THE POOR
Not much more than a dozen years ago, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
startled England by stating that thirteen million of our people stood,
at all times, on the edge of starvation. He took as a basis the study
of the condition of the poor, made by Mr Charles Booth in a great
number of volumes, containing a great number of columns of figures, and
was alluding in general to the large class that existed on a family
income of twenty-three shillings a week. There was something terrible
about those figures, so terrible that even the press was shocked. But
there was something uninspired and inhuman about Mr Booth’s columns
of figures; it is all very well telling us that so many thousands of
people live five in a room, and so many thousands six in a room, and so
on, but it does not mean anything. The ordinary man finds it almost as
difficult to imagine that kind of life as to visualise a million; he
can see six people in a room, but his mind does not bring up the idea
of those six people in material attitudes, sleeping, eating, courting,
making merry; figures create no microcosm. I suspect that to understand
the poor, a little, you need to know very well the places where the
poor live. The house is a fairly clear indication of the inhabitant;
it is the house he chose, or the house to which he submitted. Then who
is this poor man? this poor man round whom so many essays have been
written? by the Fabian Society, judicial; by the Charity Organisation
Society, severe; by Mr John Galsworthy, understanding and tender? The
poor man is of the same genus as the rich man, but of a different
species. (I mean the born poor man as opposed to the born rich man.)
The rich man is no better than the poor man; the poor man is no better
than the rich man; they are different creatures, made such by different
conditions, just as a Spaniard and a Lancastrian are made different by
their various lives. Only, and there’s the political rub, Englishmen
have not to administer the affairs of Spaniards, while they do have to
administer the affairs of their own poor; thus it is important that
they should not blunder, because the poor are not good at improving
conditions; their attitude is to grin and bear, and then, one day, to
cease to bear.
To understand them at all one must take an imaginative leap; if you
find this difficult, Mr John Galsworthy has taken it admirably in _The
Freelands_. Listen to his description of a labourer’s life:--
‘He gets up summer and winter ... out of a bed that he cannot afford
time or money to keep too clean or warm, in a small room that probably
has not a large enough window; into clothes stiff with work, and
boots stiff with clay; makes something hot for himself, very likely
brings some of it to his wife and children; goes out, attending to
his digestion crudely and without comfort; works with his hands and
feet from half-past six or seven in the morning till past five at
night, except that twice he stops for an hour or so and eats simple
things that he would not altogether have chosen to eat, if he could
have had his will. He goes home to a tea that has been got ready for
him, and has a clean-up without assistance, smokes a pipe of shag,
reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes out again to work for
his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in
an atmosphere of beer and “baccy.” And so, dead tired, but not from
directing other people, he drowses himself to early lying again in his
doubtful bed.’
One should read, as a contrast, Mr Galsworthy’s description of the rich
man he calls Malloring:--
‘Your Malloring is called with a cup of tea, at, say, seven o’clock,
out of a nice, clean, warm bed; he gets into a bath that has been got
ready for him; into clothes and boots that have been brushed for him;
and goes down to a room where there’s a fire burning already if it’s
a cold day, writes a few letters, perhaps, before eating a breakfast
of exactly what he likes, nicely prepared for him, and reading the
newspaper that best comforts his soul; when he has eaten and read,
he lights his cigar or his pipe, and attends to his digestion in the
most sanitary and comfortable fashion; then in his study he sits down
to the steady direction of other people, either by interview or by
writing letters, or what not. In this way, between directing people
and eating what he likes, he passes the whole day, except that for
two or three hours, sometimes indeed seven or eight hours, he attends
to his physique by riding, motoring, playing a game, or indulging
in a sport that he has chosen for himself. And, at the end of all
that, he probably has another bath that has been made ready for him,
puts on clean clothes that have been put out for him, goes down to a
good dinner that has been cooked for him, smokes, reads, learns, and
inwardly digests, or else plays cards, billiards, and acts host until
he is sleepy, and so to bed, in a clean, warm bed, in a clean, fresh
room.’
