"Every minute dies a man,
Every minute one is born."
In London, 169 people die daily, and a babe is born every five minutes.
The number of persons, says the Registrar-General, who died in 1856, in
116 public institutions, such as workhouses and hospitals, was 10,381.
It is really shocking to think, and a deep stigma on the people,--or on
the artificial arrangements of society, by which so much poverty is
perpetuated,--that nearly one person out of five, who died that year,
closed his days under a roof provided by law or public charity. In 1856
the police report 147 suicides. Dr. Wakley says, 4000 infants die
annually of neglect. It is calculated 500 people are drowned in the
Thames every year. In the first week of last year there were five deaths
from intemperance alone. How much wretchedness lies in these facts,--for
the deaths from actual intemperance bear but a small proportion to the
deaths induced by the immoderate use of intoxicating liquors; and of the
500 drowned, by far the larger class, we have every reason to believe,
are of the number of whom Hood wrote--
"Mad with life's history,
Glad to death's mystery
Swift to be hurled--
Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of the world!"
A meeting was held last year of the unemployed, chiefly the carpenters,
bricklayers, and bricklayers' labourers of the metropolis, in which it
was stated that their number--though very probably there may be some
exaggeration here--is 35,000. If these men are married and have
families, we get a further idea of the deep distress in this wealthy and
luxurious capital,--this capital where the gold of Australia, the jewels
of Golconda, the silks and spices of the East, come for sale, and are
lavished as freely on the most questionable purposes and persons as on
the noblest specimens of humanity and the most glorious objects for which
men care to live. Then think of the inmates of the lunatic asylums, and
the poor-houses, and the hospitals, in most cases sent there as the
result of their own ignorance or imprudence. Last Christmas day the
dinners provided at the workhouses for the inmates fed between 30 and
40,000. Add to these our prison population, and our criminal classes,
and our prostitutes,--and what a picture we get of the Night Side of
London, of the classes whose existence is a reproach or a curse. In
London one man in every ninety belongs to the criminal class.
According to the last reports, there were in London 143,000 vagrants
admitted in one year into the casual wards of the workhouses. In 1856 it
appears that in all 73,240 persons were taken into custody, of whom
45,941 were males, and 27,209 females; 18,000 of the apprehensions were
on account of drunkenness, 8160 for unlawful possession of goods, 7021
for simple larceny, 6763 for common assaults, 2914 for assaults on the
police; 4303 women were taken into custody as prostitutes. The period of
life most prolific of crime is that between the 20th and 25th years. The
convictions upon trial in 1856 were in the following proportions:--Under
10 years of age, 1; 10 years and under 15 years, 91; 15 years and under
20 years, 610; 20 years and under 25 years, 770; 25 years and under 30
years, 390; 30 years and under 40 years, 410; 40 years and under 50
years, 188; 50 years and under 60 years, 90; 63 years and upwards, 37.
The committals for murder in the year 1856 were 11; they were 12 in 1855,
10 in 1854, 7 in 1853,11 in 1852, 8 in 1851, 11 in 1850, 19 in 1849, 11
in 1848, and 10 in 1847. Of the larcenies in dwelling-houses last year,
only 315 were committed by means of false keys, as many as 2175 through
doors being left open, 679 by lifting up a window, or breaking glass, and
31 by entering attic windows from empty houses. Again, 1595 such
larcenies were committed by lodgers, 1701 by servants, and as many as 673
by means of false messages. The cases enumerated under the last three
heads are such as the police could hardly be expected to prevent. 2371
persons were reported last year to the police as lost, and of these the
police restored 1084. The City returns, for which I am indebted to the
kindness of G. Borlase Childs, Esq., surgeon to the force, are for 1856,
as follows: number of persons taken into custody; males 3030, females
1014; of these, 1083 males and 450 females were discharged; 1628 males,
517 females were summarily convicted or held to bail; 319 males and 77
females were committed for trial: 8 males and 1 female under 10 years of
age; 322 males and 37 females under 15; 755 males and 152 females under
20; 645 males and 235 females under 25; 341 males and 165 females under
30; 497 males and 220 females under 40; 300 males and 116 females under
50; 125 males and 78 females under 60; and above that age 41 males and 20
females. Tried by the education test of the whole number taken into
custody, 782 males and 421 females could neither read nor write; 1925
males and 570 females could read and write imperfectly; 317 males and 23
females could read and write well; 6 males come under the head of
superior instruction. The value of property stolen was 11,425 pounds; of
property recovered 3829 pounds; the return of destitute persons taken in
charge by the police is, men 141, women 115, children 79. During the
same period 1603 males and 1097 females were brought to the station
house. Children missing and found by the police; males 496, females 319.
