world, may be likened, in some respects, to the march of an army
through an enemy’s country. He who, from fatigue, from disease, from
inebriety, from severe wounds, or whatever cause, falls out of the
line of march, and lays him down by the wayside, is sure, as a matter
of course, to be destroyed by the peasantry; once let the column he
belongs to pass on a little way ahead, and death is his sure portion.
It is a dreadful thing to fall behind the onward march of the world.
VICTIMS—the word placed at the head of this article—is a designation
for those woe-begone mortals who have had the misfortune to drop out of
the ranks of society. Every body must know more or less of _victims_,
for every body must have had to pay a smaller or greater number of
half-crowns in his time to keep them from starvation. It happens,
however, that the present writer has had _a great deal to do with
victims_; and he therefore conceives himself qualified to afford his
neighbours a little information upon the subject. It is a subject not
without its moral.
A _victim_ may become so from many causes. Some men are wrong placed in
the world by their friends, and ruin themselves. Some are ill married,
and lose heart. Others have tastes unsuited to the dull course of a man
of business, as for music, social pleasures, the company of men _out of
their own order_, and so forth. Other men have natural imperfections of
character, and sink down, from pure inability to compete with rivals of
more athletic constitution. But the grand cause of declension in life
is inability to accommodate circumstances and conduct.
Suppose a man to have broken credit with the world, and made that
treaty of perpetual hostility with it, which, _quasi lucus a non
lucendo_, is called a _cessio bonorum_—what is he to do next? One thing
is dead clear: he no more appears on Prince’s Street or the bridges.
They are to him as a native and once familiar land, from which he is
exiled for ever. His migrations from one side of the town to the other
are now accomplished by by-channels, which, however well known to
our ancestors, are in the present day dreamt of by nobody, except,
perhaps, the author of the Traditions of Edinburgh. I once came full
upon a _victim_ in Croftangry, a wretched alley near the Palace of
Holyrood House; he looked the very Genius of the place! But the ways
of _victims_ are in general very occult. Sometimes I have altogether
lost sight of one for several years, and given him up for dead. But
at length he would re-appear amidst the crowd at a midnight fire, as
salmon come from the deepest pools towards the lighted sheaf of the
fisherman, or as some old revolutionary names that had disappeared
from French history for a quarter of a century, came again above board
on the occasion of the late revolution at Paris. At one particular
conflagration, which happened some years ago, I observed several
_victims_, who had long vanished from the open daylight streets, come
out to glare with their bleared eyes upon the awful scene—perhaps
unroosted from their dens by the progress of the “devouring element.”
But—what is a _victim_ like?
The progress of a _victim’s_ gradual deterioration depends very
much upon the question, whether he has, according to the old
joke, failed with a waistcoat or a full suit. Suppose the latter
contingency: he keeps up a decent appearance for some months after
the fatal event, perhaps even making several attempts to keep up
a few of his old acquaintance. It won’t do, however; the clothes
get worn—threadbare—slit—torn—patched—darned; let ink, thread, and
judicious arrangement of person, do their best. The hat, the shoes, and
the gloves, fail first; he then begins to wear a suspicious deal of
whitey-brown linen in the way of cravat. Collars fail. Frills retire.
The vest is buttoned to the uppermost button, or even, perhaps, with
a supplementary pin (a pin is the most squalid object in nature or
art) at top. Still at this period he tries to carry a jaunty, genteel
air; he has not yet all forgot himself to rags. But, see, the buttons
begin to show something like new moons at one side; these moons
become _full_; they _change_; and then the button is only a little
wisp of thread and rags, deprived of all power of retention over the
button-hole. His watch has long been gone to supply the current wants
of the day. The vest by and bye retires from business, and the coat is
buttoned up to the chin. About this period, he perhaps appears in a
pair of nankeen trousers, which, notwithstanding the coldness of the
weather, he tries to sport in an easy, genteel fashion, as if it were
his taste. If you meet him at this time, and inquire how he is getting
on in the world, he speaks very confidently of some excellent situation
he has a prospect of, which will make him better than ever; it is
perhaps to superintend a large new blacking manufactory which is to be
set up at Portobello, and for which two acres of stone bottles, ten
feet deep, have already been collected from all the lumber-cellars in
the country; quite a nice easy business; nothing to do but collect the
orders and see them executed; good salary, free house, coal, candle,
and _blacking_; save a pound a-year on the article of blacking alone.
