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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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HOW THE POOR LIVE 
 
 ETC. 
 
a/ 
 
 'N 
 
 BOOKS BY GEORGE R. SIMS. 
 
 Post 8vo., illustrated boards, 2s. each ; 
 cloth limp, 2S. 6d. 
 
 ROGUES AND VAGABONDS. 
 THE RING O' BELLS. 
 MARY JANE'S MEMOIRS. 
 MARY JANE MARRIED. 
 TALES OF TO-DAY. 
 
 THE DAGONET RECITER AND READER : 
 
 Being Readings and Recitations in Prose and 
 Verse, selected from his own Works byG. R. Sims. 
 Post 8vo., portrait cover, is. ; cloth, is. 6d. 
 
 LONDON : CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE 
 
 AND 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON 
 
 By GEORGE R. SIMS 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'THE DAGONET RECITER,' ' MARY JANE'S MEMOIRS,' ETC. 
 
 3LotttlOtt 
 
 CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY 
 
 1889 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The papers which form this volume appeared originally in 
 The Pictorial World and The Daily Neivs. The interest now 
 evinced in the great question of Housing the Poor leads me 
 to hope that they will be of assistance to many who are 
 studying the subject, and would desire to have their infor- 
 mation in a convenient form for reference. Much that I ven- 
 tured to prognosticate when ' How the Poor Live ' was 
 written has happened since, and I have the permission of the 
 author of ' The Bitter Cry of Outcast London ' to say that 
 from these articles he derived the greatest assistance while 
 compiling his famous pamphlet. I have thought it well, all 
 circumstances considered, to let the work stand in its original 
 form, and have in no way added to it or altered it. 
 
 If an occasional lightness of treatment seems to the 
 reader out of harmony with so grave a subject, I pray that 
 he will remember the work was undertaken to enlist the 
 sympathies of a class not generally given to the study of 
 " low life.' 
 
 GEOEGE E. SIMS. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE - 1 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON - - - - - - 113 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 I commence, with the first of these chapters, a book of 
 travel. An author and an artist have gone hand-in-hand 
 into many a far-off region of the earth, and the result has 
 been a volume eagerly studied by the stay-at-home public, 
 anxious to know something of the world in which they live. 
 In these pages I propose to record the result of a journey 
 into a region which lies at our own doors — into a dark con- 
 tinent that is within easy walking distance of the General 
 Post Office. This continent will, I hope, be found as interest- 
 ing as any of those newly-explored lands which engage the 
 attention of the Royal Geographical Society — the wild races 
 who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily 
 as those savage tribes for whose benefit the Missionary 
 Societies never cease to appeal for funds. 
 
 I have no shipwrecks, no battles, no moving adventures 
 by flood and field, to record. Such perils as I and my fellow- 
 traveller have encountered on our journey are not of the 
 order which lend themselves to stirring narrative. It is un- 
 pleasant to be mistaken, in underground cellars where the 
 vilest outcasts hide from the light of day, for detectives in 
 search of their prey — it is dangerous to breathe for some 
 hours at a stretch an atmosphere charged with infection and 
 poisoned with indescribable effluvia — it is hazardous to be 
 hemmed in down a blind alley by a crowd of roughs who 
 
 1 
 
2 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 have had hereditarily transmitted to them the maxim of 
 John Leech, that half-bricks were specially designed for 
 the benefit of ' strangers ;' but these are not adventures of 
 the heroic order, and they will not be dwelt upon lovingly 
 after the manner of travellers who go farther afield. 
 
 My task is perhaps too serious a one even for the light 
 tone of these remarks. No man who has seen ' How the 
 Poor Live ' can return from the journey with aught but an 
 aching heart. No man who recognises how serious is the 
 social problem which lies before us can approach its con- 
 sideration in any but the gravest mood. Let me, then, 
 briefly place before the reader the serious purpose of these 
 pages, and then I will ask him to set out with me on the 
 journey and judge for himself whether there is no remedy 
 for much that he will see. He will have to encounter 
 misery that some good people think it best to leave undis- 
 covered. He will be brought face to face with that dark 
 side of life which the wearers of rose-coloured spectacles 
 turn away from on principle. The worship of the beautiful 
 is an excellent thing, but he who digs down deep in the 
 mire to find the soul of goodness in things evil is a better 
 man and a better Christian than he who shudders at the 
 ugly and the unclean, and kicks it from his path, that it 
 may not come between the wind and his nobility. 
 
 But let not the reader be alarmed, and imagine that I 
 am about to take advantage of his good-nature in order to 
 plunge him neck-high into a mud bath. He may be pained 
 before we part company, but he shall not be disgusted. He 
 may occasionally feel a choking in his throat, but he shall 
 smile now and again. Among the poor there is humour as 
 well as pathos, there is food for laughter as well as for 
 tears, and the rays of God's sunshine lose their way now 
 and again, and bring light and gladness into the vilest of 
 the London slums. 
 
 His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, in his speech 
 at the opening of the Royal College of Music some years ago, 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 3 
 
 said,: ' The time has come when class can no longer stand aloof 
 from class, and that man does his duty best who works most 
 earnestly in bridging over the gulf between different classes 
 which it is the tendency of increased wealth and increased 
 civilization to widen.' It is to increased wealth and to in- 
 creased civilization that we owe the wide gulf which to-day 
 separates well-to-do citizens from the masses. It is the 
 increased wealth of this mighty city which has driven the 
 poor back inch by inch, until we find them to-day herding 
 together, packed like herrings in a barrel, neglected and 
 despised, and left to endure wrongs and hardships which, 
 if they were related of a far-off savage tribe, would cause 
 Exeter Hall to shudder till its bricks fell down. It is the 
 increased civilization of this marvellous age which has made 
 life a victory only for the strong, the gifted, and the specially 
 blest, and left the weak, the poor, and the ignorant to work 
 out in their proper persons the theory of the survival of the 
 fittest to its bitter end. 
 
 There are not wanting signs that the ' one-roomed helot ' 
 and his brood are about to receive a little scientific atten- 
 tion. They have become natural curiosities, and to this fact 
 they may owe the honour in store for them, of dividing 
 public attention with the Zenanas, the Aborigines, and the 
 South Sea Islanders. The long-promised era of domestic 
 legislation is said to be at hand, and prophets with power- 
 ful telescopes declare they can see the first faint signs of its 
 dawn upon the political horizon. When that era has come 
 within the range of the naked eye, it is probable that the 
 Homes of the Poor will be one of its burning questions, and 
 the strong arm of the law may be extended protectingly, 
 even at the risk of showing the shortness of its sleeve, as 
 far as the humble toilers who at the present moment suffer 
 only its penalties and enjoy none of its advantages. 
 
 That there are remedies for the great evil which lies like 
 a cankerworm in the heart of this fair city is certain. What 
 those remedies are you will be better able to judge when 
 
 1—2 
 
4 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 you have seen the condition of the disease for which Dr. 
 State is to be called in. Dr. State, alas ! is as slow to put 
 in an appearance as his parish confrere when the patient in 
 need of his services is poor and friendless. 
 
 Forgive me this little discourse by the way. It has at 
 any rate filled up the time as we walk along to the outskirts 
 of the land through which we are to travel for a few weeks 
 together. And now, turning out of the busy street alive 
 with the roar of commerce, and where the great marts and 
 warehouses tower stories high, and where Dives adds daily 
 to his wealth, we turn up a narrow court, and find ourselves 
 at once in the slum where Lazarus lays his head — even as 
 he did in the sacred story — at the very gates of the mighty 
 millionnaire. 
 
 We walk along a narrow dirty passage, 'which would 
 effectually have stopped the Claimant had he come to this 
 neighbourhood in search of witnesses, and at the end we 
 find ourselves in what we should call a back-yard, but 
 which, in the language of the neighbourhood, is a square. 
 The square is full of refuse ; heaps of dust and decaying 
 vegetable matter lie about here and there, under the windows 
 and in front of the doors of the squalid tumble-down houses. 
 The windows above and below are broken and patched ; 
 the roofs of these two-storied 1 eligible residences ' look as 
 though Lord Alcester had been having some preliminary 
 practice with his guns here before he set sail for Alexandria. 
 All these places are let out in single rooms at prices vary- 
 ing from 2s. 6d to 4s. a' week. We can see a good deal of 
 the inside through the cracks and crevices and broken panes, 
 but if we knock at the door we shall get a view of the in- 
 habitants. 
 
 If you knew more of these Alsatias, you would be rather 
 astonished that there was a door to knock at. Most of the 
 houses are open day and night, and knockers and bells are 
 things unknown. Here, however, the former luxuries exist ; 
 so we will not disdain them. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 5 
 
 Knock, knock ! 
 
 Hey, presto ! what a change of scene ! Sleepy Hollow 
 has come to life. Every door flies open, and there is a 
 cluster of human beings on the threshold. Heads of matted 
 hair and faces that haven't seen soap for months come out 
 of the broken windows above. 
 
 Our knock has alarmed the neighbourhood. Who are 
 we ? The police ? No. "Who are we ? Now they recognise 
 one of our number — our guide — with a growl. He and we 
 with him can pass without let or hindrance where it would 
 be dangerous for a policeman to go. We are supposed to 
 be on business connected with the School Board, and we 
 are armed with a password which the worst of these out- 
 casts have grown at last sulkily to acknowledge. 
 
 This is a very respectable place, and we have taken it 
 first to break the ground gently for an artist who has not 
 hitherto studied 1 character ' on ground where I have had 
 many wanderings. 
 
 To the particular door attacked there comes a poor 
 woman, white and thin and sickly-looking ; in her arms 
 she carries a girl of eight or nine with a diseased spine ; 
 behind her, clutching at her scanty dress, are two or three 
 other children. We put a statistical question, say a kind 
 word to the little ones, and ask to see the room. 
 
 What a room ! The poor woman apologizes for its con- 
 dition, but the helpless child, always needing her care, and 
 the other little ones to look after, and times being bad, etc. 
 Poor creature, if she had ten pair of hands instead of one 
 pair always full, she could not keep this room clean. The 
 walls are damp and crumbling, the ceiling is black and peel- 
 ing off, showing the laths above, the floor is rotten and 
 broken away in places, and the wind and the rain sweep in 
 through gaps that seem everywhere. The woman, her hus- 
 band, and her six children live, eat, and sleep in this one 
 room, and for this they pay three shillings a week. It is 
 quite as much as they can afford. There has been no break- 
 
6 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 fast yet, and there won't be any till the husband (who has 
 been out to try and get a job) comes in and reports progress. 
 As to complaining of the dilapidated, filthy condition of the 
 room, they know better. If they don't like it they can go. 
 There are dozens of families who will jump at the accom- 
 modation, and the landlord is well aware of the fact. 
 
 Some landlords do repair their tenants' rooms. Why, 
 cert'nly. Here is a sketch of one and of the repairs we saw 
 the same day. Eent, 4s. a week ; condition indescribable. 
 But notice the repairs : a bit of a box-lid nailed across a 
 hole in the wall big enough for a man's head to go through, 
 a nail knocked into a window-frame beneath which still 
 comes in a little fresh air, and a strip of new paper on a 
 corner of the wall. You can't see the new paper because it 
 is not up. The lady of the rooms holds it in her hand. The 
 rent collector has just left it for her to put up herself. Its 
 value, at a rough guess, is threepence. This landlord has 
 executed repairs. Items : one piece of a broken soap-box, 
 one yard and a half of paper, and one nail. And for these 
 repairs he has raised the rent of the room threepence a 
 iveek. 
 
 We are not in the square now, but in a long dirty street, 
 full of lodging-houses from end to end, a perfect human 
 warren, where every door stands open night and day — a 
 state of things that shall be described and illustrated a little 
 later on when we come to the ' 'appy dossers.' In this 
 street, close to the repaired residence, we select at hazard 
 an open doorway and plunge into it. We pass along a 
 greasy, grimy passage, and turn a corner to ascend the 
 stairs. Eound the corner it is dark. There is no staircase 
 light, and we can hardly distinguish in the gloom where we 
 are going. A stumble causes us to strike a light. 
 
 That stumble was a lucky one. The staircase we were 
 ascending, and which men and women and little children 
 go up and down day after day and night after night, is a 
 wonderful affair. The handrail is broken away, the stairs 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 7 
 
 themselves are going — a heavy boot has been clean through 
 one of them already, and it would need very little, one would 
 think, for the whole lot to give way and fall with a crash. 
 A sketch, taken at the time, by the light of successive vestas, 
 fails to give the grim horror of that awful staircase. The 
 surroundings, the ruin, the decay, and the dirt, could not be 
 reproduced. 
 
 We are anxious to see what kind of people get safely 
 up and down this staircase, and as we ascend we knock 
 accidentally up against something; it is a door and a 
 landing. The door is opened, and as the light is thrown on 
 to where we stand we give an involuntary exclamation of 
 horror ; the door opens right on to the corner stair. The 
 woman who comes out would, if she stepped incautiously, 
 fall six feet, and nothing could save her. It is a tidy room 
 this, for the neighbourhood. A good hardworking woman 
 has kept her home neat, even in such surroundings. The 
 rent is four and sixpence a week, and the family living in it 
 numbers eight souls ; their total earnings are twelve shillings. 
 A hard lot, one would fancy ; but in comparison to what we 
 have to encounter presently it certainly is not. Asked about 
 the stairs, the woman says, ' It is a little ockard-like for the 
 young 'uns a-goin' up and down to school now the Board 
 make 'em wear boots ; but they don't often hurt themselves.' 
 Minus the boots, the children had got used to the ascent 
 and descent, I suppose, and were as much at home on 
 the crazy staircase as a chamois on a precipice. Excelsior 
 is our motto on this staircase. No maiden with blue eyes 
 comes out to mention avalanches, but the woman herself 
 suggests ' it's werry bad higher up.' We are as heedless of 
 the warning as Longfellow's headstrong banner-bearer, for 
 we go on. 
 
 It is 1 werry bad ' higher up, so bad that we begin to light 
 some more matches and look round to see how we are to 
 get down. But as we continue to ascend the darkness grows 
 less and less. We go a step at a time, slowly and circum- 
 
8 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 spectly, up, up to the light, and at last our heads are sud- 
 denly above a floor and looking straight into a room. 
 
 We have reached the attic, and in that attic we see a 
 picture which will be engraven on our memory for many a 
 month to come. 
 
 The attic is almost bare ; in a broken fireplace are some 
 smouldering embers ; a log of wood lies in front like a fender. 
 There is a broken chair trying to steady itself against a 
 wall black with the dirt of ages. In one corner, on a 
 shelf, is a battered saucepan and a piece of dry bread. On 
 the scrap of mantel still remaining embedded in the wall is 
 a rag ; on a bit of cord hung across the room are more 
 rags — garments of some sort, possibly ; a broken flower-pot 
 props open a crazy window-frame, possibly to let the smoke 
 out, or in — looking at the chimney-pots below, it is difficult 
 to say which; and at one side of the room is a sack of 
 Heaven knows what — it is a dirty, filthy sack, greasy and 
 black and evil-looking. I could not guess what was in it if 
 I tried, but what was on it was a little child — a neglected, 
 ragged, grimed, and bare-legged little baby-girl of four. 
 There she sat, in the bare, squalid room, perched on the sack, 
 erect, motionless, expressionless, on duty. 
 
 She was ' a little sentinel,' left to guard a baby that lay 
 asleep on the bare boards behind her, its head on its arm, 
 the ragged remains of what had been a shawl flung over its 
 legs. 
 
 That baby needed a sentinel to guard it, indeed. Had it 
 crawled a foot or two, it would have fallen head-foremost 
 into that unprotected, yawning abyss of blackness below. In 
 case of some such proceeding on its part, the child of four 
 had been left ' on guard.' 
 
 The furniture of the attic, whatever it was like, had been 
 seized the week before for rent. The little sentinel's papa 
 — this we unearthed of the ' deputy ' of the house later on — 
 was a militiaman, and away ; the little sentinel's mamma 
 was gone out on ' a arrand,' which, if it was anything like 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 9 
 
 her usual ' arrands,' the deputy below informed us, would 
 bring her home about dark, very much the worse for it. 
 Think of that little child keeping guard on that dirty sack 
 for six or eight hours at a stretch — think of her utter loneli- 
 ness in that bare, desolate room, every childish impulse 
 checked, left with orders ' not to move, or I'll kill yer,' and 
 sitting there often till night and darkness came on, hungry, 
 thirsty, and tired herself, but faithful to her trust to the last 
 minute of the drunken mother's absence ! ' Bless yer ! I've 
 known that young 'un sit there eight 'our at a stretch. I've 
 seen her there of a mornin' when I've come up to see if I 
 could git the rint, and I've seen her there when I've come 
 agin at night,' says the deputy. ' Lor, that ain't nothing — 
 that ain't.' 
 
 Nothing ! It is one of the saddest pictures I have seen for 
 many a day. Poor little baby-sentinel ! — left with a human 
 life in its sole charge at four — neglected and overlooked : what 
 will its girl-life be, when it grows old enough to think ? I 
 should like some of the little ones whose every wish is 
 gratified, who have but to whimper to have, and who live 
 surrounded by loving, smiling faces, and tendered by gentle 
 hands, to see the little child in the bare garret sitting sentinel 
 over the sleeping baby on the floor, and budging never an 
 inch throughout the weary day from the place that her 
 mother had bidden her stay in. 
 
 With our minds full of this pathetic picture of child-life in 
 the 1 Homes of the Poor,' we descend the crazy staircase, 
 and get out into as much light as can find its way down these 
 narrow alleys. 
 
 Outside we see a portly gentleman with a big gold chain 
 across his capacious form, and an air of wealth and good 
 living all over him. He is the owner of a whole block of 
 projrdrty such as this, and he waxes rich on his rents. 
 Strange as it may seem, these one-roomed outcasts are the 
 best paying tenants in London. They pay so much for 
 so little, and almost fight to get it. That they should be 
 
10 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 left to be thus exploited is a disgrace to the Legislature, 
 which is never tired of protecting the oppressed of ' all 
 races that on earth do dwell,' except those of that particular 
 race who have the honour to be free-born Englishmen. 
 
 As I glance over the notes I have jotted down during my 
 journey through Outcasts' Land, the delicacy of the task I 
 have undertaken comes home to me more forcibly than ever. 
 The housing of the poor and the remedy for the existing 
 state of things are matters I have so much at heart, that I 
 fear lest I should not make ample use of the golden oppor- 
 tunities here afforded me of ventilating the subject. On the 
 other hand, I hesitate to repel the reader, and, unfortunately, 
 the best illustrations of the evils of overcrowding are repul- 
 sive to a degree. 
 
 Perhaps if I hint at a few of the very bad cases, it will be 
 sufficient. Men and women of the world will be able to 
 supply the details and draw the correct deductions ; and it 
 is, after all, only men and women of the world whose 
 practical sympathy is likely to be enlisted by a revelation of 
 the truth about the poor of great cities. 
 
 Come with me down this court, where at eleven o'clock in 
 the morning a dead silence reigns. Every house is tenanted, 
 but the blinds of the windows are down and the doors are 
 shut. Blinds and doors ! Yes, these luxuries are visible 
 here. This is an aristocratic street, and the rents are paid 
 regularly. There is no grinding poverty, no starvation here, 
 and no large families to drag at the bread-winner. There is 
 hardly any child-life here at all, for the men are thieves and 
 highway cheats, and the women are of the class which has 
 furnished the companions of such men from the earliest 
 annals of roguedom. 
 
 The colony sleeps though the sun is high. The day with 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 n 
 
 them is the idle time, and they reap their harvest in the 
 hours of darkness. Later in the day, towards two o'clock, 
 there will be signs of life ; oaths and shouts will issue from 
 the now silent rooms, and there will be fierce wrangles and 
 fights over the division of ill-gotten gains. The spirit of 
 murder hovers over this spot, for life is held of little account. 
 There is a Bill Sikes and Nancy in scores of these tene- 
 ments, and the brutal blow is ever the accompaniment of 
 the brutal oath. 
 
 These people, remember, rub elbows with the honest 
 labouring poor ; their lives are no mystery to the boys and 
 girls in the neighbourhood; the little girls often fetch 
 Nancy's gin, and stand in a gaping crowd while Nancy and 
 Bill exchange compliments on the doorstep, drawn from the 
 well of Saxon, impure and utterly defiled. The little boys 
 look up half with awe and half with admiration at the burly 
 Sikes with his flash style, and delight in gossip concerning 
 his talents as a ' crib-cracker,' and his adventures as a 
 pickpocket. The poor — the honest poor — have been driven 
 by the working of the Artizans' Dwellings Acts, and the 
 clearance of rookery after rookery, to come and herd with 
 thieves and wantons, to bring up their children in the last 
 Alsatias, where lawlessness and violence still reign supreme. 
 
 The constant association of the poor and the criminal 
 class has deadened in the former nearly all sense of right 
 and wrong. In the words of one of them, ' they can't 
 afford to be particular about their choice of neighbours.' I 
 was but the other day in a room in this district occupied by 
 a widow woman, her daughters of seventeen and sixteen, 
 her sons of fourteen and thirteen, and two younger children. 
 Her wretched apartment was on the street level, and behind 
 it was the common yard of the tenement. In this yard the 
 previous night a drunken sailor had been desperately mal- 
 treated, and left for dead. I asked the woman if she had 
 not heard the noise, and why she didn't interfere. ' Heard 
 it ?' was the reply ; ' well, we ain't deaf, but they're a rum 
 
12 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 lot in this here house, and we're used to rows. There ain't 
 a night passes as there ain't a fight in the passage or a 
 drunken row ; but why should I interfere ? 'Taint no 
 business of mine.' As a matter of fact, this woman, her 
 grown-up daughters, and her boys must have lain in that 
 room night after night, hearing the most obscene language, 
 having a perfect knowledge of the proceedings of the vilest 
 and most depraved of profligate men and women forced 
 upon them, hearing cries of murder and the sound of blows, 
 knowing that almost every crime in the Decalogue was 
 being committed in that awful back yard on which that 
 broken casement looked, and yet not one of them had ever 
 dreamed of stirring hand or foot. They were saturated with 
 the spirit of the place, and though they were respectable 
 people themselves, they saw nothing criminal in the be- 
 haviour of their neighbours. 
 
 For this room, with its advantages, the widow paid four 
 and sixpence a week ; the walls were mildewed and stream- 
 ing with damp ; the boards as you trod upon them made the 
 slushing noise of a plank spread across a mud puddle in a 
 brickfield ; foul within and foul without, these people paid 
 the rent of it gladly, and perhaps thanked God for the luck 
 of having it. Booms for the poor earning precarious liveli- 
 hoods are too hard to get and too much in demand now for 
 a widow woman to give up one just because of the trifling 
 inconvenience of overhearing a few outrages and murders. 
 
 One word more on this shady subject and we will get out 
 into the light again. I have spoken of the familiarity of 
 the children of the poor with all manner of wickedness 
 and crime. Of all the evils arising from this one-room 
 system there is perhaps none greater than the utter destruc- 
 tion of innocence in the young. A moment's thought will 
 enable the reader to appreciate the evils of it. But if it is 
 bad in the case of a respectable family, how much more 
 terrible is it when the children are familiarized with actual 
 immorality ! 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 13 
 
 Wait outside while we knock at this door. 
 
 Knock, knock !— No answer ! 
 
 Knock, knock, knock ! 
 
 A child's voice answers, ' What is it ?' 
 
 We give the answer — the answer which has been our 
 ' open, sesame ' everywhere — and after a pause a woman 
 opens a door a little and asks us to wait a moment. Pre- 
 sently we are admitted. A woman pleasing looking and 
 with a certain refinement in her features holds the door 
 open for us. She has evidently made a hurried toilet and 
 put on an ulster over her night attire. She has also put a 
 brass chain and locket round her neck. There is a little 
 rouge left on her cheeks and a little of the burnt hairpin 
 colour left under her eyes from overnight. At the table 
 having their breakfast are two neat and clean little girls 
 of seven and eight. 
 
 They rise and curtsey as we enter. We ask them a few 
 questions, and they answer intelligently — they are at the 
 Board School and are making admirable progress — charm- 
 ing children, interesting and well-behaved in every way. 
 They have a perfect knowledge of good and evil — one of 
 them has taken a Scripture prize— and yet these two charm- 
 ing and intelligent little girls live in that room night and 
 day with their mother, and this is the den to which she 
 snares her dissolute prey. 
 
 I would gladly have passed over this scene in silence, but 
 it is one part of the question which directly bears on the 
 theory of State interference. It is by shutting our eyes to 
 evils that we allow them to continue unreformed so long. I 
 maintain that such cases as these are fit ones for legislative 
 protection. The State should have the power of rescuing 
 its future citizens from such surroundings, and the law which 
 protects young children from physical hurt should also be so 
 framed as to shield them from moral destruction. 
 
 The worst effect of the present system of Packing the 
 Poor is the moral destruction of the next generation. 
 
14 
 
 HO W THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 Whatever it costs us to remedy the disease we shall gain in 
 decreased crime and wickedness. It is better even that the 
 ratepayers should bear a portion of the burthen of new 
 homes for the respectable poor than that they should have 
 to pay twice as much in the long-run for prisons, lunatic 
 asylums, and workhouses. 
 
 Enough for the present of the criminal classes. Let us 
 see some of the poor people who earn an honest living — 
 well, ' living,' perhaps, is hardly the word — let us say, who 
 can earn enough to pay their rent and keep body and soul 
 together. 
 
 Here is a quaint scene, to begin with. When we open 
 the door we start back half choked. The air is full of 
 floating fluff, and some of it gets into our mouths and half 
 chokes us. When we've coughed and wheezed a little we 
 look about us and gradually take in the situation. 
 
 The room is about eight feet square. Seated on the floor 
 is a white fairy — a dark-eyed girl who looks as though she 
 had stepped straight off a twelfth cake. Her hair is pow- 
 dered all over a la Pompadour, and the effect is bizarre. 
 Seated beside her is an older woman, and she is white and 
 twelfth-cakey too. Alas ! their occupation is prosaic to a 
 degree. They are simply pulling rabbit-skins — that is to 
 say, they are pulling away all the loose fluff and down and 
 preparing the skins for the furriers, who will use them for 
 cheap goods, dye them into imitations of rarer skins, and 
 practise upon them the various tricks of the trade. 
 
 Floor, walls, ceiling, every inch of the one room these 
 people live and sleep in, is covered with fluff and hair. 
 How they breathe in it is a mystery to me. I tried and 
 failed, and sought refuge on the doorstep. The pair, 
 working night and day at their trade, make, when business 
 is good, about twelve shillings a week. Their rent is four. 
 This leaves them four shillings a week each to live upon, 
 and as there is no one else to share it with them, I suppose 
 they are well-to-do folk. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 *5 
 
 The younger woman's appearance was striking. Seated 
 on the floor in an Eastern attitude, and white from top to 
 toe — the effect of her dark eyes heightened by the contrast 
 — she was a picture for an artist, and my fellow- worker 
 made excellent use of his pencil, while I engaged her and 
 her mother in conversation. 
 
 These people complained bitterly of their surroundings, 
 of the character of the people they had to live among, and 
 of the summary proceedings of their landlord, who abso- 
 lutely refused to repair their room or give them the slightest 
 convenience. 
 
 ' Then why not move ?' I ventured to suggest. « Four 
 shillings a week — ten guineas a year for this pigsty — is an 
 exorbitant rent : you might do better.' 
 
 The woman shook her head. ' There's lots o' better 
 places we'd like to go to, but they won't have us. They 
 object to our business. We must go where they'll take us.' 
 
 ' But there are plenty of places a little way out where 
 you can have two rooms for what you pay for this.' 
 
 1 A little way out, yes ; but how are we to get to and fro 
 with the work when it's done ? We must be near our work. 
 We can't afford to ride.' 
 
 Exactly ! And therein lies one of the things which re- 
 formers have to consider. There are thousands of these 
 families who would go away into the suburbs, where we 
 want to get them, if only the difficulty of travelling expenses 
 to and fro could be conquered. They herd together all in 
 closely packed quarters because they must be where they 
 can get to the dock, the yard, the wharf, and the warehouses 
 without expense. The highest earnings of this class is 
 rarely above sixteen shillings a week, and that, with four or 
 five shillings for rent, leaves very little margin where the 
 family is large. The omnibus and the train are the magicians 
 which will eventually bid the rookeries disappear, but the 
 services of these magicians cost money, and there is none to 
 spare in the pockets of the poor. 
 
i6 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 In another room close to these people, but if anything in 
 a more wretched condition still, we come upon a black man 
 sitting with his head buried in his hands. He is suffering 
 with rheumatics, and has almost lost the use of his limbs. 
 The reason is evident. His wife points to the bed in the 
 corner against the wall ; the damp is absolutely oozing 
 through and trickling down the wall. The black man is 
 loquacious. He is a hawker, and can't go out and lay in a 
 stock, for he hasn't a penny in the world. He is stone 
 broke. He is a Protestant darkie, he informs us, and is full 
 of troubles. Two boys are lolling about on the floor. At 
 our entrance a shock-headed, ragged girl of ten has crawled 
 under the bed. The Protestant darkie drags her out and 
 explains she is ' a-bringin' him to his grave with sorrer — 
 she's a bad gel and slangs her mother.' The P. D. doesn't 
 know how he's going to pay his rent or where the next 
 meal's coming from. He stands outside ' a corffee shop ' 
 generally, when he can get about, and ' the lady as keeps it, 
 bless her ! — she's a rare good 'un to me — she's a fallen angel, 
 that's what she is ;' but he can't go and hawk nothing, else 
 he'd be took up. ' I ain't got no capital, and, faith of a 
 Protestant darkie, I'm defunct.' 
 
 The man has a host of quaint sayings and plenty of the 
 peculiar wit of the nigger breed, but his position is un- 
 doubtedly desperate. 
 
 The rent of the death-trap he lives in with his wife and 
 family is four and sixpence, and his sole means of subsist- 
 ence is hawking shrimps and winkles when they are cheap, 
 or specked oranges and damaged fruit. He has at the best 
 of times only a shilling or two to lay out in the wholesale 
 market, and out of his profit he must pay his rent and keep 
 his family. I suspect that the ' fallen angel ' is often good 
 for a meal to the poor darkie, and I learn that he is a most 
 respectable, hardworking fellow. ' How do you do when 
 you're stone broke ?' I ask him. 1 Well, sir, sometimes I comes 
 across a gentleman as gives me a bob and starts me again.' 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 17 
 
 The shot hits the mark, and we leave the Protestant 
 darkie grinning at his own success, and debating with his 
 wife what will be the best article in which to invest for the 
 day's market. 
 
 Honest folks enough in their way, these — keeping them- 
 selves to themselves and struggling on as best they can, now 
 \ making a bit over,' and now wondering where on earth the 
 next sixpence is to come from. Just up the street is a house 
 with an inscription over it which tells us we can find within 
 a very different class to study. This is a licensed lodging- 
 house, where you can be accommodated for fourpence or six- 
 pence a night. This payment gives you during the day the 
 privilege of using the common kitchen, and it is into the 
 common kitchen we are going. We walk into the passage, 
 and are stopped by a strapping young woman of about eight- 
 and-twenty. She is the deputy. ' What do we want ?' 
 
 Once again the password is given, and the attitude of the 
 lady changes. She formally conducts us into a large room, 
 where the strangest collection of human beings are crowded 
 together. It is sheet-washing day, and there is a great fire 
 roaring up the chimney. Its ruddy glare gives a Eem- 
 brandtish tone to the picture. Tables and forms run round 
 the room, and there is not a vacant place. Men, women, 
 and children are lolling about, though it is mid-day, appar- 
 ently with nothing to do but make themselves comfortable* 
 The company is not a pleasant one. . Many of the men and 
 women and boys are thieves. Almost every form of disease, 
 almost every kind of deformity, seems crowded into this 
 Chamber of Horrors. The features are mostly repulsive ; 
 an attractive face there is not among the sixty or seventy 
 human beings in the room. Some of them are tramps and 
 hawkers, but most of them are professional loafers, picking 
 up in any way that presents itself the price of a night's 
 lodging. They are a shifting population, and rarely remain 
 in one house long. Some of them only get a night in now 
 and then as a luxury, and look upon it as a Grand Hotel 
 
 Q 
 
1 8 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 episode. They sleep habitually in the open, on the stair- 
 cases, or in the casual ward. The house we are in is one 
 where Nancy and Sikes come often enough when they are 
 down on their luck. Here is a true story of this very place, 
 which will perhaps illustrate sufficiently the type of its 
 frequenters. 
 
