The world, they say, changed more between the year 1800 and the year
1900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century,
the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of
mankind--the epoch of the great cities, the end of the old order of
country life.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of mankind still
lived upon the countryside, as their way of life had been for countless
generations. All over the world they dwelt in little towns and villages
then, and engaged either directly in agriculture, or in occupations that
were of service to the agriculturist. They travelled rarely, and dwelt
close to their work, because swift means of transit had not yet come.
The few who travelled went either on foot, or in slow sailing-ships, or
by means of jogging horses incapable of more than sixty miles a day.
Think of it!--sixty miles a day. Here and there, in those sluggish
times, a town grew a little larger than its neighbours, as a port or as
a centre of government; but all the towns in the world with more than a
hundred thousand inhabitants could be counted on a man's fingers. So it
was in the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end, the
invention of railways, telegraphs, steamships, and complex agricultural
machinery, had changed all these things: changed them beyond all hope of
return. The vast shops, the varied pleasures, the countless conveniences
of the larger towns were suddenly possible, and no sooner existed than
they were brought into competition with the homely resources of the
rural centres. Mankind were drawn to the cities by an overwhelming
attraction. The demand for labour fell with the increase of machinery,
the local markets were entirely superseded, and there was a rapid growth
of the larger centres at the expense of the open country.
The flow of population townward was the constant preoccupation of
Victorian writers. In Great Britain and New England, in India and China,
the same thing was remarked: everywhere a few swollen towns were visibly
replacing the ancient order. That this was an inevitable result of
improved means of travel and transport--that, given swift means of
transit, these things must be--was realised by few; and the most puerile
schemes were devised to overcome the mysterious magnetism of the urban
centres, and keep the people on the land.
Yet the developments of the nineteenth century were only the dawning of
the new order. The first great cities of the new time were horribly
inconvenient, darkened by smoky fogs, insanitary and noisy; but the
discovery of new methods of building, new methods of heating, changed
all this. Between 1900 and 2000 the march of change was still more
rapid; and between 2000 and 2100 the continually accelerated progress of
human invention made the reign of Victoria the Good seem at last an
almost incredible vision of idyllic tranquil days.
The introduction of railways was only the first step in that development
of those means of locomotion which finally revolutionised human life. By
the year 2000 railways and roads had vanished together. The railways,
robbed of their rails, had become weedy ridges and ditches upon the face
of the world; the old roads, strange barbaric tracks of flint and soil,
hammered by hand or rolled by rough iron rollers, strewn with
miscellaneous filth, and cut by iron hoofs and wheels into ruts and
puddles often many inches deep, had been replaced by patent tracks made
of a substance called Eadhamite. This Eadhamite--it was named after its
patentee--ranks with the invention of printing and steam as one of the
epoch-making discoveries of the world's history.
When Eadham discovered the substance, he probably thought of it as a
mere cheap substitute for india rubber; it cost a few shillings a ton.
But you can never tell all an invention will do. It was the genius of a
man named Warming that pointed to the possibility of using it, not only
for the tires of wheels, but as a road substance, and who organised the
enormous network of public ways that speedily covered the world.
These public ways were made with longitudinal divisions. On the outer on
either side went foot cyclists and conveyances travelling at a less
speed than twenty-five miles an hour; in the middle, motors capable of
speed up to a hundred; and the inner, Warming (in the face of enormous
ridicule) reserved for vehicles travelling at speeds of a hundred miles
an hour and upward.
For ten years his inner ways were vacant. Before he died they were the
most crowded of all, and vast light frameworks with wheels of twenty and
thirty feet in diameter, hurled along them at paces that year after year
rose steadily towards two hundred miles an hour. And by the time this
revolution was accomplished, a parallel revolution had transformed the
ever-growing cities. Before the development of practical science the
fogs and filth of Victorian times vanished. Electric heating replaced
fires (in 2013 the lighting of a fire that did not absolutely consume
its own smoke was made an indictable nuisance), and all the city ways,
all public squares and places, were covered in with a recently invented
glass-like substance. The roofing of London became practically
continuous. Certain short-sighted and foolish legislation against tall
buildings was abolished, and London, from a squat expanse of petty
houses--feebly archaic in design--rose steadily towards the sky. To the
municipal responsibility for water, light, and drainage, was added
another, and that was ventilation.
But to tell of all the changes in human convenience that these two
hundred years brought about, to tell of the long foreseen invention of
flying, to describe how life in households was steadily supplanted by
life in interminable hotels, how at last even those who were still
concerned in agricultural work came to live in the towns and to go to
and fro to their work every day, to describe how at last in all England
only four towns remained, each with many millions of people, and how
there were left no inhabited houses in all the countryside: to tell all
this would take us far from our story of Denton and his Elizabeth. They
had been separated and reunited, and still they could not marry. For
Denton--it was his only fault--had no money. Neither had Elizabeth until
she was twenty-one, and as yet she was only eighteen. At twenty-one all
the property of her mother would come to her, for that was the custom of
the time. She did not know that it was possible to anticipate her
fortune, and Denton was far too delicate a lover to suggest such a
thing. So things stuck hopelessly between them. Elizabeth said that she
was very unhappy, and that nobody understood her but Denton, and that
when she was away from him she was wretched; and Denton said that his
heart longed for her day and night. And they met as often as they could
to enjoy the discussion of their sorrows.
