RESPECTING THE PARENTAGE OF SOME OF OUR GUTTER POPULATION.
_Who are the Mothers_?—_The Infant Labour Market_.—_Watch London and
Blackfriars Bridges_.—_The Melancholy Types_.—_The Flashy_, _Flaunting_
“_Infant_.”—_Keeping Company_.—_Marriage_.—_The Upshot_.
INSTRUCTIVE and interesting though it may be to inquire into the haunts
and habits of these wretched waifs and “rank outsiders” of humanity, of
how much importance and of useful purpose is it to dig yet a little
deeper and discover who are the parents—the mothers especially—of these
babes of the gutter.
Clearly they had no business there at all. A human creature, and more
than all, a _helpless_ human creature, endowed with the noblest shape of
God’s creation, and with a soul to save or lose, is as much out of place
grovelling in filth and contamination as would be a wild cat crouching on
the hearth-rug of a nursery. How come they there, then? Although not
bred absolutely in the kennel, many merge into life so very near the edge
of it, that it is no wonder if even their infantine kickings and
sprawlings are enough to topple them over. Some there are, not vast in
number, perhaps, but of a character to influence the whole, who are
dropped into the gutter from such a height that they may never crawl out
of it—they are so sorely crippled. Others, again, find their way to the
gutter by means of a process identical with that which serves the
conveyance to sinks and hidden sewers of the city’s ordinary refuse and
off-scourings. Of this last-mentioned sort, however, it will be
necessary to treat at length presently.
I think that it may be taken as granted that gross and deliberate
immorality is not mainly responsible for our gutter population. Neither
can the poverty of the nation be justly called on to answer for it. On
the contrary, unless I am greatly mistaken, the main tributary to the
foul stream has its fountain-head in the keen-witted, ready-penny
commercial enterprise of the small-capital, business-minded portion of
our vast community.
In no respect are we so unlike our forefathers as in our struggles after
“mastership” in business, however petty. This may be a sign of
commercial progress amongst us, but it is doubtful if it tends very much
to the healthful constitution of our humanity. “Work hard and win a
fortune,” has become a dry and mouldy maxim, distasteful to modern
traders, and has yielded to one that is much smarter, viz., “There is
more got by scheming than by hard work.”
By scheming the labour of others, that is; little children—anyone. It is
in the infant labour market especially that this new and dashing spirit
of commercial enterprise exercises itself chiefly. There are many kinds
of labour that require no application of muscular strength; all that is
requisite is dexterity and lightness of touch, and these with most
children are natural gifts. They are better fitted for the work they are
set to than adults would be, while the latter would require as wages
shillings where the little ones are content with pence. This, perhaps,
would be tolerable if their earnings increased with their years; but such
an arrangement does not come within the scheme of the sweaters and
slop-factors, Jew and Christian, who grind the bones of little children
to make them not only bread, but luxurious living and country houses, and
carriages to ride in. When their “hands” cease to be children, these
enterprising tradesmen no longer require their services, and they are
discharged to make room for a new batch of small toilers, eager to engage
themselves on terms that the others have learned to despise, while those
last-mentioned unfortunates are cast adrift to win their bread—somehow.
Anyone curious to know the sort of working young female alluded to may be
gratified a hundred times over any day of the week, if he will take the
trouble to post himself, between the hours of twelve and two, at the foot
of London or Blackfriars bridge. There he will see the young girl of the
slop-shop and the city “warehouse” hurrying homeward on the chance of
finding a meagre makeshift—“something hot”—that may serve as a dinner.