 Some time last year two men left the house one morning. 
 They were going into the country on business. One, whom 
 I will call John, kissed his mistress, a girl of twenty, and 
 said ' Good-bye,' leaving her at the house ; he wouldn't be 
 away long, and he and Bill, his companion, set out on their 
 travels. 
 
 A day or two after Bill returns alone ; the girl asks him 
 where her sweetheart is. ' He's lagged,' says Bill. But 
 the girl has a bit of newspaper, and in it she reads that 
 ' the body of a man has been found in some woods near 
 London ;' and she has an idea it may be John. ' Oh, 
 nonsense,' says Bill — I quote the evidence — ' he then lit 
 his candle, and they retired to rest.' John, as a matter of 
 fact, had been murdered by his companion, they having 
 quarrelled over the division of the proceeds of the burglary ; 
 and eventually this young woman, who so readily transferred 
 her affections from one lord to another, appeared in the 
 witness-box and deposed to pawning boots and other things 
 for Bill which were undoubtedly the proceeds of a robbery 
 at a house close to where the body was found. 
 
 This is the house in which we stand where the burglary 
 was planned — whence the murderer and the murdered set 
 out together on their fatal journey. It was at one of these 
 tables that the young girl discussed her absent lover's fate 
 with her new lord, his murderer, and it was here that the 
 police came to search for him and found the girl whose 
 evidence helped to hang him. 
 
 Look at the people who sit there to-day — murderers and 
 burglars some of them, cheats and pickpockets others, and 
 a few respectable folks as far as their opportunities will 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 19 
 
 allow. But remember that dozens of really respectable 
 families do have to frequent these places now, and mix with 
 malefactors day and night, because there are no other places 
 open to them. 
 
 Among all the cruelties practised on the poor in the 
 name of Metropolitan improvements this one deserves 
 mentioning — that the labourer earning a precarious liveli- 
 hood with his wife and his children have been driven at 
 last to accept the shelter of a thieves' kitchen and to be 
 thankful for it. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 I cannot help being struck, in my wanderings through 
 Povertyopolis, with the extraordinary resemblance which 
 Caesar bore ■ to Pompey — especially Pompey. One room in 
 this district is very like the other. The family likeness of 
 the chairs and tables is truly remarkable, especially in the 
 matter of legs. Most chairs are born with four legs, but 
 the chairs one meets with here are a two-legged race— a 
 four-legged chair is a rara avis, and when found should be 
 made a note of. The tables, too, are of a type indigenous 
 to the spot. The survival of the fittest does not obtain in 
 these districts in the matter of tables. The most positively 
 unfit are common, very common objects. What has become 
 of the fittest I hesitate to conjecture. Possibly they have 
 run away. I am quite sure that a table with legs would 
 make use of them to escape from such surroundings. 
 
 As to the bedsteads, they are wretched, broken-down old 
 things of wood and iron that look as though they had been 
 rescued a little late from a fire, then used for a barricade, 
 afterwards buried in volcanic eruption, and finally dug out 
 of a dust-heap that had concealed them for a century. The 
 bedding, a respectable coal-sack would blush to acknowledge 
 even as a poor relation. 
 
 2—2 
 
20 
 
 HOW 7 HE POOR LIVE. 
 
 I have enumerated chairs, tables, and beds, not because 
 they are found in every poor home — there are several rented 
 rooms which can boast of nothing but four walls, a ceiling, 
 and a floor — but because these articles placed in one of these 
 dens constitute what are euphemistically called ' furnished 
 apartments,' a species of accommodation with which all very 
 poor neighbourhoods abound. 
 
 The ' furnished apartments ' fetch as much as tenpence a 
 day, and are sometimes occupied by three or four different 
 tenants during a week. 
 
 The ' deputy ' comes for the money every day, and it is 
 pay or go with the occupants. If the man who has taken 
 one of these furnished rooms for his ' home, sweet home,' 
 does not get enough during the day to pay his rent, out he 
 goes into the street with his wife and children, and enter 
 another family forthwith. 
 
 The tenants have not, as a rule, much to be flung after 
 them in the shape of goods and chattels. The clothes they 
 stand upright in, a battered kettle, and, perhaps, a bundle, 
 make up the catalogue of their worldly possessions. 
 
 This kind of rough-and-ready lodging is the resource of 
 thousands of industrious people earning precarious liveli- 
 hoods, and they rarely rise above it to the dignity of taking a 
 room by the week. The great struggle is to get over Saturday, 
 and thank God for Sunday. Sunday is a free day, and no 
 deputy comes to disturb its peaceful calm. The Saturday's 
 rent, according to the custom of the country, makes the 
 tenant free of the apartments until Monday. 
 
 It is the custom to denounce the poor as thriftless, and 
 that they are so I grant. The temptation to trust to luck 
 and let every day take care of itself is, it must be remem- 
 bered, great. Life with them is always a toss-up, a daily 
 battle, an hourly struggle. Thousands of them can never 
 hope to be five shillings ahead of the world if they keep 
 honest. The utmost limit of their wage is reached when 
 they have paid their rent, kept themselves and their horribly 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 21 
 
 large families from starvation, and bought the few rags 
 which keep their limbs decently covered. With them the 
 object of life is attained when the night's rent is paid, and 
 they do not have to hesitate between the workhouse or a 
 corner of the staircase in some doorless house. 
 
 There is a legend in one street I know of — a man who 
 once saved half a crown, and lost it through a hole in his 
 pocket. The moral of that legend may have impressed 
 itself upon the whole population and discouraged thrift for 
 evermore ; but be that as it may, the general rule is, ' what 
 you make in a day spend in a day.' It is needless to add 
 that this precept brings its practisers perpetually within 
 measurable distance of absolute pennilessness. They live 
 and die on the confines of it. I am wrong ; they invariably 
 die on the wrong side of the border, and are buried at 
 somebody else's expense. 
 
 Drink is the curse of these communities ; but how is it to 
 be wondered at ? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and 
 fortunes are made out of men and women who seldom know 
 where to-morrow's meal is coming from. 
 
 Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their 
 light and their glitter, are crowded ? Drink is sustenance 
 to these people ; drink gives them the Dutch courage neces- 
 sary to go on living ; drink dulls their senses and reduces 
 them to the level of the brutes they must be to live in such 
 sties. 
 
 The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell 
 of their pestilent homes. A copper or two, often obtained 
 by pawning the last rag that covers the shivering children 
 on the bare floor at home, will buy enough vitriol-madness 
 to send a woman home so besotted that the wretchedness, 
 the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost 
 their grip. To be drunk with these people means to be 
 happy. Sober — God help them ! — how could they be aught 
 but wretched ? 
 
 There is not only temptation to drink wrought by the 
 
22 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 fearful surroundings of the poor ; a positive craving for it is 
 engendered by the foul and foetid atmosphere they continu- 
 ally breathe. I have often wondered that the advocates of 
 temperance, with the immense resources of wealth and 
 organization they command, have not given more attention 
 to the overcrowding and the unsanitary condition of the 
 dwellings of the poor, as one of the great causes of the 
 abuse of stimulants. 
 
 It is not only that crime and vice and disorder flourish 
 luxuriantly in these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort 
 bred of intemperance of the inhabitants, but the effect upon 
 the children is terrible. The offspring of drunken fathers 
 and mothers inherit not only a tendency to vice, but they 
 come into the world physically and mentally unfit to con- 
 quer in life's battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen 
 child-object one comes upon in these localities is the most 
 painful part of our explorers' experience. The county 
 asylums are crowded with pauper idiots and lunatics, who 
 owe their wretched condition to the sin of the parents, and 
 the rates are heavily burthened with the maintenance of the 
 idiot offspring of drunkenness. 
 
 The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp 
 edge from sorrow, and leaves the drinker for awhile in a 
 fools' paradise. Here is the home of the most notorious 
 * drunkardess ' — if I may coin a work — in the neighbour- 
 hood. Mrs. O'Flannigan's room is easily entered, for it is 
 on the street-level, and one step brings us into the presence 
 of the lady herself. She is in bed, a dirty red flannel rag 
 is wrapped about her shoulders, and her one arm is in a 
 sling. She sits up in bed at the sight of visitors, and greets 
 us in a gin and fog voice, slightly mellowed with the Irish 
 brogue. Biddy has been charged at the police-courts 
 seventy-five times with being drunk, and she is therefore 
 a celebrated character. She is hardly sober now, though 
 she has evidently had a shaking which would have sobered 
 most people for a month. Her face is a mass of bruises and 
 cuts, and' every now and then a groan and a cry to certain 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 23 
 
 Saints in her calendar tell of aches and pains in the limbs 
 concealed under the dirty blanket that covers the bed. 
 
 \ I'm a pretty sight now, ain't I, gintlemen dear ?' she 
 says, with a foolish laugh. ' Shure and I got blind drunk 
 again last Saturday, and they run me in. The inspector let 
 me out o' Sunday ; God bless him for a rale gintleman ! 
 They carried me on a stretcher, bless yer hearts ! and I 
 kicked. Ha! ha! ha!' 
 
 The hag positively yelled with laughter as she thought of 
 the scene she caused, and the trouble she gave the police. 
 
 Suddenly she looks round as if in search of something. 
 
 ' Molly, ye young varmint, where are ye?' she shouts, and 
 presently from under the bed, where the child lay crouching 
 in fear, she drags a wretched little girl of seven or eight, 
 with her face and head covered with sores, that make one 
 shudder to look at them. 
 
 ' There, Molly, ye young varmint, show yourself to their 
 honours, will ye ?' 
 
 The child begins to snivel. One of our number is the 
 Board School officer of the district, and Molly has not been 
 to school lately. 
 
 Mrs. O'Flannigan explains. 
 
 ' Ye see, I can't use my limbs just yet, yer honour, and 
 Molly — Lord love her ! — she's just the only thing I got to 
 look afther me. I might be burned in my blessed bed, yer 
 honour, and not able to move.' 
 
 ' You should give up getting drunk,' I ventured to 
 suggest ; 1 then you wouldn't want a nurse.' 
 
 ' You're right, your honour. It's the drink. Yer see, I 
 can't help it. I ain't been sober for five years — ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 — and it's all thro' the trouble as come to me. My boy got 
 into bad company and got lagged and put away for ten 
 years, and I've never been the same since, and it broke my 
 heart, and I took to the drink. And now my old man's 
 took to drink thro' aggravation o' me, and he gets drunk 
 every night of his blessed life. Ha ! ha ! ha !' 
 
 The woman's story is practically true. Before her trouble 
 
24 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 she and her husband were costermongers and hawkers of 
 fruit. The first of the evils of the foul slums, where honest 
 workers are forced to live, fell upon them in the ruin of the 
 boy reared in a criminal atmosphere. The vicious surround- 
 ings were too strong for him, and he became a thief and 
 paid the penalty. 
 
 The mother sees her son — idolized in her rough way — 
 taken from her; the den of a home becomes doubly 
 wretched, and the cursed drink-fiend is invoked to charm 
 the sorrow away. That is the first step, ' to drown sorrow.' 
 The steps after that are easy to count. The woman becomes 
 an habitual drunkard, the rooms they live in get dirtier and 
 smaller and fouler, and at last the husband drowns his 
 sorrow too. ' Aggravation ' and a constant association 
 with a drunken woman turn the poor fellow to evil ways ; 
 himself and a whole family are wrecked, that under better 
 circumstances might have been good and useful citizens. 
 Had these people been able to get a decent room among 
 decent people, the first misfortune that sent them wrong 
 might never have happened. Their case is the case of 
 hundreds. 
 
 Of drinking-shops there are plenty in these places ; of 
 eating-houses, or shops for the sale of food, very few. So 
 rare are the latter that when we come to one in a dirty, 
 tumble-down street, we stop and examine the contents of 
 the window. I don't know whether to call it a tart-shop, a 
 baker's, or a dripping emporium. There seems to be a 
 little bit of each about it, and half a rice pudding, and a 
 ham-bone, on which a bluebottle has gone to sleep — tired 
 out, perhaps, with looking for the meat — give it the faintest 
 suspicion of being an eating-house. There is also in the 
 window a dilapidated bloater which looks as though it had 
 been run over by an omnibus many years ago. 
 
 It is while taking notes of the contents of this tempting 
 emporium of luxuries that we become aware of a very 
 powerful perfume. It seems to rise from beneath where we 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 25 
 
 are standing, and used as we are by this time to the 
 bouquets of the East, we involuntarily step back and contort 
 the muscles of our faces. 
 
 Then we see that we have been standing on a grating. 
 Peering down, we can just see into a gloomy little room. 
 To the opened window presently there comes a man in his 
 shirt-sleeves, and looks up at us. His face is deadly white, 
 the eyes are sunken, the cheek-bones hollow, and there is a 
 look in his face that says more plainly than the big ticket of 
 the blind impostor, 1 I am starving.' Starving down below 
 there, with only a thin floor between himself and the ham- 
 bone, the ancient herring, the rice pudding, and the treacle 
 tarts. 
 
 As the noisome eflfluvia rises and steams through the 
 grating we begin to appreciate the situation. This food 
 shop is directly over the cellar which gives the odour forth. 
 Pleasant for the customers, certainly. We determine to 
 push our investigation still further, and presently we are 
 down in the cellar below. 
 
 The man in his shirt-sleeves — we can guess where the 
 coat is — receives us courteously. His wife apologizes for 
 the wretched condition of the room. Both of them speak 
 with that unmistakable timbre of voice which betokens a 
 smattering of education. In the corner of the room is 
 a heap of rags. That is the bed. There are two children, a 
 boy and a girl, sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the 
 fast-dying embers of a wretched fire. Furniture the room 
 has absolutely none, but a stool roughly constructed of three 
 pieces of unplaned wood nailed together. 
 
 Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the 
 pie-shop ; the foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the 
 basement, and the utter neglect of all sanitary precautions. 
 
 The man (who has only one arm) is out of work this 
 week, he tells us, but he is promised a job next. To tide 
 over till then is a work of some difficulty, but the ' sticks ' 
 and the ' wardrobe ' of the family have paid the rent up to 
 
26 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 now. As to meals — well, they hain't got much appetite. 
 The stench in which they live effectually destroys that. In 
 this instance even bad drainage has its advantages, you see. 
 
 Before the man lost his arm he was a clerk ; without a 
 right hand he is not much good as a penman in a com- 
 petitive market. So he goes on as timekeeper in a builder's 
 yard, as a messenger, or as anything by which he can get a 
 few shillings for a living. 
 
 The children have not been to school. ' Why ?' asks the 
 officer who accompanies us. ' Because they've no boots, 
 and they are both ill now.' It is true. The children, pale, 
 emaciated little things, cough a hard, rasping cough from 
 time to time. To show us how bad they are they set up a 
 perfect paroxysm of coughing until the mother fetches them 
 a smack, and inquires ' how they expect the gentleman to 
 hear himself speak if they kick up that row ?' 
 
 The children's boots have gone with the father's coat, and 
 at present it does seem hard to say that the parents must 
 be fined unless the children come barefooted through the 
 sloppy streets to school. 
 
 Such, however, is the rule, and this boot question is an 
 all-important one in the compulsory education of the children 
 of the slums. How to get the boots for Tommy and Sarah 
 to go their daily journey to the Board School is a problem 
 which one or two unhappy fathers have settled by hanging 
 themselves behind the domestic door. 
 
 The difficulties which the poor have in complying with 
 the demands of the Education Act are quite unsuspected 
 by the general public. They are so numerous, and the 
 histories revealed by their investigation are so strange, that 
 I propose in the next chapter to ask the reader to accompany 
 me to a meeting at which the parental excuses for non- 
 attendance are made. This is a meeting at which the 
 parents who have been * noticed ' for the non-attendance 
 of their children adduce what reasons they can why they 
 should not be summoned before a magistrate. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 27 
 
 I will let the mothers and fathers tell their own tale, and 
 give a few statistics which I fancy will be a revelation to 
 many who are at present in sublime ignorance of how the 
 poor live. 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 In the remote age when I was a good little boy I remember 
 being induced to join a Dorcas meeting. Don't imagine 
 that I ever so far forgot the dignity of my sex as to sew or 
 make little flannel petticoats and baby-linen for the poor of 
 the parish. The young ladies did that, and we — myself and 
 about ten other good little boys — were inveigled into joining 
 on the plea that while our sisters plied needle and thread 
 we could stick scraps into books and colour them, make 
 toys, and perform various other little feats of usefulness 
 which would eventually benefit the benighted Hottentots. 
 
 I know that when I had consented to join I was in agonies 
 till the first day of meeting arrived, and wondered to what 
 I had committed myself; and I remember to this day 
 how very red I blushed when I arrived late and found fifty 
 other good little boys and girls assembled, all of whom 
 looked up and eyed me as though I was a natural curiosity, 
 when the good lady who directed the society said, * This is 
 little Master So-and-so, who has come to help us in our 
 good work.' 
 
 How I got past all those little girls I don't know, but 
 I kept my eyes fixed modestly on the ground, and at last 
 found myself seated at a table with about a dozen young 
 gentlemen of my own age. 
 
 The elderly, good-hearted spinster who presided instantly 
 deposited in front of me a huge pot of paste, an empty 
 book, and some old illustrated papers. I guessed what she 
 intended me to do, and I made wild efforts to do it. I was 
 informed that this book, when I had completed it, would be 
 sold at a bazaar for the benefit of the heathen. 
 
2cS 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 I never ascertained what that book did fetch, but I know 
 that it never paid expenses. The mess that I got into with 
 that paste, the way it would get all over my fingers and on to 
 my coat-sleeve, and all down me and all over me — why, I 
 wrecked a whole suit, which in my vanity I put on new, at 
 a single sitting. That was my first introduction to scissors 
 and paste, and I took an intense dislike to them. 
 
 I quote the reminiscence because this article is to be all 
 about a ' B ' meeting ; and when I first heard of a ' B ' 
 meeting I made sure it must be something like a Dorcas 
 meeting, where everybody was a busy bee, and did work for 
 the poor. 
 
 I had not had a very long experience before I found out 
 that it was something not half so pleasant as the scrap-book 
 and flannel petticoat society of my youth. 
 
 A ' B ' meeting is held under the auspices of the School 
 Board, to hear the reasons parents may have to give why 
 they should not be summoned to appear before a magistrate 
 for neglecting to send their children to school. 
 
 Here is an exact reproduction of the Notice B left with 
 the parents, which brings them to the meeting I am about 
 to describe : 
 
 [By-laws.] [Form No. 13.] 
 
 NOTICE.— FORM B. 
 The Elementary Education Acts, 1870, 1873, and 1876. 
 
 SCHOOL BOAED FOE LONDON. 
 
 Notice to attend before Divisional Committee. 
 
 Division. 
 
 May 30, 1S83. 
 
 To Mr. Bridge, 2, Smith's Court. 
 
 Take Notice, that you have been guilty of a breach of the law in 
 that your child Robert has not duly attended school, and you are hereby 
 invited to attend at George Street School on Wednesday, the 6th day of 
 June, at 2 o'clock in the afternoon precisely, to state any excuse you may 
 have, and to show cause why you should not be summoned before a 
 magistrate and fined. 
 
 Dated this 31st day of May, 1883. 
 
 (Signed) 
 
 Officer of the School Board for London. 
 
 (seal.) 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE, 
 
 29 
 
 Few persons who have not actual experience of the lives 
 of the poorest classes can have any conception of the serious 
 import to them of the Education Act. Compulsory educa- 
 tion is a national benefit. I am one of its stoutest defenders, 
 but it is idle to deny that it is an Act which has gravely 
 increased the burthens of the poor earning precarious 
 livelihoods ; and as self-preservation is the first law of 
 nature, there is small wonder that every dodge that craft 
 and cunning can suggest is practised to evade it. 
 
 In many cases the payment of the fees is a most serious 
 difficulty. Twopence or a penny a week for each of four 
 children is not much, you may say ; but where the difference 
 between the weekly income and the rent is only a couple of 
 shillings or so, I assure you the coppers represent so many 
 meals. The Board now allows the members to remit fees in 
 cases of absolute inability to pay them, and the remission of 
 fees is one of the principal items of business at a 'B' meeting. 
 
 Again, many of the children who are of school age are of 
 a wage-earning age also, and their enforced ' idleness,' as 
 their parents call it, means a very serious blow to the family 
 exchequer. Many a lad whose thick skull keeps him from 
 passing the standard which would leave him free to go to 
 work, has a deft hand, strong arms, and a broad back — 
 three things which fetch a fair price in the labour market. 
 As I will show you presently, from the actual cases which 
 come before the ' B ' meeting, the hardship of making boys 
 and girls stop at school who might be earning good money 
 towards their support is terrible. Often these children are 
 the sole bread-winners, and then the position is indeed a 
 hard nut for the kind-hearted official to crack. 
 
 After the children have passed a certain standard the 
 officials have the power of granting * half-time ' ; that is to 
 say, the boys and girls can earn money so many days a 
 week, and come to school for the remainder. ' The half- 
 time grant ' is another feature of the 4 B ' meeting. 
 
 The worst duty of the official who presides is to authorize 
 
3° 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 the summoning before a magistrate of the parents who can- 
 not or will not send their children regularly. The law leaves 
 him no option. All children must come unless illness or 
 some equally potent excuse can be urged, and if they don't 
 the parent must appear before a magistrate, who, if the case 
 is made out, is bound by the law to impose a fine. I will 
 endeavour to show you, as the meeting progresses, a few of 
 the parents who thoroughly deserve the penalty. 
 
 A ' B ' meeting is held in the upstairs room of one of the 
 Board Schools. The summoned parents wait in a huge 
 crowd outside. They come in one by one to be disposed of. 
 The president of the meeting sits with the book before 
 him, in which the cases to be heard are fully entered up. 
 Beside him sits the Board official, the inspector of officers, 
 who advises him on little points of School Board law, and 
 who marks the papers which are to be returned to the 
 School Board officer 'in charge of the case' to be acted 
 upon. 
 
 Standing round the room are the School Board officers 
 of the different divisions in the district. They are familiar 
 with the history and circumstances of every one who comes 
 into the little room, and they supply confirmation or con- 
 tradiction as the necessity arises. 
 
 Somewhere or other in the scene my friend and I stand. 
 We are accepted by the parents who come and go as part 
 and parcel of the 1 Inquisition,' and some care is necessary 
 in executing our descriptive task, for this class is very great 
 on the rights of property; and more than one energetic 
 dame, if she knew she was being 1 noted ' by an un- 
 authorized interloper, would return the compliment with 
 interest. 
 
 ' The short and simple annals of the poor,' here related 
 in their own words, will induct the reader into the mysteries 
 of 1 How they live ' far more thoroughly than I could do did 
 I fill pages with my own composition ; so, silence, pray, and 
 let the 1 B ' meeting commence. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 3i 
 
 Here is a lady who very much objects to being summoned. 
 
 ' What bizerness 'as he to summings me,' she says, point- 
 ing to the officer, ' just cus my boy ain't bin fur a week ? 
 He's 'arsh and harbitury, that's what he is. 'Arsh and 
 harbitury ! D'ye think I ain't got anything to do without 
 a-trapesin' down here a-losin' my work ? I tell ye what it 
 is ' 
 
 The chairman mildly interposes : ' My good lady ' 
 
 ' Don't good lady me. I ain't a lady. If I was you daren't 
 treat me like it, you daren't ; it's only because I'm ' 
 
 ' My good woman, will you allow me to say one word ?' 
 
 ' Oh — -yes — certainly — if you've got anything to say — 
 go on.' 
 
 Thus encouraged, the chairman points out to the voluble 
 lady that her son has not been to school for a fortnight. 
 ' Well, it's all through the boots.' 
 
 ' Boots !' says the chairman ; 1 why, that was what you 
 said last time, and we gave you an order on a shoemaker 
 for a pair.' 
 
 The woman acknowledges this is so. Some charitable 
 people have started a fund to let a few bad cases have boots, 
 and this truant has been one of the first recipients. 
 
 1 1 know you was kind enough to do that,' says the 
 mother, 1 but they 'urt him, and he can't wear 'em.' 
 
 Here the officer who has brought the lady up before the 
 Board tells his story. 
 
 ' The boy had a decent pair of boots supplied him, sir ; 
 but . Mrs. Dash went back to the shop with him, and said 
 they weren't good enough — she wanted a pair of the best 
 the man had in stock, and made such a noise she had to be 
 put out.' 
 
 ' Which, beggin' your pardon,' strikes in the angry lady, 
 ' it's like your imperence to say so. They 'urt the boy, they 
 did, and he haves tender feet, through his father, as is dead, 
 being a shoemaker hisself.' 
 
 The officer chimes in again, ' If he can play about the 
 
3-2 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 streets all clay in the boots, Mrs. Dash, they can't hurt him 
 very much.' 
 
 ' My boy play about the streets ! Well, of all the auda- 
 cious things as ever I 'erd ! And as to his comin' to school, 
 he's a beautiful little scholard now, and he ain't got no more 
 to learn.' 
 
 Eventually the 1 beautiful little scholard,' who was wait- 
 ing outside, was sent for. 
 
 He confessed that the boots didn't hurt him, and Mrs. 
 Dash was informed that if he didn't forthwith attend she 
 would be summoned. 
 
 With much difficulty Mrs. Dash was induced to retire, 
 and her place was taken by a burly man covered with grime 
 from a forge, or something of the sort, who looked the 
 personification of fierceness and stony-heartedness. His 
 daughter had not been to school lately, and he was asked 
 to account for her absence. 
 
 There was a moment's pause. We expected an oath or 
 a volley of abuse. Instead of that the man's lips trembled 
 a moment, then his eyes filled with tears, and one rolled 
 slowly down each grimy cheek. 
 
 In a choking voice he gasped out, ' I am very sorry, sir, 
 but I've had a little trouble.' 
 
 ' Dear me !' says the chairman, slightly staggered at the 
 unusual display of emotion ; ' I am sorry for that. What 
 sort of trouble ?' 
 
 ' Well, sir, it ain't a pleasant thing to talk about ' — sob — 
 ' but my wife ' — sob — ' she's left me, sir ' — sob — ' gone away 
 with another man.' 
 
 Here the poor fellow broke down utterly and sobbed like 
 a child. Then he drew a dirty rag from his pocket, and 
 rubbed and rubbed it round his eyes till there was a white 
 ring about them that looked like a pair of spectacles. 
 
 The effect was ludicrous, but no one smiled. The audience, 
 as they say in theatrical notices, was visibly affected. 
 
 The man stammered out his tale bit by bit. His wife 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 33 
 
 had left him with four little children. He had to go out to 
 work, and his daughter he had to keep away from school to 
 look after them. She had to be ' little mother ' in the 
 deserted home. 
 
 I wondered what the woman was like, and if she had any 
 idea of the genuine love for her that welled up in this honest 
 fellow's heart. As I watched the tears flow down his grimy 
 face, I couldn't help thinking how many a noble dame would 
 like to know that her absence from the domestic hearth 
 would cause grief as genuine as this. 
 
 Under the painful circumstances the excuse was accepted ; 
 the ' little mother ' was allowed a short holiday till the 
 betrayed husband had time to make other arrangements, 
 and he left the room murmuring his thanks and mopping 
 his eyes. 
 
 ' Mrs. Smith,' calls out the Board official, taking the next 
 case down on the list for hearing, and a young girl of about 
 fifteen, with a baby in her arms and a child of five clinging 
 to her skirts, enters the room and seats herself nervously on 
 the extreme edge of the chair. 
 
 ' You're not Mrs. Smith, my dear,' says the chairman, 
 with a smile. 
 
 'No, sir; that's mother.' 
 
 ' Oh, you've come for her, eh ? These boys, Thomas 
 and Charles, who have been absent for three weeks, are 
 your brothers, I suppose ?' 
 
 ' Yes, sir.' 
 
 ' Well, my dear, they ought to come, you know. What's 
 the reason ?' 
 
 ' Please, sir, they're at work.' 
 
 ' But they've not passed the Fourth Standard.' 
 
 ' I know, sir ; but they've got a job, and it's four shillings 
 a week each, and that's all I've got to keep us.' 
 
 ' All you've got, my dear ? Where's your father ?' 
 
 The girl colours a little and hesitates. The School Board 
 officer steps forward to the table and helps her. 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 ' It's a very painful case, sir,' he says. ' The father's 
 been living with another woman — left his family. A fort- 
 night ago the mother met him and asked him for some 
 money. He knocked her down, and she fell and cut her 
 head open. She's in St. Thomas's Hospital — not expected 
 to live. The man was taken up, and he's under remand now, 
 and this girl has to look after the entire family.' 
 
 ' I see,' says the chairman ; ' and Thomas and Charles 
 are giving you their money, eh? and that's all you've got ?' 
 
 ' Yes, sir. I can't work myself, because I've got the 
 baby and the others to look after.' 
 
 1 Well, my dear,' says the chairman, ' I am very sorry 
 for you, but your brothers can only have half-time or 
 come back to school.' 
 
 The girl says nothing, she is only fifteen, and can't argue 
 it out with the gentleman — so she curtseys and is ushered 
 out. I wonder, if the mother dies and the father gets a long 
 term of imprisonment, what the fate of the family will be ? 
 
 I have said that the hardships entailed upon the poor by 
 the Education Act are numerous. Let me quote a few 
 statistics gleaned from the papers which I turn over on the 
 chairman's desk by his kind permission. 
 
 They are cases in which the parents apply to have the 
 fees remitted because they cannot afford to pay them. 
 
 1. Mrs. Walker. 7 children of school age ; fee 2d. a week 
 each. Total earnings of entire family, 10s. Eent, 
 5s. 6d. Husband once good mechanic, lost employ- 
 ment through illness and deafness. Parish relief none. 
 Character good. Is now a hawker — sells oranges and 
 fish. Children half-starved. When an orange is too 
 bad to sell they have it for breakfast, with a piece of 
 bread. 
 
 2. Mr. Thompson. 5 children of school age. Out of 
 work. No income but pawning clothes and goods. 
 Eent, 4s. Wife drinks surreptitiously. Husband, good 
 character. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 35 
 
 3. Mrs. . 5 children of school age ; widow. Earn- 
 ings, 6s. Kent, 3s. Her husband when alive was a 
 Drury Lane clown. Eespectable woman ; feels her 
 poverty very keenly. 
 
 4. Mr. Garrard. 8 children of school age; two always 
 under doctor. No income. Pawning last rags. Eent, 
 5s. 6d. No parish relief. Starving. Declines to 
 go into workhouse. 
 
 I could multiply such instances by hundreds. These, 
 however, will suffice to show how serious a burden is added 
 to the lives of the very poor by the enforced payment of 
 school fees. As a rule they are remitted for very good 
 and sufficient reasons. 
 
 How these people live is a mystery. It is a wonder that 
 they are not found dead in their wretched dens, for which 
 they pay a rent out of all proportion to their value, by 
 dozens daily. But they live on, and the starving children 
 come day after day to school with feeble frames and bloodless 
 bodies, and the law expects them to learn as readily as well- 
 fed, healthy children, and to attain the same standard 
 of proficiency in a given time. 
 
 It is these starving children who are not allowed to earn 
 money towards their support until they are thirteen, and in 
 many cases fourteen. Less necessitous children, as a rule, 
 pass out of school earlier, for reasons which will be obvious 
 to anyone who reflects for a moment upon the relationship 
 of a healthy brain to a healthy body. 
 
 In another chapter we shall hear a few more personal 
 narrations at a ' B ' meeting. I will conclude this one 
 with a story of a young gentleman whose excuse for 
 non-attendance is at least dramatic. He has been absent 
 for six weeks, and his mother explains, ' It's all along of 'is 
 aven a reg'lar engagement at the Surrey Pantermine, and 
 there hev been so many matynees.' 
 
 1 He's on the Surrey, is he ?' says the chairman, 
 1 Perhaps that's the reason he can't pass the Standard !' 
 
 3—2 
 
36 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 We see the joke and chuckle, but the boy doesn't. 
 Evidently his pantomime training has been thrown away 
 upon him, 
 
 CHAPTEB V. 
 
