This street is in the East End. There is no need to say in the East End
of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the
hand of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through
Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will
say: a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus
of slums that hide human creeping things, where filthy men and women
live on penn'orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies
unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his
hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the
Unemployed. And the Unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and
whose enemy is soap: now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with
banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks.
Still another knows the East End only as the place whence begging
letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all perennially
insolvent, and everybody always wants a day in the country. Many and
misty are people's notions of the East End; and each is commonly but the
distorted shadow of a minor feature. Foul slums there are in the East
End, of course, as there are in the West; want and misery there are, as
wherever a host is gathered together to fight for food. But they are not
often spectacular in kind.
Of this street there are about one hundred and fifty yards--on the same
pattern all. It is not pretty to look at. A dingy little brick house
twenty feet high, with three square holes to carry the windows, and an
oblong hole to carry the door, is not a pleasing object; and each side
of this street is formed by two or three score of such houses in a row,
with one front wall in common. And the effect is as of stables.
Round the corner there are a baker's, a chandler's, and a beer-shop.
They are not included in the view from any of the rectangular holes; but
they are well known to every denizen, and the chandler goes to church on
Sunday and pays for his seat. At the opposite end, turnings lead to
streets less rigidly respectable: some where "Mangling done here"
stares from windows, and where doors are left carelessly open; others
where squalid women sit on doorsteps, and girls go to factories in white
aprons. Many such turnings, of as many grades of decency, are set
between this and the nearest slum.
They are not a very noisy or obtrusive lot in this street. They do not
go to Hyde Park with banners, and they seldom fight. It is just possible
that one or two among them, at some point in a life of ups and downs,
may have been indebted to a coal and blanket fund; but whosoever these
may be, they would rather die than publish the disgrace, and it is
probable that they very nearly did so ere submitting to it.
Some who inhabit this street are in the docks, some in the gasworks,
some in one or other of the few shipbuilding yards that yet survive on
the Thames. Two families in a house is the general rule, for there are
six rooms behind each set of holes: this, unless "young men lodgers" are
taken in, or there are grown sons paying for bed and board. As for the
grown daughters, they marry as soon as may be. Domestic service is a
social descent, and little under millinery and dressmaking is compatible
with self-respect. The general servant may be caught young among the
turnings at the end where mangling is done; and the factory girls live
still further off, in places skirting slums.
Every morning at half-past five there is a curious demonstration. The
street resounds with thunderous knockings, repeated upon door after
door, and acknowledged ever by a muffled shout from within. These
signals are the work of the night-watchman or the early policeman, or
both, and they summon the sleepers to go forth to the docks, the
gasworks, and the ship-yards. To be awakened in this wise costs
fourpence a week, and for this fourpence a fierce rivalry rages between
night-watchmen and policemen. The night-watchman--a sort of by-blow of
the ancient "Charley," and himself a fast vanishing quantity--is the
real professional performer; but he goes to the wall, because a large
connection must be worked if the pursuit is to pay at fourpence a
knocker. Now, it is not easy to bang at two knockers three-quarters of a
mile apart, and a hundred others lying between, all punctually at
half-past five. Wherefore the policeman, to whom the fourpence is but a
perquisite, and who is content with a smaller round, is rapidly
supplanting the night-watchman, whose cry of "Past nine o'clock," as he
collects orders in the evening, is now seldom heard.
The knocking and the shouting pass, and there comes the noise of
opening and shutting of doors, and a clattering away to the docks, the
gasworks and the ship-yards. Later more door-shutting is heard, and then
the trotting of sorrow-laden little feet along the grim street to the
grim Board School three grim streets off. Then silence, save for a
subdued sound of scrubbing here and there, and the puny squall of croupy
infants. After this, a new trotting of little feet to docks, gasworks,
and ship-yards with father's dinner in a basin and a red handkerchief,
and so to the Board School again. More muffled scrubbing and more
squalling, and perhaps a feeble attempt or two at decorating the
blankness of a square hole here and there by pouring water into a grimy
flower-pot full of dirt. Then comes the trot of little feet toward the
oblong holes, heralding the slower tread of sooty artisans; a smell of
bloater up and down; nightfall; the fighting of boys in the street,
perhaps of men at the corner near the beer-shop; sleep. And this is the
record of a day in this street; and every day is hopelessly the same.
Every day, that is, but Sunday. On Sunday morning a smell of cooking
floats round the corner from the half-shut baker's, and the little feet
trot down the street under steaming burdens of beef, potatoes, and
batter pudding--the lucky little feet these, with Sunday boots on them,
when father is in good work and has brought home all his money; not the
poor little feet in worn shoes, carrying little bodies in the threadbare
clothes of all the week, when father is out of work, or ill, or drunk,
and the Sunday cooking may very easily be done at home,--if any there be
to do.
On Sunday morning one or two heads of families appear in wonderful black
suits, with unnumbered creases and wrinklings at the seams. At their
sides and about their heels trot the unresting little feet, and from
under painful little velvet caps and straw hats stare solemn little
faces towelled to a polish. Thus disposed and arrayed, they fare gravely
through the grim little streets to a grim Little Bethel where are
gathered together others in like garb and attendance; and for two hours
they endure the frantic menace of hell-fire.
Most of the men, however, lie in shirt and trousers on their beds and
read the Sunday paper; while some are driven forth--for they hinder the
housework--to loaf, and await the opening of the beer-shop round the
corner. Thus goes Sunday in this street, and every Sunday is the same as
every other Sunday, so that one monotony is broken with another. For the
women, however, Sunday is much as other days, except that there is
rather more work for them. The break in their round of the week is
washing day.
