me to share,—the Ragged Schools and Streetboys’ Sunday School in St.
James’s Back,—I laboured, of course, under the same disadvantage as in
the Red Lodge of never clearly foreseeing how much would be understood
of my words or ideas; and what would be most decidedly “caviar to the
general.” A ludicrous example of this occurred on one occasion. I always
anxiously desired to instil into the minds of the children admiration
for brave and noble deeds, and therefore told them stories of heroism
whenever my subject afforded an opening for one. Having to give a lesson
on France, and some boy asking a question about the Guillotine, I
narrated, as vivaciously and dramatically as I knew how, the beautiful
tale of the Nuns who chanted the _Te Deum_ on the scaffold, till one
voice after another was silenced for ever, and the brave Abbess still
continued to sing the grand old hymn of Ambrose, till her turn came for
death. I fondly hoped that some of my own feelings in describing the
scene were communicated to my audience. But such hopes were dashed when,
a day or two later, Miss Carpenter came home from her lesson at the
school, and said: “My dear friend, what in the name of heaven can you
have been teaching those boys? They were all excited about some lesson
you had given them. They said you described cutting off a lot of heads;
and it was ‘chop! and a head fell into the basket; and chop! another
head in the basket! They said it was such a nice lesson!’ But _whose_
heads were cut off, or why, none of them remembered,—only chop! and a
head fell in the basket!”
I consoled myself, however, for this and many another defeat by the
belief that if my lessons did not much instruct their wild pates, their
hearts were benefitted in some small measure by being brought under my
friendly influence. Miss Carpenter always made the schoolmaster of the
Day School attend at our Sunday Night-School, fearing some wild outbreak
of the 100 and odd boys and hobbledehoys who formed our congregation.
The first Sunday, however, on which the school was given into my charge,
I told the schoolmaster he might leave me and go home; and I then
stopped alone (we had no assistants) with the little herd. My lessons, I
am quite sure, were all the more impressive; and though Miss Carpenter
was quite alarmed when she heard what I had done, she consented to my
following my own system of confidence, and I never had reason to repent
the adoption of it.
In my humble judgment (and I know it was also that of one much better
able to judge, Lord Shaftesbury) these elastic and irregular Ragged
Schools were far better institutions for the class for whom they were
designed than the cast-iron Board Schools of our time. They were
specially designed to _civilize_ the children: to _tame_ them enough to
induce them, for example, to sit reasonably still on a bench for
half-an-hour at a time; to wash their hands and faces; to comb their
hair; to forbear from shouting, singing, “turning wheels,” throwing
marbles, making faces, or similarly disporting themselves, while in
school; after which preliminaries they began to acquire the art of
learning lessons. It was not exactly Education in the literary sense,
but it was a Training, without which as a substructure the “Three R’s”
are of little avail,—if we may believe in William of Wykeham’s axiom
that “Manners makyth Manne.”
Another, and, as I think, great merit of the Ragged School system was,
that decent and self-respecting parents who strove to keep their
children from the contamination of the gutter and were willing to pay
their penny a week to send them to school, were not obliged, as now, to
suffer their boys and girls to associate in the Board Schools with the
very lowest and roughest of children fresh from the streets. Nothing has
made me more indignant than a report I read some time ago in one of the
newspapers of a poor widow who had “seen better days,” being summoned
and fined for engaging a non-certified poor governess to teach her
little girl, rather than allow the child to attend the Board School and
associate with the girls she would meet there. As if all the learning of
a person, if he could pour it into a child’s brain, would counterbalance
in a young girl’s mind the foul words and ideas familiar to the hapless
children of the “perishing and dangerous classes!”
People talk seriously of the _physical_ infection which may be conveyed
where many young children are gathered in close contiguity. They would,
if they knew more, much more anxiously deprecate the _moral_ contagion
which may be introduced into a school by a single girl who has been
initiated into the mysteries of a vicious home. On two separate
occasions Miss Carpenter and I were startled by what I can only describe
as a portentous wave of evil which passed over the entire community of
50 girls in the Red Lodge. In each case it was undeniably traceable to
the arrival of new comers who had been sent by mistake of magistrates to
our Reformatory when they ought to have gone to a Penitentiary. It was
impossible for us to guess how, with all the watchful guardianship of
the teachers, these unhappy girls had any opportunity for corrupting
their companions, but that they did so (temporarily only, as they were
immediately discovered and banished) I saw with my own eyes beyond
possibility of mistake.