 The ladies and gentlemen whom I had the pleasure of 
 introducing to you in the last chapter had, most of them, 
 some good and sufficient excuse for the non-attendance of 
 their children at school. Before the ' B ' meeting at which 
 we assisted was over, more than one case was examined 
 which left the official no option but to take out a summons 
 and run the risk of one of those amiable lectures which un- 
 thinking magistrates now and again see fit to bestow upon 
 the luckless officer of the Board who has done what the law 
 compels him to do, and no more. 
 
 The parents summoned are in many instances dissolute 
 or careless people, who utterly neglect their offspring, and 
 take no pains to ensure their attending school, or they are 
 crafty, cunning wretches, who see in the law a means of 
 attaining a consummation devoutly to be wished. 
 
 Here is a woman who, when asked why her boy of nine 
 has not been to school for a month, declares that he plays 
 truant, and that he is quite beyond her control. Now, 
 the result of such a complaint is, that the young gentleman 
 will, if the parent reiterates in court her statement, be sent 
 to a reformatory for five years. 
 
 That is just what the good lady wants. Her story is one 
 that may be instructive if not edifying. 
 
 Two years ago her husband got ten years' penal servitude 
 for a heavy fracture of his country's laws, leaving her with 
 three children, two boys and a girl. There is a custom in 
 such districts as that of which I write which shortens the 
 period of mourning for a lost mate very considerably. 
 Directly husband ' No. 1 ' gets forcibly removed from the 
 domestic hearth, his place is almost invariably taken by 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 37 
 
 another gentleman, who is 'master of the situation,' and 
 locum tenens with full family honours. 
 
 I cannot resist telling a little story apropos of this domestic 
 phase of slum life, which illustrates it rather forcibly. A 
 little girl of eight at one of the schools near the Mint came 
 one morning with a pair of boots on her little feet. This 
 was the first pair of boots she had ever been seen in, and 
 the unwonted magnificence naturally attracted attention. 
 
 ' Why, Annie, you've got a pair of boots at last, then !•' 
 exclaimed the governess. 
 
 ' Yes, mistress,' the child replied, glancing proudly at 
 the battered, second-hand shoes, three times too large for her. 
 
 1 And where did you get them ?' 
 
 ' One of my fathers gave 'em to me, mistress — the one 
 what's at home this week.' 
 
 This ' father ' was evidently a better fellow than most of 
 the nomadic husbands who wander about from family circle 
 to family circle, ready to replace its absent head at a 
 moment's notice. He must have been more generous to 
 another man's child than the ' husband ' of the lady whose 
 history I have so unceremoniously interrupted, and who 
 wants her boy put away in a reformatory. 
 
 Husband 'No. 2,' I gather from one who knows the 
 history of the case, is a young fellow who objects to ' brats,' 
 and the ' brats' are being got out of the way one by one. 
 The eldest boy was put to thieving, and he is being kept 
 now by the State ; the girl took to something worse, 
 and a benevolent society relieved the mother of any future 
 liability on her behalf. And now the good lady comes to 
 the ' B ' meeting and declares the youngest boy is incor- 
 rigible, and hints as broadly as she dare that she should be 
 glad to have him put away as well. She will have her wish, 
 and the boy, whom in all probability she has wilfully kept 
 away and encouraged in his incorrigibleness, will be sent to 
 a reformatory within a fortnight. 
 
 Thus you see a wholesale clearance has been made of one 
 
38 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 family, and the room they took up at home will soon be 
 utilized by new-comers, in the shape of family number two. 
 
 A more charming and ingenious way of disposing of in- 
 cumbrances it is difficult to imagine. It is not, however, by 
 any means uncommon. 
 
 Marriage, as an institution, is not fashionable in these 
 districts. Yet so long as cohabitation is possible — that is to 
 say, so long as neither the hospital, the prison, nor the 
 churchyard effects a separation — the couples are fairly 
 faithful, and look upon themselves as man and wife, with 
 the usual marital obligations. 
 
 Both parties to the arrangement exhibit great reluctance 
 to ' break ' of their own free will, and it is marvellous to 
 see the tenacity with which a decent hard-working woman 
 will cling to a ruffian who spends her earnings and blackens 
 her eye, as regularly as Saturday night comes round, 
 although he has not the slightest legal claim on her allegiance. 
 
 If you ask the couples who live happily together why 
 they don't get married, some will tell you frankly that they 
 never gave it a thought, others that it's a lot of trouble and 
 they haven't had time. A clergyman's wife who took intense 
 interest in a young couple living together in a room in the 
 Mint determined to make them get married. The young 
 fellow earned fair wages, and was sober and steady ; the 
 girl kept her room and her two little children clean and 
 decent, and was always civil-spoken and pleasant. The good 
 lady who had the entrde of the place talked to the young 
 man whenever she saw him, and he admitted at last that, 
 perhaps, the union might as well be made a legal one : 1 Not 
 that me and Sail 'ull get on any better, you know, mum — 
 we couldn't ; but since you've been on at her she seems to 
 have a bit o' fancy like for to have the marridge lines, and 
 if you'll tell us how, we'll get it done and over, missis.' 
 
 Delighted with the promise, the lady set to work and 
 prepared everything. She gave the bride a new gown to be 
 married in, and made frocks for the two little ones to come 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 39 
 
 and see their father married ; she arranged with her husband 
 to perform the ceremony ; and last, but most important, she 
 got the young man a day's holiday without loss of pay from 
 his employers. 
 
 The eventful day arrived ; the good soul beaming and 
 elated, waited, with a few friends invited to see the interest- 
 ing ceremony, at the church. The clergyman stood with his 
 book at the altar, but no young couple. Twelve o'clock 
 struck, the clergyman went into the vestry, and put his 
 coat on ; and bitterly disappointed at the failure of her little 
 scheme, the good lady sat on for an hour, thinking some 
 delay might have occurred ; but after awhile she gave it up 
 as a bad job, and departed also. 
 
 That evening, in as towering a rage as a clergyman's wife 
 could decently be, she marched off to the Mint, and tackled 
 the delinquents at once. 
 
 What did they mean by it ? 
 
 The young man was very civil and very apologetic. 
 
 ' He didn't mean to be rude, but the fact was, a mate 
 hearin' he'd got a day off offered him a job at carting as was 
 worth five bob ; and, you know, mum, I couldn't lose five 
 bob just for the sake o' getting married.' 
 
 I am happy to say that the energetic lady set to work 
 again, got another holiday for the man a week after, and 
 this time 1 personally conducted ' the wedding-party to the 
 church, which they did not leave till the young woman was 
 the proud possessor of that by no means common property 
 in the locality — a marriage certificate. 
 
 But to return to the ' B ' meeting. The lady who wants 
 her little boy put away having been disposed of, a decent- 
 looking woman takes her place. She is nursing a baby, 
 and by her side stands a small boy, with staring eyes that 
 seem fixed upon nothing in particular — a strange, uncanny, 
 big-headed child, who attracts attention directly. 
 
 Mrs. Jones, the mother, is called upon to say why this 
 lad's sister, aged ten, has been absent three weeks. 
 
4 o 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 1 Well, I'm very sorry, gen'lemen, but I've had to keep 
 her at home. Ye see, gen'lemen, I haves ruematics, which 
 takes me all of a nunplush in the joints o' the knees and 
 the ankles of the feet, and then I can't move.' 
 
 ' Yes, but that needn't keep the girl at home. You can 
 nurse the baby even if you have rheumatics.' 
 
 ' Yes, sir, I know ; but it's that boy as is the trouble. 
 Ye see, sir, he can't be lef not a minnit without somebody as 
 can get after him quick. He's allers settin' hisself afire. 
 He gets the matches wherever we 'ides 'em, and he lights 
 anything he sees — the bed, the baby, hisself. Bless you, 
 gen'lemen, it's orful ; he can't be off settin' somethin' alight 
 not five minnits together. He ain't right in 'is 'ed, sir.' 
 
 The idiot incendiary paid not the slightest attention ; his 
 wild, strange eyes were wandering about the room, probably 
 for a box of matches with which to set us alight, and make 
 one big blaze of the ' B ' meeting, chairman, officers, 
 himself, and all. 
 
 ' And that ain't all, sir. My 'usband's dead, sir ; and all 
 we've got for a livin's a little shop, sir, where we sells 
 drippin', and matches, and candles, and odds and ends ; and I 
 can't run in and out when I'm so queer, and the gal's all I've 
 got to do things. I wish you would give her half-time, sir.' 
 
 The poor woman certainly had her work cut out, with the 
 rheumatics, the baby, the shop, and the idiot incendiary; 
 and the chairman, after a little consultation with the officer, 
 finding the case was a deserving one, granted the half-time ; 
 and the woman left evidently considerably relieved, dragging 
 the young gentleman with a tendency to commit hourly 
 arson after her. 
 
 The next to put in an appearance was a lady with a 
 wretched-looking face, and a shabby, draggled, out-all-night 
 and drunk-in-the-morning appearance generally. Her pro- 
 fession was stated with official bluntness in the paper handed 
 to the chairman. It is generally translated ' street-walker ' 
 in family circles. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 4i 
 
 But, whatever she might be, she had children, and the law 
 required them to come to school. Instead of making their 
 attendances, learning to read and write, the children were 
 street Arabs. The woman was meek and quiet enough. She 
 promised ' she'd see to it,' and was reminded that she had 
 made the same promise before. This time it was not 
 accepted, and the woman was informed that she would have 
 to appear before a magistrate. 
 
 Meekly and quietly she said, ' Thank you, sir,' as if the 
 chairman had presented her with a medal or a pound of tea, 
 and went out. 
 
 The women poured in one after the other— there were 
 very few men, most of them, I suppose, being ' at work,' 
 whatever that term might imply in their particular case — 
 and they were of all sizes, sorts and conditions. There 
 were respectable, decent, motherly-looking souls, drunken 
 outcasts, slatternly trollops, half-starved and sickly-looking 
 women, and fat, overwhelming women, who came not to be 
 crushed, but to crush. 
 
 One gaunt, fierce-looking lady, with the voice of a man 
 and the fist of a prize-fighter, gave the company a bit of her 
 mind. ' Her " gal " warn't a-coming to be worrited with a 
 lot o' stuff. She was delikit, her gal was, and the School 
 Board was murderin' of her.' 
 
 ' What's the matter with her ?' asked the chairman. 
 
 1 Well, it's nervis system, and her teeth growin' out.' 
 
 ' Where's the doctor's certificate that she's too ill to 
 attend ?' 
 
 ' Sitifkit ? d'ye think I've got time to go a-gettin' sitifkits 
 — not me — ain't my word good ernuff ?' 
 
 The School Board officer knows this lady's circumstances, 
 and he whispers something to the chairman. The girl's 
 ' nervis system ' and dental eccentricities have not prevented 
 her affectionate mother from sending her out hawking every 
 day while she stops at home and drinks. 
 
 'Where's your husband?' asked the officer. 'I haven't 
 
4 2 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 seen him lately. He'll have to be summoned, you know, as 
 you can't get a certificate.' 
 
 The officer in question has good reason to ask affection- 
 ately after the husband. Last year the worthy gentleman 
 got a month for playfully tossing the officer down a flight of 
 stairs on to his head. 
 
 'Where's my husband? Ah!' says she, purple with 
 passion, 1 you want to summon him, do you ? Well, then, 
 you jolly well carn't. Gord's got him.' 
 
 ' Dead ?' asked the chairman. 
 
 ' Yes — didn't I say so ?' 
 
 1 Then you will be summoned instead.' 
 
 The lady didn't retire — she had to be diplomatically 
 crowded out, and the last sounds that reached the room as 
 she receded along the corridor, under gentle pressure, were 
 wishes that the chairman and all concerned might go where — 
 at least, if her estimate of his whereabouts was correct — they 
 would not have the pleasure of meeting her late lamented 
 consort. 
 
 There are some rough customers to deal with in this " 
 district — so rough that it is a wonder the Act works so 
 smoothly as it does. The fiercest and most reckless of the 
 lawless classes have to be bearded in their dens by the 
 devoted, ill-paid officers, who ferret out the children and 
 insist upon their coming to school. Up to the topmost 
 garret and down to the lowest cellar, in dens and hovels 
 given over to thieves and wantons, I have accompanied a 
 School Board officer on his rounds, and I frankly confess 
 that I have passed a few bad quarters of an hour. 
 
 There are dozens of these places where the blow follows 
 the word in a moment, where life is held of the least account, 
 and where assaults are so common that the victims would 
 as soon think of asking the police to notice their broken 
 windows as to take cognizance of their broken heads. 
 
 There is a legend that in one of these cellars in the Mint 
 — it fetches three shillings a week rent, by-the-bye — a man 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 43 
 
 killed a woman and left her ; and that nobody took any 
 notice until the body got unpleasant, and then they threw 
 it out into the street. 
 
 The ' 'appy dossers ' 1 are the wretched people who roam 
 about the street houseless, and creep in to sleep on the 
 stairs, in the passages and untenanted cellars of the lodging- 
 houses, with the doors open night and day. No policeman's 
 lantern is ever turned on them, and they crowd together in 
 their rags and make a jolly night of it. Sometimes in among 
 them creeps a starving woman, to die from want and ex- 
 posure, and she dies while the foul oath and the ribald 
 jests go on ; and the ' dossers ' who are well enough to be 
 1 'appy ' make such a noise that a lodger, disturbed in his 
 legitimate rest for which he has paid, comes out and lays 
 about him vigorously at the ' varmints,' and kicks them 
 downstairs, if he can. 
 
 Thus not only are many of the licensed lodging-houses 
 and homes of the poor breeding-houses in themselves for 
 crime, disease, and filth, but they are, for lack of supervision, 
 receptacles for that which has already been bred elsewhere, 
 and which is deposited gratis, to swell the collection. 
 
 A ' 'appy dosser ' can make himself comfortable anywhere. 
 I heard of one who used to crawl into the dust-bin, and pull 
 the lid down ; but I know that to be an untruth, from the 
 simple fact that none of the dust-bins on this class of pro- 
 perty have a lid. The contents are left, too, for months to 
 decompose, not only under the eyes of the authorities, but 
 under the noses of the inhabitants. The sanitary inspection 
 of these houses is a farce, and in many cases the vestrymen, 
 who ought to put the law in motion, are themselves the 
 owners of the murder-traps. 
 
 How foul, how awful some of these places, where the poor 
 have found their last refuge from Artisans' Dwelling Acts 
 and Metropolitan improvements, are, I dare not tell you. I 
 have been told that the readers of a shilling book don't care 
 to know, and the difficulties of dealing with this subject are 
 
44 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 increased by my knowledge of the fact that in a truthful 
 account of 1 How the Poor Live ' there can be but little to 
 attract those who read for pleasure only. Eags — that i« to 
 say, the rags of our cold, sunless clime — are never pic- 
 turesque ; squalor and misery can only be made tolerable by 
 the touch of the romancist — and here I dare not romance. 
 
 Bad, however, as things are, shocking as is the condition 
 in which thousands and thousands of our fellow-citizens live 
 from the cradle to the grave, it is not an unmixed evil if out 
 of its very repulsiveness grows a remedy for it. 
 
 It has got now into a condition in which it cannot be left. 
 For very shame England must do something — nay, for self- 
 preservation, which is the most powerful of all human 
 motives. This mighty mob of famished, diseased, and filthy 
 helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically 
 dangerous. The barriers that have kept it back are rotten 
 and giving way, and it may do the State a mischief if it be 
 not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread 
 to the homes of the wealthy ; its lawless armies may sally 
 forth and give us a taste of the lesson the mob has tried to 
 teach now and again in Paris, when long years of neglect 
 have done their work. 
 
 Happily, there is a brighter side. Education — compulsory 
 education — has done much. The new generation is learning 
 at least to be clean if not to be honest. The young mothers 
 of the slums — the girls who have been at the Board Schools 
 — have far tidier homes already than their elders. The old 
 people born and bred in filth won't live out of it. If you 
 gave some of the slumites Buckingham Palace they would 
 make it a pigsty in a fortnight. These people are irre- 
 claimable, but they will die out, and the new race can be 
 worked for with hope and with a certainty of success. Hard 
 as are some of the evils of the Education Act, they are out- 
 balanced by the good, and it is that Act above all others 
 which will eventually bring about the new order of things 
 so long desired. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 45 
 
 So important a bearing on the home question has the 
 schooling of the children who are to be the rent-payers of 
 the next generation, that I propose to devote the next chapter 
 to some sketches of School Board life and character ; and I 
 will take it in one of the worst districts in London, where- 
 the parents are sunk in a state of misery almost beyond belief. 
 
 I will show you the children at school who come daily 
 to their work from the foulest and dirtiest dens in London 
 — that awful network of hovels which lie about the Borough 
 and the Mint. 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 The difficulty of getting that element of picturesqueness 
 into these chapters which is so essential to success with a 
 large class of English readers becomes more and more ap- 
 parent as I and my travelling companion explore region after 
 region where the poor are hidden away to live as best they 
 can. There is a monotony in the surroundings which became 
 painfully apparent to us, and were our purpose less earnest 
 than it is, we might well pause dismayed at the task we have 
 undertaken. 
 
 The Mint and the Borough present scenes awful enough 
 in all conscience to be worthy of earnest study ; but scene 
 after scene is the same. Rags, dirt, filth, wretchedness, the 
 same figures, the same faces, the same old story of one room 
 unfit for habitation yet inhabited by eight or nine people, 
 the same complaint of a ruinous rent absorbing three -fourths 
 Of the toiler's weekly wage, the same shameful neglect by 
 the owner of the property of all sanitary precautions, rotten 
 floors, oozing walls, broken windows, crazy staircases, tile- 
 less roofs, and in and around the dwelling-place of hundreds 
 of honest citizens the nameless abominations which could 
 only be set forth were we contributing to the Lancet instead 
 of writing a book — these are the things which confront 
 
4 6 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 us, whether we turn to the right or to the left, whether we 
 linger in the Mint or seek fresh fields in the slums that lie 
 round Holborn, or wind our adventurous footsteps towards 
 the network of dens that lie within a stone's throw of our 
 great National Theatre, Drury Lane. 
 
 The story of one slum is the story of another, and all are 
 unrelieved by the smallest patch of that colour which lends 
 a charm to pictures of our poorest peasantry. God made the 
 country, they say, and man made the town ; and wretched 
 as is the lot of the agricultural labourer, the handiwork of 
 Heaven still remains to give some relief to the surroundings 
 of his miserable life. Field and tree and flower, the green 
 of the meadow and the hedge, the gold and white of butter- 
 cup and daisy, the bright hues of the wild cottage garden — 
 it is in the midst of these the pigsties of the rustic poor 
 are pitched, and there is scope for the artist's brush. But 
 in the slums he can use but one colour ; all is a monotone — 
 a sombre gray deepening into the blackness of night. Even 
 the blue, that in the far-off skies seems to defy the man- 
 made town to be utterly colourless, is obscured by the 
 smoke belched forth from a hundred chimneys ; and even 
 the sun, which shines with systematic impartiality on the 
 righteous and the unrighteous alike, is foiled in its efforts to 
 get at these outcasts by the cunning builders, who have put 
 house so close to house that even a sunbeam which had 
 trained down to the proportions of Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt, 
 and then been flattened by a steam-roller, could not force 
 its way between the overhanging parapets with any chance 
 of getting to the ground. So what sunshine there is stops 
 on the roofs among the chimney-pots, and is the sole 
 property of the cats of the neighbourhood, who may be seen 
 dozing about in dozens, or indulging in a pastime which 
 they have certainly not learnt of their masters and mis- 
 tresses, namely, washing their faces. 
 
 The cat-life of the slums is peculiar. Dogs are rare, but 
 the cats are as common as blackberries in September. Not 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 47 
 
 over-clean and not over-fat, the cats of the slums yet seern 
 perfectly contented, and rarely leave the district in which 
 they have been reared. They ascend to the roof early in the 
 day, and stay there long after darkness has set in, and in 
 the choice of a local habitation they show their feline sense. 
 The rooms of their respective owners offer neither air nor 
 sunshine, and when 1 the family ' are all at home it is 
 possibly the inability of finding even a vacant corner to curl 
 up in that drives Thomas to that part of a house which the 
 people of the East consider the best, but which the people 
 of our East have never sought to utilize. 
 
 The cats of the slums are certainly domesticated : they 
 marry and have families, and the kittens are the only really 
 pretty things we have seen since we started on our ex- 
 plorations. 
 
 The young of most animals are interesting and picturesque ; 
 but a kitten is perhaps the prettiest of all ; and a painful 
 contrast is there between the sallow dirty face, the sunken 
 eyes and wizard features of a baby we see sitting on a door- 
 step nursing one, and the dainty face, blue eyes, and plump, 
 pretty figure of the kitten. The mother of the latter has 
 set an example in the matter of philoprogenitiveness and 
 domestic forethought which the mother of the former would 
 do well to imitate. 
 
 There are not wanting those who believe that for the 
 present generation of poor little can be done — I mean, of 
 course, the poor who are sunk in the misery and degradation 
 of slum life. Dirtiness is ingrained in them, and if they had 
 decent habitations provided for them to-morrow, they would 
 no more live in them than a gipsy could settle down under 
 any but a canvas roof. 
 
 Thrift they do not understand, and are too old to be 
 taught ; and ordinary decency is a thing of which they have 
 about as much conception as they would have of the sestheti- 
 cism of Mr. Oscar Wilde or the philosophy of Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer. 
 
4S 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 I am not of the school which says that the regeneration 
 of the masses is hopeless, but I freely confess that the great 
 chance of bringing about a new and better order of things 
 lies among the children who are to be the mothers and 
 fathers of the future. In the old Biblical times water and 
 fire were the elements which solved the knotty problem of 
 regenerating a seething mass of humanity sunk in the lowest 
 abysses of vice and degradation. The deluge that shall do 
 the work now must come of the opening of the floodgates 
 of knowledge. Already, in tiny rivulets as yet, the waters 
 are trickling even into the darkest corners of our great cities. 
 The flood can never rise high enough to cleanse those who 
 have grown up ignorant — at best it can but wet their feet ; 
 but the children cannot escape it — the waters will gather 
 force and volume and grow into a broad glorious river, 
 through which the boys and girls of to-day will wade breast 
 high until they gain the banks of the Promised Land. It 
 is this river of knowledge which the modern wanderers in 
 the wilderness must ford to reach the Canaan which the 
 philanthropist sees waiting for them in his dreams. 
 
 The first working of the Education Act was fraught with 
 countless difficulties. It was no light task to catch the 
 children of a shifting race, to schedule street Arabs and the 
 offspring of beggars and thieves and prostitutes. But in the 
 course of a few years almost every difficulty has been con- 
 quered, and now there is hardly a child above a certain age 
 — no matter how wretched its condition may be — that is not 
 brought within the beneficial influence of education. 
 
 True that many of them come shoeless, ragged, and 
 starving, to learn the three 1 E's,' to burthen their scanty 
 brains with sums and tasks while their stomachs are empty 
 and their bodies weakened by disease and neglect ; but they 
 have at least their chance. Let us take a school where, 
 perhaps, the poorest children come — a school recruited from 
 such homes as we have familiarized you with in previous 
 chapters — and see the little scholars at their dainty tasks. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 49 
 
 Here is a child who is but one remove from an idiot. The 
 teacher has a hard task, for the Government inspector 
 expects all the scholars to make the same progress. This 
 poor waif — the offspring of a gentleman whose present ad- 
 dress is Holloway Gaol, and a lady who has been charged 
 seventy-three times with being drunk and incapable — must 
 pass a certain standard before she can leave school ; in her 
 case, if she lives, she will pass out by age, for statistics show 
 that no system can make this class of intellect retain a 
 lesson. It is sowing seed upon a rock, and there will be no 
 harvest ; but the child has just sufficient intelligence to 
 escape the asylum, and between the asylum and the school 
 there is no half-way house. 
 
 Some benefit, at least, she derives from the discipline, the 
 care, and the motherly sympathy of a kind head-mistress, 
 who takes a strong personal interest in her little charges. 
 For so many hours a day at least the child escapes the 
 ghastly surroundings of the den which is her ' home.' 
 . Side by side with her sits a pretty, intelligent little girl of 
 nine. This child's eyes are bright with intelligence, the 
 features are pleasing and regular. As she is called forward, 
 she rises and smilingly comes towards us. There is none 
 of that stolid indifference, that mechanical obedience to a 
 command which distinguishes too many of the little ones 
 who are here in obedience to the laws. This girl learns 
 quickly, and has had all the better qualities brought out. 
 She is neat, and takes a pride in her personal appearance. 
 She has learnt to be ashamed of dirt, and she is ambitious 
 to be high up in her class. Ambition is the one quality 
 which will help above all others to lift the poor out of 
 degradation. The older race have it not ; hence they are 
 content with their present positions, only seeking to gratify 
 their daily appetites, and caring not a fig for the morrow. 
 This child will do well, whatever she undertakes ; and it is 
 such as she who will survive in the battle of life, and become 
 the mothers of a better and more useful class. 
 
 4 
 
HO IV THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 Yet hers is a sad enough story. Her father was a boat- 
 man, and in a drunken rage struck his wife down with a 
 boat-hook. 
 
 Hers was the common offence of asking for money. The 
 blow injured the woman's brain, and from that day to this 
 she has been in a lunatic asylum. The father disappeared 
 after the crime, and the child's grandmother took the orphan 
 with living parents in, and out of her scanty earnings kept 
 her. One day this year the old lady passed some men 
 carrying a body found in the river to the dead-house. 
 Curiosity induced her to go in with the crowd, and the face 
 of the dead man was that of her son. 
 
 A back-street tragedy — common enough, with a varied 
 plot and incidents in these parts, but, as it stands, the life- 
 story of this child. 
 
 ' And your granny keeps you now ?' says the teacher, as 
 she concludes the little history, and turns to the girl. 
 
 ' Yes, teacher ; and when I grow up I'm going to keep 
 granny.' 
 
 So may it be ! 
 
 There are some hundred girls in the room. Some of them 
 come from decent homes, and some from cellars ; many of 
 their histories are romances ; but they are romances which 
 mostly tend one way — to show the misery, the guilt, and 
 the poverty in which they have been reared ; and to recount 
 them would be but to dwell upon a note which perhaps 
 I have touched too often already. 
 
 There are brighter stories, too, to be told of their parents, 
 but none so bright as they will be able to tell of themselves 
 when, after years of discipline and culture, they go forth to 
 lead lives which with their fathers and mothers were 
 impossible. 
 
 Close to the school where the elder girls are educated, 
 and in the same building, is the department for infants. 
 Here the children under seven are prepared to pass into the 
 upper department. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 5i 
 
 Directly we enter we are struck with the appearance of 
 these children. Bad faces there are among them — bruises 
 and scars, and bandages and rags — but the bulk of these 
 younger children have a generally better appearance than 
 their little neighbours. 
 
 There is a theory in the school, and it is borne out to a 
 certain extent by fact, that some of the youngest and best- 
 looking are the children of girls who just got the benefit of 
 the Education Act before they were too old, and who in their 
 young married life have reaped the benefit of those principles 
 of cleanliness and thrift which the Board School inculcates. 
 The young mothers are already a race far ahead of the older 
 ones in this district, and the children naturally benefit by it. 
 It must be borne in mind that the girls of this class marry 
 or take a mate at a very early age. Many of them have three 
 or four children by the time they are twenty, so that they 
 would have been brought under the influence of the present 
 Education Act. These young women, too, live in a better 
 way ; their room is tidier and cleaner, there is a little 
 coquetry in them, and they have a sense of shame which 
 renders them excellent service. They are anxious about 
 their children's education, they recognise the advantage the 
 discipline and instruction have been to them, and the 
 general tone of their lives is every way a distinct advance 
 on the old order of things. 
 
 I quote these facts because they so fully bear out the 
 theory that Education must be the prime instrument in 
 changing the condition of the poor for the better, whatever 
 results it may have later on upon the condition of the labour 
 market, and the political and social questions of the future. 
 The many theories which are put forward about the result 
 of educating the masses, it is not my province here to 
 discuss ; nor need I consider those doctrines which are 
 closely akin to Socialism, and which are the favourite argu- 
 ments of a school of advanced thinkers when discussing the 
 future condition of the masses. 
 
 4—2 
 
52 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 I have only to confine myself to the facts before me, and 
 I think this great improvement in the children of the young 
 mothers a most important one. 
 
 The best examples are in a room which is a kind of creche. 
 Here the babies can be left by the mothers who have to go 
 out to work, and the tiny mites are looked after with 
 motherly care by a kind-hearted creature whose lot I do 
 not envy. Fancy forty infants, some of them little over two 
 years old, to take care of for eight hours a day ! Mothers 
 will appreciate the situation better than I can describe it. 
 
 Look at the babies at dinner. They have brought their 
 bread and butter with them, and they sit at the little low table 
 enjoying it thoroughly. In the winter, when work is scarce, 
 alas ! baby's bread and butter is not always so thick as it is to- 
 day. Sometimes baby has only a dry crust. But there is a lot 
 of the best sort of Christian character knocking about in the 
 Great City, and an excellent society, which provides dinners 
 for poor Board School children, has done much to alleviate 
 this painful state of things. A starving body, a famished 
 child ; there is no fear of imposture here ; and if anyone 
 who reads these chapters wishes to support a truly admirable 
 movement, where there is no fear of abuse, he or she may 
 imitate Captain Cuttle, and, having found a good thing, make 
 a note of it. 
 
 In addition to the dining and play-table there is a long bed 
 in the room. There the tired babies sleep eight or ten in a 
 row sometimes, and forget their baby troubles. The creche 
 is a boon and a blessing to the poor woman who going out 
 to work has a choice of keeping an elder girl at home to 
 nurse the baby and be summoned for it, or locking the said 
 baby up alone in a room all day with the risk to its life and 
 its limbs inevitable to such a course, not to mention the 
 danger of fire and matches and fits. 
 
 It is therefore with grief I hear that there are to be no 
 more built in Board Schools, and that the cost of maintain- 
 ing those existing must in future be defrayed by voluntary 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 53 
 
 contributions. The Government objects to the creche depart- 
 ment on economical grounds. 
 
 The lady who manages the infants old enough to learn 
 has no easy task, but the order is perfect, and the children 
 drill like little soldiers. Here, too, the stories of many of 
 them reveal a depth of misery not often sounded except in 
 the police-courts. 
 
 Here I see a bright, pretty, golden-haired girl of five who 
 rather upsets my pet theory. She ought to be ugly and dull, 
 if there is anything in breed. Her mamma is seldom out of 
 prison for more than a week. Mamma, not having learned 
 Latin, does not know the difference between meum and tuum, 
 and is an incorrigible shoplifter and thief. When she is 
 enjoying her liberty, too, she has a habit of tumbling about 
 which is not conducive to health. She has fallen out of a 
 window and damaged the pavement below, and once with 
 a baby in her arms she fell down the stairs of this very 
 school. 
 
 When they picked her up the baby's collar-bone was 
 broken, but she was sound enough to exclaim, ' If it hadn't 
 ha' been for that blessed baby I'd a broken my neck, I 
 would.' 
 
 It isn't every mother who is philosopher enough to re- 
 cognise the use of a baby in breaking her fall downstairs. 
 
 The father of this little girl is a respectable man ; but he 
 has to go a long way for work, and when papa is in the 
 country and mamma is in gaol, some good Sisters of Charity 
 have taken the child and found it a home. 
 
 We have made our notes, and the children file out of 
 school to dinner and to play. 
 
 One sturdy little chap takes his sister's hand and leads her 
 out like a little father. He has over half a mile to take her 
 home. We are told it is a beautiful sight to see him piloting 
 her across the great thoroughfares when the traffic sweeps 
 wildly up and down, and never leaving go the little hand 
 that is placed so trustingly in his till home is reached and the 
 
54 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 dangers of the streets are over. They are a pretty pair as 
 they toddle out hand in hand, and they form a pleasant 
 picture in this brief sketch of the little scholars who come 
 daily from the garrets and, cellars of the slums to get that 
 ' little learning ' which in their cases is surely the reverse of 
 a ' dangerous thing.' 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 If I were asked to say off-hand what was the greatest curse 
 of the poor and what was the greatest blessing, I think my 
 answer to the first query would be the public-house, and to 
 the second the hospital. Of course, I might be wrong. 
 There are some people who will contend that in these islands 
 the greatest blessing of the natives of all degrees is that they 
 are Great Britons. Our patriotic songs bid us all rejoice 
 greatly at the fact, and patriotism is not a class privilege. 
 The starved outcast, crouching for shelter on a wild March 
 night in one of the stone recesses of London Bridge, has a 
 right to exclaim with the same pride as the Marquis of 
 Westminster — 
 
 ' Far as the breeze can bear the billows' foam, 
 Survey our empire and behold our home.' 
 
