CHAPTER IX.
These pages would be incomplete without at least a passing reference to some of the many efforts which have already been made to deal with the evils arising from the condition of things it has been my desire to expose.
The mere charitable work going on I have not space to deal with. There are night refuges, missions, and many excellent institutions due to public and private enterprise in all the poorer quarters, all of which in a manner more or less satisfactory afford relief to the inhabitants.
One good work, however, which I do not care to leave hiding its light under a bushel is the home for factory-girls, managed by the Sisters of St. John the Baptist, Clewer, and situated in Southwark.
Here, girls employed in the many factories of the neighbourhood during the day can, if they are willing to submit to the rules, find a real home for a small weekly payment, and escape the wretched and too often vicious surroundings of the places in which their parents live.
With a full knowledge of all the temptation which besets the work-girls who have to spend their leisure in these slums, none can doubt the good work such institutions may do.
On the night of our visit we were conducted from basement to roof by one of the Sisters; we saw the girls and heard their histories from their own lips, and learnt how terrible was the sin and misery which had forced them to look upon their vile homes with loathing, and how fierce the temptation which beset them when left to themselves.
These girls are of the class which most deserve help; they work hard at dangerous trades for their living, and they pay for their food and board. What the charity does is to throw a certain home influence around them, give them cleanliness and godliness, and preserve them to some extent from the contamination of the streets—streets which are here thronged at night with the worst types of humanity the great city can show.
The story of the Mission is romantic. A lady, Mrs. Hun, was left a young widow. After less than two years of married life her husband died suddenly. She devoted herself to her only daughter, who grew up into a beautiful girl. The morning after her first ball the young lady was found dead in her bed. To assuage her grief and keep from breaking down utterly, the bereaved mother determined to devote herself to charity. The fearful condition of the young girls in this neighbourhood was brought to her attention, and with her fortune and that of her dead daughter she devoted herself to establishing a home for factory-girls.
Such is the short and simple story of how this excellent institution was founded. How it is carried out, how the girls cling to the Home, and how thoroughly they appreciate its comforts, any lady can see who cares to take a trip as far as Union Street, Borough, and ring the bell of the All Hallows' Mission-House.
The work which these girls have to do in return for a small wage is generally of a dangerous character. Many of them literally snatch their food from the jaws of death.
One girl in the Home was white and ill and weak, and her story may be taken as a sample. She worked at the 'bronzing,' that is, a branch of the chromo-lithography business, and it consists in applying a fluid, which gives off a poisonous exhalation, to certain work. Bronzing enters largely into the composition of those Christmas pictures which delight us so much at the festive season, and which adorn the nursery of many a happy, rosy-cheeked English child.
The law, recognising the dangerous nature of the work, says that the girls doing it shall be allowed a pint of milk per day, the milk in some way counteracting the effect of the poison the girls inhale. It will hardly be believed that some of the best firms refuse to comply with the regulation, and if the girls complain they are at once discharged.
Now, the wages paid are seven shillings per week. To keep at their employment it is necessary that the workers take castor-oil daily, and drink at least a pint of milk. They must either pay for these luxuries out of their scanty earnings or go without, and eventually find their way to the hospital.
Take another trade—the fur-pulling. The women and girls employed at this are in some shops locked in the room with their work, and have to eat their food there.
If you had ever seen a room crowded with girls pulling the fluff from cats, rabbits, rats, and goodness knows what other animals, you would appreciate the situation better. The fluff, the down, and the small hairs smother everything, and are necessarily swallowed by the occupants of the room, with pernicious effect. Yet it is the custom of some of the men in the trade to force their employés to eat under such circumstances—that is, to swallow their food thickly coated with the hairs from which nothing can preserve it.
Why do not the women refuse? Because they would be discharged. There are always hundreds ready and eager to take their places. The struggle for bread is too fierce for the fighters to shrink from any torture in its attainment.
With the dangers of the white-lead works, which employ a large number of these families, most people are now familiar; at least, those who read the inquests must be. In addition to the liability to lead-poisoning, in many of these works the machinery is highly dangerous. In spite of the Employers' Liability Act, the victims of machinery accidents—that is, when they are women or children—rarely get compensation.
The hospitals are full of accidents from these causes; often the negligence is that of a fellow-workman, but in at least half a dozen cases I have investigated not one shilling of compensation has the victim obtained.
Saw-mills, and places where steam and circular saws are used, employ a large number of boys. If you were to give a tea-party to saw-mill boys, the thing that would astonish you would be the difficulty of finding half a dozen of your guests with the proper number of fingers.
