neglected and so little known, is really a most important structure;
that it has made East London possible, and London itself healthy, while
it has converted miles and miles of barren swamp into smiling meadows
and fertile farms.
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V
THE FACTORY GIRL
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V
THE FACTORY GIRL
EAST LONDON—one cannot repeat it too often—is a city of working bees. As
we linger and loiter among the streets multitudinous, we hear, as from a
hive, the low, contented murmur of continuous and patient work. There
are two millions of working-people in this city. The children work at
school; the girls and boys, and the men and women, work in factory, in
shop, and at home, in dock and in wharf and in warehouse; all day long
and all the year round, these millions work. They are clerks,
accountants, managers, foremen, engineers, stokers, porters, stevedores,
dockers, smiths, craftsmen of all kinds. They are girls who make things,
girls who sew things, girls who sell things. There are among them many
poor, driven, sweated creatures, and the sweaters themselves are poor,
driven, sweated creatures, for sweating once begun is handed on from one
to the other as carefully and as religiously as any holy lamp of
learning. They work from early morning till welcome evening. The music
of this murmur, rightly understood, is like the soft and distant singing
of a hymn of praise. For the curse of labor has been misunderstood;
without work man would be even as the beasts of the field. It is the
necessity of work that makes him human; of necessity he devises and
discovers and invents, because he would die if he did not work; and
because he has to subdue the animal within him. The animal is solitary;
the man must be gregarious. He must make a friend of his brother, he
must obey the stronger, he must make laws, he must fight with nature,
and compel her to give up her secrets. It is only by means of work that
man can rise; it is his ladder; in the sweat of his face he eats his
bread—yea, the bread of life. It is not with any pity that we should
listen to this murmur. It should be with pure contentment and gratitude,
for the murmur, though it speaks partly of the whirr of ten thousand
wheels and partly of those who stand and serve those wheels, speaks also
of this blessed quality of work, that it enables men to use the body for
the sake of the soul. Man must work.
Imagine, if you can, what would follow if you held up your hand and
said: “Listen, all. There will be no more work. You may stop the
engines, or they may run down of their own accord. You may take off your
aprons and wash your hands. You may all sit down for the rest of your
lives. Your food will be waiting for you when you want it. Eat, drink,
and be happy if you can.” If they can! But can they, with nothing to
do—no work to do, only, like the sheep in the field, to browse, or, like
the wolves of the forest, to rend and tear and slay?
If you can use your eyes as well as your ears, look about you. It is
really like looking at a hive of bees, is it not? There are thousands of
them, and they are all alike; they are all doing the same thing; they
are all living the same lives; they wake and work and rest and sleep,
and so life passes by. If you look more closely you will observe
differences. No two human creatures, to begin with, are alike in face.
More closely still, and you will discover that in the greatest crowd,
where the people are, like sheep in a fold, huddled together, every one
is as much for himself—there is as much individuality here—as in the
places where every one stands by himself and has room to move in and a
choice to make.
[Illustration: Wade Street, Limehouse.]
Let us take a single creature out of these millions. Perhaps if we learn
how one lives, how one regards the world, we may understand, in some
degree, this agitated, confused, restless, incoherent, inarticulate
mass.
I introduce you to a baby. Her name is Liz. She has as yet but a few
days of life behind her. She is hardly conscious of hunger, cold, or
uneasiness, or any of the things with which life first makes its
beginning apparent to the half-awakened brain. She opens eyes that
understand nothing—neither form, nor distance, nor color, nor any
differences; she sees men, like trees, walking. When she is hungry she
wails; when she is not hungry she sleeps. We will leave the child with
her mother, and we will stand aside and watch while the springs and
summers pass, and while she grows from an infant to a child, a girl, a
woman.
The room where the baby lies is a first-floor front, in a house of four
rooms and a ruinous garret, belonging to a street which is occupied,
like all the streets in this quarter, wholly by the people of the lower
working-class. This is London Street, Ratcliffe. It is a real street,
with a real name, and it is in a way typical of East London of the lower
kind. The aristocracy of labor, the foremen and engineers of shipyards
and works, live about Stepney Church, half a mile to the north. Their
streets are well kept, their doorsteps are white, their windows are
clean, there are things displayed in the front windows of their houses.
Here you will see a big Bible, here a rosewood desk, here a vase full of
artificial flowers, here a bird-cage with foreign birds,—Avvadavats,
Bengalees, love-birds, or a canary,—here a glass case containing coral
or “Venus’s fingers” from the Philippines, here something from India
carved in fragrant wood, here a piece of brasswork from Benares. There
is always something to show the position and superiority of the tenant.
