London Labour and the London Poor: Selection (Classics) (78 page)

It is impossible to mistake the Asylum if you go there at dark, just as the lamp in the wire cage over the entrance-door is being lighted. This is the hour for opening; and ranged along the kerb is a kind of ragged
regiment, drawn up four deep, and stretching far up and down the narrow lane, until the crowd is like a hedge to the roadway. Nowhere in the world can a similar sight be witnessed.

It is a terrible thing, indeed, to look down upon that squalid crowd from one of the upper windows of the institution. There they stand shivering in the snow, with their thin, cobwebby garments hanging in tatters about them. Many are without shirts; with their bare skin showing through the rents and gaps of their clothes, like the hide of a dog with the mange. Some have their greasy coats and trousers tied round their wrists and ankles with string, to prevent the piercing wind from blowing up them. A few are without shoes; and these keep one foot only to the ground, while the bare flesh that has had to tramp through the snow is blue and livid-looking as half cooked meat. It is a sullenly silent crowd, without any of the riot and rude frolic which generally ensue upon any gathering in the London streets; for the only sounds heard are the squealing of the beggar infants, or the wrangling of the vagrant boys for the front ranks, together with a continued succession of hoarse coughs, that seem to answer each other like the bleating of a flock of sheep.

To each person is given half-a–pound of the best bread on coming in at night, and a like quantity on going out in the morning; and children, even if they be at the breast, have the same, which goes to swell the mother’s allowance. A clerk enters in a thick ledger the name, age, trade, and place of birth of the applicants, as well as where they slept the night before.

As the eye glances down the column of the register, indicating where each applicant has passed the previous night, it is startled to find how often the clerk has had to write down, ‘in the streets’; so that ‘ditto’, ‘ditto’, continually repeated under the same head, sounded as an ideal chorus of terrible want in the mind’s ear.

[pp. 438–9] Around the fierce stove, in the centre of the ward, there is generally gathered a group of the houseless wanderers, the crimson rays tinting the cluster of haggard faces with a bright lurid light that colours the skin as red as wine. One and all are stretching forth their hands, as if to let the delicious heat soak into their half-numbed limbs. They seem positively greedy of the warmth, drawing up their sleeves and trousers so that their naked legs and arms may present a larger surface to the fire.

Not a laugh nor sound is heard, but the men stand still, munching their bread, their teeth champing like horses in a manger. One poor wretch, at the time of my visit, had been allowed to sit on a form inside the railings
round the stove, for he had the ague; and there he crouched, with his legs near as a roasting-joint to the burning coals, as if he were trying to thaw his very marrow.

Then how fearful it is to hear the continued coughing of the wretched inmates! It seems to pass round the room from one to another, now sharp and hoarse as a bark, then deep and hollow as a lowing, or – with the old – feeble and trembling as a bleat.

In an hour after the opening the men have quitted the warm fire and crept one after another to their berths, where they lie rolled round in their leathers – the rows of tightly-bound figures, brown and stiff as mummies, suggesting the idea of some large catacomb.

The stillness is broken only by the snoring of the sounder sleepers and the coughing of the more restless.

It is a marvellously pathetic scene. Here is a herd of the most wretched and friendless people in the world, lying down close to the earth as sheep; here are some two centuries of outcasts, whose days are an unvarying round of suffering, enjoying the only moments when they are free from pain and care – life being to them but one long painful operation as it were, and sleep the chloroform which, for the time being, renders them insensible.

The sight sets the mind speculating on the beggars’ and the outcasts’ dreams. The ship’s company, starving at the North Pole, dreamt, every man of them, each night, of feasting; and are those who compose this miserable, frozen-out beggar crew, now regaling themselves, in their sleep, with visions of imaginary banquets? – are they smacking their mental lips over ideal beef and pudding? Is that poor wretch yonder, whose rheumatic limbs rack him each step he takes – is
he
tripping over green fields with an elastic and joyous bound, that in his waking moments he can never know again? Do that man’s restlessness and heavy moaning come from nightmare terrors of policemen and treadwheels? – and which among those runaway boys is fancying that he is back home again, with his mother and sisters weeping on his neck?

