shame for the callous indifference which bids one half the world ignore the sufferings of the other—anger that, with all the gold annually borne along on the broad stream of charity, so little of it ever reaches the really deserving and necessitous poor.
The house this poor woman lay dying in was one of a block which would have been a prize to a sanitary inspector anxious to make a sensational report. For the room in question the plumber out of work had to pay four and sixpence, and the broken pane of glass the landlord had refused to replace. The man was told 'he must do it himself, or if he didn't like it as it was he could go.'
Such stories as this are painful, but they should be told. It is good for the rich that now and again they should be brought face to face with misery, or they might doubt its existence. These people—our fellow-citizens—cannot be neglected with impunity. These fever and pestilence-breeding dens that are still allowed to exist, these deathtraps out of which vestrymen and capitalists make large annual incomes, are a danger to the whole community.
While I am on this subject, I may as well quote an instance which bears directly upon the interest—the selfish interest—which the better classes have in lending their voices to swell the chorus of complaints which is going up about the present state of things.
Here is an 'interior' to which I would call the special attention of ladies who employ nurse-girls for their children.
This room when we entered it was in a condition beyond description. The lady was washing the baby, and she made that an excuse for the dirt of everything else. Two ragged boys were sitting on the filthy floor, a dirty little girl was in a corner pulling a dirty kitten's tail, and the smoke from the untidiest grate I ever saw in my life was making the half-washed baby sneeze its little head nearly off. The family, all told, that slept in this room was seven. There was a bed and there was a sofa—so I concluded the floor must have been the resting-place of some of them. 'The eldest girl'—materfamilias informed us in answer to our questions—'was gone out. She slept on the sofa.' We knew somebody had slept there, because some rags were on it, which had evidently done duty as bed-clothes.
Outside this room, which opened on to a back-yard, was a dust-bin. We didn't want eyesight to know that—it appealed with sufficient power to another sense. Inside was an odour which made the dust-bin rather a relief.
I have described this place a little graphically for the sake of that eldest girl. It is not from any gallantry to the fair sex that I have done this, but because the young woman in question was, I ascertained, a domestic servant. She was a nursemaid just home from a place at Norwood, and in a week she was going to a place at Clapham. I remembered, as I gazed on the scene, a certain vigorous letter from Mr. Charles Reade which appeared in the Daily Telegraph some years ago about servants 'pigging with their relations at home,' and wanting the best bedroom and a feather-bed with damask furniture when in service. I never so thoroughly realized what 'pigging with their relations' meant before.
Now, if you will take the trouble to think out the possible result of girls going from such pigsties as these straight into well-to-do families, where they will nurse the children and be constantly in the closest contact with the younger members of the family, I think you will see that the dangers of unhealthy homes for the poor may be equally dangerous to a better class. I should like to know how many families now mourning the loss of a little child from fever, or the death of some dear one from small-pox, would have been spared their sorrow had the existence of such places as I have described been rendered impossible by the action of the law!
I do not imagine for one moment that I have seen, or that I am likely to see, the worst phases of the evil which has become one of the burning questions of the hour. But what I have written about I have in every case seen with my own eyes, and in no case have I exaggerated; and yet more than one of my kindly correspondents doubt my story of the dead body being kept, and eventually put out into the street.
With regard to this, let the reader in doubt ask any sanitary inspector or officer of health to whom he can get an introduction, if it is not an appalling fact that the poor have grown so used to discomfort and horrors that they do not look upon a corpse in the room they live, and eat, and sleep in as anything very objectionable!
It often happens there is no money to pay for the funeral, and so, with that inertness and helplessness bred of long years of neglect, nothing at all is done, no steps are taken, and the body stops exactly where it was when the breath left it.
The following incident I take haphazard from the reports of Dr. Liddell, whose recent statement has even attracted Parliamentary attention and led to a question in the House:
Prolonged Retention of a Dead Body in a Room occupied by a Family.
Mr. Wrack reports that, on visiting No. 17, Hope Street, Spitalfields, he found in the room of the second floor the dead body of a child who had died fifteen days before the time of his visit. The room, which contained 1,176 cubic feet of space, was occupied by the parents of the dead child and a daughter aged thirteen years. The body was in a decomposed state. The reason assigned for not burying the child at an earlier period was that the father had no means to do so, and that his friends had failed to render him the assistance which they had promised. Mr. Wrack having pointed out the danger of keeping a dead body so long in the only room occupied by the family, application was made to the relieving officer, and the body was buried on the following day.
