CHAPTER V_Liverpool

THE SLUMS

§ 1.

She couches there like a vast Presence, seaward-facing but inly

brooding, and, indeed, it is profoundly true that the remote adventures

she surveys draw much of their range and splendour from the darkness of

her private dreams. For in a manner much more direct and unescapable

than those dumb grey regions in the east, these black abysses of her

underworld are intimately bound up with the chief sources of her

efficiency and power. It is their main purpose to provide the human

fulcrum demanded by those monstrous levers at the Docks, and the

strange motions of those engines are of a nature that inevitably leave

the flesh hideously excoriated and crushed. The bedraggled humans

whom we saw running hither and thither among the unhuman silences

and uproars are drawn almost wholly from the Slums, and it is, quite

undisguisedly, the incalculable necessities of those silences and

uproars that have condemned them to the slums and kept them prisoned

there.

[Illustration: THE ALBERT DOCK.]

For it is not that the wage of a dock-labourer is insufficient to grant

life its decencies. It would, on the contrary, be quite possible for a

dock-labourer, constantly employed, to live in one of the suburbs--out,

say, at Seaforth--and come to the wharves each day by electric car. But

the majority of these men are not constantly employed, and much of that

inconstancy would seem to be inevitable. Ships come, ships go, and the

tide of labour waxes and wanes as ceaselessly as the tides about it,

and vastly more capriciously. And thus not more than twenty-five per

cent. of these workers receive a full and constant wage; quite fifty

per cent. average less than one-half; and fully a quarter are fortunate

if they are permitted to work a couple of days a week. For the greater

number of these ministers to Liverpool’s efficiency, then, the Slums,

obviously, are inevitable. Equally inevitably, the Slums form a

topographical annexe to the Docks, a hinterland behind its gates. Out

of the bodies of the battered and congested people who crowd there

Liverpool contrives a suave unguent, more dreadful than adipocere,

which enables the great ships to slide so smoothly to their berths.

§ 2.

That, then, is the first broad feature of Liverpool’s poverty--the

frankness and completeness with which it is involved in the processes

which grant her all her wealth. I have already spoken of its physical

distribution: two dirty smears, one on either hand of the clean-swept

central spaces. Of the two, the northern is the larger; and together

they probably contain some six thousand adults and some thirteen

thousand children. Of these (and this is the second and more interior

peculiarity), the majority are either Irish or of Irish descent.[5] It

follows, therefore, that here alone in Liverpool do you get a specific

dialect. They speak a bastard brogue: a shambling, degenerate speech of

slipshod vowels and muddied consonants--a cast-off clout of a tongue,

more debased even than Whitechapel Cockney, because so much more

sluggish, so much less positive and acute. It follows, too, that the

ruling religion of these quarters is Roman Catholicism. There are about

a dozen Catholic churches actually in the Slums, and to pass suddenly

into one of them out of the stench and uproar of some dishevelled

court is to taste again, in a very peculiar measure, the sweet, rich

silence that has so often broken on one’s palate in the towns and

villages of the Continent. Here, as on the Continent, too, the people

slip in and out all day long, genuflecting, sitting in apathetic

huddles, going back once more to their sorrowful outer world. And you

constantly see the figures of priests moving to and fro among the lanes

and alleys.

[5] The northern Slum forms a large part of the only English

constituency returning a Nationalist Member to the House.

§ 3.

