summed up the three suspicious characters, observed: “I first
discovered them in Holborn three nights ago, when I was on duty in
plain clothes. I don’t exactly yet know rightly what their little game
is; but it’s either dog-stealing or ‘picking up.’ This is how they
do it. The woman looks out for a ‘mug,’ that is a drunken fellow, or
a stupid, foolish sort of fellow. She then stops him in the street,
talks to him, and pays particular attention to his jewellery, watch,
and every thing of that sort, of which she attempts to rob him. If
he offers any resistance, or makes a noise, one of her bullies comes
up, and either knocks him down by a blow under the ear, or exclaims:
‘What are you talking to my wife for?’ and that’s how the thing’s done,
sir, that’s exactly how these chaps do the trick. I found out where
they live yesterday. It’s somewhere down near Barbican, Golden Lane;
the name’s a bad, ruffianly, thievish place. They are being watched
to-night, although they don’t know it. I planted a man on them.” Two
women were standing just outside the same public. They were dressed in
a curious assortment of colours, as the low English invariably are, and
their faces had a peculiar unctuous appearance, somewhat Israelitish,
as if their diet from day to day consisted of fried fish and dripping.
The sergeant knew them well, and they knew him, for they accosted him.
“One of these women,” he said, “is the cleverest thief out. I’ve known
her twelve years. She was in the first time for robbing a public. I’ll
tell you how it was. She was a pretty woman--a very pretty woman--then,
and had been kept by a man who allowed her 4_l._ a week for some time.
She was very quiet too, never went about anywhere, never knocked about
at night publics or any of those places; but she got into bad company,
and was in for this robbery. She and her accomplices got up a row in
the bar, everything being concerted before hand; they put out the
lights, set all the taps running, and stole a purse, a watch, and some
other things; but we nabbed them all, and, strange to say, one of the
women thieves died the next day from the effects of drink. All these
women are great gluttons, and when they get any money, they go in for
a regular drink and debauch. This one drank so much that it positively
killed her slick off.”
At the corner of Drury Lane I saw three women standing talking
together. They were innocent of crinoline, and the antiquity of their
bonnets and shawls was really wonderful, while the durability of the
fabric of which they were composed was equally remarkable. Their
countenances were stolid, and their skin hostile to the application
of soap and water. The hair of one was tinged with silver. They were
inured to the rattle of their harness; the clank of the chains pleased
them. They had _grown grey_ as prostitutes.
I learnt from my companion that “that lot was an inexpensive luxury;
it showed the sterility of the neighbourhood. They would go home with
a man for a shilling, and think themselves well paid, while sixpence
was rather an exorbitant amount for the temporary accommodation their
vagrant amour would require.”
There were a good many of them about. They lived for the most part in
small rooms at eighteen pence, two shillings, and half-a-crown a week,
in the small streets running out of Drury Lane.
We went down Charles Street, Drury Lane, a small street near the Great
Mogul public-house. I was surprised at the number of clean-looking,
respectable lodging-houses to be seen in this street, and indeed in
almost every street thereabouts. Many of them were well-ventilated,
and chiefly resorted to by respectable mechanics. They are under the
supervision of the police, and the time of a sergeant is wholly taken
up in inspecting them. Visits are made every day, and if the Act of
Parliament by the provisions of which they are allowed to exist, and
by which they are regulated, is broken, their licences are taken away
directly. Some speculators have several of these houses, and keep a
shop as well, full of all sorts of things to supply their lodgers.
There is generally a green blind in the parlour window, upon which
you sometimes see written, Lodgings for Travellers, 3_d._ a night;
or, Lodgings for Gentlemen; or, Lodgings for Single Men. Sometimes
they have Model Lodging-house written in large black letters on a
white ground on the wall. There are also several little shops kept
by general dealers, in contiguity, for the use of the inmates of the
lodging-houses, where they can obtain two pennyworth of meat and “a
haporth” of bread, and everything else in proportion.
There are a great number of costermongers about Drury Lane and that
district, and my informant assured me that they found the profession
very lucrative, for the lower orders, and industrial classes don’t
care about going into shops to make purchases. They infinitely prefer
buying what they want in the open street from the barrow or stall of a
costermonger.
What makes Clare Market so attractive, too, but the stalls and barrows
that abound there.
