those attractive quarters of London, which is interesting alike for its
historical associations and for memorable houses that were once
inhabited by famous men. In essays, letters, fiction--all through that
period which has been called the Augustan age of English literature--we
find allusions to it; and after that time it continued to be the
favourite resort of artists, men of letters, wealthy merchants, and not
a few statesmen and eminent politicians. In Leicester Square, Hogarth
laughed, moralised, and painted. The house of Sir Joshua Reynolds stands
yet in that now renovated space, and a well-known artist has a studio
there to-day. But the tide of fashion has receded since powdered wigs
and sedan chairs disappeared. The tall stately houses are many of them
dismantled, or are converted into manufactories and workshops. The great
iron extinguishers which still adorn the iron railings by the doorsteps
have nearly rusted away. It must be a century since the flambeaux
carried by running footmen were last thrust into them, when great
rumbling, creaking coaches drew up and landed visitors before the
dimly-lighted portals. Silence and decay are the characteristics of many
a once goodly mansion; and the houses themselves are not unfrequently
associated with the relief of that poverty which is everywhere so
apparent as to appeal to almost every form of charity. Before one such
house we are standing now, its quietly opening door revealing a broad
lofty hall, from which a great staircase, with heavy baluster of black
oak and panelled walls leads to the spacious rooms above. This mansion
is historical, too, in its way, for we are at the corner of Soho Square,
in Greek Street, and are about to enter what was once the London
residence of the famous Alderman Beckford, and his equally famous
son--the man who inherited the mysterious and gorgeously furnished
palace at Fonthill, the author of "Vathek," the half-recluse who bought
Gibbon's extensive library at Lausanne, that he might have "something to
amuse him when he went that way," and afterwards went that way, read
himself nearly blind, and then made a friend a present of all the books,
sold Fonthill, went abroad, and set about building another mysterious
castle in a strange land.
In that big committee-room on the first floor, which we shall visit
presently, there was to be seen, four or five years ago, a stupendous
chimney-piece of oak, elaborately carved, and said to have been a
masterpiece of Grinling Gibbons. It was taken down and sold for a
handsome sum of money, to augment the funds of the Institution which now
occupies the old mansion, for the door at which we enter receives other
guests than those who once thronged it--suffering, depressed,
poverty-stricken, weary men and women, who come here to seek the rest
that is offered to them in the quiet rooms--the restoration of meat and
drink and refreshing sleep, the comfort of hopeful words and friendly
aid. It is named "The House of Charity," and the work that its
supporters have set themselves to do is carried on so silently--I had
almost said so secretly--that the stillness you observe within the
building, as we stand here waiting for the lady who superintends the
household, is suggestive alike of the repose which is essential to the
place, and of a severe earnestness not very easy to define.
Members of the same committee, whose earnest hearty work is apparent at
Newport Market and at the Soup Kitchen in Ham Yard, are helping this
House of Charity, which has the Archbishop of Canterbury for its patron
and the Bishop of London for its visitor.
Here, in the two large sitting-rooms opening from the hall, we may see
part of what is being done, in giving rest to the weary and upholding
them who are ready to faint. One is for men, the other for women, who
have been received as inmates, for periods extending from a fortnight to
a longer time, according to the necessities of each case, and the
probability of obtaining suitable employment. Of course the aid is
intended to be only temporary--though in some peculiar cases it is
continued till the applicant recovers from weakness following either
uninfectious illness or want. There can be, of course, no actual
sick-nursing here; but in a warm and comfortable upper room, near the
dormitory, which we shall see presently--a room which is the day-nursery
of a few children who are also admitted--I have seen young women, one
who was suffering from a consumptive cough, another an out-patient at an
hospital for disease of the hip, and wearing an instrument till she
could be admitted as a regular case. They were both sitting cosily at
their tea, and were employed at needlework, as most of the women are who
find here a temporary home. For it is one of the beneficent results of
an influential committee, that a number of cases are sent to hospitals
or to convalescent homes, and so are restored; but till this can be done
they are fed and tended--fed with food more delicate than that of the
ordinary meal--and are allowed to rest in peace and to regain strength.