I challenge you to say that this is exaggerated. If you like, say you
don’t care; but don’t say it isn’t true. And I will not preach at you,
but suggest, to such as detect in me sentimentality, that if we belong
to a refined and gifted class into whose hands the world has been
given, if, indeed, we are refined and gifted people, a condition such
as that of the poor man should offend our æsthetic sense. I have known
a rather larger number of poor men than is usual in my class; I have
not known them very well, because the worst of the difference between
the rich and the poor is that the poor cannot trust the rich; they know
them too well. The poor know that the rich conduct against them the
class-war, and so they are defensive, inclined either to say the thing
that will procure a tip, or a post as office-boy for little Tommy, or
they will turn savagely on you to show you they are as good as you, and
tell you that though margarine is good enough for you, their inborn
good taste makes it impossible for them to consume anything but the
best butter. One does not get together, any more than that Spaniard and
that Lancastrian would get together, after five years of Ollendorff.
Still, if one passionately wants to understand, one sometimes, for a
moment, perceives the shadow of a hint of what another creature is. I
remember perceiving it, for the first time, in the midst of an alien
family in Widegate Street, just off Petticoat Lane; I had been sent by
the firm who employed me to make searching inquiries and to dispense
small bounties. My aliens were, I think, German Jews, who called
themselves Russian refugees because it sounded more appealing; they
were not a pleasant crowd; the man was a great, big, heavy, fat fellow,
with greasy, black hair, a rather surly brigand; there was a woman,
too, lying in a corner, dirtier than the man, presumably because she
had been lying there for some time; there were four little children,
exceedingly fat and well kept, the usual mystery of Jewish poverty;
there was an extraordinarily old woman who sat next to the woman on the
floor, and from the beginning to the end of the interview said not a
word and moved not a feature. But the horror of it came from the woman
on the floor, who also said not a word: there was no furniture in the
room, not a table, not a chair, not even a bed; the woman lay on a few
crumpled newspapers ... and had, the night before, given birth to a
child, who lay naked between her indescribably filthy bodice and her
breast. They were there, all together, in the midst of life, left and
abandoned, hungrily desirous of the moment when the great industrial
machine of London would be ready to consume them. Impostors, perhaps,
but if so, hard is the way of imposture and slender the wages thereof.
I remember thinking, after that, as I went along Petticoat Lane,
that is become Middlesex Street, how much the district resembled the
people. There is no Petticoat Lane now; Middlesex Street holds nothing
picturesque or national; even its open-air market on Sunday morning can
be paralleled by any Saturday afternoon scene in the little streets
of Edgware Road, or in Walker’s Court, Soho. It is a street mainly of
warehouses; Widegate Street and Sandys Row exhibit the oddity of narrow
crookedness and no more. Petticoat Lane, where the shops are paltry,
and the folk divide into too fat and too lean, is not even a mean
street. Its one charm is the prevalent, handsome young Jewess, aged
about fourteen, with high tasselled boots, and plenty of silk stocking,
containing plenty of leg. She is a fine girl; she haunts you all along
Whitechapel Road, and so to Mile End, with her rude air of wealth and
wealth-consciousness. I don’t know how she does it; with very little
money, some crude colour and some light furs, she suggests opulence.
There is something matronly about her, too; she looks so marriageable
... and when one looks into the humid softness of her brown eyes, one
finds a limitless rectitude of morals, which may arise from a limitless
power to resist temptation.
Her thick mouth is tight closed; her stays are tight; her mind is
tight. She is fair and square, and will give her husband value for his
money, but somehow one feels it a pity that all she will give him is
value.
Those girls are part of a certain reckless gaiety that pervades
Whitechapel. I like Whitechapel Road; the streets that run off it are
indeed tragic with dirt and desolation, but the road itself, which is
the pleasure-house of the inhabitants, is full of vitality. At all
times it is thickly peopled, mostly with foreign Jews of all types,
many of them scrubby little men with beards, who gesticulate in groups
at street corners, and argue with their co-religionists. Some are in a
state of offensive prosperity. Those Jewish crowds are more alive than
the average London crowd; their eyes shine more, as if they were more
capable of conceiving desire. They are at their most intense before the
many open-air stalls, where you may buy boots and clothing, flowers,
toys, and books, and music, and furniture, and every food you know, and
some you do not; and teasers for ladies, and surprises for gents, and
penny boxes of tricks that will make you popular at a social evening,
and collections of jokes of ancient lineage. It is a wonderful show;
it is, in many ways, more wonderful than Williamson’s Bonanza in the
Brixton Road, because it is cheaper, because a penny goes farther, and
thus the penn’orth is more hotly desired. All that points to another
side of the poor, the side Mr Galsworthy never sees: their joys.
