Transcriber Note:
Obvious typos and punctuation errors corrected.
Italic text is represented by underscores surrounding the _italic
text_.
Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.
A small decoration on the title page is represented by [Decoration].
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THIS
MISERY _of_ BOOTS
BY
H. G. WELLS
_Author of “Socialism and the Family,” “In the
Days of the Comet,” “A Modern
Utopia,” etc._
[Decoration]
BOSTON
THE BALL PUBLISHING CO.
1908
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THIS MISERY OF
BOOTS
CHAPTER I
THE WORLD AS BOOTS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
“It does not do,” said a friend of mine, “to think about boots.” For my
own part, I have always been particularly inclined to look at boots, and
think about them. I have an odd idea that most general questions can be
expressed in terms of foot-wear—which is perhaps why cobblers are often
such philosophical men. Accident it may be, gave me this persuasion. A
very considerable part of my childhood was spent in an underground
kitchen; the window opened upon a bricked-in space, surmounted by a
grating before my father’s shop window. So that, when I looked out of
the window, instead of seeing—as children of a higher upbringing would
do—the heads and bodies of people, I saw their under side. I got
acquainted indeed with all sorts of social types as boots simply,
indeed, as the soles of boots; and only subsequently, and with care,
have I fitted heads, bodies, and legs to these pediments.
There would come boots and shoes (no doubt holding people) to stare at
the shop, finicking, neat little women’s boots, good sorts and bad
sorts, fresh and new, worn crooked in the tread, patched or needing
patching; men’s boots, clumsy and fine, rubber shoes, tennis shoes,
goloshes. Brown shoes I never beheld—it was before that time; but I have
seen pattens. Boots used to come and commune at the window, duets that
marked their emotional development by a restlessness or a kick.... But
anyhow, that explains my preoccupation with boots.
But my friend did not think it _did_, to think about boots.
My friend was a realistic novelist, and a man from whom hope had
departed. I cannot tell you how hope had gone out of his life; some
subtle disease of the soul had robbed him at last of any enterprise, or
belief in coming things; and he was trying to live the few declining
years that lay before him in a sort of bookish comfort, among
surroundings that seemed peaceful and beautiful, by not thinking of
things that were painful and cruel. And we met a tramp who limped along
the lane.
“Chafed heel,” I said, when we had parted from him again; “and on these
pebbly byways no man goes barefooted.” My friend winced; and a little
silence came between us. We were both recalling things; and then for a
time, when we began to talk again, until he would have no more of it, we
rehearsed the miseries of boots.
We agreed that to a very great majority of people in this country boots
are constantly a source of distress, giving pain and discomfort, causing
trouble, causing anxiety. We tried to present the thing in a concrete
form to our own minds by hazardous statistical inventions. “At the
present moment,” said I, “one person in ten in these islands is in
discomfort through boots.”
My friend thought it was nearer one in five.
“In the life of a poor man or a poor man’s wife, and still more in the
lives of their children, this misery of the boot occurs and recurs—every
year so many days.”
We made a sort of classification of these troubles.
There is the TROUBLE OF THE NEW BOOT.
(i) They are made of some bad, unventilated material; and “draw the
feet,” as people say.
(ii) They do not fit exactly. Most people have to buy ready-made boots;
they cannot afford others, and, in the submissive philosophy of poverty,
they wear them to “get used” to them. This gives you the little-toe
pinch, the big-toe pinch, the squeeze and swelling across the foot; and,
as a sort of chronic development of these pressures, come corns and all
the misery of corns. Children’s feet get distorted for good by this
method of fitting the human being to the thing; and a vast number of
people in the world are, as a consequence of this, ashamed to appear
barefooted. (I used to press people who came to see me in warm pleasant
weather to play Badminton barefooted on the grass—a delightful thing to
do—until I found out that many were embarrassed at the thought of
displaying twisted toes and corns, and such-like disfigurements.)
(iii) The third trouble of new boots is this: they are unseasoned and in
bad condition, and so they squeak and make themselves an insulting
commentary on one’s ways.
But these are but trifling troubles to what arises as the boots get into
wear. Then it is the pinch comes in earnest. Of these TROUBLES OF THE
WORN BOOT, I and my friend, before he desisted, reckoned up three
principal classes.
(i) There are the various sorts of chafe. Worst of the chafes is
certainly the heel chafe, when something goes wrong with the upright
support at the heel. This, as a boy, I have had to endure for days
together; because there were no other boots for me. Then there is the
chafe that comes when that inner lining of the boot rucks up—very like
the chafe it is that poor people are always getting from over-darned and
hastily-darned socks. And then there is the chafe that comes from
ready-made boots one has got a trifle too large or long, in order to
avoid the pinch and corns. After a little while, there comes a
transverse crease across the loose-fitting forepart; and, when the boot
stiffens from wet or any cause, it chafes across the base of the toes.
They have you all ways. And I have a very lively recollection too of the
chafe of the knots one made to mend broken laces—one cannot be always
buying new laces, and the knots used to work inward. And then the chafe
of the crumpled tongue.
(ii) Then there are the miseries that come from the wear of the sole.
There is the rick of ankle because the heel has gone over, and the sense
of insecurity; and there is the miserable sense of not looking well from
behind that many people must feel. It is almost always painful to me to
walk behind girls who work out, and go to and fro, consuming much
foot-wear, for this very reason, that their heels seem always to wear
askew. Girls ought always to be so beautiful, most girls could be so
beautiful, that to see their poor feet askew, the grace of their walk
gone, a sort of spinal curvature induced, makes me wretched, and angry
with a world that treats them so. And then there is the working through
of nails, nails in the shoe. One limps on manfully in the hope presently
of a quiet moment and a quiet corner in which one may hammer the thing
down again. Thirdly, under this heading I recall the flapping sole. My
boots always came to that stage at last; I wore the toes out first, and
then the sole split from before backwards. As one walked it began
catching the ground. One made fantastic paces to prevent it happening;
one was dreadfully ashamed. At last one was forced to sit by the wayside
frankly, and cut the flap away.
(iii) Our third class of miseries we made of splitting and leaks. These
are for the most part mental miseries, the feeling of shabbiness as one
sees the ugly yawn, for example, between toe cap and the main upper of
the boot; but they involve also chills, colds, and a long string of
disagreeable consequences. And we spoke too of the misery of sitting
down to work (as multitudes of London school children do every wet
morning) in boots with soles worn thin or into actual holes, that have
got wet and chilling on the way to the work-place....
From these instances my mind ran on to others. I made a discovery. I had
always despised the common run of poor Londoners for not spending their
Sundays and holidays in sturdy walks, the very best of exercise. I had
allowed myself to say when I found myself one summer day at Margate:
“What a soft lot all these young people must be who loaf about the
band-stand here, when they might be tramping over the Kentish hills
inland!” But now I repented me of that. Long tramps indeed! Their boots
would have hurt them. Their boots would not stand it. I saw it all.
And now my discourse was fairly under way. “_Ex pede Herculem_,” I said;
“these miseries of boots are no more than a sample. The clothes people
wear are no better than their boots; and the houses they live in far
worse. And think of the shoddy garment of ideas and misconceptions and
partial statements into which their poor minds have been jammed by way
of education! Think of the way _that_ pinches and chafes them! If one
expanded the miseries of these things.... Think, for example, of the
results of the poor, bad, unwise food, of badly-managed eyes and ears
and teeth! Think of the quantity of toothache.”
“I tell you, it does not _do_ to think of such things!” cried my friend,
in a sort of anguish; and would have no more of it at any price....
And yet in his time he had written books full of these very matters,
before despair overtook him.
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