Fifteen days! Fancy that! with the knowledge you have by this time of the size and condition of the room in which the corpse remains mixed up with the living inmates day and night. Here are two more cases. Note the fact that in the first the child has died of scarlet fever, and that tailoring work is going on around it—work which when finished will be carried, in all human probability, with the germs of disease in it to the homes of well-to-do and prosperous people—a class which too frequently objects to be worried with revelations of the miseries of the masses.
Prolonged Retention op a Dead Body in a Room occupied by a Family.
Mr. Wrack reports that, upon visiting No. 28, Church Street, Spital-fields, on the 5th December last, he found in the second floor front room the dead body of a child which had died of scarlet fever on the 1st of the month. The body was not coffined, and it lay exposed on a table in one corner of the room. The room was occupied as a living and sleeping room by five persons, viz., the father and mother, their child, a girl about three years old, and by two adults, viz., the grandfather and grandmother of the child, who were engaged at tailors' work. The child was playing on the floor. The room was about fourteen feet square and eight feet high, thus affording only 260 cubic feet of space to each person. The smell on entering the room was most sickening. Upon remonstrating with the people for keeping the body so long unburied, and especially for not having it coffined, they replied that they were waiting to raise the means for burying it; and, being Irish, said that it was not their custom to coffin their dead until the day of the funeral. The body was not buried until the 9th of December, and then it had to be buried by the parish authorities.
Mr. Wrack also visited No. 24, Princes Street, Spitalfields, on the 5th January, and found in the second floor front room the dead body of an aged woman, who died on Christmas Day. The room was occupied by the daughter of the deceased, a person about forty years of age, who lived and slept in the same room. Upon asking the reason of her keeping the body so long unburied, she stated that she had been waiting for suitable things to be made for the funeral; and upon asking when the funeral would take place, she stated that the body would not be buried until the 8th January, a period of fifteen days from the death. The Board had no power to compel the removal of the corpse, as there is no mortuary belonging to the Board in the district.
I want to drive this nail home, though it is the practice itself I should prefer to knock on the head. Here are three more cases. Let me quote them, and have done with the subject.
Prolonged Retention of Dead Bodies.
There have been three cases of prolonged retention of the dead in rooms occupied as living and sleeping rooms. One of these cases was that of a child who died at No. 26, King Street, Spitalfields, and whose body was retained for nine days, the parents stating that they were unable to raise sufficient money to bury it. During the time the body was kept it became so offensive that it was necessary to remove it to a shed at the rear of the house. Eventually the father applied to the relieving officer, and obtained an order for the burial of the body.
Another case was that of a young man who died of consumption at 120, Royal Mint Street. The body of this young man was kept for eight days in the room in which his father and mother lived and slept.
The third case was that of a child three weeks old, who died at No. 5, Devonshire Place, Whitechapel. The body of this child was kept in the room occupied by its parents for a period of twelve days, and at the time of the visit of the inspector the smell from it was most offensive.
Although in each of these cases everything was done by the officer of this Board, and by the relieving officer, to induce the respective parties to bury their dead before a nuisance was occasioned, yet to a certain extent their effort s were unavailing.
As such cases are of frequent occurrence, it is certainly full time that power was given to magistrates to order the burial without delay of every corpse which is certified to be a nuisance or dangerous to the public health.
It is necessary a great many things were done. It is necessary, above all, that the direct attention of the State should be given to the whole question, but the Home Secretary says there is 'no time' to attend to such matters. The question which led to this answer and the Home Secretary's statement in full were as follows:
Sanitary Condition of Whitechapel.
Mr. Bryce asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether his attention had been called to the two last reports presented to the Whitechapel District Board of Works by the Medical Officer of Health on the sanitary condition of the Whitechapel district, in which he condemned, as unsanitary and ill-arranged, several new buildings recently erected in that district, and expressed the opinion that amendments in the existing Building Acts were urgently required; and whether, if sufficient powers to prevent the erection or order the closing of unsanitary dwelling were not now possessed by local authorities, he would undertake to bring in a Bill to amend the Building Acts in this important particular, by investing the proper local authorities with such powers.
