The seven curses of London
by James Greenwood · English · Gutenberg #45585 · 748,180 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The seven curses of London
Author: James Greenwood
Release date: May 5, 2014 [eBook #45585]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45585
Credits: Transcribed from the [1869] edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEVEN CURSES OF LONDON ***
Transcribed from the [1869] edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Yours truly James Greenwood (picture of Greenwood)]
THE
SEVEN CURSES OF LONDON.
* * * * *
BY JAMES GREENWOOD,
The “Amateur Casual.”
* * * * *
* * * * *
* * * * *
LONDON:
STANLEY RIVERS AND CO.
CONTENTS.
I. Neglected Children.
CHAPTER I.
STARTLING FACTS.
The Pauper Population.—Pauper Children.—Opinions page 1
concerning their proper Treatment.—A Hundred Thousand
Children loose in London Streets.—Neglected
Babies.—Juvenile “Market Prowlers”
CHAPTER II.
RESPECTING THE PARENTAGE OF SOME OF OUR GUTTER POPULATION.
Who are the Mothers?—The Infant Labour-Market.—Watch p. 13
London and Blackfriars Bridges.—The Melancholy Types.—The
Flashy, Flaunting “Infant.”—Keeping Company.—Marriage.—The
Upshot
CHAPTER III.
BABY-FARMING.
“Baby-Farmers” and Advertising “Child-Adopters.”—“F. X.” p. 29
of Stepney.—The Author’s Interview with Farmer Oxleek.—The
Case of Baby Frederick Wood
CHAPTER IV.
WORKING BOYS.
The London Errand-Boy.—His Drudgery and Privations.—His p. 58
Temptations.—The London Boy after Dark.—The Amusements
provided for him
CHAPTER V.
THE PROBLEM OF DELIVERANCE.
Curious Problem.—The best Method of Treatment.—The “Child p. 76
of the Gutter” not to be entirely abolished.—The genuine
Alley-bred Arab.—The Poor Lambs of the Ragged Flock.—The
Tree of Evil in our midst.—The Breeding Places of Disease
and Vice
II. Professional Thieves.
CHAPTER VI.
THEIR NUMBER AND DIFFICULTIES.
Twenty Thousand Thieves in London.—What it means.—The p. 85
Language of “Weeds.”—Cleverness of the Pilfering
Fraternity.—A Protest against a barbarous Suggestion.—The
Prisoner’s great Difficulty.—The Moment of Leaving
Prison.—Bad Friends.—What becomes of Good Resolutions and
the Chaplain’s Counsel?—The Criminal’s Scepticism of Human
Goodness.—Life in “Little Hell.”—The Cow-Cross Mission.
CHAPTER VII.
HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE BRITISH THIEF.
The Three Classes of Thieving Society.—Popular p. 108
Misapprehensions.—A True Picture of the London Thief.—A
Fancy Sketch of the “Under-ground Cellar.”—In Disguise at
a Thieves’ Raffle.—The Puzzle of “Black Maria.”—Mr.
Mullins’s Speech and his Song
CHAPTER VIII.
JUVENILE THIEVES.
The Beginning of the Downhill Journey.—Candidates for p. 124
Newgate Honours.—Black Spots of London.—Life from the
Young Robber’s Point of View.—The Seedling Recruits the
most difficult to reform.—A doleful Summing-up.—A Phase of
the Criminal Question left unnoticed.—Budding
Burglars.—Streams which keep at full flood the Black Sea
of Crime.—The Promoters of “Gallows Literature.”—Another
Shot at a Fortress of the
Devil.—“Poison-Literature.”—“Starlight Sall.”—“Panther
Bill”
CHAPTER IX.
THE THIEF NON-PROFESSIONAL.
The Registered and the Unregistered Thieves of the London p. 144
Hunting-ground.—The Certainty of the Crop of Vice.—Omnibus
Drivers and Conductors.—The “Watchers.”—The London General
Omnibus Company.—The Scandal of their System.—The
Shopkeeper Thief.—False Weights and Measures.—Adulteration
of Food and Drink.—Our Old Law, “I am as honest as I can
afford to be!”—Rudimentary Exercises in the Art of Pillage
CHAPTER X.
CRIMINAL SUPPRESSION AND PUNISHMENT.
Lord Romilly’s Suggestion concerning the Education of the p. 173
Children of Criminals.—Desperate Criminals.—The Alleys of
the Borough.—The worst Quarters not, as a rule, the most
noisy.—The Evil Example of “Gallows Heroes,” “Dick
Turpin,” “Blueskin,” &c.—The Talent for “Gammoning Lady
Green.”—A worthy Governor’s Opinion as to the best way of
“Breaking” a Bad Boy.—Affection for “Mother.”—The Dark
Cell and its Inmate.—An Affecting Interview
CHAPTER XI.
ADULT CRIMINALS AND THE NEW LAW FOR THEIR BETTER GOVERNMENT.
Recent Legislation.—Statistics.—Lord Kimberley’s “Habitual p. 183
Criminals” Bill.—The Present System of
License-Holders.—Colonel Henderson’s Report.—Social
Enemies of Suspected Men.—The Wrong-headed Policeman and
the Mischief he may cause.—Looking out for a Chance.—The
last Resource of desperate Honesty.—A Brotherly
Appeal.—“Ginger will settle her.”—Ruffians who should be
shut up
III. Professional Beggars.
CHAPTER XII.
THE BEGGAR OF OLDEN TIME.
“Only a Beggar.”—The Fraternity 333 Years ago.—A savage p. 211
Law.—Origin of the Poor-Laws.—Irish Distinction in the
Ranks of Beggary.—King Charles’s Proclamation.—Cumberland
Discipline
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WORK OF PUNISHMENT AND RECLAMATION.
The Effect of “The Society for the Suppression of p. 221
Mendicity.”—State Business earned out by Individual
Enterprise.—“The Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society.”—The
quiet Work of these Societies.—Their Mode of Work.—Curious
Statistics.—Singular Oscillations.—Diabolical Swindling
CHAPTER XIV.
BEGGING “DODGES.”
The Variety and Quality of the Imposture.—Superior p. 242
Accomplishments of the Modern Practitioner.—The Recipe for
Success.—The Power of “Cheek.”—“Chanting” and the “Shallow
Lay.”—Estimates of their Paying Value.—The Art of touching
Women’s Hearts.—The Half-resentful Trick.—The Loudon
“Cadger.”—The Height of the “Famine Season.”
CHAPTER XV.
GENTEEL ADVERTISING BEGGARS.
The Newspaper Plan and the delicate Process.—Forms of 259
Petition.—Novel Applications of Photography.—Personal
Attractions of the Distressed.—Help, or I perish!
IV. Fallen Women.
CHAPTER XVI.
THIS CURSE.