I know one little lad who is employed at pulling out the planks which have been pushed through the machine by men, and he has one hand now on which only the thumb is left. Then there is the lemonade-bottling, which is another industry largely employing the lads of poor neighbourhoods. The bottles are liable to burst, and cases of maiming are almost of daily occurrence. The bottlers are obliged to wear masks to protect their faces, but their hands are bound to be exposed to the danger.
These are a few of the dangerous and unhealthy occupations by which the poor live, and I have enumerated those largely practised by children. I have done so to show how little we can wonder if for lack of a protecting arm, or that parental love which is, alas! so rare a thing in the very poor districts, these boys and girls yield to the first temptation to go wrong, and instead of risking life and limb for a paltry wage, take to those paths of vice which we have it on the highest authority are always the most easy of access.
As we leave the home of the factory girls we come upon a scene which illustrates the life outside. A big crowd of foul-mouthed, blackguardly boys and girls, with a few men and women among them, are gathered round two girls who are fighting fiercely. They have quarrelled, a bystander tells us, in the adjacent public-house about a young man. He is considered her legitimate property by one lady, and the said lady has surprised him treating her rival to gin. Neither of the girls is more than seventeen, I should say, yet they are fighting and blaspheming and using words that make even myself and my collaborator shudder, used as we are by this time to the defiled Saxon of the slums.
'Go it, Sal!' yells a female friend, and Sal goes it, and the boys and girls stand round and enjoy the spectacle, and add their chorus of blasphemy and indecency to the quarrel duet of the Madame Angots of the gutter.
I had nearly forgotten an incident which occurred when we were in the factory-girls' home, and which is not without its lesson as showing the value even these girls attach to social position. One young lady was introduced to us as having a sweetheart who always brought her home of an evening with great punctuality. 'What is your sweetheart?' I asked. 'A boot-finisher,' was the answer. 'Where does he work—at what firm?' 'He works just by Fenchurch Street Station.' 'Is it a large bootmaker's?' 'Well, it ain't exactly a bootmaker's; he's a shoeblack.' I never heard a shoeblack called a boot-finisher before, but I think the euphemism was allowable in a young lady who wished to exalt the commercial status of her intended.
I alluded in a recent chapter to the costermongers as a large and worthy class. Since that chapter was written I have explored a district which is almost exclusively inhabited by them—a portion of St. Luke's. To what I have already written let me add that until now I had not the slightest conception that things were so bad as they really are. My visit was early in the morning, before the men and women had gone out with their loads. If you could have seen the condition of the rooms and yards piled up with rotting vegetable refuse, and the way in which the cabbages and the fruit were stowed for the night, and where they were stowed, it would have cured such among you as are fond of a bargain at the door from ever patronising a barrow again.
Out of the fetid one room where man and wife and family slept they carried the stuff that then neighbours were to eat. It had passed the night with them, and the green-stuff was decidedly faded and languid. It was piled on the barrow, and then soused with dirty water, and so wheeled away to be cried up and down the streets of London.
No wonder diseases are spread if from such poisoned, fever-breeding dens as this the food is carried with all its impurity day after day to be hawked from door to door!
I do not blame the costers. They must get where there is an open space for their barrows handy, some bit of waste land where houses have been condemned and pulled down. They stack their barrows here, taking off one wheel and carrying it home, that their property may not be wheeled off in the night. But areas with this waste land are limited, so up go the prices, and the coster must pay. In Green Arbour Gourt, St. Luke's, I came upon a man who was paying eight shillings a week for one miserable room, and all round the district the very vilest accommodation fetches something very near that figure.
Eight shillings a week for one room! Surely a class that can pay that must be worth catering for even by the five per cent, philanthropists.
Some time ago there was a scheme to build a goods station in this district, and before the Bill could be considered Parliment required a labouring-class statement, that is, a statement of the number of poor people who would be displaced.
On looking through the figures I find that to build this station about 3,000 poor people would have to be turned out of their homes.
It is the pulling down of area after area for the purpose of building large warehouses and railway-stations, and that sort of thing, which is, of course, at the root of the overcrowding. The accommodation becomes more limited year after year, and the property built as dwelling-houses under the Artisans' Dwellings Act does not, as I have pointed out before, offer any accommodation to the class displaced.
In another district I made a discovery which I fancy must be unique. I found a public-house which was a highway for traffic. You went out of a street into a bar—you walked straight through and found yourself in a network of courts behind. I found on inquiry that for years the public-house had been used as a footpath, and I have no doubt it was found highly convenient by ladies and gentlemen in a hurry to escape observation.