But we are still in the men's sitting-room, where several poor fellows
are looking at the lists of advertisements in the newspapers for some
announcement of a vacant situation. A supply of books is also provided
both for men and women, and the latter are just now engaged in mending
or making their clothes.
Between thirty and forty inmates can be received at one time, and those
who are in search of employment, or who require to go out during the
day, may leave the house after breakfast, and return either to dinner or
to tea. There are, indeed, few restrictions when once preliminary
inquiries and the recommendation of a member of the committee result in
the admission of an applicant; and it is easy to see how deeply and
thankfully many of these poor depressed men and women, beaten in the
battle of life, with little hope of regaining a foothold, weak,
dispirited, destitute, and with no strength left to struggle under the
burden that weighs them down, find help and healing, food and sleep,
advice, and very often a recommendation which places them once more in a
position of comfort and independence. A large proportion of those who
are admitted are provided with situations either permanently or for a
period long enough to enable them to turn round the difficult corner
from poverty and dependence to useful and appropriate employment. Some
are sent to Homes, hospitals, or orphanages, and many return to their
own homes. From those homes they have wandered, hoping to find the world
easier than it has proved to be, and in going back to them they have
fallen by the wayside.
There are sometimes remarkable varieties here--emigrants waiting for
ships to sail that will bear them to another land; men of education,
such as tutors, engineers, engravers, and professional men, who have
been unsuccessful, or have lost their position, often through no
immediate fault of their own. Of course, the large class of genteel
poverty is largely represented in the five or six hundred cases which
make the average number of yearly inmates. Clerks, shopmen, and
travellers are about as numerous as servants, porters, and pages. Poor
women, many of whom are ladies by birth or previous position and
education, find the House of Charity a refuge indeed, and feel that the
person who has charge of the household arrangements, as well as those
who have charge of the inmates, the accounts and correspondence, may be
appealed to with an assurance of true sympathy. Here, beside the two
sitting-rooms, is a large room which we will call the refectory; it is
plainly furnished, with separate tables for men and women, and the
quantity and description of the food supplied is such as would be
provided in a respectable and well-ordered family--tea or coffee and
plenty of good bread-and-butter morning and evening, meat, bread and
vegetables, for dinner, and a supper of bread and cheese. There are no
"rations," nor any special limit as to quantity, and if one could forget
the distress which brings them hither, the family might be regarded as
belonging to some comfortable business establishment, with good plain
meals and club-room on each side the dining-hall for meeting in after
working hours.
Let us go upstairs, and look at the dormitories, which occupy
respectively the right and left side of the building, and we shall see
that they are so arranged as to secure that privacy, the want of which
would be most repulsive to persons of superior condition. Each long and
lofty room is divided into a series of enclosures or cabins by
substantial partitions about eight feet high, and in each of these
separate rooms--all of which are lighted by several windows or by
gas-branches in the main apartment--there is a neat comfortable bed and
bedstead, with space for a box, a seat, and a small table or shelf.
A resident chaplain or warden conducts morning and evening prayer in the
chapel, which is built on part of the open area at the back of the
building; and I would have you consider, not only that to many of these
weary souls this sacred spot may come to be associated with that outcome
to renewed life for which their presence in the Institution gives them
reason to hope, but that it is most desirable for the invalids, who
frequently form so large a portion of the congregation, to be able to
attend worship without practically leaving the house.
Not only because of the sick and the physically feeble, however, does
the House of Charity represent a work that needs vast extension.
The case-book would reveal a series of stories none the less affecting
because they are entered plainly, briefly, and without waste of words.
They need few touches of art to make them painfully interesting. They
tell of ladies, wives of professional men, brought to widowhood and
sudden poverty; of men of education cast adrift through failure or false
friendship, and not knowing where to seek bread; of children left
destitute or deserted under peculiar circumstances; of women removed
from persecution, and girls from the tainted atmosphere of vice; of
weary wanderers who, in despair of finding such a shelter, and dreading
the common lodging-house, have spent nights in the parks; of foreigners
stranded on the shore of a strange city; of ministers of the gospel
brought low; of friendless servant-girls, ill-treated, defrauded of
their wages, or discharged almost penniless, and cast loose amidst the
whirlpool of London streets.