The Difficulty in handling it.—The Question of its p. 271
Recognition.—The Argyll Rooms.—Mr. Acton’s Visit
there.—The Women and their Patrons.—The Floating
Population of Windmill-street.—Cremorne Gardens in the
Season
CHAPTER XVII.
THE PLAIN FACTS AND FIGURES OF PROSTITUTION.
Statistics of Westminster, Brompton, and Pimlico.—Methods p. 281
of conducting the nefarious Business.—Aristocratic
Dens.—The High Tariff.—The Horrors of the Social Evil.—The
Broken Bridge behind the Sinner.—“Dress Lodgers.”—There’s
always a “Watcher.”—Soldiers and Sailors.—The “Wrens of
the Curragh”
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE QUESTION.
The Laws applying to Street-walkers.—The Keepers of the p. 304
Haymarket Night-houses.—Present Position of the
Police-magistrates.—Music-hall
Frequenters.—Refreshment-bars.—Midnight
Profligacy—“Snuggeries.”—Over-zealous Blockheads.
CHAPTER XIX.
SUGGESTIONS.
Ignoring the Evil.—Punishment fit for the “Deserter” and p. 324
the Seducer.—The “Know-nothing” and “Do-nothing”
Principle.—The Emigration of Women of Bad Character
V. The Curse of Drunkenness.
CHAPTER XX.
ITS POWER.
The crowning Curse.—No form of sin or sorrow in which it p. 332
does not play a part.—The “Slippery Stone” of
Life.—Statistics.—Matters not growing worse.—The Army
Returns.—The System of Adulteration
CHAPTER XXI.
ATTEMPTS TO ARREST IT.
The Permissive Liquors Bill.—Its Advocates and their p. 351
Arguments.—The Drunkenness of the Nation.—Temperance Facts
and Anecdotes.—Why the Advocates of Total Abstinence do
not make more headway.—Moderate Drinking.—Hard
Drinking.—The Mistake about childish Petitioners
VI. Betting Gamblers.
CHAPTER XXII.
“ADVERTISING TIPSTERS” AND “BETTING COMMISSIONERS.”
The Vice of Gambling on the increase among the p. 377
Working-classes.—Sporting “Specs.”—A “Modus.”—Turf
Discoveries.—Welshers.—The Vermin of the
Betting-field.—Their Tactics.—The Road to Ruin
VII. Waste of Charity.
CHAPTER XXIII.
METROPOLITAN PAUPERISM.
Parochial Statistics.—The Public hold the p. 421
Purse-strings.—Cannot the Agencies actually at work be
made to yield greater Results?—The need of fair
Rating.—The Heart and Core of the Poor-law Difficulty.—My
foremost thought when I was a “Casual.”—Who are most
liable to slip?—“Crank-work.”—The Utility of
Labour-yards.—Scales of Relief.—What comes of breaking-up
a Home
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE BEST REMEDY.
Emigration.—The various Fields.—Distinguish the p. 455
Industrious Worker in need of temporary Relief.—Last Words
I.—Neglected Children.
CHAPTER I.
STARTLING FACTS.
_The Pauper Population_.—_Pauper Children_.—_Opinions concerning their
proper Treatment_.—_A Hundred Thousand Children loose in London
Streets_.—_Neglected Babies_.—_Juvenile_ “_Market Prowlers_.”
IT is a startling fact that, in England and Wales alone, at the present
time, the number of children under the age of sixteen, dependent more or
less on the parochial authorities for maintenance, amounts to three
hundred and fifty thousand.
It is scarcely less startling to learn that annually more than a hundred
thousand criminals emerge at the doors of the various prisons, that, for
short time or long time, have been their homes, and with no more
substantial advice than “to take care that they don’t make their
appearance there again,” are turned adrift once more to face the world,
unkind as when they last stole from it. This does not include our
immense army of juvenile vagrants. How the information has been arrived
at is more than I can tell; but it is an accepted fact that, daily,
winter and summer, within the limits of our vast and wealthy city of
London, there wander, destitute of proper guardianship, food, clothing,
or employment, a _hundred thousand_ boys and girls in fair training for
the treadmill and the oakum shed, and finally for Portland and the
convict’s mark.
It is these last-mentioned hundred thousand, rather than the four hundred
and fifty thousand previously mentioned, that are properly classed under
the heading of this first chapter. Practically, the three hundred and
fifty thousand little paupers that cumber the poor-rates are without the
category of neglected ones. In all probability, at least one-half of
that vast number never were victims of neglect, in the true sense of the
term. Mr. Bumble derives his foster children from sources innumerable.
There are those that are born in the “house,” and who, on some pretext,
are abandoned by their unnatural mother. There are the “strays,”
discovered by the police on their beats, and consigned, for the present,
to the workhouse, and never owned. There is the offspring of the
decamping weaver, or shoemaker, who goes on tramp “to better himself;”
but, never succeeding, does not regard it as worth while to tramp home
again to report his ill-luck. These, and such as these, may truly
ascribe their pauperism to neglect on somebody’s part; but by far the
greater number are what they are through sheer misfortune. When death
snatches father away from the table scarcely big enough to accommodate
the little flock that cluster about it—snatches him away in the lusty
prime of life, and without warning, or, worse still, flings him on a bed
of sickness, the remedies for which devour the few pounds thriftily laid
aside for such an emergency, and, after all, are of no avail, what other
asylum but the workhouse offers itself to mother and children? How many
cases of this kind the parish books could reveal, one can only guess;
quite enough, we may be sure, to render unpalatable that excessive amount
of caution observed by those in power against “holding out a premium” to
pauperism. It is somewhat amazing to hear great authorities talk
sometimes. Just lately, Mr. Bartley, reading at the Society of Arts a
paper entitled, “The training and education of pauper children,” took
occasion to remark:—
“These children cannot be looked upon exactly in the same way as
paupers proper, inasmuch as their unfortunate position is entirely
due to circumstances over which they could have no control. They are
either the offspring of felons, cripples, and idiots, or orphans,
bastards, and deserted children, and claim the protection of the law,
frequently from their tenderest years, from having been deprived of
the care of their natural guardians without fault or crime of their
own. Such being their condition, they must either steal or starve in
the streets, or the State must take charge of them. It may further
be affirmed that, in a strictly commercial point of view, it is more
economical to devote a certain amount in education and systematic
training than by allowing them to grow up in the example of their
parents and workhouse companions, to render their permanent support,
either in a prison or a workhouse, a burden on the industrious
classes. The State, in fact, acknowledges this, and accordingly a
provision is theoretically supplied for all pauper children, not only
for their bodily wants, but, to a certain extent, for their mental
improvement. At the same time, it is also necessary that the extreme
should not be run into, viz., that of treating them so liberally as
to hold out a premium to pauperism. In no case should their comfort
be better than, nor in fact as good as, an industrious labourer has
within his reach.”
