It is said—and indeed it has been said so often that I feel ashamed of
saying it—that one half the world does not know how the other half lives.
I am sure that whether that is true or not, few of my City readers have
any idea of what goes on in the City while they are sitting comfortably
at home, or are sitting equally comfortably at church or chapel (for of
course the denunciations of the preacher when he speaks of the depravity
of the age do not refer to them). Suppose we take a stroll in the
eastern part of the City, where the dirt is greatest, the population most
intense, and the poverty most dire. We need not rise very early. On a
Sunday morning we are all of us a little later at breakfast than on
ordinary occasions. We sit longer over our welcome meal—our toilette is
a little more elaborate—so that we are in the City this particular Sunday
about half-past nine—a later hour than most of the City-men patronise on
the week-day. In the leading thoroughfares shops are shut and there are
few people about, and in the City, especially these dark winter mornings,
when the golden gleam of sunshine gilds the raw and heavy fog which in
the City heralds the approach of day, very few signs of life are visible,
very few omnibuses are to be seen, and even the cabs don’t seem to care
whether you require their services or whether you let them alone. Here
and there a brisk young man or a spruce maiden may be seen hastening to
teach at some Sunday school; otherwise respectability is either asleep or
away.
As we pass along, the first thing that strikes the stranger is a dense
unsavoury mob to be met outside certain buildings. We shall see one such
assemblage in Bell Alley, Goswell Street; we shall see another in
Artillery Street; there will be another at the Cow Cross Mission Hall,
and another in Whitecross Street, and another in a wretched little hovel,
you can scarcely call it a building, in Thaull Street. Just outside the
City, at the Memorial Hall, Bethnal Green, and at the Rev. W. Tyler’s
Ragged Church in King Edward Street, there will be similar crowds. Let
us look at them. It is not well to go too near, for they are unsavoury
even on these cold frosty mornings. Did you ever see such wretched,
helpless, dirty, ragged, seedy, forlorn men and women in all your life?
I think not. Occasionally on a week-day we see a beggar, shirtless and
unwashed and unkempt, shivering in the street, but here in these mobs we
see nothing else. They have tickets for free breakfasts provided for
them under the care of Mr. J. J. Jones and the Homerton Mission. How
they crowd around the doors, waiting for admission; how sad and
disconsolate those who have not tickets look as they turn away! What a
feast of fat things, you say, there must be inside. My dear sir, it is
nothing of the kind. All that is provided for them is a small loaf of
bread, with the smallest modicum of butter, and a pint of cocoa. Not
much of a breakfast that to you or me, who have two or three good meals a
day, but a veritable godsend to the half-starved and wretched souls we
see outside. Let us follow them inside. The tables and the long forms
on which they are seated are of the rudest kind. The room, as a rule, is
anything but attractive, nor is the atmosphere very refreshing. A City
missionary or an agent of the Christian community, or a devoted Christian
woman or a young man, whose heart is in the work—is distributing the
materials of the feast, which are greedily seized and ravenously
devoured. Let us look at them now they have taken their hats off. What
uncombed heads; what dirty faces; what scant and threadbare garments!
There are women too, and they seem to have fallen lower than the men.
They look as if they had not been to bed for months; as if all pride of
personal appearance had long since vanished; as if they had come out of a
pigstye.
Well, the world is a hard one for such as they, and no one can grudge
them the cheap meal which Christian charity provides. It seems a mockery
to offer these waifs and strays of the streets and alleys and
disreputable slums of the City a Gospel address till something has been
done to assuage the pangs of hunger, and to arouse in them the dormant
and better feelings of their nature. It is thus these mission-halls are
enabled to do a little good, to go down to the very depths, as it were,
in the endeavour to reform a wasted life, and to save a human soul. As
you look at these men and women you shudder. Most of them are in what
may be called the prime of life; able-bodied, ripe for mischief, fearing
not God, regarding not man. It must do them good to get them together at
these Sunday morning breakfasts, where they may realise that Christian
love which makes men and women in the middle and upper classes of society
have compassion on such as they.