The next moment the thoughts shift, and the heart is overcome with a sense of the vast heap of social refuse – the mere human street-sweepings – the great living mixen – that is destined, as soon as the spring returns, to be strewn far and near over the land, and serve as manure to the future crime-crops of the country.

Then come the self-congratulations and the self-questionings! and as a man, sound in health and limb, walking through a hospital, thanks God that he has been spared the bodily ailments, the mere sight of which
sickens him, so in this refuge for the starving and the homeless, the first instinct of the well-to-do visitor is to breathe a thanksgiving (like the Pharisee in the parable) that ‘he is not as one of these’.

But the vain conceit has scarcely risen to the tongue before the better nature whispers in the mind’s ear, ‘By what special virtue of your own are you different from them? How comes it that you are well clothed and well fed, whilst so many go naked and hungry?’ And if you in your arrogance, ignoring all the accidents that have helped to build up your worldly prosperity, assert that you have been the ‘architect of your own fortune’, who, let us ask, gave you the genius or energy for the work?

Then get down from your moral stilts, and confess it honestly to yourself, that you are what you are by that inscrutable grace which decreed your birthplace to be a mansion or a cottage rather than a ‘padding-ken’, or which granted you brains and strength, instead of sending you into the world, like many of these, a cripple or an idiot.

It is hard for smug-faced respectability to acknowledge these dirt-caked, erring wretches as brothers, and yet, if from those to whom little is given little is expected, surely, after the atonement of their long suffering, they will make as good angels as the best of us.

THOSE THAT WILL NOT WORK

by Henry Mayhew

[pp.
1–11
] I enter upon this part of my subject with a deep sense of the misery, the vice, the ignorance, and the want that encompass us on every side – I enter upon it after much grave attention to the subject, observing closely, reflecting patiently, and generalizing cautiously upon the phenomena and causes of the vice and crime of this city – I enter upon it after a thoughtful study of the habits and character of the ‘outcast’ class generally – I enter upon it, moreover, not only as forming an integral and most important part of the task I have imposed upon myself, but from a wish to divest the public mind of certain ‘idols’ of the platform and conventicle – ‘idols’ peculiar to our own time, and unknown to the great Father of the inductive philosophy – and ‘idols’, too, that appear to me greatly to obstruct a proper understanding of the subject. Further, I am led to believe that I can contribute some new facts concerning the physics and economy of vice and crime generally, that will not only make the solution of the social problem more easy to us, but, setting more plainly before us some of its latent causes, make us look with more pity and less anger on those who want the fortitude to resist their influence; and induce us, or at least the more earnest among us, to apply ourselves steadfastly to the removal or alleviation of those social evils that appear to create so large a proportion of the vice and crime that we seek by punishment to prevent.

Such are the
ultimate
objects of my present labours: the result of them is given to the world with an earnest desire to better the condition of the wretched social outcasts of whom I have now to treat, and to contribute, if possible, my mite of good towards the common weal.

