|As I glance over the notes I have jotted down during my journey through
Outcasts' Land, the delicacy of the task I have undertaken comes home to
me more forcibly than ever. The housing of the poor and the remedy for
the existing state of things are matters I have so much at heart, that
I fear lest I should not make ample use of the golden opportunities here
afforded me of ventilating the subject. On the other hand, I hesitate
to repel the reader, and, unfortunately, the best illustrations of the
evils of overcrowding are repulsive to a degree.
Perhaps if I hint at a few of the very bad cases, it will be sufficient.
Men and women of the world will be able to supply the details and draw
the correct deductions; and it is, after all, only men and women of the
world whose practical sympathy is likely to be enlisted by a revelation
of the truth about the poor of great cities.
Come with me down this court, where at eleven o'clock in the morning
a dead silence reigns. Every house is tenanted, but the blinds of the
windows are down and the doors are shut. Blinds and doors! Yes, these
luxuries are visible here. This is an aristocratic street, and the rents
are paid regularly. There is no grinding poverty, no starvation here,
and no large families to drag at the bread-winner. There is hardly any
child-life here at all, for the men are thieves and highway cheats, and
the women are of the class which has furnished the companions of such
men from the earliest annals of roguedom.
The colony sleeps though the sun is high. The day with them is the idle
time, and they reap their harvest in the hours of darkness. Later in the
day, towards two o'clock, there will be signs of life; oaths and shouts
will issue from the now silent rooms, and there will be fierce wrangles
and fights over the division of ill-gotten gains. The spirit of murder
hovers over this spot, for life is held of little account. There is a
Bill Sikes and Nancy in scores of these tenements, and the brutal blow
is ever the accompaniment of the brutal oath.
These people, remember, rub elbows with the honest labouring poor; their
lives are no mystery to the boys and girls in the neighbourhood; the
little girls often fetch Nancy's gin, and stand in a gaping crowd while
Nancy and Bill exchange compliments on the doorstep, drawn from the well
of Saxon, impure and utterly defiled. The little boys look up half with
awe and half with admiration at the burly Sikes with his flash style,
and delight in gossip concerning his talents as a 'crib-cracker,' and
his adventures as a pickpocket: The poor--the honest poor--have been
driven by the working of the Artizans' Dwellings Acts, and the clearance
of rookery after rookery, to come and herd with thieves and wantons,
to bring up their children in the last Alsatias, where lawlessness and
violence still reign supreme.
The constant association of the poor and the criminal class has deadened
in the former nearly all sense of right and wrong. In the words of
one of them, 'they can't afford to be particular about their choice of
neighbours.' I was but the other day in a room in this district occupied
by a widow woman, her daughters of seventeen and sixteen, her sons of
fourteen and thirteen, and two younger children. Her wretched apartment
was on the street level, and behind it was the common yard of the
tenement. In this yard the previous night a drunken sailor had been
desperately maltreated, and left for dead. I asked the woman if she had
not heard the noise, and why she didn't interfere. 'Heard it?' was the
reply; 'well, we ain't deaf, but they're a rum lot in this here house,
and we're used to rows. There ain't a night passes as there ain't a
fight in the passage or a drunken row; but why should I interfere?'Taint
no business of mine.' As a matter of fact, this woman, her grown-up
daughters, and her boys must have lain in that room night after night,
hearing the most obscene language, having a perfect knowledge of the
proceedings of the vilest and most depraved of profligate men and
women forced upon them, hearing cries of murder and the sound of blows,
knowing that almost every crime in the Decalogue was being committed in
that awful back yard on which that broken casement looked, and yet
not one of them had ever dreamed of stirring hand or foot. They were
saturated with the spirit of the place, and though they were respectable
people themselves, they saw nothing criminal in the behaviour of their
neighbours.
For this room, with its advantages, the widow paid four and sixpence a
week; the walls were mildewed and streaming with damp; the boards as you
trod upon them made the slushing noise of a plank spread across a mud
puddle in a brickfield; foul within and foul without, these people paid
the rent of it gladly, and perhaps thanked God for the luck of having
it. Rooms for the poor earning precarious livelihoods are too hard to
get and too much in demand now for a widow woman to give up one just
because of the trifling inconvenience of overhearing a few outrages and
murders.
One word more on this shady subject and we will get out into the light
again. I have spoken of the familiarity of the children of the poor with
all manner of wickedness and crime. Of all the evils arising from this
one-room system there is perhaps none greater than the utter destruction
of innocence in the young. A moment's thought will enable the reader
to appreciate the evils of it. But if it is bad in the case of a
respectable family, how much more terrible is it when the children are
familiarized with actual immorality!
Wait outside while we knock at this door.
Knock, knock!--No answer!
Knock, knock, knock!
A child's voice answers, 'What is it?'
