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WORKS BY DR. JOHN BROWN.
Horae Subsecivae. Sixth Edition. 1 Volume, Extra Foolscap 8vo, Price 7s. 6d.
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EDINBURGH: EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS.
NOTES ON OLD EDINBURGH
BY THE AUTHOR OF
'THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN AMERICA.'
[Illustration: INSCRIPTION OVER DOORWAY IN BLACKFRIARS WYND.
_English Visitor._--'So this is Blackfriars Wynd!'
_Woman._--'No, it's hell's mouth.']
EDINBURGH
EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS
1869.
PREFATORY NOTE BY THE REV. DR. HANNA.
Was ever a more vivid picture of more revolting scenes offered to the
reader's eye than that which the following pages present? If any doubt
creep into his mind as to the accuracy of its details, he has but to read
the reports of Dr. LITTLEJOHN and Dr. ALEXANDER WOOD, in which everything
here stated, not vouched for by the writer herself, is authenticated. Can
nothing be done, shall nothing be done, to wipe out such foul blots from
the face of our fair city? One effort among others is being made in this
direction by the Association recently organized for improving the
condition of the poor. It is in the hope of winning for this Association
the support of all the humane among us that these "Notes" are published.
It would be a happy, and not surely hopeless issue, if, by the combined
and concentrated endeavours of all interested in the welfare of the poor,
such a change were effected that, fifty years hence, it were doubted or
denied that ever such a state of things existed as is here so graphically
portrayed.
W. H.
6, CASTLE TERRACE,
_Jan. 20, 1869_.
NOTES ON OLD EDINBURGH.
CHAPTER I.
It has been my fortune to see the worst slums of the Thames district of
London, of Birmingham, and other English and foreign cities, the
"water-side" of Quebec, and the Five Points and mud huts of New York, and
a short time ago a motive stronger than curiosity induced me to explore
some of the worst parts of Edinburgh--not the very worst, however. Honest
men can have no desire to blink facts, and no apology is necessary for
stating the plain truth, as it appears to me, that there are strata of
misery and moral degradation under the shadow of St. Giles's crown and
within sight of Knox's house, more concentrated and unbroken than are to
be met with elsewhere, even in a huge city which, by reason of a district
often supposed to have no match for vice and abjectness, is continually
held up to public reprobation. The Rev. R. Maguire, rector of St. James's,
Clerkenwell, accompanied me through a portion only of the district
visited, and he expressed his opinion then, and since more formally in
print, that more dirt, degradation, overcrowding, and consequent
shamelessness and unutterable wretchedness, exist in Edinburgh than in any
town of twice its size, or in any area of similar extent to the one
explored, taken from the worst part of London. With this opinion my own
convictions cordially concur. We have plenty of awful guilt-centres in
London--as, for instance, the alleys leading out of Liquorpond Street and
the New Cut, but even the worst are broken in upon by healthy
neighbourhoods. Here there is a loathsome infectious sore, occupying a
larger area than anywhere else--a district given up in great measure to
moral degradation, which extends from the Lawnmarket to Holyrood, from
Holyrood along the parallel streets of the Cowgate, the Grassmarket, and
the West Port, including most of the adjacent wynds and closes, and only
terminating with Cowfeeder Row.
My object was to compare a certain section of Edinburgh, both by day and
night, with a similar area in the city before alluded to. In company with
two philanthropic gentlemen, who did not hesitate to expose these social
plague-spots, and guided in one mysterious locality by one of the
lieutenants of police, I explored at various times several closes in the
High Street, Cowgate, and West Port, going by "house-row." In all cases
the people were civil and willing to admit us, and few allowed us to
depart without expressing a hope that some good would come out of the
efforts proposed to be made for them. In many houses only the children
were at home, but they answered our questions with such quick
comprehension and painfully precocious intelligence that we were not left
in doubt as to the circumstances of their parents.