It would be an easy matter to add to this list of the region’s

peculiarities: to speak of its food--chiefly bread and tea, with, upon

occasion, the viler parts of pig; of its queer parasitic industries; of

its dress, its habit of early marriage, its extravagant fecundity. But

to do this would be simply to repeat, with a difference, that oldest

and unhappiest of slum-induced habits, the habit of regarding the

people who live there as, in some sort, a race apart. We speak largely

of the Underworld, the People of the Abyss, the Submerged Tenth, and

gradually we drift into a way of considering them as a strange breed

of degenerates, mattoids, morlocks.... It is an offence that all the

friendships I have formed amongst these people make me especially

anxious to avoid. They are all, really, much more like the suburbans

than the suburbans are themselves. Each one of these so bedraggled

humans is really a rinsed and expurgated bundle of just those passions

and emotions which form the unalterable nucleus of every character in

the world. Life for them, you see, is so astonishingly shorn of the

complexities and elaborations. All its circumstances--those levers at

the Docks amongst others--have tended to fine everything down to the

blunt, primary facts; and it is here, accordingly, and not amongst the

lettuce-eaters who read Nietzsche in lonely country cottages, that you

may discover the authentic simple life. They are always undisguisedly

face to face, for instance, with that most ancient and inveterate of

human problems, the problem of getting food. They start, so to say,

from scratch. They tear the day’s vitality out of their own vitals.

They know the pains of hunger on the one hand, the pains of satisfying

hunger on the other; and they are constantly preoccupied with the

fundamental human business of reconciling that great antithesis. It

is the same throughout. Birth and Death, Hunger, Love and Hate, the

Terrors of Damnation and the Hope of Heaven, become constant and

vehement companions. The bones of life show through. Here, certainly,

_plus ça change plus c’est la même chose_. And the people who live here

are simply our simplified selves.

§ 4.

Take, for example, the case of Esther--of Esther (I’m sorry)

Grimes. She lives in one of those blind-backed courts off Blenheim

Street--quite one of the most malodorous corners in the whole of

Liverpool’s Underworld. Her father (like so many of the fathers here:

they seem to wear rather worse than the women) is dead, and Esther

keeps herself and a vile-tempered, rheumaticky old gargoyle-crowned

stick of a mother by tramping amazing distances through the northern

suburbs--Anfield, Kirkdale, and so on--selling “stuff.” “Stuff” is

Liverpool Irish for cheap fruits and vegetables, and she carries her

ill-favoured tomatoes or oranges or whatever it may be in a great

basket poised on a turban perched on the top of her head. Also, she

bellows. By getting to the market by six in the morning and steadily

walking and bellowing until five o’clock at night she can sometimes

make quite as much as twelve shillings a week, which is more than she

used to make in the tin-works. (It was Mr. Upton Sinclair, by the way,

who really expelled her from there. “The Jungle” had some unsuspected

sequels in this and that odd corner of the world.) She wears one of

those local accretions of innumerable petticoats which so successfully

attain all a crinoline’s ugliness without any of its precision, and her

mass of red hair is scraped back into a tumbling knot above her neck,

and drawn over the forehead of her pointed face in a broad fringe.

She speaks the hideous jargon of the district, and when the suburban

sees her in his own streets thus fringed, petticoated, bawling, and

besmeared, he very naturally wonders what kind of preposterous nature

must lurk beneath so preposterous an exterior.

But I know Esther very well indeed, and I protest that she is not in

the least preposterous, that she is not, essentially, anything but

particularly normal. I am convinced, indeed, as Grant Allen was of

Hedda Gabler, that “I take her in to dinner twice a week.” She has all

the essential, the root qualities: she is just, she is generous, she

is sociable. She loves cleanliness and good colours. She has a fine

appetite for pleasure, and the right, needful touch of _diablerie_.

