I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang
I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to
my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have
been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But
would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it
could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to
give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to
make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly
handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in
this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals
to one’s pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at
Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity
without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or
day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I
perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of
somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better.
The thing ought to be looked into.
At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were
running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one
place there was a little oblong building between branching streets,
round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called,
on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who
were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some
dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and
they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or
their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work
at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that
south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger.
Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by
a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers
of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked
as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of
cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced
to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had
denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to
think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down
tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set
behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought
to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into
the boy’s wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He
looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did
as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never
did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I
felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting
the populace for my selfish pleasure.