It is with a feeling doubtless somewhat analogous to that of the
angler, that the London shopkeeper from time to time regards the
moneyless crowds who throng in gaping admiration around the tempting
display he makes in his window. His admirers and the fish, however,
are in different circumstances: the one won't bite if they have no
mind; the others can't bite if they should have all the mind in the
world. Yet the shopkeeper manages better than the angler; for while
the fish are deaf to the charming of the latter, charm he never so
wisely, the former is able, at a certain season of the year, to
convert the moneyless gazers into ready-money customers. This he does
by the force of logic. 'You are thinking of Christmas,' says he--'yes,
you are; and you long to have a plum-pudding for that day--don't deny
it. Well, but you can't have it, think as much as you will; it is
impossible as you manage at present. But I'll tell you how to get the
better of the impossibility. In twenty weeks, we shall have Christmas
here: now if, instead of spending every week all you earn, you will
hand me over sixpence or a shilling out of your wages, I'll take care
of it for you, since you can't take care of it for yourself; and you
shall have the full value out of my shop any time in Christmas-week,
and be as merry as you like, and none the poorer.'
This logic is irresistible. Tomkins banks his 6d. for a plum-pudding
and the etceteras with Mr Allspice the grocer; and this identical
pudding he enjoys the pleasure of eating half-a-dozen times over in
imagination before the next instalment is due. He at length becomes so
fond of the flavour, that he actually--we know, for we have seen him
do it--he actually, to use his own expression, 'goes in for a goose'
besides with Mr Pluck the poulterer. Having once passed the Rubicon,
of course he cannot go back; the weekly sixpences must be paid, come
what will: it would be disgraceful to be a defaulter. So he practises
a little self-denial, for the sake of a little self-esteem--and the
goose and pudding in perspective. He finds, to his astonishment, that
he can do quite as much work with one pot of beer a day as he could
with two, and he drops the superfluous pot, and not only pays his
instalments to the Christmas-bank, but gets a spare shilling in his
pocket besides. Thus, under the tuition of the shopkeeper, he learns
the practice of prudence in provisioning his family with plum-pudding,
and imbibes the first and foremost of the household virtues, on the
same principle as a wayward child imbibes physic--out of regard to the
dainty morsel that is to come afterwards.
Passing one day last autumn through a long and populous thoroughfare
on the southern side of the Thames, we happened to light upon Mr
Allspice's appeal to the consciences and the pockets of the
pudding-eating public. 'If you are wise,' said the admonitory placard,
'you will lose no time in joining Allspice's Plum-pudding Club.'
Remembering the retort of a celebrated quack: 'Give me all the fools
that come this way for my customers, and you are welcome to the wise
men,' we must own we felt rather doubtful of the prosperity of the
puddings; but having an interest in the matter, we resolved,
notwithstanding, to ascertain, if possible, whether the Wisdom who
uttereth her voice in the streets had on this special occasion spoken
to any purpose, and whether any, and how many, had proved themselves
wise in the acceptation of Mr Allspice. On making the necessary
inquiries after the affair had gone off, we learned, to our surprise
and gratification, that the club had been entirely successful. Upwards
of a hundred persons of a class who are never worth half-a-crown at a
time, had subscribed 6d. a week each for eighteen weeks, and thus
entitled themselves to 9s. worth of plum-pudding ingredients, besides
a certain quantity of tea and sugar. Thus the club had prospered
exceedingly, and had been the instrument of introducing comfort and
festive enjoyment to no small number of persons who might, and in all
probability would, have had little to eat or drink, and, consequently,
little cause for merriment, at that season. This is really a very
pleasant fact to contemplate, connected though it be with a somewhat
ludicrous kind of ingenuity, which must be exercised in order to bring
it about. To anybody but a London shopkeeper, the attempt would appear
altogether hopeless, to transform a hundred poor persons, who were
never worth half-a-crown a piece from one year's end to the other,
into so many 9s. customers; and yet the thing is done, and done, too,
by the London grocer in a manner highly satisfactory, and still more
advantageous to his customers. Is it too much to imagine that the
lesson of provident forethought thus agreeably learned by multitudes
of the struggling classes--for these clubs abound everywhere in
London, and their members must be legion--have a moral effect upon at
least a considerable portion of them? If one man finds a hundred needy
customers wise enough to relish a plum-pudding of their own providing,
surely they will not _all_ be such fools as to repudiate the practice
of that very prudence which procured them the enjoyment, and brought
mirth and gladness to their firesides! Never think it! They shall go
on to improve, take our word for it; and having learned prudence from
plum-pudding, and generosity from goose--for your poor man is always
the first to give a slice or two of the breast, when he has it, to a
sick neighbour--they shall learn temperance from tea, and abstinence,
if they choose, from coffee, and ever so many other good qualities
from ever so many other good things; and from having been wise enough
to join the grocer's Plum-pudding Club, they shall end by becoming
prosperous enough to join the Whittington Club, or the Gresham Club,
or the Athenæum Club, or the Travellers' Club; or the House of
Commons, or the House of Lords either, for all that you, or we, or
anybody else, can say or do to the contrary.