It came to me as part of my work with Miss Carpenter to visit the homes
of all the children who attended our Ragged Schools—either Day Schools
or Night Schools; nominally to see whether they belonged to the class
which should properly benefit by gratuitous education, but also to find
out whether I could do anything to amend their condition. Many were the
lessons I learned respecting the “short” but by no means “simple” annals
of the poor, when I made those visits all over the slums of Bristol.
The shoemakers were a very numerous and a very miserable class among the
parents of our pupils. When anything interfered with trade they were at
once thrown into complete idleness and destitution. Over and over again
I tried to get the poor fellows, when they sat listless and lamenting,
to turn to any other kind of labour in their own line; to endeavour,
_e.g._, to make slippers for me, no matter how roughly, or to mend my
boots; promising similar orders from friends. Not one would, or could,
do anything but sew upper or under leathers, as the case might be! The
men sat all day long when there was work, sewing in their stuffy rooms
with their wives busy washing or attending to the children, and the
whole place in a muddle; but they would converse eagerly and
intelligently with me about politics or about other towns and countries,
whereas the poor over-worked women would never join in our talk. When I
addressed them they at once called my attention to Jenny’s torn frock
and Tom’s want of a new cap. One of these shoemakers, in whom I felt
rather special interest, turned to me one day, looked me straight in the
face, and said: “I want to ask you a question. Why does a lady like you
come and sit and talk to me?” I thought it a true token of confidence,
and was glad I could answer honestly that I had come first to see about
his children, but now came because I liked him.
Other cases which came to my knowledge in these rounds were dreadfully
sad. In one poor room I found a woman who had been confined only a few
days, sitting up in bed doing shopwork, her three or four _little_
children all endeavouring to work likewise for the miserable pay. Her
husband was out looking vainly for work. She showed me a sheaf of
pawntickets for a large quantity of table and house linen and plated
goods. Her husband and she had formerly kept a flourishing inn, but the
railway had ruined it, and they had been obliged to give it up and come
to live in Bristol, and get such work as they could do—at starvation
wages. She was a gentle, delicate, fair woman, who had been lady’s maid
in a wealthy family known to me by name. I asked her did she not go out
and bring the children to the Downs on a Sunday? “Ah! we tried it once
or twice,” she said, “but it was too terrible coming back to this room;
we never go now.”
Another case of extreme poverty was less tragic. There was a woman with
three children whose husband was a soldier in India, to whom she
longingly hoped to be eventually sent out by the military authorities.
Meanwhile she was in extreme poverty in Bristol, and so was her friend,
a fine young Irish woman. Their sole resource was a neighbour who
possessed a pair of good sheets, and was willing to lend them to them
_by day_, provided they were restored for her own use every night! This
did not appear a very promising source of income, but the two friends
contrived to make it one. They took the sheets of a morning to a
pawnbroker who allowed them,—I think it was two shillings, upon them.
With this they stocked a basket with oranges, apples, gooseberries, pins
and needles, match boxes, lace,—anything which could be had for such a
price, according to the season. Then one or other of the friends arrayed
herself in the solitary bonnet and shawl which they possessed between
them, and sallied out for the day to dispose of her wares, while the
other remained in their single room to take care of the children. The
evening meal was bought and brought home by the outgoing friend with the
proceeds of her day’s sales, and then the sheets were redeemed from pawn
at the price of a half-penny each day and gratefully restored to the
proprietor. This ingenious mode of filling five mouths went on, with a
little help, when I came to know of it, in the way of a fresh-filled
basket—for a whole winter. I thought it so curious that I described it
to dear Harriet St. Leger one day when she was passing through Bristol
and spent some hours with me. She was affected almost to tears and
pushed into my hand, at the last moment at the Station, all the silver
in her purse, to give to the friends. The money amounted to 7s. 6d., and
when Harriet was gone I hastened to give it to the poor souls. It proved
to be one of the numerous occasions in life in which I have experienced
a sort of fatality, as if the chance of doing a bit of good to somebody
were offered to us by Providence to take or leave and, if we postpone
taking it, the chance is lost. I was tired, and the room inhabited by
the poor women was, as it happened, at the other end of Bristol, and I
could not indulge myself with a fly, but I reflected that the money now
really belonged to them, and I was bound to take it to them without
delay. When I reached their room I found I was in the very nick of time.