In another district still I unearthed as sweet a little story as any of the annals of jobbery can, I imagine, furnish. Let me tell it carefully, for the law of libel is a fearful and wonderful thing, and I have no desire that my publishers should eat their next Christmas dinner in Holloway Gaol.
A big block of buildings, falling into decay, was for sale. A person officially connected with the parish drew the attention of the sanitary officers to them, and had them condemned as unfit for habitation. Directly this was done the parish gentleman, in conjunction with a firm of speculators, bought the property for a bagatelle—for old building material, in fact. But the new proprietors didn't pull it down—not they. They gave a coat of whitewash here and there, and let every single room again directly at increased rentals, and every single room is full of rent-payers now. The street of houses which was condemned five years ago has been a little gold mine, and a handsome fortune has been made out of it by the very people who insisted upon calling the attention of the sanitary authorities to it.
It is needless to say that the same attention has never been solicited since.
I should like to know how many more blocks of property—unfit for human habitation—are held in the same way in London.
I fancy the revelations on this subject would be startling to a degree.
Yet amidst all these horrors and sufferings, working at dangerous trades, housed in death-traps, neglected and persecuted, the poor manage to live, and some of them to amuse themselves. How they amuse themselves we shall shortly see.
CHAPTER X.
When I come to the task of describing how the poor amuse themselves, there comes back to me the memory of a certain 'exam.' I submitted myself to in the happy long ago. I am not quite sure now whether the result was to be a clerkship in Somerset House, or a certificate of proficiency which I could frame, and glaze, and hang up in my bedroom; all I remember is, that I was taken up to London with half a dozen of my fellow-collegians, and deposited in a large room, at a desk, and that in front of me was placed a paper with a string of printed questions on it, which I was requested to answer in writing. The questions were not particularly flabbergasting then, though I doubt whether I could answer a single one of them correctly now; but that which carried terror to my fluttering heart at once was the special note which enjoined me to write my answers briefly and concisely. There are certain questions which will not be answered in half a dozen words. Several such there were on my examination-paper, and such a question, after a lapse of years, again stands and defies me to mortal combat.
'How do the poor amuse themselves?'
The name of their amusements is legion, and to catalogue them briefly is beyond my powers.
The principal amusement of the people who have no money is, I take it, loafing at street corners and gossiping with their neighbours, and the form of enjoyment by far the most prevalent is getting drunk.
The public-house, after centuries of philanthropic tall-talk and hundreds of miles of newspaper and magazine writing, tracts and essays, remains still the Elysian field for the tired toiler. The well-meaning efforts of the societies which have endeavoured to attract the poor to hear countesses play the fiddle, and baronets sing comic songs in temperance halls, have not been crowned with anything like success, for the simple reason that there is an air of charity and goody-goody about the scheme which the poor always regard with suspicion. They want their amusement as a right, not as a favour, and they decline to be patronized.
The public-house, then, is still the centre of attraction for the masses during their leisure—the public-house and its giant offspring, the music-hall. The old Free and Easy, held every Monday or every Saturday, as the case might be, in the bar-parlour or the big room upstairs, is dying the death—the halls have killed it. There are a few still in existence, but the attendance is meagre, and the entertainment is only kept up by ambitious amateurs of the type who sit back in a chair and close their eyes to sing a sentimental ballad, and the young gentlemen who are anxious to exchange the workshop or the counter for the footlights, and try their hand first at the comic songs of Messrs. Arthur Roberts and McDermott before the dozen or so of the bar-parlour frequenters of the Blue Bear who make up the weekly audiences of the 'Free and Easy.'
The old sporting-houses, once the resort of half the blackguardism of the East-End and a good deal of the West, have gone down before the steady bowling of the law. The friendly bouts with the gloves between local 'chickens' and 'novices,' which once were regular Saturday night amusements, are few and far between, and dog-fights and ratting-matches have to be searched for by the curious as diligently as though they were looking for a policeman in a suburban neighbourhood, and the result is generally the same.
That boxing and ratting, and other forms of the 'fancy,' still exist as part of the amusement of the lower orders is perfectly true, but they exist in such a hole-and-corner, out-of-the-way, few-and-far-between style, that they can no longer be classed as among the amusements of those who cannot afford to pay high prices of admission to illegal entertainments.
The noble art of self-defence did undoubtedly linger among the lower orders as a pastime long after it had passed out of favour with the Corinthians, and many of the porters of Billingsgate, Covent Garden, and Smithfield, waterside labourers, costermongers, and street-hawkers are to this day famous as 'bruisers,' and given to indulge their friends at odd times with a display of their prowess on the extreme Q.T., in quiet out-houses and secluded spots where the police are unlikely to mar the harmony of the proceedings. Such meetings, when they do take place, always attract a mob of the lowest riff-raff, and if there be, as is generally the case, a charge for admission, ragged wretches, who look as though a crust of bread and cheese would be of considerable advantage to them, manage in some mysterious way to find the requisite amount of silver, without the production of which the crystal Bar of the Pug's Paradise moves not, and the sporting Peri is sent disconsolate away.