Or it is some other _concern_ equally absurd, but which the disordered
mind of the poor unfortunate is evidently rioting over with as much
enjoyment as if it were to make him once more what he had been in his
better days. At length—but not perhaps till two or three years have
elapsed—he becomes that lamentable picture of wretchedness which is his
ultimate destiny; a mere pile of clothes without pile—a deplorable—a
_victim_.
As a picture of an individual _victim_, take the following:—My earliest
recollections of Mr Kier refer to his keeping a seed-shop in the New
Town of Edinburgh. He was a remarkably smart active man, and could
tie up little parcels of seeds with an almost magical degree of
dispatch. When engaged in that duty, your eye lost sight of his fingers
altogether, as you cease to individualise the spokes of a wheel when it
is turned with great rapidity. He was the inventor of a curious tall
engine, with a peculiar pair of scissors at top, for cutting fruit off
trees. This he sent through Prince’s Street every day with one of his
boys, who was instructed every now and then to draw the string, so as
to make the scissors close as sharply as possible. The boy would watch
his men—broad-skirted men with top-boots—and, gliding in before them,
would make the thing play _clip_. “Boy, boy,” the country gentleman
would cry, “what’s that?” The boy would explain; the gentleman would
be delighted with the idea of cutting down any particular apple he
chose out of a thickly laden and unapproachable tree; and, after that,
nothing more was required than to give him the card of the shop. Mr
Kier, however, was not a man of correct or temperate conduct. He used
to indulge even in forenoon potations. Opposite to his shop there was a
tavern, to which he was in the habit of sending a boy every day for a
tumbler of spirits and water, which the wretch was carefully enjoined
to carry under his apron. One day the boy forgot the precaution, and
carried the infamous crystal quite exposed in his hand across the
open and crowded street. Mr Kier was surveying his progress both in
going and returning; and when he observed him coming towards the shop,
with so damnatory a proof of his malpractices holden forth to the
gaze of the world, he leaped and danced within his shop window like
a supplejack in a glass case. The poor boy came in quite innocently,
little woting of the crime he had committed, or the reception he was to
meet with, when, just as he had deposited the glass upon the counter, a
blow from the hand of his master stretched him insensibly in a remote
corner of the shop, among a parcel of seed-bags. As no qualities will
succeed in business unless perfectly good conduct be among the number,
and, above all things, an absence from tippling, Kier soon became a
_victim_. After he first took to the _bent_, to use Rob Roy’s phrase,
I lost sight of him for two or three years. At length I one day met
him on a road a little way out of town. He wore a coat buttoned to the
chin, and which, being also very long in the breast, according to a
fashion which obtained about the year 1813, seemed to enclose his whole
trunk from neck to groin. With the usual cataract of cravat, he wore a
hat the most woe-begone, the most dejected, the most melancholy I had
ever seen. His face was inflamed and agitated, and as he walked, he
swung out his arms with a strange emphatic expression, as if he were
saying, “I am an ill-used man, but I’ll tell it to the world.” Misery
had evidently given him a slight craze, as it almost always does when
it overtakes a man accustomed in early life to better things. Some
time afterwards I saw him a little revivified through the influence of
a _new second-hand coat_, and he seemed, from a small leathern parcel
which he bore under his arm, to be engaged in some small agency. But
this was a mere flash before utter expiration. He relapsed to the
Cowgate—to rags—to wretchedness—to madness—immediately after. When I
next saw him, it was in that street, the time midnight. He lay in the
bottom of a stair, more like a heap of mud than a man. A maniac curse,
uttered as I stumbled over him, was the means of my recognising it to
be Kier.