All that she lacks is an adequate mode of expression, the flexile,

elaborate technique which would enable her to grant these things a

gracious and orderly embodiment.... If you could invest her with

certain possibilities of dress (the dress that Mr. Charles Ricketts

designed the other day for Miss McCarthy would suit her admirably),

could get her hair heaped up and back, and so round across her forehead

in the curve that would rhyme with the feat curve of her chin, she

would present, if not a figure of intolerable beauty, at least one of

very singular vividness and charm.... Well, just in the same way with

that essential bundle of root qualities which she possesses: grant

them a similar appropriate equipment, and you would get an equally

delightful result. But as it is, hammered out on the patched and

tuneless instrument she has been provided with, all the fine human

music of which she is so full sounds fearfully like so much deliberate

discordancy. Her sociability, for instance: she is compelled to

express that by sitting on a sour doorstep in the midst of a raucous

group of messy neighbours. Her affection, again: she can only display

that by lovingly cursing her mother, and by swinking all day on her

behalf instead of getting married--as she so easily might do. She is

just; but perhaps the only dignified example of her justness that I

can produce is her remark (remember, she is one of the devoutest of

Catholics) that probably the folks who insist upon leaving tracts for

her really mean very well at bottom. She is fond of cleanliness; and

the proof of that is to be found in the fact that she spends vastly

more pains upon her toilet than many even second-rate actresses. It is

not her fault that the results are incommensurate with her efforts.

When one has to get all the water one uses from a little dribbling

pump in the middle of a filthy court; when one has to carry it in a

leaky meat-tin up a slimy stairway to a fœtid room; when one has to

wash (without soap) in the same meat-tin, and do one’s fringe without

a looking-glass; when one has to do all this on a diet of bread and

tea, and under a constant hail of reproaches from a rheumaticky old

gargoyle, then it becomes distinctly easy to expend an enormous amount

of energy without obtaining any very ravishing result. The result in

Esther’s case is that you get an apparition so preposterous and streaky

that well-meaning old ladies in the public streets are often moved to

remonstrate with it on the subject of untidiness. I have heard them.

I have also heard Esther’s replies.... She has, as I say, the needful

touch of _diablerie_.

§ 5.

As with Esther, so with the majority of those about her. They are

not plaster saints, and they are not morlocks: they are simply a

community of amiably-intentioned life and laughter loving men and

women and children, with the average amount of pluck and the average

amount of cowardice, all exceedingly human and sinful and lovable

and amorous and faithful and absurd and vain, and all compelled, by

some strange swirl of outer circumstance, to spend their strength in

a warfare waged on prehistoric lines. Here and there, of course, the

skin self-protectingly toughens, malformities creep in, the Beast

gets its appalling opportunities. Those levers at the Docks produce

some sickening results.... But I do not want to heap up horrors.

That, indeed, would be an easy thing to do. But it is even easier

to misunderstand those exterior horrors which constantly do present

themselves. That dirt, as we have seen, does not mean a love of dirt or

a lack of energy; it simply stands for lack of proper tools.

Those clustered slatterns on the doorsteps do not really symbolize

degeneracy; they merely emblematize that delicate and wholesome spirit

which finds its projection elsewhere in the pleasant devices of our

drawing-rooms. That ghastly uproar in a place of stench and wailing

children simply means that the spleen which you and I, armed with a

host of ingenious little instruments, twist and contrive into this and

that elaborate code of moods and attitudes, is there being published

abroad in the only fashion available. And it is not the fault of these

people, nor in the least their essential desire, it is wholly the fault

of the uncouth apparatus at their disposal, that their embodiment of

that other wholesome and delicate human instinct--the instinct for

Pleasure--should have taken the form of the crude lights and shocks of

a corner tavern.

No, down here in the blackness and the slime, it is not, for the most

part, any strange, incalculable brood that has its spawning-place; and

I would like these two regions to remain in your imagination rather as

a couple of far, unwholesome islands, primitive with jungle and morass,

on which some thousands of twentieth century civilians, bankrupt of

even the necessities, have been planked astonishingly down.

§ 6.