Getting out into the open air, or rather into the open street, I heard a
band of singers advance. It is a procession, but not a very dangerous
one. The leader walks with his back to us, an act rarely exercised out
of royal circles. It is thus he guides the vocalists before him, who go
walking arm-in-arm singing with all their might; while at the rear a
pleasant-looking man follows, giving papers to the people. I take one,
and learn that this is Mr. Booth’s Allelujah Band, and that a seat is
kindly offered me in his tabernacle, where I can hear the Gospel. I
don’t accept the invitation; I can hear the Gospel without going to
Whitechapel, and Mr. Booth’s extravagances are not to my taste.
Apparently this Sunday morning the people do not respond to the
invitation. It is evident that in this part of the City the novelty of
the thing has worn off.
I scarce know whether I am in the City or not. I plunge into a mass of
streets and courts leading from Artillery Street to King Edward Street at
one end, and Bethnal Green at the other. Here is a market in which a
brisk provision trade is carried on, and men and women are purchasing all
the materials of a Sunday dinner. Outside Rag-fair a trade similar to
that which prevails there seems also to be carried on. I see no
policemen about, and the people apparently do just as they like; and the
filth and garbage left lingering in some of the narrow streets are
anything but pleasant. As a I rule, I observe the policemen only
patronise the leading thoroughfares, and then it seems to me they act in
a somewhat arbitrary manner. For instance, opposite the Broad Street
Terminus a lad is cleaning a working man’s boots. While he is in the
middle of the operation the policeman comes and compels him to march off.
I move on a dozen steps, and there, up Broad Street—just as you enter the
Bishopsgate Station of the Metropolitan Railway—is another lad engaged in
the same work of shoe or boot cleaning. Him the policeman leaves alone.
I wonder why. Justice is painted blind, and perhaps the policeman is
occasionally ditto. In Bishopsgate Street itself the crowd was large of
idle boys and men, who seemed to have nothing particular to do, and did
not appear to care much about doing that. They took no note of the
Sabbath bells which called them to worship. To them the Sunday morning
was simply a waste of time. They had turned out of their homes and
lodgings, and were simply walking up and down the street till it was time
to open the public-house. In that street, as the reader may be aware,
there is the Great Central Hall, and as its doors were open, I went in.
The audience was very scanty, and apparently temperance does not find
more favour with the British working man than the Gospel. Mr. Ling was
in the chair. There was now and then a hymn sung or a temperance melody,
and now and then a speech. Indeed, the speeches were almost as numerous
as the hearers. It seems the society keeps a missionary at work in that
part of the City, and he had much to say of the cases of reformation
going on under his care. The best speech I heard was that of a working
builder, who said for years he had been in the habit of spending eight
shillings a week in the drink, and how much better off he was now that he
kept the money in his pocket. I wished the man had more of his class to
hear him. Of course he rambled a little and finished off with an attack
on the bishops, which the chairman (Mr. Ling) very properly did not allow
to pass unchallenged, as he quoted Bishop Temple as a teetotaler, and
referred to the hearty way in which many of the clergy of the Church of
England supported the temperance cause.
I hasten to other scenes. I next find myself in Sclater Street, and here
up and down surges a black mob, sufficient at any rate, were it so
disposed, to fill St. Paul’s Cathedral. This mob is composed entirely of
working men—men who are amused with anything, and hurry in swarms to a
hatter’s shop, who simply throws out among them pink and yellow cards,
indicating the extraordinary excellence and unparalleled cheapness of the
wares to be sold within.
Foreigners say Sunday is a dull day; that then there is no business doing
in London; and that everyone is very sad on that day. In Sclater Street
they would soon find out their mistake. There, it is evident, little of
Sunday quiet and Sunday dulness exists. On each side of me are shops
with birds; and if there is not a brisk trade going on, it is certainly
not the fault of the tradesmen. We have just had what the bird-catchers
call the November flight of linnets, and in Sclater Street the market
overflows with them. The London and suburban bird-catchers, who are not
to be put down by Act of Parliament, have had a fine time of it this
year. The principal part of the linnets are bred on the wild gorse
lands, and it is the wild weather such as we have had of late that drives
them into the nets of the suburban fowler, who this year has been so
lucky as to take five dozen of them at one pull of the clap-net.