The system of life pursued by _victims_ in general, is worthy of being
inquired into. _Victims_ hang much about taverns in the outskirts of
the town. Perhaps a decent man from Pennycuik, with the honest rustic
name of Walter Brown, or James Gowans, migrates to the Candlemaker Row,
or the Grassmarket, and sets up a small public house. You may know
the man by his corduroy spatterdashes, and the latchets of his shoes
drawn through them by two pye-holes. He is an honest man, believing
every body to be as honest as himself. Perhaps he has some antiquated
and prescribed right to the stance of a hay-stack at Pennycuik, and
is not without his wishes to try his fortune in the Parliament House.
Well, the _victims_ soon scent out his house by the glare of his new
sign—the _novitas regni_—and upon him they fall tooth and nail. Partly
through simplicity, partly by having his feelings excited regarding
the stance of the hay-stack, he gives these gentlemen some credit. For
a while you may observe a flocking of _victims_ toward his doorway,
like the gathering of clean and unclean things to Noah’s ark. But it
is not altogether a case of deception. _Victims_, somehow or other,
occasionally _have_ money. True, it is seldom in greater sums than
sixpence. But then, consider the importance of sixpence to a flock of
_victims_. Such a sum, judiciously managed, may get the whole set meat
and drink for a day. At length, when Walter begins to find his barrels
run dry, with little return of money wherewithal to replenish them, and
when the joint influence of occasional apparitions of sixpence, and the
stance of the hay-stack at Pennycuik, has no longer any effect upon
him, why, what is to be done but fly to some other individual, equally
able and willing to bleed?
One thing is always very remarkable in _victims_, namely, their
extraordinary frankness and politeness. A _victim_ might have been
an absolute bear in his better days; but hunger, it is said, will
tame a lion, and it seems to have the same effect in subduing the
asperities of a _victim_. Meet a _victim_ where you will—that is,
before he has become altogether deplorable—and you are amazed at the
bland, confidential air which he has assumed; so different, perhaps,
from what he sported in better days. His manner, in fact, is most
insinuating—into your pocket; and if you do not get alarmed at the
symptoms, and break off in time, you are brought down for half a crown
as sure as you live. _Victims_ keep up a kind of constant _civil_
war with shops. They mark those which have been recently opened,
and where they see only young men behind the counter. They try to
establish a kind of credit of face, by now and then dropping in and
asking, in a genteel manner, for a sight of a Directory, or for a
bit of twine, or for “the _least_ slip of paper,” occasionally even
spending a halfpenny or a penny in a candid, honourable way, with all
the air of a person wishing to befriend the shop. In the course of
these “transactions,” they endeavour to excite a little conversation,
beginning with the weather, gradually expanding to a remark upon the
state of business; and, perhaps, ending with a sympathising inquiry
as to the prospects which the worthy shopkeeper himself may have of
succeeding in his present situation. At length, having laid down
what painters call a _priming_, they come in some day, in a hurried
fiddle-faddle kind of way, and hastily and confidentially ask across
the counter, “Mr——[victims are always particular in saying _Master_],
have you got such a thing as fourpence in ha’pence? I just want to
pay a porter, and happen to have no change.” The specification of
“fourpence in ha’pence,” though in reality nonsense, carries the day;
it gives a plausibility and credit-worthiness to the demand that could
not otherwise be obtained. The unfortunate shopkeeper, carried away
by the contagious bustle of the _victim_, plunges his hand, quick as
thought, into the till, and before he knows where he is, he is minus
a groat, and the _victim_ has vanished from before him—and the whole
transaction, reflected upon three minutes afterwards, seems as if it
had been a dream.
The existence of a _victim_ is the most precarious thing, perhaps, in
the world. He is a man with no continuing dinner-place. He dines, as
the poor old Earl of Findlater used to say, at the sign of the Mouth.
