I give the following brief and characteristic statement, which is
peculiar in showing the habitual _restlessness_ of the mere labourer.
My informant was a stout, hale-looking man, who had rarely known
illness. All these sort of labourers (nightmen included) scout the
notion of the cholera attacking _them!_
“Work, sir? Well, I think I _do_ know what work is, and has known it
since I was a child; and then I was set to help at the weaving. My
friends were weavers at Norwich, and 26 years ago, until steam pulled
working men down from being well paid and well off, it was a capital
trade. Why, my father could sometimes earn 3_l._ at his work as a
working weaver; there was money for ever then; now 12_s._ a-week
is, I believe, the tip-top earnings of his trade. But _I didn’t like
the confinement or the close air in the factories_, and so, when I
grew big enough, I went to ground-work in the city (so he frequently
called Norwich); I call ground-work such as digging drains and the
like. Then I ’listed into the Marines. _Oh, I hardly know what made
me_; men does foolish things and don’t know why; it’s human natur.
I’m sure it wasn’t the bounty of 3_l._ that tempted me, for I was
doing middling, and sometimes had night-work as well as ground-work
to do. I was then sent to Sheerness and put on board the _Thunderer_
man-of-war, carrying 84 guns, as a marine. She sailed through the
Straits (of Gibraltar), and was three years and three months blockading
the Dardanelles, and cruising among the islands. I never saw anything
like such fortifications as at the Dardanelles; why, there was mortars
there as would throw a ton weight. No, I never heard of their having
been fired. Yes, we sometimes got leave for a party to go ashore on
one of the islands. They called them Greek islands, but I fancy as
how it was Turks near the Dardanelles. O yes, the men on the islands
was civil enough to us; they never spoke to us, and we never spoke
to them. The sailors sometimes, and indeed the lot of us, would have
bits of larks with them, laughing at ’em and taking sights at ’em and
such like. Why, I’ve seen a fine-dressed Turk, one of their grand
gentlemen there, when a couple of sailors has each been taking a sight
at him, and dancing the shuffle along with it, make each on ’em a low
bow, as solemn as could be. Perhaps he thought it was a way of being
civil in our country! I’ve seen some of the head ones stuck over with
so many knives, and cutlasses, and belts, and pistols, and things,
that he looked like a cutler’s shop-window. We were ordered home at
last, and after being some months in barracks, which I didn’t relish
at all, were paid off at Plymouth. Oh, a barrack life’s anything but
pleasant, but I’ve done with it. After that I was eight years and a
quarter a gentleman’s servant, coachman, or anything (in Norwich),
and then got tired of that and came to London, and got to ground and
new sewer-work, and have been on the sewers above five years. Yes, I
prefer the sewers to the Greek islands. I was one of the first set as
worked a pump. There was a great many spectators; I dare say as there
was 40 skientific gentlemen. I’ve been on the sewers, flushing and
pumping, ever since. The houses we clean out, all says it’s far the
best plan, ours is. ‘Never no more nightmen,’ they say. You see, sir,
our plan’s far less trouble to the people in the house, and there’s no
smell--least I never found no smell, and it’s cheap, too. In time the
nightmen’ll disappear; in course they must, there’s so many new dodges
comes up, always some one of the working classes is a being ruined. If
it ain’t steam, it’s something else as knocks the bread out of their
mouths quite as quick.”