They met one day at their little seat upon the flying stage. The precise
site of this meeting was where in Victorian times the road from
Wimbledon came out upon the common. They were, however, five hundred
feet above that point. Their seat looked far over London. To convey the
appearance of it all to a nineteenth-century reader would have been
difficult. One would have had to tell him to think of the Crystal
Palace, of the newly built "mammoth" hotels--as those little affairs
were called--of the larger railway stations of his time, and to imagine
such buildings enlarged to vast proportions and run together and
continuous over the whole metropolitan area. If then he was told that
this continuous roof-space bore a huge forest of rotating wind-wheels,
he would have begun very dimly to appreciate what to these young people
was the commonest sight in their lives.
To their eyes it had something of the quality of a prison, and they were
talking, as they had talked a hundred times before, of how they might
escape from it and be at last happy together: escape from it, that is,
before the appointed three years were at an end. It was, they both
agreed, not only impossible but almost wicked, to wait three years.
"Before that," said Denton--and the notes of his voice told of a
splendid chest--"_we might both be dead_!"
Their vigorous young hands had to grip at this, and then Elizabeth had a
still more poignant thought that brought the tears from her wholesome
eyes and down her healthy cheeks. "_One_ of us," she said, "_one_ of us
might be--"
She choked; she could not say the word that is so terrible to the young
and happy.
Yet to marry and be very poor in the cities of that time was--for any
one who had lived pleasantly--a very dreadful thing. In the old
agricultural days that had drawn to an end in the eighteenth century
there had been a pretty proverb of love in a cottage; and indeed in
those days the poor of the countryside had dwelt in flower-covered,
diamond-windowed cottages of thatch and plaster, with the sweet air and
earth about them, amidst tangled hedges and the song of birds, and with
the ever-changing sky overhead. But all this had changed (the change was
already beginning in the nineteenth century), and a new sort of life was
opening for the poor--in the lower quarters of the city.
In the nineteenth century the lower quarters were still beneath the sky;
they were areas of land on clay or other unsuitable soil, liable to
floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate districts,
insufficiently supplied with water, and as insanitary as the great fear
of infectious diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted. In the
twenty-second century, however, the growth of the city storey above
storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous
hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial
population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so
to speak, of the place.
In the refinement of life and manners these lower classes differed
little from their ancestors, the East-enders of Queen Victoria's time;
but they had developed a distinct dialect of their own. In these under
ways they lived and died, rarely ascending to the surface except when
work took them there. Since for most of them this was the sort of life
to which they had been born, they found no great misery in such
circumstances; but for people like Denton and Elizabeth, such a plunge
would have seemed more terrible than death.
"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.
Denton professed not to know. Apart from his own feeling of delicacy, he
was not sure how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing on the
strength of her expectations.
The passage from London to Paris even, said Elizabeth, was beyond their
means; and in Paris, as in any other city in the world, life would be
just as costly and impossible as in London.
Well might Denton cry aloud: "If only we had lived in those days,
dearest! If only we had lived in the past!" For to their eyes even
nineteenth-century Whitechapel was seen through a mist of romance.
"Is there _nothing_?" cried Elizabeth, suddenly weeping. "Must we really
wait for those three long years? Fancy _three_ years--six-and-thirty
months!" The human capacity for patience had not grown with the ages.
Then suddenly Denton was moved to speak of something that had already
flickered across his mind. He had hit upon it at last. It seemed to him
so wild a suggestion that he made it only half seriously. But to put a
thing into words has ever a way of making it seem more real and possible
than it seemed before. And so it was with him.
"Suppose," he said, "we went into the country?"
She looked at him to see if he was serious in proposing such an
adventure.
"The country?"
"Yes--beyond there. Beyond the hills."
"How could we live?" she said. "_Where_ could we live?"
"It is not impossible," he said. "People used to live in the country."
"But then there were houses."
"There are the ruins of villages and towns now. On the clay lands they
are gone, of course. But they are still left on the grazing land,
because it does not pay the Food Company to remove them. I know
that--for certain. Besides, one sees them from the flying machines, you
know. Well, we might shelter in some one of these, and repair it with
our hands. Do you know, the thing is not so wild as it seems. Some of
the men who go out every day to look after the crops and herds might be
paid to bring us food...."
She stood in front of him. "How strange it would be if one really
could...."
"Why not?"
"But no one dares."
"That is no reason."
"It would be--oh! it would be so romantic and strange. If only it were
possible."
"Why not possible?"
"There are so many things. Think of all the things we have, things that
we should miss."
"Should we miss them? After all, the life we lead is very unreal--very
artificial." He began to expand his idea, and as he warmed to his
exposition the fantastic quality of his first proposal faded away.