It is a very strange thing, and what no one could suppose _a priori_,
that the necessitous are greatly indebted to the necessitous. People
of this sort form a kind of community by themselves, and are more kind
to each other mutually than is any other particular branch of the
public to them as a class. Thus, the little that any one has, is apt
to be shared by a great many companions, and all have a mouthful. The
necessitous are also very much the dupes of the necessitous: they are
all, as it were, creatures of prey, the stronger constantly eating up
the weaker. Thus, a _victim_ in the last stage preys upon men who are
entering the set; and all prey more or less upon poor tradesmen, such
as the above Walter Brown or James Gowans, who are only liable to such
a spoliation because they are poor, and anxious for business. We have
known a _victim_, for instance, who had long passed the condition
of being _jail-worthy_, live in a great measure upon a man who had
just begun a career of victimization by being thrown into jail. This
creature was content to be a kind of voluntary prisoner for the sake of
sharing the victuals and bed of his patron. It would astonish any man,
accustomed, day after day, to go home to a spread table at a regular
hour, to know the strange shifts which victims have to make in order to
satisfy hunger—how much is done by raising small hard-wrung subsidies
from former acquaintance—how much by duping—how much by what the Scotch
people very expressively call _skeching_—how much by subdivision of
mites among the wretches themselves. Your _victim_ is often witty,
can sing one good comic song, has a turn for mimicry, or at least an
amusing smack of worldly knowledge; and he is sometimes so lucky as to
fall in with patrons little above himself in fortune, but still having
something to give, who afford him their protection on account of such
qualifications.
By way of illustrating these points, take the following instances of
what may be called the _fag-victim_.
Nisbet of ——, in Lanarkshire, originally a landed gentleman and an
advocate at the Scottish bar, was a blood of the first water in the
dissolute decade 1780-90, when, if we are to believe Provost Creech, it
was a gentleman’s highest ambition, in his street dress and manner of
walking, to give an exact personation of the character of Filch in the
Beggars’ Opera. Nisbet at that period dressed a good deal above Filch,
however he might resemble him in gait. He had a coat edged all round
with gold lace, wore a gold watch on each side (an extravagant fashion
then prevalent), and with his cane, bag-wig, and gold-buckled shoes,
was really a fine figure of the pre-revolutionary era. His house was
in the Canongate—a good flat in Chessels’s Court—garrisoned only by a
female servant called Nanny. Nisbet at length squandered away the whole
of his estate, and became a _victim_. All the world fell away from him;
but Nanny still remained. From the entailed family flat in Chessels’s
Court, he had to remove to a den somewhere about the Netherbow: Nanny
went with him. Then came the period of wretchedness: Nanny, however,
still stuck fast. The unfortunate gentleman could not himself appear in
his woe-begone attire upon those streets where he had formerly shone a
resplendent sun; neither could he bring his well-born face to solicit
his former friends for subsidies. Nanny did all that was necessary.
Foul day and fair day, she was to be seen gliding about the streets,
either petitioning tradesmen for goods to her master on credit, or
collecting food and money from the houses of his acquaintance. If
a liquid alms was offered, she had a white tankard, streaked with
smoky-looking cracks, for its reception; if the proffered article was
a mass of flesh, she had a plate or a towel. There never was such a
forager. Nisbet himself used to call her “true and trusty,” by way of
a compliment to her collective powers; and he finally found so much
reason to appreciate her disinterested attachment, that, on reaching
the usual fatal period of fifty, he made her his wife! What was the
catastrophe of their story, I never heard.
The second, and only other instance of the _fag-victim_ which can be
given here, is of a still more touching character than the above, and
seems to make it necessary for the writer of this trifling essay to
protest, beforehand, against being thought a scoffer at the misery of
his fellow creatures. He begs it to be understood, that, however light
be the language in which he speaks, he hopes that he can look with no
other than respectful feelings upon human nature, in a suffering, and,
more especially, a self-denying form.
Some years ago, there flourished, in one of the principal thoroughfares
of Edinburgh, a fashionable perfumer, the inheritor of an old business,
and a man of respectable connections, who, falling into dissolute
habits, became of course very much embarrassed, and, finally,
“unfortunate.” In his shop,
“From youth to age a reverend ’_prentice_ grew;”
a man, at the time of his master’s failure, advanced to nearly middle
life, but who, having never been any where else since he was ten
or twelve years of age, than behind Finlay’s counter—Sundays and
meal-hours alone excepted—was still looked upon by his master as “the
boy of the shop,” and so styled accordingly. This worthy creature
had, in the course of time, become as a mere piece of furniture in
the shop; his soul had _fraternized_ (to use a modern French phrase)
with his situation. The drawers and shottles, the combs, brushes,
and bottles, had entered into and become part of his own existence;
he took them all under the wide-spreading boughs of his affections;
they were to him, as the infant to the mother, part of himself. He
was on the best terms with every thing about the shop; the handles of
all things were fitted to his hand; every thing came to him, to use
a proverbial expression of Scotland, like the bowl of a pint-stoup.
