At the end of seventeen years we renew our acquaintance with the
personages who play their part in this story; but before they are
reintroduced it will be pertinent to touch upon certain political
changes which had taken place in the social condition of the people
during this period. The growth of these changes had been going on for
a great number of years, and the seeds may be said to have been sown
with the advent of the cheap press. A slow growth at first, the
slender roots beneath the soil having scarcely strength to take firm
hold; but as they became stronger they became bolder, and were now
winding themselves firmly and stoutly around the roots of the old
institutions which, fixed as they had been for centuries, were in this
audacious grasp beginning to show signs of weakness and decay. There
was a time when what is known as the higher classes would have
regarded as incredibly monstrous the idea of affinity between them and
those who moved in the lower grooves. There was a time when the lower
classes themselves would have regarded as the height of effrontery the
idea of raising their eyes in any other than a timid way to the higher
classes who ruled and dominated them. That time is past, never to be
revived. There exist here and there in England instances of feudalism
almost as marked as any that can be drawn from the time that is gone.
In those places the high hand is still employed to destroy any hope of
progress among the people, but these instances are rare, and are
becoming still rarer. The penny newspaper has drawn prince and
peasant, noble and serf--for we have the latter even in free
England--closer together, and has taught the multitude that all men
and women are human alike, and that there exists in the upper grades
no divine right of power and supremacy. And, strangely enough, it is
through this very means that the higher classes have been forced to
recognize the power and the might of the lower. This new condition of
things has also been promoted by other causes than the advancement of
intelligence. The increase of population has forced upon reasoning
minds among the people the inevitable necessity of radical changes in
the hitherto existing order of things; and the scarecrow of vested
interests, which is set up by those who lay claim to them, will be
powerless to check the onward march. There are, unhappily, retarding
influences, springing from the very vices of the people, which prove
stumbling-blocks in every step that is taken or suggested. But for
these vices the victims themselves are scarcely to blame. It is not an
inherent matter, it is a matter of birth, whether one grows up with
the courtly airs of St. James's or with the degrading characteristics
of St. Giles's; and it is good to observe that there are statesmen in
St. James's who recognize the fact, and who are working honestly and
earnestly towards a better end--or, rather, not to speak
paradoxically, towards a better beginning. And yet, despite these
reflections, society perhaps never labored under greater ills than at
present. The ephemeral, vicious fashions of St. James's were never in
greater vogue than now; the cunning and vices of St. Giles's were
never more conspicuous and apparent. There was a time when much of
this, both in the higher and lower classes, was hidden, but in the
present day everything is brought to light in the conflict of
testimony which a fair-minded survey is forced to perceive. There are
cogent and powerful arguments to be adduced in justification by each
side against the other, but these are small, meandering rivulets which
but slightly affect the rolling of the grand tide. Out of this seeming
chaos good must come. It is, as it has ever been, still the fashion of
the age--even now that darkness no longer weighs heavily upon it--to
shift and evade a responsibility. Thus, the owner of a great landed
estate, in portions of which hotbeds of vice and misery can be found,
is in the habit of shrugging his shoulders when public attention is
directed to them, and of saying, in effect, "It is not my affair, it
is the affair of my agents." But this attitude, which springs either
from fear, cowardice, or indifference, can no longer be accepted. It
is the owner alone who is responsible; it is the owner and the owner
alone who thrives and fattens upon these systems, who is in justice
accountable for the evils of which he is undoubtedly the breeder; and
the attitude he assumes proves him to be unfitted for his
responsibilities. The remedy is his to apply, and if he apply it not
in time the power of doing so will be taken out of his hands. The
present opportunity is his; the future with its dark possibilities
lies before him. It is well if he take heed of this before it is too
late. Let us present an illustration bearing upon our story.