It is the distinctive mark of the lower grades of labor that they have
none of these ornaments. Indeed, if by any chance such possessions fell
in their way they would next week be in the custody of the pawnbroker;
they would “go in.”
We are, then, in a first-floor front. Look out of the window upon the
street below: meanwhile the baby grows. The street contains forty
houses. Each house has four rooms, two or three have six; most of the
people have two rooms. There are, therefore, roughly speaking, about one
hundred families residing in this street. The door-steps, the pavement,
and the roadway are swarming with children; the street is their only
playground. Here the little girl of six bears about in her arms,
staggering under the weight, but a careful nurse, her little sister,
aged twelve months; here the children take their breakfast and their
dinner; here they run and play in summer and in winter. It seems to be
never too hot or too cold for them. They are ragged, they are
bareheaded, they are barefooted and barelegged, their toys are bits of
wood and bones and oyster-shells, transformed by the imagination of
childhood into heaven knows what of things precious and splendid. Of
what they have not they know nothing; but, then, they mind nothing,
therefore pity would be thrown away upon them. It is the only world they
know; they are happy in their ignorance; they are feeling the first joy
of life. By their ruddy faces and sturdy limbs you can see that the air
they breathe is wholesome, and that they have enough to eat.
The room is furnished sufficiently, according to the standards of the
family. There is a table, with two chairs; there is a chest of drawers
with large glass handles. On this chest stands a structure of artificial
flowers under a glass shade. This is the sacred symbol of
respectability. It is for the tenement what the Bible or the coral in
the window is for the house. So long as we have our glass shade with its
flowers we are in steady work, and beyond the reach of want. On each
side of the glass shade are arranged the cups and saucers, plates and
drinking-glasses, belonging to the family. There are also exhibited with
pride all the bottles of medicine recently taken by the various members.
It is a strange pride, but one has observed it among people of a more
exalted station. There are also set out with the bottles certain
heart-shaped velvet pincushions, made by the sailors, and considered as
decorations of the highest æsthetic value. The chest of drawers is used
for the clothes of the family—the slender supplement of what is on the
family back. It is also the storehouse for everything that belongs to
the daily life. There is a cupboard beside the chimney, with two
shelves. Any food that may be left over, and the small supplies of tea
and sugar, are placed on the upper shelf, coals on the lower. On the
table stands, always ready, a teapot, and beside it a half-cut loaf and
a plate with margarine, the substitute for butter. Margarine is not an
unwholesome compound. It is perhaps better than bad butter; it is made
of beef fat, clarified and colored to resemble butter. I am told that
other people eat it in comfortable assurance that it is butter.
When the child grows old enough to observe things she will remark, from
time to time, the absence of the chest of drawers. At other times she
will discover that the drawers are empty. These vacuities she will
presently connect with times of tightness. When money is scarce and work
is not to be got things “go in” of their own accord; the pawnbroker
receives them.
She will learn more than this; she will learn the great virtue of the
poor, the virtue that redeems so many bad habits—generosity. For the
chest of drawers and the best clothes are more often “in” to oblige a
neighbor in difficulties than to relieve their own embarrassments. The
people of Ratcliffe are all neighbors and all friends; to be sure, they
are frequently enemies, otherwise life would be monotonous. Always some
one is in trouble, always some of the children are hungry, always there
is rent to pay, always there is some one out of work. Liz will learn
that if one can help, one must. She will learn this law without any
formula or written code, not out of books, not in church, not in school;
she will learn it from the daily life around her. Generosity will become
part of her very nature.
You will perceive, however, that this child is not born of the very
poor; her parents are not in destitution; her father is, in fact, a
docker, and, being a big, burly fellow, born and brought up in the
country, he gets tolerably regular employment and very fair wages. If he
would spend less than the third or the half of his wages in drink his
wife might have a four-roomed cottage. But we must take him as he is.
His children suffer no serious privation. They are clothed and fed; they
have the chance of living respectably, and with such decencies as belong
to their ideals and their standards. In a word, Liz will be quite a
commonplace, average girl of the lower working-class.
The first duty of a mother is to “harden” the baby. With this view, Liz
was fed, while still a tiny infant, on rusks soaked in warm water, and
when she was a year old her mother began to give her scraps of
beefsteak, slightly fried, to suck; she also administered fish fried in
oil—the incense and fragrance of this delicacy fills the whole
neighborhood, and hangs about the streets day and night like a cloud.