It is a sight well worth the seeking of any philanthropic person
interested in the present condition and possible future of the infant
labour market. How much or how little of truth there may be in the
lament one occasionally hears, that our endurance is failing us, and that
we seldom reach the ripe old age attained by our ancestors, we will not
here discuss; at least there can be no doubt of this—that we grow old
much earlier than did our great grandfathers; and though our “three-score
years and ten” may be shortened by fifteen or twenty years, the downhill
portion of our existence is at least as protracted as that of the hale
men of old who could leap a gate at sixty. This must be so, otherwise
the ancient law, defining an infant as “a person under the age of
fourteen,” could never have received the sanction of legislators. Make
note of these “infants” of the law as they come in knots of two and
three, and sometimes in an unbroken “gang,” just as they left the
factory, putting their best feet foremost in a match against time; for
all that is allowed them is one hour, and within that limited period they
have to walk perhaps a couple of miles to and fro, resting only during
that brief space in which it is their happy privilege to exercise their
organs of mastication.
Good times indeed were those olden ones, if for no other reason than that
they knew not such infants as these! Of the same stuff in the main, one
and all, but by no means of the same pattern. Haggard, weary-eyed
infants, who never could have been babies; little slips of things, whose
heads are scarcely above the belt of the burly policeman lounging out his
hours of duty on the bridge, but who have a brow on which, in lines
indelible, are scored a dreary account of the world’s hard dealings with
them. Painfully puckered mouths have these, and an air of such sad, sage
experience, that one might fancy, not that these were young people who
would one day grow to be old women, but rather that, by some inversion of
the natural order of things, they had once been old and were growing
young again—that they had seen seventy, at least, but had doubled on the
brow of the hill of age, instead of crossing it, and retraced their
steps, until they arrived back again at thirteen; the old, old heads
planted on the young shoulders revealing the secret.
This, the most melancholy type of the grown-up neglected infant, is,
however, by no means the most painful of those that come trooping past in
such a mighty hurry. Some are dogged and sullen-looking, and appear as
though steeped to numbness in the comfortless doctrine, “What can’t be
cured must be endured;” as if they had acquired a certain sort of surly
relish for the sours of existence, and partook of them as a matter of
course, without even a wry face. These are not of the sort that excite
our compassion the most; neither are the ailing and sickly-looking little
girls, whose tender constitutions have broken down under pressure of the
poison inhaled in the crowded workroom, and long hours, and countless
trudgings, early and late, in the rain and mire, with no better covering
for their shoulders than a flimsy mantle a shower would wet through and
through, and a wretched pair of old boots that squelch on the pavement as
they walk. Pitiful as are these forlorn ones to behold, there is, at
least, a grim satisfaction in knowing that with them it cannot last. The
creature who causes us most alarm is a girl of a very different type.
This is the flashy, flaunting “infant,” barely fourteen, and with scarce
four feet of stature, but self-possessed and bold-eyed enough to be a
“daughter of the regiment”—of a militia regiment even. She consorts with
birds of her own feather. Very little experience enables one to tell at
a glance almost how these girls are employed, and it is quite evident
that the terrible infant in question and her companions are engaged in
the manufacture of artificial flowers. Their teeth are discoloured, and
there is a chafed and chilblainish appearance about their nostrils, as
though suffering under a malady that were best consoled with a
pocket-handkerchief. The symptoms in question, however, are caused by
the poison used in their work—arsenite of copper, probably, that deadly
mineral being of a “lovely green,” and much in favour amongst artificial
florists and their customers. Here they come, unabashed by the throng,
as though the highway were their home, and all mankind their brothers;
she, the heroine with a bold story to tell, and plenty of laughter and
free gesticulation as sauce with it. She is of the sort, and, God help
them! they may be counted by hundreds in London alone, in whom keen wit
would appear to be developed simultaneously with ability to walk and
talk. Properly trained, these are the girls that grow to be clever,
capable women—women of spirit and courage and shrewd discernment. The
worst of it is that the seed implanted will germinate. Hunger cannot
starve it to death, or penurious frosts destroy it. Untrained, it grows
apace, overturning and strangling all opposition and asserting its
paramount importance.
