The Asylum for the Houseless Poor of London is opened only when the
thermometer reaches freezing-point, and offers nothing but dry bread
and warm shelter to such as avail themselves of its charity.
To this place swarm, as the bitter winter’s night comes on, some
half-thousand penniless and homeless wanderers. The poverty-stricken
from every quarter of the globe are found within its wards; from the
haggard American seaman to the lank Polish refugee, the pale German
“out-wanderer,” the tearful black sea-cook, the shivering Lascar
crossing-sweeper, the helpless Chinese beggar, and the half-torpid
Italian organ-boy. It is, indeed, a ragged congress of nations--a
convocation of squalor and misery--of destitution, degradation, and
suffering, from all the corners of the earth.
Nearly every shade and grade of misery, misfortune, vice, and even
guilt, are to be found in the place; for characters are not demanded
previous to admission, want being the sole qualification required of
the applicants. The Asylum for the Houseless is at once the beggar’s
hotel, the tramp’s town-house, the outcast’s haven of refuge--the last
dwelling, indeed, on the road to ruin.
It is impossible to mistake the Asylum if you go there at dark, just as
the lamp in the wire cage over the entrance-door is being lighted. This
is the hour for opening; and ranged along the kerb is a kind of ragged
regiment, drawn up four deep, and stretching far up and down the narrow
lane, until the crowd is like a hedge to the roadway. Nowhere in the
world can a similar sight be witnessed.
It is a terrible thing, indeed, to look down upon that squalid crowd
from one of the upper windows of the institution. There they stand
shivering in the snow, with their thin, cobwebby garments hanging in
tatters about them. Many are without shirts; with their bare skin
showing through the rents and gaps of their clothes, like the hide of
a dog with the mange. Some have their greasy coats and trousers tied
round their wrists and ankles with string, to prevent the piercing wind
from blowing up them. A few are without shoes; and these keep one foot
only to the ground, while the bare flesh that has had to tramp through
the snow is blue and livid-looking as half-cooked meat.
It is a sullenly silent crowd, without any of the riot and rude frolic
which generally ensue upon any gathering in the London streets; for
the only sounds heard are the squealing of the beggar infants, or the
wrangling of the vagrant boys for the front ranks, together with a
continued succession of hoarse coughs, that seem to answer each other
like the bleating of a flock of sheep.
To each person is given half-a-pound of the best bread on coming in at
night, and a like quantity on going out in the morning; and children,
even if they be at the breast, have the same, which goes to swell the
mother’s allowance. A clerk enters in a thick ledger the name, age,
trade, and place of birth of the applicants, as well as where they
slept the night before.
As the eye glances down the column of the register, indicating where
each applicant has passed the previous night, it is startled to find
how often the clerk has had to write down, “in the streets;” so that
“ditto,” “ditto,” continually repeated under the same head, sounded as
an ideal chorus of terrible want in the mind’s ear.
The sleeping-wards at the Asylum are utterly unlike all preconceived
notions of a dormitory. There is not a bedstead to be seen, nor is
even so much as a sheet or blanket visible. The ward itself is a long,
bare, whitewashed apartment, with square post-like pillars supporting
the flat-beamed roof, and reminding the visitor of a large unoccupied
store-room--such as are occasionally seen in the neighbourhood of
Thames-street and the Docks. Along the floor are ranged what appear at
first sight to be endless rows of large empty orange chests, packed
closely side by side, so that the boards are divided off into some two
hundred shallow tanpit-like compartments. These are the berths, or, to
speak technically, the “bunks” of the institution. In each of them is a
black mattress, made of some shiny waterproof material, like tarpauling
stuffed with straw. At the head of every bunk, hanging against the
wall, is a leather--a big “basil” covering--that looks more like a
wine-cooper’s apron than a counterpane. These “basils” are used as
coverlids, not only because they are strong and durable, but for a more
cogent reason--they do not retain vermin.