We give the answer--the answer which has been our 'open, sesame'
everywhere--and after a pause a woman opens a door a little and asks us
to wait a moment. Presently we are admitted. A woman pleasing looking
and with a certain refinement in her features holds the door open for
us. She has evidently made a hurried toilet and put on an ulster over
her night attire. She has also put a brass chain and locket round her
neck. There is a little rouge left on her cheeks and a little of the
burnt hairpin colour left under her eyes from overnight. At the table
having their breakfast are two neat and clean little girls of seven and
eight.
They rise and curtsey as we enter. We ask them a few questions, and
they answer intelligently--they are at the Board School and are making
admirable progress--charming children, interesting and well-behaved in
every way. They have a perfect knowledge of good and evil--one of them
has taken a Scripture prize--and yet these two charming and intelligent
little girls live in that room night and day with their mother, and this
is the den to which she snares her dissolute prey.
I would gladly have passed over this scene in silence, but it is
one part of the question which directly bears on the theory of State
interference. It is by shutting our eyes to evils that we allow them to
continue unreformed so long. I maintain that such cases as these are
fit ones for legislative protection. The State should have the power of
rescuing its future citizens from such surroundings, and the law which
protects young children from physical hurt should also be so framed as
to shield them from moral destruction.
The worst effect of the present system of Packing the Poor is the moral
destruction of the next generation.
Whatever it costs us to remedy the disease we shall gain in decreased
crime and wickedness. It is better even that the ratepayers should bear
a portion of the burthen of new homes for the respectable poor than
that they should have to pay twice as much in the long-run for prisons,
lunatic asylums, and workhouses.
Enough for the present of the criminal classes. Let us see some of
the poor people who earn an honest living--well, 'living,' perhaps, is
hardly the word--let us say, who can earn enough to pay their rent and
keep body and soul together.
Here is a quaint scene, to begin with. When we open the door we start
back half choked. The air is full of floating fluff, and some of it gets
into our mouths and half chokes us. When we've coughed and wheezed a
little we look about us and gradually take in the situation.
The room is about eight feet square. Seated on the floor is a white
fairy--a dark-eyed girl who looks as though she had stepped straight off
a twelfth cake. Her hair is powdered all over _a la Pompadour_, and the
effect is _bizarre_. Seated beside her is an older woman, and she is
white and twelfth-cakey too. Alas! their occupation is prosaic to a
degree. They are simply pulling rabbit-skins--that is to say, they are
pulling away all the loose fluff and down and preparing the skins
for the furriers, who will use them for cheap goods, dye them into
imitations of rarer skins, and practise upon them the various tricks of
the trade.
Floor, walls, ceiling, every inch of the one room these people live and
sleep in, is covered with fluff and hair. How they breathe in it is a
mystery to me. I tried and failed, and sought refuge on the doorstep.
The pair, working night and day at their trade, make, when business is
good, about twelve shillings a week. Their rent is four. This leaves
them four shillings a week each to live upon, and as there is no one
else to share it with them, I suppose they are well-to-do folk.
The younger woman's appearance was striking. Seated on the floor in an
Eastern attitude, and white from top to toe--the effect of her dark
eyes heightened by the contrast--she was a picture for an artist, and my
fellow-worker made excellent use of his pencil, while I engaged her and
her mother in conversation.
These people complained bitterly of their surroundings, of the character
of the people they had to live among, and of the summary proceedings of
their landlord, who absolutely refused to repair their room or give them
the slightest convenience.
'Then why not move?' I ventured to suggest. 'Four shillings a week--ten
guineas a year for this pigsty--is an exorbitant rent: you might do
better.'
The woman shook her head. 'There's lots o' better places we'd like to
go to, but they won't have us. They object to our business. We must go
where they'll take us.'
'But there are plenty of places a little way out where you can have two
rooms for what you pay for this.'
'A little way out, yes; but how are we to get to and fro with the work
when it's done? We must be near our work. We can't afford to ride.'
Exactly! And therein lies one of the things which reformers have to
consider. There are thousands of these families who would go away
into the suburbs, where we want to get them, if only the difficulty of
travelling expenses to and fro could be conquered. They herd together
all in closely packed quarters because they must be where they can get
to the dock, the yard, the wharf, and the warehouses without expense.
The highest earnings of this class is rarely above sixteen shillings a
week, and that, with four or five shillings for rent, leaves very little
margin where the family is large. The omnibus and the train are the
magicians which will eventually bid the rookeries disappear, but the
services of these magicians cost money, and there is none to spare in
the pockets of the poor.
In another room close to these people, but if anything in a more
wretched condition still, we come upon a black man sitting with his head
buried in his hands. He is suffering with rheumatics, and has almost
lost the use of his limbs. The reason is evident. His wife points to
the bed in the corner against the wall; the damp is absolutely oozing
through and trickling down the wall. The black man is loquacious. He is
a hawker, and can't go out and lay in a stock, for he hasn't a penny in
the world. He is stone broke. He is a Protestant darkie, he informs us,
and is full of troubles. Two boys are lolling about on the floor. At our
entrance a shock-headed, ragged girl of ten has crawled under the bed.