Goldfinches also are abundant, in consequence of the provision of the
Wild Birds Preservation Act. On Sunday a bird-dealer offers me them at
threepence each, or four for a shilling. It is sad to see the poor
little things shut up in their bits of cages in the dirty shops of
Sclater Street. The proprietor with his unwashed hands takes them out
one by one and holds them out in vain. The British workman crowds round
and admires, but he does not buy, as he is keeping his money in his
pocket till 1 P.M., when the “public” opens its congenial doors, and his
unnatural thirst is slaked. It is really shocking, this display of these
beautiful little songsters. What crime have they committed that they
should be imprisoned in the dirt and bad air and uncongenial fog of
Sclater Street? What are the uses of the Wild Birds Preservation Act if
the only result is the crowding the shops of the bird-dealers in Sclater
Street? I felt indeed indignant at the sight thus permitted, and at the
trade thus carried on. Cocks and hens, ducks and rabbits, are proper
subjects of sale, I admit, though I see no particular reason why, when
other shops are closed, shops for the sale of them are permitted to
remain open; but blackbirds, linnets, thrushes, goldfinches,
bullfinches—the ornaments of the country, the cheerful choristers of the
garden and the grove—deserve kinder treatment at our hands, even if the
result be that Sclater Street does less business and is less of an
attractive lounge to the British operative on a Sabbath morn. Away from
Sclater Street and Bishopsgate Street the crowd thins, and the ordinary
lifeless appearance of the Sunday in London is visible everywhere. Here
and there a gray-headed old gentleman or an elderly female may be seen
peeping out of a first-floor window into the sad and solitary street, but
the younger branches of the family are away. Now and then you catch a
crowd of workmen who are much given to patronise the showy van which the
proprietor of some invaluable preparation of sarsaparilla utilises for
the sale of his specific for purifying the blood and keeping off all the
ills to which flesh is heir. Such shops as are open for the sale of
cheap confectionery I see also are well patronised, and in some quarters
evidently an attempt made to dispose of ginger-beer. On the cold frosty
morning the hot-chestnut trade appears also to be in demand, though I
question whether all who crowd round the vendors of such articles are
_bonâ-fide_ buyers; rather, it seems to me, that under the pretence of
being such they are taking a mean advantage of the little particle of
warmth thrown out by the charcoal fire used for the purpose of roasting
chestnuts. Well, I can’t blame them; it is cold work dawdling in the
streets, and if I were a British workman I fancy I should find a little
more interest in church than in the idle walk and talk of some, or in the
habit others have of standing stock still till The Pig and Whistle or the
Blue Lion open their doors. It is well to be free and independent and
your own master, but that is no reason why all the Sunday morning should
be spent in loafing about the streets.
But what about the many? Well, the public-houses are open, and it is
there the British workman feels himself but too much at home. And then
there is the Hall of Science, in Old Street, which is generally crowded
by an audience who pay gladly for admission to hear Mr. Bradlaugh, who is
a very able man, lecture, in a style which would shock many good people
if they were to hear him. I must candidly admit that in that style he is
far outdone by Mrs. Besant, who takes the Bible to pieces, and turns it
inside out, and holds up to ridicule all its heroes and prophets, and
kings and apostles, and Christ himself, with a zest which seems perfectly
astonishing when we remember how much Christianity has done for the
elevation of the people in general and woman in particular. Mrs. Besant
is a very clever woman, and she means well I daresay, still it is not
pleasant to see the Hall of Science so well filled as it is on a Sunday
night.
