This rickety "land" is not by any means in one of the worst closes in
Edinburgh. It is not a haunt of the criminal classes. Vice and virtue live
side by side, though the virtuous are in a miserable minority, and their
children are in grievous peril of vice. I was given to understand, by
those well acquainted with the city, that it was a good representative
specimen of an average "land" in a High Street close. On that and another
occasion we visited thirty-two families, going by room-row. I propose to
give the circumstances of a few families, taken after this fashion. All
the rooms were in themselves wretched, few more than half-lighted,
scarcely any capable of ventilation, some on the second-floor requiring
candles at mid-day, floors and partitions in a shameful condition, the
former in many instances containing holes as big as a man's head, stuffed
with stones; the latter very thin and dilapidated, mended with rags, bits
of canvas, tin, and paper. The doors were usually made of odds and ends of
old boards, so rudely put together that in some rooms the people had
nailed canvas over them to prevent strangers from looking in. The windows
were nearly all bad, and patched with brown paper; no gas or water. The
landlord had never repaired anything within the memory of the "oldest
inhabitant." Among all the people visited the complaints were the
same--rapacious landlords charging from L2, 10s. to L5; no repairs
executed; borrowed light, involving an addition to the rent in the shape
of 1s. per week for candles; want of privacy; distance of water supply;
dark stairs; increasing subdivision of rooms, involving, in some cases,
the intense hardship of a right of way through the outer room. It is due
to all these people to say, that while they readily answered all our
questions, they never begged of us, or even hinted that charity would be
acceptable. It is due to some of them also to say, that their attempts to
keep their wretched dwellings clean were most praiseworthy.
First room, 11 feet by 5 feet. A box-bed took up a third of it. No grate;
fire burning on a stone. The furniture consisted of the bed, a table with
three legs, and a "creepie." The room had direct light from a small
patched window, which was not made to open. The walls were broken, and
almost to pieces. There was a hole in the floor filled up with a large
stone. The occupier, a mason's labourer, was out seeking work, and his
wife was at the well. These two adults and five children between three and
fourteen years old slept on the floor, the eldest child said. "But don't
your father and mother sleep on the bed?" we asked. "No, they can't for
the bugs; we just lies on the floor, all of a heap." "In your clothes?"
"No; we takes them off." "Do you put anything on?" "No; we's just naked."
Truly, they had nothing to put on if they did succeed in getting out of
the wonderful aggregation of rags which hung on to them. For there were no
blankets, or any covering but an old piece of carpet. The rent was L3,
10s. a year. The girl who made this frank revelation was extremely pretty
and intelligent. Her young brother and sisters were beautiful, but
absolutely filthy; their arms and legs were covered with sores, and their
matted hair alive with vermin. The father was the only one of the family
who could read. The girl said that her father's leg had gone through the
floor up to the knee, and then they put the stone in the hole. From this
account it appears that, after deducting the space occupied by the bed,
seven individuals huddle together all of a heap in an area 6 feet by 5
feet. The room was damp and draughty.
The next room was 18 feet by 10 feet; shamefully out of repair, the wooden
partition falling to pieces. Some of the holes in it were carefully
patched with paper, but the neighbours constantly tear this off to look
in. One of the so-called panels of the door had been kicked in by a
drunken man; the landlord would not repair it, so the occupant had nailed
a piece of canvas over it. The window-glass was mostly gone, and though
the window had originally been made to open, the sash was too rotten to be
touched. The floor was in holes in several places. The rain came in along
one wall. The rent is L4. The family consisted of an elderly father and
mother, and two sons, plumbers. The father and eldest son had been out of
work for some time, and the youngest was only getting better from a fever.
They were very reticent about their circumstances, but we gathered that
two daughters in service were supporting them. Both father and mother were
rheumatic from the damp of the house, they said. There were two beds, but
they "can't sleep on either,--alive with bugs from the walls," so take
refuge on the floor. The woman pulled aside a patch of canvas, and showed
the wall swarming with these pests. They had taken every means of
destroying them, but in vain. The room was scrupulously clean. The next
measured 11 feet by 5, and 6 feet at the highest part. A single pane of
glass in a corner under the roof let in as much light as made objects
discernible. The plenishings consisted of a filthy straw bed, a bit of
carpet, and an iron pot. The floor was almost covered with cinders, and
mended in three places with stones. The room was loathsome, the smell
overpowering, the look of abject and uncared-for misery sickening. The
occupants were a widow, a cinder-picker, and her two children, very poor.
The children were "learning the devil's lessons" in the close below. A
neighbour told us that the mother often locks them into the room from five
o'clock in the morning till ten or eleven at night. The rent is L2, 12s.
The next room was a house of ill-fame, with seven occupants, very
disorderly, and much complained of by the neighbours on each side, who
were separated from it only by a wretched partition.