It was a dry, warm morning. No rain had fallen for some weeks. There was a
rumour of cholera on the Rhine, and under its salutary influence various
sanitary precautions, such as lime-washing closes and stairs, had been
recently resorted to. The district might have looked cheerful had
cheerfulness been possible, so great was the contrast between its aspect
now and its look on a wet, murky, autumn day. The appearance of the lower
part of the High Street was as little pleasant as usual. Knots of men who
never seem to "move on" stared at the passers-by on the South Bridge, bold
girls lounged about and chaffed the soldiers, careworn women, and little
girls hardly less careworn, stood round the well with their pails--some of
the last, we learned, having stood there for two and three hours. There
were dirty little children as usual rolling in the gutter or sitting
stolidly on the kerb-stone; as usual, haggard, wrinkled, vicious faces
were looking out of the dusty windows above, and an air of joylessness,
weariness, and struggle hung over all. Truly has this street been named
the _Via Dolorosa_.
The above-named well, close by John Knox's house, is a sign of one of the
standing grievances of this district of Edinburgh. It is the "water
supply" of the large population living in those many-storeyed houses which
give the immediate neighbourhood its picturesqueness. If it could tell the
tale of one day, we should have plenty of the sensational element, but it
would be the true tragedy of the real, suffering, everyday life of the
poor. From six in the morning till nearly midnight, it is the centre of a
throng, feminine mainly, but often essentially unwomanly in its language
and manners. As a horde of thirsty pilgrims struggles for the first
draught of the water of the bright oasis of the desert, so this crowd
often struggles for the first turn at the tap. In its more usual
condition, it is sad rather than belligerent, feeble in its scuffling,
loud-voiced in its abuse. Here the weakest go to the wall. Here children
carrying buckets nearly as big as themselves are sometimes known to wait
from one to five hours for the water which is to wash the faces, cook the
food, and quench the thirst of the family for the day. Here they wait,
losing time and gaining a precocious familiarity with evil from the
profanity and depravity of the talk and chaffing around them. To this well
the aged widow, who struggles hard to keep up appearances, with her white
mutch and neatly-pinned black shawl, totters with her pail down her dark
stair of 150 steps, up the steep close, and down the street, waiting with
the patience born of necessity in the heat, or rain, or snow, as the case
may be, till the younger and stronger have got their "turn," and then
stumbles with failing breath up her stair, the water, which is precious as
that of the well of Bethlehem, spilling as she goes. At what a cost does
she buy the whiteness of her mutch! Hither comes the young, weary-looking
mother, having locked up her young family in her eyrie. Heavily burdened
with care she looks. We may trust she forgets the perils of fire and
window at home; she scuffles feebly; street brawling is a new and
uncongenial thing to her, and she usually ends by losing the best part of
the morning. She is slowly dropping out of her cleanly habits. Can we
wonder? She thinks twice at least about scrubbing the floor, and it isn't
much use to wash her children's clothes when they have no place to play in
but the gutter. Here also come the small children with jugs, and hang
about for a frolic, learning to curse and swear and imitate the vices of
their elders, if they have not learned them before.
It is a pitiful sight in the street, but followed to the homes this lack
of water helps to degrade, pity for the sufferers mingles with indignant
surprise that proprietors of the _best paying property_ to be found (for
so the closes are) have not been compelled ere this to have at least a
pipe and tap in every close. Outside the great Reformer's house is the
well of pure water, difficult of access for most, nearly inaccessible at
times to the feeble, the diffident, and the old. Under the same house is
the whisky-shop, easy enough to reach, and the whisky all too easy to
procure--only the laying down a few pence, and the fluid which makes life
brighter for an hour is at the lips without waiting or scuffling. How can
our sad and sorely-tempted ones escape the snare? Limited water and
unlimited whisky, crowded dens and unwholesome air; we need nothing more
to make a city full of drunkards.
We followed this water grievance into thirty-seven houses that day, and
there was scarcely one in which it was not enlarged upon. Did our eyes
wander round a room ever so stealthily, its occupier was ready to
forestall the glance by saying, "Ah, sirs, it's the dirt ye're looking at,
but how's puir folk like us to be clean as has to haul every drop of water
from that well?" Did we shrink ever so slightly from a child whose head
and clothing were one mass of dirt, the movement was perceived, and the
want of water, the distance from the well, and the long long stair, were
the apologies offered.