Mr. Bartley is a gentleman whose knowledge of the subject he treats of
exceeds that of most men; moreover, he is a man who, in his acts and
nature, shows himself actuated by a kind heart, governed by a sound head;
but, with all deference, it is difficult to agree altogether with the
foregoing remarks of his: and they are the better worth noticing, because
precisely the same sentiment breathes through almost every modern, new,
and improved system of parochial reform. Why should these unfortunate
creatures, “their unfortunate position being entirely due to
circumstances over which they had no control,” be made less comfortable
in their condition than the industrious labourer,—who, by the way, may be
an agricultural labourer, with his starvation wages of nine shillings a
week and his damp and miserable hovel of two rooms to board and lodge his
numerous family? What sort of justice is it to keep constantly before
their unoffending eyes the humiliating fact that they have no standing
even on the bottom round of the social ladder, and that their proper
place is to crouch meekly and uncomplainingly at the foot of it? Even
supposing that they, the pauper children, are “either the offspring of
felons, cripples, and idiots, or orphans, bastards, and deserted
children,” which is assuming to the verge of improbability, still, since
it is acknowledged that the state in which we discover them “is due to no
fault or crime of their own,” why should we hesitate to make them
commonly comfortable? To fail so to do when it is in our power, and
when, according to their innocence and helplessness, it is their due, is
decidedly at variance with the commonly-understood principles of
Christian charity. It will be needless, however, here to pursue the
subject of pauper management, since another section of this book has been
given to its consideration. Anyhow, our three hundred and fifty thousand
pauper children can have no claim to be reckoned among the “neglected.”
They are, or should be, a class whose hard necessity has been brought
under the notice of the authorities, and by them considered and provided
for.
There are other neglected children besides those already enumerated, and
who are not included in the tenth part of a million who live in the
streets, for the simple reason that they are too young to know the use of
their legs. They are “coming on,” however. There is no present fear of
the noble annual crop of a hundred thousand diminishing. They are so
plentifully propagated that a savage preaching “civilization” might
regard it as a mercy that the localities of their infant nurture are such
as suit the ravening appetites of cholera and typhus. Otherwise they
would breed like rabbits in an undisturbed warren, and presently swarm so
abundantly that the highways would be over-run, making it necessary to
pass an Act of Parliament, improving on the latest enacted for dogs,
against the roaming at large of unmuzzled children of the gutter.
Observe the vast number of “city Arabs,” to be encountered in a walk,
from Cheapside to the Angel at Islington, say. You cannot mistake them.
There are other children who are constantly encountered in the street,
male and female, who, though perhaps neither so ragged and dirty as the
genuine juvenile vagrants, are even more sickly and hungry looking; but
it is as easy to distinguish between the two types—between the
_home-owning_ and the _homeless_, as between the sleek pet dog, and the
cur of the street, whose ideas of a “kennel” are limited to that
represented by the wayside gutter, from which by good-luck edibles may be
extracted. Not only does the youthful ragamuffin cry aloud for remedy in
every street and public way of the city, he thrusts his ugly presence on
us continuously, and appeals to us in bodily shape. In this respect, the
curse of neglected children differs widely from any of the others,
beggars alone excepted, perhaps. And even as regards beggars, to see
them is not always to believe in them as human creatures helpless in the
sad condition in which they are discovered, and worthy of the best help
we can afford to bestow on them. It is next to impossible by outward
signs merely to discriminate between the impostor and the really
unfortunate and destitute. The pallid cheek and the sunken eye, may be a
work of art and not of nature, and in the cunning arrangement of rags, so
as to make the most of them, the cheat must always have an advantage over
the genuine article. Weighing the evidence _pro._ and _con._, the object
of it creeping even at his snail’s pace may be out of sight before we
arrive at what appears to us a righteous verdict, and our scrupulous
charity reserved for another, occasion. But no such perplexing doubts
and hesitation need trouble us in selecting the boy gutter bred and born
from the one who lays claim to a home, even though it may be no more than
a feeble pretence, consisting of a family nightly gathering in some dirty
sty that serves as a bedroom, and a morning meeting at a board spread
with a substitute for a breakfast. In the latter there is an expression
of countenance utterly wanting in the former; an undescribable shyness,
and an instinctive observance of decency, that has been rain-washed and
sun-burnt out of the gipsy of the London highway since the time of his
crawling out of the gooseberry sieve, with a wisp of hay in it that
served him as a cradle.
And here I can fancy I hear the incredulous reader exclaim, “But that is
mere imagery of course; ragamuffin babies never are cradled in gooseberry
sieves, with a wisp of hay to lie on.” Let me assure you, dear madam, it
is not imagery, but positive fact. The strangest receptacles do duty as
baby cradles at times. In another part of our book, it will be shown
that a raisin-box may be so adapted, or even an egg-box; the latter with
a bit of straw in it as a cradle for an invalid baby with a broken thigh!
But as regards the gooseberry sieve, it is a fact that came under the
writer’s immediate observation. Accompanied by a friend, he was on a
visit of exploration into the little-known regions of Baldwin’s Gardens,
in Leather Lane, and entering a cellar there, the family who occupied it
were discovered in a state of dreadful commotion. The mother, a tall,
bony, ragged shrew, had a baby tucked under one arm, while she was using
the other by the aid of a pair of dilapidated nozzleless bellows in
inflicting a tremendous beating on a howling young gentleman of about
eleven years old. “Tut! tut! what is the matter, Mrs. Donelly? Rest
your arm a moment, now, and tell us all about it.” “Matther! shure it’s
matther enough to dhrive a poor widdy beyant her sinses!” And then her
rage turning to sorrow, she in pathetic terms described how that she left
that bad boy Johnny only for a few moments in charge of the “darlint
comfortable ashleap in her bashket,” and that he had neglected his duty,
and that the baste of a donkey had smelt her out, and “ate her clane out
o’ bed.”
I have had so much experience in this way, that one day I may write a
book on the Haunts and Homes of the British Baby. It was not long after
the incident of the gooseberry sieve, that I discovered in one small room
in which a family of six resided, three little children, varying in age
from three to eight, perhaps, stark naked. It was noon of a summer’s
day, and there they were nude as forest monkeys, and so hideously dirty
that every rib-bone in their poor wasted little bodies showed plain, and
in colour like mahogany. Soon as I put my head in at the door they
scattered, scared as rabbits, to the “bed,” an arrangement of
evil-smelling flock and old potato-sacks, and I was informed by the
mother that they had not a rag to wear, and had been in their present
condition for _more than three months_.