It is true that the joyous side of poverty is much less evident
than the unhappy side; this because the pleasures of the poor are
either localised within their own homes (instead of outcropping in
restaurants), or because they are confined every year to a limited
number of delirious days. Also, the places in which they live are
mostly so abominable that it is difficult for men of our sort to
understand that delight may dwell in a slum a little more easily, and a
little longer than love in a cottage.
The slums are so evident to our eyes; they are everywhere. For
instance, there is an unexpected little slum in the middle of Mayfair,
round Shepherd Market and Shepherd Street. I believe the whole place
is insanitary and should be pulled down (I have no love for the
picturesque). It is surprising to think that the inhabitants of Mayfair
must now and then go through the little, cramped market with the small,
dirty houses, yet fail to discover that here, between Curzon Street and
Piccadilly, stands a knot of public-houses at one of which, perhaps,
Sam Weller was asked to take part in a swarry of boiled mutton; the
hypothetical investigator from Grosvenor Square would be surprised
to find out that here one can buy a shirt for 3s. 6d., sweets by the
ounce, underclothes for 2s. 11d., and that for 2d. a hungry man can
purchase a meat pie. It is like that all over London, in Belgravia,
in Marylebone, just as in St Giles’s. They have not quite slain St
Giles’s, the street-improvers, and there still is charm in Seven Dials,
where once seven little public-houses stood at seven little corners,
and each public-house had a dial. You told the time by tossing up or
averaging. And now there is but one dial left, and it has lost its
hands. (Hush, my soul! Do not let the spirit of Mr E. V. Lucas invade
thee.)
[Illustration:
SHEPHERD’S MARKET]
There is more truth in the frank slums over the river. I once enjoyed
the services of a supernumerary postman, who frequently came to
my house to make experiments on the garden, to put up shelves, to
interfere with the gas, or to drown kittens. In the end he went too
far, for he attempted to cure the ball-cock of some obscure disease,
and it responded to his treatment by flooding the kitchen three feet
deep. But before that tragic day (you should have seen my cat swim),
I visited him in Rotherhithe, because, among his many supernumerary
trades, he numbered that of vine grower. Against the back of his
house in West Lane he had, indeed, managed to grow a splendid,
muscular-looking vine, which produced great quantities of grapes; these
grapes, when eaten, reproduced what is probably the flavour of vitriol,
but he was very proud of them, and ate them, and he kept his vine in
condition by occasionally watering its roots with a bucket of bullock’s
blood. He received this free, because he kept the slaughterer’s books
in his spare time. But all this is by the way, and there are many
respectable old gentlemen who do all these things and are thought none
the worse of; as everybody knows, lunacy in the poor is originality
in the rich. What was interesting about the supernumerary’s home was
the breadth of West Lane, that is really a dingy square of bare earth
planted with trees whose every sooty leaf whispers: ‘Oh! had I the
wings of a dove!’ It is a square of crumbling Georgian frontages not
devoid of a certain splendour. That discovery is one of the keys to the
condition of the poor. You find this not only in Rotherhithe, but in
Clapham, in Brixton, in the New Kent Road; here and there, behind the
board of a photographer, where are exposed pictures of young men with
all their hair brushed off their foreheads, and of young girls with
all their hair brushed into their eyes, you see a beautiful old house
with a porch of the Adams type. Many of these streets, such as Old Kent
Road, such as Tooley Street, have become wholly commercial, have turned
into long lines of gray warehouses and decaying side streets, haunted
by many children; some, like Jamaica Road, and most of Bermondsey,
have entirely fallen into the hands of the grayest commerce, but here
and there you are bound to find a still splendid Georgian house,
looking rather like a distressed Irish lady, who does her best to
keep her transformation combed, and to maintain the traditions of the
Ballymullins of County Mayo. These houses are in the hands of the
poor, which means that, originally intended for prosperous people with
several servants, they have been cut up into tenements; this also means
that the stairs have not been mended since the days of William IV.;
that Queen Victoria came to the throne, and married and mourned, that
Disraeli passed reform bills while no bathrooms were put in; that the
tap went on running in the backyard, where Georgian wealth used to fill
the jugs; it means that the old house has lost most of its glass, and
is running with mice and stinking with beetles; that the drains have
been left by the local to a higher authority. Part of the tragedy of
the poor is that few houses have been built for them, and that they
have to adapt themselves to houses discarded by the rich, which are
not meant for them, which are not usable by them. The rooms are so
large that the poor cannot afford them unless they overcrowd them; or
they have tiny windows because they were limited by the old window
tax. There is only one thing to do for them, as is the case with most
institutions: blow them up.