Sir W. Harcourt said he would be glad to introduce Bills upon this and many other subjects, but there was no time for them.—Evening Standard, June 18, 1883.
'No time!'
It is well, with that answer ringing in our ears, to turn to the Parliamentary proceedings and discover what the important questions are which are engrossing the entire attention of the Legislature, and leaving 'no time' for such a matter as the constant menace to public health which exists in the present system of 'Housing the Poor.' I will not enumerate them, or I might be tempted into a political disquisition, which would be out of place; but the reader can, with considerable profit to himself, find them and make a note of them.
The list of important measures which have consumed the session and left 'no time' for this question will be instructive and amusing—amusing because the discussions which have taken up the time of the House contain in themselves all the elements of screaming farce.
And, talking of screaming farce, I am reminded that we met Mr. J. L. Toole, and that he has not been introduced yet.
Room by all means, and at once for Mr. J. L. Toole—not the Toole of Toole's Theatre—the popular comedian who has made tomfoolery a fine art and burlesque a science, but his living, breathing image as he appeared to us, 'Mug,' voice, and gesture, at the door of a house at which we lately knocked in search of information as to the profits of hat-box making.
Our J. L. Toole didn't tell us anything as to these profits, though he was very funny—he cracked wheezes that even John Laurence himself might give off without blushing.
He suggested that while we were about it perhaps 'he might as well tell us who he worked for as how much he got, and then we could go round and offer to make hat-boxes a halfpenny a dozen under.' We didn't get much out of our J. L. Toole.
CHAPTER VIII.
One of the greatest evils of the overcrowded districts of London is the water-supply. I might almost on this head imitate the gentleman who wrote a chapter on 'Snakes in Iceland,' which I quote in its entirety—'There are no snakes in Iceland.' To say, however, that in these districts there is no water-supply would be incorrect, but it is utterly inadequate to the necessities of the people. In many houses more water comes through the roof than through a pipe, and a tub or butt in the back-yard about half full of a black, foul-smelling liquid supplies some dozens of families with the water they drink and the water they wash in as well. It is, perhaps, owing to the limited nature of the luxury that the use of water both internally and externally is rather out of favour with the inhabitants. As to water for sanitary purposes, there is absolutely no provision for it in hundreds of the most densely-inhabited houses. In the matter of water and air, the most degraded savage British philanthropy has yet adopted as a pet is a thousand times better off than the London labourer and his family, dwelling in the areas whose horrors medical officers are at last divulging to the public.
The difficulties of attaining that cleanliness which we are told is next to godliness may be imagined from a description of a water-butt which we found in the back-yard of a house containing over ninety people. The little boy in his shirtsleeves has come to fill his tin bowl, and we are indebted to him for the information that he wants it for his mother to drink. The mother is ill—has been for weeks; her lips are burning with fever, her throat is dry and parched, and this common reservoir, open to all the dust and dirt with which the air is thick, open to the draining in rainy weather of the filthy roof of the tumble-down structure beside it—this is the spring at which she is to slake her thirst. Is it any wonder that disease is rampant, or that the temperance folk have such trouble to persuade the masses that cold water is a good and healthy drink?
Remember, this is absolutely the supply for the day; it is, perhaps, turned on for about five minutes, and from this butt the entire inhabitants of the house must get all the water they want. In dozens of instances there is no supply at all—accident or design has interfered with it, and the housewife who wants to wash her child's face or her own, or do a bit of scrubbing, has to beg of a neighbour or make a predatory excursion into a back yard more blessed than her own.
Some of the facts about the water-supply are not easy to deal with in a book for general reading. The difficulties of the 'drawer of water' are great. It was while I and my esteemed collaborator were debating how we could possibly reproduce much that we had seen in connection with this crying evil that a gentleman came along and gave us the chance of at least one sketch 'on the spot.' He made himself busy at the side of a tub—a tub from which his neighbours will fill their drinking and their culinary vessels anon. Do not imagine that he is engaged in his morning ablution. He is washing his potatoes—that is all—and in the evening he will take them out baked, and sell them in the public highway. For the sake of the public I am glad they will be baked, but though the water will in some instances be boiled, I don't think that tea is improved by the dirt off potato-skins—at least, I have never heard so.
