|I cannot help being struck, in my wanderings through Povertyopolis,
with the extraordinary resemblance which Caesar bore to
Pompey--especially Pompey. One room in this district is very like the
other. The family likeness of the chairs and tables is truly remarkable,
especially in the matter of legs. Most chairs are born with four legs,
but the chairs one meets with here are a two-legged race--a four-legged
chair is a _rara avis_, and when found should be made a note of. The
tables, too, are of a type indigenous to the spot. The survival of the
fittest does not obtain in these districts in the matter of tables. The
most positively unfit are common, very common objects. What has become
of the fittest I hesitate to conjecture. Possibly they have run away.
I am quite sure that a table with legs would make use of them to escape
from such surroundings.
As to the bedsteads, they are wretched, broken-down old things of wood
and iron that look as though they had been rescued a little late from a
fire, then used for a barricade, afterwards buried in volcanic eruption,
and finally dug out of a dust-heap that had concealed them for a
century. The bedding, a respectable coal-sack would blush to acknowledge
even as a poor relation.
I have enumerated chairs, tables, and beds, not because they are found
in every poor home--there are several rented rooms which can boast
of nothing but four walls, a ceiling, and a floor--but because these
articles placed in one of these dens constitute what are euphemistically
called 'furnished apartments,' a species of accommodation with which all
very poor neighbourhoods abound.
The 'furnished apartments' fetch as much as tenpence a day, and are
sometimes occupied by three or four different tenants during a week.
The 'deputy' comes for the money every day, and it is pay or go with the
occupants. If the man who has taken one of these furnished rooms for his
'home, sweet home,' does not get enough during the day to pay his
rent, out he goes into the street with his wife and children, and enter
another family forthwith.
The tenants have not, as a rule, much to be flung after them in the
shape of goods and chattels. The clothes they stand upright in, a
battered kettle, and, perhaps, a bundle, make up the catalogue of their
worldly possessions.
This kind of rough-and-ready lodging is the resource of thousands of
industrious people earning precarious livelihoods, and they rarely rise
above it to the dignity of taking a room by the week. The great struggle
is to get over Saturday, and thank God for Sunday. Sunday is a free day,
and no deputy comes to disturb its peaceful calm. The Saturday's rent,
according to the custom of the country, makes the tenant free of the
apartments until Monday.
It is the custom to denounce the poor as thriftless, and that they are
so I grant. The temptation to trust to luck and let every day take care
of itself is, it must be remembered, great. Life with them is always a
toss-up, a daily battle, an hourly struggle. Thousands of them can never
hope to be five shillings ahead of the world if they keep honest. The
utmost limit of their wage is reached when they have paid their rent,
kept themselves and their horribly large families from starvation, and
bought the few rags which keep their limbs decently covered. With them
the object of life is attained when the night's rent is paid, and
they do not have to hesitate between the workhouse or a corner of the
staircase in some doorless house.
There is a legend in one street I know of--a man who once saved half
a crown, and lost it through a hole in his pocket. The moral of
that legend may have impressed itself upon the whole population and
discouraged thrift for evermore; but be that as it may, the general rule
is, 'what you make in a day spend in a day.' It is needless to add
that this precept brings its practisers perpetually within measurable
distance of absolute pennilessness. They live and die on the confines of
it. I am wrong; they invariably die on the wrong side of the border, and
are buried at somebody else's expense.
Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to be wondered
at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes are made out of
men and women who seldom know where to-morrow's meal is coming from.
Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their
glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to these people; drink gives
them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their
senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to live
in such sties.
The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell of their pestilent
homes. A copper or two, often obtained by pawning the last rag that
covers the shivering children on the bare floor at home, will buy enough
vitriol-madness to send a woman home so besotted that the wretchedness,
the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost their
grip. To be drunk with these people means to be happy. Sober--God help
them!--how could they be aught but wretched?
There is not only temptation to drink wrought by the fearful
surroundings of the poor; a positive craving for it is engendered by
the foul and foetid atmosphere they continually breathe. I have often
wondered that the advocates of temperance, with the immense resources of
wealth and organization they command, have not given more attention to
the overcrowding and the unsanitary condition of the dwellings of the
poor, as one of the great causes of the abuse of stimulants.