This is the girl who is the bane and curse of the workroom crowded with
juvenile stitchers or pasters, or workers in flowers or beads. Her
constant assumption of lightheartedness draws them towards her, her
lively stories are a relief from the monotonous drudgery they are engaged
on. Old and bold in petty wickedness, and with audacious pretensions to
acquaintance with vice of a graver sort, she entertains them with stories
of “sprees” and “larks” she and her friends have indulged in. She has
been to “plays” and to “dancing rooms,” and to the best of her ability
and means she demonstrates the latest fashion in her own attire, and
wears her draggletail flinders of lace and ribbon in such an easy and
old-fashionable manner, poor little wretch, as to impress one with the
conviction that she must have been used to this sort of thing since the
time of her shortcoating; which must have been many, many years ago. She
has money to spend; not much, but sufficient for the purchase of
luxuries, the consumption of which inflict cruel pangs on the hungry-eyed
beholders. She is a person whose intimacy is worth cultivating, and they
do cultivate it, with what result need not be here described.
At fifteen the London factory-bred girl in her vulgar way has the worldly
knowledge of the ordinary female of eighteen or twenty. She has her
“young man,” and accompanies him of evenings to “sing-songs” and raffles,
and on high days and holidays to Hampton by the shilling van, or to
Greenwich by the sixpenny boat. At sixteen she wearies of the
frivolities of sweethearting, and the young man being agreeable the pair
embark in housekeeping, and “settle down.”
Perhaps they marry, and be it distinctly understood, whatever has been
said to the contrary, the estate of matrimony amongst her class is not
lightly esteemed. On the contrary, it is a contract in which so much
pride is taken that the certificate attesting its due performance is not
uncommonly displayed on the wall of the living-room as a choice print or
picture might be; with this singular and unaccountable distinction that
when a _clock_ is reckoned with the other household furniture, the
marriage certificate is almost invariably hung under it. It was Mr.
Catlin of the Cow Cross Mission who first drew my attention to this
strange observance, and in our many explorations into the horrible courts
and alleys in the vicinity of his mission-house he frequently pointed out
instances of this strange custom; but even he, who is as learned in the
habits and customs of all manner of outcasts of civilisation as any man
living, was unable to explain its origin. When questioned on the subject
the common answer was, “They say that it’s lucky.”
It is the expense attending the process that makes matrimony the
exception and not the rule amongst these people. At least this is their
invariable excuse. And here, as bearing directly on the question of
“neglected infants,” I may make mention of a practice that certain
well-intentioned people are adopting with a view to diminishing the
prevalent sin of the unmarried sexes herding in their haunts of poverty,
and living together as man and wife.
The said practice appears sound enough on the surface. It consists
simply in marrying these erring couples gratis. The missionary or
scripture reader of the district who, as a rule, is curiously intimate
with the family affairs of his flock, calls privately on those young
people whose clock, if they have one, ticks to a barren wall, and makes
the tempting offer—banns put up, service performed, beadle and pew opener
satisfied, and all free! As will not uncommonly happen, if driven into a
corner for an excuse, the want of a jacket or a gown “to make a
’spectable ’pearance in” is pleaded; the negociator makes a note of it,
and in all probability the difficulty is provided against, and in due
course the marriage is consummated.
This is all very well as far as it goes, but to my way of thinking the
scheme is open to many grave objections. In the first place the instinct
that incites people to herd like cattle in a lair is scarcely the same as
induces them to blend their fortunes and live “for better, for worse”
till the end of their life. It requires no great depth of affection on
the man’s part to lead him to take up with a woman who, in consideration
of board and lodging and masculine protection will create some semblance
of a home for him. In his selection of such a woman he is not governed
by those grave considerations that undoubtedly present themselves to his
mind when he meditates wedding himself irrevocably to a mate. Her
history, previous to his taking up with her, may be known to him, and
though perhaps not all that he could wish, she is as good to him as she
promised to be, and they get along pretty well and don’t quarrel very
much.
Now, although not one word can be urged in favour of this iniquitous and
shocking arrangement, is it quite certain that a great good is achieved
by inducing such a couple to tie themselves together in the sacred bonds
of matrimony? It is not a marriage of choice as all marriages should be.