Let us return, however, to the hordes of small Arabs found wandering
about the streets of the city. To the mind of the initiated, instantly
recurs the question, “whence do they all come”? They are not imported
like those other pests of society, “German band boys or organ grinders;”
they must have been babies once upon a time; where did they grow up? In
very dreary and retired regions, my dear sir, though for that matter if
it should happen that you are perambulating fashionable Regent-street or
aristocratic Belgravia, when you put to yourself the perplexing question,
you may be nigher to a visible solution of the mystery than you would
care to know. Where does the shoeless, ragged, dauntless, and often
desperate boy of the gutter breed? Why, not unfrequently as close almost
to the mansions of the rich and highly respectable as the sparrows in
their chimney stacks. Nothing is more common than to discover a hideous
stew of courts and alleys reeking in poverty and wretchedness almost in
the shadow of the palatial abodes of the great and wealthy. Such
instances might be quoted by the dozen.
It is seldom that these fledglings of the hawk tribe quit their nests or
rather their nesting places until they are capable, although on a most
limited scale, of doing business on their own account. Occasionally a
specimen may be seen in the vicinity of Covent Garden or Farringdon
Market, seated on a carriage extemporized out of an old rusty teatray and
drawn along by his elder relatives, by means of a string. It may not be
safely assumed, however, that the latter are actuated by no other than
affectionate and disinterested motives in thus treating their infant
charge to a ride. It is much more probable that being left at home in
the alley by their mother, who is engaged elsewhere at washing or
“charing,” with strict injunctions not to leave baby for so long as a
minute, and being goaded to desperation by the thoughts of the plentiful
feed of cast-out plums and oranges to be picked up in “Common Garden” at
this “dead ripe” season of the year, they have hit on this ingenious
expedient by which the maternal mandate may be obeyed to the letter, and
their craving for market refuse be at the same time gratified.
By-the-bye, it may here be mentioned as a contribution towards solving
the riddle, “How do these hundred thousand street prowlers contrive to
exist?” that they draw a considerable amount of their sustenance from the
markets. And really it would seem that by some miraculous dispensation
of Providence, garbage was for their sake robbed of its poisonous
properties, and endowed with virtues such as wholesome food possesses.
Did the reader ever see the young market hunters at such a “feed” say in
the month of August or September? It is a spectacle to be witnessed only
by early risers who can get as far as Covent Garden by the time that the
wholesale dealing in the open falls slack—which will be about eight
o’clock; and it is not to be believed unless it is seen. They will
gather about a muck heap and gobble up plums, a sweltering mass of decay,
and oranges and apples that have quite lost their original shape and
colour, with the avidity of ducks or pigs. I speak according to my
knowledge, for I have seen them at it. I have seen one of these gaunt
wolfish little children with his tattered cap full of plums of a sort one
of which I would not have permitted a child of mine to eat for all the
money in the Mint, and this at a season when the sanitary authorities in
their desperate alarm at the spread of cholera had turned bill stickers,
and were begging and imploring the people to abstain from this, that, and
the other, and especially to beware of fruit unless perfectly sound and
ripe. Judging from the earnestness with which this last provision was
urged, there must have been cholera enough to have slain a dozen strong
men in that little ragamuffin’s cap, and yet he munched on till that
frowsy receptacle was emptied, finally licking his fingers with a relish.
It was not for me to forcibly dispossess the boy of a prize that made him
the envy of his plumless companions, but I spoke to the market beadle
about it, asking him if it would not be possible, knowing the
propensities of these poor little wretches, so to dispose of the
poisonous offal that they could not get at it; but he replied that it was
nothing to do with him what they ate so long as they kept their hands
from picking and stealing; furthermore he politely intimated that “unless
I had nothing better to do” there was no call for me to trouble myself
about the “little warmint,” whom nothing would hurt. He confided to me
his private belief that they were “made inside something after the
orsestretch, and that farriers’ nails wouldn’t come amiss to ’em if they
could only get ’em down.” However, and although the evidence was rather
in the sagacious market beadle’s favour, I was unconverted from my
original opinion, and here take the liberty of urging on any official of
Covent Garden or Farringdon Market who may happen to read these pages the
policy of adopting my suggestion as to the safe bestowal of fruit offal
during the sickly season. That great danger is incurred by allowing it
to be consumed as it now is, there cannot be a question. Perhaps it is
too much to assume that the poor little beings whom hunger prompts to
feed off garbage do so with impunity. It is not improbable that, in many
cases, they slink home to die in their holes as poisoned rats do. That
they are never missed from the market is no proof of the contrary. Their
identification is next to impossible, for they are like each other as
apples in a sieve, or peas in one pod. Moreover, to tell their number is
out of the question. It is as incomprehensible as is their nature. They
swarm as bees do, and arduous indeed would be the task of the individual
who undertook to reckon up the small fry of a single alley of the
hundreds that abound in Squalor’s regions. They are of as small account
in the public estimation as stray street curs, and, like them, it is only
where they evince a propensity for barking and biting that their
existence is recognised. Should death to-morrow morning make a clean
sweep of the unsightly little scavengers who grovel for a meal amongst
the market offal heaps, next day would see the said heaps just as
industriously surrounded.
CHAPTER II.
RESPECTING THE PARENTAGE OF SOME OF OUR GUTTER POPULATION.
_Who are the Mothers_?—_The Infant Labour Market_.—_Watch London and
Blackfriars Bridges_.—_The Melancholy Types_.—_The Flashy_, _Flaunting_
“_Infant_.”—_Keeping Company_.—_Marriage_.—_The Upshot_.
INSTRUCTIVE and interesting though it may be to inquire into the haunts
and habits of these wretched waifs and “rank outsiders” of humanity, of
how much importance and of useful purpose is it to dig yet a little
deeper and discover who are the parents—the mothers especially—of these
babes of the gutter.
Clearly they had no business there at all. A human creature, and more
than all, a _helpless_ human creature, endowed with the noblest shape of
God’s creation, and with a soul to save or lose, is as much out of place
grovelling in filth and contamination as would be a wild cat crouching on
the hearth-rug of a nursery. How come they there, then? Although not
bred absolutely in the kennel, many merge into life so very near the edge
of it, that it is no wonder if even their infantine kickings and
sprawlings are enough to topple them over. Some there are, not vast in
number, perhaps, but of a character to influence the whole, who are
dropped into the gutter from such a height that they may never crawl out
of it—they are so sorely crippled. Others, again, find their way to the
gutter by means of a process identical with that which serves the
conveyance to sinks and hidden sewers of the city’s ordinary refuse and
off-scourings. Of this last-mentioned sort, however, it will be
necessary to treat at length presently.
I think that it may be taken as granted that gross and deliberate
immorality is not mainly responsible for our gutter population. Neither
can the poverty of the nation be justly called on to answer for it. On
the contrary, unless I am greatly mistaken, the main tributary to the
foul stream has its fountain-head in the keen-witted, ready-penny
commercial enterprise of the small-capital, business-minded portion of
our vast community.