It is not only that crime and vice and disorder flourish luxuriantly in
these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort bred of intemperance
of the inhabitants, but the effect upon the children is terrible. The
offspring of drunken fathers and mothers inherit not only a tendency
to vice, but they come into the world physically and mentally unfit to
conquer in life's battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen child-object
one comes upon in these localities is the most painful part of our
explorers' experience. The county asylums are crowded with pauper
idiots and lunatics, who owe their wretched condition to the sin of the
parents, and the rates are heavily burthened with the maintenance of the
idiot offspring of drunkenness.
The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp edge from sorrow,
and leaves the drinker for awhile in a fools' paradise. Here is the
home of the most notorious 'drunkardess'--if I may coin a work--in the
neighbourhood. Mrs. O'Flannigan's room is easily entered, for it is on
the street-level, and one step brings us into the presence of the lady
herself. She is in bed, a dirty red flannel rag is wrapped about her
shoulders, and her one arm is in a sling. She sits up in bed at the
sight of visitors, and greets us in a gin and fog voice, slightly
mellowed with the Irish brogue. Biddy has been charged at the
police-courts seventy-five times with being drunk, and she is therefore
a celebrated character. She is hardly sober now, though she has
evidently had a shaking which would have sobered most people for a
month. Her face is a mass of bruises and cuts, and every now and then a
groan and a cry to certain Saints in her calendar tell of aches and
pains in the limbs concealed under the dirty blanket that covers the
bed.
'I'm a pretty sight now, ain't I, gintlemen dear?' she says, with a
foolish laugh. 'Shure and I got blind drunk again last Saturday, and
they run me in. The inspector let me out o' Sunday; God bless him for a
rale gintleman! They carried me on a stretcher, bless yer hearts! and I
kicked. Ha! ha! ha!'
The hag positively yelled with laughter as she thought of the scene she
caused, and the trouble she gave the police.
Suddenly she looks round as if in search of something.
'Molly, ye young varmint, where are ye?' she shouts, and presently
from under the bed, where the child lay crouching in fear, she drags a
wretched little girl of seven or eight, with her face and head covered
with sores, that make one shudder to look at them.
'There, Molly, ye young varmint, show yourself to their honours, will
ye?'
The child begins to snivel. One of our number is the Board School
officer of the district, and Molly has not been to school lately.
Mrs. O'Flannigan explains.
'Ye see, I can't use my limbs just yet, yer honour, and Molly--Lord
love her!--she's just the only thing I got to look afther me. I might be
burned in my blessed bed, yer honour, and not able to move.'
'You should give up getting drunk,' I ventured to suggest; 'then you
wouldn't want a nurse.'
'You're right, your honour. It's the drink. Yer see, I can't help it.
I ain't been sober for five years--ha! ha! ha!--and it's all thro' the
trouble as come to me. My boy got into bad company and got lagged and
put away for ten years, and I've never been the same since, and it broke
my heart, and I took to the drink. And now my old man's took to drink
thro' aggravation o' me, and he gets drunk every night of his blessed
life. Ha! ha! ha!'
The woman's story is practically true. Before her trouble she and her
husband were costermongers and hawkers of fruit. The first of the evils
of the foul slums, where honest workers are forced to live, fell upon
them in the ruin of the boy reared in a criminal atmosphere. The vicious
surroundings were too strong for him, and he became a thief and paid the
penalty.
The mother sees her son--idolized in her rough way--taken from her; the
den of a home becomes doubly wretched, and the cursed drink-fiend is
invoked to charm the sorrow away. That is the first step, 'to drown
sorrow.' The steps after that are easy to count. The woman becomes an
habitual drunkard, the rooms they live in get dirtier and smaller and
fouler, and at last the husband drowns his sorrow too. 'Aggravation' and
a constant association with a drunken woman turn the poor fellow to
evil ways; himself and a whole family are wrecked, that under better
circumstances might have been good and useful citizens. Had these people
been able to get a decent room among decent people, the first misfortune
that sent them wrong might never have happened. Their case is the case
of hundreds.