 His soul, for all we know, may rejoice greatly that Britannia 
 rules the waves, and in spite of the fact that a policeman, 
 spying him out as ' without the visible means of subsistence,' 
 may seize him and consign him to durance vile, he — the 
 outcast, not the policeman — may ponder with much national 
 vanity od the fact that Britons never shall be slaves. 
 
 Out upon the parochial-minded disciples of the Birming- 
 ham school, who pretend that a nation can be very great 
 abroad and yet very small at home ! ' Survey our empire ' 
 is a noble line, and there is another about the Queen's 
 morning drum which has a magnificent ring about it, and 
 crops up in patriotic leading articles about twice a week all 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 55 
 
 the year round. It is, however, just possible that the vast 
 extent of British rule does not come home so pleasurably to 
 my friend on the bridge as it does to the well-fed, prosperous 
 citizen of Jingo proclivities who believes that Heaven's first 
 command to an Englishman was, ' Thou shalt remove thy 
 neighbour's landmark.' The poor wretch may ' survey' his 
 ' empire ' with a feeling of anything but contentment, and he 
 may be tempted to wish that we had a little less empire to 
 look after abroad in order that a little attention might be 
 bestowed upon the place where charity begins. 
 
 Even at the risk of being pronounced unpatriotic, I shall, 
 therefore, maintain my contention that the greatest blessing 
 of the poor is the hospital — that noble institution of which 
 Englishmen of all classes and all creeds may reasonably be 
 proud. 
 
 Sickness, disease, and accident enter very largely into the 
 annals of the poor. Overcrowding and unsanitary dwellings 
 — all the ghastly surroundings of poor life in a great city, 
 which I have attempted feebly to describe in this book — 
 render the masses peculiarly susceptible to illness in every 
 shape and form. Epidemics of some sort or other are 
 rarely absent from the poorer districts, and many painful 
 diseases and deformities are transmitted regularly from 
 parent to child. To be sound of limb and well in health in 
 these dens is bad enough, but the existence of an invalid 
 under such circumstances is pitiable to a degree. The 
 hospitals are the heavens-upon-earth of the poor. I have 
 heard little children — their poor pinched faces wrinkled 
 with pain — murmur that they didn't mind it, because if 
 they had been well they would never have come to ' the 
 beautiful place.' Beautiful, indeed, by contrast with their 
 wretched homes are the clean wards, the comfortable beds, 
 and the kind faces of the nurses. Step across from the 
 home of a sick child in the slums of the Borough to the 
 Evelina Hospital, and it is like passing from the infernal 
 regions to Paradise. To this noble charity little sufferers 
 
56 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 are often brought dirty, neglected, starving ; and even the 
 nurses, used as they are to such sights, will tell you their 
 hearts ache at the depth of baby wretchedness revealed in 
 some of the cases brought to them. 
 
 Passing from cot to cot, and hearing the histories of the 
 little ones lying there so clean, and, in spite of their 
 suffering, so happy, one is inclined to think that the charity 
 is a mistake — that to nurse these children back to health 
 only to send them again to their wretched homes is a 
 species of refined cruelty. It were better in dozens of 
 cases that the children were left to die now, while they are 
 young and innocent, than that death should be wrestled 
 with and its prize torn from it only to be cast back into a 
 state of existence which is worse than death. 
 
 The children have some dim inkling of this themselves. 
 Many of them cry when they are well, and cling to the 
 kind nurses, asking piteously not to be sent back to the 
 squalor and dirt, and often, alas ! cruelty, from which they 
 have been snatched for a brief spell. 
 
 The elder people doubtless appreciate the blessings of the 
 hospital as much as the children. The poor generally 
 speak in the highest terms of such institutions. They could 
 not, as a rule, lie ill at home ; care and attention would be 
 impossible ; and for a sick person the atmosphere would 
 mean certain death. Doctors they cannot afford to pay. 
 The class of practitioners who lay themselves out for 
 business in these neighbourhoods are not, as a rule, much 
 more than nostrum and patent-medicine vendors, and their 
 charges are generally extortionate. If you could bring 
 yourself to imagine truthfully the condition of the sick poor 
 without the hospitals to go to, you would see a picture of 
 human misery so appalling that you would cover your eyes 
 and turn away from it with a shudder. 
 
 Yet there are such pictures to be seen. There are cases 
 which, from varying circumstances, do not go to the hospital. 
 There are men and women who lie and die day by day in 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 57 
 
 these wretched single rooms, sharing all the family trouble, 
 enduring the hunger and the cold, and waiting without hope, 
 without a single ray of comfort, until God curtains their 
 staring eyes with the merciful film of death. 
 
 It was such a case we came upon once in our wanderings, 
 and which, without unduly harrowing up the reader's 
 feelings, I will endeavour to describe. 
 
 The room was no better and no worse than hundreds of 
 its class. It was dirty and dilapidated, with the usual bulg- 
 ing blackened ceiling and the usual crumbling greasy walls. 
 Its furniture was a dilapidated four-post bedstead, a chair, 
 and a deal table. On the bed lay a woman, young, and with 
 features that, before hourly anguish contorted them, had 
 been comely. The woman was dying slowly of heart disease. 
 Death was ' writ large ' upon her face. At her breast she 
 held her child, a poor little mite of a baby that was drawing 
 the last drain of life from, its mother's breast. The day 
 was a bitterly cold one ; through the broken casement the 
 wind came ever and anon in icy gusts, blowing the hanging 
 end of the ragged coverlet upon the bed to and fro like a 
 flag in a breeze. The wind roared in the chimney, too, 
 eddying down into the fireless grate with a low howling 
 noise like the moan of a Banshee round a haunted house. 
 To protect the poor woman from the cold her husband had 
 flung on it his tattered great-coat — a garment that the most 
 ancient four-wheel night cabman would have spurned as a 
 knee-protector. ' He was a plumber,' she whispered to us 
 in a weak, hollow voice ; 1 he had been out of work for a 
 week, and he had gone out to try and look for a job.' One 
 shivered to think of him wearily trudging the streets this 
 bitter day, half clad and wholly starved ; what must have 
 been his torture as he failed at place after place, and the 
 day wore on and brought the night when he would have to 
 return to the poor dying wife with the old sad story ? 
 
 As one realized the full meaning of this little domestic 
 tragedy, and knew that it was only one of many daily 
 
58 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 enacted in the richest city in the world — the scene of it laid 
 not a mile from the full tide of all the pomps and vanities 
 of fashion, of all the notorious luxury and extravagances 
 which is the outward show of our magnificence and wealth, 
 it was hard to repress a feeling of something akin to shame 
 and anger — shame for the callous indifference which bids 
 one half the world ignore the sufferings of the other — anger 
 that, with all the gold annually borne along on the broad 
 stream of charity, so little of it ever reaches the really 
 deserving and necessitous poor. 
 
 The house this poor woman lay dying in was one of a 
 block which would have been a prize to a sanitary inspector 
 anxious to make a sensational report. For the room in 
 question the plumber out of work had to pay four and six- 
 pence, and the broken pane of glass the landlord had 
 refused to replace. The man was told ' he must do it 
 himself, or if he didn't like it as it was he could go.' 
 
 Such stories as this are painful, but they should be told. 
 It is good for the rich that now and again they should be 
 brought face to face with misery, or they might doubt its 
 existence. These people — our fellow-citizens — cannot be 
 neglected with impunity. These fever and pestilence- 
 breeding dens that are still allowed to exist, these death- 
 traps out of which vestrymen and capitalists make large 
 annual incomes, are a danger to the whole community. 
 
 While I am on this subject, I may as well quote an 
 instance which bears directly upon the interest — the selfish 
 interest — which the better classes have in lending their 
 voices to swell the chorus of complaints which is going up 
 about the present state of things. 
 
 Here is an ' interior ' to which I would call the special 
 attention of ladies who employ nurse -girls for their 
 children. 
 
 This room when we entered it was in a condition beyond 
 description. The lady was washing the baby, and she made 
 that an excuse for the dirt of everything else. Two ragged 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 59 
 
 boys were sitting on the filthy floor, a dirty little girl was in 
 a corner pulling a dirty kitten's tail, and the smoke from 
 the untidiest grate I ever saw in my life was making the 
 half-washed baby sneeze its little head nearly off. The 
 family, all told, that slept in this room was seven. There 
 was a bed and there was a sofa — so I concluded the floor 
 must have been the resting-place of some of them. 1 The 
 eldest girl ' — materfamilias informed us in answer to our 
 questions — 1 was gone out. She slept on the sofa.' We 
 knew somebody had slept there, because some rags were on 
 it, which had evidently done duty as bed-clothes. 
 
 Outside this room, which opened on to a back-yard, was 
 a dust-bin. We didn't want eyesight to know that — it ap- 
 pealed with sufficient power to another sense. Inside was 
 an odour which made the dust-bin rather a relief. 
 
 I have described this place a little graphically for the sake 
 of that eldest girl. It is not from any gallantry to the fair 
 sex that I have done this, but because the young woman in 
 question was, I ascertained, a domestic servant. She was a 
 nursemaid just home from a place at Norwood, and in a 
 week she was going to a place at Clapham. I remembered, 
 as I gazed on the scene, a certain vigorous letter from Mr. 
 Charles Eeade which appeared in the Daily Telegraph some 
 years ago about servants ' pigging with their relations at 
 home,' and wanting the best bedroom and a feather-bed with 
 damask furniture when in service. I never so thoroughly 
 realized what ' pigging with their relations ' meant before. 
 
 Now, if you will take the trouble to think out the possible 
 result of girls going from such pigsties as these straight into 
 well-to-do families, where they will nurse the children and 
 be constantly in the closest contact with the younger mem- 
 bers of the family, I think you will see that the dangers of 
 unhealthy homes for the poor may be equally dangerous to 
 a better class. I should like to know how many families now 
 mourning the loss of a little child from fever, or the death of 
 some dear one from small-pox, would have been spared their 
 
6o 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 sorrow had the existence of such places as I have described 
 been rendered impossible by the action of the law ! 
 
 I do not imagine for one moment that I have seen, or that 
 I am likely to see, the worst phases of the evil which has 
 become one of the burning questions of the hour. But what 
 I have written about I have in every case seen with my own 
 eyes, and in no case have I exaggerated ; and yet more than 
 one of my kindly correspondents doubt my story of the dead 
 body being kept, and eventually put out into the street. 
 
 With regard to this, let the reader in doubt ask any 
 sanitary inspector or officer of health to whom he can get 
 an introduction, if it is not an appalling fact that the poor 
 have grown so used to discomfort and horrors that they do 
 not look upon a corpse in the room they live, and eat, and 
 sleep in as anything very objectionable ! 
 
 It often happens there is no money to pay for the funeral, 
 and so, with that inertness and helplessness bred of long 
 years of neglect, nothing at all is done, no steps are taken, 
 and the body stops exactly where it was when the breath 
 left it. 
 
 The following incident I take haphazard from the reports 
 of Dr. Liddell, whose recent statement has even attracted 
 Parliamentary attention and led to a question in the House : 
 
 Prolonged Retention of a Dead Body in a Room occupied by 
 a Family. 
 
 Mr. Wrack reports that, on visiting No. 17, Hope Street, Spitalfields, 
 he found in the room of the second floor the dead body of a child who 
 had died fifteen days before the time of his visit. The room, which con- 
 tained 1,176 cubic feet of space, was occupied by the parents of the dead 
 child and a daughter aged thirteen years. The body was in a decomposed 
 state. The reason assigned for not burying the child at an earlier period 
 was that the father had no means to do so, and that his friends had failed 
 to render him the assistance which they had promised. Mr. Wrack having 
 pointed out the danger of keeping a dead body so long in the only room 
 occupied by the family, application was made to the relieving officer, and 
 the body was buried on the following day. 
 
 Fifteen days ! Fancy that ! with the knowledge you have 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 61 
 
 by this time of the size and condition of the room in which 
 the corpse remains mixed up with the living inmates day 
 and night. Here are two more cases. Note the fact that 
 in the first the child has died of scarlet fever, and that 
 tailoring work is going on around it — work which when 
 finished will be carried, in all human probability, with the 
 germs of disease in it to the homes of well-to-do and prosper- 
 ous people— a class which too frequently objects to be 
 worried with revelations of the miseries of the masses. 
 
 Prolonged Retention of a Dead Body in a Room occupied by a 
 Family. 
 
 Mr. Wrack reports that, upon visiting No. 28, Church Street, Spital- 
 fields, on the 5th December last, he found in the second floor front 
 room the dead body of a child which had died of scarlet fever on the 1st 
 of the month. The body was not coffined, and it lay exposed on a table 
 in one corner of the room. The room was occupied as a living and sleep- 
 ing room by five persons, viz., the father and mother, their child, a girl 
 about three years old, and by two adults, viz., the grandfather and grand- 
 mother of the child, who were engaged at tailors' work. The child was 
 playing on the floor. The room was about fourteen feet square and eight 
 feet high, thus affording only 260 cubic feet of space to each person. The 
 smell on entering the room was most sickening. Upon remonstrating with 
 the people for keeping the body so long unburied, and especially for not 
 having it coffined, they replied that they were waiting to raise the means 
 for burying it ; and, being Irish, said that it was not their custom to coffin 
 their dead until the day of the funeral. The body was not buried until the 
 9th of December, and then it had to be buried by the parish authorities. 
 
 Mr. Wrack also visited No. 24, Princes Street, Spitalfields, on the 5th 
 January, and found in the second floor front room the dead body of an 
 aged woman, who died on Christmas Day. The room was occupied by 
 the daughter of the deceased, a person about forty years of age, who 
 lived and slept in the same room. Upon asking the reason of her keeping 
 the body so long unburied, she stated that she had been waiting for suitable 
 things to be made for the funeral ; and upon asking when the funeral 
 would take place, she stated that the body would not be buried until the 
 8th January, a period of fifteen days from the death. The Board had no 
 power to compel the removal of the corpse, as there is no mortuary belong- 
 ing to the Board in the district. 
 
 I want to drive this nail home, though it is the practice 
 itself I should prefer to knock on the head. Here are three 
 more cases. Let me quote them, and have done with the 
 subject. 
 
62 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 Prolonged Retention of Dead Bodies. 
 
 There have been three cases of prolonged retention of the dead in 
 rooms occupied as living and sleeping rooms. One of these cases was that 
 of a child who died at No. 26, King Street, Spitalfields, and whose body- 
 was retained for nine days, the parents stating that they were unable to 
 raise sufficient money to bury it. During the time the body was kept it 
 became so offensive that it was necessary to remove it to a shed at the 
 rear of the house. Eventually the father applied to the relieving officer, 
 and obtained an order for the burial of the body. 
 
 Another case was that of a young man who died of consumption at 
 120, Royal Mint Street. The body of this young man was kept for eight 
 days in the room in which his father and mother lived and slept. 
 
 The third case was that of a child three weeks old, who died at No. 
 5, Devonshire Place, Whitechapel. The body of this child was kept in 
 the room occupied by its parents for a period of twelve days, and at 
 the time of the visit of the inspector the smell from it was most 
 offensive. 
 
 Although in each of these cases everything was done by the officer of 
 this Board, and by the relieving officer, to induce the respective parties to 
 bury their dead before a nuisance was occasioned, yet to a certain extent 
 their effort s were unavailing. 
 
 As such cases are of frequent occurrence, it is certainly full time that 
 power was given to magistrates to order the burial without delay of every 
 corpse which is certified to be a nuisance or dangerous to the public health. 
 
 It is necessary a great many things were done. It is 
 necessary, above all, that the direct attention of the State 
 should be given to the whole question, but the Home 
 Secretary says there is 1 no time ' to attend to such matters. 
 The question which led to this answer and the Home 
 Secretary's statement in full were as follows : 
 
 Sanitary Condition of Whitechapel. 
 
 Mr. Bryce asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department 
 whether his attention had been called to the two last reports presented 
 to the Whitechapel District Board of Works by the Medical Officer of 
 Health on the sanitary condition of the Whitechapel district, in which 
 he condemned, as unsanitary and ill-arranged, several new buildings 
 recently erected in that district, and expressed the opinion that amend- 
 ments in the existing Building Acts were urgently required ; and 
 whether, if sufficient powers to prevent the erection or order the closing 
 of unsanitary dwelling were not now possessed by local authorities, he 
 would undertake to bring in a Bill to amend the Building Acts in this 
 important particular, by investing the proper local authorities with such 
 powers. 
 
 Sir W. Harcourt said he would be glad to introduce Bills upon this and 
 many other subjects, but there was no time for them. — Evening Standard, 
 June 18, 1883. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 63 
 
 [ No time !' 
 
 It is well, with that answer ringing in our ears, to turn to 
 the Parliamentary proceedings and discover what the impor- 
 tant questions are which are engrossing the entire attention 
 of the Legislature, and leaving ' no time ' for such a matter 
 as the constant menace to public health which exists in the 
 present system of ' Housing the Poor.' I will not enumerate 
 them, or I might be tempted into a political disquisition, 
 which would be out of place ; but the reader can, with con- 
 siderable profit to himself, find them and make a note of them. 
 
 The list of important measures which have consumed the 
 session and left ' no time ' for this question will be instruc- 
 tive and amusing — amusing because the discussions which 
 have taken up the time of the House contain in themselves 
 all the elements of screaming farce. 
 
 And, talking of screaming farce, I am reminded that we 
 met Mr. J. L. Toole, and that he has not been introduced 
 yet. 
 
 Eoom by all means, and at once for Mr. J. L. Toole — not 
 the Toole of Toole's Theatre — the popular comedian who 
 has made tomfoolery a fine art and burlesque a science, but 
 his living, breathing image as he appeared to us, ' Mug,' 
 voice, and gesture, at the door of a house at which we lately 
 knocked in search of information as to the profits of hat- 
 box making. 
 
 Our J. L. Toole didn't tell us anything as to these 
 profits, though he was very funny — he cracked wheezes 
 that even John Laurence himself might give off without 
 blushing. 
 
 He suggested that while we were about it perhaps ' he 
 might as well tell us who he worked for as how much he 
 got, and then we could go round and offer to make hat- 
 boxes a halfpenny a dozen under.' We didn't get much out 
 of our J. L. Toole. 
 
6 4 
 
 HO W THE POOR LIVE, 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 One of the greatest evils of the overcrowded districts of 
 London is the water-supply. I might almost on this head 
 imitate the gentleman who wrote a chapter on ' Snakes in 
 Iceland,' which I quote in its entirety — ' There are no snakes 
 in Iceland.' To say, however, that in these districts there 
 is no water-supply would be incorrect, but it is utterly in- 
 adequate to the necessities of the people. In many houses 
 more water comes through the roof than through a pipe, and 
 a tub or butt in the back-yard about half full of a black, 
 foul-smelling liquid supplies some dozens of families with 
 the water they drink and the water they wash in as well. 
 It is, perhaps, owing to the limited nature of the luxury that 
 the use of water both internally and externally is rather out 
 of favour with the inhabitants. As to water for sanitary 
 purposes, there is absolutely no provision for it in hundreds 
 of the most densely-inhabited houses. In the matter of 
 water and air, the most degraded savage British philan- 
 thropy has yet adopted as a pet is a thousand times better 
 off than the London labourer and his family, dwelling in the 
 areas whose horrors medical officers are at last divulging to 
 the public. 
 
 The difficulties of attaining that cleanliness which we are 
 told is next to godliness may be imagined from a description 
 of a water-butt which we found in the back-yard of a house 
 containing over ninety people. The little boy in his shirt- 
 sleeves has come to fill his tin bowl, and we are indebted to 
 him for the information that he wants it for his mother to 
 drink. The mother is ill — has been for weeks ; her lips are 
 burning with fever, her throat is dry and parched, and this 
 common reservoir, open to all the dust and dirt with which 
 the air is thick, open to the draining in rainy weather of the 
 filthy roof of the tumble-down structure beside it — this is the 
 spring at which she is to slake her thirst. Is it any wonder 
 that disease is rampant, or that the temperance folk have 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 65 
 
 such trouble to persuade the masses that cold water is a 
 good and healthy drink ? 
 
 Bern ember, this is absolutely the supply for the day; it 
 is, perhaps, turned on for about five minutes, and from this 
 butt the entire inhabitants of the house must get all the 
 water they want. In dozens of instances there is no supply 
 at all — accident or design has interfered with it, and the 
 housewife who wants to wash her child's face or her own, 
 or do a bit of scrubbing, has to beg of a neighbour or make 
 a predatory excursion into a back yard more blessed than 
 her own. 
 
 Some of the facts about the water-supply are not easy to 
 deal with in a book for general reading. The difficulties 
 of the ' drawer of water ' are great. It was while I and my 
 esteemed collaborator were debating how we could possibly 
 reproduce much that we had seen in connection with this 
 crying evil that a gentleman came along and gave us the 
 chance of at least one sketch ' on the spot.' He made him- 
 self busy at the side of a tub — a tub from which his neigh- 
 bours will fill their drinking and their culinary vessels anon. 
 Do not imagine that he is engaged in his morning ablution. 
 He is washing his potatoes — that is all — and in the evening 
 he will take them out baked, and sell them in the public 
 highway. For the sake of the public I am glad they will 
 be baked, but though the water will in some instances be 
 boiled, I don't think that tea is improved by the dirt off 
 potato-skins — at least, I have never heard so. 
 
 Perhaps at the house where we saw this tub the inhabi- 
 tants were not so much injured as they might have been 
 by the deficient water-supply in the yard. If they didn't 
 get water in one way, they generally had it in another. 
 The law of compensation is always at work, and the rapacity 
 of a landlord who left his tenants so badly off in one par- 
 ticular way may have been a godsend in another. 
 
 The water in rainy weather simply poured through the 
 roof of this house, saturating the sleepers in their beds and 
 
 5 
 
66 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 washing their faces in a rough-and-ready manner, but un- 
 fortunately it didn't rain towels at the same time, so that 
 the bath had its inconveniences. 
 
 The cause of these periodical shower-baths was pointed 
 out to us by a tenant who paid four and sixpence a week 
 for his ' watery nest ' in the attic, and who, in language 
 which did not tend to show that his enforced cleanliness 
 had brought godliness in its train, explained that the land- 
 lord had taken the lead from the roof and sold it, and 
 replaced it with asphalte, which had cracked, with the 
 result above described. 
 
 Unacquainted with the stern necessities of the situation, 
 you will contemplate the picture and say that these people 
 are idiots to pay rent for such accommodation. What are 
 they to do ? Move. Whither ? They know well how they 
 will have to tramp from slum to slum, losing work, and 
 the difficulties which will beset them on this room-hunt. 
 They are thankful to have a roof, even with cracks in it, 
 and they will go on suffering — not in silence, perhaps, but 
 without taking action, because they know if they go further 
 they may fare worse. 
 
 The accommodation which these people will put up with 
 is almost incredible. 
 
 Some of the houses are as absolutely dangerous to life 
 and limb as those specially built up on the stage as pitfalls 
 for the unwary feet of the melodramatic heroes and heroines 
 led there by designing villains in order that they may fall 
 through traps into dark rivers, and so be got rid of. 
 
 Here is a house which has been slowly decaying for 
 years; the people who live in it must be competent to 
 accept engagements as acrobats, yet from floor to roof 
 every room is densely inhabited. 
 
 The stairs are rotten, and here and there show where 
 some foot has trodden too heavily. The landing above is 
 a yawning gulf which you have to leap, and leap lightly, 
 or the rotten boarding would break away beneath you. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 67 
 
 Open a door and look into a room. There are two women 
 and three children at work, and the holes in the floor are 
 patched across with bits of old boxes which the tenants 
 have nailed down themselves. 
 
 The place is absolutely a shell. There is not a sound 
 room or passage in it. Yet it is always crammed with 
 tenants, and they pay their rent without a murmur — nay, 
 within the last year the rents of the rooms have been raised 
 nearly twenty-five per cent. 
 
 The gentleman who inhabits the ground-floor with his 
 wife and family is best off. He is a bit of a humorist, and 
 he seems quite proud of pointing out to us the dilapidations 
 of his dwelling-place, and takes the opportunity to indulge 
 in what the gentlemen of the theatrical persuasion call 
 ' wheezes.' 
 
 1 Come through ?' he says ; 4 well, no, I can't say as anybody 
 have come through, not altogether. We sees a leg o' some- 
 body sometimes as we ain't invited to join us, and now and 
 agen a lump o' ceilin' comes down when the young woman 
 upstairs stamps her foot ; but so long as they don't start a 
 dancin' acadermy up there, I don't mind.' 
 
 ' But haven't you spoken to the landlord about it ?' 
 
 ' Spoke ! Lor' bless you ! wot's the use ? He'd larf at 
 us, and if he was to larf too loud it might be dangerous. 
 He won't do nothink. The place is bound to come down, 
 yer know, by-and-by, for improvements.' 
 
 Possibly the man's explanation of the landlord's neglect 
 was correct, but to us it certainly appeared that the 
 place was more likely to come down for lack of improve- 
 ments. 
 
 Going to bed under such circumstances as these must 
 require a good deal of confidence ; but I suppose the con- 
 tingency of the floor above descending on one in one's 
 sleep does not have the same terror for these people that it 
 had for the nervous hero of that story of Edgar Allan Poe's, 
 in which the room with contracting walls and descending 
 
 5—2 
 
• 
 
 68 
 
 BOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 roof was supposed to be a horror worthy of the inventive 
 genius of the gentlemen of the Inquisition. 
 
 Of course, when the ordinary repairs demanded by con- 
 sideration for the safety of life and limb are left undone, 
 and the most ordinary sanitary precautions are neglected, 
 it is not likely that the present race of poor tenement-owners 
 will listen to the appeals of those tenants whose livelihood 
 depends upon them keeping animals, and make some pro- 
 vision for the housing of pigs and the stabling of donkeys. 
 
 Strange, too, as it may seem, in the houses which are 
 being built on improved principles, no provision is made 
 for the barrows and donkeys of the costermongers — a class 
 which enters very largely into the composition of the one- 
 roomed tribes. Some time ago a man was charged with 
 assaulting his wife, and at the magisterial hearing it was 
 elicited that the matrimonial quarrel was all on account of 
 a donkey which slept under the bed. 
 
 The magistrate was naturally astonished. He didn't 
 believe such a state of things possible. Doubtless his 
 wonder was shared by the public. The presence of a 
 donkey in the apartment of a costermonger and his family 
 is, however, by no means rare, and quite recently a zealous 
 sanitary inspector has discovered a cellar inhabited by a 
 man, his wife, three children, and four pigs. 
 
 The presence of animals not exactly regarded as domestic 
 is a feature of certain poor districts of London. Fowls 
 roost nightly in dozens of bedrooms in the back streets; 
 and only the other day a score of those miserable tortoises 
 that one sees on barrows destitute of the smallest vestige 
 of green stuff, and probably enduring the most prolonged 
 agony, were discovered crawling about the floor of a coster- 
 monger's attic among his progeny, only slightly inferior in 
 point of numbers to the poor animals themselves. 
 
 It is a great complaint of the men, who, as a rule, are 
 hardworking, honest fellows enough in their way, and 
 thrifty, too, when they can keep away from the temptation of 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 69 
 
 drink, that so little attention is being paid to their needs in 
 the many schemes for improved dwellings for the industrial 
 classes. 
 
 In some of the cases where the accommodation for ponies 
 and donkeys may fairly be called ' stabling,' the entrance 
 is through the passage of a house densely inhabited, and 
 the animals are led in and out daily in such a manner as to 
 be a nuisance to the occupants, while the stables, being so 
 close to the windows of the room and kept in anything but 
 good order, are a constant danger to health. 
 
 I have been assured by an old inhabitant of the costers' 
 quarters that he knew a donkey who went upstairs to the 
 third floor every night to go to bed; but old inhabitants 
 are not to be relied upon, and I give you the story for what 
 it is worth. 
 
 Of one thing, however, no one who personally investi- 
 gates the poorer districts of great cities can remain in 
 doubt. There are there hidden away from general observa- 
 tion marvels as great as any of those which the enterprising 
 Farini imports from the Cannibal Islands, the dismal 
 swamps, the deserts and jungles of the savage world, for 
 the amusement and edification of the shilling-paying public. 
 Missing links abound, and monstrosities are plentiful. Some 
 of the terrible sights which we have seen we have too much 
 respect for the reader's feelings to reproduce. Now and 
 again the revelations of some police-court send a shudder 
 through society. Children starved and stunted and ignorant 
 as the lowest beasts of the forests are unearthed in foul 
 dens, where they have passed their little lives chained to the 
 walls, or pounced upon by the police, led to the discovery 
 by the tavern gossip of the neighbours. Grown women 
 who have lived naked in underground cellars, and long ago 
 lost their reason, are found one fine morning by the merest 
 accident while their gaolers are away. On these hidden 
 horrors of unknown London I need not dwell here. The 
 history of Horrible London has yet to be written ; but the 
 
 r. 
 
7 o 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 brutality which makes many of these terrible things possible 
 is largely due to the circumstances under which the poor 
 live. The careless disregard of human life and human 
 suffering which has so long characterized us as a nation 
 must bear fruit. The waste of human life brought about 
 by the conditions under which the poor are allowed to live 
 breeds in them a contempt for the sufferings of others. 
 They become hardened, and the cruelty at which we shudder 
 is their second nature. All that is best and holiest in life 
 there is nothing to encourage — only the ferocious instincts 
 of the brute are fostered by a state of existence in which 
 the struggle for the very air men breathe is bitter and 
 intense. 
 
 Says a philanthropist, who has gone to the root of this 
 appalling subject : ' In these districts men live in little 
 more than half the space their corpses occupy when dead.' 
 Think of it ! Penetrate the awful places where vice and 
 squalor, crime and brutality, reign supreme ; where the oath 
 of the gin-maddened ruffian, the cry of the trampled wife, 
 and the wail of the terrified child ring out night and day ; 
 where all is one fierce ferment in a hell upon earth, where 
 day brings no light, and night no rest, and ask yourself 
 what manner of fruit these forcing-houses can bear. 
 
 When some one bold enough shall write ' Horrible 
 London,' and the black page lies open that all may read, 
 then, and not till then, will the enormity of the responsi- 
 bility be recognised of those to whom the power to do so 
 much has been given and who have done so little. 
 
 That work is for stronger hands than mine to do. I am 
 content here to chronicle such lights and shadows of life 
 among the poor as fall across my pajh in a journey round 
 the outskirts only of the dark continent in our midst. 
 
 Here is an incident which, pathetic enough, has yet its 
 humorous side. Here is a boy of eight years old in 
 petticoats, a big, strong, healthy lad. His father is a dock 
 labourer, and this is how he was brought forward as a 
 
BOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 7i 
 
 candidate for some castroff clothing which a director of 
 the East and West India Dock Company was generously 
 distributing. 
 
 The dock labourers are a distinct class among the East- 
 End poor, and I hope at some future time to give the reader 
 a glimpse of life among them. How hard their struggle is 
 may be t gathered from the fact that their boys have to go 
 till eight and nine years old in petticoats because the parents 
 cannot afford to buy them knickerbockers or trousers. 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 These pages would be incomplete without at least a passing 
 reference to some of the many efforts which have already 
 been made to deal with the evils arising from the condition 
 of things it has been my desire to expose. 
 
 The mere charitable work going on I have not space to 
 deal with. There are night refuges, missions, and many 
 excellent institutions due to public and private enterprise in 
 all the poorer quarters, all of which in a manner more or less 
 satisfactory afford relief to the inhabitants. 
 
 One good work, however, which I do not care to leave 
 hiding its light under a bushel is the home for factory-girls, 
 managed by the Sisters of St. John the Baptist, Clewer, 
 and situated in Southwark. 
 