For drink she gave the baby the water in which whiting had been boiled;
this is considered a sovereign specific for building up a child’s
constitution. Sometimes, it is true, the treatment leads to unforeseen
results. Another child, for instance, about the same age as Liz, and
belonging to the same street, was fed by its mother on red herring, and,
oddly enough, refused to get any nourishment out of that delightful form
of food. They carried it to the Children’s Hospital, where the doctor
said it was being starved to death, and made the most unkind remarks
about the mother—most unjust as well, for the poor woman had no other
thought or intention than to “harden the inside” of her child, and all
the friends and neighbors were called in to prove that plenty of herring
had been administered.
As soon as Liz was three years of age she had the same food as her
parents and elder sisters. You shall dine with the family presently. For
breakfast and tea and supper, and for any occasional “bever” or snack,
she had a slice of bread and margarine, which she cut for herself when,
like Mrs. Gamp, so disposed. It was indeed terrifying to see the small
child wielding a bread-knife nearly as big as herself. She got plenty of
pennies when work was regular; nobody is so generous with his pennies as
the man who needs them most. She spent these casual windfalls in sweets
and apples, passing the latter round among her friends for friendly
bites, and dividing the former in equal portions. This cheap
confectionery for the children of the kerb and the door-step supplies
the place of sweet puddings, for the mystery of the pudding is
unfortunately little known or understood by the mothers of Ratcliffe.
In the matter of beer, Liz became very early in life acquainted with its
taste. There is a kind of cheap porter, sold at three farthings a pint,
considered grateful and comforting by the feminine mind of Ratcliffe.
What more natural than that the child should be invited to finish what
her mother has left of the pint? It would not be much. What more
motherly, when one is taking a little refreshment in a public house,
than to give a taste to the children playing on the pavement outside?
And what more natural than for the children to look for these windfalls,
and to gather round the public house expectant? It seems rough on the
little ones to begin so early; it is contrary to modern use and custom,
but we need not suppose that much harm is done to a child by giving it
beer occasionally. Formerly all children had beer for breakfast, beer
for dinner, and beer for supper. In Belgium very little children have
their bock for dinner. The mischief in the case of our Liz and her
friends was that she got into the habit of looking for drink more
stimulating than tea, and that the habit remained with her and grew with
her.
At three years of age Liz passed, so to speak, out of the nursery, which
was the door-step and the kerb, into the school-room. She was sent to
the nearest Board-school, where she remained under instruction for
eleven long years. She began by learning certain highly important
lessons; first, that she had to obey; next, that she had to be quiet;
and, thirdly, that she had to be clean. As regards the first and second,
obedience and order were not enforced in the nursery of London Street.
They were, it is true, sometimes enjoined with accompaniment of a cuff
and a slap, not unkindly meant, in the home. As for cleanliness, one
wash a week, namely, on Sunday morning, had hitherto been considered
sufficient. It was, however, a thorough wash. The unkempt locks, brown
with the dust and grime of a week’s street play, came out of the tub a
lovely mass of light-brown, silky curls; the child’s fair skin emerged
from its coating of mud; her rosy cheeks showed their natural color; her
round, white arms fairly shone and glowed in the sunshine. On Sunday
morning Liz presented the appearance of a very pretty child, clean and
fair and winsome. As soon as she went to school, however, she had to
undergo the same process every morning except Saturday. If she appeared
in school unwashed she had to go home again; not only that, but there
was often unpleasantness in the matter of pinafore. Saturday is a school
holiday, therefore no one washes on Saturday, and face and hands and
pinafore may all go grimy together.
[Illustration: In an East-End Gin-Shop.]
Liz remained at school from three to fourteen years of age. What she
learned I do not exactly know. Some years ago I looked through some
“readers” for Board-schools, and came to the conclusion that nothing at
all could be learned from them, counting scraps as worth nothing. But I
hear that they have altered their “readers.” Still, if you remember that
no one has any books at all in London Street, that even a halfpenny
paper is not often seen there, that no talk goes on which can instruct a
child in anything, you will own that a child may be at school even for
eleven years and yet learn very little. And since she found no means of
carrying on her education after she left school, no free libraries, no
encouragement from her companions, you will not be surprised to hear
that all she had learned from books presently dropped from her like a
cloak or wrapper for which she had no further use. Let us be reasonable.
The Board-school taught her, besides a certain small amount of temporary
and short-lived book-lore, some kind of elementary manners—a respect, at
least, for manners; the knowledge of what manners may mean. The clergy
and the machinery of the parish cannot teach these things. It can be
done only at the Board-school. It is the school, and not the church,
which softens manners and banishes some of the old brutality, because,
you see, they do not go to church, and they must go to school. How
rough, how rude, the average girl of Ratcliffe was before the
Board-schools were opened, Liz herself neither knows nor comprehends.