In fact, like a piece of wood placed in a petrifying spring, this man
might be said to have been transfigured out of his original flesh and
blood altogether, and changed into a creature participating in the
existence and qualities of certain essences, perfumes, wigs, pomades,
drawers, wig-blocks, glass cases, and counters forming the _materiel_
of Mr Finlay’s establishment. Such a being was, as may be supposed,
a useful servant. He knew all the customers; he knew his master’s
whole form of practice, all his habits, and every peculiarity of his
temper. And then the fidelity of the creature; but that was chiefly
shown in the latter evil days of the shop, and during the victimhood
of his master. As misfortune came on, the friendship of master and
man became more intensely familiar and intimate than it had ever been
before. As the proudest man, met by a lion in the desert, makes no
scruple to coalesce with his servant in resisting it, so was Finlay
induced, by the devouring monster Poverty, to descend to the level,
and make a companion, of his faithful “boy.” They would at last go
to the same tavern together, take the same Sunday walks—were, in
reality, boon companions. In all Finlay’s distresses, the “boy”
partook; if any thing “occurred about a bill,” as Crabbe says, it was
the “boy” who had the chief dolour of its accommodation; he would
scour the North and South Bridges, with his hat off, borrowing small
silver a _l’improviste_, as if to make up change to a customer, till
he had the necessary sum amassed. The “boy” at length became very
much demoralised: he grew vicious towards the world, to be the more
splendidly virtuous to his master: one grand redeeming quality, after
the manner of Moses’ serpent, had eaten up all the rest. It were
needless to pursue the history of the shop through all its stages
of declension. Through them all the “boy” survived, unshaken in his
attachment. The shop might fade, grow dim, and die, but the “boy”
never. The goods might be diminished, the Duke of Wellington might be
sold for whisky, and his lady companions pawn their wigs for mutton
pies; but the “boy” was a fixture. There was no pledging away his
devoted, inextinguishable friendship. The master at last _went to_ the
Canongate jail—I say _went to_, in order to inform the sentimental
part of mankind that imprisonment is seldom done in the active voice,
people generally incarcerating themselves with the most philosophical
deliberation, and not the least air of compulsion in the matter. The
shop was still kept open, and the “boy” attended it. But every evening
did he repair to the dreary mansion, to solace his master with the
news of the day, see after his comforts, and yield up the prey which,
jackall-like, he had collected during the preceding four-and-twenty
hours. This prey, be it remarked, was not raised from the sale of any
thing in the shop. Every saleable article had by this time been sold.
The only furniture was now a pair of scissors and a comb, together with
the announcement, “Hair-cutting rooms,” in the window. By means of
these three things, however, the “boy” contrived generally to _fleece_
the public of a few sixpences in the day; and all these sixpences, with
the exception of a small commission for his own meagre subsistence,
went to his master at the Canongate jail. Often, in the hour between
eight and nine in the evening, have they sat in that small dingy
back-room behind the large hall, enjoying a bottle of strong ale, drunk
out of stoneware tumblers—talking over all their embarrassments, and
speculating how to get clear of them. Other prisoners had their wives
or their brothers to see after them; but we question if any one had,
even in these relations of kindred, a friend so attached as the “boy.”
At length, after a certain period, this unfortunate tradesman was one
evening permitted to walk away, arm in arm, with his faithful “young
man,” and the world was all before them where to choose.
For a considerable period all trace of the attached pair is lost. No
doubt their course was through many scenes of poignant misery; for at
the only part of their career upon which I have happened to obtain any
light, the “boy” was wandering through the streets of Carlisle, in
the dress and appearance of a very old beggar, and singing the songs
wherewith he had formerly delighted the citizens of Edinburgh in Mrs
Manson’s or Johnnie Dowie’s, for the subsistence of his master, who, as
ascertained by my informant, was deposited in a state of sickness and
wretchedness transcending all description, in a low lodging-house in a
back street. Such is the fag-victim, following his master
“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”