The return of the metropolitan police for 1857, was 2825 brothels, and
8600 prostitutes. In the City, the number of such houses and persons is
very small; the prison population at any particular time is 6000, costing
for the year 170,000 pounds. Our juvenile thieves cost us 300 pounds
a-piece. The average income of the London thief is estimated at 2 pounds
per week.
Again, let us look at the classes whose labours and occupations and modes
of life are inconsistent with health, or not favourable to any great
development of moral principle. Almost 20,000 persons are engaged in
Sunday trading; the number of ragged children is nearly 30,000, the
number of families living in one room is estimated as high as 150,000.
It appears from a report by Mr. Goderich, officer of health in the parish
of Kensington, that in a place called the Potteries there are 1147 human
beings and 1041 pigs congregated within a space of less than nine acres,
the present number of pigs being below the usual average. The dwellings
of a large proportion of the inhabitants of this locality are mere hovels
with shattered roofs and unglazed windows, the floor is below the level
of the external soil, which has been raised by excessive accumulations of
filth of all kinds, and the walls are at all times partially damp and
giving out pestilential gases, intolerable to those who have not been
born among them, fatal to the health of those who have. Another portion
of the miserable population has converted old caravan bodies, removed in
some cases from their wheels, into houses; others have no other dwelling
than ruinous post-chaise bodies, for which a rent of sixpence per week is
paid. In one of the caravans eight persons dwell, among whom a child
suffering from small-pox was battling with death at the time of Mr.
Goderich's visit in March.
Mr. Timbs calculates the number of professional beggars in London at
15,000, two-thirds of whom are Irish. 30,000 men, women, and children
are employed in the costermonger trade; besides, we have, according to
Mr. Mayhew, 2000 street sellers of green stuff, 4000 street sellers of
eatables and drinkables, 1000 street sellers of stationery, 4000 street
sellers of other articles, whose receipts are three millions sterling,
and whose incomes may be put down at one. Let us extend our survey, and
we shall not wonder that the public-houses--and the gin palaces--and the
casinos--and the theatres--and the penny gaffs--and the lowest and vilest
places of resort in London, are full. In Spitalfields there are 70,000
weavers with but 10_s._ per week; there are 22,479 tailors, 30,805
shoemakers, 43,928 milliners; seamstresses, 21,210; bonnet-makers, 1769;
cap-makers, 1277. What hard, wretched work is theirs!
In the first week of January this present year, a poor woman named Martha
Duke was brought up at the Thames police office, charged with attempting
to commit suicide. She was a poor needle-woman, and found the misery of
that mode of life greater than could be borne. Speaking not of this case
in particular, but of needlewomen in general, Mr. Burch, the resident
medical officer of the London Hospital, stated that "a large number of
patients had been under his care, and he had carefully investigated a
considerable number of cases, and was satisfied that needle-women were
the most ill-paid class of people and the most hard-working on earth.
They were miserably paid," he added, "and he knew that numbers of them,
with constitutions broken down, earned from 3_s._ to 4_s._ per week only,
and for that scanty pittance were compelled to work from three o'clock in
the morning till ten at night. They soon became enfeebled by
insufficient diet and over-work, and when broken down either had recourse
to suicide or prostitution." In 1844 the operative tailors instituted an
inquiry into the sweating system, and then it was found that there were
at the West End 676 men, women, and children working under sweaters, and
occupying 92 small rooms, the majority of which measured eight feet by
ten. The sweater, it may be as well to state, is the man who contracts
with the large houses to supply them with shirts, or clothes, or any
other kind of slop work; the more his victims sweat, the more are his
gains. The sweater is often a Jew, never a Christian.