In no respect are we so unlike our forefathers as in our struggles after
“mastership” in business, however petty. This may be a sign of
commercial progress amongst us, but it is doubtful if it tends very much
to the healthful constitution of our humanity. “Work hard and win a
fortune,” has become a dry and mouldy maxim, distasteful to modern
traders, and has yielded to one that is much smarter, viz., “There is
more got by scheming than by hard work.”
By scheming the labour of others, that is; little children—anyone. It is
in the infant labour market especially that this new and dashing spirit
of commercial enterprise exercises itself chiefly. There are many kinds
of labour that require no application of muscular strength; all that is
requisite is dexterity and lightness of touch, and these with most
children are natural gifts. They are better fitted for the work they are
set to than adults would be, while the latter would require as wages
shillings where the little ones are content with pence. This, perhaps,
would be tolerable if their earnings increased with their years; but such
an arrangement does not come within the scheme of the sweaters and
slop-factors, Jew and Christian, who grind the bones of little children
to make them not only bread, but luxurious living and country houses, and
carriages to ride in. When their “hands” cease to be children, these
enterprising tradesmen no longer require their services, and they are
discharged to make room for a new batch of small toilers, eager to engage
themselves on terms that the others have learned to despise, while those
last-mentioned unfortunates are cast adrift to win their bread—somehow.
Anyone curious to know the sort of working young female alluded to may be
gratified a hundred times over any day of the week, if he will take the
trouble to post himself, between the hours of twelve and two, at the foot
of London or Blackfriars bridge. There he will see the young girl of the
slop-shop and the city “warehouse” hurrying homeward on the chance of
finding a meagre makeshift—“something hot”—that may serve as a dinner.
It is a sight well worth the seeking of any philanthropic person
interested in the present condition and possible future of the infant
labour market. How much or how little of truth there may be in the
lament one occasionally hears, that our endurance is failing us, and that
we seldom reach the ripe old age attained by our ancestors, we will not
here discuss; at least there can be no doubt of this—that we grow old
much earlier than did our great grandfathers; and though our “three-score
years and ten” may be shortened by fifteen or twenty years, the downhill
portion of our existence is at least as protracted as that of the hale
men of old who could leap a gate at sixty. This must be so, otherwise
the ancient law, defining an infant as “a person under the age of
fourteen,” could never have received the sanction of legislators. Make
note of these “infants” of the law as they come in knots of two and
three, and sometimes in an unbroken “gang,” just as they left the
factory, putting their best feet foremost in a match against time; for
all that is allowed them is one hour, and within that limited period they
have to walk perhaps a couple of miles to and fro, resting only during
that brief space in which it is their happy privilege to exercise their
organs of mastication.
Good times indeed were those olden ones, if for no other reason than that
they knew not such infants as these! Of the same stuff in the main, one
and all, but by no means of the same pattern. Haggard, weary-eyed
infants, who never could have been babies; little slips of things, whose
heads are scarcely above the belt of the burly policeman lounging out his
hours of duty on the bridge, but who have a brow on which, in lines
indelible, are scored a dreary account of the world’s hard dealings with
them. Painfully puckered mouths have these, and an air of such sad, sage
experience, that one might fancy, not that these were young people who
would one day grow to be old women, but rather that, by some inversion of
the natural order of things, they had once been old and were growing
young again—that they had seen seventy, at least, but had doubled on the
brow of the hill of age, instead of crossing it, and retraced their
steps, until they arrived back again at thirteen; the old, old heads
planted on the young shoulders revealing the secret.
This, the most melancholy type of the grown-up neglected infant, is,
however, by no means the most painful of those that come trooping past in
such a mighty hurry. Some are dogged and sullen-looking, and appear as
though steeped to numbness in the comfortless doctrine, “What can’t be
cured must be endured;” as if they had acquired a certain sort of surly
relish for the sours of existence, and partook of them as a matter of
course, without even a wry face. These are not of the sort that excite
our compassion the most; neither are the ailing and sickly-looking little
girls, whose tender constitutions have broken down under pressure of the
poison inhaled in the crowded workroom, and long hours, and countless
trudgings, early and late, in the rain and mire, with no better covering
for their shoulders than a flimsy mantle a shower would wet through and
through, and a wretched pair of old boots that squelch on the pavement as
they walk. Pitiful as are these forlorn ones to behold, there is, at
least, a grim satisfaction in knowing that with them it cannot last. The
creature who causes us most alarm is a girl of a very different type.
This is the flashy, flaunting “infant,” barely fourteen, and with scarce
four feet of stature, but self-possessed and bold-eyed enough to be a
“daughter of the regiment”—of a militia regiment even. She consorts with
birds of her own feather. Very little experience enables one to tell at
a glance almost how these girls are employed, and it is quite evident
that the terrible infant in question and her companions are engaged in
the manufacture of artificial flowers. Their teeth are discoloured, and
there is a chafed and chilblainish appearance about their nostrils, as
though suffering under a malady that were best consoled with a
pocket-handkerchief. The symptoms in question, however, are caused by
the poison used in their work—arsenite of copper, probably, that deadly
mineral being of a “lovely green,” and much in favour amongst artificial
florists and their customers. Here they come, unabashed by the throng,
as though the highway were their home, and all mankind their brothers;
she, the heroine with a bold story to tell, and plenty of laughter and
free gesticulation as sauce with it. She is of the sort, and, God help
them! they may be counted by hundreds in London alone, in whom keen wit
would appear to be developed simultaneously with ability to walk and
talk. Properly trained, these are the girls that grow to be clever,
capable women—women of spirit and courage and shrewd discernment. The
worst of it is that the seed implanted will germinate. Hunger cannot
starve it to death, or penurious frosts destroy it. Untrained, it grows
apace, overturning and strangling all opposition and asserting its
paramount importance.
This is the girl who is the bane and curse of the workroom crowded with
juvenile stitchers or pasters, or workers in flowers or beads. Her
constant assumption of lightheartedness draws them towards her, her
lively stories are a relief from the monotonous drudgery they are engaged
on. Old and bold in petty wickedness, and with audacious pretensions to
acquaintance with vice of a graver sort, she entertains them with stories
of “sprees” and “larks” she and her friends have indulged in. She has
been to “plays” and to “dancing rooms,” and to the best of her ability
and means she demonstrates the latest fashion in her own attire, and
wears her draggletail flinders of lace and ribbon in such an easy and
old-fashionable manner, poor little wretch, as to impress one with the
conviction that she must have been used to this sort of thing since the
time of her shortcoating; which must have been many, many years ago. She
has money to spend; not much, but sufficient for the purchase of
luxuries, the consumption of which inflict cruel pangs on the hungry-eyed
beholders. She is a person whose intimacy is worth cultivating, and they
do cultivate it, with what result need not be here described.