 Here, girls employed in the many factories of the neigh- 
 bourhood during the day can, if they are willing to submit 
 to the rules, find a real home for a small weekly payment, 
 and escape the wretched and too often vicious surroundings 
 of the places in which their parents live. 
 
 "With a full knowledge of all the temptation which besets 
 the work-girls who have to spend their leisure in these slums, 
 none can doubt the good work such institutions may do. 
 
 On the night of our visit we were conducted from base- 
 ment to roof by one of the Sisters ; we saw the girls and 
 
72 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 heard their histories from their own lips, and learnt how 
 terrible was the sin and misery which had forced them to 
 look upon their vile homes with loathing, and how fierce the 
 temptation which beset them when left to themselves. 
 
 These girls are of the class which most deserve help ; 
 they work hard at dangerous trades for their living, and 
 they pay for their food and board. What the charity does 
 is to throw a certain home influence around them, give 
 them cleanliness and godliness, and preserve them to some 
 extent from the contamination of the streets — streets which 
 are here thronged at night with the worst types of humanity 
 the great city can show. 
 
 The story of the Mission is romantic. A lady, Mrs. Hun, 
 was left a young w T idow. After less than two years of married 
 life her husband died suddenly. She devoted herself to her 
 only daughter, who grew up into a beautiful girl. The 
 morning after her first ball the young lady was found dead 
 in her bed. To assuage her grief and keep from breaking 
 down utterly, the bereaved mother determined to devote 
 herself to charity. The fearful condition of the young girls 
 in this neighbourhood was brought to her attention, and 
 with her fortune and that of her dead daughter she devoted 
 herself to establishing a home for factory-girls. 
 
 Such is the short and simple story of how this excellent 
 institution was founded. How it is carried out, how the 
 girls cling to the Home, and how thoroughly they appreciate 
 its comforts, any lady can see who cares to take a trip as far 
 as Union Street, Borough, and ring the bell of the All 
 Hallows' Mission-House. 
 
 The work which these girls have to do in return for a 
 small wage is generally of a dangerous character. Many of 
 them literally snatch their food from the jaws of death. 
 
 One girl in the Home was white and ill and weak, and 
 her story may be taken as a sample. She worked at the 
 ' bronzing,' that is, a branch of the chromo-lithography 
 business, and it consists in applying a fluid, which gives off 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 73 
 
 a poisonous exhalation, to certain work. Bronzing enters 
 largely into the composition of those Christmas pictures 
 which delight us so much at the festive season, and which 
 adorn the nursery of many a happy, rosy-cheeked English 
 child. 
 
 The law, recognising the dangerous nature of the work, 
 says that the girls doing it shall be allowed a pint of milk 
 per day, the milk in some way counteracting the effect of 
 the poison the girls inhale. It will hardly be believed that 
 some of the best firms refuse to comply with the regulation, 
 and if the girls complain they are at once discharged. 
 
 Now, the wages paid are seven shillings per week. To 
 keep at their employment it is necessary that the workers 
 take castor-oil daily, and drink at least a pint of milk. They 
 must either pay for these luxuries out of their scanty earnings 
 or go without, and eventually find their way to the hospital. 
 
 Take another trade — the fur-pulling. The women and 
 girls employed at this are in some shops locked in the room 
 with their work, and have to eat their food there. 
 
 If you had ever seen a room crowded with girls pulling 
 the fluff from cats, rabbits, rats, and goodness knows what 
 other animals, you would appreciate the situation better. 
 The fluff, the down, and the small hairs smother everything, 
 and are necessarily swallowed by the occupants of the room, 
 with pernicious effect. Yet it is the custom of some of the 
 men in the trade to force their employes to eat under such 
 circumstances — that is, to swallow their food thickly coated 
 with the hairs from which nothing can preserve it. 
 
 Why do not the women refuse ? Because they would be 
 discharged. There are always hundreds ready and eager to 
 take their places. The struggle for bread is too fierce for 
 the fighters to shrink from any torture in its attainment. 
 
 With the dangers of the white-lead works, which employ a 
 large number of these families, most people are now familiar; 
 at least, those who read the inquests must be. In addition 
 to the liability to lead-poisoning, in many of these works 
 
74 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 the machinery is highly dangerous. In spite of the Em- 
 ployers' Liability Act, the victims of machinery accidents 
 — that is, when they are women or children — rarely get 
 compensation. 
 
 The hospitals are full of accidents from these causes ; 
 often the negligence is that of a fellow-workman, but in at 
 least half a dozen cases I have investigated not one shilling 
 of compensation has the victim obtained. 
 
 Saw-mills, and places where steam and circular saws are 
 used, employ a large number of boys. If you were to give 
 a tea-party to saw-mill boys, the thing that would astonish 
 you would be the difficulty of finding half a dozen of your 
 guests with the proper number of fingers. 
 
 I know one little lad who is employed at pulling out the 
 planks which have been pushed through the machine by 
 men, and he has one hand now on which only the thumb is 
 left. Then there is the lemonade-bottling, which is another 
 industry largely employing the lads of poor neighbourhoods. 
 The bottles are liable to burst, and cases of maiming are 
 almost of daily occurrence. The bottlers are obliged to 
 wear masks to protect their faces, but their hands are bound 
 to be exposed to the danger. 
 
 These are a few of the dangerous and unhealthy occu- 
 pations by which the poor live, and I have enumerated 
 those largely practised by children. I have done so to 
 show how little we can wonder if for lack of a protecting 
 arm, or that parental love which is, alas ! so rare a thing in 
 the very poor districts, these boys and girls yield to the first 
 temptation to go wrong, and instead of risking life and 
 limb for a paltry wage, take to those paths of vice which we 
 have it on the highest authority are always the most easy of 
 access. 
 
 As we leave the home of the factory girls we come upon 
 a scene which illustrates the life outside. A big crowd of 
 foul-mouthed, blackguardly boys and girls, with a few men 
 and women among them, are gathered round two girls who 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 75 
 
 are fighting fiercely. They have quarrelled, a bystander 
 tells us, in the adjacent public-house about a young man. 
 He is considered her legitimate property by one lady, and 
 the said lady has surprised him treating her rival to gin. 
 Neither of x the girls is more than seventeen, I should say, 
 yet they are fighting and blaspheming and using words that 
 make even myself and my collaborator shudder, used as we 
 are by this time to the defiled Saxon of the slums. 
 
 ' Go it, Sal !' yells a female friend, and Sal goes it, and 
 the boys and girls stand round and enjoy the spectacle, and 
 add their chorus of blasphemy and indecency to the quarrel 
 duet of the Madame Angots of the gutter. 
 
 I had nearly forgotten an incident which occurred when 
 we were in the factory-girls' home, and which is not without 
 its lesson as showing the value even these girls attach to 
 social position . One young lady was introduced to us as 
 having a sweetheart who always brought her home of an 
 evening with great punctuality. ' What is your sweetheart T 
 I asked. ' A boot-finisher,' was the answer. ' Where does 
 he work — at what firm ?' ' He works just by Fenchurch 
 Street Station.' ' Is it a large bootmaker's ?' ' Well, it 
 ain't exactly a bootmaker's ; he's a shoeblack.' I never 
 heard a shoeblack called a boot-finisher before, but I think 
 the euphemism was allowable in a young lady who wished 
 to exalt the commercial status of her intended. 
 
 I alluded in a recent chapter to the costermongers as a 
 large and worthy class. Since that chapter was written I 
 have explored a district which is almost exclusively in- 
 habited by them — a portion of St. Luke's. To what I have 
 already written let me add that' until now I had not the 
 slightest conception that things were so bad as they really 
 are. My visit was early in the morning, before the men and 
 women had gone out with their loads. If you could have 
 seen the condition of the rooms and yards piled up with 
 rotting vegetable refuse, and the way in which the cabbages 
 and the fruit were stowed for the night, and where they were 
 
70 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 stowed, it would have cured such among you as are fond of 
 a bargain at the door from ever patronising a barrow again. 
 
 Out of the fetid one room where man and wife and family 
 slept they carried the stuff that their neighbours were to eat. 
 It had passed the night with them, and the green-stuff was 
 decidedly faded and languid. It was piled on the barrow, 
 and then soused with dirty water, and so wheeled away to 
 be cried up and down the streets of London. 
 
 No wonder diseases are spread if from such poisoned, 
 fever-breeding dens as this the food is carried with all its 
 impurity day after day to be hawked from door to door ! 
 
 I do not blame the costers. They must get where there 
 is an open space for their barrows handy, some bit of waste 
 land where houses have been condemned and pulled down. 
 They stack their barrows here, taking off one wheel and 
 carrying it home, that their property may not be wheeled 
 off in the night. But areas with this waste land are limited, 
 so up go the prices, and the coster must pay. In Green 
 Arbour Court, St. Luke's, I came upon a man who was 
 paying eight shillings a week for one miserable room, and 
 all round the district the very vilest accommodation fetches 
 something very near that figure. 
 
 Eight sMHings a week for one room ! Surely a class that 
 can pay that must be worth catering for even by the five 
 per cent, philanthropists. 
 
 Some time ago there was a scheme to build a goods station 
 in this district, and before the Bill could be considered Par- 
 liament required a labouring-class statement, that is, a state- 
 ment of the number of poor people who would be displaced. 
 
 On looking through the figures I find that to build this 
 station about 3,000 poor people would have to be toned out 
 of their homes. 
 
 It is the pulling down of area after area for the purpose 
 of building large warehouses and railway- stations, and that 
 sort of thing, which is, of course, at the root of the over- 
 crowding. The accommodation becomes more limited year 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 77 
 
 after year, and the property built as dwelling-houses under 
 the Artisans' Dwellings Act does not, as I have pointed out 
 before, offer any accommodation to the class displaced. 
 
 In another district I made a discovery which I fancy must 
 be unique. I found a public-house which was a highway for 
 traffic. You went out of a street into a bar — you walked 
 straight through and found yourself in a network of courts 
 behind. I found on inquiry that for years the public-house 
 had been used as a footpath, and I have no doubt it was 
 found highly convenient by ladies and gentlemen in a hurry 
 to escape observation. 
 
 In another district still I unearthed as sweet a little story 
 as any of the annals of jobbery can, I imagine, furnish. 
 Let me tell it carefully, for the law of libel is a fearful 
 and wonderful thing, and I have no desire that my pub- 
 lishers should eat their next Christmas dinner in Holloway 
 Gaol. 
 
 A big block of buildings, falling into decay, was for sale. 
 A person officially connected with the parish drew the atten- 
 tion of the sanitary officers to them, and had them con- 
 demned as unfit for habitation. Directly this was done the 
 parish gentleman, in conjunction with a firm of specula- 
 tors, bought the property for a bagatelle — for old building 
 material, in fact. But the new proprietors didn't pull it 
 down — not they. They gave a coat of whitewash here and 
 there, and let every single room again directly at increased 
 rentals, and every single room is full of rent-payers now. 
 The street of houses which was condemned five years ago 
 has been a little gold mine, and a handsome fortune has 
 been made out of it by the very people who insisted upon 
 calling the attention of the sanitary authorities to it. 
 
 It is needless to say that the same attention has never 
 been solicited since. 
 
 I should like to know how many more blocks of property 
 — unfit for human habitation — are held in the same way in 
 London. 
 
7S 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 I fancy the revelations on this subject would be startling 
 to a degree. 
 
 Yet amidst all these horrors and sufferings, working at 
 dangerous trades, housed in death-traps, neglected and 
 persecuted, the poor manage to live, and some of them to 
 amuse themselves. How they amuse themselves we shall 
 shortly see. 
 
 When I come to the task of describing how the poor amuse 
 themselves, there comes back to me the memory of a certain 
 ' exam.' I submitted myself to in the happy long ago. I 
 am not quite sure now whether the result was to be a clerk- 
 ship in Somerset House, or a certificate of proficiency which 
 I could frame, and glaze, and hang up in my bedroom ; all 
 I remember is, that I was taken up to London with half a 
 dozen of my fellow-collegians, and deposited in a large 
 room, at a desk, and that in front of me was placed a paper 
 with a string of printed questions on it, which I was re- 
 quested to answer in writing. The questions were not 
 particularly flabbergasting then, though I doubt whether I 
 could answer a single one of them correctly now ; but that 
 which carried terror to my fluttering heart at once was the 
 special note which enjoined me to write my answers briefly 
 and concisely. There are certain questions which will not 
 be answered in half a dozen words. Several such there 
 were on my examination-paper, and such a question, after 
 a lapse of years, again stands and defies me to mortal combat. 
 
 ' How do the poor amuse themselves ?' 
 
 The name of their amusements is legion, and to catalogue 
 them briefly is beyond my powers. 
 
 The principal amusement of the people who have no 
 money is, I take it, loafing at street corners and gossiping 
 with their neighbours, and the form of enjoyment by far the 
 most prevalent is getting drunk. 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 79 
 
 The public-house, after centuries of philanthropic tall-talk 
 and hundreds of miles of newspaper and magazine writing, 
 tracts and essays, remains still the Elysian field for the tired 
 toiler. The well-meaning efforts of the societies which have 
 endeavoured^to attract the poor to hear countesses play the 
 fiddle, and baronets sing comic songs in temperance halls, 
 have not been crowned with anything like success, for the 
 simple reason that there is an air of charity and goody-goody 
 about the scheme which the poor always regard with sus- 
 picion. They want their amusement as a right, not as a 
 favour, and they decline to be patronized. 
 
 The public -house*, then, is still the centre of attraction for 
 the masses during their leisure — the public-house and its 
 giant offspring, the music-hall. The old Free and Easy, 
 held every Monday or every Saturday, as the case might be, 
 in the bar-parlour or the big room upstairs, is dying the 
 death — the halls have killed it. There are a few still in 
 existence, but the attendance is meagre, and the entertain- 
 ment is only kept up by ambitious amateurs of the type who 
 sit back in a chair and close their eyes to sing a sentimental 
 ballad, and the young gentlemen who are anxious to ex- 
 change the workshop or the counter for the footlights, and 
 try their hand first at the comic songs of Messrs. Arthur 
 Roberts and McDermott before the dozen or so of the bar- 
 parlour frequenters of the Blue Bear who make up the 
 weekly audiences of the ' Free and Easy.' 
 
 The old sporting-houses, once the resort of half the black- 
 guardism of the East-End and a good deal of the West, 
 have gone down before the steady bowling of the law. The 
 friendly bouts with the gloves between local ' chickens ' and 
 1 novices,' which once were regular Saturday night amuse- 
 ments, are few and far between, and dog-fights and ratting- 
 matches have to be searched for by the curious as diligently 
 as though they were looking for a policeman in a suburban 
 neighbourhood, and the result is generally the same. 
 
 That boxing and ratting, and other forms of the ' fancy,' 
 
So 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 still exist as part of the amusement of the lower orders is 
 perfectly true, but they exist in such a hole-and-corner, out- 
 of-the-way, few-and-far-between style, that they can no 
 longer be classed as among the amusements of those who 
 cannot afford to pay high prices of admission to illegal 
 entertainments. 
 
 The noble art of self-defence did undoubtedly linger 
 among the lower orders as a pastime long after it had 
 passed out of favour with the Corinthians, and many of 
 the porters of Billingsgate, Covent Garden, and Smithfield, 
 waterside labourers, costermongers, and street-hawkers are 
 to this day famous as 1 bruisers,' and given to indulge their 
 friends at odd times with a display of their prowess on the 
 extreme Q.T., in quiet out-houses and secluded spots where 
 the police are unlikely to mar the harmony of the proceed- 
 ings. Such meetings, when they do take place, always 
 attract a mob of the lowest riff-raff, and if there be, as is 
 generally the case, a charge for admission, ragged wretches, 
 who look as though a crust of bread and cheese would be 
 of considerable advantage to them, manage in some mys- 
 terious way to find the requisite amount of silver, without 
 the production of which the crystal Bar of the Pug's Paradise 
 moves not, and the sporting Peri is sent disconsolate away. 
 
 It has been my good or evil fortune, in my desire to know 
 all sorts and conditions of men, to witness some of the latest 
 revivals of glove- fighting ; now in drill-sheds, now in top- 
 floors of public-houses, and once in the upper floor of a 
 workshop, which nearly gave way with the weight of 
 accumulated blackguardism collected. These, it is only fair 
 to say, were mostly ' ramps,' or swindles, got up to obtain 
 the gate-money, and generally interrupted by circumstances 
 arranged beforehand by those who were going to ' cut up ' 
 the plunder. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the suburban racecourse has now 
 absorbed most of the poorer patrons of the ring, and the 
 fighting men — that is, the class who are of the slum order — 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 81 
 
 find employment in connection with the betting-lists and 
 booths. The turf is still as highly patronised as ever in 
 poor districts, in spite of the objection of the police to 
 ready-money betting, and the racing element enters largely 
 into the recreations of the residuum. 
 
 This, however, is hardly the class of amusement with 
 which we are concerned, which is more that which en- 
 gages the attention of the poorer toilers after work-hours. 
 Saturday night is the great night in these districts for the 
 play which prevents Jack being dull, and accordingly it is a 
 Saturday night we select to take a trip once more through 
 the streets of the unfashionable quarters. 
 
 We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and 
 emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A 
 sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long 
 thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is 
 a fair, in fact ; the pavement and the roadway are crowded 
 with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the 
 meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and 
 the cheap-finery stalls ; there are shooting-galleries, try- 
 your-strength-machines, weighing-chairs, rafning-boards, and 
 nothing is lacking but ' three shies a penny ' and a Eichard- 
 son's show to make a complete picture of an old-fashioned 
 fair, 
 
 All the world and his wife are out to-night, and the wildest 
 extravagances are being committed in the way of fish for 
 supper to-night and vegetables for dinner to-morrow. The 
 good housewives, basket on arm, are giving the ready-witted 
 hawker as much repartee over the price of a cabbage as 
 would suffice for a modern comedy. 
 
 The workman, released from his toil, is smoking his pipe 
 and listening open-mouthed to the benevolent and leather- 
 lunged gentlemen who are sacrificing household utensils, 
 boots, ornaments, concertinas, and cutlery, at prices which 
 would have cajoled the money from the pocket of a Daniel 
 Dancer. And the golden youth of the neighbourhood, with 
 
 6 
 
82 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 their best attire on, all cut after one relentless fashion — the 
 mashers of the East — they, too, are out in full force, enter- 
 ing into the wild delirium of reckless pleasure which the 
 scene invites. 
 
 The principal amusement in the street, apart from buying 
 knives and neckties of the Cheap Jack and entering into a 
 raffle for a concertina, which is the sole business of one 
 densely-crowded stall, seems to be shooting at a target — 
 three shots a penny — and the prize for hitting the bull's-eye 
 a real Whitechapel cigar. This seems to be an intensely 
 popular pastime with the boys, and the one who wins a cigar 
 and turns away and proudly lights it is at once surrounded 
 by a crowd of lads, who praise his skill, and plead for a puff 
 at the luxury which his marksmanship has won for him. 
 
 The public-houses are crammed all along the line. This 
 form of ' amusement ' seems to be the favourite one with 
 families, for in house after house there are little groups 
 comprising a gray-headed old lady with a glass of neat gin, 
 a buxom young woman with a baby and ditto, and a burly 
 young fellow with a big pewter. On barrels against the 
 wall, and on forms set around, these groups of young men 
 and young women are talking more or less loudly, and 
 spending an idle hour in putting the bulk of the week's 
 wages down their throats. It is a truism to say that the 
 curse of the lower orders is drink, but no man with eyes 
 can walk on a Saturday night through the homes of the 
 wage-earning class without feeling how terrible the evil 
 is, and how earnestly, without being either a bigot or a 
 fanatic, every man who has a chance should raise his voice 
 at the criminal neglect which flings these poor people into 
 the arms of their only caterer — the publican. 
 
 Many people object to the music-halls as sinks of iniquity. 
 That they are unmixed blessings I am not going to contend, 
 but if properly conducted they do an immense deal of com- 
 parative good. Drink is -sold certainly in some of them, 
 but few people get drunk. A very little liquor goes a long 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 83 
 
 way at a hall, and the people, being amused and interested 
 in the entertainment, do not want much liquid sustenance. 
 The entertainments at some of the lower halls might, it is 
 true, be weeded of certain suggestive songs ; but, after all, the 
 best patrons of indecency are the rich, and the poor give 
 their loudest applause to skilful dancing and sentimental 
 singing. A good ballad, well sung, ' fetches ' the masses 
 as nothing else will, and they can appreciate good music. If 
 the managers of halls would do away with the coarser items 
 in their programmes, I should say that this form of enter- 
 taining the masses was absolutely calculated to benefit them. 
 I am quite certain that to keep young men and women off 
 the streets and away from bars is no bad service to the 
 cause of morality. In the East of London there are several 
 places where a big entertainment is given and no liquor is sold 
 at all. At one of them — the best of its kind in London — 
 there are two houses nightly. From seven till nine dramas 
 are performed, then everybody is turned out and the house 
 is refilled with a fresh audience for a music-hall entertain- 
 ment — and nearly every evening the theatre is crammed to 
 suffocation ; the admission is Id. the gallery, 2d. the pit, and 
 3d. and 6d. the upper circle and boxes. On the night of our 
 visit there wasn't room to cram another boy in the place ; 
 the gallery and pit were [full of boys and girls of from eight 
 to fifteen, I should say, and the bulk of the audience in the 
 other parts were quite young people. 
 
 The gallery was a sight which, once seen, could never be 
 forgotten. It was one dense mass of little faces and white 
 bare arms twined and intertwined like snakes round a tree — 
 tier above tier of boys rising right away from the front rows 
 until the heads of the last row touched the ceiling. It was 
 a jam — not a crowd — when one boy coughed it shook the 
 thousands wedged in and round about ; and when one boy 
 got up to go out he had to crawl and walk over the heads of 
 the others ; space below for a human foot to rest there was 
 absolutely none. 
 
 6—2 
 
§4 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 All this vast audience was purely local. Our advent, though 
 our attire was a special get-up for the occasion, attracted 
 instant attention, and the cry of ' Hottentots ' went round. 
 ' Hottentots ' is the playful way in this district of designat- 
 ing a stranger, that is to say, a stranger come from the West. 
 
 The entertainment was admirable; the artistes were clever, 
 and in only one case absolutely vulgar ; and the choruses 
 were joined in by the entire assembled multitude. 
 
 When it was time for the chorus to leave off and the 
 singer to go on again, an official in uniform, standing by the 
 orchestra, and commanding the entire house, raised his 
 hand, and instantly, as if by magic, the chorus ceased. 
 
 Of course there are disturbances, but the remedy is short 
 and effective. Two young gentlemen in the dress circle 
 fought and used bad language to each other. Quick as 
 lightning the official was upstairs with a solitary policeman, 
 the delinquents were seized by the collar, and, before they 
 could expostulate, flung down a flight of steps and hustled 
 out into the street with a celerity which could only come of 
 constant practice. 
 
 It is fair to say that the youths seemed quite ready for the 
 emergency, and took their ' chucking out ' most skilfully. 
 I should have fallen and broken my nose had I been flung 
 down a flight of steps like that ; these youths were evidently 
 prepared, and took a flying jump on to the landing. What 
 they did outside I can't say, but after a chorus of hooting at 
 the helmeted intruder, the audience resumed their seats, and 
 the performance went on without any further interruption. 
 
 Such places as this — the cheaper halls, gaffs, and sing- 
 songs — are the principal places of resort of the ladies and 
 gentlemen of the slums who have coppers to spare for 
 amusement. But the streets themselves offer to many a 
 variety of entertainments for which there is no charge. A 
 horse down is a great source of quiet enjoyment ; a fight 
 attracts hundreds ; and round in one dark spot we came 
 upon an al fresco gambling establishment, where some 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 §5 
 
 hundreds of lads were watching half a dozen of their com- 
 panions playing some game at cards on a rough deal stand, 
 presided over by a villainous-looking Jew. What the game 
 was we could not stay long enough to study, for our approach 
 was signalled by scouts, and as we came close to the crowd 
 it dispersed as if by magic, and the gentleman with the 
 board produced from his pocket a quantity of cough-drops, 
 and flung them upon the board, bawling aloud, ' Six a penny, 
 six a penny !' in a manner intended to convince us that this 
 was his occupation. Possibly we were mistaken for plain 
 clothes policemen ; at any rate, we were followed and 
 watched for fully a hundred yards. 
 
 The mock-litany scoundrel had a big crowd in one street, 
 and an infant phenomenon — a boy who played all the popular 
 airs down the spout of a coffee-pot — was largely patronised ; 
 but the biggest audience of the evening surrounded a gentle- 
 man who, mounted on a cart, was at once carrying on the 
 business of an ointment vendor and the profession of an 
 improvisatore. His ointment was only a penny a box, but 
 its intrinsic merits were priceless. It was warranted to draw 
 glass or iron or steel from any part of the human body with 
 one application ; also to cure weak eyes, bad legs, and sores 
 of all descriptions. 
 
 The gentleman indulged in anecdotes full of ancient and 
 modern history, all proving the value of his ointment, and 
 every now and then he dropped into rhyme : 
 
 ' If you have a bad leg, and physicians have given you up, 
 Or you have been to the doctors, who've half poisoned you with nasty 
 stuff, 
 
 Perhaps you fancy that it's no good — that your leg can't be cured ; 
 
 But Moore's ointment will do, of that rest assured. 
 
 Try it ; if it don't succeed, you're only a penny the worse. 
 
 If you don't try it, you may think of it too late, when you're in your 
 
 funeral hearse. 
 It's cured hundreds, and thousands will testify 
 It is good for even the tenderest baby's eye. 
 Why pay a doctor, or in hospital lie for months, 
 When this ointment will cure you by only applying it once ?' 
 
86 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 Then the gentleman broke off into prose, and related 
 how Napoleon, in the Island of ' Helber,' had bought a box 
 of this very ointment of the seller's grandfather, who was 
 under the British Government then, and had declared, if 
 ever he got free, every soldier in the French army should 
 have a box in his knapsack, and also gave certain humorous 
 reminiscences of his own struggles to get the English people 
 to believe in the specific. His eloquence was not thrown 
 away, for he did a roaring trade, and at one time a perfect 
 forest of hands was held up to secure the famous ointment. 
 
 The crowd thins as closing-time comes, and the hawkers 
 pack up what is left of their stock, strike their naphtha-lamps, 
 and wheel off the ground. "What they have left they will 
 sell in the early market on Sunday morning. 
 
 CHAPTEE XL 
 
 Looking over what I have written, I am struck by what 
 seems to me an important omission. In driving home the 
 nail of the miserable condition in which the poor are forced 
 to live, I have perhaps led the reader to imagine that the 
 better instincts of humanity have been utterly stamped out 
 — that the courts and alleys are great wastes of weed, where 
 never a flower grows. 
 
 I should be loth to father such an idea as this. In the 
 course of many years of the closest contact with the most 
 poverty-stricken of our fellow-men, I have learnt to think 
 better, and not worse, of human nature, and to know that 
 love, self-sacrifice, and devotion flourish in this barren soil 
 as well as in the carefully-guarded family circles, which are, 
 or should be, forcing-houses for all that is choicest and most 
 beautiful among human instincts. 
 
 Braver than many a hero who comes back from foreign 
 plains, with a deed of prowess to his credit and a medal on 
 his breast, are some of the ragged rank and file who fight 
 the battle of life against overwhelming odds, and never 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 87 
 
 flinch or falter, but fight on to the end ; and the end, alas ! 
 is rarely victory or renown — too often the guerdon of these 
 brave soldiers is the workhouse, the hospital, or a miser- 
 able death from cold and slow starvation, in a quiet 
 corner of the street, where they have sunk down to rise no 
 more. 
 
 It is often a matter of wonder — at least, I hope it is — to 
 the good folks who skim their newspapers at the morning 
 meal, and take their politics, their Court Circular, and 
 their police intelligence at a single draught between their 
 sips of coffee, what becomes of the children whose 
 fathers and mothers are sent to prison for long or short 
 periods. 
 
 The State does not consider the innocent victims of 
 crime ; the law punishes the individual without taking 
 thought of the consequences to those who may be dependent 
 upon her or him for bread. I am not advocating any 
 leniency to a culprit on the score of his value as a bread- 
 winner ; I am simply going to state a few facts, and leave 
 my readers to draw any moral they please from the 
 narrative. 
 
 Half the men and women of the lower orders who are 
 imprisoned for various small offences, such as being drunk 
 and incapable, assaulting each other, or committing petty 
 larceny, are married and have families. Bachelors and 
 spinsters are rare after a certain age in low neighbourhoods, 
 and large families are invariably the result of early marriages, 
 or that connection which, among the criminal classes and 
 the lowest grade of labourers, does duty for the legally- 
 solemnized institution. 
 
 Many persons who wander into police-courts at the East- 
 end, either for business or amusement, must be familiar with 
 the poor woman, a baby in her arms, and her head strapped 
 up with sticking-plaster and surgical bandages, who begs the 
 magistrate not to punish the hulking fellow in the dock who 
 has so brutally ill-used her. The woman knows, what the 
 
88 
 
 BOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 magistrate and the public ignore, that the three months' 
 sentence means comfort and luxury to the man — misery and 
 starvation to the woman and her little ones. 
 
 He has probably been the chief bread-winner ; the woman 
 is incapacitated by his ill-treatment from doing any work, 
 and so she and her children are suddenly rendered penniless 
 and homeless. She must crawl back from the court to her 
 miserable garret, and when her babies ask for food pawn her 
 few rags to get it for them ; and when all is pawned and 
 gone, she cannot pay her nightly rent, so she must turn out 
 with her little family into the streets or go into the work- 
 house. Such a case we heard as we looked into a police- 
 court on our travels ; and I shall not soon forget the agonized 
 cry of the woman as the magistrate gave her husband six 
 months, and congratulated her on being temporarily rid of 
 such a ruffian. 
 
 ■ Great God, what will become of us now ?' 
 I see that many humane people are asking what can be 
 done to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. I don't know 
 whether there is any society which looks after the wives and 
 children of malefactors, and lends them a helping hand, if 
 they deserve it, to tide over the absence of their sole source 
 of income ; but if there is not, I fancy here is work for idle 
 hands to do, and a source for charity that, worked with 
 discrimination and care, might alleviate one of the crushing 
 evils to which poor families are liable. 
 
 But these people are not always friendless, and it is a 
 case I wish to quote which has led me to touch upon the 
 subject. 
 
 In one wretched room we visited there were six little ones 
 home at the mid-day hour from school. 
 
 ' You have six children ?' I said to the woman. 
 
 1 No, sir, only four ; these two little ones ain't mine — 
 they are staying with us.' 
 
 I imagined that they were the children of a relative, and 
 questioned the woman further, wondering how she cared to 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 89 
 
 crowd her little den with extra visitors, and then the story 
 came out. 
 
 These two extra mouths the good soul was feeding be- 
 longed to two little children whose mother, a widow, lived 
 in a room above. For an assault upon the police she had 
 been sent to prison. Thus the position of these orphans 
 with a living parent was terrible. They would have been 
 starved or taken to the workhouse, but this good creature 
 went up and fetched them down to be with her own children, 
 and made them welcome ; she washed them and dressed 
 them, and did for them all she could, and she intended to 
 keep them if she was able till the mother came out. 
 
 She didn't see that she had done anything wonderful. 
 1 It was only neighbourly-like, and my heart bled to see the 
 poor young 'uns a-cryin', and that wretched and neglected 
 and dirty.' 
 
 Such cases as this are common enough — the true charity, 
 the charity which robs itself to give to others, is nowhere so 
 common as among the poor. The widow's mite that won 
 the Saviour's praise is cast into the great treasury daily, and 
 surely stands now, as then, far higher on the roll of good 
 deeds than all the gold flung carelessly by the hands of the 
 rich to every box-rattler who promises ' that the amount 
 shall be duly acknowledged in the Times.' 
 
 I will quote one more case, which has just come under 
 my personal observation, and which illustrates the brave 
 struggles against adversity of which these people are 
 capable. 
 
 Our attention was directed to the circumstance by the 
 head-mistress of the school which the children were attend- 
 ing, and who had noticed that they, who had always been 
 the cleanest and tidiest in the class, were beginning to show 
 signs of a little less motherly care. The children said their 
 mother was too ill to do much, and we went to see 
 her. 
 