It has been my good or evil fortune, in my desire to know all sorts and conditions of men, to witness some of the latest revivals of glove-fighting; now in drill-sheds, now in top-floors of public-houses, and once in the upper floor of a workshop, which nearly gave way with the weight of accumulated blackguardism collected. These, it is only fair to say, were mostly 'ramps,' or swindles, got up to obtain the gate-money, and generally interrupted by circumstances arranged beforehand by those who were going to 'cut up' the plunder.
As a matter of fact, the suburban racecourse has now absorbed most of the poorer patrons of the ring, and the fighting men—that is, the class who are of the slum order—find employment in connection with the betting-lists and booths. The turf is still as highly patronised as ever in poor districts, in spite of the objection of the police to ready-money betting, and the racing element enters largely into the recreations of the residuum.
This, however, is hardly the class of amusement with which we are concerned, which is more that which engages the attention of the poorer toilers after work-hours. Saturday night is the great night in these districts for the play which prevents Jack being dull, and accordingly it is a Saturday night we select to take a trip once more through the streets of the unfashionable quarters.
We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is a fair, in fact; the pavement and the roadway are crowded with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the cheap-finery stalls; there are shooting-galleries, try-your-strength-machines, weighing-chairs, raffling-boards, and nothing is lacking but 'three shies a penny' and a Richardson's show to make a complete picture of an old-fashioned fair.
All the world and his wife are out to-night, and the wildest extravagances are being committed in the way of fish for supper to-night and vegetables for dinner to-morrow. The good housewives, basket on arm, are giving the ready-witted hawker as much repartee over the price of a cabbage as would suffice for a modern comedy.
The workman, released from his toil, is smoking his pipe and listening open-mouthed to the benevolent and leather-lunged gentlemen who are sacrificing household utensils, boots, ornaments, concertinas, and cutlery, at prices which would have cajoled the money from the pocket of a Daniel Dancer. And the golden youth of the neighbourhood, with their best attire on, all cut after one relentless fashion—the mashers of the East—they, too, are out in full force, entering into the wild delirium of reckless pleasure which the scene invites.
The principal amusement in the street, apart from buying knives and neckties of the Cheap Jack and entering into a raffle for a concertina, which is the sole business of one densely-crowded stall, seems to be shooting at a target—three shots a penny—and the prize for hitting the bull's-eye a real Whitechapel cigar. This seems to be an intensely popular pastime with the boys, and the one who wins a cigar and turns away and proudly lights it is at once surrounded by a crowd of lads, who praise his skill, and plead for a puff at the luxury which his marksmanship has won for him.
The public-houses are crammed all along the line. This form of 'amusement' seems to be the favourite one with families, for in house after house there are little groups comprising a gray-headed old lady with a glass of neat gin, a buxom young woman with a baby and ditto, and a burly young fellow with a big pewter. On barrels against the wall, and on forms set around, these groups of young men and young women are talking more or less loudly, and spending an idle hour in putting the bulk of the week's wages down their throats. It is a truism to say that the curse of the lower orders is drink, but no man with eyes can walk on a Saturday night through the homes of the wage-earning class without feeling how terrible the evil is, and how earnestly, without being either a bigot or a fanatic, every man who has a chance should raise his voice at the criminal neglect which flings these poor people into the arms of their only caterer—the publican.
Many people object to the music-halls as sinks of iniquity. That they are unmixed blessings I am not going to contend, but if properly conducted they do an immense deal of comparative good. Drink is sold certainly in some of them, but few people get drunk. A very little liquor goes a long way at a hall, and the people, being amused and interested in the entertainment, do not want much liquid sustenance. The entertainments at some of the lower halls might, it is true, be weeded of certain suggestive songs; but, after all, the best patrons of indecency are the rich, and the poor give their loudest applause to skilful dancing and sentimental singing. A good ballad, well sung, 'fetches' the masses as nothing else will, and they can appreciate good music. If the managers of halls would do away with the coarser items in their programmes, I should say that this form of entertaining the masses was absolutely calculated to benefit them. I am quite certain that to keep young men and women off the streets and away from bars is no bad service to the cause of morality. In the East of London there are several places where a big entertainment is given and no liquor is sold at all. At one of them—the best of its kind in London—there are two houses nightly. From seven till nine dramas are performed, then everybody is turned out and the house is refilled with a fresh audience for a music-hall entertainment—and nearly every evening the theatre is crammed to suffocation; the admission is 1d. the gallery, 2d. the pit, and 3d. and 6d. the upper circle and boxes. On the night of our visit there wasn't room to cram another boy in the place; the gallery and pit were full of boys and girls of from eight to fifteen, I should say, and the bulk of the audience in the other parts were quite young people.