If the pair had been bent on church marriage and earnestly desired it, it
is absurd to suppose that the few necessary shillings, the price of its
performance, would have deterred them. If they held the sacred ceremony
of so small account as to regard it as well dispensed with as adopted, it
is no very great triumph of the cause of religion and morality that the
balance is decided by a gown or a jacket, in addition to the good will of
the missionary (who, by-the-bye, is generally the distributor of the alms
of the charitable) being thrown into the scale.
To be sure the man is not compelled to yield to the persuasions of those
who would make of him a creditable member of society; he is not compelled
to it, but he can hardly be regarded as a free agent. If the pair have
children already, the woman will be only too anxious to second the
solicitation of her friend, and so secure to herself legal protection in
addition to that that is already secured to her through her mate’s
acquired regard for her. Then it is so difficult to combat the simple
question, “Why not?” when all is so generously arranged—even to the
providing a real gold ring to be worn in place of the common brass
make-believe—and nothing remains but to step round to the parish church,
where the minister is waiting, and where in a quarter of an hour, the
great, and good, and lasting work may be accomplished. The well-meaning
missionary asks, “Why not?” The woman, urged by moral or mercenary
motives, echoes the momentous query, and both stand with arms presented,
in a manner of speaking, to hear the wavering one’s objection. The
wavering one is not generally of the far-seeing sort. In his heart he
does not care as much as a shilling which way it is. He does not in the
least trouble himself from the religious and moral point of view. When
his adviser says, “Just consider how much easier your conscience will be
if you do this act of justice to the woman whom you have selected as your
helpmate,” he wags his head as though admitting it, but having no
conscience about the matter he is not very deeply impressed. Nine times
out of ten the summing-up of his deliberation is, “I don’t care; it won’t
cost _me_ nothing; let ’em have their way.”
But what, probably, is the upshot of the good missionary’s endeavours and
triumph? In a very little time the gilt with which the honest adviser
glossed the chain that was to bind the man irrevocably to marriage and
morality wears off. The sweat of his brow will not keep it bright; it
rusts it. He feels, in his own vulgar though expressive language, that
he has been “bustled” into a bad bargain. “It is like this ’ere,” a
matrimonial victim of the class once confided to me; “I don’t say as she
isn’t as good as ever, but I’m blowed if she’s all that better as I was
kidded to believe she would be.”
“But if she is as good as ever, she is good enough.”
“Yes, but you haven’t quite got the bearing of what I mean, sir, and I
haint got it in me to put it in the words like you would. Good enough
before isn’t good enough now, cos it haint hoptional, don’t you see? No,
you don’t. Well, look here. S’pose I borrer a barrer. Well, it’s good
enough and a conwenient size for laying out my stock on it. It goes
pooty easy, and I pays eighteen pence a week for it and I’m satisfied.
Well, I goes on all right and without grumbling, till some chap he ses to
me, ‘What call have you got to borrer a barrer when you can have one of
your own; you alwis _want_ a barrer, don’t you know, why not make this
one your own?’ ‘Cos I can’t spare the money,’ I ses. ‘Oh,’ he ses,
‘I’ll find the money and the barrer’s yourn, if so be as you’ll promise
and vow to take up with no other barrer, but stick to this one so long as
you both shall live.’ Well, as aforesaid, it’s a tidy, useful barrer,
and I agrees. But soon as it’s _mine_, don’t you know, I ain’t quite so
careless about it. I overhauls it, in a manner of speaking, and I’m more
keerful in trying the balance of it in hand when the load’s on it. Well,
maybe I find out what I never before troubled myself to look for.
There’s a screw out here and a bolt wanted there. Here it’s weak, and
there it’s ugly. I dwells on it in my mind constant. I’ve never got
that there barrer out of my head, and p’raps I make too much of the weak
pints of it. I gets to mistrust it. ‘It’s all middling right, just now,
old woman—old barrer, I mean,’ I ses to myself, ‘but you’ll be a playing
me a trick one day, I’m afraid.’ Well, I go on being afraid, which I
shouldn’t be if I was only a borrower.”