Let the reader walk with us to a fashionable clothing establishment--a
mart, we believe, as it is called. The building, as you approach it,
seems a palace. It is redolent with polished mahogany and plate-glass
and gilt. You pass it when the lamps are lit, and you think of the
Arabian Nights. It is illuminated as if peace had just been proclaimed,
or some great national desire had been realised. You enter with cash,
and all is fair and smooth within. Whatever you want in the way of
apparel is there, and at a price for which no honest tradesman can afford
to sell it. Honest! asks the reader, is not the man honest? Does he
steal the cloth? Certainly not. Does he not pay rent, and taxes, and
wages? Most certainly he does. Do not his creditors all get twenty
shillings in the pound? Most undoubtedly they do; the law protects them,
and with them the man, willing or not, must keep himself right. So far
as they are concerned, honesty is the best policy. How, then, does he
make his profit? How is this monster establishment maintained? Out of
what fund is it that its glitter and glare are paid for? We shall now
see. Come down this stinking court. Go up those creaking stairs. Enter
that miserable garret. Look at those men, who know nothing of labour but
its curse, and of life but its misery. Mark the haggard faces already
stamped with the impress of death. If you can bear the polluted
atmosphere, you will hear from these men how they toil from early morning
far into the night for two shillings a day; how for them the fine air and
the golden sunshine, and the rest of the sabbath, exist not; and it is by
them, by their sweat and blood and sinew, that the profit is made. And
now go back and look into the gilded shop, and it will seem to you a
Golgotha--a place of skulls. Is another illustration needed? Up in yon
miserable chamber, without fire--without food--without furniture--almost
without clothes, Martha Duke is stitching to earn the few pence by which
she prolongs life, and its misery. Once, youth was hers, with its bright
hopes and joys; but they are gone, and with an aching heart and pallid
brow she plies her daily task. Is it wonderful that, wanting coals or
something better than dry bread, the shirt or the waistcoat should be
pawned? Is it not more wonderful that such bleak and hopeless poverty
should be so honest as it is? And yet from such poor forlorn, forgotten
women as these, proceed the profits which pay for dazzling window and
gorgeous pile. Is it strange that the city missionaries for last year
show an increase of fallen women in their districts of 1035?
Bear in mind also that corporal labourers are shorter lived and endure
more physical evil than the mental labourers. The coal-whippers'
work--the most wasteful, unscientific, and pernicious expenditure of
human muscle ever devised, writes Dr Chambers--overstrains the fibres of
the heart, and the organs become diseased. Painters again are liable to
palsy and colic, from the use of white lead. The tailor sits till the
stomach and bowels becomes disordered, the spine twisted, the gait
shambling, and the power of taking the exercise necessary to health
obliterated. Shoemakers and bootmakers suffer equally from a constrained
position and the pressure of the last against the stomach. Heart-burn
and indigestion are so common among them, that a pill in the Pharmacopeia
is called the cobbler's pill. Then there is the baker's malady, which
carries off a large proportion of its victims. Dressmakers are
peculiarly subject to the attacks of consumption; workwomen constantly
suffer from varicose veins.
There are two worlds in London, with a gulf between--the rich and the
poor. We have glanced at the latter; for the sake of contrast let us
look at the former. Emerson says the wealth of London determines prices
all over the globe. The revenue of the corporation of the city of London
for 1856 was 2,595,216 pounds 16_s._ 4.5_d._ In 1853 the money coined in
the mint was 11,952,391 pounds in gold, and 701,544 pounds in silver.