Of drinking-shops there are plenty in these places; of eating-houses, or
shops for the sale of food, very few. So rare are the latter that when
we come to one in a dirty, tumble-down street, we stop and examine the
contents of the window. I don't know whether to call it a tart-shop, a
baker's, or a dripping emporium. There seems to be a little bit of each
about it, and half a rice pudding, and a ham-bone, on which a bluebottle
has gone to sleep--tired out, perhaps, with looking for the meat--give
it the faintest suspicion of being an eating-house. There is also in the
window a dilapidated bloater which looks as though it had been run over
by an omnibus many years ago.
It is while taking notes of the contents of this tempting emporium of
luxuries that we become aware of a very powerful perfume. It seems to
rise from beneath where we are standing, and used as we are by this time
to the bouquets of the East, we involuntarily step back and contort the
muscles of our faces.
Then we see that we have been standing on a grating. Peering down, we
can just see into a gloomy little room. To the opened window presently
there comes a man in his shirt-sleeves, and looks up at us. His face is
deadly white, the eyes are sunken, the cheek-bones hollow, and there
is a look in his face that says more plainly than the big ticket of the
blind impostor, 'I am starving.' Starving down below there, with only
a thin floor between himself and the ham-bone, the ancient herring, the
rice pudding, and the treacle tarts.
As the noisome effluvia rises and steams through the grating we begin
to appreciate the situation. This food shop is directly over the cellar
which gives the odour forth. Pleasant for the customers, certainly. We
determine to push our investigation still further, and presently we are
down in the cellar below.
The man in his shirt-sleeves--we can guess where the coat is--receives
us courteously. His wife apologizes for the wretched condition of the
room. Both of them speak with that unmistakable _timbre_ of voice which
betokens a smattering of education. In the corner of the room is a heap
of rags. That is the bed. There are two children, a boy and a girl,
sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the fast-dying embers of
a wretched fire. Furniture the room has absolutely none, but a stool
roughly constructed of three pieces of unplaned wood nailed together.
Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the pie-shop; the
foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the basement, and the utter
neglect of all sanitary precautions.
The man (who has only one arm) is out of work this week, he tells us,
but he is promised a job next. To tide over till then is a work of some
difficulty, but the 'sticks' and the 'wardrobe' of the family have paid
the rent up to now. As to meals--well, they hain't got much appetite.
The stench in which they live effectually destroys that. In this
instance even bad drainage has its advantages, you see.
Before the man lost his arm he was a clerk; without a right hand he
is not much good as a penman in a competitive market. So he goes on as
timekeeper in a builder's yard, as a messenger, or as anything by which
he can get a few shillings for a living.
The children have not been to school. 'Why?' asks the officer who
accompanies us. 'Because they've no boots, and they are both ill now.'
It is true. The children, pale, emaciated little things, cough a hard,
rasping cough from time to time. To show us how bad they are they set
up a perfect paroxysm of coughing until the mother fetches them a smack,
and inquires 'how they expect the gentleman to hear himself speak if
they kick up _that_ row?'
The children's boots have gone with the father's coat, and at present it
does seem hard to say that the parents must be fined unless the children
come barefooted through the sloppy streets to school.
Such, however, is the rule, and this boot question is an all-important
one in the compulsory education of the children of the slums. How to
get the boots for Tommy and Sarah to go their daily journey to the Board
School is a problem which one or two unhappy fathers have settled by
hanging themselves behind the domestic door.
The difficulties which the poor have in complying with the demands of
the Education Act are quite unsuspected by the general public. They are
so numerous, and the histories revealed by their investigation are
so strange, that I propose in the next chapter to ask the reader to
accompany me to a meeting at which the parental excuses for non-attendance
are made. This is a meeting at which the parents who have
been 'noticed' for the non-attendance of their children adduce what
reasons they can why they should not be summoned before a magistrate.
I will let the mothers and fathers tell their own tale, and give a few
statistics which I fancy will be a revelation to many who are at present
in sublime ignorance of how the poor live.