At fifteen the London factory-bred girl in her vulgar way has the worldly
knowledge of the ordinary female of eighteen or twenty. She has her
“young man,” and accompanies him of evenings to “sing-songs” and raffles,
and on high days and holidays to Hampton by the shilling van, or to
Greenwich by the sixpenny boat. At sixteen she wearies of the
frivolities of sweethearting, and the young man being agreeable the pair
embark in housekeeping, and “settle down.”
Perhaps they marry, and be it distinctly understood, whatever has been
said to the contrary, the estate of matrimony amongst her class is not
lightly esteemed. On the contrary, it is a contract in which so much
pride is taken that the certificate attesting its due performance is not
uncommonly displayed on the wall of the living-room as a choice print or
picture might be; with this singular and unaccountable distinction that
when a _clock_ is reckoned with the other household furniture, the
marriage certificate is almost invariably hung under it. It was Mr.
Catlin of the Cow Cross Mission who first drew my attention to this
strange observance, and in our many explorations into the horrible courts
and alleys in the vicinity of his mission-house he frequently pointed out
instances of this strange custom; but even he, who is as learned in the
habits and customs of all manner of outcasts of civilisation as any man
living, was unable to explain its origin. When questioned on the subject
the common answer was, “They say that it’s lucky.”
It is the expense attending the process that makes matrimony the
exception and not the rule amongst these people. At least this is their
invariable excuse. And here, as bearing directly on the question of
“neglected infants,” I may make mention of a practice that certain
well-intentioned people are adopting with a view to diminishing the
prevalent sin of the unmarried sexes herding in their haunts of poverty,
and living together as man and wife.
The said practice appears sound enough on the surface. It consists
simply in marrying these erring couples gratis. The missionary or
scripture reader of the district who, as a rule, is curiously intimate
with the family affairs of his flock, calls privately on those young
people whose clock, if they have one, ticks to a barren wall, and makes
the tempting offer—banns put up, service performed, beadle and pew opener
satisfied, and all free! As will not uncommonly happen, if driven into a
corner for an excuse, the want of a jacket or a gown “to make a
’spectable ’pearance in” is pleaded; the negociator makes a note of it,
and in all probability the difficulty is provided against, and in due
course the marriage is consummated.
This is all very well as far as it goes, but to my way of thinking the
scheme is open to many grave objections. In the first place the instinct
that incites people to herd like cattle in a lair is scarcely the same as
induces them to blend their fortunes and live “for better, for worse”
till the end of their life. It requires no great depth of affection on
the man’s part to lead him to take up with a woman who, in consideration
of board and lodging and masculine protection will create some semblance
of a home for him. In his selection of such a woman he is not governed
by those grave considerations that undoubtedly present themselves to his
mind when he meditates wedding himself irrevocably to a mate. Her
history, previous to his taking up with her, may be known to him, and
though perhaps not all that he could wish, she is as good to him as she
promised to be, and they get along pretty well and don’t quarrel very
much.
Now, although not one word can be urged in favour of this iniquitous and
shocking arrangement, is it quite certain that a great good is achieved
by inducing such a couple to tie themselves together in the sacred bonds
of matrimony? It is not a marriage of choice as all marriages should be.
If the pair had been bent on church marriage and earnestly desired it, it
is absurd to suppose that the few necessary shillings, the price of its
performance, would have deterred them. If they held the sacred ceremony
of so small account as to regard it as well dispensed with as adopted, it
is no very great triumph of the cause of religion and morality that the
balance is decided by a gown or a jacket, in addition to the good will of
the missionary (who, by-the-bye, is generally the distributor of the alms
of the charitable) being thrown into the scale.
To be sure the man is not compelled to yield to the persuasions of those
who would make of him a creditable member of society; he is not compelled
to it, but he can hardly be regarded as a free agent. If the pair have
children already, the woman will be only too anxious to second the
solicitation of her friend, and so secure to herself legal protection in
addition to that that is already secured to her through her mate’s
acquired regard for her. Then it is so difficult to combat the simple
question, “Why not?” when all is so generously arranged—even to the
providing a real gold ring to be worn in place of the common brass
make-believe—and nothing remains but to step round to the parish church,
where the minister is waiting, and where in a quarter of an hour, the
great, and good, and lasting work may be accomplished. The well-meaning
missionary asks, “Why not?” The woman, urged by moral or mercenary
motives, echoes the momentous query, and both stand with arms presented,
in a manner of speaking, to hear the wavering one’s objection. The
wavering one is not generally of the far-seeing sort. In his heart he
does not care as much as a shilling which way it is. He does not in the
least trouble himself from the religious and moral point of view. When
his adviser says, “Just consider how much easier your conscience will be
if you do this act of justice to the woman whom you have selected as your
helpmate,” he wags his head as though admitting it, but having no
conscience about the matter he is not very deeply impressed. Nine times
out of ten the summing-up of his deliberation is, “I don’t care; it won’t
cost _me_ nothing; let ’em have their way.”
But what, probably, is the upshot of the good missionary’s endeavours and
triumph? In a very little time the gilt with which the honest adviser
glossed the chain that was to bind the man irrevocably to marriage and
morality wears off. The sweat of his brow will not keep it bright; it
rusts it. He feels, in his own vulgar though expressive language, that
he has been “bustled” into a bad bargain. “It is like this ’ere,” a
matrimonial victim of the class once confided to me; “I don’t say as she
isn’t as good as ever, but I’m blowed if she’s all that better as I was
kidded to believe she would be.”
“But if she is as good as ever, she is good enough.”
“Yes, but you haven’t quite got the bearing of what I mean, sir, and I
haint got it in me to put it in the words like you would. Good enough
before isn’t good enough now, cos it haint hoptional, don’t you see? No,
you don’t. Well, look here. S’pose I borrer a barrer. Well, it’s good
enough and a conwenient size for laying out my stock on it. It goes
pooty easy, and I pays eighteen pence a week for it and I’m satisfied.
Well, I goes on all right and without grumbling, till some chap he ses to
me, ‘What call have you got to borrer a barrer when you can have one of
your own; you alwis _want_ a barrer, don’t you know, why not make this
one your own?’ ‘Cos I can’t spare the money,’ I ses. ‘Oh,’ he ses,
‘I’ll find the money and the barrer’s yourn, if so be as you’ll promise
and vow to take up with no other barrer, but stick to this one so long as
you both shall live.’ Well, as aforesaid, it’s a tidy, useful barrer,
and I agrees. But soon as it’s _mine_, don’t you know, I ain’t quite so
careless about it. I overhauls it, in a manner of speaking, and I’m more
keerful in trying the balance of it in hand when the load’s on it. Well,
maybe I find out what I never before troubled myself to look for.