Now, it is obviously not in the nature of things that Liverpool should

permit all the resultant discordancies and malformities--the constant

waste of effort, the constant and preposterous clothing of civil

bodies in a barbarous dress--without making some very notable efforts

to provision and equip those islands. Much of this black disorder

forms, as I have said, a large part of the price she pays for her

efficiency--these people have been marooned here by the necessities of

her own prosperous voyages--and although her passion for efficiency

will never permit her to reduce the blackness by decreasing the

efficiency, that very passion has always made her supremely anxious

to beat down the price as far as possible. In no other city in the

country, certainly, have the questions of feeding the poor, of housing

them, nursing them, washing them, received more earnest and controlled

attention; and upon the shores of these strange islands far-sounding

official tides are constantly flinging this and that of necessity, of

comfort, of direction. Into the details of all these efforts I have

now no space to enter; nor, indeed, would such entry fall within the

scope of this book. But you get their presence visualized, you get the

vital sense of the activity of all these forces, when you turn some

drab corner among the hovels and the rank disorder and come suddenly in

sight of one of the clean, decisive blocks of Corporation dwellings:

leash, personable structures, balconied and symmetrical, made up of

course upon course of fit and habitable flats, and glittering at

night with an unexpected blithesomeness and order. You get the same

assurance, again, in the public wash-houses planted here and there--the

first of their kind in the kingdom; and again in the occurrence of

those neat-handed depots for distributing sterilized milk which dot a

white pattern all about the blackness.

And always about these coasts, augmenting the gifts of the controlled

official tides, there constantly wheels and dips an active fleet

of friendly privateers. It is to them, indeed, that one’s natural

inclination is always to look most hopefully: they are obviously

human, they bring camaraderie and affection--needful things that the

milk depots are not compelled to supply. You get all that side of the

thing admirably symbolized by those open-air concerts (also, I fancy,

the first of their sort in the kingdom) organized by one of the most

successful of these free-lance expeditions, which fill the darkest of

the courts, night after night, with actual, colourful music.... So

that all these islanders, Esther and the rest, are not to be pictured

as living in absolute isolation. Through the chaotic crowd of them

there constantly move, very vitally and wonderfully, certain reassuring

visitants--some shrewd, some benignant, some sentimental, but all

enormously in earnest; and for my own part I never recall the dull

bleared speech that prevails there without hearing, too, the dainty

broken English, the daintier laughter, of a certain Swiss worker who

chaffs them and mothers them and bullies them, and whom they love

exceedingly, or without seeing the spare figure of that fine Founder of

a noble secular order whom seven thousand children know by name, and

who can pass anywhere among these morasses, at any hour of the day or

night, and receive nothing but a welcome of elemental friendliness.

§ 7.

So that, in one way and another, the islanders begin to get their

apparatus, the People of the Abyss, if you prefer to call them so,

their share of light and laughter; and some day, perhaps, these two

dull smears may even be wholly erased. And one speaks of such an event

with the more of hopefulness because there are not lacking certain

signals of a wide and deep change that is about to pass over, that

has, indeed, already begun to pass over, the great organism of which

they form so intimate a part. I do not speak now of a mere change in

the social attitude towards these people; I speak rather of those

profounder alterations of character, of purpose, of ideal, which

must run their apparently unrelated course before any such specific

attitude can be affected at all stably and significantly. All this

blackness and disarray is, after all, too fundamental to vanish before

any self-conscious and deliberate endeavours; it can only disappear

by a kind of accident, the almost unintended by-product of other and

alien processes; and it is, therefore, neither to the efforts of these

fine workers, nor to the validity and zeal of that glittering official

machinery, that one turns, on the last analysis, for the true portents

of the change. It is rather to the talk going on in the cafés, to the

books in the booksellers’ windows, to the remote suburban firesides

where very different matters are being quietly discussed, to the

efforts apparent in the ateliers. And in all these places, it seems to

me, there are to be discerned the signs of the dawn of another epoch in

the City’s history.

Liverpool passes out of her pubescence. The swift straight lines of

her eager and yet so strangely dignified uprising begin to swerve

out now into ample curves, begin to enclose another spaciousness, a

larger and more considerate leisure. One finds it evidenced in the

social atmosphere of the place, in an increasing suavity and ripeness

to be discovered there. It appears again in the part played by the

University--a part of ever-increasing confidence and intimacy on the

one hand, of ever-increasing acceptability on the other. It is to

be detected in the religious life of the place, in the aspirations

which surround the great Cathedral which is now splendidly uprising

in her midst. It is disclosed in the revealing mirror of the arts.