Two years after Kingsley's return Nansie and her uncle, who
constituted the government of ways and means of the household, decided
that the rooms they occupied were too dear; they paid for these rooms
five shillings a week. They looked out for others, and decided upon
two rooms at the top of a house in a narrow court, in comparison with
which Church Alley was a paradise. This court was so narrow that the
occupants of the houses on either side could hold conversation with
each other from opposite windows. The rooms were very small, the
ceilings very low, the ventilation horrible, the sanitary arrangements
disgraceful--a description of affairs which renders it all the more
wonderful how Nansie's daughter, Hester, and how Nansie herself, could
have kept themselves pure and sweet in an atmosphere so inimical to
healthful moral and physical growth. The court--with other
thoroughfares as narrow and stunted and vicious in its immediate
neighborhood--was built upon part of an estate which belonged to a
family the head of which sat in the House of Lords. There was in the
house in which Nansie resided a cellar, politely called a basement. In
this cellar were two rooms--one back, one front. The back room had a
fireplace, but no window; what light filtered into it was filtered
through a pane of glass let into the compartment which divided it from
the front room, and as this front room itself could boast of but one
window, the light it supplied to its neighbor was of a character so
dismal and forlorn as scarcely to relieve the darkness into which, by
the laws of its structure, it was plunged. But, indeed, to call it by
the name of light was the bitterest of mockeries, not alone because of
the small play it had, but because of the dust and cobwebs which
covered both sides of the pane of glass. In this back room, however,
lived a family of father, mother, and three children, all pigging
together--there is no other word to describe it--in the narrow space
which may fitly be likened to the Black Hole of Calcutta. They had
certainly one advantage--that they could run out when they pleased and
breathe the fetid air of the court, and thence into wider
thoroughfares where the air was not vile enough to poison them. Had
this opportunity not been theirs they would have died in a week. The
social station of the head of this family was that of a scavenger, for
six months of the year out of work. His wife occasionally got half a
day's washing to do; the children were young and helpless, and the
life they all lived can be more easily imagined than described. To
describe it faithfully would be impossible in the pages or columns of
any respectable journal, the details were so frightful and vile. And
it is in no class spirit, in no spirit but that of mournfulness and
amazement, that the fact is repeated--that the virtual owner of this
back cellar sat in the House of Lords.
The front room of the cellar was occupied by a cobbler. The window
which supplied light to his room was a practicable one, resembling a
shutter of glass, which could be put up and taken down at will; and
during the whole of the year, in fair weather or foul--except upon
those occasions, which were frequent enough, when he was drunk--the
man could be seen by passersby plying his thread and awl. Fortunately
for himself and for everybody about him, he was a bachelor.
There were two rooms on the ground-floor, the front occupied by a
"baked-tater man," his wife, and two young children. At those periods
of the year when baked potatoes with their seasoning of pepper and
salt were not in request, the man, being a strict Conservative, was
idle, allowing his wife to accompany a friend of his, who drove quite
a roaring trade in fairly good neighborhoods with his barrow of
seasonable flowers. For this labor she was paid in coin one shilling a
day, and a share of his bread and cheese or bread and meat, as well as
of the sundry pots of beer his thirsty soul demanded in his
peregrinations. Their two children played in the gutters, being not
exceptional in this respect, because most of the children in the court
found in the gutters a veritable Crystal Palace of delights.
The back room on the ground-floor was occupied by a large
family--father, mother, and seven children--all employed from morning
till night, and often from night till morning, upon the manufacture of
match-boxes, at the rate of two-pence three-farthings a gross. Their
united earnings never exceeded fifteen shillings, often were less.
Thus the grim effort to make both ends meet, no less than their close
and long hours of toil, rendered them white, pinched, haggard-looking,
and almost fleshless.
On the first-floor front lived a married couple with an only child.
The man had once been a law-writer, probably not a very skilful or
capable scribe, seeing he had never been able to save a penny.
However, it was here he found himself plunged into poverty's depths
and unable to follow his calling, the muscles of his right hand being
paralyzed. The wife had become a shirtmaker, and was assisted by her
child, a girl of sixteen. Neither of these was a skilful workwoman,
and after the payment of their rent there was seldom left at the end
of the week more than seven or eight shillings to expend in food.
The first-floor back was tenanted by a widow with two children, twins,
a little more than a year old. Being unable to find any other means of
living she had, by force of circumstances, drifted into the rear ranks
of the ballet, where she helped to fill the stage on a salary of two
shillings a night. Commencing late in life to learn to dance, there
was for her no hope of promotion in the ranks. Her lot was hard
enough, Heaven knows; but she would have found it harder, because of
the impossibility of leaving her babies every night for a good many
hours together, had it not been for the kindness of the law-writer's
wife and daughter, who often looked after them when the mother was
absent.
In the rooms on the second floor, which were very small attics with
slanting roofs, lived Nansie, Kingsley, and their daughter. Mr.
Loveday took his meals with them, but slept elsewhere. The front attic
was used as a living-room during the day, and as a bedroom during the
night--the shut-up bedstead being sometimes occupied by Kingsley alone
and sometimes by Hester. Altogether there slept in this small house
twenty-eight persons. The frontage of the house was twelve feet, its
depth twenty feet; and it will be gathered from these dimensions how
utterly unsuitable it was in the way of health and morals for so large
a number of occupants. In this respect anything more vicious can
scarcely be imagined, and yet this house was but one of many built
upon land owned by an enormously wealthy man, one who helped to make
laws for the social regeneration of the people. Were the facts forced
upon his knowledge in the way of accusation, he would doubtless plead
ignorance of the circumstances, as others have pleaded before him; but
this convenient blindness to the truth will not serve; this convenient
shifting of responsibility is of no avail; an unfaithful steward he
has been, and an unfaithful steward he remains.