Perhaps at the house where we saw this tub the inhabitants were not so much injured as they might have been by the deficient water-supply in the yard. If they didn't get water in one way, they generally had it in another. The law of compensation is always at work, and the rapacity of a landlord who left his tenants so badly off in one particular way may have been a godsend in another.
The water in rainy weather simply poured through the roof of this house, saturating the sleepers in their beds and washing their faces in a rough-and-ready manner, but unfortunately it didn't rain towels at the same time, so that the bath had its inconveniences.
The cause of these periodical shower-baths was pointed out to us by a tenant who paid four and sixpence a week for his 'watery nest' in the attic, and who, in language which did not tend to show that his enforced cleanliness had brought godliness in its train, explained that the landlord had taken the lead from the roof and sold it, and replaced it with asphalte, which had cracked, with the result above described.
Unacquainted with the stern necessities of the situation, you will contemplate the picture and say that these people are idiots to pay rent for such accommodation. What are they to do? Move. Whither? They know well how they will have to tramp from slum to slum, losing work, and the difficulties which will beset them on this room-hunt. They are thankful to have a roof, even with cracks in it, and they will go on suffering—not in silence, perhaps, but without taking action, because they know if they go further they may fare worse.
The accommodation which these people will put up with is almost incredible.
Some of the houses are as absolutely dangerous to life and limb as those specially built up on the stage as pitfalls for the unwary feet of the melodramatic heroes and heroines led there by designing villains in order that they may fall through traps into dark rivers, and so be got rid of.
Here is a house which has been slowly decaying for years; the people who live in it must be competent to accept engagements as acrobats, yet from floor to roof every room is densely inhabited.
The stairs are rotten, and here and there show where some foot has trodden too heavily. The landing above is a yawning gulf which you have to leap, and leap lightly, or the rotten boarding would break away beneath you.
Open a door and look into a room. There are two women and three children at work, and the holes in the floor are patched across with bits of old boxes which the tenants have nailed down themselves.
The place is absolutely a shell. There is not a sound room or passage in it. Yet it is always crammed with tenants, and they pay their rent without a murmur—nay, within the last year the rents of the rooms have been raised nearly twenty-five per cent.
The gentleman who inhabits the ground-floor with his wife and family is best off. He is a bit of a humorist, and he seems quite proud of pointing out to us the dilapidations of his dwelling-place, and takes the opportunity to indulge in what the gentlemen of the theatrical persuasion call 'wheezes.'
'Come through?' he says; 'well, no, I can't say as anybody have come through, not altogether. We sees a leg o' somebody sometimes as we ain't invited to join us, and now and agen a lump o' ceilin' comes down when the young woman upstairs stamps her foot; but so long as they don't start a dancin' acadermy up there, I don't mind.'
'But haven't you spoken to the landlord about it?'
'Spoke! Lor' bless you! wot's the use? He'd larf at us, and if he was to larf too loud it might be dangerous. He won't do nothink. The place is bound to come down, yer know, by-and-by, for improvements.'
Possibly the man's explanation of the landlord's neglect was correct, but to us it certainly appeared that the place was more likely to come down for lack of improvements.
Going to bed under such circumstances as these must require a good deal of confidence; but I suppose the contingency of the floor above descending on one in one's sleep does not have the same terror for these people that it had for the nervous hero of that story of Edgar Allan Poe's, in which the room with contracting walls and descending roof was supposed to be a horror worthy of the inventive genius of the gentlemen of the Inquisition.
Of course, when the ordinary repairs demanded by consideration for the safety of life and limb are left undone, and the most ordinary sanitary precautions are neglected, it is not likely that the present race of poor tenement-owners will listen to the appeals of those tenants whose livelihood depends upon them keeping animals, and make some provision for the housing of pigs and the stabling of donkeys.
Strange, too, as it may seem, in the houses which are being built on improved principles, no provision is made for the barrows and donkeys of the costermongers—a class which enters very largely into the composition of the one-roomed tribes. Some time ago a man was charged with assaulting his wife, and at the magisterial hearing it was elicited that the matrimonial quarrel was all on account of a donkey which slept under the bed.