There’s a screw out here and a bolt wanted there. Here it’s weak, and
there it’s ugly. I dwells on it in my mind constant. I’ve never got
that there barrer out of my head, and p’raps I make too much of the weak
pints of it. I gets to mistrust it. ‘It’s all middling right, just now,
old woman—old barrer, I mean,’ I ses to myself, ‘but you’ll be a playing
me a trick one day, I’m afraid.’ Well, I go on being afraid, which I
shouldn’t be if I was only a borrower.”
“But you should not forget that the barrow, to adopt your own ungallant
figure of speech, is not accountable for these dreads and suspicions of
yours; it will last you as long and as well as though you had continued a
borrower; you will admit that, at least!”
“I don’t know. _Last_, yes! That’s the beggaring part of it. Ah, well!
p’raps it’s all right, but I’m blest if I can stand being haunted like I
am now.”
Nothing that I could say would add force to the argument of my
costermonger friend, as set forth in his parable of the “barrer.”
Applying it to the question under discussion, I do not mean to attribute
to the deceptiveness of the barrow or to its premature breaking down, the
spilling into the gutter of all the unhappy children there discovered.
My main reason for admitting the evidence in question was to endeavour to
show that as a pet means of improving the morality of our courts and
alleys, and consequently of diminishing the gutter population, the modern
idea of arresting fornication and concubinage, by dragging the pair there
and then to church, and making them man and wife, is open to serious
objections. The state of matrimony is not good for such folk. It was
never intended for them. It may be as necessary to healthful life as
eating is, but no one would think of taking a man starved, and in the
last extremity for lack of wholesome aliment, and setting before him a
great dish of solid food. It may be good for him by-and-by, but he must
be brought along by degrees, and fitted for it. Undoubtedly a great
source of our abandoned gutter children may be found in the shocking
herding together of the sexes in the vile “slums” and back places of
London, and it is to be sincerely hoped that some wise man will presently
devise a speedy preventive.
In a recent report made to the Commissioners of Sewers for London, Dr.
Letheby says: “I have been at much pains during the last three months to
ascertain the precise conditions of the dwellings, the habits, and the
diseases of the poor. In this way 2,208 rooms have been most
circumstantially inspected, and the general result is that nearly all of
them are filthy or overcrowded or imperfectly drained, or badly
ventilated, or out of repair. In 1,989 of these rooms, all in fact that
are at present inhabited, there are 5,791 inmates, belonging to 1,576
families; and to say nothing of the too frequent occurrence of what may
be regarded as a necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife,
and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably
small and ill-conditioned room, there are numerous instances where adults
of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same
room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from
three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children,
are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages; and where
every human instinct of propriety and decency is smothered. Like my
predecessor, I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common
with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the
casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy
rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and
females of different families that tenant the same room, where birth and
death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast
down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation
from each other, or from the rest of the inmates. Of the many cases to
which I have alluded, there are some which have commanded my attention by
reason of their unusual depravity—cases in which from three to four
adults of both sexes, with many children, were lodging in the same room,
and often sleeping in the same bed. I have note of three or four
localities, where forty-eight men, seventy-three women, and fifty-nine
children are living in thirty-four rooms. In one room there are two men,
three women, and five children, and in another one man, four women, and
two children; and when, about a fortnight since, I visited the back room
on the ground floor of No. 5, I found it occupied by one man, two women,
and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died
in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare
floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the
living, and we may well ask how it can be otherwise than that the human
heart should be dead to all the gentler feelings of our nature, when such
sights as these are of common occurrence.
“So close and unwholesome is the atmosphere of some of these rooms, that
I have endeavoured to ascertain, by chemical means, whether it does not
contain some peculiar product of decomposition that gives to it its foul
odour and its rare powers of engendering disease. I find it is not only
deficient in the due proportion of oxygen, but it contains three times
the usual amount of carbonic acid, besides a quantity of aqueous vapour
charged with alkaline matter that stinks abominably. This is doubtless
the product of putrefaction, and of the various fœtid and stagnant
exhalations that pollute the air of the place. In many of my former
reports, and in those of my predecessor, your attention has been drawn to
this pestilential source of disease, and to the consequence of heaping
human beings into such contracted localities; and I again revert to it
because of its great importance, not merely that it perpetuates fever and
the allied disorders, but because there stalks side by side with this
pestilence a yet deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a
rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly
and incestuous, and scattering, while society averts her eye, the
retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence and pauperism.”
CHAPTER III.
BABY-FARMING.
“_Baby-Farmers_” _and Advertising_ “_Child Adopters_.”—“_F. X._” _of
Stepney_.—_The Author’s Interview with Farmer Oxleek_.—_The Case of Baby
Frederick Wood_.
ALTHOUGH it is not possible, in a book of moderate dimensions, such as
this, to treat the question of neglected children with that extended care
and completeness it undoubtedly deserves, any attempt at its
consideration would be glaringly deficient did it not include some
reference to the modern and murderous institution known as “baby
farming.”
We may rely on it that we are lamentably ignorant both of the gigantic
extent and the pernicious working of this mischief. It is only when some
loud-crying abuse of the precious system makes itself heard in our
criminal courts, and is echoed in the newspapers, or when some
adventurous magazine writer in valiant pursuit of his avocation, directs
his inquisitive nose in the direction indicated, that the public at large
hear anything either of the farmer or the farmed.
A year or so ago a most atrocious child murder attracted towards this
ugly subject the bull’s-eye beams of the press, and for some time it was
held up and exhibited in all its nauseating nakedness. It may be safely
asserted that during the protracted trial of the child murderess, Mrs.
Winser, there was not one horrified father or mother in England who did
not in terms of severest indignation express his or her opinion of how
abominable it was that such scandalous traffic in baby flesh and blood
should, through the law’s inefficiency, be rendered possible. But it was
only while we, following the revolting revelations, were subject to a
succession of shocks and kept in pain, that we were thus virtuous. It
was only while our tender feelings were suffering excruciation from the
harrowing story of baby torture that we shook in wrath against the
torturer. Considering what our sufferings were (and from the manner of
our crying out they must have been truly awful) we recovered with a speed
little short of miraculous. Barely was the trial of the murderess
concluded and the court cleared, than our fierce indignation subsided
from its bubbling and boiling, and quickly settled down to calm and
ordinary temperature. Nay it is hardly too much to say that our
over-wrought sympathies as regards baby neglect and murder fell so cold
and flat that little short of a second edition of Herod’s massacre might
be required to raise them again.
