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HOW THE POOR LIVE. 20 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 pigstye in a fortnight. These people are irreclaimable, 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 outbalanced by the good, and it is that Act above all others which will eventually bring about the new order of things so long desired. 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. CHAPTER VI. HE difficulty of getting that element of pictu- resqueness into these Chapters which is so essential to success with a large class of English readers, becomes mpre and more apparent 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 the Pictorial World;—these are the things which confront 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 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 buttercup and daisy, the bright hues of the wild cottage garden,—it is in the midst of these the pigstyes 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 grey 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 when the sun, which shines with systematic impartiality on the righteous and 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 steamroller, 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 mistresses, 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 over clean and not over fat, the cats of the slums yet seem 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 " the fa.nily " 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 utilise.
Object Description
Title | How the poor live |
Creator | Sims, George Robert |
Publisher | Chatto |
Place of Publication | London |
Date | 1883 |
Language | eng |
Type | Books/Pamphlets |
Description
Title | 00000029 |
Type | Books/Pamphlets |
Transcript | HOW THE POOR LIVE. 20 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 pigstye in a fortnight. These people are irreclaimable, 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 outbalanced by the good, and it is that Act above all others which will eventually bring about the new order of things so long desired. 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. CHAPTER VI. HE difficulty of getting that element of pictu- resqueness into these Chapters which is so essential to success with a large class of English readers, becomes mpre and more apparent 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 the Pictorial World;—these are the things which confront 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 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 buttercup and daisy, the bright hues of the wild cottage garden,—it is in the midst of these the pigstyes 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 grey 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 when the sun, which shines with systematic impartiality on the righteous and 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 steamroller, 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 mistresses, 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 over clean and not over fat, the cats of the slums yet seem 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 " the fa.nily " 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 utilise. |