An order had come for the soldier’s wife to present herself at some
military office next day with her children, and with a certain “kit” of
clothes and utensils for the voyage, and if all were right she would be
sent to join her husband’s regiment in India by a vessel to sail
immediately. Without the proper outfit she would not have been taken;
and of course the poor soul had no kit and was in an agony of anxiety.
Harriet’s gift, with some trifling addition, happily supplied all that
was wanted.
I did not see so much of drunkenness in Bristol as the prominence given
to the subject by many philanthropists led me to expect. Of course I
came across terrible cases of it now and then, as for example a little
boy of ten at our Ragged School who begged Miss Carpenter to let him go
home at mid-day, and on enquiry, it proved that he wanted to _release
his mother_, whom he had locked in, dead-drunk, at nine in the morning.
I also had a frightful experience of the case of the drunken wife of a
poor man dying of agonizing cancer. The doctor who attended him told me
that a little brandy was the only thing to help him, and I brought small
quantities to him frequently, till, when I was leaving home for three
weeks, I thought it best to give a whole bottle to his wife under
injunctions to administer it by proper degrees. Happening to pass by the
door of the wretched couple a day later, before I started, I saw a small
crowd, and asked what had happened? “Mrs. Whale had been drinking and
had fallen down stairs and broken her neck and was dead.” Horror-struck
I mounted the almost perpendicular stair and found it was so; the poor
hapless husband was still alive, and my empty brandy bottle was on the
table.
The other great form of vice however was thrust much more often on my
notice—the ghastly ruin of the wretched girls who fell into it and the
nameless damnation of the hags and Jews who traded on their souls and
bodies. The cruelty of the fate of some of the young women was often
piteous. Thankful I am that the law for assaults has been made since
those days far more stringent and is oftener put in force. There were
stories which came to my personal knowledge which would draw tears from
many eyes were I to tell them, but the more cruel the wrong done, the
more difficult it generally proved to induce anybody to undertake to
receive the victims into their houses on any terms.
A gentleman whom I met in Italy, who knew Bristol well, told me he had
watched a poor young sailor’s destruction under the influence of some of
the eighteen hundred miserable women then infesting the city. He had
just been paid off and had received £73 for a long service at sea. Mr.
Empson first saw him in the fangs of two of the wretched creatures, and
next, six weeks later, he found him dying in the Infirmary, having spent
every shilling of his money in drink and debauchery. He told Mr. Empson
that, after the first week, he had never taken any food at all, but
lived only on stimulants.
CHAPTER
XI.
_BRISTOL._
_THE SICK IN WORKHOUSES._
My new life on Durdham Down, though solitary, was a very happy one. I
had two nice rooms in Belgrave House (then the last house on the road
opening on the beautiful Downs from the Redland side), wherein a bright,
excellent, pretty widow, Mrs. Stone, kept several suites of lodgings. It
is not often, alas! that the relations of lodger and landlady are
altogether pleasant, but in my case they were eminently so, and resulted
in cordial and permanent mutual regard. My little bedroom opened by a
French window on a balcony leading to a small garden, and beyond it I
had an immense view of Bristol and the surrounding country, over the
smoke of which the rising sun often made Turneresque pictures. My
sitting room had a front and a corner view of the delightful Downs as
far as “Cook’s Folly” and the Nightingale Valley; and often, over the
“Sea Wall,” the setting sun went down in great glory. I walked down
every week-day into Bristol (of course I needed more than ever to
economise, and even the omnibus fare had to be considered), and went
about my various avocations in the schools and workhouse till I could do
no more, when I made my way home as cheaply as I could contrive, to
dinner. I had my dear dog Hajjin, a lovely mouse-coloured Pomeranian,
for companion at all times, and on Sundays we generally treated
ourselves to a good ramble over the Downs and beyond them, perhaps as
far as Kings’-Weston. The whole district is dear to me still.