The magistrate was naturally astonished. He didn't believe such a state of things possible. Doubtless his wonder was shared by the public. The presence of a donkey in the apartment of a costermonger and his family is, however, by no means rare, and quite recently a zealous sanitary inspector has discovered a cellar inhabited by a man, his wife, three children, and four pigs.
The presence of animals not exactly regarded as domestic is a feature of certain poor districts of London. Fowls roost nightly in dozens of bedrooms in the back streets; and only the other day a score of those miserable tortoises that one sees on barrows destitute of the smallest vestige of green stuff, and probably enduring the most prolonged agony, were discovered crawling about the floor of a costermonger's attic among his progeny, only slightly inferior in point of numbers to the poor animals themselves.
It is a great complaint of the men, who, as a rule, are hardworking, honest fellows enough in their way, and thrifty, too, when they can keep away from the temptation of drink, that so little attention is being paid to their needs in the many schemes for improved dwellings for the industrial classes.
In some of the cases where the accommodation for ponies and donkeys may fairly be called 'stabling,' the entrance is through the passage of a house densely inhabited, and the animals are led in and out daily in such a manner as to be a nuisance to the occupants, while the stables, being so close to the windows of the room and kept in anything but good order, are a constant danger to health.
I have been assured by an old inhabitant of the costers' quarters that he knew a donkey who went upstairs to the third floor every night to go to bed; but old inhabitants are not to be relied upon, and I give you the story for what it is worth.
Of one thing, however, no one who personally investigates the poorer districts of great cities can remain in doubt. There are there hidden away from general observation marvels as great as any of those which the enterprising Farini imports from the Cannibal Islands, the dismal swamps, the deserts and jungles of the savage world, for the amusement and edification of the shilling-paying public. Missing links abound, and monstrosities are plentiful. Some of the terrible sights which we have seen we have too much respect for the reader's feelings to reproduce. Now and again the revelations of some police-court send a shudder through society. Children starved and stunted and ignorant as the lowest beasts of the forests are unearthed in foul dens, where they have passed their little lives chained to the walls, or pounced upon by the police, led to the discovery by the tavern gossip of the neighbours. Grown women who have lived naked in underground cellars, and long ago lost their reason, are found one fine morning by the merest accident while their gaolers are away. On these hidden horrors of unknown London I need not dwell here. The history of Horrible London has yet to be written; but the brutality which makes many of these terrible things possible is largely due to the circumstances under which the poor live. The careless disregard of human life and human suffering which has so long characterized us as a nation must bear fruit. The waste of human life brought about by the conditions under which the poor are allowed to live breeds in them a contempt for the sufferings of others. They become hardened, and the cruelty at which we shudder is their second nature. All that is best and holiest in life there is nothing to encourage—only the ferocious instincts of the brute are fostered by a state of existence in which the struggle for the very air men breathe is bitter and intense.
Says a philanthropist, who has gone to the root of this appalling subject: 'In these districts men live in little more than half the space their corpses occupy when dead.' Think of it! Penetrate the awful places where vice and squalor, crime and brutality, reign supreme; where the oath of the gin-maddened ruffian, the cry of the trampled wife, and the wail of the terrified child ring out night and day; where all is one fierce ferment in a hell upon earth, where day brings no light, and night no rest, and ask yourself what manner of fruit these forcing-houses can bear.
When some one bold enough shall write 'Horrible London,' and the black page lies open that all may read, then, and not till then, will the enormity of the responsibility be recognised of those to whom the power to do so much has been given and who have done so little.
That work is for stronger hands than mine to do. I am content here to chronicle such lights and shadows of life among the poor as fall across my path in a journey round the outskirts only of the dark continent in our midst.
Here is an incident which, pathetic enough, has yet its humorous side. Here is a boy of eight years old in petticoats, a big, strong, healthy lad. His father is a dock labourer, and this is how he was brought forward as a candidate for some cast-off clothing which a director of the East and West India Dock Company was generously distributing.
The dock labourers are a distinct class among the East-End poor, and I hope at some future time to give the reader a glimpse of life among them. How hard their struggle is may be gathered from the fact that their boys have to go till eight and nine years old in petticoats because the parents cannot afford to buy them knickerbockers or trousers.