These schools have caused the disappearance of old characteristics once
thought to be ingrained habits. Their civilizing influence during the
last thirty years has been enormous. They have not only added millions
to the numbers of those who read a great deal and perhaps—but this is
doubtful—think a little, but they have abolished much of the old
savagery. I declare that the life of this street as it was thirty or
forty years ago simply could not be written down with any approach to
truth in these pages.
Let me only quote the words of Professor Huxley, who began life by
practising as a medical man in this quarter. “I have seen the Polynesian
savage,” I once heard him say in a speech, “in his primitive condition,
before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beach-comber got at him.
With all his savagery, he was not half so savage, so unclean, so
irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.”
These words open the door to unbounded flights of imagination. Leave
that vanished world, leave the savage slum of Huxley’s early manhood, to
the region of poetry and fancy, to the unwritten, to the suggested, to
the half-whispered. It exists no longer; it has been improved.
Liz passed through school, then, from one standard to the next. We have
seen that she learned manners, order, obedience, and the duty of cleanly
clothes and cleanly language. She learned also to love teacher and
school. Teacher came to see her when she was ill, and brought her nice
things. Teacher kissed her. There were others, however, who took a mean
advantage of her affectionate nature, and used it as a means of keeping
her out of mischief—ladies who went in and out of the streets and
houses, not afraid of anything; who gathered the children together on
Sundays, and sang with them and talked to them, and gave them oranges.
These ladies knew all the children. When they walked down the streets
the very little ones ran after them, clinging to their skirts, catching
at their hands, in the hope of a word and a kiss. Liz, among the rest,
was easily softened by kindness. She had two schools,—that provided by
the country and that provided by these ladies, who taught her more than
books can teach,—and both schools, if you please, were provided for
nothing. Whatever may happen to Liz in after life, her respect for
manners and for the life of order will remain. And sometimes, when
things look very black and there is real cause for sadness and
repentance, this respect may be the poor girl’s most valuable asset.
At the age of fourteen, when she had to leave school, she was a sturdy,
well-built girl, square-shouldered, rather short, but of a better frame
than most of her companions, because her father was country-born; her
features were sharp, her face was plain, but not unpleasing; her gray
eyes were quick and restless, her lips were mobile; her cheek was
somewhat pale, but not worn and sunken. She looked abounding in life and
health; she was full of fun, and quick to laugh on the smallest
provocation; she was ready-witted and prompt with repartee and retort;
she danced as she went along the street, because she could not walk
sedately; if a barrel-organ came that way she danced in the road,
knowing half a dozen really pretty steps and figures. She had something
in her quick movements, in the restlessness of her eyes, in the
half-suspicious turn of the head, of the street sparrow, the only bird
which she knew. If you grow up among street sparrows there is every
reason for the adoption of some of their manners; the same resemblance
to the sparrow, which is an impudent, saucy bird, always hungry, always
on the lookout for something more, may be observed in other street
children. She was affectionate with her companions, but always watchful
for her own chance.
In her views of the conduct of life she was no strict moralist. She was
ready to condone some things which more rigid maidens condemn. She would
not, for instance, bear malice because her brother, for one of the
smaller crimes, such as gambling on the pavement, got into trouble; nor
would she judge him harshly if he was found in the possession of things
“picked up”—unconsidered trifles; nor would she resent being knocked
down by her brother when in drink. She had too often seen her mother
cuffed by her father when he came home drunk to feel any resentment
about such a trifle. In sober moments her brother did not use his fist
upon her, nor did her father, except under the provocation of drink,
drive the whole family flying into the street by “taking the strap” to
everybody.
What did she know about the outer world? From her books and her school
little enough. Her own country, like every other country, was to her a
geographical expression. Even of London she knew nothing, though from
the river stairs and foreshore she could see a good deal of it. Once a
year, however, she had been taken for a day in the country, either by
train to the nearest seaside place, or by brakes and wagonettes to
Epping Forest. She was therefore by no means ignorant of green fields.
Why, there was the “Island Garden,” in the Isle of Dogs, close at hand.
But of trees and flowers and birds individually she knew nothing, and
she never would know anything. A bird was a bird, a tree was a tree to
her. On the whole of nature her mind was a blank. About her own country,
its history, its position, its achievements, she had learned something,
but it was rapidly becoming a vague and dim memory; of literature she
knew nothing. She had learned a little singing, and had an ear for
melody. She never read either newspapers or books, not even penny
story-books, therefore she added nothing to her scanty knowledge.