The gallery was a sight which, once seen, could never be forgotten. It was one dense mass of little faces and white bare arms twined and intertwined like snakes round a tree—tier above tier of boys rising right away from the front rows until the heads of the last row touched the ceiling. It was a jam—not a crowd—when one boy coughed it shook the thousands wedged in and round about; and when one boy got up to go out he had to crawl and walk over the heads of the others; space below for a human foot to rest there was absolutely none.
All this vast audience was purely local. Our advent, though our attire was a special get-up for the occasion, attracted instant attention, and the cry of 'Hottentots' went round. 'Hottentots' is the playful way in this district of designating a stranger, that is to say, a stranger come from the West.
The entertainment was admirable; the artistes were clever, and in only one case absolutely vulgar; and the choruses were joined in by the entire assembled multitude.
When it was time for the chorus to leave off and the singer to go on again, an official in uniform, standing by the orchestra, and commanding the entire house, raised his hand, and instantly, as if by magic, the chorus ceased.
Of course there are disturbances, but the remedy is short and effective. Two young gentlemen in the dress circle fought and used bad language to each other. Quick as lightning the official was upstairs with a solitary policeman, the delinquents were seized by the collar, and, before they could expostulate, flung down a flight of steps and hustled out into the street with a celerity which could only come of constant practice.
It is fair to say that the youths seemed quite ready for the emergency, and took their 'chucking out' most skilfully. I should have fallen and broken my nose had I been flung down a flight of steps like that; these youths were evidently prepared, and took a flying jump on to the landing. What they did outside I can't say, but after a chorus of hooting at the helmeted intruder, the audience resumed their seats, and the performance went on without any further interruption.
Such places as this—the cheaper halls, gaffs, and singsongs—are the principal places of resort of the ladies and gentlemen of the slums who have coppers to spare for amusement. But the streets themselves offer to many a variety of entertainments for which there is no charge. A horse down is a great source of quiet enjoyment; a fight attracts hundreds; and round in one dark spot we came upon an al fresco gambling establishment, where some hundreds of lads were watching half a dozen of their companions playing some game at cards on a rough deal stand, presided over by a villainous-looking Jew. What the game was we could not stay long enough to study, for our approach was signalled by scouts, and as we came close to the crowd it dispersed as if by magic, and the gentleman with the board produced from his pocket a quantity of cough-drops, and flung them upon the board, bawling aloud, 'Six a penny, six a penny!' in a manner intended to convince us that this was his occupation. Possibly we were mistaken for plain clothes policemen; at any rate, we were followed and watched for fully a hundred yards.
The mock-litany scoundrel had a big crowd in one street, and an infant phenomenon—a boy who played all the popular airs down the spout of a coffee-pot—was largely patronised; but the biggest audience of the evening surrounded a gentleman who, mounted on a cart, was at once carrying on the business of an ointment vendor and the profession of an improvisatore. His ointment was only a penny a box, but its intrinsic merits were priceless. It was warranted to draw glass or iron or steel from any part of the human body with one application; also to cure weak eyes, bad legs, and sores of all descriptions.
The gentleman indulged in anecdotes full of ancient and modern history, all proving the value of his ointment, and every now and then he dropped into rhyme:=
```'If you have a bad leg, and physicians have given you up,
```Or you have been to the doctors, who've half poisoned you with nasty `````stuff,
```Perhaps you fancy that it's no good—that your leg can't be cured;
```But Moore's ointment will do, of that rest assured.
```Try it; if it don't succeed, you're only a penny the worse.
```If you don't try it, you may think of it too late, when you're in your `````funeral hearse.
```It's cured hundreds, and thousands will testify
```It is good for even the tenderest baby's eye.
```Why pay a doctor, or in hospital lie for months,
```When this ointment will cure you by only applying it once?'=
Then the gentleman broke off into prose, and related how Napoleon, in the Island of 'Helber,' had bought a box of this very ointment of the seller's grandfather, who was under the British Government then, and had declared, if ever he got free, every soldier in the French army should have a box in his knapsack, and also gave certain humorous reminiscences of his own struggles to get the English people to believe in the specific. His eloquence was not thrown away, for he did a roaring trade, and at one time a perfect forest of hands was held up to secure the famous ointment.