No event in the outer world makes any impression in this street. Nations
may rise, or may totter in ruin; but here the colorless day will work
through its twenty-four hours just as it did yesterday, and just as it
will to-morrow. Without there may be party strife, wars and rumors of
wars, public rejoicings; but the trotting of the little feet will be
neither quickened nor stayed. Those quaint little women, the
girl-children of this street, who use a motherly management toward all
girl-things younger than themselves, and toward all boys as old or
older, with "Bless the child!" or "Drat the children!"--those quaint
little women will still go marketing with big baskets, and will regard
the price of bacon as chief among human considerations. Nothing disturbs
this street--nothing but a strike.
Nobody laughs here--life is too serious a thing; nobody sings. There was
once a woman who sang--a young wife from the country. But she bore
children, and her voice cracked. Then her man died, and she sang no
more. They took away her home, and with her children about her skirts
she left this street forever. The other women did not think much of her.
She was "helpless."
One of the square holes in this street--one of the single, ground-floor
holes--is found, on individual examination, to differ from the others.
There has been an attempt to make it into a shop-window. Half a dozen
candles, a few sickly sugar-sticks, certain shrivelled bloaters, some
bootlaces, and a bundle or two of firewood compose a stock which at
night is sometimes lighted by a little paraffine lamp in a tin sconce,
and sometimes by a candle. A widow lives here--a gaunt, bony widow, with
sunken, red eyes. She has other sources of income than the candles and
the bootlaces: she washes and chars all day, and she sews cheap shirts
at night. Two "young men lodgers," moreover, sleep upstairs, and the
children sleep in the back room; she herself is supposed not to sleep at
all. The policeman does not knock here in the morning--the widow wakes
the lodgers herself; and nobody in the street behind ever looks out of
window before going to bed, no matter how late, without seeing a light
in the widow's room where she plies her needle. She is a quiet woman,
who speaks little with her neighbors, having other things to do: a woman
of pronounced character, to whom it would be unadvisable--even
dangerous--to offer coals or blankets. Hers was the strongest contempt
for the helpless woman who sang: a contempt whose added bitterness
might be traced to its source. For when the singing woman was marketing,
from which door of the pawnshop had she twice met the widow coming
forth?
This is not a dirty street, taken as a whole. The widow's house is one
of the cleanest, and the widow's children match the house. The one house
cleaner than the widow's is ruled by a despotic Scotchwoman, who drives
every hawker off her whitened step, and rubs her door handle if a hand
have rested on it. The Scotchwoman has made several attempts to
accommodate "young men lodgers," but they have ended in shrill rows.
There is no house without children in this street, and the number of
them grows ever and ever greater. Nine-tenths of the doctor's visits are
on this account alone, and his appearances are the chief matter of such
conversation as the women make across the fences. One after another the
little strangers come, to live through lives as flat and colorless as
the day's life in this street. Existence dawns, and the
doctor-watchman's door knock resounds along the row of rectangular
holes. Then a muffled cry announces that a small new being has come to
trudge and sweat its way in the appointed groove. Later, the trotting of
little feet and the school; the midday play hour, when love peeps even
into this street; after that more trotting of little feet--strange
little feet, new little feet--and the scrubbing, and the squalling, and
the barren flower-pot; the end of the sooty day's work; the last
home-coming; nightfall; sleep.
When love's light falls into some corner of the street, it falls at an
early hour of this mean life, and is itself but a dusty ray. It falls
early, because it is the sole bright thing which the street sees, and is
watched for and counted on. Lads and lasses, awkwardly arm in arm, go
pacing up and down this street, before the natural interest in marbles
and doll's houses would have left them in a brighter place. They are
"keeping company"; the manner of which proceeding is indigenous--is a
custom native to the place. The young people first "walk out" in pairs.
There is no exchange of promises, no troth-plight, no engagement, no
love-talk. They patrol the street side by side, usually in silence,
sometimes with fatuous chatter. There are no dances, no tennis, no
water-parties, no picnics to bring them together: so they must walk out,
or be unacquainted. If two of them grow dissatisfied with each other's
company, nothing is easier than to separate and walk out with somebody
else. When by these means each has found a fit mate (or thinks so), a
ring is bought, and the odd association becomes a regular engagement;
but this is not until the walking out has endured for many months. The
two stages of courtship are spoken of indiscriminately as "keeping
company," but a very careful distinction is drawn between them by the
parties concerned. Nevertheless, in the walking out period it would be
almost as great a breach of faith for either to walk out with more than
one, as it would be if the full engagement had been made. And
love-making in this street is a dreary thing, when one thinks of
love-making in other places. It begins--and it ends--too soon.
Nobody from this street goes to the theatre. That would mean a long
journey, and it would cost money which might buy bread and beer and
boots. For those, too, who wear black Sunday suits it would be sinful.
Nobody reads poetry or romance. The very words are foreign. A Sunday
paper in some few houses provides such reading as this street is
disposed to achieve. Now and again a penny novel has been found among
the private treasures of a growing daughter, and has been wrathfully
confiscated. For the air of this street is unfavorable to the ideal.
Yet there are aspirations. There has lately come into the street a young
man lodger who belongs to a Mutual Improvement Society. Membership in
this society is regarded as a sort of learned degree, and at its
meetings debates are held and papers smugly read by lamentably
self-satisfied young men lodgers, whose only preparation for debating
and writing is a fathomless ignorance. For ignorance is the inevitable
portion of dwellers here: seeing nothing, reading nothing, and
considering nothing.
Where in the East End lies this street? Everywhere. The hundred and
fifty yards is only a link in a long and a mightily tangled chain--is
only a turn in a tortuous maze. This street of the square holes is
hundreds of miles long. That it is planned in short lengths is true, but
there is no other way in the world that can more properly be called a
single street, because of its dismal lack of accent, its sordid
uniformity, its utter remoteness from delight.