We know nothing of the original genius who first hit upon this mode of
indoctrinating the lower orders in a way so much to their advantage;
we hope, however, as there is little reason to doubt, that he found
his own account in it, and reaped his well-deserved reward. Whoever he
was, his example has been well followed for many years past. In the
poorer and more populous districts of the metropolis, this practice of
making provision for inevitable wants, by small subscriptions paid in
advance, prevails to a large extent. As winter sets in, almost every
provision-dealer, and other traders as well, proffers a compact to the
public, which he calls a club, though it is more of the nature of a
savings-bank, seeing that, at the expiration of the subscribing
period, every member is a creditor of the shop to the amount of his
own investments, and nothing more. Thus, besides the Plum-pudding
Clubs, there are Coal Clubs, by which the poor man who invests 1s. a
week for five or six of the summer months, gets a ton of good coal
laid in for the winter's consumption before the frost sets in and the
coal becomes dear. Then there is the Goose Club, which the wiser
members manage among themselves by contracting with a country dealer,
and thus avoid the tipsy consummation of the public-house, where these
clubs have mostly taken shelter. Again, there is the Twelfth-cake
Club, which comes to a head soon after Christmas, and is more of a
lottery than a club, inasmuch as the large cakes are raffled for, and
the losers, if they get anything, get but a big bun for their pains
and penalties. All these clubs, it will be observed, are plants of
winter-growth, or at least of winter-fruiting, having for their object
the provision of something desirable or indispensable in the winter
season. There is, however, another and a very different species of
club, infinitely more popular than any of the above, the operations of
which are aboundingly visible throughout the warm and pleasant months
of summer, and which may be, and sometimes is, called the Excursion
Club.
The Excursion Club is a provision which the working and labouring
classes of London have got up for themselves, to enable them to enjoy,
at a charge available to their scanty means, the exciting
pleasures--which are as necessary as food or raiment to their health
and comfort--of a change of air and scene. It is managed in a simple
way. The foreman of a workshop, or the father of a family in some
confined court, or perhaps some manageress of a troop of
working-girls, contracts with the owner of a van for the hire of his
vehicle and the services of a driver for a certain day. More
frequently still, the owner of the van is the prime mover in the
business, but then the trip is not so cheap. The members club their
funds, the men paying 1s. each, the wives, 6d., the children, 3d. or
4d.; and any poor little ragged orphan urchin, who may be hanging
about the workshop, gets accommodated with a borrowed jacket and
trousers, and a gratuitous face-washing from Mrs Grundy, and is taken
for nothing, and well fed into the bargain. The cost, something over a
guinea, is easily made up, and if any surplus remains, why, then, they
hire a fiddler to go along with them. On the appointed morning, at an
early hour, rain or shine, they flock to the rendezvous to the number
of forty or fifty--ten or a dozen more or less is a trifle not worth
mentioning. Each one carries his own provisions, and loaded with
baskets, cans, bottles, and earthen-jars, mugs and tea-kettles, in
they bundle, and off they jog--pans rattling, women chattering,
kettles clinking, children crowing, fiddle scraping, and men
smoking--at the rate of six or seven miles an hour, to Hampton Court
or Epping Forest. It is impossible for a person who has never
witnessed these excursions in the height of summer, to form an
adequate notion of the merry and exciting nature of the relaxation
they afford to a truly prodigious number of the hardworking classes.