There are many flower-girls who are sent out by their old gin-drinking
mothers to pick up a few pence in the street by the sale of their
goods. They begin very young, often as young as five and six, and go on
till they are old enough to become prostitutes, when they either leave
off costermongering altogether, or else unite the two professions. They
are chiefly the offspring of Irish parents, or cockney Irish, as they
are called, who are the noisiest, the most pugnacious, unprincipled,
and reckless part of the population of London. There is in Exeter
Street, Strand, a very old established and notorious house of ill-fame,
called the ----, which the police says is always honestly and orderly
conducted. Married women go there with their paramours, for they are
sure of secrecy, and have confidence in the place. It is a house
of accommodation, and much frequented; rich tradesmen are known to
frequent it. They charge ten shillings and upwards for a bed. A man
might go there with a large sum of money in his pocket, and sleep in
perfect security, for no attempt would be made to deprive him of his
property.
There is a coffee-house in Wellington Street, on the Covent Garden side
of the Lyceum Theatre, in fact adjoining the playhouse, where women may
take their men; but the police cannot interfere with it, because it is
a coffee-house, and not a house of ill-fame, properly so called. The
proprietor is not supposed to know who his customers are. A man comes
with a woman and asks for a bed-room; they may be travellers, they may
be a thousand things. A subterranean passage, I am told, running under
the Lyceum connects this with some supper-rooms on the other side of
the theatre, which belongs to the same man who is proprietor of the
coffee and chop house.
We have before spoken of “dress-lodgers:” there are several to be seen
in the Strand. Any one who does not understand the affair, and had
not been previously informed, would fail to observe the badly-dressed
old hag who follows at a short distance the fashionably-attired young
lady, who walks so gaily along the pavement, and who only allows
the elasticity of her step to subside into a quieter measure when
stopping to speak to some likely-looking man who may be passing. If her
overtures are successful she retires with her prey to some den in the
vicinity.
The watcher has a fixed salary of so much per week, and never loses
sight of the dress-lodger, for very plain reasons. The dress-lodger
probably lives some distance from the immoral house by whose owner she
is employed. She comes there in the afternoon badly dressed, and has
good things lent her. Now if she were not watched she might decamp.
She might waste her time in public-houses; she might take her dupes to
other houses of ill-fame, or she might pawn the clothes she has on,
for the keeper could not sue her for a debt contracted for immoral
purposes. The dress-lodger gets as much money from her man as she can
succeed in abstracting, and is given a small percentage on what she
obtains by her employer. The man pays usually five shillings for the
room. Many prostitutes bilk their man; they take him into a house, and
then after he has paid for the room leave him. The dupe complains to
the keeper of the house, but of course fails to obtain any redress.
I happened to see an old woman in the Strand, who is one of the most
hardened beggars in London. She has two children with her, but one she
generally disposes of by placing her in some doorway. The child falls
back on the step, and pretends to be asleep or half-frozen with the
cold. Her naturally pale face gives her a half-starved look, which
completes her pitiable appearance. Any gentleman passing by being
charitably inclined may be imposed upon and induced to touch her on
the shoulder. The child will move slowly and rub her eyes, and the
man, thoroughly deceived, gives her an alms and passes on, when the
little deceiver again composes herself to wait for the next chance.
This occurred while I was looking on; but unfortunately for the child’s
success the policeman on the beat happened to come up, and she made her
retreat to a safer and more convenient locality.
Many novelists, philanthropists, and newspaper writers have dwelt much
upon the horrible character of a series of subterranean chambers or
vaults in the vicinity of the Strand, called the Adelphi Arches. It is
by no means even now understood that these arches are the most innocent
and harmless places in London, whatever they might once have been. A
policeman is on duty there at night, expressly to prevent persons who
have no right or business there from descending into their recesses.
They were probably erected in order to form a foundation for the
Adelphi Terrace. Let us suppose there were then no wharves, and no
embankments, consequently the tide must have ascended and gone inland
some distance, rendering the ground marshy, swampy, and next to
useless. The main arch is a very fine pile of masonry, something like
the Box tunnel on a small scale, while the other, running here and
there like the intricacies of catacombs, looks extremely ghostly and
suggestive of Jack Sheppards, Blueskins, Jonathan Wilds, and others of
the same kind, notwithstanding they are so well lighted with gas. There
is a doorway at the end of a vault leading up towards the Strand, that
has a peculiar tradition attached to it. Not so very many years ago
this door was a back exit from a notorious coffee and gambling house,
where parties were decoyed by thieves, blacklegs, or prostitutes, and
swindled, then drugged, and subsequently thrown from this door into the
darkness of what must have seemed to them another world, and were left,
when they came to themselves, to find their way out as best they could.