The next room was almost dark; 11 feet by 5 feet; rent, 1s. per week. Its
sole occupant was a frightful-looking hag, apparently more than seventy
years old, a mass of rags and filth, with an uncovered hoary head, whose
long locks were tangled with neglect and dirt. She was sleeping off the
effects of a drunken debauch on some old straw, but woke up sufficiently
to mutter a curse, and glower upon us a moment with her bloodshot eyes.
She had received the parish allowance the day before, and this was the
result--a whisky-bottle, without a cork, but not quite empty, was lying
beside her. There was no other sign of human habitation, and in the
wretched object lying on the straw we could hardly recognise humanity.
Our next visit was of a different kind. Reaching the topmost floor, we
came upon a passage, very dilapidated, but lighted by a large projecting
window. A very respectable artisan was lime-washing the passage, the roof,
and the top of the stair. He said it was the best he could do, and he did
it once a fortnight. He had two rooms, only one of which had direct light.
They were like all the rest, in utter disrepair. He leant against the
outer partition, which swerved considerably from the perpendicular as he
did so, and said, "The weight of two men would bring it down." He came to
a situation in Edinburgh, has good wages, and could meet with nothing
better than this at the term. The rent is L9 a year. He gave a revolting
account of the immorality of the stair. He had three young children, he
said; if he couldn't get into a decent neighbourhood he'd rather see them
in their graves than grow up there. "What can I hope for my bairns," he
added, "when they can't get a breath of fresh air without seeing such as
yon?" Looking out, we saw in a window, not a pistol-shot off, three
debased women, sitting in the broad daylight, absolutely nude, as far as
we could see of them. The worthy citizens who were with me blushed for the
city called so fair, in which an honest artisan, with money in his pocket,
was compelled to shelter his family where all sights and sounds were
polluting, feeling, as he did, the abhorrent shame. The top of the stair
was much broken, and destitute of any protection. A fall would have been
into about forty feet of darkness. On our alluding to this as a great
peril for the young children, the man said, with a bitter smile, "Bairns
reared in such places are like lambs born among precipices--they early
learn to take care of themselves." This is true, or the juvenile
population of these closes would be decimated. Of the sad sights we saw
that morning, that was about the saddest--the honest man and his shame,
and the helplessness of his circumstances. It was enough to make even
"polite indifference" put forth some redeeming effort.
First room on fifth floor, 12 by 14 feet. Rent L2, 10s. Very cold; roof
out of repair, and admitting rain; the partitions much broken. The
occupiers were a very decent-looking man, seventy-six years old, by trade
a shoemaker, his wife, aged seventy-three, and a dumb grandson, who was
mending a shoe on the stool on which his grandfather "had sat for
sixty-two years." They had parish relief. The woman had been in bed twelve
months with paralysis, and suffered much from being removed. The dirt and
vermin were perfectly awful. She was a miserable object; apparently she
had no bed-gown, and her skeleton chest and ribs, which were exposed to
view, might have served as a model for death. Both she and her husband had
the speech and air of having seen better days. They had lived in this
attic for twenty years, and had had typhus fever twice during the last
ten. The rent had been raised L1 during the same period. They had five
children, scattered in Australia and America, but letters addressed to
them were returned with the notice "Not found." They seemed very poor, but
made no complaint of anything but the wretched condition of the room, the
cold and damp, the want of privacy, and the distance from which the old
man had to bring the water up the long dark stair. The room was clean,
with the exception of the bed, but the cracks in the partitions there, as
everywhere else, were "alive with bugs." The old man _said_ he was a
church-member, and paid 2s. 6d. a year for a seat at a U.P. church. This
was their own account of themselves, and the general appearance of things
bore it out. Such are the cases in which much may be done, by systematic
visitation, in the way of arresting a downward course. These people are
now in the Poor-house, the dram-shop having proved too much for the old
man.
Next room, 8 feet by 9 feet. A most wretched place, only fit to be pulled
down; borrowed light. A joiner, in very bad health, and consequently out
of work for two years, with his wife and four children, and a daughter by
a former marriage, with an illegitimate child, were the occupants. The
wife and grown-up daughter earn 7s. 6d. per week by washing. The rent is
L2 a year. A most miserable family, utterly gone to wreck.
Next room.--A blind labourer, very frail, with a wife, who supports the
family and four children. After an illness, were ordered into the
Poor-house, then out again, and were quite broken up by it. This room was
wretched in every respect--9 feet by 10 feet, very low, and rented at L2.
In the next room there was a very sad case--a compositor, with a wife and
two children, living in a room, requiring a candle at mid-day, 12 feet by
8 feet; roof mended with tin, letting in the rain; floor broken and mended
with stones, so rotten that a walking-stick went through it in two places.
