The first class go abroad daily to _find_ in the streets, and carry
away with them such things as bones, rags, “pure” (or dogs’-dung),
which no one appropriates. These they sell, and on that sale support
a wretched life. The second class of people are also as strictly
_finders_; but their industry, or rather their labour, is confined to
the river, or to that subterranean city of sewerage unto which the
Thames supplies the great outlets. These persons may not be immediately
connected with the _streets_ of London, but their pursuits are carried
on in the open air (if the sewer-air may be so included), and are all,
at any rate, out-of-door avocations. The third class is distinct from
either of these, as the labourers comprised in it are not finders, but
_collectors_ or _removers_ of the dirt and filth of our streets and
houses, and of the soot of our chimneys.
The two first classes also differ from the third in the fact that the
sweeps, dustmen, scavengers, &c., are paid (and often large sums) for
the removal of the refuse they collect; whereas the bone-grubbers, and
mud-larks, and pure-finders, and dredgermen, and sewer-hunters, get for
their pains only the value of the articles they gather.
Herein, too, lies a broad distinction between the street-finder, or
collector, and the street-buyer: though both deal principally with
refuse, the buyer _pays_ for what he is permitted to take away; whereas
the finder or collector is either paid (like the sweep), or else he
neither pays nor is paid (like the bone-grubber), for the refuse that
he removes.
The third class of street-collectors also presents another and a
markedly distinctive characteristic. They act in the capacity of
servants, and do not depend upon chance for the result of their day’s
labour, but are put to stated tasks, being employed and paid a fixed
sum for their work. To this description, however, some of the sweeps
present an exception; as when the sweep works on his own account, or,
as it is worded, “is his own master.”
The public health requires the periodical cleaning of the streets, and
the removal of the refuse matter from our dwellings; and the man who
contracts to carry on this work is decidedly a street-collector; for
on what he collects or removes depends the amount of his remuneration.
Thus a wealthy contractor for the public scavengery, is as entirely one
of the street-folk as the unskilled and ignorant labourer he employs.
The master lives, and, in many instances, has become rich, on the
results of his street employment; for, of course, the actual workmen
are but as the agents or sources of his profit. Even the collection of
“pure” (dogs’-dung) in the streets, if conducted by the servants of any
tanner or leather dresser, either for the purposes of his own trade or
for sale to others, might be the occupation of a wealthy man, deriving
a small profit from the labour of each particular collector. The same
may also be said of bone-grubbing, or any similar occupation, however
insignificant, and now abandoned to the outcast.
Were the collection of mud and dust carried on by a number of distinct
individuals--that is to say, were each individual dustman and scavenger
to collect on his own account, there is no doubt that no _one man_
could amass a fortune by such means--while if the collection of bones
and rags and even dogs’-dung were carried on “in the large way,” that
is to say, by a number of individual collectors working for one “head
man,” even the picking up of the most abject refuse of the metropolis
might become the source of great riches.
The bone-grubber and the mud-lark (the searcher for refuse on the
banks of the river) differ little in their pursuits or in their
characteristics, excepting that the mud-larks are generally boys, which
is more an accidental than a definite distinction. The grubbers are
with a few exceptions stupid, unconscious of their degradation, and
with little anxiety to be relieved from it. They are usually taciturn,
but this taciturn habit is common to men whose callings, if they
cannot be called solitary, are pursued with little communication with
others. I was informed by a man who once kept a little beer-shop near
Friar-street, Southwark Bridge-road (where then and still, he thought,
was a bone-grinding establishment), that the bone-grubbers who carried
their sacks of bones thither sometimes had a pint of beer at his house
when they had received their money. They usually sat, he told me,
silently looking at the corners of the floor--for they rarely lifted
their eyes up--as if they were expecting to see some bones or refuse
there available for their bags. Of this inertion, perhaps fatigue and
despair may be a part. I asked some questions of a man of this class
whom I saw pick up in a road in the suburbs something that appeared to
have been a coarse canvas apron, although it was wet after a night’s
rain and half covered with mud. I inquired of him what he thought
about when he trudged along looking on the ground on every side. His
answer was, “Of nothing, sir.” I believe that no better description
could be given of that vacuity of mind or mental inactivity which
seems to form a part of the most degraded callings. The minds of such
men, even without an approach to idiotcy, appear to be a blank. One
characteristic of these poor fellows, bone-grubbers and mud-larks, is
that they are very poor, although I am told some of them, the older
men, have among the poor the reputation of being misers. It is not
unusual for the youths belonging to these callings to live with their
parents and give them the amount of their earnings.
