|One of the greatest evils of the overcrowded districts of London is
the water-supply. I might almost on this head imitate the gentleman
who wrote a chapter on 'Snakes in Iceland,' which I quote in its
entirety--'There are no snakes in Iceland.' To say, however, that in
these districts there is no water-supply would be incorrect, but it is
utterly inadequate to the necessities of the people. In many houses more
water comes through the roof than through a pipe, and a tub or butt in
the back-yard about half full of a black, foul-smelling liquid supplies
some dozens of families with the water they drink and the water they
wash in as well. It is, perhaps, owing to the limited nature of the
luxury that the use of water both internally and externally is rather
out of favour with the inhabitants. As to water for sanitary purposes,
there is absolutely no provision for it in hundreds of the most
densely-inhabited houses. In the matter of water and air, the most
degraded savage British philanthropy has yet adopted as a pet is a
thousand times better off than the London labourer and his family,
dwelling in the areas whose horrors medical officers are at last
divulging to the public.
The difficulties of attaining that cleanliness which we are told is next
to godliness may be imagined from a description of a water-butt which
we found in the back-yard of a house containing over ninety people. The
little boy in his shirtsleeves has come to fill his tin bowl, and we are
indebted to him for the information that he wants it for his mother to
drink. The mother is ill--has been for weeks; her lips are burning with
fever, her throat is dry and parched, and this common reservoir, open to
all the dust and dirt with which the air is thick, open to the draining
in rainy weather of the filthy roof of the tumble-down structure beside
it--this is the spring at which she is to slake her thirst. Is it any
wonder that disease is rampant, or that the temperance folk have such
trouble to persuade the masses that cold water is a good and healthy
drink?
Remember, this is absolutely the supply for the day; it is, perhaps,
turned on for about five minutes, and from this butt the entire
inhabitants of the house must get all the water they want. In dozens of
instances there is no supply at all--accident or design has interfered
with it, and the housewife who wants to wash her child's face or her
own, or do a bit of scrubbing, has to beg of a neighbour or make a
predatory excursion into a back yard more blessed than her own.
Some of the facts about the water-supply are not easy to deal with in a
book for general reading. The difficulties of the 'drawer of water' are
great. It was while I and my esteemed collaborator were debating how we
could possibly reproduce much that we had seen in connection with this
crying evil that a gentleman came along and gave us the chance of at
least one sketch 'on the spot.' He made himself busy at the side of a
tub--a tub from which his neighbours will fill their drinking and their
culinary vessels anon. Do not imagine that he is engaged in his morning
ablution. He is washing his potatoes--that is all--and in the evening he
will take them out baked, and sell them in the public highway. For the
sake of the public I am glad they will be baked, but though the water
will in some instances be boiled, I don't think that tea is improved by
the dirt off potato-skins--at least, I have never heard so.
Perhaps at the house where we saw this tub the inhabitants were not so
much injured as they might have been by the deficient water-supply in
the yard. If they didn't get water in one way, they generally had it in
another. The law of compensation is always at work, and the rapacity of
a landlord who left his tenants so badly off in one particular way may
have been a godsend in another.
The water in rainy weather simply poured through the roof of this house,
saturating the sleepers in their beds and washing their faces in a
rough-and-ready manner, but unfortunately it didn't rain towels at the
same time, so that the bath had its inconveniences.
The cause of these periodical shower-baths was pointed out to us by a
tenant who paid four and sixpence a week for his 'watery nest' in the
attic, and who, in language which did not tend to show that his enforced
cleanliness had brought godliness in its train, explained that the
landlord had taken the lead from the roof and sold it, and replaced it
with asphalte, which had cracked, with the result above described.
Unacquainted with the stern necessities of the situation, you will
contemplate the picture and say that these people are idiots to pay rent
for such accommodation. What are they to do? Move. Whither? They know
well how they will have to tramp from slum to slum, losing work, and the
difficulties which will beset them on this room-hunt. They are
thankful to have a roof, even with cracks in it, and they will go on
suffering--not in silence, perhaps, but without taking action, because
they know if they go further they may fare worse.
The accommodation which these people will put up with is almost
incredible.
Some of the houses are as absolutely dangerous to life and limb as those
specially built up on the stage as pitfalls for the unwary feet of the
melodramatic heroes and heroines led there by designing villains in
order that they may fall through traps into dark rivers, and so be got
rid of.
Here is a house which has been slowly decaying for years; the people who
live in it must be competent to accept engagements as acrobats, yet from
floor to roof every room is densely inhabited.
The stairs are rotten, and here and there show where some foot has
trodden too heavily. The landing above is a yawning gulf which you
have to leap, and leap lightly, or the rotten boarding would break away
beneath you.
Open a door and look into a room. There are two women and three children
at work, and the holes in the floor are patched across with bits of old
boxes which the tenants have nailed down themselves.
The place is absolutely a shell. There is not a sound room or passage
in it. Yet it is always crammed with tenants, and they pay their rent
without a murmur--nay, within the last year the rents of the rooms have
been raised nearly twenty-five per cent.
The gentleman who inhabits the ground-floor with his wife and family
is best off. He is a bit of a humorist, and he seems quite proud of
pointing out to us the dilapidations of his dwelling-place, and takes
the opportunity to indulge in what the gentlemen of the theatrical
persuasion call 'wheezes.'
'Come through?' he says; 'well, no, I can't say as anybody have come
through, not altogether. We sees a leg o' somebody sometimes as we ain't
invited to join us, and now and agen a lump o' ceilin' comes down when
the young woman upstairs stamps her foot; but so long as they don't
start a dancin' acadermy up there, I don't mind.'
'But haven't you spoken to the landlord about it?'