Returning from Kingston to London one fine Monday morning in June
last, we met a train of these laughter-loaded vans, measuring a full
mile in length, and which must have consisted of threescore or more
vehicles, most of them provided with music of some sort, and adorned
with flowers and green boughs. As they shot one at a time past the
omnibus on which we sat, we were saluted by successive volleys of
mingled mirth and music, and by such constellations of merry-faced
mortals in St Monday garb, as would have made a sunshine under the
blackest sky that ever gloomed. Arrived at Hampton Court, the separate
parties encamp under the trees in Bushy Park, where they amuse
themselves the livelong day in innocent sports, for which your
Londoner has at bottom a most unequivocal and hearty relish. They
will most likely spend a few hours in wandering through the
picture-galleries in the palace, then take a stroll in the exquisite
gardens, where the young fellow who is thoughtless enough to pluck a
flower for his sweetheart, is instantly and infallibly condemned to
drag a heavy iron roller up and down the gravel-walk, to the amusement
of a thousand or two of grinning spectators. Having seen the palace
and the gardens, they pay a short visit, perhaps, to the monster
grape-vine, with its myriads of clusters of grapes, all of which Her
Gracious Majesty is supposed to devour; and then they return to their
dinner beneath some giant chestnut-tree in the park. The cloth is
spread at the foot of the huge trunk; the gashed joints of the
Sunday's baked meats, flanked by a very mountainous gooseberry pie,
with crusty loaves and sections of cheese and pats of butter, cut a
capital figure among the heterogeneous contribution of pitchers,
preserve-jars, tin-cans, mugs and jugs, shankless rummers and
wineglasses, and knives and forks of every size and pattern, from the
balance handles and straight blades of to-day, to the wooden haft and
curly-nosed cimeter of a century back. Their sharpened appetites make
short work of the cold meats and pies. Treble X of somebody's own
corking fizzes forth from brown jar and black bottle, and if more is
wanted, it is fetched from the neighbouring tavern. Dinner done, the
fiddle strikes up, and a dance on the greensward by the young people,
while the old ones, stretched under the trees, enjoy a quiet gossip
and a refreshing pipe, fills up the afternoon. There is always
somebody at this crisis who is neither too old to dance nor too young
to smoke a gossipping pipe, and so he does both at intervals--rushing
now into the dance, drawn by the irresistible attraction of the
fiddle, and now sidling back again to his smoke-puffing chums,
impelled by the equally resistless charms of tobacco. Then and
therefore he is branded as a deserter, and a file of young lasses lay
hands on him, and drag him forth in custody to the dance; and after a
good scolding from laughing lips, and a good drubbing from white
handkerchiefs, they compromise the business at last by allowing him to
dance with his pipe in his mouth.
By five o'clock, Mrs Grundy has managed, with the connivance of Jack
the driver, somehow or other to boil the kettle, and a cup of tea is
ready for all who are inclined to partake. The young folks for the
most part prefer the dance: they can have tea any day--they will not
dance on the grass again till next year perhaps; so they make the most
of their time. By and by, the fiddler's elbow refuses to wag any
longer: he is perfectly willing himself, as he says, 'to play till
all's blue; but you see,' he adds, 'bones won't do it.' 'Never mind,'
says the Beau Nash of the day: 'sack your badger, old boy, and go and
get some resin. Now, then, for kiss in the ring!' Then while the
fiddler gets his resin, which means anything he likes to eat or drink,
the whole party, perhaps amounting to three or four van-loads in all,
form into a circle for 'kiss in the ring.' The ring is one uproarious
round of frolic and laughter, which would 'hold both its sides,' but
that it is forced to hold its neighbours' hands with both its own,
under which the flying damsel who has to be caught and kissed bobs in
and out, doubling like a hare, till she is out of breath, and is
overtaken at last, and led bashfully into the centre of the group, to
suffer the awful penalty of the law. While this popular pastime is
prolonged to the last moment, the van is getting ready to return; the
old folks assist in stowing away the empty baskets and vessels; and an
hour or so before sun-down, or it may be half an hour after, the whole
party are remounted, and on their way home again, where they arrive,
after a jovial ride, weary with enjoyment, and with matter to talk
about for a month to come.
At Epping Forest, the scene is very different, but not a whit the less
lively. There are no picture-galleries or pleasure-gardens, but there
is the Forest to roam in, full of noble trees, in endless sinuous
avenues, crowned with the 'scarce intruding sky,' among which the
joyous holiday-makers form a finer picture than was ever painted yet.
Then there are friendly foot-races and jumping-matches, and
leap-frogging, and black-berrying, and foot-balling, and
hockey-and-trapping, and many other games besides, in addition to the
dancing and the ring-kissing. Epping and Hainault Forests are
essentially the lungs of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Their leafy
shades are invaded all the summer long by the van-borne hosts of
laborious poverty. Clubs, whose members invest but a penny a week,
start into existence as soon as the leaves begin to sprout in the
spring; with the first gush of summer, the living tide begins to flow
into the cool bosom of the forest; and until late in the autumn,
unless the weather is prematurely wintry, there is no pause for a day
or an hour of sunshine in the rush of health-seekers to the green
shades. The fiat has gone forth from the government for the
destruction of these forests, for the felling of the trees and the
enclosure of the land. Will the public permit the execution of the
barbarous decree? We trust not.
Notwithstanding all that has been said, and so justly said, of the
notorious improvidence of the poor, it will be seen from the above
hasty sketches, that they yet can and do help themselves to many
things which are undeniably profitable and advantageous to them: they
only want, in fact, a motive for so doing--a foregone conviction that
the thing desiderated is worth having. Now, here is ground for
hope--an opening, so to speak, for the point of the wedge. That the
very poor may be taught to practise self-denial, in the prospect of a
future benefit, these clubs have proved; and we may confess to a
prejudice in their favour, not merely from what they have
accomplished, but from a not unreasonable hope, that they may
perchance foster a habit which will lead to far better things than
even warm chimney-corners, greenwood holidays, roast geese, and
plum-pudding.