My attention was attracted, while in these arches, by the cries and
exclamations of a woman near the river, and proceeding to the spot I
saw a woman sitting on some steps, before what appeared to be a stable,
engaged in a violent altercation with a man who was by profession a
cab proprietor--several of his vehicles were lying about--and who, she
vehemently asserted, was her husband. The man declared she was a common
woman when he met her, and had since become the most drunken creature
it was possible to meet with. The woman put her hand in her pocket and
brandished something in his face, which she triumphantly said was her
marriage-certificate. “That,” she cried, turning to me, “that’s what
licks them. It don’t matter whether I was one of Lot’s daughters afore.
I might have been awful, I don’t say I wasn’t, but I’m his wife, and
this ’ere’s what licks ’em.”
I left them indulging in elegant invectives, and interlarding their
conversation with those polite and admirable metaphors that have
gained so wide-spread a reputation for the famous women who sell fish
in Billingsgate; and I was afterwards informed by a sympathising
bystander, in the shape of a stable-boy, that the inevitable result of
this conjugal altercation would be the incarceration of the woman, by
the husband, in a horse-box, where she might undisturbed sleep off the
effects of her potations, and repent the next day at her leisure. “Neo
dulces amores sperne puer.”
Several showily-dressed, if not actually well-attired women, who
are to be found walking about the Haymarket, live in St. Giles’s
and about Drury Lane. But the lowest class of women, who prostitute
themselves for a shilling or less, are the most curious and remarkable
class in this part. We have spoken of them before as growing grey in
the exercise of their profession. One of them, a woman over forty,
shabbily dressed, and with a disreputable, unprepossessing appearance,
volunteered the following statement for a consideration of a spirituous
nature.
“Times is altered, sir, since I come on the town. I can remember
when all the swells used to come down here-away, instead of going to
the Market; but those times is past, they is, worse luck, but, like
myself, nothing lasts for ever, although I’ve stood my share of wear
and tear, I have. Years ago Fleet Street and the Strand, and Catherine
Street, and all round there was famous for women and houses. Ah! those
were the times. Wish they might come again, but wishing’s no use, it
ain’t. It only makes one miserable a thinking of it. I come up from
the country when I was quite a gal, not above sixteen I dessay. I come
from Dorsetshire, near Lyme Regis, to see a aunt of mine. Father was a
farmer in Dorset, but only in a small way--tenant farmer, as you would
say. I was mighty pleased, you may swear, with London, and liked being
out at night when I could get the chance. One night I went up the area
and stood looking through the railing, when a man passed by, but seeing
me he returned and spoke to me something about the weather. I, like a
child, answered him unsuspectingly enough, and he went on talking about
town and country, asking me, among other things, if I had long been
in London, or if I was born there. I not thinking told him all about
myself; and he went away apparently very much pleased with me, saying
before he went that he was very glad to have made such an agreeable
acquaintance, and if I would say nothing about it he would call for me
about the same time, or a little earlier, if I liked, the next night,
and take me out for a walk. I was, as you may well suppose, delighted,
and never said a word. The next evening I met him as he appointed, and
two or three times subsequently. One night we walked longer than usual,
and I pressed him to return, as I feared my aunt would find me out;
but he said he was so fatigued with walking so far, he would like to
rest a little before he went back again; but if I was very anxious he
would put me in a cab. Frightened about him, for I thought he might be
ill, I preferred risking being found out; and when he proposed that
we should go into some house and sit down I agreed. He said all at
once, as if he had just remembered something, that a very old friend
of his lived near there, and we couldn’t go to a better place, for
she would give us everything we could wish. We found the door half
open when we arrived. ‘How careless,’ said my friend, ‘to leave the
street-door open, any one might get in.’ We entered without knocking,
and seeing a door in the passage standing ajar we went in. My friend
shook hands with an old lady who was talking to several girls dispersed
over different parts of the room, who, she said, were her daughters.