'Spoke! Lor' bless you! wot's the use? He'd larf at us, and if he was to
larf too loud it might be dangerous. He won't do nothink. The place is
bound to come down, yer know, by-and-by, for improvements.'
Possibly the man's explanation of the landlord's neglect was correct,
but to us it certainly appeared that the place was more likely to come
down for lack of improvements.
Going to bed under such circumstances as these must require a good
deal of confidence; but I suppose the contingency of the floor above
descending on one in one's sleep does not have the same terror for these
people that it had for the nervous hero of that story of Edgar Allan
Poe's, in which the room with contracting walls and descending roof was
supposed to be a horror worthy of the inventive genius of the gentlemen
of the Inquisition.
Of course, when the ordinary repairs demanded by consideration for the
safety of life and limb are left undone, and the most ordinary sanitary
precautions are neglected, it is not likely that the present race of
poor tenement-owners will listen to the appeals of those tenants whose
livelihood depends upon them keeping animals, and make some provision
for the housing of pigs and the stabling of donkeys.
Strange, too, as it may seem, in the houses which are being built on
improved principles, no provision is made for the barrows and donkeys
of the costermongers--a class which enters very largely into the
composition of the one-roomed tribes. Some time ago a man was charged
with assaulting his wife, and at the magisterial hearing it was elicited
that the matrimonial quarrel was all on account of a donkey which slept
under the bed.
The magistrate was naturally astonished. He didn't believe such a state
of things possible. Doubtless his wonder was shared by the public. The
presence of a donkey in the apartment of a costermonger and his family
is, however, by no means rare, and quite recently a zealous sanitary
inspector has discovered a cellar inhabited by a man, his wife, three
children, _and four pigs_.
The presence of animals not exactly regarded as domestic is a feature
of certain poor districts of London. Fowls roost nightly in dozens of
bedrooms in the back streets; and only the other day a score of those
miserable tortoises that one sees on barrows destitute of the smallest
vestige of green stuff, and probably enduring the most prolonged agony,
were discovered crawling about the floor of a costermonger's attic among
his progeny, only slightly inferior in point of numbers to the poor
animals themselves.
It is a great complaint of the men, who, as a rule, are hardworking,
honest fellows enough in their way, and thrifty, too, when they can keep
away from the temptation of drink, that so little attention is being
paid to their needs in the many schemes for improved dwellings for the
industrial classes.
In some of the cases where the accommodation for ponies and donkeys may
fairly be called 'stabling,' the entrance is through the passage of a
house densely inhabited, and the animals are led in and out daily in
such a manner as to be a nuisance to the occupants, while the stables,
being so close to the windows of the room and kept in anything but good
order, are a constant danger to health.
I have been assured by an old inhabitant of the costers' quarters that
he knew a donkey who went upstairs to the third floor every night to go
to bed; but old inhabitants are not to be relied upon, and I give you
the story for what it is worth.
Of one thing, however, no one who personally investigates the poorer
districts of great cities can remain in doubt. There are there hidden
away from general observation marvels as great as any of those which
the enterprising Farini imports from the Cannibal Islands, the dismal
swamps, the deserts and jungles of the savage world, for the amusement
and edification of the shilling-paying public. Missing links abound, and
monstrosities are plentiful. Some of the terrible sights which we have
seen we have too much respect for the reader's feelings to reproduce.
Now and again the revelations of some police-court send a shudder
through society. Children starved and stunted and ignorant as the lowest
beasts of the forests are unearthed in foul dens, where they have passed
their little lives chained to the walls, or pounced upon by the police,
led to the discovery by the tavern gossip of the neighbours. Grown women
who have lived naked in underground cellars, and long ago lost their
reason, are found one fine morning by the merest accident while their
gaolers are away. On these hidden horrors of unknown London I need not
dwell here. The history of Horrible London has yet to be written; but
the brutality which makes many of these terrible things possible is
largely due to the circumstances under which the poor live. The
careless disregard of human life and human suffering which has so long
characterized us as a nation must bear fruit. The waste of human life
brought about by the conditions under which the poor are allowed to
live breeds in them a contempt for the sufferings of others. They become
hardened, and the cruelty at which we shudder is their second nature.
All that is best and holiest in life there is nothing to encourage--only
the ferocious instincts of the brute are fostered by a state of
existence in which the struggle for the very air men breathe is bitter
and intense.
Says a philanthropist, who has gone to the root of this appalling
subject: 'In these districts men live in little more than half the space
their corpses occupy when dead.' Think of it! Penetrate the awful places
where vice and squalor, crime and brutality, reign supreme; where the
oath of the gin-maddened ruffian, the cry of the trampled wife, and the
wail of the terrified child ring out night and day; where all is one
fierce ferment in a hell upon earth, where day brings no light,
and night no rest, and ask yourself what manner of fruit these
forcing-houses can bear.
When some one bold enough shall write 'Horrible London,' and the black
page lies open that all may read, then, and not till then, will the
enormity of the responsibility be recognised of those to whom the power
to do so much has been given and who have done so little.
That work is for stronger hands than mine to do. I am content here to
chronicle such lights and shadows of life among the poor as fall across
my path in a journey round the outskirts only of the dark continent in
our midst.
Here is an incident which, pathetic enough, has yet its humorous side.
Here is a boy of eight years old in petticoats, a big, strong, healthy
lad. His father is a dock labourer, and this is how he was brought
forward as a candidate for some cast-off clothing which a director of
the East and West India Dock Company was generously distributing.
The dock labourers are a distinct class among the East-End poor, and
I hope at some future time to give the reader a glimpse of life among
them. How hard their struggle is may be gathered from the fact that
their boys have to go till eight and nine years old in petticoats
because the parents cannot afford to buy them knickerbockers or
trousers.