 Mrs. B. had some children of her own, and in addition she 
 
9o 
 
 ROW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 and her husband had taken in a little girl whose father had 
 gone off tramping in search of work. 
 
 We found her propped up in a chair looking terribly ill, 
 but in front of her, in another chair, was the wash-tub, and 
 the poor woman was making a feeble effort to wash and 
 wring out some of the children's things. She was dying. 
 She was suffering from dropsy, and had not lain down for a 
 month — the water was rising rapidly, and would soon reach 
 her heart and kill her. Yet here she sat, scarcely able to 
 breathe, and enduring untold agony, but making an effort to 
 the very last to work and keep her little ones clean and tidy. 
 
 It is a glorious lot in life, these people's — is it not ? — to 
 toil on and struggle, to resist temptation, and giving their 
 youth and age to the hardest labour for a wage that barely 
 staves off starvation, to know that when illness comes, or 
 time steals their strength . away, they are mere burthens, 
 refuse to be got rid of, since it encumbers the land. 
 
 Can one blame them if, knowing their hard lot and the 
 little reward the most virtuous life can bring them, they sink 
 into the temptations spread around them ? Remember that, 
 for half their miseries, half their illness and premature 
 decay, and much of the disease which cripples and carries 
 off their children, the shameful way in which they are 
 housed, and the callous neglect of their rights as citizens by 
 the governing class, is responsible. 
 
 They are handicapped in the race from start to finish. 
 And, under these circumstance, such charity, such humanity, 
 and such patience and long-suffering, as exist among them, 
 are indeed worthy of admiration. 
 
 The natural instinct of man is to evil, and when I read in 
 little tracts and clerical addresses of the awful depravity of 
 the ' heathen in our midst,' I am tempted to ask what the 
 reverend gentlemen and shocked philanthropists expect. I 
 say, with a full knowledge of their surroundings, that the 
 lower classes of our great cities are entitled to the highest 
 credit for not being twenty times more depraved than they are. 
 
BOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 9i 
 
 They are a class which contains the germs of all that goes 
 to make up good citizenship, and the best proof of it is the 
 patience with which they endure the systematic neglect of 
 their more fortunate fellow-countrymen. In any other land 
 but ours, the mighty mass of helots would long ago have 
 broken their bonds and swept over the land in vast revolu- 
 tionary hordes. They did not always know their power, 
 and had not enough knowledge to appreciate their wrongs. 
 Education is opening their eyes, and their lips will not be 
 slow to express their new-born sentiments. It will be well 
 to meet the movement half-way, and yield to them that re- 
 form and humane recognition which some day they may all 
 too noisily demand. 
 
 Here am I up on a platform and thumping away at the 
 table and spouting what I have no doubt many excellent 
 persons will think is rank communism, though it is nothing 
 of the sort. Peccavi, I apologize. The fumes of the misery 
 I have passed through the last two months have got into 
 my head and made me talk wildly. Let me resume my labour 
 more in the character of a missionary or special correspon- 
 dent, and leave oratory and denunciation to the Sunday 
 morning Wilkeses of Battersea Park. 
 
 We have no business out-of-doors at all — let us study 
 another domestic interior. The scene, a street which lies 
 cheek by jowl with the quarter where the world of fashion 
 rolls nightly in comfortable carriages to enjoy theatrical and 
 operatic performances in half-guinea stalls and three-guinea 
 boxes, and where fabulous fortunes are made by those who 
 can make Mr. and Mrs. Dives weep at imaginary woes or 
 laugh at a merry jest or comic antic. 
 
 From such a scene as I am going to ask you to witness, 
 thousands who crowd a theatre nightly to see a woman's 
 head battered out against a sofa, or a young man suffocate 
 himself with the fumes of charcoal, would shrink back in 
 disgust. But you will not, for if you have gone so far with 
 us as this journey, you are, I feel sure, convinced that no 
 
9 2 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 good can come of hiding the worst phase of a question which 
 is only dragged forward here that it may, by the very horror 
 of its surroundings, arrest attention and so secure that dis- 
 cussion which must always precede a great scheme of re- 
 formation. 
 
 Come with me to this place. Our way lies through Clare 
 Market, so don't go alone, for it is a dangerous neighbour- 
 hood to strangers. Come with me through strange sights 
 and sounds, past draggled, tipsy women crowding the foot- 
 way, and hulking fellows whose blasphemies fill the tainted 
 air ; pick your way carefully through the garbage and filth 
 that litter the streets, and stop in this narrow thoroughfare 
 which is but a stone's-throw from many a stage that holds 
 the mirror up to nature, and yet would shrink from holding 
 such a scene as this. 
 
 We have stopped at a marine-store shop — we enter the 
 passage and find our way up to the third floor. Here in a 
 single room live a man, his wife, and three children. There 
 has been an inquest on a baby who has died — poisoned by 
 the awful atmosphere it breathed. We have stumbled* up 
 the dark crazy staircase at the risk of our limbs, to see this 
 room in which the family live and sleep and eat, because in 
 its way it is a curiosity. It has been the scene of an 
 incident which one would hardly believe possible in this 
 Christian country. For days in this foul room the body of 
 a dead baby had to lie because the parish had no mortuary. 
 Not only did the corpse have to lie here for days among the 
 living, but on that little table, propped against the window, 
 the surgeon had to perform a post-mortem examination. 
 
 Think of it, you who cry out that the sufferings of these 
 people are sensationally exaggerated — the dead baby was 
 cut open in the one room where the mother and the other 
 little ones, its brothers and sisters, lived and ate and slept. 
 And why ? 
 
 Because the parish had no mortuary, and no room in 
 which post-mortems could be performed. 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 93 
 
 The jurymen who went to view the body sickened at the 
 frightful exhalations of this death-trap, and one who had 
 thirty years' experience of London said never had he seen a 
 fouler den. 
 
 I have turned to the newspapers for a report of the 
 inquest and found it, and I think it will be better to present 
 it word for word. It is an ordinary newspaper report of 
 what has happened and been legally investigated, and may 
 carry conviction where my own unsupported testimony 
 would fail : 
 
 ' A coroner's inquiry was held last night by Mr. Langham 
 regarding the death of an infant aged two and a half 
 months, the daughter of a butcher named Kent, who, with 
 his wife and three children, occupy a single room on the 
 third floor of premises used as a marine store in Wych 
 Street. The inquiry was held in the Vestry-room of the 
 parish. On the return of the jury from viewing the body — 
 which lay in the room occupied by the family — one of the 
 jurymen addressed the coroner. He had, he stated, during 
 his thirty years' residence in the parish, seen many places 
 which he regarded as unfit for dwelling-houses, but never 
 had he seen one so bad as that which the jury had just 
 visited. The staircase was dark and out of repair. The 
 atmosphere inside was intolerable. Indeed, it was so bad 
 that several of his fellow- jurymen had felt ill while they were 
 there. They hoped that this expression of opinion would 
 have some effect in inducing the proper authorities to provide 
 a mortuary for the district, and that families who lived in 
 one room might not be compelled to sleep and take their 
 meals with a dead body within sight. Mr. Samuel Mills, 
 surgeon, 3, Southampton Street, Strand, medical officer to 
 the Bow Street Division of Police, deposed that he had made 
 a post-mortem examination of the body on a propped-up table 
 placed in front of the window of the room occupied by the 
 family. The cause of death was consumption of the brain. 
 From the state of the atmosphere in which the child was 
 
94 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 born, it was unhealthy. Another child had died from the 
 same cause. He thought the local authority ought to pro- 
 vide a mortuary, and also a room in which post-mortem 
 examinations could be conducted. A verdict in accordance 
 with the medical evidence was returned by the jury, who 
 further expressed their opinion that the want of a mortuary 
 was calculated to be detrimental to the health of the persons 
 living in the district ; that there being no mortuary was a 
 disgrace to the local authority ; and that the circumstances 
 surrounding the case they had investigated were a disgrace 
 to this enlightened age.' 
 
 I will not add a word. I leave the newspaper report to 
 arouse whatever thoughts it may in the minds of those who 
 will peruse it. It is at least a revelation to many of ' How 
 the Poor Live.' 
 
 Let me hark back again to the lighter side of my subject. 
 I began the chapter with a story of the self-sacrifice of the 
 poor. I will now end it with a little incident of »which I 
 was an eye-witness. Some poor children of the slums had 
 ' a day in the country ' given them by a friend, at which I 
 had the privilege of being present. 
 
 At tea, to every little one there were given two large slices 
 of cake ; I noticed one little boy take his, break a little 
 piece off, eat it, and quietly secrete the remainder in his 
 jacket pocket. Curious, and half suspecting what his inten- 
 tion was, I followed the lad when tea was over to the fields. 
 
 ' Eaten your cake yet ?' I asked. 
 
 ' No, sir,' he answered, colouring as though he had done 
 something wrong. 
 
 ' What are you going to do with it ?' 
 
 ' Please, sir,' he stammered, ' I'm goin' to take it 'ome to 
 mother. She's ill and can't eat nothink, and I thought as 
 she might manage cake, sir.' 
 
 In the train that brought those youngsters down came one 
 white-faced child, who looked faint and ill with the walk to 
 the station. 
 
I 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 95 
 
 The head teacher, who has the history of each child at 
 her fingers' ends, saw what was the matter. 
 
 ' Had no breakfast to-day, Annie ?' 
 
 ' No, ma'am,' was the faltering reply. 
 
 There was a crowd of poor mothers at the station, come 
 to see the children off. One went out and presently returned 
 with a penny, which she pressed into the child's hand — to 
 buy herself something with. The woman had pawned her 
 shawl for a copper or two in sheer womanly sympathy. 
 Had she had the money about her, she needn't have left the 
 station. 
 
 There was a good deal of pawning that morning, I know, 
 from an eye-witness, and all to give the little children a 
 copper or two to spend. 
 
 . And what a struggle there had been to get them something 
 decent to wear for that grand day out ! If all the stories 
 were written that could be told of the privations and sacrifices 
 endured by mothers, that Sally and Jane and Will might 
 look respectable at the treat, your heart would ache. As I 
 don't wish it to, we will not go into the matter. 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 To get an odd job at the Docks is often the last hope of 
 the labouring men who are out of regular employment, and 
 to whom the acquisition of a few shillings for rent, and the 
 means of subsistence for themselves and families, is a task 
 fraught with as much difficulty as were some of the labours 
 the accomplishment of which added in no inconsiderable 
 degree to the posthumous fame of Hercules. 
 
 When it is borne in mind that sometimes at the West 
 India Docks — taking one for example — as many as 2,500 
 hands can be taken on in the morning, it will be easily 
 understood that the chance of employment draws an immense 
 concourse of men daily to the gates. 
 
9 6 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 The time to see what I venture to think is one of the 
 most remarkable sights in the world is an hour at which the 
 general public is not likely to be passing by. 
 
 Sometimes the hands are engaged as early as four, but it 
 is generally about six o'clock that the quay-gangers ascend 
 the rostrums or elevated stands which are placed all along 
 the outside wall, and survey the huge crowd in front of 
 them, and commence to call them out for work and send 
 them into the different docks where the good ships lie, with 
 their vast cargoes, waiting for willing hands to unload them. 
 
 The pay is flvepence an hour, and the day's work lasts for 
 eight hours. It is miscellaneous, and a man is expected to 
 put his hand to anything in the shape of loading or unload- 
 ing that the occasion may require. 
 
 Stand outside the dock gates any morning about six, and 
 you will have plenty to study among the vast crowd of men, 
 more or less dilapidated and hungry-looking, who fill all the 
 approaches and line the banks in front of the rostrums. 
 
 Many of them are regular men, who are called ' royals,' 
 and who are pretty sure to be taken on, their names being 
 on the ganger's list and called out by him as a matter of 
 course. These men show signs of regular employment, and 
 differ very little from the ordinary labourer. The strangest 
 part of the crowd are the ragged, wretched, woebegone- 
 looking outcasts who are penniless, and whose last hope is 
 that they may have the luck to be selected by the ganger. 
 Many of these come from the distant parts of London, from 
 the North, and the South, and the East, and the West. 
 Some of them have tramped all night, and flung themselves 
 down to sleep at the great dock gates in the early dawn, 
 determined to be in the front rank. 
 
 They are of all sorts, sizes, and conditions. Among them 
 is the seedy clerk, the broken-down betting man, the dis- 
 charged soldier, the dismissed policeman, the ticket-of-leave 
 man, the Jack'-of-all-trades, the countryman, and the London 
 rough. An enormous proportion of the regular men are 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 97 
 
 Irish and of the ordinary labouring class, but now and then 
 a foreigner or a negro crops up among the crowd. One 
 man there is among them who wears his rough jacket and 
 his old battered billycock with a certain air of gentility, and 
 whose features are strongly refined when compared with the 
 coarser lineaments of those around him. 
 
 In the Docks they call him 1 the nobleman.' He is a 
 gentleman by birth and education ; he can swear, I believe, 
 in four languages ; and as a matter of fact is the son of a 
 baronet, and has a right to be called ' sir ' if he chose to 
 'demand it. Into the sad story which has brought about this 
 social wreck it is no business of mine to enter, though to the 
 friendly dock police and to the gangers the baronet is ready 
 enough to tell it. 
 
 The baronet can work, in spite of his pedigree, as well as 
 any of his mates, and the fivepence an hour is a godsend to 
 him. Strange are the stories of vicissitude which many of 
 these men can tell. I have said it is the last haven of the 
 outcast, and by that I do not mean to imply that all Dock- 
 labourers are destitute ; but that among the huge crowd of 
 outsiders who come daily to take their chance are many of 
 those who form the absolutely most helpless and most hope- 
 less of the London poor, No character is required for the 
 work, no questions are asked ; a man can call himself any 
 name he likes ; so long as he has two hands and is willing to 
 use them, that is all the Dock Company require. Among 
 these men are hundreds of those whose cases are so difficult 
 to deal with in respect of house accommodation. They are 
 the men who have to pay exorbitant rents for the filthy 
 single rooms of the slums, and whose fight with starvation 
 is daily and hourly. They are the men earning precarious 
 livelihoods who are objected to by the managers of all the 
 new Industrial dwellings, which have swept away acres of 
 accommodation of an inferior class. A man who is a dock- 
 labourer may earn a pound a week — he may earn only five 
 shillings. Sometimes they get taken on every day in a 
 
 7 
 
9 8 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 week, and then for a fortnight they may have to go empty- 
 handed from the gates day after day. 
 
 Once fix on your mind the wear and tear, the anxiety and 
 doubt, the strain and harass, the ups and downs of a life like 
 this, count the smallness of the gain and the uncertainty of 
 employment, and you will understand why it is that the 
 common body of men who are classed as ' Dock-labourers ' 
 are reckoned as among the poorest of the London poor 
 who make an honest effort to keep out of the workhouse. 
 Watch the crowd — there must be over two thousand present 
 in the great outer circle. The gangers are getting into the 
 rostrums — two tea ships have come in, and a large number 
 of men will be required. Hope is on many faces now ; the 
 men who have been lying in hundreds sleeping on the bank 
 opposite — so usual a bed that the grass is worn away — leap 
 to their feet. The crowd surges close together, and every 
 eye is fixed in the direction of the ganger, who, up in his 
 pulpit, his big book, with the list of the names of regular 
 men, or 4 Royals,' open before him, surveys the scene, and 
 prepares for business. He calls out name after name — the 
 men go up and take a pass, present it to the police at the 
 gate, and file in to be told off to the different vessels. It is 
 when the f Eoyals ' are exhausted that the real excitement 
 begins. The men who are left are over a thousand strong 
 — they have come on the chance. The ganger eyes them 
 with a quick, searching glance, then points his finger to 
 them, ' You — and you — and you — and you.' The extra 
 men go through the usual formality, and pass in. There is 
 still hope for hundreds of them. The ganger keeps on 
 engaging men ; but presently he stops. 
 
 You can almost hear a sigh run through the ragged crowd. 
 There comes into some of the pale, pinched faces a look of 
 unutterable woe — the hope that welled up in the heart has 
 sunk back again. There is no chance now. All the men 
 wanted are engaged. 
 
 As you turn and look at these men and study them — these, 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 99 
 
 the unfortunate ones — you picture to yourself what the 
 situation means to some of them. What are their thoughts 
 as they turn away ? Some of them, perhaps, have grown 
 callous to suffering, hardened in despair. To-day's story is 
 but the story of yesterday, and will be the story of to- 
 morrow. There is on many of their faces that look of 
 vacant unconcern to everything that comes of long familiarity 
 with adversity. They have the look of the man who came 
 into the French Court of Justice to take his trial for 
 murdering his colleague at the galleys, and who had branded 
 on his arm his name — Never & chance !' Never a chance 
 when a man gets that branded, not on his arm but on his 
 heart ; he takes bad luck very quietly. It is the good luck 
 which would astonish and upset him. 
 
 Some of the men, new-comers most of these, and not used 
 to the game yet, show a certain rough emotion. It is fair 
 to say it generally takes the form of an expletive. Others, 
 men who look as though they had sunk by degrees from 
 better positions, go away with a quivering lip and a flush of 
 disappointment. If we could follow the thoughts of some 
 of them, we should see far away, and perhaps where in some 
 wretched room a wife and children sit cowering and shiver- 
 ing, waiting for the evening to come, when father will bring 
 back the price of the day's work he has gone to seek. It 
 must be with a heavy heart that his wife towards mid- day 
 hears the sound of her husband's footsteps on the creaking 
 stairs. This advent means no joy to her. That footstep 
 tells its sad, cruel tale in one single creak. He has not 
 been taken on at the Docks ; another weary day of despair 
 has to be sat through, another night she and the little ones 
 must go hungry to bed. 
 
 It must not be imagined that the men clear away directly 
 who have not been engaged. Hope springs eternal in the 
 human breast, and dozens of men still wait on in hope. It 
 sometimes happens that a ship comes in late, or something 
 
 7—2 
 
ICO 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 happens, and more men are required. Then the ganger comes 
 out and picks them from among the remaining crowd. 
 
 Dozens of them hang about on the off-chance until two ; 
 after that it rarely happens any men are engaged, so the last 
 brave few who have stood w T ith wistful eyes for six or eight 
 hours at the gate, turn slowly on their heels and go — God 
 knows where ! 
 
 Some of them, I believe, are absolutely homeless and 
 friendless, and hang about street corners, getting perhaps a 
 bit of tobacco from one or another more fortunate in this 
 world's goods than themselves, and with it stave off the 
 gnawing pangs of hunger. They hang about up side streets 
 and round corners till night comes, then fling themselves 
 down and sleep where they can, and go back once more at 
 dawn to the gates of their paradise, to wait and hope, and 
 be disappointed perhaps again. 
 
 This is the dark side of the Dock-labourer's story. It 
 has a brighter and better one inside, where on miles and 
 miles of wharf hundreds of men, package- and bale-laden, 
 are hurrying to and fro, stowing the produce of the world in 
 shed after shed. Thousands of barrels of sugar are lying 
 in one, and the air is perfectly sweet with it. The ground 
 is treacly with it, and one's boots are saturated with it as one 
 walks through a thick slime of what looks like toffee gone 
 wrong in a sweetstuff window on a hot summer day. Thou- 
 sands of boxes of tea, just in from China, are in another 
 shed, and their next-door neighbours are myriads of bags of 
 wheat. The steam cranes are going as far as the eye can 
 see, whirling and dragging, and swinging huge bale after 
 bale greedily from the good ships' holds ; lighters laden to 
 the top are being piled higher still ; whole regiments of men 
 bent with precious burthens are filing from wharf to ware- 
 house ; the iron wheels of the trolley, as it is pushed rapidly 
 over the asphalted floor, make a music of their own ; and the 
 whole scene is shut in with a background of shipping — 
 argosies freighted with the wealth of the Indies, the produce 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 101 
 
 of many a land beyond the seas ; all this goes to make up a 
 picture of industry and enterprise and wealth, which gives 
 just a little pardonable pride to the Englishman who con- 
 templates it for the first time. 
 
 The system in the Docks is admirable. The strange men 
 who are taken on are not taken entirely on trust. There is 
 a uniform scale of pay for old hands and new, but there is 
 an overlooker to see that all work well. If a man shirks or 
 makes himself in any way objectionable, the process is short 
 and summary : ' Go to the office and take your money.' 
 The man is discharged — he is paid for the time he has 
 worked, but no more ; and he can leave the Docks out of 
 the question as a field for his talents, if he has shown 
 himself a duffer. A mark is put against his name in the 
 ganger's book. 
 
 At the door every man who leaves the Docks is searched. 
 This is more of a preventive measure than anything else. 
 The men handle many packages of valuable commodities 
 which have been broken in transit, and could easily extract 
 some for their private use. 
 
 It would not be hard for a gentleman brought face to 
 face with a broken chest of tea to fill his pockets with a 
 loose pound or two, for instance. The search at the gate 
 stops that. Knowing that detection is certain, those men 
 who would be dishonest if they could get a chance see the 
 impossibility of escaping with their plunder, and so, making 
 a virtue of necessity, respect the eighth commandment. 
 The Docks are in the custody of a special body of Dock- 
 police, who maintain order, keep guard night and day over 
 the goods in the warehouse, search the men, and check all 
 the carts and vans passing out or in at the gates, and are 
 generally responsible for everything. 
 
 The boys employed as messengers between the Dock 
 House in Billiter Street and the Docks themselves, and also 
 the lads employed on the spot, are all dressed in a remark- 
 ably neat uniform, and add to the picturesqueness of the 
 
102 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 busy scene. All these boys are drilled, and come to attention 
 and salute their superiors with the precision of old soldiers. 
 
 I have given a little space to the inside of the Docks 
 because such numbers of the men whose homes we have 
 visited in previous chapters are employed there, and it is 
 there that unskilled labour finds the readiest market. 
 
 But it is outside that one must search for the misery 
 which those who know them best acknowledge to be the 
 commonest lot of the Dock-labourer. 
 
 Inside, when the men are at work, the beer barrel on 
 a stand with wheels is trundled merrily along at certain 
 hours, and there is a contractor who supplies the men with 
 food. It is outside that the beer barrel and the food 
 contractor find their occupation gone. 
 
 Poverty in its grimmest form exists here, and it is for these 
 men, struggling so bravely and waiting so patiently for the 
 work their hands are only too willing to do, that philan- 
 thropists might look a little more earnestly into the question 
 of house accommodation. 
 
 Looking at the uncertainty of employment, it is not hard 
 for anyone to see that a rent of five shillings for a single 
 room is too much for these men to pay, and they cannot go 
 out into the suburbs, where rents are cheaper, because they 
 could not get to the Docks in anything like condition to work. 
 
 These men must live within a reasonable distance of their 
 labour, and to do so they have to pay exorbitant prices for 
 vile accommodation. They are kept in the lowest depths of 
 poverty, because rent almost exhausts all the money — all 
 that the luckiest can hope to earn. 
 
 ' Honest sweat,' the poet has told us, is a very noble 
 decoration to a man's brow, and these men are plentifully 
 decorated before their task is over, I can assure you. It is 
 scandalous that having done all they can, risked life and 
 limb (for Dock accidents are numerous and keep a hospital 
 busy), and done their duty in that state of life to which it 
 has pleased God to call them, they should have to creep 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 103 
 
 home to fever dens and pestilential cellars. Half the money 
 they pay ought to go for food for themselves and their 
 children, instead of into the well-lined pockets of those 
 who are making fortunes out of the death-traps they call 
 * House Property.' 
 
 This short and hurried sketch of life in the Docks is 
 necessarily incomplete. Its one great feature connected 
 with the subject of this book my readers can see for 
 themselves at any time they like to take a long walk in the 
 very early morning. No one who does not see the vast 
 crowd can appreciate the character and pathetic elements it 
 contains. I cannot write them with my pen ; but I can 
 gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to Mr. A. T. A. 
 Brownlow, of the London Offices, and Captain Sheppy, of 
 the Dock Police, whose kindness enabled me to see under 
 peculiar advantages this phase of 
 
 How the Poor Live. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 With the present chapter I bring this series to a close. 
 I have endeavoured briefly to present to the reader a few 
 of the phases of existence through which their poorer 
 brethren pass. I have necessarily left untrodden whole 
 acres of ground over which a traveller, in search of startling 
 revelations, might with advantage have journeyed. But 
 startling revelations were not the object I had in view 
 when I undertook these sketches. My object was to 
 skim the surface lightly, but sufficiently to awaken in 
 the general mind an interest in one of the great social 
 problems of the day. A few of the evils of the present 
 system of overcrowding and neglected sanitation, I have 
 the courage to believe, have been brought home for the 
 first time to a world of readers outside the hitherto 
 
HO W THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 narrow circle of philanthropists who take an active interest 
 in the social condition of the masses. 
 
 One word with regard to the many letters which have 
 appeared in the newspapers, and which have reached me 
 privately. There seems a very general and a very earnest 
 desire among the writers to do something for the people 
 on whose behalf I have appealed to their sympathy. 
 
 While fully appreciating the kind-heartedness and the 
 generous feelings evoked, I cannot help regretting that in 
 too many instances the idea prevails that charity can 
 ameliorate the evils complained of. I have been grievously 
 misunderstood if anything I have said has led to the belief 
 that all Englishmen have to do to help the denizens of the 
 slums and alleys is to put their hands in and pull out a 
 sovereign or a shilling. 
 
 It is legislation that is wanted, not almsgiving. It is not 
 a temporary relief, but a permanent one, that can alone 
 affect, in any appreciable manner, the condition of the one- 
 roomed portion of the population of great cities. 
 
 Charity is to be honoured wherever it is found, but 
 charity, unless accompanied by something else, may do 
 more evil than good. There are in London scores and 
 scores of men and women who live by getting up bogus 
 charities and sham schemes for the relief of the poor. 
 Hundreds of thousands of pounds pass annually through 
 the hands of men whose antecedents, were they known, 
 would make a careful householder nervous about asking them 
 into his hall if there were any coats and umbrellas about. 
 
 I am not a thick and thin supporter of the C.O.S. At 
 various times I have been bitterly opposed both to its 
 theories and its practices ; but it certainly has done an 
 immense deal of good in exposing some of the scoundrels 
 who appeal to the best sympathies of human nature under 
 absolutely false pretences. 
 
 It is not so long ago that a man who had been convicted of 
 fraud was found to be the nourishing proprietor of a mission 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 105 
 
 to the poor, or something of the sort — whose annual income 
 for two years past had been over a couple of thousand 
 pounds, against an expenditure in tracts, rent, and blankets 
 of one hundred and thirty-six pounds. 
 
 In another instance, the promoter of a charity, which had 
 been in a flourishing condition for years, actually had his 
 villa at St. John's Wood, and kept his brougham — his total 
 source of income being the charity itself. 
 
 If I quote these cases here it is not to hinder the flow of 
 the broad, pure stream of charity by one single obstacle, but 
 to show such of my readers as may need the hint how 
 dangerous and delusive it is to think that careless alms- 
 giving is in any shape or form a real assistance to. the poor 
 and suffering. 
 
 People who wish to do good must give their time as well 
 as their money. They must personally investigate all those 
 cases they wish to relieve, and they must set about seeing 
 how the causes which lead to misery and suffering can be 
 removed. 
 
 How are the evils of overcrowding — how are the present 
 miseries of the poor to be removed ? In what way can the 
 social status of the labouring classes be permanently raised? 
 Not by collecting-cards or funds, not by tracts or missions, 
 but by remedial legislation — by State help and State pro- 
 tection, and by the general recognition of those rights of 
 citizenship, which should be as carefully guarded for the 
 lowest class as for the highest. 
 
 We live in a country which practically protects the poor 
 and oppressed of every land under the sun at the expense of 
 its own. We organize great military expeditions, we pour 
 out blood and money ad libitum in order to raise the social 
 condition of black men and brown ; the woes of an Egyptian, 
 or a Bulgarian, or a Zulu send a thrill of indignation through 
 honest John Bull's veins ; and yet at his very door there is 
 a race so oppressed, so hampered, and so utterly neglected, 
 that its condition has become a national scandal. 
 
106 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 Is it not time that the long-promised era of domestic 
 legislation gave some faint streaks of dawn in the par- 
 liamentary sky ? Are we to wait for a revolution before we 
 rescue the poor from the clutches of their oppressors ? Are 
 we to wait for the cholera or the plague before we remedy 
 a condition of things which sanitarily is without parallel 
 in civilized countries ? 
 
 There is a penalty for packing cattle too closely together ; 
 why should there be none for improperly packing men and 
 women and children ? The law says that no child shall 
 grow up without reading, writing, and arithmetic ; but the 
 law does nothing that children may have air, and light, and 
 shelter. 
 
 No one urges that the State should be a grandmother to 
 the citizens, but it should certainly exercise ordinary parental 
 care over its family. 
 
 To quote an instance of the gross neglect of the interests 
 of the poor by the State, take the working of the Artisans' 
 Dwellings Act. Space after space has been cleared under 
 the provisions of this Act, thousands upon thousands of 
 families have been rendered homeless by the demolition of 
 whole acres of the slums where they hid their heads, and 
 in scores of instances the work of improvement has stopped 
 with the pulling down. To this day the cleared spaces stand 
 empty — a cemetery for cats, a last resting-place for worn-out 
 boots and tea-kettles. The consequence of this is, that the 
 hardships of the displaced families have been increased a 
 hundredfold. So limited is now the accommodation for the 
 class whose wage-earning power is of the smallest, that in 
 the few quarters left open to them rents have gone up 100 
 per cent, in five years — a room which once let for 2s. a week 
 is now 4s. Worse even than this — the limited accommoda- 
 tion has left the renters helpless victims of any extortion or 
 neglect the landlords of these places may choose to practise. 
 
 The tenants cannot now ask for repairs, for a decent 
 water-supply, or for the slightest boon in the way of 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 107 
 
 improvement. They must put up with dirt, and filth, and 
 putrefaction ; with dripping walls and broken windows ; with 
 all the nameless abominations of an unsanitary hovel, be- 
 cause if they complain the landlord can turn them out at 
 - once, and find dozens of people eager to take their places, 
 who will be less fastidious. It is Hobson's choice — that 
 shelter or none — and it is small wonder that few families 
 are stoical enough to move from a death-trap to a ditch 
 or a doorstep for the sake of a little fresh air. The law 
 \ .which allows them the death-trap denies them the doorstep 
 —that is a property which must not be overcrowded. 
 
 Now, is it too much to ask that in the intervals of civilizing 
 the Zulu and improving the condition of the Egyptian fellah 
 the Government should turn its attention to the poor of 
 London, and see if in its wisdom it cannot devise a scheme 
 to remedy this terrible state of things ? 
 
 The social, moral, and physical improvement of the 
 labouring classes is surely a question as important, say, 
 as the condition of the traffic at Hyde* Park Corner, or the 
 disfigurement of the Thames Embankment. If one-tenth 
 of the indignation which burst forth when a ventilator 
 ventured to emit a puff of smoke on the great riverside 
 promenade to the injury of the geraniums in Temple 
 Gardens could only be aroused over the wholesale stifling 
 and poisoning of the poor which now goes on all over 
 London, the first step towards a better state of things would 
 have been taken. 
 
 Why does that indignation find no stronger outlet than 
 an occasional whisper, a nod of the head, a stray leading 
 article, or a casual question in the House sandwiched be- 
 tween an inquiry concerning the Duke of Wellington's 
 statue, and one about the cost of cabbage-seed for the 
 kitchen-garden at Buckingham Palace ? 
 
 The answer probably will be, that up to a recent date the 
 magnitude of the evil has not been brought home to the 
 general public or the members of the Legislature. M.P.'s 
 
io8 
 
 HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 do not drive through the Mint or Whitechapel, nor do they 
 take their constitutional in the back slums of Westminster 
 and Drury Lane. What the eye does not see the heart 
 does not grieve after, and the conservative spirit born and 
 bred in Englishmen makes them loth to start a crusade 
 against any system of wrong until its victims have begun to 
 start a crusade of their own — to demonstrate in Trafalgar 
 Square, and to hold meetings in Hyde Park. There is a 
 disposition in this country not to know that a dog is hungry 
 till it growls, and it is only when it goes from growling to 
 snarling, and from snarling to sniffing viciously in the 
 vicinity of somebody's leg, that the somebody thinks it time 
 to send out a flag of truce in the shape of a bone. We 
 don't want to wait until the dog shows its teeth to know 
 that he has such things. We want the bone to be offered 
 now — a good marrowy bone, with plenty of legislative meat 
 upon it. He has been a good, patient, long-suffering dog, 
 chained to a filthy kennel for years, and denied even a drink 
 of clean water, let alone a bone, so that the tardy offering 
 is at least deserved. 
 
