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HOW THE POOR LIVE. 35 great city, which I have attempted feebly to describe in these papers—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 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. Here is a child at home and the same child in the hospital. Contrast the surroundings. Look on this picture and on that, and then say if there is not at least some ground for such a train of thought as the Hospital for Sick Children suggested to me! 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 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 the reader up, 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 bulging 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 tireless 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; " 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 realised the full meaning of this little domestic tragedy, and knew that it was only one of many daily 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 sixpence, 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-
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 | 00000035 |
Type | Books/Pamphlets |
Transcript | HOW THE POOR LIVE. 35 great city, which I have attempted feebly to describe in these papers—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 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. Here is a child at home and the same child in the hospital. Contrast the surroundings. Look on this picture and on that, and then say if there is not at least some ground for such a train of thought as the Hospital for Sick Children suggested to me! 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 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 the reader up, 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 bulging 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 tireless 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; " 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 realised the full meaning of this little domestic tragedy, and knew that it was only one of many daily 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 sixpence, 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- |