The business of the Bank of England is conducted by about 800 clerks,
whose salaries amount to about 200,000 pounds. The Bank in 1857 had
26,683,790 pounds bank notes in circulation. In the same year there were
about 5 millions deposited in the Savings Banks of the metropolis. The
gross Customs revenue of the port of London in 1849 was 11,070,176
pounds. 65 millions is the estimate formed by Mr M'Culloch of the total
value of the produce conveyed into and from London. The gross rental as
assessed by the property and income tax is 12.5 millions. The gross
property insured is 166,000,000 pounds, and only two-fifths of the houses
are insured. The amount of capital at the command of the entire London
bankers may be estimated at 64 millions; the insurance companies have
always 10 millions of deposits ready for investment. 78 millions are
employed in discounts. In 1841 the transactions of one London house
amounted to 30 millions. In 1840 the payments made in the clearing house
were 974,580,600 pounds,--an enormous sum, which will appear still
greater when we remember all sums under 100 pounds are omitted from this
statement. All this business cannot be carried on without a considerable
amount of eating and drinking. The population consumes annually 277,000
bullocks, 30,000 calves, 1,480,000 sheep, 34,000 pigs, 1,600,000 quarters
of wheat, 310,464,000 pounds of potatoes, 89,672,000 cabbages. Of fish
the returns are almost incredible. Besides, it eats 2,742,000 fowls,
1,281,000 game. Exclusive of those brought from the different parts of
the united kingdom, from 70 to 75 millions of eggs are annually imported
into London from France and other countries. About 13,000 cows are kept
in the city and its environs for the supply of milk and cream; and if we
add to their value that of the cheese, and butter, and milk, brought from
the country into the city, the expenditure on dairy produce must be
enormous. Then London consumes 65,000 pipes of wine, 2,000,000 gallons
of spirits, 43,200,000 gallons of porter and ale, and burns 3,000,000
tons of coal; and I have seen it estimated that one-fourth of the
commerce of the nation is carried on in its port. On Boxing Night it was
estimated that 60,000 persons visited the various theatres and places of
amusement in London. In 1856, 361,714 persons visited the British
Museum; 161,764, Hampton Court; 344,140 went to Kew Gardens. The total
number of bathers in the Serpentine were 20,000 persons. On the last
Derby, the South Western Company alone conveyed 37,700 passengers. In
London in 1853, according to Sir R. Mayne, there were 3613 beer shops,
5279 public houses, 13 wine rooms. The theatres and saloons licensed by
the Lord Chamberlain are, the Haymarket Theatre, Adelphi, Olympic,
Princess's, Strand, Surrey, Queen's, Soho, City of London, Marylebone,
Standard, Pavilion, Victoria, Sadler's Wells, St James's, Lyceum,
Astley's, Her Majesty's, Drury Lane, Grecian Saloon, Albert, Britannia,
Bower, Earl of Effingham. Literary Institutions shut up. The Great
Globe itself is a doubtful property. That beautiful building, the
Panopticon in Leicester-square, was a failure, and the Adelaide Gallery
has long been closed. An attempt was made to form an educational
association in Charing Cross, where, by means of a library and cheap
lectures, the popular mind could be improved and instructed and amused,
but the attempt did not succeed; dancing, drinking, theatrical
representations,--most of them adaptations from the French,--music, are
the only pleasures which a London population cared for. Even as in the
old Hebrew days, Wisdom lifts up her voice in our streets, and no man
regards her testimony.
And now to guard all this wealth, to preserve all this mass of industry
honest, and to keep down all this crime, what have we? 5847 police,
costing 434,081 pounds, 13 police courts, costing 67,006 pounds, and
about a dozen criminal prisons; 69 union relieving officers, 316 officers
of local boards, and 1256 other local officers. We have 35 weekly
magazines, 9 daily newspapers, 5 evening, 72 weekly ones. Independently
of the mechanics' institutions, colleges, and endowed schools, we have
14,000 children of both sexes clothed and educated gratis, and the
National and British and Foreign Schools in all parts of London, and
Sunday schools. We have Bartholomew's Hospital, relieving, in 1856,
in-patients 5933, out-patients 78,443; Guy's Hospital; St Thomas's, with
4531 in-patients, outpatients, 34,281; St George's; the Middlesex, last
year relieving 2268 in-patients, and 16,844 out-patients; the London, the
King's College, the University College, and many more. In the Cancer
Hospital last year 2500 patients were treated: then there are Bedlam, the
Foundling Hospital, the Philanthropic Institution, the Magdalen. In the
report of the Statistical Society of London it is stated that 14 general