Around the fierce stove, in the centre of the ward, there is generally
gathered a group of the houseless wanderers, the crimson rays tinting
the cluster of haggard faces with a bright lurid light that colours the
skin as red as wine. One and all are stretching forth their hands, as
if to let the delicious heat soak into their half-numbed limbs. They
seem positively greedy of the warmth, drawing up their sleeves and
trousers so that their naked legs and arms may present a larger surface
to the fire.
Not a laugh nor sound is heard, but the men stand still, munching their
bread, their teeth champing like horses in a manger. One poor wretch,
at the time of my visit, had been allowed to sit on a form inside the
railings round the stove, for he had the ague; and there he crouched,
with his legs near as a roasting-joint to the burning coals, as if he
were trying to thaw his very marrow.
Then how fearful it is to hear the continued coughing of the wretched
inmates! It seems to pass round the room from one to another, now sharp
and hoarse as a bark, then deep and hollow as a lowing, or--with the
old--feeble and trembling as a bleat.
In an hour after the opening the men have quitted the warm fire and
crept one after another to their berths, where they lie rolled round in
their leathers--the rows of tightly-bound figures, brown and stiff as
mummies, suggesting the idea of some large catacomb.
The stillness is broken only by the snoring of the sounder sleepers and
the coughing of the more restless.
It is a marvellously pathetic scene. Here is a herd of the most
wretched and friendless people in the world, lying down close to the
earth as sheep; here are some two centuries of outcasts, whose days are
an unvarying round of suffering, enjoying the only moments when they
are free from pain and care--life being to them but one long painful
operation as it were, and sleep the chloroform which, for the time
being, renders them insensible.
The sight sets the mind speculating on the beggars’ and the outcasts’
dreams. The ship’s company, starving at the North Pole, dreamt, every
man of them, each night, of feasting; and are those who compose this
miserable, frozen-out beggar crew, now regaling themselves, in their
sleep, with visions of imaginary banquets?--are they smacking their
mental lips over ideal beef and pudding? Is that poor wretch yonder,
whose rheumatic limbs rack him each step he takes--is _he_ tripping
over green fields with an elastic and joyous bound, that in his waking
moments he can never know again? Do that man’s restlessness and heavy
moaning come from nightmare terrors of policemen and treadwheels?--and
which among those runaway boys is fancying that he is back home again,
with his mother and sisters weeping on his neck?
The next moment the thoughts shift, and the heart is overcome
with a sense of the vast heap of social refuse--the mere human
street-sweepings--the great living mixen--that is destined, as soon as
the spring returns, to be strewn far and near over the land, and serve
as manure to the future crime-crops of the country.
Then come the self-congratulations and the self-questionings! and as a
man, sound in health and limb, walking through a hospital, thanks God
that he has been spared the bodily ailments, the mere sight of which
sickens him, so in this refuge for the starving and the homeless, the
first instinct of the well-to-do visitor is to breathe a thanksgiving
(like the Pharisee in the parable) that “he is not as one of these.”
But the vain conceit has scarcely risen to the tongue before the
better nature whispers in the mind’s ear, “By what special virtue of
your own are you different from them? How comes it that you are well
clothed and well fed, whilst so many go naked and hungry?” And if you
in your arrogance, ignoring all the accidents that have helped to build
up your worldly prosperity, assert that you have been the “architect of
your own fortune,” who, let us ask, gave you the genius or energy for
the work?
Then get down from your moral stilts, and confess it honestly to
yourself, that you are what you are by that inscrutable grace which
decreed your birthplace to be a mansion or a cottage rather than a
“padding-ken,” or which granted you brains and strength, instead of
sending you into the world, like many of these, a cripple or an idiot.
It is hard for smug-faced respectability to acknowledge these
dirt-caked, erring wretches as brothers, and yet, if from those to whom
little is given little is expected, surely, after the atonement of
their long suffering, they will make as good angels as the best of us.