Will the superman be bred by the L.C.C.? I do not know, but I am sure
that the superman will not be bred in any numbers in the middle of the
stench of the past. Evil and old are almost synonyms, and I confess
that I like better the vulgarity of the suburban street, with its
concrete that pretends to be stone, and its plaster beams that pretend
to be wood, its wooden pillars that pretend to be marble. I like it
better, with its bay windows, so built that no article of furniture
will fit it, with its awful ingle nooks, its sham gables and its sham
dormer windows, than the awful old Georgian houses near Lamb’s Conduit
Street, where, crowded together under a ceiling still flecked with
gold, on which naked cherubs sprawl, a dozen Russian furriers sit and
scratch. For the hideous modern house can at least be clean; it is
small; it is washable; a through draught can be arranged; a very little
it opens the window on life.
In the sense of housing we have never housed our poor; hardly anywhere,
up to 1900 or so, have we done anything but run up rude brick boxes
as shelters, or adapt the dwellings of the rich. Hence, I believe,
a stricken, scrofulous generation. Yes, I know there is a charm
about all this black filth, as if, indeed, flowers did sprout from
dunghills. It is the charm of contrast, it is singularity. You feel
it in every poor region. You feel it at the Elephant and Castle, for
instance, though why the Elephant should alone be famous, while at the
two opposite corners sit the Rockingham and Alfred’s Head, equally
great public-houses, I do not know; you feel it in the rowdiness of
London Road, and in a sort of ‘none-of-your-lip’ air that hangs over
Newington Causeway. You feel it still more in Deptford; indeed,
Deptford is a pitiful place, all gray stone and gray slate, but the
smell of the sea hangs about it, and as it lies along the docks, often
above these slate roofs, above the timber stacks of strange wood, you
see the tangled masts and cranes cut out against the sky, patterns
evidently designed by Nevinson. I remember once seeing on the shoulder
of an old woman who kept a stationer’s shop, a gorgeous parrot. It had
a yellow and blue body, scarlet feathers in its tail, a bill of ebony,
and eyes like molten gold. It sat on her shoulder, thinking of things
old as the willow pattern. The parrot looked out upon Deptford High
Street, through the flaming topaz of its eyes at the young men who
passed now and then, sun-burnt starvelings of the merchant service, in
blue jerseys; the sailors rolled and the parrot thought, and in the
heat the East breathed from the logs of mahogany and sandalwood. But
under all that, under all that theatrical charm was buried the same old
thing, the bad old house made to fit the bad new time.
Yet, the poor are not as unhappy as they look. They do not, in the
accepted sense, live a life of pleasure, but to say that they have no
pleasures, or can have none because they are poor, is a mistake. The
poor have cheap pleasures, pleasures which many of us do not care for,
and they take no part in what we choose to call pleasures. If I were
compelled to say something sweeping, I should say that the rich have
less pleasures than the poor; they are free from more pains, but that
is not the same thing. The pleasures of the poor reside much more than
do ours in animal comforts; whereas the rich take a good dinner and
its wines as a matter of course, the poor make a feast of a joint or a
gallon of beer. Things such as these, food, drink, warmth, second-class
travelling, arm-chairs, extra blankets, translate themselves, not into
the mere satisfaction of needs, but into recognisable pleasures. It is
so in the whole field of their amusements, the cinema, the music-hall,
the football and cricket fields, where many watch matches, and a few
play them; it is so in regard to bank holidays, to journeys to Southend
or Margate, to bathing, to visiting the Chamber of Horrors, to being
photographed. All these things matter more to the poor than they do
to the rich, and you will realise that this is true, if you recall
that you have never met an underpaid clerk or a working girl who did
not passionately look forward to holidays. On the other hand, you
are all familiar with the state of mind of a well-to-do family, who
solemnly discuss one May evening, ‘Where shall we go in August?’ When
the poor discuss where they shall go to in August, and most of them
mean on August Bank Holiday, they do not come together in the spirit of
profound misery and grim hostility that characterises the respectable
classes. They do not go away because they must go away in August, nor
must they go away in August because everybody goes away in August: it
costs them something to go away. The holiday is a treat, and is not a
part of the household budget estimated for in every income. I need not
stress this, but we all know that when estimates are prepared one must
put in rent, rates, taxes, doctor, dentist, chemist ... _holidays_.