The crowd thins as closing-time comes, and the hawkers pack up what is left of their stock, strike their naphtha-lamps, and wheel off the ground. What they have left they will sell in the early market on Sunday morning.
CHAPTER XI.
Looking over what I have written, I am struck by what seems to me an important omission. In driving home the nail of the miserable condition in which the poor are forced to live, I have perhaps led the reader to imagine that the better instincts of humanity have been utterly stamped out—that the courts and alleys are great wastes of weed, where never a flower grows.
I should be loth to father such an idea as this. In the course of many years of the closest contact with the most poverty-stricken of our fellow-men, I have learnt to think better, and not worse, of human nature, and to know that love, self-sacrifice, and devotion flourish in this barren soil as well as in the carefully-guarded family circles, which are, or should be, forcing-houses for all that is choicest and most beautiful among human instincts.
Braver than many a hero who comes back from foreign plains, with a deed of prowess to his credit and a medal on his breast, are some of the ragged rank and file who fight the battle of life against overwhelming odds, and never flinch or falter, but fight on to the end; and the end, alas! is rarely victory or renown—too often the guerdon of these brave soldiers is the workhouse, the hospital, or a miserable death from cold and slow starvation, in a quiet corner of the street, where they have sunk down to rise no more.
It is often a matter of wonder—at least, I hope it is—to the good folks who skim their newspapers at the morning meal, and take their politics, their Court Circular, and their police intelligence at a single draught between their sips of coffee, what becomes of the children whose fathers and mothers are sent to prison for long or short periods.
The State does not consider the innocent victims of crime; the law punishes the individual without taking thought of the consequences to those who may be dependent upon her or him for bread. I am not advocating any leniency to a culprit on the score of his value as a breadwinner; I am simply going to state a few facts, and leave my readers to draw any moral they please from the narrative.
Half the men and women of the lower orders who are imprisoned for various small offences, such as being drunk and incapable, assaulting each other, or committing petty larceny, are married and have families. Bachelors and spinsters are rare after a certain age in low neighbourhoods, and large families are invariably the result of early marriages, or that connection which, among the criminal classes and the lowest grade of labourers, does duty for the legally-solemnized institution.
Many persons who wander into police-courts at the East-end, either for business or amusement, must be familiar with the poor woman, a baby in her arms, and her head strapped up with sticking-plaster and surgical bandages, who begs the magistrate not to punish the hulking fellow in the dock who has so brutally ill-used her. The woman knows, what the magistrate and the public ignore, that the three months' sentence means comfort and luxury to the man—misery and starvation to the woman and her little ones.
He has probably been the chief bread-winner; the woman is incapacitated by his ill-treatment from doing any work, and so she and her children are suddenly rendered penniless and homeless. She must crawl back from the court to her miserable garret, and when her babies ask for food pawn her few rags to get it for them; and when all is pawned and gone, she cannot pay her nightly rent, so she must turn out with her little family into the streets or go into the workhouse. Such a case we heard as we looked into a police-court on our travels; and I shall not soon forget the agonized cry of the woman as the magistrate gave her husband six months, and congratulated her on being temporarily rid of such a ruffian.
'Great God, what will become of us now?'
I see that many humane people are asking what can be done to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. I don't know whether there is any society which looks after the wives and children of malefactors, and lends them a helping hand, if they deserve it, to tide over the absence of their sole source of income; but if there is not, I fancy here is work for idle hands to do, and a source for charity that, worked with discrimination and care, might alleviate one of the crushing evils to which poor families are liable.
But these people are not always friendless, and it is a case I wish to quote which has led me to touch upon the subject.
In one wretched room we visited there were six little ones home at the mid-day hour from school.
'You have six children?' I said to the woman.
'No, sir, only four; these two little ones ain't mine—they are staying with us.'
I imagined that they were the children of a relative, and questioned the woman further, wondering how she cared to crowd her little den with extra visitors, and then the story came out.
These two extra mouths the good soul was feeding belonged to two little children whose mother, a widow, lived in a room above. For an assault upon the police she had been sent to prison. Thus the position of these orphans with a living parent was terrible. They would have been starved or taken to the workhouse, but this good creature went up and fetched them down to be with her own children, and made them welcome; she washed them and dressed them, and did for them all she could, and she intended to keep them if she was able till the mother came out.
She didn't see that she had done anything wonderful. 'It was only neighbourly-like, and my heart bled to see the poor young 'uns a-cryin', and that wretched and neglected and dirty.'