But though such be my ultimate object, let me here confess that my immediate aim is the elimination of the truth; without this, of course, all other principles must be sheer sentimentality – sentiments being, to my mind, opinions engendered by the feelings rather than the judgment. The attainment of the truth, then, will be my primary aim; but by the truth, I wish it to be understood, I mean something
more
than the bare facts.
Facts, according to my ideas, are merely the elements of truths, and not the truths themselves; of all matters there are none so utterly useless by themselves as your mere matters of fact. A fact, so long as it remains an isolated fact, is a dull, dead, uninformed thing; no object nor event by itself can possibly give us any knowledge, we must compare it with some other, even to distinguish it; and it is the distinctive quality thus developed that constitutes the essence of a thing – that is to say, the point by which we cognize and recognise it when again presented to us. A fact must be assimilated with, or discriminated from, some other fact or facts, in order to be raised to the dignity of a truth, and made to convey the least knowledge to the mind. To say, for instance, that in the year 1850 there were 26,813 criminal offenders in England and Wales, is merely to oppress the brain with the record of a fact that,
per se
, is so much mental lumber. This is the very mummery of statistics; of what rational good can such information by itself be to any person? who can tell whether the number of offenders in that year be large or small, unless they compare it with the number of some other year, or in some other country? but to do this will require another fact, and even then this second fact can give us but little real knowledge. It may teach us, perhaps, that the past year was more or less criminal than some other year, or that the people of this country, in that year, were more or less disposed to the infraction of the laws than some other people abroad; still, what will all this avail us? If the year which we select to contrast criminally with that of 1850 be not itself compared with other years, how are we to know whether the number of criminals appertaining to it be above or below the average? or, in other words, how can the one be made a measure of the other?

To give the least mental value to facts, therefore, we must generalize them, that is to say, we must contemplate them in connection with other facts, and so discover their agreements and differences, their antecedents, concomitants, and consequences. It is true we may frame erroneous and defective theories in so doing; we may believe things which are similar in appearance to be similar in their powers and properties also; we may distinguish between things having no real difference; we may mistake concomitant events for consequences; we may generalize with too few particulars, and hastily infer that to be common to all which is but the special attribute of a limited number; nevertheless, if theory may occasionally teach us wrongly, facts without theory or generalization cannot possibly teach us at all. What the process of digestion is to food, that of generalizing is to fact; for as it is by the assimilation of the substances we eat with the elements of our bodies that our limbs are enlarged and our
whole frames strengthened, so is it by associating perception with perception in our brains that our intellect becomes at once expanded and invigorated. Contrary to the vulgar notion, theory, that is to say, theory in its true Baconian sense, is not opposed to fact, but consists rather of a
large
collection of facts; it is not true of this or that thing alone, but of
all
things belonging to the same class – in a word, it consists not of
one
fact but an
infinity
. The theory of gravitation, for instance, expresses not only what occurs when a stone falls to the earth, but when every other body does the same thing; it expresses, moreover, what takes place in the revolution of the moon round our planet, and in the revolution of our planet and of all the other planets round our sun, and of all other suns round the centre of the universe; in fine, it is true not of one thing merely, but of every material object in the entire range of creation.

There are, of course, two methods of dealing philosophically with every subject – deductively and inductively. We may either proceed from principles to facts, or recede from facts to principles. The one explains, the other investigates; the former applies known general rules to the comprehension of particular phenomena, and the latter classifies the particular phenomena, so that we may ultimately come to comprehend their unknown general rules. The deductive method is the mode of
using
knowledge, and the inductive method the mode of
acquiring
it.

In a subject like the crime and vice of the metropolis, and the country in general, of which so little is known – of which there are so many facts, but so little comprehension – it is evident that we must seek by induction, that is to say, by a careful classification of the known phenomena, to render the matter more intelligible; in fine, we must, in order to arrive at a
comprehensive
knowledge of its antecedents, consequences, and concomitants, contemplate as large a number of facts as possible in as many different relations as the statistical records of the country will admit of our doing.

With this brief preamble I will proceed to treat generally of the class that will not work, and then particularly of that portion of them termed prostitutes. But, first, who are those that
will
work, and who those that
will not
work? This is the primary point to be evolved.

The essential quality of an animal is that it seeks its own living, whereas a vegetable has its living brought to it. An animal cannot stick its feet in the ground and suck up the inorganic elements of its body from the soil,
nor drink in the organic elements from the atmosphere. The leaves of plants are not only their lungs but their stomachs. As
they
breathe they acquire food and strength, but as animals breathe
they
gradually waste away. The carbon which is
secreted
by the process of respiration in the vegetable is excreted by the very same process in the animal. Hence a fresh supply of
carbonaceous
matter must be sought after and obtained at frequent intervals, in order to repair the continual waste of animal life.