hospitals in London possess an income from realised property to the
amount of 109,687 pounds; annual subscriptions, 17,091 pounds; donations,
16,636 pounds; legacies, 10,206 pounds; and their miscellaneous sources
of income to 1996 pounds. The total income of all these hospitals from
every source is 155,616 pounds; and the annual contributions of the
public amount to 45,929 pounds. In addition to the above hospitals there
are in this metropolis 36 special hospitals, possessing an aggregate
income of 117,218 pounds; making the income of the general and special
hospitals taken together amount to 272,834 pounds. There are also
returns from 42 general dispensaries, possessing incomes from all sources
of 21,000 pounds; and 18 special dispensaries, with annual incomes of
8064 pounds. If these two sums, making 29,064 pounds, be added to the
former, it gives the enormous amount of 301,898 pounds annually expended
in medical charities in this metropolis; and this sum, large as it is,
excludes Samaritan and other funds connected with hospitals and
dispensaries, poor-law medical relief (28,776 pounds), cost of
maintenance of pauper lunatics (79,988 pounds), vaccination (4292
pounds), and nurses' training institutions. All these sums would make a
grand total of nearly half a million expended on our sick poor. The City
Missionaries now number 325, and every missionary visits once a month
about 500 families or 2800 persons. The Ragged School Union has its
ramifications in every part of the metropolis. Their returns are 128
Sunday Schools with 16,937 scholars in attendance; 98 day ditto, with
13,057; 117 evening schools with 8085; and 84 industrial classes with
3224. London has 12 societies for the reformation of life and public
morals with a total income of 11,583 pounds; 18 for reclaiming the
fallen, and staying the progress of crime, with 35,036 pounds; 14 for the
relief of general destitution and distress, with 23,880 pounds; 12 for
the relief of specified distress, with 29,881 pounds; 14 for aiding the
resources of the industrious, with 7246 pounds; 11 for the blind, deaf,
and dumb, with 34,762 pounds; 103 colleges, hospitals, and other asylums
for the aged (exclusive of Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals, 83,047
pounds); 16 charitable pension societies, with 18,989 pounds; 74
charitable and provident societies, chiefly for specified classes, with
103,227 pounds; 31 asylums for orphans and other necessitous children,
with 81,015 pounds; 10 educational foundations, exclusive of libraries,
modern colleges, or proprietary schools, 93,112 pounds; 4 charitable
ditto, with 13,300 pounds; 40 school societies, religious book,
church-aiding, and Christian instructing, irrespective of government
grants or establishments, with an income, taking the sale of
publications, as much as 318,189 pounds. Mr Low gives the total number
of charitable institutions as 500; Mr Mayhew puts down their number as
530. Then there are 100 temperance meetings held weekly. May we not
hope that all these institutions have some effect, that by means of them
some are reclaimed, and many saved?
The more direct religious agency may be estimated as follows. In the
Handbook to Places of Worship, published by Low, in 1851, there is a list
of 371 churches and chapels in connexion with the Establishment; the
number of church sittings, according to Mr Mann, is 409,184; the
Independents have about 140 places of worship and 100,436 sittings; the
Baptists, 130 chapels, and accommodation for 54,234; the Methodists, 154
chapels, 60,696; the Presbyterians, 23 chapels and 18,211 sittings; the
Unitarians, 9 chapels and about 3300 sittings; the Roman Catholics, 35
chapels and 35,994 sittings; 4 Quaker chapels, with sittings for 3151;
the Moravians have two chapels, with 1100 sittings; the Jews have 11
synagogues and 3692 sittings. There are 94 chapels belonging to the New
Church, the Plymouth Brethren, the Irvingites, the Latter-Day Saints,
Sandemanians, Lutherans, French Protestants, Greeks, Germans, Italians,
which chapels have sittings for 18,833. We thus get 691,723 attendants
on divine exercises.
Those who know London life will know that I have not glanced at its
darkest side: any man of the world will tell you infamies which I may not
name here. I do not go so far as Mr Patmore, and affirm that in the
higher ranks of life a young man is obliged to keep a mistress to avoid
being laughed at; but I can conceive of no city more sunk in
licentiousness and rascality than ours. Paris, Hamburgh, Vienna, may be
as bad, but they cannot be worse. The poor are looked after by the
police--visited by the city missionary; their wants and woes are worked
up into newspaper articles, and they live as it were in houses of glass.
It is true that one half the world does not know how the other half
lives; but it is not true in the sense in which it is generally affirmed.