That is not pleasure. But it is pleasure when Alf tells Ethel that he
has had a rise, and that they can this year rise to Cromer instead of
Ramsgate. The difference is still more remarkable if we recall the
‘thank-God-that’s-over’ attitude of the rich when, at last, their
holiday is done, and the beneficent train pants into Paddington or
Victoria. I have known many poor young men and women, and never met one
who had not enjoyed a perfect holiday. I have met some who had passed
seven days in a mackintosh, and even then had enjoyed a perfect holiday.
The poor have pleasures, because they draw more than we can from
pleasures; they anticipate more, because they are less spoilt by the
experience of pleasures, and have not yet found out that these have
mutable faces. To make their good fortune more complete, they are even
capable of anticipating pleasure without being disappointed when they
attain it. Their pleasures are keen, because they are rare. They are
keen, because they obtain very little pleasure without paying for it,
and as they have little money they must scheme, plan, save; so pleasure
becomes a thing to strive for, a true reward; they have to climb the
fig tree to secure the figs; they are not cursed with the ownership of
the fig tree, cannot lie under its boughs until a ripe fig drops into
their mouth.
We must not forget, too, that poverty has psychological reactions.
Mr Bernard Shaw says that poverty is a disgusting disease, and, on
the whole, he is right, but the sufferer has marvellous moments of
recovery. In those moments the poor man does what the rich man, by
long education, has been taught not to do: he lets himself go. He
can hold arms with half a dozen companions and proceed uproariously
along a pier, singing abominably an excellent music-hall tune, to the
inefficient accompaniment of a concertina or mouth-organ; he can reel
out of public-houses in a state of complete indifference to public
opinion, instead of being secreted by the club waiter and paternally
controlled by a taxi-driver; indeed, the poor man can derive much
vanity from his condition, and rise in the esteem of his fellows next
day, because he took part in such a spree. (In this country, if you
can’t be great, be drunk.) Above all, he can make love in public.
He can, unashamedly, sit upon a bench in the park, complicatedly
intertwined with his beloved, sometimes with two beloveds; nobody
minds, and the little god of love will, for a moment, blind the
policeman’s bull’s eye. He needs no Sussex down, nor footmen, nor
thermos flasks, to make a picnic; with the _Daily Mirror_ beneath the
bough, a flask of ginger beer, and her beside him singing, ‘Who were
you with Last Night?’ Battersea Park is Paradise enow.
Their social functions, too, are more social, and less functional.
They do not, in our sense, entertain, that is to say they do not, at
given intervals, go through their address book and say: ‘We can’t ask
Lady So-and-So, because she has refused our last two invitations, and
I suppose we must ask the Fitz-Thompsons. Or do you think we could get
out of it?’ No, they don’t entertain; they prefer to be entertained,
and so, on strictly scheduled occasions, namely, Christmas, birthdays,
wedding anniversaries, and engagements, _and on no others_, the whole
family and a few very old friends are asked to a spread. And it _is_ a
spread. It is not compulsory jellies from Gunter’s, or game pie from
the Café Royal, or, still worse, a dinner no better than every day’s
dinner, but merely a little longer; it is a real spread comprising
three times the food that is normally eaten, choice food, such as
tinned salmon, lobster, trifle with real brandy, stuffed loin of pork,
likely to be remembered. If there is wine it is port wine, the real
article. The real article and not the rotten routine. So the people
they bring together are not the frigid crowd we call acquaintances,
whom most of us ask because they have asked us, or because they
threaten to do so, people whom we do not know very well and whom we
don’t want to know very well, people, therefore, on whom our display
cannot make a great impression. The poor ask the people they know well,
people who know their exact income. Thus they attain a great human
pleasure: ostentation. The life of the poor is harsh, but their joys
are keen. I used to know a woman who called them the poor poor. What a
fool she was!
VIII
STONES