The Protestant darkie drags her out and explains she is 'a-bringin' him
to his grave with sorrer--she's a bad gel and slangs her mother.' The P.
D. doesn't know how he's going to pay his rent or where the next meal's
coming from. He stands outside 'a corffee shop' generally, when he can
get about, and 'the lady as keeps it, bless her!--she's a rare good'un
to me--she's a fallen angel, that's what she is;' but he can't go and
hawk nothing, else he'd be took up. 'I ain't got no capital, and, faith
of a Protestant darkie, I'm defunct.'
The man has a host of quaint sayings and plenty of the peculiar wit of
the nigger breed, but his position is undoubtedly desperate.
The rent of the death-trap he lives in with his wife and family is four
and sixpence, and his sole means of subsistence is hawking shrimps and
winkles when they are cheap, or specked oranges and damaged fruit.
He has at the best of times only a shilling or two to lay out in the
wholesale market, and out of his profit he must pay his rent and keep
his family. I suspect that the 'fallen angel' is often good for a
meal to the poor darkie, and I learn that he is a most respectable,
hardworking fellow. 'How do you do when you're stone broke?' I ask him.
'Well, sir, sometimes I comes across a gentleman as gives me a bob and
starts me again.'
The shot hits the mark, and we leave the Protestant darkie grinning
at his own success, and debating with his wife what will be the best
article in which to invest for the day's market.
Honest folks enough in their way, these--keeping themselves to
themselves and struggling on as best they can, now 'making a bit over,'
and now wondering where on earth the next sixpence is to come from. Just
up the street is a house with an inscription over it which tells us
we can find within a very different class to study. This is a licensed
lodging-house, where you can be accommodated for fourpence or sixpence a
night. This payment gives you during the day the privilege of using the
common kitchen, and it is into the common kitchen we are going. We walk
into the passage, and are stopped by a strapping young woman of about
eight-and-twenty. She is the deputy. 'What do we want?'
Once again the password is given, and the attitude of the lady changes.
She formally conducts us into a large room, where the strangest
collection of human beings are crowded together. It is sheet-washing
day, and there is a great fire roaring up the chimney. Its ruddy glare
gives a Rembrandtish tone to the picture. Tables and forms run round,
the room, and there is not a vacant place.' Men, women, and children are
lolling about, though it is mid-day, apparently with nothing to do but
make themselves comfortable. The company is not a pleasant one. Many of
the men and women and boys are thieves. Almost every form of disease,
almost every kind of deformity, seems crowded into this Chamber of
Horrors. The features are mostly repulsive; an attractive face there is
not among the sixty or seventy human beings in the room. Some of them
are tramps and hawkers, but most of them are professional loafers,
picking up in any way that presents itself the price of a night's
lodging. They are a shifting population, and rarely remain in one house
long. Some of them only get a night in now and then as a luxury, and
look upon it as a Grand Hotel episode. They sleep habitually in the
open, on the staircases, or in the casual ward. The house we are in is
one where Nancy and Sikes come often enough when they are down on their
luck. Here is a true story of this very place, which will perhaps
illustrate sufficiently the type of its frequenters.
Some time last year two men left the house one morning. They were going
into the country on business. One, whom I will call John, kissed his
mistress, a girl of twenty, and said 'Good-bye,' leaving her at the
house; he wouldn't be away long, and he and Bill, his companion, set out
on their travels.
A day or two after Bill returns alone; the girl asks him where her
sweetheart is. 'He's lagged,' says Bill. But the girl has a bit of
newspaper, and in it she reads that 'the body of a man has been found
in some woods near London;' and she has an idea it may be John. 'Oh,
nonsense,' says Bill--I quote the evidence--'he then lit his candle, and
they retired to rest.' John, as a matter of fact, had been murdered by
his companion, they having quarrelled over the division of the proceeds
of the burglary; and eventually this young woman, who so readily
transferred her affections from one lord to another, appeared in the
witness-box and deposed to pawning boots and other things for Bill which
were undoubtedly the proceeds of a robbery at a house close to where the
body was found.
This is the house in which we stand where the burglary was
planned--whence the murderer and the murdered set out together on
their fatal journey. It was at one of these tables that the young girl
discussed her absent lover's fate with her new lord, his murderer, and
it was here that the police came to search for him and found the girl
whose evidence helped to hang him.
Look at the people who sit there to-day--murderers and burglars some of
them, cheats and pickpockets others, and a few respectable folks as far
as their opportunities will allow. But remember that dozens of really
respectable families do have to frequent these places now, and mix with
malefactors day and night, because there are no other places open to
them.
Among all the cruelties practised on the poor in the name of
Metropolitan improvements this one deserves mentioning--that the
labourer earning a precarious livelihood with his wife and his children
have been driven at last to accept the shelter of a thieves' kitchen and
to be thankful for it.