 It would be easy to show how the amelioration of the 
 condition of the lower classes would be beneficial to the 
 entire community, but it is scarcely worth while to put the 
 question on such low grounds. The boon craved should 
 come as an act of justice, not as a concession wrung from 
 unwilling hands by fear, or granted with interested motives. 
 
 Briefly, and narrowing the question down to its smallest 
 dimensions, what is wanted is this : The immediate erection 
 on cleared spaces of tenements suitable to the classes dis- 
 lodged. A system of inspection which would not only cause 
 the demolition of unhealthy houses, but prevent unhealthy 
 houses being erected. A certain space should be insisted on 
 for every human being inhabiting a room — say 300 cubic 
 feet for each person, and this regulation should be enforced 
 by inspection of labouring-class dwellings, the enforcement 
 of proper sanitary regulations, and a higher penalty for any 
 
HOW THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 109 
 
 breach of them ; the providing of increased bath and 
 washing accommodation in every crowded district ; the 
 erection of proper mortuaries in every parish; and the 
 preservation in every district of certain open spaces to act 
 as lungs to the neighbourhood — all these should be items 
 in any remedial scheme. Beyond this, the poor should be 
 encouraged in every possible way to decentralize. They 
 must at present all crowd round the big centres of employ- 
 ment, because the means of travelling to and fro are beyond 
 the reach of their slender purses. But if a system of cheap 
 conveyance by tram or rail for the working-classes could be 
 developed, they would scatter themselves more and more 
 about the suburbs, and by their own action reduce the 
 exorbitant rents they are now called upon to pay. 
 
 Again, there should be in all new blocks of tenements 
 built for this class accommodation for the hawkers and 
 others who have barrows which they must put somewhere, 
 and who are compelled at times to house the vegetable and 
 animal matter in which they deal. A man who sells 
 cabbages in the streets cannot leave his unsold stock to take 
 care of itself at night, so he takes it home with him. At 
 present he and his family generally sleep on it in their one 
 room, but lock-up sheds and stabling for donkeys and 
 ponies would obviate all the evils of the present system. 
 The men are quite willing to pay for a little extra accom- 
 modation, and the removal of the mischief which comes of 
 whole areas polluted with decaying vegetable matter is at 
 least worth an experiment. 
 
 The density of the population in certain districts, and the 
 sanitary defects of the tenements, are, at present, absolute 
 dangers to the Public Health. On this ground alone it is 
 desirable to agitate for reform ; but there is a broader 
 ground still — humanity. It is on that broad ground I 
 venture to ask those who by these scant sketches of a great 
 evil have become in some slight way acquainted with it, to 
 raise their voices and give strength to the cry which is going 
 
I IO 
 
 HO IV THE POOR LIVE. 
 
 up at last for a rigid and searching inquiry into the con- 
 ditions under which the Poor of this vast city live. 
 
 To leave the world a little better than he found it is the 
 best aim a man can have in life, and no labour earns so 
 sweet and so lasting a reward as that which has for its 
 object the happiness of others. 
 
 Public opinion boldly expressed never fails to compel the 
 obedience of those who guide the destinies of States. Public 
 opinion is a chorus of voices, and the strength of that 
 chorus depends upon the manner in which each individual 
 member of it exerts his vocal power. How long the scandal 
 which disgraces the age shall continue depends greatly, 
 therefore, good reader, upon your individual exertions. If 
 aught that has been written here, then, has enlisted your 
 sympathy, pass from a recruit to a good soldier of the 
 cause, and help with all your will and all your strength 
 to make so sad a story as this impossible when in future 
 years abler pens than mine shall perhaps once again 
 attempt to tell you 
 
 How the Pook Live. 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
) 
 
 \ 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 CHAPTEE J. 
 
 A great subject, which for years journalists and philan- 
 thropists have been vainly endeavouring to interest the 
 general public in, has suddenly by leaps and bounds assumed 
 the front rank in the great army of social and political 
 problems. The housing of the poor has long been a smoul- 
 dering question ; dozens of willing hands have sought to 
 fan it into a flame, but hitherto with small results. At the 
 last moment a little pamphlet laid modestly on the dying 
 embers has done what all the bellows-blowing of the Press 
 failed to accomplish, and the smouldering question has 
 become a brightly-burning one. It is while the flames are 
 still at their height, and everyone is suggesting a remedy, 
 that I should like to say a few words on a subject with 
 which I have been practically and intimately acquainted for 
 many years. 
 
 It is evident, after reading the many letters which have 
 appeared in the Daily Neivs and other journals, that the 
 great bulk of the remedy-suggesters are writing without 
 the slightest personal knowledge of the people who 
 are to be washed and dressed, rehoused and regenerated, 
 and converted by the State and the Church into whole- 
 some, pleasant, God-fearing citizens of the most ap- 
 proved type. There is a capital picture on the hoardings 
 
 * Originally published in the Daily News. 
 
 8 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 of London of a little black boy in a bath who has been 
 washed white as far as the neck with Messrs. Somebody's 
 wonderful soap. I do not for one moment dispute the 
 excellent qualities of the moral and political soaps which 
 kindly philanthropists are recommending as likely to accom- 
 plish a similar miracle for the Outcast Blackamoors of 
 Horrible London ; but I am inclined to think the advocates 
 for these said soaps underestimate the blackness of the boy. 
 
 In the early part of the present year I spent some two 
 months in visiting the worst slums of London, and in in- 
 vestigating the condition of the inhabitants. I not only 
 went from cellar to attic, but I traced back the family 
 history of many of the occupants. I followed the workers 
 to their work, the thieves and wantons to their haunts, the 
 children to their schools, and the homeless loafers to the « 
 holes and corners, the open passages and backyards where 
 they herded together at night. I began my task with a light 
 heart ; I finished it with a heavy one. In that two months 
 I saw a vision of hell more terrible than the immortal 
 Florentine's, and this was no poet's dream — it was a terrible 
 truth, ghastly in its reality, he'artbreaking in its intensity, 
 and the doom of the imprisoned bodies in this modern 
 Inferno was as horrible as any that Dante depicted for his 
 tortured souls. But the most terrible thing of all was that 
 the case of many of these lost creatures seemed utterly 
 hopeless. I felt this then, and, now that the Press has 
 been flooded with suggestions, I feel it still. In writing 
 this I trust I shall not be misunderstood. I have only ven- 
 tured to intrude myself in this great discussion now to 
 point out where I think the new forces set in motion may be 
 most profitably employed and where they would simply be 
 wasted. 
 
 We must remember that it is not only poverty we have to 
 deal with in order to metamorphose Horrible London into a 
 new Arcadia— we have to do battle with a hydra-headed 
 monster called Vice, and vice is born and bred in tens of 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 "5 
 
 thousands of these outcasts, whose lot we are trying to 
 remedy. It taints the entire atmosphere of the slums. 
 The people I refer to are dirty and foul and vicious, as tigers 
 are fierce and vindictive and cruel, because it is part of their 
 nature. Take them from their dirt to-morrow, and put 
 them in clean rooms amid wholesome surroundings, and 
 what would be the result ? — the dirty people would not be 
 improved, but the clean rooms would be dirtied. You can- 
 not stamp out the result of generations of neglect in a day, 
 or a week, or a year, any more than you can check the 
 ravages of consumption with doses of cough mixture ; 
 whether you give it to the patient a tablespoonful or a 
 tumblerful at a time, once an hour or once a week, the result 
 will be the same. 
 
 The first great work of the reformers in all their schemes 
 must be to separate the labouring from the criminal classes. 
 At present both classes herd together, to the infinite harm 
 of the former; and the poor artisan's children grow up with 
 every form of crime and vice practised openly before their 
 eyes, The pulling down of vast areas of labouring-class 
 accommodation to make way for Metropolitan improvements 
 is the cause of this commingling of the honest poor with 
 their dishonest brethren. The men and women earning low 
 wages and precarious livelihoods have been driven step by 
 step into the Alsatias of London, because nowhere else have 
 they been able to find shelter. The suburbs are beyond their 
 means, not because of the rents, but because of the expense 
 of getting to and from their daily work. Take the case of 
 the thousands of the labouring poor who get employment at 
 the docks. Their only chance of being taken on is to be at 
 the dock-gates by four or five in the morning. Many of 
 them are there as early as three. How could these men get 
 from the suburbs at such an hour, and how could they afford 
 the daily railway fare ? Then there are the factory hands, 
 and the men and women and children who work at home for 
 the City houses — they too must be within walking-distance 
 
 8—2 
 
n6 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 of the factories and warehouses. At present their only 
 chance is to live in the rookeries, and there they must pay 
 from two-and-sixpence to four shillings for a single room. 
 And without exception all these rookeries are largely 
 peopled by the criminal classes, who find their security in 
 the surrounding filth and lawlessness, which are so many 
 fortifications against the enemy. The criminal classes will 
 oppose all efforts at their redemption, the labouring classes 
 will welcome them, so that, to get a good result quickly, the 
 latter must be the first consideration with politicians, what- 
 ever the religious view of the subject may be. 
 
 Having separated the criminals from the workers, the next 
 task must be to separate the old from the young, in planning 
 out measures of reform and applying remedies. The condi- 
 tion of many of the older people, even among the poorer 
 workers, is almost hopeless. They could never adapt them- 
 selves now to the life the philanthropist dreams for them. 
 They could not be brought to see that marriage is any better 
 than cohabitation, that thrift is a virtue, or that there is any 
 higher pleasure in life than the gratification of the animal 
 instincts. To gratify intellectual instincts, men must have 
 intellects trained and cultivated to gratify. The older deni- 
 zens of Horrible London have had their intellects dulled 
 rather than sharpened by long years of familiarity with 
 want, privation, and wretched surroundings. They have 
 lived come-day, go-day, God-send- Sunday lives too long to 
 be suddenly awakened to a taste for intellectual amusements 
 or to higher aspirations ; and, what is more, the bulk of the 
 class I allude to are absolutely ignorant, and can neither 
 read nor write. 
 
 But with their children the case is different ; and here is 
 the great hope of the reformer. The Board schools have, 
 through good and evil report, sown the seeds of a new era. 
 Amid all the talk of the last few weeks, few have recognised 
 the fact that it is by the education of the rising generation 
 that the ground has been cleared for the brighter and better 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 117 
 
 state of things we are all hoping to see. The children who 
 go back to the slums from the Board schools are themselves 
 quietly accomplishing more than Acts of Parliament, missions, 
 and philanthropic crusades can ever hope to do. Already the 
 young race of mothers, the girls who had the benefit for a 
 year or two of the Education Act, are tidy in their persons, 
 clean in their homes, and decent in their language. Let the 
 reader, who wishes to judge for himself of the physical and 
 moral results which education has already accomplished, go 
 - to any Board school recruited from the ' slum ' districts, and 
 note the difference in the elder and the younger children, or 
 attend a ' B ' meeting, where the mothers come to plead 
 excuses for their little ones' non-attendance, and note the 
 difference between the old and the young mothers — between 
 those who, before they took ' mates ' or husbands, had a 
 year or two of school training, and those who had given 
 birth to children in the old days of widespread ignorance. 
 
 It is to the rising generation we look for that which is 
 hopeless in the grown-up outcasts of to-day. Even educa- 
 tion, the greatest remedy that has yet been applied to the 
 evil, will be heavily handicapped if such home-teaching is 
 to supplement the efforts of the schools. 
 
 I have only touched lightly upon a few points which lie on 
 the outskirts of this great question. Knowing the nature of 
 the task our social reformers have undertaken, I venture 
 most earnestly to hope that nothing may be done hastily, or 
 entrusted to well-meaning dilettanti or crotcheteers. Any 
 scheme, to be successful, must embrace the entire question. 
 The peculiar needs and necessities of a people who are a race 
 by themselves must be borne in mind, and whatever is 
 granted in the way of amelioration must be given, not as a 
 charity to the abject poor, but as a right yielded at last to 
 our long-neglected fellow-citizens. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 In a sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, the Rev. 
 Prebendary .Capel-Cure referred to the preceding article on 
 1 Horrible London.' While insisting on the necessity for 
 State interference, the preacher went on to say that he had 
 read a series of papers on the ' Misery of Paris,' published in 
 1881, and that the unspeakable, the nameless horrors, the 
 awful accumulation of guilt and filth and misery which the 
 French writer had seen with his own eyes, and heard with 
 his own ears, ' made even the dreadful revelation of the 
 English writer seem almost trivial in comparison.' Now, as 
 a matter of fact, no English writer conversant with the 
 subject has dared to tell a plain unvarnished tale of London's 
 guilt and woe. There are many of us who have seen with 
 our own eyes, and heard with our own ears, things so revolt- 
 ing that we can only hint at them in vague and hesitating 
 language. Were I, even now that public attention has been 
 thoroughly aroused to a great danger, to go into the details 
 of ordinary life in a London slum, the story would be one 
 which no journal enjoying a general circulation could pos- 
 sibly print. 
 
 There is indeed a great danger that, in endeavouring to 
 steer clear of loathsome details, writers dealing with the 
 question of the amelioration of the condition of the poor 
 may fail to bring home to the public the real nature of the 
 ills that have to be remedied. It is to the general avoidance 
 of offensive revelations that we owe most of the impractic- 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 119 
 
 able schemes of reform with which the Press all over the 
 country is being flooded. 
 
 Let us ' rehouse ' the poor by all means, but before we set 
 about the task it is imperatively necessary that we should 
 know what kind of people we are going to build for. Unless 
 this is thoroughly understood, the result of the present 
 agitation will be simply deplorable. We shall pull down 
 slum after slum, not to rehouse the present inhabitants, but 
 to drive them into still closer and closer contact, until we 
 have massed together a huge army of famished and des- 
 perate men and women, ready, in the 'wild hour' that must 
 sooner or later come, to burst their barriers at last, and to 
 declare open and violent war against law and order and 
 property. 
 
 The present terrible condition of affairs is mainly due to 
 two causes — over-population and the small remuneration 
 commanded by labour, and it is out of the former evil that 
 the latter has grown. That drink is the curse of poverty- 
 stricken districts no one wishes to deny, but it is a mistake 
 to say that drink is the cause of poverty ; as a matter of 
 fact, poverty is equally the cause of drink. On this part 
 of the question I may at some future time give the result 
 of my experiences among the poor. For the present I 
 want my readers to accompany me through a typical London 
 slum, and to make a short study of the inhabitants, in order 
 that they may form their own opinion of the remedies 
 likely to be of permanent value. 
 
 One London slum is very like another, but for my purpose 
 now I will select a district in Southwark, where the houses 
 are in such a condition that they are bound to come down 
 under any scheme of sanitary improvement, however half- 
 hearted it may be. 
 
 We enter a narrow court, picking our way with caution 
 over the nameless filth and garbage and the decaying vege- 
 table matter that, flung originally in heaps outside the doors, 
 has been trodden about by the feet of the inhabitants until 
 
120 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 the broken flags are almost undiscernible beneath a thick 
 paste of indescribable filth. The outside of the houses pre- 
 pares us for what is to come. Inside them we find the 
 staircases rotten and breaking away. A greasy cord stretched 
 from flight to flight is often the sole protection they possess. 
 Wooden rails there may originally have been, but the land- 
 lord has not replaced them. He does not supply his tenants 
 with firewood gratis. The windows are broken and patched 
 with paper, or occasionally with a bit of board. The roofs 
 are dilapidated, and the wet of a rainy season has soaked 
 through the loose tiles, and saturated the walls and ceilings 
 from attic to basement. And the rooms themselves ! To 
 describe them with anything like truth taxes my know- 
 ledge of euphemisms to the utmost. The rooms in these 
 houses are pigsties, and nothing more, and in them men, 
 women and children live and sleep and eat. More I can- 
 not say, except that the stranger, entering one of these 
 rooms for the first time, has every sense shocked, and finds 
 it almost impossible to breathe the pestilent atmosphere 
 without being instantly sick. And in such rooms as these 
 there are men and women now living who never leave them 
 for days and weeks together. They are sometimes dis- 
 covered in an absolute state of nudity, having parted with 
 every rag in their possession in order to keep body and soul 
 together through times when no work is to be had. 
 
 So much for the district which is to be levelled, and the 
 general habits of the inhabitants who are to be ' rehoused.' 
 Let us take a few of the families who will have to be some- 
 body's tenants under any scheme, and see what their circum- 
 stances are. The cases are all selected from the district I 
 have endeavoured to hint at above. I will begin with the 
 workers : 
 
 T. Harborne, stonemason, occupies two dilapidated rooms, 
 which are in a filthy condition. Has five children. Total 
 weekly income through slackness, 8s. Rent, 4s. 6d. 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 121 
 
 E. Williams, costermonger, two rooms in a court which 
 is a hotbed of vice and disease. Has eight children. Total 
 earnings, 17s. Eent, 5s. 6d. 
 
 T. Briggs, labourer, one room, four children. Eent, 4s. 
 No furniture ; all sleep on floor. Daughter answered 
 knock, absolutely naked ; ran in and covered herself with a 
 sack. 
 
 Mrs. Johnson, widow, one room, three children. Earnings, 
 6s. Eent, 3s. 6d. 
 
 W. Leigh, fancy boxmaker, two awful rooms, four chil- 
 dren. Earnings, 14s. Eent, 6s. 
 
 H. Walker, hawker, two rooms, seven children. Earnings, 
 10s. Eent, 5s. 6d. 
 
 E. Thompson, out of work, five children. Living by 
 pawning goods and clothes. Wife drinks. Eent, 4s. 
 
 G. Garrard, labourer, out looking for work, eight children. 
 No income. Eent, 5s. 6d. Pawning last rags. No parish 
 relief. Starving. Declines to go into workhouse. 
 
 These people may fairly be described as workers. They 
 will accept employment if they can get it, but they positively 
 refuse to go into the workhouse when they cannot. If they 
 fail to get the rent together, they will go into a furnished 
 apartment, i.e., a frightful hovel, with an awful bed, a broken 
 table, and one chair in it. These places can be had by the 
 night, and vary in price from sixpence to a shilling. They 
 are largely used by the criminal classes, who do not care to 
 accumulate household goods, which their frequent tem- 
 porary retirements from society would leave at the mercy of 
 others. 
 
 In the same district and in the same houses, mixing 
 freely with their more honest neighbours, and quarrelling, 
 fighting, and drinking with them, we find another class 
 whose earnings are also precarious. I will quote one or two 
 cases, as these people must be dislodged when the present 
 buildings come down : 
 
122 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 Mrs. Smith. Husband in gaol. One room, three chil- 
 dren. She earns 6s. a week, and pays 2s. 6d. rent. The 
 man has been away fourteen years for burglary. The day 
 of his release he came home. (The manner in which the 
 men coming from long terms of imprisonment find their 
 wives is marvellous.) The woman gave him what money 
 she had, and he went out at once and got drunk. In the 
 evening he came back, quarrelled with his neighbour, and 
 stabbed a woman in a fight. He was taken to the police- 
 station, tried, and sentenced to twelve months' imprison- 
 ment. 
 
 F. Barker. One dreadful room,. three children; father 
 and mother both criminals. Have been getting three and 
 six months at intervals for years. Sometimes both in gaol 
 together. Their neighbours take the children and mind 
 them till parents come out. 
 
 W. Moggs, Easpberry Court — a sweet name for a hideous 
 place — one room, four children. Rent, 4s. Father profes- 
 sional thief. Constantly in and out of prison. 
 
 These cases are fair samples of the class of people we call 
 ' the abject poor,' people who will not go to the workhouse 
 under any circumstances, and who are at present herding 
 together in the rookeries we are all agreed must be de- 
 molished and replaced by something better. Add to them 
 the people carrying on objectionable trades in one or two 
 rooms — and who must carry them on to live wherever they 
 go — and the reformers will have a fair idea of the tenants 
 for whom houses must be provided somewhere, if their pre- 
 sent dwellings are to be pulled down. At the first glance it 
 seems almost impossible to cater for them. Fancy turning 
 these people into nice clean rooms and expecting five per 
 cent, for your money ! Besides, putting their habits on one 
 side, they are never sure of regular work. They may pay 
 the rent one week and be penniless the next. Then five per 
 cent, philanthropy must turn them out, having given them a 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 123 
 
 glimpse of Paradise which will make the return to Hades a 
 terrible trial to those who have had their better instincts 
 aroused. 
 
 Whichever way we look at the subject, it is fraught with 
 difficulties, and if we are challenged to find a remedy, we 
 have to go into a question which thousands of excellent 
 people refuse altogether to discuss. The deserving poor 
 could all be better housed now without a single brick being 
 laid or a single Act of Parliament passed, if they had fewer 
 children. Even in the slums the rents are lower and the 
 rooms better for couples who have only two children. In 
 dozens of instances where I have asked the denizens of these 
 hovels why they pay four and five shillings for such vile 
 accommodation, the answer is, 'They won't' take us in a 
 decent place because of the children.' 
 
 I know a case now of a man who took a house for himself 
 and family, and found he had two rooms to spare. The 
 house was clean and healthy, and he had dozens of applica- 
 tions from would-be lodgers. But, though he was poor — 
 and the extra rent would have been a godsend to him — he 
 remained unlet for four months because all the applicants 
 had three or four children. His case is the case of hun- 
 dreds of people who have decent rooms to let for the 
 labouring poor. 
 
 The large families these people invariably have not only 
 keep them in grinding poverty all their lives, but the over- 
 population floods the labour market and keeps the scale of 
 wages down to starvation point. While supply so enor- 
 mously exceeds demand, how can any market be in a 
 healthy condition ? 
 
 Men and women, and boys and girls, all eager for some- 
 thing to do, are to be had by thousands, and labour is at a 
 discount. If the supply diminished, and hands were more 
 in proportion to the work to be done, labour would be at a 
 premium. 
 
 We have reached a point when it is absolutely mischievous 
 
124 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 to ignore this side of the question. It is not only labour that 
 is affected by the rapid increase in the population ; half of 
 the vice and half the crime we deplore in these districts is 
 traceable to the same cause. Did I wish to imitate the 
 French writer and plunge the reader to his eyes in horror, I 
 might tell how the lack of employment brings mere children 
 in these districts into the streets — how girls of eleven and 
 twelve are forced into sin by their wretched parents as the 
 last desperate means of that self-preservation which we are 
 told is the first law of nature. And as the girls in evil times 
 sin at first for bread to eat, so the boys begin to thieve ; and 
 we are brought face to face with the fact that we have in our 
 midst vast human warrens, which are simply places where 
 thieves and wantons are bred, and poverty and crime increase 
 and multiply together. 
 
 I have no desire to argue a vexed question or engage in a 
 controversy on a subject which requires the most delicate 
 handling, but no one who has actual experience of outcast 
 London can keep this one great cause of the teeming misery 
 and vice entirely out of sight. What the remedy for it may 
 be it is no part of my purpose to discuss, but here again I 
 believe that the great hope is in the new race that is coming 
 to replace the old. The next generation will be more cul- 
 tured, more intellectual, and more refined ; mental faculties 
 will be exercised which have been dormant in the poor of 
 to-day, and as we increase in civilization so shall we decrease 
 in numbers. Education will make even the lowest of our 
 citizens something better than they are at present — mere 
 animal reproducers of their species. 
 
 In the meantime, while we are waiting for that good day 
 to dawn, we can be helping it on. If Ave begin our task by 
 catering at once for the most hopeful class we can find, we 
 shall make a distinct step in advance. Weed out the slums 
 by degrees — encourage the most decent among the workers 
 first, and get down to the lower strata step by step. Leave 
 the poor wretches who are impossible in any but rookeries a 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 125 
 
 rookery or two to finish their careers in. Encourage every- 
 thing that will keep their rents down, and encourage every- 
 thing that will give labour a better return. If the process 
 of elimination is gradual, we shall in time improve the con- 
 dition of all who are not beyond help. As for the rest, they 
 will solve the riddle in time for themselves by dying off, and 
 leaving the ground free for the well-paid, well-educated, 
 healthy labourer, with two little children and a contented 
 mind, who is the dream of the modern social reformer. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 A public meeting was held at 1 the Farm House,' Harrow 
 Street, in the Mint, some time since, to take into con- 
 sideration the grievances of the poor people whose homes 
 were about to be demolished to make way for a new street, 
 a railway, and some dwellings for the accommodation of 
 a superior class of tenants. 
 
 It is necessary for a thorough understanding of the ques- 
 tion which is agitating the entire community that every 
 phase of it should be studied. 
 
 In and about the Mint, which is a notorious 1 slum,' in 
 addition to a very large contingent of the criminal classes, 
 there resides a colony of industrious folks, whose livelihood 
 must be earned in the great thoroughfares. Hawkers of 
 fish and fruit and vegetables, penny-toy vendors, watercress 
 and flower girls, cheapjacks, street stall-keepers of all sorts 
 and conditions, and men and women and children who work 
 at certain industries carried on in the neighbourhood — 
 these are among the deserving class of the poor, earning 
 precarious incomes, who are about to be driven out by a 
 Metropolitan improvement and forced to seek shelter in one 
 or other of the already densely-packed districts. 
 
 The first effect on the dishoused people themselves will be 
 disastrous. They will not only be compelled to give up their 
 work and their clientele in the neighbourhood, but they will 
 lose a privilege which is absolute salvation to many of them. 
 The injury is greatest to the most industrious, because they 
 have ' established a character ' among the little tradespeople 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 127 
 
 of the district, and in the winter they obtain the necessaries 
 of life on credit. In the winter, times are bad for many of 
 the ordinary industries of the poor, and, but for the fact 
 that local shopkeepers will trust established tenants of decent 
 character, hundreds of them would be brought face to face 
 with absolute starvation. 
 
 The * characters ' worked up in one district are useless 
 in. another, and thus it will be seen how severe a blow to 
 the poor dwellers in a neighbourhood its destruction 
 must be. 
 
 Moreover, in addition to being injured themselves, the 
 displaced inhabitants will injure the neighbourhoods to 
 which they migrate. A sudden rush will be made, say, on 
 the rookeries of Bethnal Green or Whitechapel — places 
 already overcrowded. What will be the result ? Where 
 we have one family living in a single room now, we shall 
 presently find two families packed, and the rush for accom- 
 modation will send the rents of these places up another ten 
 or fifteen per cent. 
 
 Some of the dislodged people, men and women who are 
 never half-a-crown ahead of the world, must, as they get no 
 compensation for the loss they will be put to by eviction, 
 drift into the workhouse. 
 
 Now, the workhouse is utter ruin to the class who look 
 for their work daily. A man goes into the casual ward; 
 before he leaves it in the morning, he must do a certain 
 amount of work. It is quite right that he should, but what 
 is the result ? When he gets out it is too late to look for 
 work that day ; the chance is gone. So he must come in 
 again the next night, and the process is repeated. This is 
 the way habitual loafers are too often manufactured, and 
 one fruitful source of vagabondage is the constant disturb- 
 ance of the poor from the places where they had settled 
 down and started in business. 
 
 Another evil which must inevitably come of the poorest 
 and the most helpless being driven farther and farther back 
 
128 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 before the march of improvement is this : They must come 
 into closer and closer contact with the criminal and the 
 vicious classes. Men come into a low district because they 
 are poor and other neighbourhoods are beyond their means. 
 Many of them come honest and remain honest, but the 
 children degenerate rapidly under the evil influences of the 
 place. 
 
 Take the history of the Black Gang of the Mint as an 
 example. It is composed of the worst desperadoes, young 
 and old, of the metropolis. Its ranks are thinned over and 
 over again by the arrest and conviction of the members, but 
 their places are filled almost directly by the sons of the 
 labourers and hard-working folks of the district. This is a 
 painful fact which is perpetually being forced on the atten- 
 tion of those who do philanthropic work in the slums. The 
 criminal classes are daily recruited from the children of the 
 labouring classes, and this is mainly due to their enforced 
 herding together in the rookeries. But where else are the 
 dislodged poor with large families to go ? 
 
 Those who have passed their lives among these people, 
 and have watched area after area of labourers' dwellings 
 disappear, know that each fresh clearance has a de- 
 teriorating effect on the character of the remaining dis- 
 tricts. Unless some scheme be devised which will check 
 the wholesale destruction of slum neighbourhoods and the 
 hasty displacement of those who cannot be accommodated 
 elsewhere, the ultimate result must be pestilence or revolu- 
 tion. We may frankly recognise the necessity of con- 
 demning buildings unfit for habitation without denying the 
 hardships of the evicted tenants. All reforms injure one 
 class at first in order to benefit another. But while public 
 attention is so fully aroused to the question of ' Housing the 
 Poor,' we may as well learn the lesson of the past in order 
 to avoid a recurrence of the evil. How is it a puzzled 
 public is asking every day that, with medical officers of 
 health, sanitary inspectors, inspectors of nuisances, and 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 129 
 
 what not, all armed with full powers, so many districts of 
 labouring-class accommodation have been allowed to drift 
 into a state of dilapidation and filth which renders it 
 imperatively necessary to raze them to the ground ? The 
 machinery to prevent such a state of things was ample. 
 We have a right to know why it has broken down. 
 
 I will endeavour to explain as far as I can why we have 
 at present a ' Horrible London,' and also to suggest in what 
 way it may be possible to avoid having another. The clear- 
 ance of vast spaces has sent accommodation in tenement 
 houses up to a premium, and landlords have been able to let 
 their rooms regardless of their condition. 
 
 The officers whose duty it is to report on sanitary neglect 
 are appointed by the vestry, and hold their appointments at 
 the goodwill and pleasure of the vestryman. 
 
 Much of the worst property in London is held either by 
 vestrymen or by persons who have friends in the vestry. 
 The first thing, as a rule, which a man does who acquires 
 low-class and doubtful property is to try and be elected a 
 vestryman. What chance under such circumstances has a 
 vestry-appointed officer of doing his duty in a thorough and 
 efficient manner ? His reports, if he make them, are too 
 often burked. Messrs. Jones and Smith and Brown are the 
 gentlemen upon whose votes will depend that increase of 
 salary he is going to ask for next Christmas. And Messrs. 
 Jones and Smith and Brown are the gentlemen who will be 
 put to considerable pecuniary loss if he insists upon the 
 unsanitary condition of certain large blocks of property in 
 the district. 
 
 I do not for one moment pretend that this is the case in 
 the Mint — there some of the vestrymen are among the most 
 earnest agitators for a new order of things. 
 
 But the evil exists in some of the worst districts, and to 
 an extent of which the public little dreams. If some of the 
 flagrant pieces of jobbery in this class of property, which 
 have been the result of vestry government, could be brought 
 
 9 
 
130 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 to light, the public would cease to wonder how such a condi- 
 tion of things could have come to pass. 
 
 Let anyone who wishes to inform himself thoroughly on 
 the subject walk through any of the slums, and contrast the 
 condition of the registered lodging-houses with the condition 
 of the surrounding dwellings. The lodging-houses are almost 
 everywhere in better repair. The floors are scrubbed con- 
 tinually, the walls are fairly clean, and there is proper sani- 
 tary accommodation. But these lodging-houses are under 
 the control of the police — an officer appointed by Scotland 
 Yard inspects them, and sees that every regulation is com- 
 plied with. If the proprietor fails in his duty he loses his 
 license. 
 
 A portion of this very Farm House in the Mint is a 
 common lodging-house, and it is a place the most refined 
 lady might enter and inspect without the slightest repug- 
 nance. 
 
 Within a stone's-throw of it are whole streets of houses 
 which are sinks of all that is abominable. 
 
 If a periodical inspection of certain lodging-houses can 
 produce such an excellent result, it must strike an observer 
 at the first blush that a periodical inspection of houses 
 let out to families would have a similarly beneficial 
 effect. 
 
 I may say that the idea of licensing houses let out in 
 rooms to the class of people whose condition we have been 
 discussing, and placing them under the control of a police- 
 appointed official, is a favourite one with many of the local 
 agitators for reform. 
 