Such cases as this are common enough—the true charity, the charity which robs itself to give to others, is nowhere so common as among the poor. The widow's mite that won the Saviour's praise is cast into the great treasury daily, and surely stands now, as then, far higher on the roll of good deeds than all the gold flung carelessly by the hands of the rich to every box-rattler who promises 'that the amount shall be duly acknowledged in the Times.'
I will quote one more case, which has just come under my personal observation, and which illustrates the brave struggles against adversity of which these people are capable.
Our attention was directed to the circumstance by the head-mistress of the school which the children were attending, and who had noticed that they, who had always been the cleanest and tidiest in the class, were beginning to show signs of a little less motherly care. The children said their mother was too ill to do much, and we went to see her.
Mrs. B. had some children of her own, and in addition she and her husband had taken in a little girl whose father had gone off tramping in search of work.
We found her propped up in a chair looking terribly ill, but in front of her, in another chair, was the wash-tub, and the poor woman was making a feeble effort to wash and wring out some of the children's things. She was dying. She was suffering from dropsy, and had not lain down for a month—the water was rising rapidly, and would soon reach her heart and kill her. Yet here she sat, scarcely able to breathe, and enduring untold agony, but making an effort to the very last to work and keep her little ones clean and tidy.
It is a glorious lot in life, these people's—is it not?—to toil on and struggle, to resist temptation, and giving their youth and age to the hardest labour for a wage that barely staves off starvation, to know that when illness comes, or time steals their strength away, they are mere burthens, refuse to be got rid of, since it encumbers the land.
Can one blame them if, knowing their hard lot and the little reward the most virtuous life can bring them, they sink into the temptations spread around them? Remember that, for half their miseries, half their illness and premature decay, and much of the disease which cripples and carries off their children, the shameful way in which they are housed, and the callous neglect of their rights as citizens by the governing class, is responsible.
They are handicapped in the race from start to finish. And, under these circumstance, such charity, such humanity, and such patience and long-suffering, as exist among them, are indeed worthy of admiration.
The natural instinct of man is to evil, and when I read in little tracts and clerical addresses of the awful depravity of the 'heathen in our midst,' I am tempted to ask what the reverend gentlemen and shocked philanthropists expect. I say, with a full knowledge of their surroundings, that the lower classes of our great cities are entitled to the highest credit for not being twenty times more depraved than they are.
They are a class which contains the germs of all that goes to make up good citizenship, and the best proof of it is the patience with which they endure the systematic neglect of their more fortunate fellow-countrymen. In any other land but ours, the mighty mass of helots would long ago have broken their bonds and swept over the land in vast revolutionary hordes. They did not always know their power, and had not enough knowledge to appreciate their wrongs. Education is opening their eyes, and their lips will not be slow to express their new-born sentiments. It will be well to meet the movement half-way, and yield to them that reform and humane recognition which some day they may all too noisily demand.
Here am I up on a platform and thumping away at the table and spouting what I have no doubt many excellent persons will think is rank communism, though it is nothing of the sort. Peccavi, I apologize. The fumes of the misery I have passed through the last two months have got into my head and made me talk wildly. Let me resume my labour more in the character of a missionary or special correspondent, and leave oratory and denunciation to the Sunday morning Wilkeses of Battersea Park.
We have no business out-of-doors at all—let us study another domestic interior. The scene, a street which lies cheek by jowl with the quarter where the world of fashion rolls nightly in comfortable carriages to enjoy theatrical and operatic performances in half-guinea stalls and three-guinea boxes, and where fabulous fortunes are made by those who can make Mr. and Mrs. Dives weep at imaginary woes or laugh at a merry jest or comic antic.
From such a scene as I am going to ask you to witness, thousands who crowd a theatre nightly to see a woman's head battered out against a sofa, or a young man suffocate himself with the fumes of charcoal, would shrink back in disgust. But you will not, for if you have gone so far with us as this journey, you are, I feel sure, convinced that no good can come of hiding the worst phase of a question which is only dragged forward here that it may, by the very horror of its surroundings, arrest attention and so secure that discussion which must always precede a great scheme of reformation.
Come with me to this place. Our way lies through Clare Market, so don't go alone, for it is a dangerous neighbourhood to strangers. Come with me through strange sights and sounds, past draggled, tipsy women crowding the footway, and hulking fellows whose blasphemies fill the tainted air; pick your way carefully through the garbage and filth that litter the streets, and stop in this narrow thoroughfare which is but a stone's-throw from many a stage that holds the mirror up to nature, and yet would shrink from holding such a scene as this.
