I cut out of the 'Morning Post' of September 15th, 1873, the
following piece of fashionable intelligence, as a sufficiently
interesting example of the "Sorrowful Paradise" which marriage, and
the domestic arrangements connected with it, occasionally construct
in the districts of England where Mr. Applegarth's great principle,
"No sentiment ought to be brought into the subject," would be most
consistently approved in all the affairs of life. The inconvenience
to his master of the inopportune expression of sentiment on the
part of the dog, is a striking corroboration of Mr. Applegarth's
views:--"Charles Dawson, an ironworker, who had left his wife and
cohabited with a young woman named Margaret Addison, attacked her in
the house with a coal rake on the head and body. He then, when his
victim screamed, pressed her neck down on the floor with one of his
heavy boots, while with the other he kicked her. He jumped upon her,
and finally seized a large earthern pan and dashed it upon her head,
killing her on the spot. The whole of the attack was witnessed by
a man who was deterred from interfering by a loaded revolver which
Dawson held. Dawson decamped, and strong bodies of police guarded the
different roads from the town, and searched several of his haunts. At
three o'clock yesterday morning a dog recognised to be Dawson's was
followed, and Sergeant Cuthbert broke open the door where the animal
was scratching to obtain admission, and captured Dawson, who was
sitting on a chair. Although he was armed with a loaded revolver,
he offered no resistance."
I ought to have noted in last 'Fors,' respecting the difficulty
of spelling, some forms of bad spelling which result from the mere
quantity of modern literature, and the familiarity of phrases which
are now caught by the eye and ear, without being attentively looked at
for an instant, so that spelling and pronunciation go to ruin together.
On the other hand, I print the following portions of a very graceful
letter I received early this year, which indicates the diffusion of
really sound education. I wish its writer would tell me her employment.
"London, S.E.
"March 9th, 1873.
"And you will not again call yourself our friend, because you
are disheartened by our regardlessness of your friendship, and
still more, it may be, by the discouraging voice of some on whom
you might perhaps more reasonably have counted.
"You say we have never written you a word of encouragement. But
don't you think the fault-finders would be sure to speak first,
and loudest? I even, in my loneliness, am able to lend my copies
to four, who all look forward to their turn with pleasure. (They
get their pleasure for nothing, and I was not quite sure you would
approve! until I found you would be willing to lend your Talmud!)
"On one point I grumble and find fault.
"Most of those works which you say you want us to read, I have
read; but if I had had to pay the price at which you propose to
publish them, they would have cost me £3 and I could not have
afforded it; because, much as I delighted in them, I longed for
certain other books as well. Many an intelligent working man with
a family is poorer than I am.
"I quite thoroughly and heartily sympathise with your contempt
for advertising (as it is abused at present, anyway). But I think
all good books should be cheap. I would make bad ones as dear as
you like.
"Was it not Socrates alone of the great Greeks who would put no
price on his wisdom?--and Christ 'taught daily in their streets.' I
do assure you there are plenty of us teachable enough, if only
any one capable of teaching could get near enough, who will never,
in this world, be able to afford 'a doctor's fee.'
"I wonder--if it be wrong to take interest--of what use my very
small savings could be to me in old age? Would it be worth while
for working women to save at all?
(Signed) "A Working Woman."
No, certainly not wrong. The wrong is in the poor wages of good work,
which make it impossible to buy books at a proper price, or to save
what would be enough for old age. Books should not be cheaper, but
work should be dearer.
A young lady writing to me the other day to ask what I really wanted
girls to do, I answered as follows, requesting her to copy the answer,
that it might serve once for all. I print it accordingly, as perhaps
a more simple statement than the one given in 'Sesame and Lilies.'