Who ever has an idea that a pious baronet, taking the chair at a
religious meeting in Exeter Hall, will prove a felon; that that house,
eminent in the mercantile and philanthropic world, will sanction the
circulation of forged Dock warrants; that that manager, about to engage
in prayer at a meeting of directors, will turn out to be the manager of
the greatest swindle of modern times? Who sees a dishonoured suicide in
the patriotic Sadleir, or in the philanthropic Redpath a convict for
life, or in the dashing Robson a maniac? If I tell you that respectable
old gentleman now coming out of his club is going to inspect a fresh
victim, whom some procuress has lured with devilish art, you will tell me
that I am uncharitable; or if I point you to that well-appointed equipage
in the Park, and tell you that that fair young girl that sits within has
crushed many a young wife's heart, and has sent many a man to the devil
before his time, you will tell me I exaggerate: I do nothing of the kind.
If I were to tell what most men know--what everyone knows, except those
whose business it is to know it, and to seek to reform it--I should be
charged with indelicacy, as if truth could be indelicate, and my book
perhaps suppressed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice--if that
abortion exists still. We are choked up with cant; almost everything we
believe in is a lie. The prayer of Ajax should be ours,--Light--more
light.
What are we to do?--to stand stock still, looking to heaven "with a
frenzied air, as if to ask if a God were there?" One can almost believe,
with George Gilfillan, that the earth needs a new gospel and a new
manifestation of divine power. From this low estate who is to rescue us?
Not the aristocracy, a barbarous institution, perpetrating barbarous
ideas in our midst,--that work is not honourable; whereas all true
civilization points us to the fact, that man is only happy and virtuous
as he is steadily industrious; and thus our most uncivilized classes are
our upper and lower,--our lords and ladies on one side, and our rogues
and prostitutes on the other. Not our law-makers, who imprison our young
lads in costly jails, where the criminals have luxuries denied to the
poor; and then in Newgate, or at the public works, mix them all up
together, that the comparatively innocent may learn to be adepts in
crime. Not our religious, I fear, when, from the Archbishop of
Canterbury down to Dr Cumming, the cry is, If you have a proper
translation of the Bible you will destroy the faith of the people. Not
our trading classes, becoming richer and more sunk in flunkeyism every
day. But it may be that these--
"Are graves from which a glorious phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day."
Whom am I to blame? Not the victims, but the fathers, and mothers, and
divines, and schoolmasters, and governing classes. Father, you have
given your bold, manly son an emasculated religion,--a religion that
wilfully shuts its eyes, and will not look upon life as it is; and,
immediately he goes into the world, away vanish all the pasteboard
defences with which you childishly sought to guard him; and yet you will
not confess that in inculcating religious creeds,--that in teaching
children catechisms,--that in vaguely telling them to be good,--that in
leading them to believe in forms rather than truths, you are only damming
up for a while the passionate impulses of young blood, that they may
ultimately exert a more tumultuous and irresistible sway. You take the
little Arab of the streets, and, for acts of levity and wantonness which
all boys commit, you send him to prison, at an age when you confess he is
not a responsible creature, and then idiotically wonder that he turns out
a criminal, and that he wars with society till he is hanged. You are
surprised that woman, fond of praise, of dress, and pleasure, should
prefer to walk the street in silk and satin, to have a short life and a
merry one, rather than slave and drudge, and end her days after all in a
workhouse. You tone down your fashionably educated daughters into
automatons, and then wonder that hot youth finds domestic life tame and
dull. Above all, do not go away with the idea that we have reached the
utmost height of civilization,--that we are a model people,--that it is
our mission to set up as teachers of religion to all mankind. Let us
remember that the increase of crime and dissipation are facts; that there
can be no corrupter city than London, and that it must be so, so long as
we make professions our practice so scandalously denies. I have heard
Her Majesty's proclamation against vice and immorality read at
quarter-sessions by men in whose reading it became a farce which the most
ignorant bumpkin in court could relish. Now we are going to do wonders,
the policeman is to supplement the parson, the wicked are to be hunted
down. Is this the way seriously to set about moral reform? Routine and
officialism in church and state have made the outside of the sepulchre
white enough; do we not need a little cleansing within? How long will
men look for grapes from thorns?