The Hall of Science in the Old Street Road is not an attractive place
outside, and internally it is less of a hall and more of a barn than any
public building with which I chance to be familiar. And yet, Sunday
night after Sunday night, it is well filled, though the admission for
each person is from threepence to a shilling, and there is no attempt by
music or ritual to attract the sentimental or the weak. The lectures
delivered are long and argumentative, and it is worth the study,
especially of the Christian minister who complains that he cannot get at
the working man, how it is that the people prefer to pay money to hear
the lectures at Old Street, while he offers them the Gospel without money
and without price and often with the additional attraction of a free tea.
With that view I went to hear Mrs. Besant one Sunday night. I know
little of Mrs. Besant, save that she has been made the subject of a
prosecution which, whatever be its results, whether of fine or
imprisonment to herself or of gain to her prosecutors, is one deeply to
be deplored. If a clergyman of the Established Church of England
established or attempted to establish the fact that mankind has a
tendency to increase beyond the means of existence, a woman, on behalf of
the sex that has the most to suffer from the misery of overpopulation,
has a right in the interests of humanity to call attention to the
subject. In a very old-fashioned couplet it has been remarked of woman—
That if she will, she will, you may depend on’t;
And if she won’t, she won’t, and there’s an end on’t.
To that class of female Mrs. Besant emphatically belongs. She is one of
those rare ones who will say what she thinks. There is a great deal of
firmness in her face. Such a woman always goes her own way. It was a
pleasant change from the strong meat of the Hall of Science—the withering
scorn and contempt there poured on all that the best men in the world
have held to be best—to the mild excitement of a Shakespearian reading in
a public-house. Could there be a fitter teacher for the people who do
not go to church, and, let me add, also for those who do? There could be
no negative reply to such a question, and surely if Shakespeare is quoted
in the pulpit on a Sunday morning, the people may hear him read on a
Sunday evening.
“Sunday evening readings for the people!” Only think of that! What a
gain from the tap-room and the bar-parlour. Such was the announcement
that met my eye the other night in a street not a hundred miles from
King’s Cross railway station. Mr. So-and-So, the bill proceeded to
state, had the pleasure to inform his friends that, with a view to oblige
the public, he had secured the services of a celebrated dramatic reader,
who would on every Sunday evening read or recite passages from
Shakespeare, Thackeray, Dickens, Hood, Thornbury, Sketchley, etc.
Further, the bill stated that these readings would commence at a
quarter-past seven, and terminate at a quarter-past ten. Could I resist
such an intellectual treat? Could I deny myself such an exquisite
gratification? Forgive me, indulgent reader, if for once I made up my
mind I could not. The difficulty was where to find the place, for, in my
delight at finding a publican so public-spirited—so ready to compete with
the attractions of St. George’s Hall—I had unfortunately failed to make a
note of the house thus kindly thrown open to an intelligent public. The
difficulty was greater than would at first sight appear, for on Sunday
night shops are mostly closed, and there are few people in a position to
answer anxious inquirers. Great gin-palaces were flaring away in all
their glory, and doing a roaring trade at the time when church-bells were
ringing for evening service, and decent people were hastening to enter
the sanctuary, and for awhile to forget earth with its care and sin. In
vain I timidly entered and put the query to the customers at the crowded
bar, to potman over the counter, to landlord, exceptionally brilliant in
the splendour of his Sunday clothes. They knew nothing of the benevolent
individual whose whereabouts I sought; and evidently had a poor opinion
of me for seeking his address. Sunday evening readings for the people!