The return to fresh air and to something like country life was
delightful. It had been, I must avow, an immense strain on my resolution
to live in Bristol among all the sordid surroundings of Miss Carpenter’s
house; and when once in a way in those days I left them and caught a
glimpse of the country, the effort to force myself back was a hard one.
One soft spring day, I remember, I had gone across the Downs and sat for
half an hour under a certain horse-chestnut tree, which was that day in
all the exquisite beauty of its young green leaves. I felt _this_ was
all I wanted to be happy—merely to live in the beauty and peace of
Nature, as of old at Newbridge; and I reflected that, of course, I
_could_ do it, at once, by breaking off with Miss Carpenter and giving
up my work in hideous Bristol. But, _per contra_, I had concluded that
this work was wanted to be done and that I could do it; and had
seriously given myself to it, believing that so I could best do God’s
will. Thus there went on in my mind for a little while a very stiff
fight, one of those which leave us either stronger or weaker ever after.
_Now_ at last, without any effort on my part, the bond which held me to
live in Red Lodge House, was loosened, and I was able both to go on with
my work in Bristol and also to breathe the fresh air in the morning and
to see the sun rise and set, and often to enjoy a healthful run over
those beautiful Downs. By degrees, also, I made several friendships in
the neighbourhood, some most dear and faithful ones which have lasted
ever since; and many people were very kind to me and helped me in
various ways in my work. I shall speak of these friends in another
chapter.
One of my superstitions has long been that if any particular task seems
to us at the first outlook specially against the grain, it will
continually happen that in the order of things it comes knocking at our
door and practically saying to our consciences: “Are you going to get up
and do what is wanted, or sit still and please yourself with something
else?” In this guise of disagreeability, workhouse visiting first
presented itself to me. Miss Carpenter frequently mentioned the
workhouse as a place which ought to be looked after; and which she
believed sadly wanted voluntary inspection; but the very name conveyed
to me such an impression of dreary hopelessness that I shrank from the
thought. When St. Paul coupled _Hope_ with Faith and Charity he might
have said “these three are one,” for without the Hope of achieving some
good (or at least of stopping some evil) it is hard to gird ourselves to
any practical exertion for our fellow-creatures. To lift up the criminal
and perishing classes of the community and cut off the root of crime and
vice by training children in morality and religion, this was a
soul-inspiring idea. But to bring a small modicum of cheer to the aged
and miserable paupers, who may be supposed generally to be undergoing
the inevitable penalties of idle or drunken lives, was far from equally
uplifting! However, my first chance-visit to St. Peter’s in Bristol with
Miss Elliot, showed me so much to be done, so many claims to sympathy
and pity, and the sore lack of somebody, unconnected officially with the
place, to meet them, that I at once felt that here I must put in my oar.