But, as I have already intimated, it is not alone for its temporary aid
in affording a home that the House of Charity is distinguished; it
affords a good hope also, by seeking to obtain situations, for cases
where peculiar circumstances make such a search difficult--for bereaved
and impoverished ladies, and for educated men, as well as for domestic
servants and ordinary employés. Its supporters give their special aid to
the work, and, as they number amongst them many ladies and gentlemen of
considerable social influence, employment is frequently found for those
whose misfortunes would otherwise be almost irretrievable.
_WITH THE POOR AND NEEDY._
"All hope abandon, ye who enter here," would, as we might fancy, be an
appropriate inscription for many a wretched court and alley in the
greatest and most opulent city in the world--a city distinguished for
its claims to be regarded as the centre of civilisation; as the exemplar
of benevolence, and of active Christianity. It is one of the marvellous
results of the vast extent of this metropolis of England that there are
whole districts of foul dwellings crowded with a poverty-stricken
population, which yet are almost ignored, so far as public recognition
of their existence is concerned. Legislation itself does not reach them,
in the sense of compelling the strict observance of Acts of Parliament
framed and presumably enforced for the purpose of maintaining sanitary
conditions; philanthropy almost stands appalled at the difficulty of
dealing with a chronic necessity so widely spread, a misery and
ignorance so deep and apparently impregnable; sentimentalism sighs and
turns away with a shiver, or is touched to the extent of relieving its
overcharged susceptibilities by the comfortable expedient of the
smallest subscription to some association in the neighbourhood. True,
active, practical religion alone, of all the agencies that have operated
in these places, gains ground inch by inch, and at last exercises a
definite and beneficial influence, by taking hold of the hearts and
consciences of the people themselves, and working from within the area
of vice and misery, till the law of love, beginning to operate where the
law of force had no influence, a change, gradual but sure, here a little
and there a little, is effected.
We are continually hearing of the "dwellings of the poor;" and can
scarcely take up a newspaper without noting the phrase, "one of the
worst neighbourhoods in London," connected with some report of crime,
outrage, or suffering; yet how few of us are really familiar with the
actual abodes of the more degraded and miserable of our fellow-citizens!
how quickly, how gladly, we dismiss from our memory the account of an
inquest where the evidence of the cause of death of some unfortunate
man, woman, or child, without a natural share of light, air, food, and
water, reveals hideous details of want and wretchedness, which we might
witness only a few streets off, and yet are unconscious of their
nearness to us in mere physical yards and furlongs, because they are so
far from us spiritually, in our lack of sympathy and compassion.
Even at the time that these lines are being written I have before me a
report of an examination by the coroner into the circumstances attending
the death of a woman seventy years of age, who obtained a miserable and
precarious living by stay-making, and who was found dead in the back
kitchen of a house. Her death was alleged to have been brought about by
the unhealthiness of the house in which she lived, although the landlord
was a medical officer of health for one of the metropolitan districts.
In this case the alleged landlord, who was actually a medical officer of
health, answered the charge made against him by the statement that he
had only just come into possession of the property, and had at once set
about putting it in repair. It is to be hoped that this was the case,
and, indeed, the evidence of the sanitary inspector went to show that it
was so; but the question remains: How is it that dwellings are permitted
to be thus overcrowded, and to become actual centres of pestilence in
the midst of entire neighbourhoods, where, for one foul tenement to have
an infamous reputation amidst such general filth and dilapidation, it
must indeed be, as one member of the jury said this place was, "so bad,
that no gentleman would keep his dog there?"