 For the accommodation of the doubtful class, buildings 
 might be erected constructed almost entirely of brick and 
 stone and iron ; wood should be avoided wherever possible, 
 as it harbours filth, and is easily damaged or removed to 
 light the fire with. The rooms should be square, and with- 
 out corner or crevice, and should have floors made of 
 material which could be cleansed thoroughly with a mop 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 and a bucket of water. No human power could ever cleanse 
 the wooden floors of the present dens. The water-supply in 
 such houses would of course be an efficient one. At present 
 the bad water-supply is a source of the greatest evils. One 
 butt in a backyard frequently has to supply the inmates of 
 half a dozen houses, and this butt is, in nine cases out of 
 ten, open at the top, so that it easily becomes impregnated 
 with objectionable matter. In one instance a butt, when 
 cleared out, was found to contain the dead body of a cat, 
 and a playful youth of the neighbourhood confessed to 
 having tossed it in six weeks previously. This is the water 
 the inhabitants not only do such washing with as they occa- 
 sionally indulge in, but it is also the liquid with which they 
 make their tea. In its simple condition, water, I may state, 
 is not largely consumed by the adult population, but the 
 children frequently quench their thirst with it. Here at 
 least is one evil which may be dealt with to the advantage 
 of the very poorest denizen of the slums. 
 
 Another glaring iniquity in the present system is the 
 insufficient accommodation of a most necessary kind, and 
 this is an evil to which the most horrible phase of the 
 ' domestic interior ' of the slums is largely due. The only 
 retiring-room in one place available for the 150 people who 
 inhabit ten small houses is situated right away down another 
 court, and in some instances the only accommodation of this 
 kind is in the cellar of the building, and this cellar is 
 inhabited by a family. 
 
 Such a monstrous state of things as this will, of course, 
 never be permitted in any new property, however low class 
 it may be ; and any improvement in such matters as this — 
 the water supply, and the adaptability of the rooms to the 
 cleaning process — will tell advantageously on the health and 
 cleanliness and decency of the inhabitants. 
 
 But while these improvements are being made, the old 
 houses which are past repair must go, and many more are 
 to be sacrificed to railway schemes and to new streets. 
 
 9—2 
 
132 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 Such is the condition of affairs in the Mint, a district which 
 teems with the poor earning precarious livelihoods, and we 
 may look forward with interest to the views of the tenants 
 themselves, who will be invited to speak at a proposed 
 meeting. It is, I believe, to be the first of a series about to 
 be held, at which the whole question will be discussed. The 
 names of Mr. Berry, a gentleman who was born in the Mint, 
 and carries on business there still ; Mr. Hawkins, a member 
 of the School Board, who knows all the circumstances of the 
 inhabitants ; Mr. Hunter, a local temperance worker ; Mr. 
 Andrew Dunn, and Mr. Arthur Cohen, M.P., are guarantees 
 that the discussion will be guided into practical channels, 
 and those who have said so much about the poor will be able 
 to hear what the poor have to say about themselves. 
 
 If anyone interested in the question should make his way 
 to these meetings and wish to see some of the property that 
 is coming down, let him take Gunn Street and Martin Street 
 en route. Through the open doors he will catch a glimpse 
 of some curious interiors. He will see, if he goes at the 
 right time, unsold fish, grapes, vegetables, and what not, 
 being carried into strange backyards and queer corners, and 
 he will be struck with the extraordinary number of fowls, 
 geese, and ducks which are roaming about in the slush and 
 the garbage, fattening themselves for the Christmas market 
 of the big thoroughfares, where they will doubtless be 
 offered by their gentle- voiced proprietors as ' prime country 
 fed.' 
 
 As, however, the accommodation is exceedingly limited, 
 and the ' natives ' are likely to attend in large numbers, the 
 curious outsider had better, for many reasons, wait until the 
 committee carry out their announced intention of calling a 
 public meeting in a larger hall. 
 
 We have passed through the period in which it was 
 necessary to arouse general attention, and no one who reads 
 the public journals can be ignorant of the main facts of the 
 case. The two great questions to which reformers have 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 133 
 
 now to find a practical answer are these : What scheme 
 will release this class of property from vestry control and 
 compel a more efficient carrying out of the ample powers 
 the authorities now possess ? and in what way can we save 
 the inhabitants of the scheduled areas from the loss, the 
 misery, and the further degradation which have been the 
 result of wholesale evictions hitherto ? 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 It has been asserted by several writers who have joined in 
 the present controversy concerning the Housing of the Poor 
 that drink and unthrift are the main causes of the existing 
 distress, and some go so far as to say that the masses live 
 to drink, and that consequently no legislation can improve 
 their condition. 
 
 This is a pessimist view of the question which is by no 
 means warranted by the facts. To deny that the poor in 
 the rookeries drink and are unthrifty would be foolish. But 
 I venture to assert, with a knowledge of the life-histories of 
 hundreds of these ' outcasts,' that the drinking habits of a 
 large percentage are due to the circumstances under which 
 they are at present forced to live. Temptation surely enters 
 as largely into drunkenness as into any other vice, and 
 in the foul and fetid courts and alleys of London the tempta- 
 tion to every kind of vice is never absent. The complete 
 lack of home-comforts, the necessity of dulling every finer 
 sense in order to endure the surrounding horrors, the 
 absence of anything to enter into competition with the 
 light and glitter of the gin-palace, and the cheapness of 
 drink in comparison with food — all these contribute to 
 make the poor easy victims of intemperance. Thousands of 
 people do undoubtedly drink for drinking's sake, but that is 
 a phase of intemperance which is by no means confined to 
 one class. Among the poor the constant war with fate, the 
 harassing conditions of daily life, and the apparent hope- 
 lessness of trying to improve their conditions, do un- 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 135 
 
 doubtedly tend to make them ' drown their sorrows ' and 
 rush for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the 
 publican dispenses at so much a glass. This is no general 
 assertion ; it is a conclusion arrived at with a knowledge 
 of the circumstances which first led many of the most 
 notorious drunkards of a slum to contract their evil 
 habits. 
 
 Ask any of the temperance workers in the viler districts, 
 and they will tell you how they have watched hundreds 
 of decent folk come into a bad neighbourhood and gradually 
 sink under the degrading influences of their surroundings. 
 There are few men who have worked to keep their brethren 
 from the clutches of the drink-fiend who would not gladly 
 hail the advent of air and light and cleanliness, and the 
 enforcement of sanitary laws, as the best weapons with 
 which to do doughty deeds in their combats with intemper- 
 ance among the poor. 
 
 Having said so much, I am prepared to admit that 
 drink is a contributing cause to the present condition of 
 the poor. It is even, in a certain degree, a cause of over- 
 crowding. 
 
 The Bishop of Bedford, in a recent speech, expressed a 
 desire to have the drink statistics of a slum. I cannot give 
 figures, but I can give facts. The Bishop expressed a belief 
 that the revelation would astonish the public. I am quite 
 sure that it will. 
 
 More than one-fourth of the daily earnings of the denizens 
 of the slums goes over the bars of the public-houses and 
 gin-palaces. To study the drink phase of this burning ques- 
 tion, let us take the districts from which I have drawn the 
 facts and figures I have previously submitted. 
 
 On a Saturday night, in the great thoroughfare adjacent, 
 there are three corner public-houses which take as much 
 money as the whole of the other shops on both sides of the 
 way put together. Butchers, bakers, greengrocers, clothiers, 
 furniture dealers, all the caterers for the wants of the popu- 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 lace, are open till a late hour ; there are hundreds of thern 
 trading round and about, but the whole lot do not take as 
 much money as three publicans — that is a fact ghastly- 
 enough in all conscience. Enter the public-houses, and you 
 will see them crammed. Here are artisans and labourers 
 drinking away the wages that ought to clothe their little 
 ones. Here are the women squandering the money that 
 would purchase food, for the lack of which their children 
 are dying. One group rivets the eye of an observer at once. 
 It consists of an old gray-haired dame, a woman of forty, 
 and a girl of about nineteen with a baby in her arms. All 
 these are in a state which is best described as ' maudlin ' — 
 they have finished one lot of gin, and the youngest woman is 
 ordering another round. It is a great-grandmother, grand- 
 mother, and a mother and her baby — four generations 
 together — and they are all dirty and dishevelled and drunk 
 except the baby, and even that poor little mite may have its 
 first taste of alcohol presently. It is no uncommon sight in 
 these places to see a mother wet a baby's lips with gin-and- 
 water. The process is called ' giving the young 'un a taste,' 
 and the baby's father will look on sometimes and enjoy the 
 joke immensely. 
 
 But the time to see the result of a Saturday night's heavy 
 drinking in a low neighbourhood is after the houses are 
 closed. Then you meet dozens of poor wretches reeling 
 home to their miserable dens ; some of them roll across the 
 roadway and fall, cutting themselves till the blood flows. 
 Every penny in some instances has gone in drink. 
 
 One dilapidated, ragged wretch I met last Saturday night 
 was gnawing a baked potato. By his side stood a thinly- 
 clad woman bearing a baby in her arms, and in hideous 
 language she reproached him for his selfishness. She had 
 fetched him out of a public-house with his last halfpenny in 
 his pocket. With that halfpenny he had bought the potato, 
 which he refused to share with her. At every corner the 
 police are ordering or coaxing men and women to ' move on/ 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 137 
 
 Between twelve and one it is a long procession of drunken 
 men and women, and the most drunken seem to be those 
 whose outward appearance betokens the most abject 
 poverty. 
 
 Turn out of the main thoroughfare and into the dimly- 
 lighted back streets, and you come upon scene after scene to 
 the grim, grotesque horror of which only the pencil of a 
 Dore could do justice. Women, with hideous, distorted 
 faces, are rolling from side to side, shrieking aloud snatches 
 of popular songs, plentifully interlarded with the vilest 
 expressions. Men as drunk as themselves meet them; 
 there is a short interchange of ribald jests and foul oaths, 
 then a quarrel and a shower of blows. Down from one dark 
 court rings a cry of murder, and a woman, her face hideously 
 gashed, makes across the narrow road, pursued by a howling 
 madman. It is only a drunken husband having a row with 
 his wife. 
 
 Far into the small hours such cries will ring here, now 
 that of an injured wife, now that of a drunken fool trapped 
 into a den of infamy to be robbed and hurled into the street 
 by the professional bully who resides on the premises. As 
 you pass the open doors of some of the houses, you may 
 hear a heavy thud and a groan, and then stillness. It 
 is only a drunken man who, staggering up the staircase to 
 his attic, has missed his footing and fallen heavily. 
 
 Spend any Saturday night you like in a slum, and then 
 say if one-tenth of the habitual horrors of the ' drunken 
 night ' have been catalogued here. And all these people who 
 have spent so much in drink are undoubtedly among the 
 class included in the description ' the abject poor.' 
 
 It is not fair to prove by facts and statistics the. evil of 
 over-population and the evil of low wages, and to shrink 
 from revealing the evil of drink. That has to be removed 
 as well as the others, and must be taken into account. 
 
 I have given here merely the experience of one Saturday 
 night in the districts I have taken for a test in previous 
 
133 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 articles. It is in the same district I will find the facts to 
 prove that the drink curse contributes to overcrowding as 
 well as to poverty. 
 
 Hundreds of the people crowding into a slum have no 
 business there at all. They should be in better neighbour- 
 hoods, inhabiting superior houses ; but they are people who 
 have fallen on evil times, and become gradually impoverished. 
 People on a downward track filter through the slums en 
 route for the workhouse. 
 
 Come to a common lodging-house, and see what class of 
 people fill the beds at fourpence a night. Poor labourers? 
 Yes. Loafers and criminals? Yes. But hundreds of 
 men who have once been in first-class positions, and who 
 have had every chance of doing well, are to be found there 
 also. 
 
 For my purpose I will merely take the cases which have 
 drifted to the slum lodging-house through drink. 
 
 The following have all passed recently through one 
 common lodging-house in one of the most notorious slums 
 of London : 
 
 A paymaster of the Eoyal Navy. 
 
 Two men who had been college chums at Cambridge, and 
 met accidentally here one night, both in the last stage of 
 poverty. One had kept a pack of hounds, and succeeded to 
 a large fortune. 
 
 A physician's son, himself a doctor, when lodging here 
 sold fusees in the Strand. 
 
 A clergyman who had taken high honours. Last seen in 
 the Borough, drunk, followed by jeering boys. 
 
 A commercial traveller and superintendent of a Sunday- 
 school. 
 
 A member of the Stock Exchange — found to be suffering 
 from delirium tremens — removed to workhouse. 
 
 The brother of a clergyman and scholar of European 
 repute died eventually in this slum. Friends had exhausted 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 139 
 
 every effort to reclaim him. Left wife and three beautiful 
 children living in a miserable den in the neighbourhood. 
 Wife drinking herself to death. Children rescued by friends 
 and provided for. 
 
 Brother of a vicar of large London parish — died in the 
 slum. 
 
 These are all cases which have passed through one 
 common lodging-house. What would the others show, had 
 we the same opportunity of knowing their customers? 
 These people have all been forced back on a rookery 
 through drink — sober, they need : never have sunk so low as 
 that. Now come from the lodging-house into the hovels — 
 the places where men, women, and children herd together 
 like animals. 
 
 To one fearful court we trace a master in a celebrated 
 college, a Fellow of the Royal Society. To another a lieu- 
 tenant in the army, who ekes out a miserable drunken 
 existence as a begging-letter impostor. Among the tenants 
 of houses that are in the last stage of dilapidation and dirt, 
 we find the sons of officers in the army and navy, of con- 
 tractors and wealthy tradesmen. Some of them are water- 
 side labourers, and one is the potman of a low beer-shop. 
 Perhaps the most terrible case that has drifted to this slum 
 is the wife of a West-End physician, who became one of 
 the lowest outcasts of the neighbourhood, and died in the 
 workhouse. 
 
 I could multiply instances like these, but there is no 
 necessity. They will suffice to show that drunkenness is 
 one of the causes of overcrowding in poor districts. 
 
 But drinking goes on among the natives as well as among 
 the immigrants. It is only when one probes this wound 
 that one finds how deep it is. Much as I have seen of the 
 drink evil, it was not until I came to study one special dis- 
 trict, with a view of ascertaining how far the charge of 
 drunkenness could be maintained against the poor as a body, 
 
140 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 that I had any idea of the terrible extent to which this cause 
 of poverty prevails. 
 
 In the street I saw evidence enough. From a common 
 lodging-house and from the tenement houses I have quoted 
 the cases given above. Come to the school and see how the 
 drink affects the future of the children of whom we have 
 such hopes. Let them tell their own stories : 
 
 M. L. Father drunk ; struck mother and hurt her skull. 
 Mother went raving mad, and has been in a lunatic asylum 
 ever since. Father slipped off a barge when he was drunk 
 and was drowned. Poor old grandmother has to keep the 
 children. 
 
 E. S. Father gets drunk and beats mother. Is in prison 
 now for assaulting her. Children dread his coming back, he 
 is so cruel to them when he's drunk. 
 
 S. H. Has a fearful black eye. Mother and father both 
 drink, and hurl things at each other. Missiles often bruise 
 and injure the children. 
 
 C. S. Mother drinks ' awful.' Dropped baby on pave- 
 ment ; baby so injured it died. This is the second baby she 
 has killed accidentally. 
 
 M. A. H. Came to school with arm broken. ' Father 
 didn't mean no harm, but he was tight.' 
 
 S. S. Bright, lively girl of seven. Mother drinks. 
 Shoulders and neck black with bruises. There is a curious 
 domestic arrangement in this case which is worth recording. 
 S.'s mother lived with a man, and had several children. 
 The man deserted her. Mrs. S.'s sister was married to a 
 man named D., and had also several children. One day 
 Mrs. D. gets eighteen months for assaulting the police. 
 Then D. takes compassion on his wife's sister, and has her 
 to live with him, and the children of both families herd 
 together. How the family will rearrange itself when the 
 legitimate Mrs. D. comes out remains to be seen. 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 These stories, told by the lips of little children, are terrible 
 enough ; but the authorities of the district and those whose 
 business takes them constantly into the wretched homes can 
 tell you worse. 
 
 A friend of mine, who is never tired of trying to urge the 
 people of this district to temperance, not long since found a 
 man sitting up naked on a heap of rags, shivering with the 
 death throes on him, and crying for water for his parched 
 throat. His wife, in a maudlin state of intoxication, was 
 staring helplessly at her dying husband. A coat was given 
 to wrap round the poor fellow. At night, when my friend 
 returned, he found the man cold and dead and naked, and 
 the woman in a state of mad intoxication. She had torn the 
 coat from the body of the dying man and pawned it for 
 drink. In these districts men and women who are starving 
 will get grants of bread, and some of them ask for the bread 
 to be wrapped in clean paper. Do you know why ? That 
 they may sell the loaf to someone for a copper or two, and 
 get drunk with the money. Men will come and buy a pair 
 of boots in the morning out of their earnings, and pay seven 
 shillings for them. At night they will return to the same 
 shop and offer to sell them back for four shillings. They 
 have started drinking, and want the money to finish the 
 carouse with. 
 
 Such are a few of the facts connected with the drink 
 phase of one London slum. They might easily be multiplied 
 and intensified did we pass from the slum to the workhouse, 
 and then to the County Lunatic Asylum ; but for my present 
 purpose I have given the reader sufficient evidence already. 
 I have endeavoured to prove that drink is one cause of the 
 existing misery and overcrowding. But is it a cause which 
 is more beyond remedy than are any of the others ? All 
 honour to the brave temperance workers who have already 
 done so much to diminish the evil. In this district such 
 men are labouring night and day. No one now disputes the 
 good which temperate temperance can accomplish. It will 
 
142 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 strengthen the hands of those who are trying to wean the 
 thriftless poor from drink, if we give the people better homes 
 and enforce sanitary laws. The very extent of the evil 
 shows the necessity for immediate action. Signing the 
 pledge is a very good thing for drunkards to do, but in this 
 very neighbourhood a woman signed it twenty-three times 
 and died drunk. Again, all alcohol may be poison in some 
 good people's estimation, but there are degrees of poison. 
 It is the vile nature of the stuff now allowed to be sold to 
 the poor which increases the effect of drink upon them and 
 makes their reclamation more difficult. And, having seen 
 all I have seen, and heard all I have heard, I return to my 
 original statement, that much of the intemperance of these 
 people is due to their wretched surroundings. Eemedy that, 
 and you give them a chance to be sober. You pave the 
 way for the brave soldiers of a good cause to fight under 
 more favourable circumstances. The temperance advocates 
 have accomplished much — they will accomplish more ; but 
 if they wish to check the evil in its hotbed, they must be 
 among the strongest advocates of the proper Housing of the 
 Poor. To say, because a certain proportion of the poor are 
 drunkards, it is useless to try and improve the social condi- 
 tion of the masses, is like refusing to send the lifeboat to a 
 sinking ship because half the crew are already known to be 
 drowned. 
 
 There are drunkards, there are criminals, there are poor 
 labourers in these districts who will never be 'improved.' 
 No one who knows them has the slightest hope for them. 
 But Sodom was to be spared for the sake of ten just persons ; 
 in the City of Dreadful Night, where our poor herd together, 
 there are hundreds of just persons. Tor their sakes the city 
 must be saved. 
 
CHAPTEE V. 
 
 That the great ' Guilt Gardens ' of London are overrun with 
 the rankest of weeds and the most poisonous of plants must 
 by this time be the conclusion of everyone who has studied 
 the mass of literature which the question of the Housing of 
 the Poor has called forth. So thickly do crime and vice and 
 drink and improvidence twine and intertwine and spread 
 themselves over the soil upon the fertilizing juices of which 
 they flourish and grow fouler day by day, that to the casual 
 observer nothing else is visible. But those who have studied 
 the horticulture of the slums know that deep down under 
 all the rank luxuriance of nettle and weed there may be 
 found many a fair flower of humanity. And the fairest of 
 all is the flower which is the offshoot of a weed. The 
 generosity of the very poor to each other is to a great extent 
 the outcome of their improvidence. 
 
 The poor help the poor. Nowhere are the bonds of human 
 sympathy so strong as down the courts and alleys whose 
 horrors have lately been exhibited in as fierce a light as ever 
 beat upon a throne. We have all painted in strong colours 
 the vices of the people in whom such general interest is now 
 taken — it is only right that their virtues should be brought 
 into equal prominence on the canvas. To weep with those 
 that weep and rejoice with those that do rejoice is the best 
 system of co-operation as yet invented for the benefit of 
 mankind, and it is the system of co-operation which has 
 long been in vogue among those whom we are pleased to 
 term 'outcasts.' Outcasts many of the abject poor are. 
 
U4 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 They are cast out by Dives to make room for his mansions, 
 his marts, and his manufactories, his railway schemes and 
 his splendid streets, and they are cast out by the stern 
 philosophers who hold that before the march of improve- 
 ment all who are not fit to survive must shrink back and 
 hide in holes and corners till, in obedience to the law of 
 nature, they pass away and cumber the earth no more. 
 But they are not outcasts to their brethren in misfortune, or 
 to the grade of poor immediately above them. 
 
 The poor are kinder to each other than the rich ; they are 
 bound by stronger ties of sympathy ; their hearts respond 
 more readily to generous impulses. They have greater 
 opportunities of helping each other, and there are no 
 barriers of pride between them. They live their lives 
 before each other's eyes, and their joys and sorrows are the 
 common property of the entire community. The rich man 
 wraps his mantle about him and breaks his heart, locked in 
 the darkest room of his house; the poor man bares his 
 breast to the light of day, and has not a neighbour but 
 knows the nature of his woe and has seen every link in the 
 chain of circumstances that brought his trouble about. 
 What is the fate of one to-day may be the fate of another 
 to-morrow. In their sympathy they are but making common 
 cause against a common enemy. The poor are trained by 
 constant association to ready appreciation of the 1 points ' of 
 the human drama always being enacted before their eyes, 
 just as certain audiences are trained to appreciate the points 
 of the theatrical drama. To expect the rich to understand 
 and sympathize with the poor as readily as they do with 
 each other would be as just as to turn the old ' Grecian ' 
 audience into the St. James's Theatre, and expect them to 
 ' take the points ' of the latest society drama with the same 
 readiness as the habitues. 
 
 It may seem harsh to say that much of the generosity of 
 the poor springs from their improvidence, but it is true. The 
 beggars, the lame fiddlers, the widowed warbler of street 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 H5 
 
 ballads, and the crippled orphan with a crutch and a concer- 
 tina, reap their richest harvests on Saturday night in poor 
 neighbourhoods. Friendly leads, whip-rounds, and benefits 
 are nowhere so common as among the labouring classes 
 whose earnings are precarious. While a millionaire 
 requires a reference from the C. O. S. before giving the 
 ' broken-down officer ' who calls on him half- a- sovereign, 
 the street-hawker or the dock labourer flings his sixpence 
 into the hat extended for a ' poor cove ' he has never seen in 
 his life without a second thought. A pitiful tale reaches the 
 heart of the poor in a moment — their tears are as easily won 
 as their laughter. It is the fashion to sneer at ' cheap senti- 
 ment,' and to talk about the pathos of ordinary melodrama 
 as \ food for the gods,' but the sneer ers forget that the mimic 
 misery comes home to the poor as it can never do to the 
 rich. To the gallery people the starvation in the garret, the 
 separation of husband and wife, the wail of the little chil- 
 dren for bread, the agony of the mother over the cradle of 
 her sick baby, the struggle with poverty, the heartlessness 
 of the cruel landlord who wants the rent, and the roughness 
 of- the officials who are called in to persecute virtue in dis- 
 tress, are all so many items in their own daily life. They 
 have been familiar with such things from their birth, and 
 they understand the true meaning of that which the stalls — 
 justly perhaps from their point of view — call ' bosh.' 
 
 Having shown, or endeavoured to show, why the poor 
 sympathize with and help each other, let me give a few 
 instances to show what practical forms their sympathies 
 invariably take. I shall not cull them haphazard here and 
 there, but all from the same neighbourhood which has 
 furnished the bulk of the facts on which these articles are 
 formed. My purpose is to give the reader the complete 
 story of a London slum and its inhabitants, that they may 
 consider the popular question of the day in all its bearings. 
 I have shown the vices of one of these districts ; it is a 
 pleasanter task to chronicle the virtues. 
 
 10 
 
146 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 The first thing which a visitor to the slums asks is, What 
 becomes of the children of the men and women who are sent 
 to prison, or who are removed to the hospitals ? The answer 
 is simple. The neighbours take them in and take care of 
 them. Orphans are by no means rare in the slums, but they 
 are almost always ' adopted.' 
 
 In the house of a Mrs. R. lived a family named Hinde. 
 Mrs. Hinde died of consumption, leaving four children and 
 a husband out of work. He set out to look for it, and 
 Mrs. R. took the four little ones into her room to sleep with 
 her own six. Out of her scanty earnings she fed them too, 
 and when she was asked why she had taxed her limited 
 resources to this extent, she answered, ' Poor young 'uns ! 
 how could I see 'em a-starvin' and their father out o' work, 
 and no mother !' The man is still out of work, and Mrs. R. 
 has thought it her duty to keep his children for over six 
 months. 
 
 Orphans are not only kept, but are passed on sometimes 
 from family to family. There is a little crippled lad I know 
 named Dennis Sullivan. Till lately he was kept by an old 
 watercress-seller, who had adopted him. A month or two 
 since the poor old soul fell into the fire, and was so severely 
 burned that she died. And when the boy was to be sent to 
 an institution, a brother of the old watercress woman, a poor 
 hawker, came forward and said, 1 He shan't be sent away. 
 I'll keep him for the sake o' the old woman as was so fond 
 of him.' 
 
 One of the most touching cases of this kind I ever met I 
 have alluded to elsewhere, but for the sake of my argument 
 I will repeat it here. A poor woman had taken charge of 
 three children whose father was away in the country. She 
 had children of her own as well. Sickness came upon her, 
 and a terrible disease almost disabled her. Yet she refused 
 to let the little ones go uncared for. Dying slowly of dropsy, 
 she was found one day propped up in a chair, with a wash- 
 tub in front of her, and with her poor weak hands making a 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 147 
 
 brave struggle to wash the little ones' clothes, that they 
 might look clean and tidy at the school. 
 
 A servant-girl lost her place, and in the slums gave birth 
 to an illegitimate child. She could not keep it ; she must go 
 to service. An old woman adopted the child, and brought it 
 up, giving it her own name. The mother married, and then 
 wanted the child. The old woman had fallen on evil days, 
 and consented to part with it. But the real mother ill- 
 treated the child, and it was unhappy. Off marched the old 
 lady, and fetched it back again. 1 1 ain't got much to spare, 
 God knows,' she said, ' but I ain't goin' to see the gal 
 unhappy, and I'll keep her somehow.' 
 
 A maker of wooden toys deserted his child, and left it 
 starving. A poor woman, with eight children of her own 
 and an income of 15s. a week, * felt her 'art bleed for the 
 poor little thing.' She took the child into her own room, 
 and her eight are now nine. 
 
 When these people have no money, and their friends are 
 in distress, they will often pledge their clothes rather than 
 see misery unrelieved. 
 
 The other day, at a police-court, a woman was fined 
 2s. 6d., and in default sent to the cells. Her 'pal ' went 
 out of court, took the shawl from her shoulders, collected a 
 few more of her garments, and, pawning the lot, returned 
 and liberated the prisoner. Pawning is frequently resorted 
 to by the women who attend each other in their confine- 
 ments. In these districts the female neighbours, be it 
 remembered, invariably take the place of the doctor, and 
 their kindness and gentleness to their suffering sisters is 
 marvellous. They will sit by the invalid day and night in a 
 foul den, destitute of every comfort, and perform all the 
 household duties as well. They will see to the children, get 
 the husband's tea, and if there is, as is too often the case, a 
 lack of all that the sufferer needs, they will go and pledge 
 all they have and buy it. 
 
 These people do not inquire into a person's creed or moral 
 
 10—2 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 character before they hold out the helping hand. When a 
 thief comes back to his district from prison, his ' pals ' find 
 him money and food for weeks, until he either gets a job or 
 takes to his former line of business again. A notoriously 
 bad character has just died here. He was ill for months, 
 and his ' pals ' kept him the whole time, and gave him a 
 grand funeral when he died. I have known men, out of 
 work and ill, kept for months and months by the subscrip- 
 tions of their poor neighbours. 
 
 A street-hawker was found last Sunday sharing his dinner 
 with a man, his wife, and his children who lived in the same 
 house with him, and who were penniless. The hawker's 
 takings on the previous Saturday had been 3s. 7d., and 
 depending on him were a wife, two children, and a donkey. 
 How improvident ! but — how kind ! 
 
 Into the common lodging-houses many a man comes at 
 night who has not the fourpence to pay for his bed. He 
 tells his story ; if he is not known as a professional cadger, 
 and his woes appear real, round goes the hat in a minute, 
 and the other lodgers pay for his night's rest. In these 
 places, too, the lodgers divide their food frequently, and a 
 man, seeing a neighbour without anything, will hand him 
 his teapot, and say, ' Here you are, mate ; here's a bull for 
 you.' A 1 bull ' is a teapot with the leaves left in for a second 
 brew. When Mrs. Brown or Mrs. Jones loses a baby and 
 cannot bury it, or when Mr. Smith is in trouble and more 
 money is wanted than one friend or two can conveniently 
 spare, a friendly lead is organized and a general subscription 
 made at a social gathering. Here is a card announcing one 
 of these meetings : 
 
 ' A Friendly Meeting will take place at Mr. Dash's, " The 
 Three Stars," on Saturday evening, Oct. 27th, 1883, for the 
 joint benefit of Mike Johnson and Fred Miller, who, through 
 unforeseen circumstances, have been placed in rather pecu- 
 liar difficulties, and solicit your kind assistance. They, 
 
HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 149 
 
 being good supporters of these Meetings, now hope their 
 Friends will rally round them on this occasion. Chairman, 
 Charley Mackney ; Vice, Jack Dobson. Supported by the 
 following Friends : Bros. Holland, G. Rush, Bros. Wenham, 
 D. Purcell, T. Remmington, Bros. Poole, W. Haynes, F. 
 McHugh, J. Beecham, Ted Dobson, Peter Mason, Jack 
 Howard, G. Wooder, Tom Eastopp, Alf. Barron, Jemmy 
 Welch, Jerry Casey, and a host of others. Commence at 
 eight o'clock.' 
 
 I do not know what the 4 unforeseen circumstances ' were, 
 or the 1 peculiar. difficulties.' Generally the wording is less 
 vague. The meeting is for 1 Mrs. Bousby, better known as 
 Loo, to bury her child or for 4 Bill Hinkham, known as 
 Dutchy, whose wife has died in her confinement, leaving 
 him with eight children ;' or something of the same kind. 
 Apropos of the latter misfortune, it is no uncommon thing 
 for the mothers of the neighbourhood to suckle the babies of 
 dead or ailing women. A foster-mother is found in a moment, 
 and a previous acquaintance with the family is quite un- 
 necessary. A woman will even lose a portion of her work 
 during the day for months to go and suckle a neighbour's 
 child. 
 
 There is no difficulty in giving facts to illustrate the kind- 
 ness of the poor to each other. Such stories as I have given 
 above abound in every alley and every street. This virtue, 
 of course, no more makes the poor wholly good than do 
 their intemperate and dirty habits make them wholly bad. 
 But this phase of the character of the abject poor should be 
 made known to those who, skimming only the surface of 
 what has lately been written, could never discover it for 
 themselves. The soul of goodness that lurks in things evil 
 is apt to be lost sight of too often when from pulpit and 
 platform the vices and errors of the masses are denounced. 
 That a better appreciation of the fact that the poor are 
 reckless in their generosity and full of sympathy for each 
 
So 
 
 HORRIBLE LONDON. 
 
 other will assist philanthropists and politicians to arrive at 
 a speedier solution of the present dwelling-house difficulty, 
 I do not pretend to say. But I do maintain that the poor 
 man's virtues should be as widely discussed as his vices. If 
 we know that beneath the rank vegetation of our guilt 
 gardens there grows many a fair white bud struggling for 
 the light and the air which would give it a better chance to 
 blossom, that at least is some encouragement to reformers 
 to go vigorously to work with rake and hoe in order to clear 
 the noxious weeds away. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.