what cared they for them? Why could I not stand soaking like the others
at their bar, and not trouble my head about readings from Shakespeare and
Dickens? Such evidently was the train of thought suggested by my
questions. Just over the way was a police-station. Of course the police
would know; it was their duty to know what went on in all the
public-houses of the district. I entered, and found three policemen in
the charge of a superior officer. I put my question to him, and then to
them all. Alas! they knew as little of the matter as myself; indeed,
they knew less, for they had never heard of such a place, and seemed
almost inclined to “run me in” for venturing to suppose they had. What
wonderful fellows are our police! I say so because all our
penny-a-liners say so; but my opinion is, after all, that they can see
round a corner or through a brick wall just as well as myself or any
other man, and no more. Clearly this was a case in point, for the
public-house I was seeking was hardly a stone’s-throw off, and I was
directed to it by an intelligent greengrocer, who was standing at his
shop-door and improving his mind by the study of that fearless champion
of the wrongs of the oppressed and trodden-down British working man,
_Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper_. It was he who put me on the right scent—not
that he was exactly certain—but he indicated the house at which such
proceedings were likely to take place, and as he was right in his
conjecture, I take this opportunity of publicly returning him my thanks.
Had it not been for him I should have had no Shakespeare, no Thackeray,
no Hood, no Dickens, no feast of reason and flow of soul that Sunday
night. As it was, it turned out as I expected, and I had very little of
either to reward my painful search. As I have said, the nominal hour at
which proceedings commenced was a quarter-past seven; in reality, it was
not till nearly half-past eight that the celebrated dramatic reader
favoured us with a specimen of his powers. It was true he was in the
house, but he was down in the bar with a select circle, indulging in the
luxuries generally to be found in such places. In the meantime I took
stock leisurely of the room upstairs in which we assembled, and of its
occupants. At that early hour the latter were not numerous. A little
foreigner with his wife was seated by the fire, and him she led off
before the dramatic readings commenced. Reasons, which a sense of
delicacy forbids my mentioning, suggested the wisdom and the prudence of
an early retirement from a scene rather dull—at any rate, quite the
reverse of gay and festive. As to the rest of us, I can’t say that we
were a particularly lively lot. A stern regard to truth compels me
reluctantly to remark that we were unprepossessing looking rather than
otherwise. The majority I of us there were lads with billycock hats and
short pipes, who talked little to each other, but smoked and drank beer
in solemn silence. The cheerfulest personage in the room was the potboy,
who, as he stalked about with his apron on and his shirt-sleeves tucked
up, seemed to be quite at home with his customers. Some of the lads had
their sweethearts with them; at any rate I presume they were such from
the retiring way in which they sat—she, after the manner of such young
people in a large room, chiefly occupied in counting the ten fingers of
her red and ungloved hands, while her male admirer sat smoking his short
pipe and spitting on the sanded floor in a way more suggestive of perfect
freedom than of grace. I could see but two decent-looking girls in the
room, which, by the time the entertainment was over, contained as many as
sixty or seventy. Evidently the class of customers expected was a low
one, greengrocers’ and costermongers’ boys apparently, and such like.
The tables were of the commonest order, and we had no chairs, nothing but
long forms, to sit on. In the middle by the wall was a small platform,
carpeted; on this platform was a chair and table, and it was there the
hero of the evening seated himself, and it was from thence that at
intervals he declaimed. As to the entertainment, if such it may be
called, the less said about it the better. A more fifth-rate,
broken-down, ranting old hack I think I never heard. Even now it puzzles
me to think how the landlord could have ever had the impudence to attach
the term “celebrated” to his name. It seemed as if the reader had an
impediment in his speech, so laughable and grotesque was his enunciation,
which, however, never failed to bring down an applause in the way of raps
on the tables which caused the glasses to jingle—to the manifest danger
of spilling their contents. We had a recitation about Robert Bruce, and
other well-known readings; then he bellowed and tossed his arms about and
screamed! How dull were his comic passages! How comic was his pathos!
Surely never was good poetry more mangled in its delivery before. I can
stand a good deal—I am bound to stand a good deal, for in the course of a
year I have to listen to as much bad oratory as most; but at last I could
stand it no longer, and was compelled to beat a precipitate retreat,
feeling that I had over-estimated the public spirit of the landlord and
his desire to provide intellectual amusement for his friends—feeling that
these readings for the people are nothing better than an excuse for
getting boys and girls to sit smoking and drinking, wasting their time
and injuring their constitutions, on a night that should be sacred to
better things, in the tainted atmosphere of a public-house.