It will hardly be pretended this year that the English Christmas
has been a merry one, or that the New Year has the promise of being
particularly happy. The winter is proving very cold and vicious—as
if nature herself were loath to be left out of the general conspiracy
against the comfort and self-complacency of man. The country at large
has a sense of embarrassment and depression, which is brought home
more or less to every class in the closely graduated social hierarchy,
and the light of Christmas firesides has by no means dispelled the
gloom. Not that I mean to overstate the gloom. It is difficult to
imagine any combination of adverse circumstances powerful enough to
infringe very sensibly upon the appearance of activity and prosperity,
social stability and luxury, which English life must always present
to a stranger. Nevertheless the times are distinctly of the kind
synthetically spoken of as hard—there is plenty of evidence of it—and
the spirits of the public are not high. The depression of business
is extreme and universal; I am ignorant whether it has reached so
calamitous a point as that almost hopeless prostration of every
industry which it is assured us you have lately witnessed in America,
and I believe the sound of lamentation is by no means so loud as it
has been on two or three occasions within the present century. The
possibility of distress among the lower classes has been minimised by
the gigantic poor-relief system which is so characteristic a feature of
English civilisation and which, under especial stress, is supplemented
(as is the case at present) by private charity proportionately huge.
I notice too that in some parts of the country discriminating groups
of work-people have selected these dismal days as a happy time for
striking. When the labouring classes rise to the recreation of a
strike I suppose the situation may be said to have its cheerful side.
There is, however, great distress in the North, and there is a general
feeling of scant money to play with throughout the country. The “Daily
News” has sent a correspondent to the great industrial regions, and
almost every morning for the last three weeks a very cleverly executed
picture of the misery of certain parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire
has been served up with the matutinal tea and toast. The work is a
good one, and, I take it, eminently worth doing, as it appears to have
had a visible effect upon the purse-strings of the well-to-do. There
is nothing more striking in England than the success with which an
“appeal” is always made. Whatever the season or whatever the cause,
there always appears to be enough money and enough benevolence in the
country to respond to it in sufficient measure—a remarkable fact when
one remembers that there is never a moment of the year when the custom
of “appealing” intermits. Equally striking perhaps is the perfection
to which the science of distributing charity has been raised—the way
it has been analysed and organised and made one of the exact sciences.
You perceive that it has occupied for a long time a foremost place
among administrative questions, and has received all the light that
experience and practice can throw upon it. Is there in this perception
more of a lightened or more of an added weight for the brooding
consciousness? Truly there are aspects of England at which one can but
darkly stare.
[Illustration: A FACTORY TOWN AT NIGHT]
I left town a short time before Christmas and went to spend the
festive season in the North, in a part of the country with which I was
unacquainted. It was quite possible to absent one’s self from London
without a sense of sacrifice, for the charms of the capital during the
last several weeks have been obscured by peculiarly vile weather. It
is of course a very old story that London is foggy, and this simple
statement raises no blush on the face of nature as we see it here. But
there are fogs and fogs, and the folds of the black mantle have been
during the present winter intolerably thick. The thickness that draws
down and absorbs the smoke of the housetops, causes it to hang about
the streets in impenetrable density, forces it into one’s eyes and
down one’s throat, so that one is half-blinded and quite sickened—this
form of the particular plague has been much more frequent than usual.
Just before Christmas, too, there was a heavy snow-storm, and even a
tolerably light fall of snow has London quite at its mercy. The emblem
of purity is almost immediately converted into a sticky, lead-coloured
mush, the cabs skulk out of sight or take up their stations before
the lurid windows of a public-house, which glares through the sleety
darkness at the desperate wayfarer with an air of vulgar bravado. For
recovery of one’s nervous balance the only course was flight—flight
to the country and the confinement of one’s vision to the large
area of one of those admirable homes which at this season overflow
with hospitality and good cheer. By this means the readjustment is
effectually brought about—these are conditions that you cordially
appreciate. Of all the great things that the English have invented and
made a part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect,
the most characteristic, the one they have mastered most completely
in all its details, so that it has become a compendious illustration
of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed,
well-administered, well-filled country-house. The grateful stranger
makes these reflections—and others besides—as he wanders about in the
beautiful library of such a dwelling, of an inclement winter afternoon,
just at the hour when six o’clock tea is impending. Such a place
and such a time abound in agreeable episodes; but I suspect that the
episode from which, a fortnight ago, I received the most ineffaceable
impression was but indirectly connected with the charms of a luxurious
fireside. The country I speak of was a populous manufacturing region,
full of tall chimneys and of an air that is grey and gritty. A lady
had made a present of a Christmas-tree to the children of a workhouse,
and she invited me to go with her and assist at the distribution of
the toys. There was a drive through the early dusk of a very cold
Christmas Eve, followed by the drawing up of a lamp-lit brougham in
the snowy quadrangle of a grim-looking charitable institution. I had
never been in an English workhouse before, and this one transported
me, with the aid of memory, to the early pages of “Oliver Twist.” We
passed through cold, bleak passages, to which an odour of suet-pudding,
the aroma of Christmas cheer, failed to impart an air of hospitality;
and then, after waiting a while in a little parlour appertaining to
the superintendent, where the remainder of a dinner of by no means
eleemosynary simplicity and the attitude of a gentleman asleep with
a flushed face on the sofa seemed to effect a tacit exchange of
references, we were ushered into a large frigid refectory, chiefly
illumined by the twinkling tapers of the Christmas-tree. Here entered
to us some hundred and fifty little children of charity, who had been
making a copious dinner and who brought with them an atmosphere of
hunger memorably satisfied—together with other traces of the occasion
upon their pinafores and their small red faces. I have said that the
place reminded me of “Oliver Twist,” and I glanced through this little
herd for an infant figure that should look as if it were cut out for
romantic adventures. But they were all very prosaic little mortals.
They were made of very common clay indeed, and a certain number of
them were idiotic. They filed up and received their little offerings,
and then they compressed themselves into a tight infantine bunch and,
lifting up their small hoarse voices, directed a melancholy hymn toward
their benefactress. The scene was a picture I shall not forget, with
its curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose—the dying wintry light
in the big, bare, stale room; the beautiful Lady Bountiful, standing
in the twinkling glory of the Christmas-tree; the little multitude of
staring and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless, faces.
1879.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]