Gracious, Mr. Conductor (which is like an omnibus) what a nice new
journal you have got! And ‘Household Words’ too; _that’s_ what I like!
I’ve often thought that if the world could hear _my_ household words,
some people would be wiser for them. Sir, if you are not above receiving
advice and information from an old woman, I will give you some. I will
just chatter to you as I do to the boys and girls down in my part of the
country here, without any ceremony. I have bought two pens and a quire
of paper, and I’ll write down a few things; but my spectacles are bad,
and my pen is not over steady.
I may observe, in limmony, that you will soon discover me to be a well
edicated woman. I have lived a long life, and have always picked up
knowledge fast, taking four meals of it a day. Especially, you will find
that my medical attainments are considerable. I’m not one of your women
who go costing their husbands a whole till-full of money every year for
doctor’s bills. As a mother of a family—and—though you wouldn’t believe
it, Mr. Editor, if you was to look at me—I’ve had as many as eighteen,—I
felt it my duty, as the mother of a family, to acquire the knowledge
that was necessary for the preservation of my children’s lives. I have
bought or borrowed a large number of medical books, and studied them so
well, that if the dear children had been spared me long enough,—whereas
thirteen died young, and one an infant, which was quite owing to the
nurse having forgot to give it its Godfrey three nights running,—if they
had all lived, I should have been surrounded by a very healthy family,
and they would have owed to me, every one of them, their blooming looks.
Of the five that survive, Edward is delicate, and Tom is rather daft,
but the other three are in strong health, and prove what a blessing it
was their mother took such care of them.
Some one of you gentlemen has been a writing about Lucifer-matches.
Lucifers, indeed! Is that your improvement of the people? Yah! If folks
were wise they would send Lucifer his matches back, and not be indebted
to him any longer for them. None of us ever lost our jawbones over a
tinder-box in my young days. But you must have improvements. Don’t you
know that you pay for civilisation with health. Look at me. I am
eighty-two; but we used flint and steel when I was young. Turn to the
British and Foreign Medical Review of a few years ago, there you will
see what I mean. There’s an account in it, of the new disease begotten
by lucifer-matches; by the phosphorus. It’s this: a worker in the
manufactory has a hollow tooth, it generally begins there, resembles
tooth-ache; then there is inflammation about it; the periosteum of the
lower jaw becomes inflamed; the bone dies: a man is recorded to have
picked his lower jawbone out of his chin as we pulled winkles out of
their shells, when winkles were eaten, in the good old times. It’s true
that forewarned is forearmed. Great care is taken in lucifer factories
on a large scale; those who work over the phosphorus have their mouths
shielded, I believe, and so on: but then, what a thing it is! Here’s
your march of improvement! A new luxury, a new disease.
You have been looking over Water-works; isn’t beer good enough for the
folks now-a-days? To be sure one cannot wash in beer, but it’s not much
need one has for washing. I saw a little boy the other day, bothering
about a cabstand; he wanted a bucket of water, but the tap was
locked—and could be unlocked only for the horses. He said there was no
water in his alley, and he looked as if there were no water in the
world. I gave him twopence to go and buy a pint of beer, and went on,
feeling that I had done a charitable action. Water indeed! Don’t you
think, Mr. Conductor, that some of you reformers carry the thing a
little bit too far? I wrote the other day to a grandson of mine, he sets
up for a sanitary reformer, and because I was angry at a little
rapscallion who stole three pounds of Wiltshire bacon (a nice lean
piece) from my kitchen dresser, what does he write and say? I know what
I wrote and said in answer very well. _He_ never darkens my doors again,
and it’s 2000_l._ he will be out of pocket one of these days. I’ll just
copy his impudence. He says—
‘Let it be supposed, grandmother, that you were born in one of the
thousand London alleys; that you were nursed with milk and opiates by a
mother able or willing to pay small attention to your wants. Your first
recollection is of having ‘scalled head,’ a disgusting skin disease,
begotten among dirt, with which poor ragged children are infested. Then
you remember the death of a brother who was your baby playmate. He died
of a fever. You remember other deaths, and how you pondered much in a
child’s way, while playing with a pool of filth, upon this fever, what
it was. You remember the pool in your undrained alley, when it was not
quite so bad as it is now. You remember how you laboured three times a
week, when water was turned on for two hours at the common tap, how you
laboured for your mother to supply her want of it, and came with your
bucket into competition with the tenants of the other houses, all eager
to lay in a stock. You remember how you enjoyed a wash when you could
get it; how you saw your mother strive to wash a tub full of linen in a
pipkin full of water, and the precious juice then could not be thrown
away until you had aided her attempt to scrub the floors with it. You
remember how your father died of a fever, and you slept so near his
corpse that when you were restless in the night once, you were awakened
by your hand touching upon its cold face. You remember how your mother
moaned by day, and how you heard her sob in the night season. So much,
that now and then you went to kiss her. You remember when your elder
sister drowned herself, nobody ever told you why;—you think you know
why. How your mother went out, when she could, for a day’s work, but was
too ragged and too dirty to find many patrons. How she took to
gin-drinking, lost her old love for you, and her old memories. How you
wished that you could find employment, but could find none for the
ragged little wretch. How you begged some pence, and bought some
oranges, and prayed to God that you might be honest in a trade however
small. How you were taken by a policeman before a magistrate, who said
that he must put you down. How you were sent to prison, and came out
shaking your little fists against Society, who made you be the dirty
thief you are.’
There! I can’t copy any more for rage. There’s a fellow, to address a
woman of my years! But he’ll live to repent it, Sir, when I am dead and
gone. My hand shakes so after copying this insolence, that I can’t hold
my pen any more to-day; besides, it has got bad, and there is nobody now
here to mend it. I should like my letter to be put first in your next
number; let it have large print and a great many capitals.