At this announcement some of them laughed, when she got very angry and
ordered them out of the room. Somehow I didn’t like the place, and not
feeling all right I asked to be put in a cab and sent home. My friend
made no objection and a cab was sent for. He, however, pressed me to
have something to drink before I started. I refused to touch any wine,
so I asked for some coffee, which I drank. It made me feel very sleepy,
so sleepy indeed that I begged to be allowed to sit down on the sofa.
They accordingly placed me on the sofa, and advised me to rest a little
while, promising, in order to allay my anxiety, to send a messenger to
my aunt. Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain my
consciousness till the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I
had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a
child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.
“When I became quiet I received a visit from my seducer, in whom I had
placed so much silly confidence. He talked very kindly to me, but I
would not listen to him for some time. He came several times to see
me, and at last said he would take me away if I liked, and give me a
house of my own. Finally, finding how hopeless all was I agreed to his
proposal, and he allowed me four pounds a week. This went on for some
months, till he was tired of me, when he threw me over for some one
else. There is always as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it,
and this I soon discovered.
“Then for some years--ten years, till I was six-and-twenty,--I went
through all the changes of a gay lady’s life, and they’re not a few,
I can tell you. I don’t leave off this sort of life because I’m in a
manner used to it, and what could I do if I did? I’ve no character;
I’ve never been used to do anything, and I don’t see what employment
I stand a chance of getting. Then if I had to sit hours and hours all
day long, and part of the night too, sewing or anything like that, I
should get tired. It would worrit me so; never having been accustomed,
you see, I couldn’t stand it. I lodge in Charles Street, Drury Lane,
now. I did live in Nottingham Court once, and Earls Street. But, Lord,
I’ve lived in a many places you wouldn’t think, and I don’t imagine
you’d believe one half. I’m always a-chopping and a-changing like
the wind as you may say. I pay half-a-crown a week for my bed-room;
it’s clean and comfortable, good enough for such as me. I don’t think
much of my way of life. You folks as has honour, and character, and
feelings, and such, can’t understand how all that’s been beaten out
of people like me. I don’t feel. _I’m used to it._ I did once, more
especial when mother died. I heard on it through a friend of mine, who
told me her last words was of me. I did cry and go on then ever so,
but Lor’, where’s the good of fretting? I arn’t happy either. It isn’t
happiness, but I get enough money to keep me in victuals and drink, and
it’s the drink mostly that keeps me going. You’ve no idea how I look
forward to my drop of gin. It’s everything to me. I don’t suppose I’ll
live much longer, and that’s another thing that pleases me. I don’t
want to live, and yet I don’t care enough about dying to make away with
myself. I arn’t got that amount af feeling that some has, and that’s
where it is I’m kinder ’fraid of it.”
This woman’s tale is a condensation of the philosophy of sinning. The
troubles she had gone through, and her experience of the world, had
made her oblivious of the finer attributes of human nature, and she had
become brutal.
I spoke to another who had been converted at a Social Evil Meeting, but
from a variety of causes driven back to the old way of living.
The first part of her story offered nothing peculiar. She had been on
the town for fifteen years, when a year or so ago she heard of the
Midnight Meeting and Baptist Noel. She was induced from curiosity
to attend; and her feelings being powerfully worked upon by the
extraordinary scene, the surroundings, and the earnestness of the
preacher, she accepted the offer held out to her, and was placed in a
cab with some others, and conveyed to one of the numerous metropolitan
homes, where she was taken care of for some weeks, and furnished with
a small sum of money to return to her friends. When she arrived at
her native village in Essex, she only found her father. Her mother
was dead; her sister at service, and her two brothers had enlisted
in the army. Her father was an old man, supported by the parish; so
it was clear he could not support her. She had a few shillings left,
with which she worked her way back to town, returned to her old haunts,
renewed her acquaintance with her vicious companions, and resumed her
old course of life.
I don’t insert this recital as a reflection upon the refuges and homes,
or mean to asperse the Midnight Meeting movement, which is worthy of
all praise. On the contrary, I have much pleasure in alluding to the
subject and acknowledging the success that has attended the efforts of
the philanthropic gentlemen associated with the Rev. Mr. Baptist Noel.