I took yesterday an afternoon’s country-drive to a neighboring town,
with no idea of finding anything of note-worthy interest, but it strikes
me that one or two little matters that made a mark in my memory, may be
worth recording. England is so paved and hedged with matter to think
about, that you can scarce stir without pencilling by the way.
I strolled towards a very picturesque church while the ladies of my
party were shopping. The town (Abingdon) is a tumbled-up, elbowy,
crooked old place, with the houses all frowning at each other across the
gutters, and the streets narrow and intricate. The church was a rough
antique, with the mendings of a century or two on the originally
beautiful turrets and windows, but as I walked around it, I came upon
the church-yard, hemmed in at awkward angles by three long and venerable
buildings. Two of these seemed to have been built with proper reference
to the climate, for the lower stories were faced with covered galleries,
wherein the occupants might take the air, and yet be sheltered from the
rain. Through the low arches of one of the galleries, I saw a couple of
old men pacing up and down, and on inquiring of one of them, I found it
was a poor-house, of curious as well as ancient endowment—the funds
being devoted to the support of twenty-five widowers and as many widows.
What else, (beside being left destitute) was necessary to make one a
recipient of the charity, I could not learn of my informant. He ushered
me, however, into his apartment, and a charming little rubbishy,
odd-angled, confused cupboard it was! I could not but mentally
congratulate him on the difference between his _snuggery for one_, (for
each man had a niche to himself,) and the dreadfully whitewashed halls,
like new churches that have never been prayed in, in which the poor are
elsewhere imprisoned. He had old shoes lying in one corner, and a smoked
print stuck against the wall, and things hung up and stuffed away
untidily, here and there—in short, it looked like a _home_! The whole
building was but a row of these single rooms—a long, one-storied and
narrow structure, and behind was a garden with a portion divided off to
each pensioner—his window so near that he could sit in-doors and inhale
the fragrance from flowers of his own tending. I rather think every man
was his own turnkey and superintendent.
But we visited in the course of the afternoon, a poor-house which was in
direct contrast to this. Abingdon is distinguished for possessing the
_model work-house_ of the new _Union System_, which has diminished the
burthensome cost of the poor, to the country, one half. It used to be
customary to give the helpless paupers two shillings a week, and let
them shift for themselves, if they preferred it. Now, the poor of half a
dozen villages, more or less, are provided for in one “improved”
work-house, and if they do not live _in it_, they can receive nothing.
And, to live in it, they must work and submit to the discipline.
The new work-house was a building of three long wings, in the form of a
Y; the superintendent’s room placed in the crotch, and his windows
commanding a complete view of the two sides of each wing. The gardens
and workshops were in the angles, and there was scarce an inch of the
premises that was not overlooked from the centre. We were kindly shown
over the different apartments. The cleanliness was enough to discourage
a fly. A smell of soap-and-water’s utmost completely impregnated the
atmosphere. The grain of the scrubbed tables stood on end. The little
straight beds looked as if it must be a bold man who would crook his
legs in them. The windows were too high for a child or a short person to
look out. It was like an insane hospital or a prison. In one of the
first rooms we entered, was a delicate and pretty child of seven or
eight years of age, a new inmate. Her mother, who was her only relative,
had just died in a neighboring village, and left her quite alone in the
world. She was shut up in a room with an old woman, for by the
“regulations,” she was to be separated some days from the other
children, to make sure that she brought no disease into the work-house.
But the sight of the poor little sobbing thing, sitting on the middle of
a long clean bench, with no object to look at within the four white
walls, except a table and a soured old woman, looked very little like
“charity.” And the hopeless down-hill of her sob sounded as if she felt
but little like one newly befriended. “She’s done nothing but cry all
the day long!” said the old woman. Fortunately I had a pocket full of
sweets, intended for a happier child, and I was able to make one break
in her long day’s monotony.
In another room we found ten or twelve old women, who were too decrepid
for work of any kind. But they _had laps left_![6] And in each one’s lap
lay a baby. The old knees were trotting with the new-born of pauper
mothers, and but for its dreadful uniformity—each old trunk grafted
with a bud, and trunks and buds dressed and swathed in the poor-house
uniform—this room full of life’s helpless extremities would have seemed
the happiest of all. They cuddled up their druling charges as we
approached the benches on which they sat, and chirruped their toothless
“tsup! tsup! tsup!” as if each was proud of her charge. One of the old
women complained bitterly of not being allowed to have a pinch of snuff.
The reason why, was because the others would want it too, or demand an
equivalent, paupers being cared for _by system_. The unhappy and
improvident creature had educated a superfluous want!
The sick rooms were marked with the same painful naked neatness. Old
people, disposed of to die, economically tucked up in rows against the
wall, with no person to come near them except the one to nurse a dozen,
form a dreadful _series_. Really, there should be some things sacred
from classification. The fifth acts of dramas, like whole human lives,
should not pass like the shelving of utensils that are one degree short
of worthless. I stood looking for a minute or two at an old man whose
only reply to “well, how are you now?” was a hopeless lifting and
dropping of the eyelids, and I wondered whether a life was worth having,
that had such possible terminations in its dark lottery.
The children’s school seemed under more genial charge, and there were
prints hung upon the walls of their school-room. The weaving and
spinning-rooms looked cheerful also. Some thirty boys singing hymns
together while at work, and seeming contentedly employed. To the old of
both sexes, however, this kind of poor-house is utterly repulsive, I was
told, and the taking refuge in it is considered by the poor hardly
better than starvation. One of the rules seems to bear very
hard—married paupers (an old couple for instance,) being put into
different wards, and only permitted to see each other _once a week_, and
then in the presence of superintendents.
The flower-beds at the front door were in great splendor with the
lillies in bloom. I called the door keeper’s attention to the
inappropriateness of this particular ornament to the threshold of a
work-house. “They toil not, neither do they spin,” etc., etc., etc.
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[6] Bloomers please take notice.