Keep his dog indeed! Why I know whole rows and congeries of intersecting
courts and alleys where a country squire would no more think of
kennelling his hounds than he would dream of stabling his horses! There
has during the past few years been a tolerably determined stand made
against the introduction of pigsties into the back-yards of some of the
hovels about Mile End and Bethnal Green; and though cow-sheds are not
altogether abolished everywhere in close and overbuilt localities, there
are some precautions taken to diminish the sale of infected milk by an
inspection of the laystalls, and the enforcement of lime-whiting and
ventilation in the sheds. Costermongers' donkeys are the only animals
besides dogs and cats which are commonly to be found in London slums
now, and as these can be stowed in any shanty just outside the back
door, or can be littered down in a spare corner of a cellar, they
remain, in costermongering districts, without much opposition on the
part of the local authorities. For, after all, what can these
authorities do? Under the 35th section of the Sanitary Act, power was
given to them to register all houses let out by non-resident landlords,
who were under a penalty of forty shillings for not keeping their houses
in repair, well supplied with water, drainage clear, &c. To those who
have an intimate acquaintance with the density of population in whole
acreages of London slums, there is something almost ludicrous in these
words, especially when they are read in the light of the fact that the
landlords of such places are frequently parochial magnates or officials
who know how to make things pleasant with subordinate sanitary
inspectors.
What may be the ultimate result of an Act of Parliament "for improving
the dwellings of the poor" it is not at present easy to say; but
assuredly any plan which commences by a general and imperfectly
discriminative destruction of existing houses, hovels though they may
be, will only have the effect of crowding more closely the already
fœtid and swarming tenements where, for half-a crown a week, eight or
ten people eat, live, and sleep in a single apartment. It was only the
other day, in a district of which I shall presently speak more
definitely, that a "mission woman" was called in to the aid of a family,
consisting of a man, his wife, his wife's brother--who was there as a
lodger--and five or six children, all of whom occupied one room, where
the poor woman had just given birth to an infant. The place was almost
destitute of furniture; beds of straw and shavings, coverlets of old
coats and such ragged clothing as could be spared; little fire and
little food. Such destitution demanded that the "maternity box," or a
suddenly-extemporised bag of baby-clothing and blankets, should be
fetched at once; and though the mission there is a poor one, with
terrible needs to mitigate, a constant demand for personal work and
noble self-sacrifice, such cases are every-day events, such demands
always to be answered by some kind of helpful sympathy, even though the
amount of relief afforded is necessarily small and temporary in
character.
Not in one quarter of London alone, but dotted here and there throughout
its vastly-extending length and breadth--from St. Pancras, and further
away northward, to Bethnal Green and all that great series of
poverty-stricken townships and colonies of casual labour, on the east;
from the terrible purlieux of Southwark, the districts where long rows
of silent houses, in interminable streets, chill the unaccustomed
wayfarer with vague apprehensions, where "Little Hell" and the knots and
tangles of that "Thief-London" which has found a deplorable Alsatia in
the purlieux of the Borough and of Bermondsey; and so round the
metropolitan circle, westward to the neighbourhood of aristocratic
mansions and quiet suburban retreats, where the garotter skulks and the
burglar finds refuge; further towards the centre of the town, in
Westminster, not a stone's-throw from the great legislative assembly,
which, while it debates in St. Stephen's on sanitation and the
improvement of dwellings, scarcely remembers all that may be seen in St.
Peter's, about Pye Street, and remembers Seven Dials and St Giles's only
as traditional places, where "modern improvements" have made a clean
sweep, just as the Holborn Viaduct and the metropolitan Railway swept
away Field Lane, and the new meat market at Smithfield put an end for
ever to the horrible selvage of Cloth Fair--and only left the legends of
Jonathan Wild's rookery and the "blood-bowl house."
But the very mention of these places brings the reflection that not in
outlying districts, but in the very heart of London, in the core of the
great city itself, the canker of misery, poverty, and vice is festering
still. What is the use of eviction, when the law punishes houselessness,
and the _Poor_ Law cannot meet any sudden demand, nor maintain any
continuous claim on the part of the houseless? Summarily to thrust a
score or so of wretched families into the streets is to make them either
criminals or paupers. They must find some place of shelter; and if they
are to live _by_ their labour, they must live _near_ their labour, the
wages of which are, at best, only just sufficient to procure for them
necessary food and covering for their bodies.
In the neighbourhood to which I have already referred, four thousand
evictions have taken place, or, at any rate, the population has
diminished from 22,000 to 18,000, because of a small section of a large
puzzle map of courts and alleys having been taken down in order to build
great blocks of warehouses. The consequence is, that in the remaining
tangle of slums the people herd closer, and that a large number of poor
lodgers have gone to crowd other tenements not far distant, and which
were already peopled beyond legal measure.