The man's joints were stiff with rheumatism, caught in the damp cold of
the room. Work had slackened, and after having had a good room in
Carrubbers Close, they had come here. The man had had no work for a long
time, and they had pledged everything, till they had only "the clothes
they stood in." They had had good furniture, but it "was all gone to keep
life in them." They spoke of their poverty very reluctantly, and very
warmly of the kindness of the missionary. Both man and wife were steady.
Her earnings supported them; but she was expecting her confinement
shortly.
The next room was 14 feet by 8 feet, and the remains of a cornice held on
to the outer wall. The side walls were skeleton partitions, dilapidated
and swarming with bugs. There were three doors. The occupant was a
fish-hawker, an Irishwoman--cheery and self-asserting, voluble as to
herself and her neighbours. Had she been of smaller size and milder tongue
the hardship of which she complained would have had more pathos about it;
but even as it is, a more infamous injustice could scarcely be perpetrated
by the proprietors of these ruinous fabrics: her room had been subdivided
since she came; she continued to pay the old rent--L4. The occupants of
the inner room were a man and woman, with two lodgers, apparently of most
irregular habits, who came through her room with a passkey, drunk and
sober, at all hours of day and night. This is one of eleven instances of
passage-rooms that I have seen in Edinburgh. In the Cowgate this infamous
system flourishes, and occasionally to such an extent that the outer room
is the only mode of ingress and egress for three or four others. The
insult and hardship this plan entails upon the virtuous, and the
facilities for immorality that it affords to the vicious cannot be recited
here.
Outside this woman's room there was a perfect labyrinth of passages, all
dark, but on opening a door we entered a room 12 feet square, with direct
light, but with rotten partitions, like all the rest, and so pervious to
sound that we heard every word of a narrative of our visit which the
"decent widder" before mentioned was giving to an incomer. This room was
miserable. Ashes, the accumulation of days, heaped the floor round the
fire. There was no other furniture than a bedstead with a straw mattress
upon it, a table, and a stool; but it was the occupants, rather than the
apparent poverty, who claimed our attention. A girl about eighteen, very
poorly dressed, was sitting on the stool; two others, older and very much
undressed, were sitting on the floor, and the three were eating, in most
swinish fashion, out of a large black pot containing fish. I have shared a
similar meal, in a similar primitive fashion, in an Indian wigwam in the
Hudson's Bay Territory, but there the women who worshipped the Great
Spirit were modest in their dress and manner, and looked _human_, which
these "Christian" young women did not. An infant of about a month old,
perfect in its beauty, and smiling in its sleep, "as though heaven lay
about it," was on the bed, not dressed, but partly covered with a rug.
What better could be desired for it than that the angels might take it
speedily away from that shameful birth-chamber to behold its Father's face
in heaven? Easier by far to trust it in death to His mercy, than in life
to the zeal of the Christianity of Edinburgh. Death for these is better
than life; and, in many cases, drugs and neglect soon bring it about.
"Where are you from?" one of my philanthropic companions asked of the girl
of eighteen, the mother. "Dundee; mother and I came here five weeks ago. I
was a mill-worker." "Will the father of your child marry you?" "No, sir."
"Have you got work here?" "No, sir; I can't get any." "What are you going
to do, then?" "I suppose I must do as the others." She gave this answer
without shame, and without effrontery. An upbringing in a Dundee "pend"
had not acquainted her with shame as an attendant upon sin. Alas for the
hundreds of girl-children growing up among the debasing circumstances of
the crowded "lands" of our wynds and closes, without even the instincts of
virtue!
The next room, though miserable in itself, was clean and well furnished,
with pictures hanging upon the partitions. A mother and daughter, both
widows, but earning a good living by needlework, were the occupants. They
complained bitterly of the gross viciousness of the stair, and of the
"awful riot" kept up all night by those newcomers. They told us that the
wretched old hag who had come from Dundee had five female lodgers, with
only two gowns among them all, and that they were of the poorest and most
degraded class. These respectable widows, both elderly women, had lived in
that room for seven years, and in the main had had quiet neighbours. They
now found themselves in this close proximity to a den of vice, unable to
exclude the sounds which came through the thin partition, and too
terrified at night by the drinking and uproar to be able to sleep. The
term was lately passed, so they were compelled to bear it.
A few sentences more will take us through the remaining rooms on the two
floors we are investigating. There follow a widow, who binds shoes, with
two children, sleeping in a large bed in a room 11 feet by 9 feet, with a
small window, letting in air too impure to breathe; rent, L2, 12s. A
widow, with a brother seventy-two years old, poor, but clean, chiefly
dependent on a daughter in service. A mason's labourer, who once farmed
six acres of land, now earns 12s. per week; wife with bad eyes, and health
too delicate for work, having fretted herself into decline for two
children who had died of the cholera; room, 12 feet by 8 feet, rented at
1s. 2d. per week. Three adults and six children in a room 12 feet by 10
feet, without direct light. Drunken labourer, earning 15s. per week--two
sons in prison; two daughters living with him, with three illegitimate
children; room, 14 feet by 15 feet; rent, L3, 18s. a year. Pauper widow,
with one child and two unregistered lodgers. Married labourer, with two
children, earning 15s. per week; three lodgers (prostitutes) in the same
room, 14 feet by 12 feet; rent, L3, 18s.; borrowed light; no furniture;
all drunken together. Then follow five families, all wretched; and we have
completed our room-to-room visitation of two floors in an average land in
an average close in the High Street.