In her latest and most perfect piece of architecture, the luminous

building, so significantly isolated, that serenely dominates her

central wharves, she seems, almost for the first time, to have

confessed herself in beauty perfectly, and she has done that because

the nature of the confession had already suffered change. A new poet,

too, has wonderfully arisen in the midst of these hitherto almost

songless workers; and in the painters’ quarters there is a momentous

stir of schism and disputation. Already the old art of the place,

called into existence by its spirit of independence, but limited by

the typical demands of so strenuous an atmosphere, begins to give way

a little before the advances of an art that concedes nothing to the

citizen, that sits frankly apart among its own visions.... In a little

bronze-hung studio, poised high above one of the central ways, a woman

is dealing with pigment in a fashion more sensitive and personal than

any that has been known in Liverpool before. Well, in the quality of

her work I find some confession of the forces that are producing the

profound unanimous change which may lead, among other things, to the

dispersal of the darkness of the underworld.

So that in the end this dull stain may vanish. I have called it

a dream--a black mood out of which the City dreadfully gathers

inspiration for her battles. Like other dreams, it may one day draw to

its close. But when it is over the dreamer, too, will have changed;

that, at least, is inevitable. Just in what manner these subtle

and various mutations will affect her character, her aspect, it is

impossible even to suggest. It may be that this growing sensitiveness

will soften in some measure the fingers we have seen probing, so

tirelessly, so tirelessly, for the hard unmitigable fact. Or it may be

that she will discover some wonderful union between these qualities,

will maintain a double dominion, losing nothing of her ardour, gaining

much of this new tranquillity. It is impossible to predict. This much

alone is certain: that the next book which essays her portraiture will

have to deal with a strangely different subject.