For this acreage of vice and wretchedness of which I speak is close to
the great city thoroughfares--almost within sound of Bow Bells. It is
about a quarter of a mile in extent each way, lying between the
Charterhouse and St. Luke's, close to the new meat market at Smithfield
on one side, and Finsbury Square on the other. One entrance to it is
directly through Golden Lane, Barbican; the other close to Bunhill
Fields burial ground, along a passage which bears the significant name
of "Chequer Alley." It is a maze of intersecting and interlocking
courts, streets, and alleys, some of them without any thoroughfare, some
reached by ascending or descending steps, many of them mere tanks, the
walls of which are represented by hovels inhabited by costermongers,
French-polishers, dock-labourers, chair-makers, workers at all kinds of
underpaid labour and poor handicrafts. Many of the women go out to work
at factories, or at charing, and the children are--or at least
were--left to the evil influences of the streets, till another and a
more powerful influence began to operate, slowly, but with the impetus
of faith and love, to touch even this neglected and miserable quarter of
London with "the light that lighteth every man."
In this square quarter of a mile--which, starting from the edge of
Aldersgate, stretches to the further main thoroughfare abutting on the
pleasant border of the City Road, and includes the northern end of
Whitecross Street--there are eighty public-houses and beer-shops!
I tell you this much, as we stand here at the entrance of Golden Lane,
but I have no intention just now to take you on a casual visit either to
the dens of wretchedness and infamy, or to the homes where poverty
abides. I must try to let you see what has been done, and is still
doing, to bring to both that Gospel which is alone efficient to change
the conditions, by changing the hearts and motives of men. I may well
avoid any description of the places which lie on either hand, for, in
fact, there is nothing picturesque in such misery, nothing specially
sensational in such crime. It is all of a sordid miserable sort; all on
a dreary dead-level of wretchedness and poverty, full of poor shifts and
expedients, or of mean brutality and indifference. There is no
show-place to which you could be taken, as it is said curious gentlemen
were at one time conducted to the dens of the mendicants, thieves, and
highwaymen of old London. Even in the tramps' kitchen the orgies, if
there are any, are of so low a kind that they would be depressing in
their monotonous degradation.
Let us go farther, and enter this strange wilderness by its fitting
passage of Chequer Alley, so that we may, as it were, see the beginning
of the work that has been going on with more or less power for more than
thirty years.
I think I have some acquaintance with what are the worst neighbourhoods
of London. I have made many a journey down East; have studied some of
the strange varieties of life on the shore amidst the water-side
population; have lived amidst the slums of Spitalfields, and passed
nights "Whitechapel way;" but never in any unbroken area of such extent
have I seen so much that is suggestive of utter poverty, so much
privation of the ordinary means of health and decency, as on a journey
about this district which I long ago named "The Chequers." Each court
and blind alley has the same characteristics--the same look of utter
poverty, the same want of air and light, the same blank aspect of dingy
wall and sunken doorsteps, the same square areas surrounded by hovels
with clothes'-lines stretched from house to house, almost unstirred by
any breeze that blows, shut in as they are in close caverns, only to be
entered by narrow passages between blank walls. It is the extent of this
one solid district, almost in the very centre of City life, that is so
bewildering, and wherein lies its terrible distraction.
The labour of reformation has begun, but the labourers are few. For more
than thirty years some efforts have been going on to redeem this
neglected and unnoticed neighbourhood, which lies so near to, and yet so
far from London's heart.
Let it be noted that this moral effort had gone on for nearly
twenty-nine years before any very definite attempt was made to improve
the physical condition of the place.
In 1841 a tract distributor, Miss Macarthy, began an organised endeavour
to teach the depraved inhabitants of Chequer Alley. In 1869, a sanitary
surveyor, reporting on _one_ of the courts of this foul district,
recommended that the premises there should be demolished under the
"Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Act," because the floors and
ceilings were considerably out of level, some of the walls saturated
with filth and water, the others broken and falling down, doors,
window-sashes and frames rotten, stairs dilapidated and dangerous, roof
leaky and admitting the rain, no provisions for decency, and a foul and
failing water supply.