As seen thus, in broad daylight, except for the filth, dilapidation,
vermin, darkness, and poverty, combined with the suggestions of immoral
conduct on the part of most of the people, there was nothing peculiarly
startling to any one at all acquainted with the Old Town of Edinburgh. I
have taken this particular close, for the especial reason that what is
said of it and its inhabitants applies to dwellings and circumstances in
which possibly 40,000 people pass their days. I have given the impression
made by it upon a stranger, in preference to depicting entries in a part
of the town with which I am well acquainted, and which, in many of their
aspects, are far worse. There are cellar-dwellings, damp and dark, old
byres with open drains still running through them, let for human beings;
garrets, damp and draughty, in which a man can scarcely stand upright; and
cabins, of which stairs, roofs, and walls are mainly of wood. There are
rooms as small as any I have mentioned, occupied by one, two, and three
families, only reached by passage-rooms as small and crowded as
themselves; and in these dens the whole round of human life goes
on--agonies of birth and death, miseries of sickness and sorrow, marriage
jollifications, funeral revels, the cold remains of mortality lying on the
same straw with the living; the miserable meal on the table, the
unshrouded corpse on the floor. Are such woes as these, such absolute
savage degradation, the inevitable deposit of the highest Christian
civilisation? Is there, indeed, no balm in Gilead--is there no physician
there? Is it the curse of God's indignation, or the curse of man's
selfishness, avarice, and neglect, under which those thousands are lying?
Is this the "good ground" on which the gospel seed is to spring up and
bear fruit one hundredfold? Are the rich and godly to send missionaries
and Bible-women among these masses, and save their own souls by giving the
necessary funds? Shall they not rather go down themselves among the lost,
as Christ went, and learn their needs, and find from themselves that
foremost among these are decent dwellings in which it might be possible to
live and die otherwise than as swine. We might then hear less of money
lying at two per cent. in the banks, or lost in insolvent railroads, and
more of 8, 10, and 12 per cent. as a certain return. Talk of the risk of
house property! Is it greater than the risks people have contentedly run
for years in railroads, mines, and cotton? Possibly every L100 spent on
improving the dwellings of the poor might do something towards
accumulating a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief
approacheth, or moth corrupteth.
The walls of the Old Town houses are generally strong. Such a "land" as
that which I have described, gutted from cellar to roof, and supplied with
water, gas, and a temporary receptacle for rubbish, would make a good
substantial house at a comparatively small cost, with a certain return of
from 8 to 10 per cent. The removal of the subdividing partitions, new
floors, doors, and windows would be a necessity. The good result of such
an undertaking in every close and wynd would not be only the placing of
sixteen or eighteen families in a position in which, if they were so
minded, they could be moral and religious, but the insertion of a _wedge_
into this hardened stratum of viciousness and poverty. The bad could not
be so bad in close proximity to the virtuous. The filthy would aspire to
be something better. The landlords, the hardest class of all to deal with,
would be compelled, by competition and opinion, to amend their property
and their ways. Decent houses in St. Bernard's or St. Leonard's have no
more influence over the manners and morals of Hume's Close or Todrick's
Wynd than decent houses in Moray Place or Chester Street; but decent lands
put down in Cant's Close or Skinner's Close, with rooms rented from L2,
10s. to L4, would do a better work of reformation around them than all the
agencies which are at work.
It is only necessary to refer to the complete renovation of Warden's
Close, Grassmarket, by Dr. Foulis, as a proof of what is to be done by
energetic individual action. The restored fabric, as arranged for _human
beings_, pays 14 per cent. Of course, the still greater overcrowding of
other dens during the renovation of even one "land" requires to be
carefully provided against.
It has been frequently stated that a third of the inhabitants of Edinburgh
are not in connexion with any Christian Church. In the thirty-two families
visited in ---- Close, two women were the only persons who professed to
attend any place of worship. In another small close which we visited none
but a Catholic family professed to attend any church. Eight years ago, in
two populous stairs in another part of the town with which I was well
acquainted, there was a total of nine persons attending church out of an
adult population of forty. At the present time this number is reduced to
one woman, who, "when she goes anywhere, goes to Lady Yester's." Of the
thirty-two families before spoken of, most of the women and some of the
men had formerly been church-goers. Where is this "lapsing" to end?