INDEX

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 161

Abercromby Square, 126

Aigburth, 97, 99, 134

Aintree, 99, 115

Aintree Racecourse, 116

Allerton, 134

Altcar 100

Anfield, 99, 118, 123 _seq._, 133, 148

Architecture, 6, 43, 60, 61, 66, 128, 161

Aristocracy, 12, 128

Art, 12, 84, 86, 160 _seq._

Art Gallery, 23, 60, 65, 86

_Art nouveau_, 85

Athleticism, 76, 80, 118

Autumn Exhibition, 86

Bach, 76

_Baltic_, 35, 40

Bank Holiday in Liverpool, 89

Banking, 23, 83, 88

Bar, the, 17

Beardsley, Aubrey, 126

Beauty of Liverpool, 28, 34, 36, 39, 42, 52, 55, 66 _seq._, 90 _seq._,

95, 140

Bedford Street, 126

Bidston Hill, 139

Bidston Lighthouse, 139

Birkdale, 80, 100

Birkenhead, 24, 138

Bixteth Street, 53

Blenheim Street, 148

Bloomsbury, 129

Blundellsands, 80, 100, 124

Bold Street, 46, 59, 71, 76

Bootle, 93, 96, 106 _seq._

Botanic Gardens, 125

Breweries, 2

Brokers, 47, 78

Brunswick Half Tide Dock, 34

Brunswick Street, 47, 48, 84

Brussels, 47

Cabbage Hall, 99, 119, 124, 127

Cafés, 82, 160

Calderstones Park, 129

_Campania_, 35, 40

Canals, 67, 98, 110

Cathedral, 161

Catherine Street, 126

Catholicism, 105, 144, 151

Central Station, 51, 55, 67

Champs Elysées, 130, 131

Changing modes, 85, 87, 160 _seq._

Chapel Street, 58, 59, 80

“Charter,” 8

Chatham Street, 126

Chemical Works, 2

Chinese Colony, 135

Church Street, 51, 76, 77, 91

Civic spirit, 9, 10, 13, 25, 87, 88, 163

Clerks, 15, 78 _seq._

Club life, 85

Coburg Dock, 34

Commerce, 5, 9, 28, 30, 32, 120, 143

Convent of Our Good Shepherd, 105

Corn Exchange, 23, 47

Corn-mills, 2

Corporation dwellings, 156

Cosmopolitanism, 9, 10, 87, 88, 135

Cotton, 29, 59

Cotton Exchange, 23, 60, 89

County, the, 12, 128

_Courier_, 49

Court concerts, 157

Crosby, 93

Crosshall Street, 45

Croxteth, 128

Cunard Line, 31

Custom House, 60

Dale Street, 58, 91

Dee, 104

De Quincey, 119

Derby Road, 100

Dialect, 75, 89, 102, 144, 149, 158

Dingle, 26, 99, 135, 137

Directories, 123

Dock-labourer, 15, 78, 142 _seq._

Dock offices, 20, 55, 56, 67, 139, 161

Docks, extent of the, 18, 26 _seq._, 30 _seq._

drama of the, 26 _seq._, 33 _seq._, 67, 136

system of the, 31 _seq._, 43

and the slums, 141 _seq._, 146, 153

Dress, 74, 75, 77, 149, 150

E----, 84, 85, 88

Eastham, 138

Edge Hill, 99, 124

Efficiency, 13, 30, 35, 51, 62, 65, 74, 141, 143, 155

Egremont, 17, 138

Eighteenth century, 5, 8

Electric cars, 55, 75, 90, 95, 97, 110, 111, 117

Emigrants, 40, 135

Emigration, 83

Environment, 17 _seq._, 21, 103, 127 _seq._, 133, 137

Everton, 96, 99, 106, 124, 133

Exchange Station, 51, 52, 78, 94

Fairfield, 99

Fazakerley, 99

Football, 118

Ford, 105, 109

Formby, 80, 100

Freshfield, 100

Future, 64, 102, 160, 163

Garston, 24, 99, 134

General Post Office, 46, 48

Gladstone, 126

Glasgow, 3

Golf, 76, 138

Golf-links, 80, 100, 138

Grain, 29

Grand National, 116

Great Howard Street, 100

Grimes, Esther, 147, 158

Harland, Henry, 83

Harrington Dock, 32

Herculaneum Dock, 35, 136

Heswall, 138

Heywood’s Bank, 47

History, 4, 5, 9, 93, 113, 160

Homogeneity, 9 _seq._, 62, 95, 98

Horses, 59, 68

Housing problem, 12, 25, 156

Hoylake, 80, 138

Huskisson Dock, 29, 31, 35

Independence, 10 _seq._, 14, 25, 63, 69, 98, 162

Industries, 2, 24, 145, 148

Irish, 105, 144

Irish traders, 8

Isolation, 13, 14, 98

James Street, 58, 91

“The Jungle,” effect of, 149

Kirkdale, 93, 94, 97, 119, 148

Knotty Ash, 99, 128

Knowsley, 128

L----, 81, 88, 118, 131

Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, 100

Landing Stage, 18, 19, 36, 38 _seq._, 51, 55, 80, 89

Leasowe, 80, 138

Leather Lane, 58

Library, 55

Lime Street, 53, 54, 63

Lime Street Station, 58

Linacre, 24, 106, 109

Linacre Road, 105

Literature, 76, 83, 160, 161

Litherland, 93, 99, 109, 111

Locomotion, 25, 95, 97

London, 3, 12, 14, 42, 90, 95

London Road, 91

Lord Street, 44, 77

Mahogany, 85

Manchester, 12, 13

_Manchester Guardian_, 12

Marconi Station, 103

Markets 67

Merchants, 10, 15, 48, 78, 83, 96

Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, 139.