I merely give one instance, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely,
of the distress arising from this comparatively little thought-of cause.
In a wretched den on the seventh storey, none the brighter or lighter for
being nearer the skies, for it had no direct light, a family, consisting
of father, mother, and child of three years old, were fighting a hard
battle for life. On the floor, on a straw bed, the husband had been "down
with fever" for six weeks. He was wandering and murmuring incessantly,
"Drink! drink!" clutching all the time at a tin pitcher by his side which
contained water. He was too weak to lift it, and his wife, who expected
shortly to become a mother, was helping him to it every three or four
minutes. The bairn was crippled and mentally deficient, and kept crawling
into the ashes, so that between it and her husband the poor woman had not
a moment's rest. On a line across the room a half-washed sheet was
hanging, steaming as it dried. The atmosphere in the room was poisonous.
The woman said, "Ah, you are feeling the smell. Sometimes I think he'd get
better if we could have things clean about us. He's got bed-sores, and you
see they run a good deal, and I'm such a weak body, I can't haul water
enough to wash it out of the sheets. He drinks nearly all I bring--quarts
a day. He was always so fond of the water, he never tasted the whisky in
his life. He's been a good husband to me; and since we've come here I
can't get the water to keep him clean." In answer to inquiry, she said she
had waited half an hour at the well the night before, and in coming up the
long dark stair a drunk man had pushed against her and upset the whole
pailful. On our expressing some sympathy, she burst into tears, sobbing
out, "Oh, God only knows what it is to _slave_ after the water--it's
killing me and him too, _and in the glen we came from the bonnie burn ran
by the door_." In that moment, some cruel memory contrasted that foul
steaming sheet, whose poisonous fumes nearly overcame the strong, with the
linen washed on the grass by the burn, over which the birch and harebell
trembled, and bleached afterwards by the sun to the whiteness of snow.
They were evicted crofters from Perthshire, and misfortune, not drink or
vice, had brought them so low. Our sanitary reforms are too late for them,
for both went shortly afterwards to the land where "they shall thirst no
more."
Travellers have often enlarged upon the hardships suffered by the
fellaheen of Egypt in carrying water for irrigating purposes. It is from
the free, pure Nile they draw it at will, and over the pure alluvial soil
they carry it. But this water grievance, which exists not only in the
Canongate and High Street, but in the Cowgate, the Grassmarket, the West
Port, and elsewhere, involves _female slavery_ in Edinburgh of the most
grinding description, and consequences from which the moralist and the
philanthropist may well shrink. This want of water involves not alone a
slavery which in many cases knows no Sabbath, and dirt which is a help to
degradation, but an absence of all arrangements for decency. Looking at
this subject from a stranger's stand-point, it seems perfectly credible
that the lack of all proper water supply in these crowded districts, the
impossibility which it creates of preserving physical self-respect, and
the evil influence on the young of the "wait" at the wells, is one among
the many causes of the lapsing of the masses in Edinburgh. The subject of
the water supply is beset with difficulties, but there is a possibility of
grappling with and overcoming them. The matter is more closely connected
with moral reform than we might think at first sight. In England we have a
proverb, "Cleanliness is next to godliness," and without indorsing it
fully, we may agree that physically filthy habits and moral impurity,
among the poor at least, are intimately associated. _It is impossible for
these people to be clean in their dwellings, clothes, or persons under
present circumstances._ It is inevitable that infectious diseases of the
most fatal kind must be generated and diffused. It is certain that the
spirit of murmuring against God is fostered by this lack of an element
which these female water-carriers suppose should be free to them as light
and air. The evil is becoming worse and worse as a larger and larger
population crowds into these subdivided dwellings, there, perforce almost,
to fall into habits lower than those of the beasts. It is well known that
drunkenness, disease, and degradation are the results of a deficient water
supply. It is more difficult to estimate statistically the broken health
and hearts of the female water-carriers. There is an economy of water and
a most prodigal expenditure of human suffering.