The sewer-hunters are again distinct, and a far more intelligent and
adventurous class; but they work in gangs. They must be familiar with
the course of the tides, or they might be drowned at high water. They
must have quick eyes too, not merely to descry the objects of their
search, but to mark the points and bearings of the subterraneous
roads they traverse; in a word, “to know their way underground.”
There is, moreover, some spirit of daring in venturing into a dark,
solitary sewer, the chart being only in the memory, and in braving
the possibility of noxious vapours, and the by no means insignificant
dangers of the rats infesting these places.
The dredgermen, the finders of the water, are again distinct, as being
watermen, and working in boats. In some foreign parts, in Naples, for
instance, men carrying on similar pursuits are also divers for anything
lost in the bay or its confluent waters. One of these men, known some
years ago as “the Fish,” could remain (at least, so say those whom
there is no reason to doubt) three hours under the water without
rising to the surface to take breath. He was, it is said, web-footed,
naturally, and partially web-fingered. The King of the Two Sicilies
once threw a silver cup into the sea for “the Fish” to bring up and
retain as a reward, but the poor diver was never seen again. It was
believed that he got entangled among the weeds on the rocks, and so
perished. The dredgermen are necessarily well acquainted with the sets
of the tide and the course of the currents in the Thames. Every one of
these men works on his own account, being as it were a “small master,”
which, indeed, is one of the great attractions of open-air pursuits.
The dredgermen also depend for their maintenance upon the sale of what
they find, or the rewards they receive.
It is otherwise, however, as was before observed, with the third class
of the street-finders, or rather collectors. In all the capacities of
dustmen, nightmen, scavengers, and sweeps, the employers of the men are
_paid_ to do the work, the proceeds of the street-collection forming
only a portion of the employer’s remuneration. The sweep has the soot
in addition to his 6_d._ or 1_s._; the master scavenger has a payment
from the parish funds to sweep the streets, though the clearance of
the cesspools, &c., in private houses, may be an individual bargain.
The whole refuse of the streets belongs to the contractor to make the
best of, but it must be cleared away, and so must the contents of a
dust-bin; for if a mass of dirt become offensive, the householder may
be indicted for a nuisance, and municipal by-laws require its removal.
It is thus made a matter of compulsion that the dust be removed from
a private house; but it is otherwise with the soot. Why a man should
be permitted to let soot accumulate in his chimney--perhaps exposing
himself, his family, his lodgers, and his neighbours to the dangers of
fire, it may not be easy to account for, especially when we bear in
mind that the same man may not accumulate cabbage-leaves and fish-tails
in his yard.
The dustmen are of the plodding class of labourers, mere labourers, who
require only bodily power, and possess little or no mental development.
Many of the agricultural labourers are of this order, and the dustman
often seems to be the stolid ploughman, modified by a residence in a
city, and engaged in a peculiar calling. They are generally uninformed,
and no few of them are dustmen because their fathers were. The same
may be said of nightmen and scavengers. At one time it was a popular,
or rather a vulgar notion that many dustmen had become possessed of
large sums, from the plate, coins, and valuables they found in clearing
the dust-bins--a manifest absurdity; but I was told by a marine-store
dealer that he had known a young woman, a dustman’s daughter, sell
silver spoons to a neighbouring marine-store man, who was “not very
particular.”