The condition of the English workhouses generally at that period (1859)
was very different from what it is now. I visited many of them in the
following year or two in London and the provincial towns, and _this_ is
what I saw. The sick lay on wretched beds, fit only for able-bodied
tramps, and were nursed mostly by old pauper women of the very lowest
class. The infirm wards were very frequently placed in the worst
possible positions. I remember one (in London) which resounded all day
long with din from an iron-foundry just beneath, so that one could not
hear oneself speak; and another, of which the windows could not be
opened in the hottest weather, because carpets were taken to be beaten
in the court below. The treatment of the pauper children was no less
deplorable. They were joyless, spiritless little creatures, without
“mothering” (as blessed Mrs. Senior said a few years later), without
toys, without the chance of learning anything practical for use in after
life, even to the lighting of a fire or cooking a potato. Their poor
faces were often scarred by disease and half blinded by ophthalmia. The
girls wore the hideous workhouse cotton frocks, not half warm enough to
keep them healthy in those bare, draughty wards, and heavy hob-nailed
shoes which acted like galley-slaves’ bullets on their feet when they
were turned to “play” in a high-walled, sunless yard, which was
sometimes, as I have seen, six inches deep in coarse gravel. As to the
infants, if they happened to have a good motherly matron it was so far
well, though even she (mostly busy elsewhere) could do but little to
make the crabbed old pauper nurses kind and patient. But how often, we
might ask, were the workhouse matrons of those days really kind-hearted
and motherly? Of course they were selected by the gentlemen guardians
(there were no ladies then on the Boards) for quite other merits; and as
Miss Carpenter once remarked to me from the depth of her experience:—
“_There never yet was man so clever but the Matron of an Institution
could bamboozle him about every department of her business!_”
I have sat in the Infants’ ward when an entire Board of about two dozen
gentlemen tramped through it, for what they considered to be
“inspection”; and anything more helpless and absurd than those masculine
“authorities” appeared as they glanced at the little cots (never daring
to open one of them) while the awakened babies screamed at them in
chorus, it has seldom been my lot to witness.
On one occasion I visited an enormous workhouse in a provincial town
where there were nearly 500 sick and infirm patients. The Matron told me
she had but lately been appointed to her post. I said, “It is a
tremendously heavy charge for you, especially with only these pauper
nurses. No doubt you have gone through a course of Hospital training,
and know how to direct everything?”
“O, dear. No! Madam!” replied the lady with a toss of her cap-strings;
“I never nursed anybody I can assure you, except my ’usband, before I
came here. It was misfortune brought me to this!”
How many other Masters and Matrons throughout the country received their
appointments with as little fitness for them and simply as favours from
influential or easy-going guardians, who may guess?
I had at this time become acquainted with the friend whose
comradeship—cemented in the dreary wards of Bristol Workhouse more than
30 years ago—has been ever since one of the great pleasures of my life.
All those who know Miss Elliot, daughter of the late Dean of Bristol,
will admit that it would be very superfluous, not to say impertinent, to
enlarge on the privileges of friendship with her. Miss Elliot was at
that time living at the old Deanery close to Bristol Cathedral, and
taking part in every good work which was going on in the city and
neighbourhood. Among other things she had been teaching regularly for
years in Miss Carpenter’s Reformatory, regardless of the prejudice
against her unitarianism; and one day she called at Miss Carpenter’s
house to ask her what was to be done with Kitty, who had been very
naughty. Miss Carpenter asked her to see the lady who had come to work
with her; and we met for the first time. Miss Elliot begged me to return
her visit, and though nothing was further from my mind at that time than
to enter into anything like society, I was tempted by the great
attractions of my brilliant young friend and her sister and of the witty
and wide-minded Dean, and before long (especially after I went to live
alone) I enjoyed much intercourse with the delightful household.
Miss Elliot had been in the habit of visiting a poor old woman named
Mrs. Buckley, who had formerly lived close to the Deanery and had been
removed to the workhouse; and one day she asked me to accompany her on
her errand. This being over, I wandered off to the various wards where
other poor women, and also the old and invalid men, spent their dreary
days, and soon perceived how large a field was open for usefulness in
the place.
The first matter which occupied us was the condition of the sick and
infirm paupers; first of the women only; later of both men and women.
The good Master and Matron admitted us quite freely to the wards, and we
saw and knew everything which was going on. St. Peter’s was an
exceptional workhouse in many respects. The house was evidently at one
time (about A.D. 1600, like Red Lodge) the mansion of some merchant
prince of Bristol, erected in the midst of the city. The outer walls are
still splendid specimens of old English wood and stonework; and, within,
the Board-room exhibits still a magnificent chimney-piece. The larger
part of the building, however, has been pulled about and fashioned into
large wards, with oak-beamed rafters on the upper floor, and intricate
stairs and passages in all directions. Able-bodied paupers and casuals
were lodged elsewhere (at Stapleton Workhouse) and were not admitted
here. There were only the sick, the aged, the infirm, the insane and
epileptic patients and lying-in women.
Here are some notes of the inmates of this place by Miss Elliot:—