We have stopped at a marine-store shop—we enter the passage and find our way up to the third floor. Here in a single room live a man, his wife, and three children. There has been an inquest on a baby who has died—poisoned by the awful atmosphere it breathed. We have stumbled up the dark crazy staircase at the risk of our limbs, to see this room in which the family live and sleep and eat, because in its way it is a curiosity. It has been the scene of an incident which one would hardly believe possible in this Christian country. For days in this foul room the body of a dead baby had to lie because the parish had no mortuary. Not only did the corpse have to lie here for days among the living, but on that little table, propped against the window, the surgeon had to perform a post-mortem examination.
Think of it, you who cry out that the sufferings of these people are sensationally exaggerated—the dead baby was cut open in the one room where the mother and the other little ones, its brothers and sisters, lived and ate and slept. And why?
Because the parish had no mortuary, and no room in which post-mortems could be performed.
The jurymen who went to view the body sickened at the frightful exhalations of this death-trap, and one who had thirty years' experience of London said never had he seen a fouler den.
I have turned to the newspapers for a report of the inquest and found it, and I think it will be better to present it word for word. It is an ordinary newspaper report of what has happened and been legally investigated, and may carry conviction where my own unsupported testimony would fail:
'A coroner's inquiry was held last night by Mr. Langham regarding the death of an infant aged two and a half months, the daughter of a butcher named Kent, who, with his wife and three children, occupy a single room on the third floor of premises used as a marine store in Wych Street. The inquiry was held in the Vestry-room of the parish. On the return of the jury from viewing the body—which lay in the room occupied by the family—one of the jurymen addressed the coroner. He had, he stated, during his thirty years' residence in the parish, seen many places which he regarded as unfit for dwelling-houses, but never had he seen one so bad as that which the jury had just visited. The staircase was dark and out of repair. The atmosphere inside was intolerable. Indeed, it was so bad that several of his fellow-jurymen had felt ill while they were there. They hoped that this expression of opinion would have some effect in inducing the proper authorities to provide a mortuary for the district, and that families who lived in one room might not be compelled to sleep and take their meals with a dead body within sight. Mr. Samuel Mills, surgeon, 3, Southampton Street, Strand, medical officer to the Bow Street Division of Police, deposed that he had made a post-mortem examination of the body on a propped-up table placed in front of the window of the room occupied by the family. The cause of death was consumption of the brain. From the state of the atmosphere in which the child was born, it was unhealthy. Another child had died from the same cause. He thought the local authority ought to provide a mortuary, and also a room in which post-mortem examinations could be conducted. A verdict in accordance with the medical evidence was returned by the jury, who further expressed their opinion that the want of a mortuary was calculated to be detrimental to the health of the persons living in the district; that there being no mortuary was a disgrace to the local authority; and that the circumstances surrounding the case they had investigated were a disgrace to this enlightened age.'
I will not add a word. I leave the newspaper report to arouse whatever thoughts it may in the minds of those who will peruse it. It is at least a revelation to many of 'How the Poor Live.'
Let me hark back again to the lighter side of my subject. I began the chapter with a story of the self-sacrifice of the poor. I will now end it with a little incident of which I was an eye-witness. Some poor children of the slums had 'a day in the country' given them by a friend, at which I had the privilege of being present.
At tea, to every little one there were given two large slices of cake; I noticed one little boy take his, break a little piece off, eat it, and quietly secrete the remainder in his jacket pocket. Curious, and half suspecting what his intention was, I followed the lad when tea was over to the fields.
'Eaten your cake yet?' I asked.
'No, sir,' he answered, colouring as though he had done something wrong.
'What are you going to do with it?'
'Please, sir,' he stammered, 'I'm goin' to take it 'ome to mother. She's ill and can't eat nothink, and I thought as she might manage cake, sir.'
In the train that brought those youngsters down came one white-faced child, who looked faint and ill with the walk to the station.
The head teacher, who has the history of each child at her fingers' ends, saw what was the matter.
'Had no breakfast to-day, Annie?'
'No, ma'am,' was the faltering reply.
There was a crowd of poor mothers at the station, come to see the children off. One went ont and presently returned with a penny, which she pressed into the child's hand—to buy herself something with. The woman had pawned her shawl for a copper or two in sheer womanly sympathy. Had she had the money about her, she needn't have left the station.
There was a good deal of pawning that morning, I know, from an eye-witness, and all to give the little children a copper or two to spend.
And what a struggle there had been to get them something decent to wear for that grand day out! If all the stories were written that could be told of the privations and sacrifices endured by mothers, that Sally and Jane and Will might look respectable at the treat, your heart would ache. As I don't wish it to, we will not go into the matter.