The circumstances and character of the chimney-sweeps have, since
Parliament “put down” the climbing boys, undergone considerable change.
The sufferings of many of the climbing boys were very great. They
were often ill-lodged, ill-fed, barely-clad, forced to ascend hot and
narrow flues, and subject to diseases--such as the chimney-sweep’s
cancer--peculiar to their calling. The child hated his trade, and was
easily tempted to be a thief, for prison was an asylum; or he grew
up a morose tyrannical fellow as journeyman or master. Some of the
young sweeps became very bold thieves and house-breakers, and the most
remarkable, as far as personal daring is concerned: the boldest feat of
escape from Newgate was performed by a youth who had been brought up
a chimney-sweep. He climbed up the two bare rugged walls of a corner
of the interior of the prison, in the open air, to the height of some
60 feet. He had only the use of his hands, knees, and feet, and a
single slip, from fear or pain, would have been death; he surmounted a
parapet after this climbing, and gained the roof, but was recaptured
before he could get clear away. He was, moreover, a sickly, and reputed
a cowardly, young man, and ended his career in this country by being
transported.
A master sweep, now in middle age, and a man “well to do,” told me that
when a mere child he had been apprenticed out of the workhouse to a
sweep, such being at that time a common occurrence. He had undergone,
he said, great hardships while learning his business, and was long,
from the indifferent character of his class, ashamed of being a sweep,
both as journeyman and master; but the sweeps were so much improved in
character now, that he no longer felt himself disgraced in his calling.
The sweeps are more intelligent than the mere ordinary labourers I have
written of under this head, but they are, of course, far from being an
educated body.
The further and more minute characteristics of the curious class of
street-finders or collectors will be found in the particular details
and statements.
Among the finders there is perhaps the greatest poverty existing,
they being the very lowest class of all the street-people. Many of
the very old live on the hard dirty crusts they pick up out of the
roads in the course of their rounds, washing them and steeping them
in water before they eat them. Probably that vacuity of mind which is
a distinguishing feature of the class is the mere atony or emaciation
of the mental faculties proceeding from--though often producing in the
want of energy that it necessarily begets--the extreme wretchedness
of the class. But even their liberty and a crust--as it frequently
literally is--appears preferable to these people to the restrictions of
the workhouse. Those who are unable to comprehend the inertia of both
body and mind begotten by the despair of long-continued misfortune are
referred to page 357 of the first volume of this work, where it will
be found that a tinman, in speaking of the misery connected with the
early part of his street-career, describes the effect of extreme want
as producing not only an absence of all hope, but even of a desire to
better the condition. Those, however, who have studied the mysterious
connection between body and mind, and observed what different creatures
they themselves are before and after dinner, can well understand that a
long-continued deficiency of food must have the same weakening effect
on the muscles of the mind and energy of the thoughts and will, as it
has on the limbs themselves.
Occasionally it will be found that the utter abjectness of the
bone-grubbers has arisen from the want of energy begotten by
intemperate habits. The workman has nothing but this same energy
to live upon, and the permanent effect of stimulating liquors is
to produce an amount of depression corresponding to the excitement
momentarily caused by them in the frame. The operative, therefore,
who spends his earnings on “drink,” not only squanders them on a
brutalising luxury, but deprives himself of the power, and consequently
of the disposition, to work for more, and hence that idleness,
carelessness, and neglect which are the distinctive qualities of the
drunkard, and sooner or later compass his ruin.
For the poor wretched children who are reared to this the lowest trade
of all, surely even the most insensible and unimaginative must feel
the acutest pity. There is, however, this consolation: I have heard
of none, with the exception of the more prosperous sewer-hunters and
dredgermen, who have remained all their lives at street-finding. Still
there remains much to be done by all those who are impressed with a
sense of the trust that has been confided to them, in the possession of
those endowments which render their lot in this world so much more easy
than that of the less lucky street-finders.