“But you should not forget that the barrow, to adopt your own ungallant
figure of speech, is not accountable for these dreads and suspicions of
yours; it will last you as long and as well as though you had continued a
borrower; you will admit that, at least!”
“I don’t know. _Last_, yes! That’s the beggaring part of it. Ah, well!
p’raps it’s all right, but I’m blest if I can stand being haunted like I
am now.”
Nothing that I could say would add force to the argument of my
costermonger friend, as set forth in his parable of the “barrer.”
Applying it to the question under discussion, I do not mean to attribute
to the deceptiveness of the barrow or to its premature breaking down, the
spilling into the gutter of all the unhappy children there discovered.
My main reason for admitting the evidence in question was to endeavour to
show that as a pet means of improving the morality of our courts and
alleys, and consequently of diminishing the gutter population, the modern
idea of arresting fornication and concubinage, by dragging the pair there
and then to church, and making them man and wife, is open to serious
objections. The state of matrimony is not good for such folk. It was
never intended for them. It may be as necessary to healthful life as
eating is, but no one would think of taking a man starved, and in the
last extremity for lack of wholesome aliment, and setting before him a
great dish of solid food. It may be good for him by-and-by, but he must
be brought along by degrees, and fitted for it. Undoubtedly a great
source of our abandoned gutter children may be found in the shocking
herding together of the sexes in the vile “slums” and back places of
London, and it is to be sincerely hoped that some wise man will presently
devise a speedy preventive.
In a recent report made to the Commissioners of Sewers for London, Dr.
Letheby says: “I have been at much pains during the last three months to
ascertain the precise conditions of the dwellings, the habits, and the
diseases of the poor. In this way 2,208 rooms have been most
circumstantially inspected, and the general result is that nearly all of
them are filthy or overcrowded or imperfectly drained, or badly
ventilated, or out of repair. In 1,989 of these rooms, all in fact that
are at present inhabited, there are 5,791 inmates, belonging to 1,576
families; and to say nothing of the too frequent occurrence of what may
be regarded as a necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife,
and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably
small and ill-conditioned room, there are numerous instances where adults
of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same
room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from
three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children,
are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages; and where
every human instinct of propriety and decency is smothered. Like my
predecessor, I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common
with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the
casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy
rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and
females of different families that tenant the same room, where birth and
death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast
down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation
from each other, or from the rest of the inmates. Of the many cases to
which I have alluded, there are some which have commanded my attention by
reason of their unusual depravity—cases in which from three to four
adults of both sexes, with many children, were lodging in the same room,
and often sleeping in the same bed. I have note of three or four
localities, where forty-eight men, seventy-three women, and fifty-nine
children are living in thirty-four rooms. In one room there are two men,
three women, and five children, and in another one man, four women, and
two children; and when, about a fortnight since, I visited the back room
on the ground floor of No. 5, I found it occupied by one man, two women,
and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died
in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare
floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the
living, and we may well ask how it can be otherwise than that the human
heart should be dead to all the gentler feelings of our nature, when such
sights as these are of common occurrence.
“So close and unwholesome is the atmosphere of some of these rooms, that
I have endeavoured to ascertain, by chemical means, whether it does not
contain some peculiar product of decomposition that gives to it its foul
odour and its rare powers of engendering disease. I find it is not only
deficient in the due proportion of oxygen, but it contains three times
the usual amount of carbonic acid, besides a quantity of aqueous vapour
charged with alkaline matter that stinks abominably. This is doubtless
the product of putrefaction, and of the various fœtid and stagnant
exhalations that pollute the air of the place. In many of my former
reports, and in those of my predecessor, your attention has been drawn to
this pestilential source of disease, and to the consequence of heaping
human beings into such contracted localities; and I again revert to it
because of its great importance, not merely that it perpetuates fever and
the allied disorders, but because there stalks side by side with this
pestilence a yet deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a
rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly
and incestuous, and scattering, while society averts her eye, the
retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence and pauperism.”