This is the unhappy fate that attends nearly all our great social
grievances. They are overlooked or shyly glanced at and kicked aside for
years and years, when suddenly a stray spark ignites their smouldering
heaps, and the eager town cooks a splendid supper of horrors at the gaudy
conflagration; but having supped full, there ensues a speedy distaste for
flame and smoke, and in his heart every one is chiefly anxious that the
fire may burn itself out, or that some kind hand will smother it. “We
have had enough of it.” That is the phrase. The only interest we ever
had in it, which was nothing better than a selfish and theatrical
interest, is exhausted. We enjoyed the bonfire amazingly, but we have no
idea of tucking back our coat-sleeves and handling a shovel or a pick to
explore the unsavoury depth and origin of the flareup, and dig and dam to
guard against a repetition of it. It is sufficient for us that we have
endured without flinching the sensational horrors dragged to light; let
those who dragged them forth bury them again; or kill them; or be killed
by them. We have had enough of them.
Great social grievances are not to be taken by storm. They merely bow
their vile heads while the wrathful blast passes, and regain their
original position immediately afterwards. So it was with this business
of baby-farming, and the tremendous outcry raised at the time when the
wretch Winser was brought to trial. There are certain newspapers in
whose advertisement columns the baby-farmer advertises for “live stock”
constantly, and at the time it was observed with great triumph by certain
people that since the vile hag’s detection the advertisements in question
had grown singularly few and mild. But the hope that the baby-farmer had
retired, regarding his occupation as gone, was altogether delusive. He
was merely lying quiet for a spell, quite at his ease, making no doubt
that business would stir again presently. Somebody else was doing his
advertising, that was all. If he had had any reasonable grounds for
supposing that the results of the appalling facts brought to light would
be that the Legislature would bestir itself and take prompt and
efficacious steps towards abolishing him, it would have been different.
But he had too much confidence in the sluggardly law to suppose anything
of the kind. He knew that the details of the doings of himself and his
fellows would presently sicken those who for a time had evinced a relish
for them, and that in a short time they would bid investigators and
newspapers say no more—they had had enough of it! When his sagacity was
verified, he found his way leisurely back to the advertising columns
again.
I have spoken of the baby-farmers as masculine, but that was merely for
convenience of metaphor. No doubt that the male sex have a considerable
interest in the trade, but the negociators, and ostensibly the
proprietors, are women. As I write, one of the said newspapers lies
before me. It is a daily paper, and its circulation, an extensive one,
is essentially amongst the working classes, _especially amongst working
girls and women_.
The words italicised are worthy particular attention as regards this
particular part of my subject. Here is a daily newspaper that is mainly
an advertising broadsheet. It is an old-established newspaper, and its
advertisement columns may be said fairly to reflect the condition of the
female labour market over vast tracts of the London district. Column
after column tells of the wants of servants and masters. “Cap-hands,”
“feather-hands,” “artificial flower-hands,” “chenille-hands,” hands for
the manufacture of “chignons” and “hair-nets” and “bead work,” and all
manner of “plaiting” and “quilling” and “gauffering” in ribbon and net
and muslin, contributing towards the thousand and one articles that stock
the “fancy” trade. There are more newspapers than one that aspire as
mediums between employers and employed, but this, before all others, is
_the_ newspaper, daily conned by thousands of girls and women in search
of work of the kind above mentioned, and it is in this newspaper that the
baby-farmer fishes wholesale for customers.
I write “wholesale,” and surely it is nothing else. To the uninitiated
in this peculiar branch of the world’s wickedness it would seem that, as
an article of negociation, a baby would figure rarer than anything, and
in their innocence they might be fairly guided to this conclusion on the
evidence of their personal experience of the unflinching love of parents,
though never so poor, for their children; yet in a single number of this
newspaper published every day of the week and all the year round, be it
borne in mind, appear no less than _eleven_ separate advertisements,
emanating from individuals solicitous for the care, weekly, monthly,
yearly—anyhow, of other people’s children, and that on terms odorous of
starvation at the least in every meagre figure.
It is evident at a glance that the advertisers seek for customers and
expect none other than from among the sorely pinched and poverty-stricken
class that specially patronise the newspaper in question. The
complexion, tone, and terms of their villanously cheap suggestions for
child adoption are most cunningly shaped to meet the possible
requirements of some unfortunate work-girl, who, earning while at liberty
never more than seven or eight shillings a week, finds herself hampered
with an infant for whom no father is forthcoming. There can scarcely be
imagined a more terrible encumbrance than a young baby is to a working
girl or woman so circumstanced. Very often she has a home before her
disaster announced itself—her first home, that is, with her parents—and
in her shame and disgrace she abandons it, determined on hiding away
where she is unknown, “keeping herself to herself.” She has no other
means of earning a livelihood excepting that she has been used to. She
is a “cap-hand,” or an “artificial flower-hand,” and such work is always
entirely performed at the warehouse immediately under the employer’s eye.
What is she to do? She cannot possibly carry her baby with her to the
shop and keep it with her the livelong day. Were she inclined so to do,
and could somehow contrive to accomplish the double duty of nurse and
flower-weaver, it would not be allowed. If she stays at home in the
wretched little room she rents with her infant she and it must go hungry.
It is a terrible dilemma for a young woman “all but” good, and honestly
willing to accept the grievous penalty she must pay if it may be
accomplished by the labour of her hands. Small and puny, however, the
poor unwelcome little stranger may be, it is a perfect ogre of rapacity
on its unhappy mother’s exertions. Now and then an instance of the
self-sacrificing devotion exhibited by those unhappy mothers for their
fatherless children creeps into print. There was held in the parish of
St. Luke’s, last summer, an inquest on the body of a neglected infant,
aged seven months. The woman to whose care she was confided had got
drunk, and left the poor little thing exposed to the cold, so that it
died. The mother paid the drunken nurse four-and-sixpence a week for the
child’s keep, and it was proved in evidence that she (the mother) had
been earning at her trade of paper-bag making never more than
six-and-threepence per week during the previous five months. That was
four-and-sixpence for baby and _one-and-ninepence_ for herself.
I don’t think, however, that the regular baby-farmer is a person
habitually given to drink. The successful and lucrative prosecution of
her business forbids the indulgence. Decidedly not one of the eleven
advertisements before mentioned read like the concoctions of persons
whose heads were muddled with beer or gin. Here is the first one:—
NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT.—The Advertiser, a Widow with a
little family of her own, and a moderate allowance from her late
husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young
child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care.
Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under
two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.
Women are shrewder than men at understanding these matters, and the
advertisement is addressed to women; but I doubt if a man would be far
wrong in setting down the “widow lady with a little family of her own,”
as one of those monsters in woman’s clothing who go about seeking for
babies to devour. Her “moderate allowance,” so artlessly introduced, is
intended to convey to the unhappy mother but half resolved to part with
her encumbrance, that possibly the widow’s late husband’s friends settle
her butcher’s and baker’s bills, and that under such circumstances the
widow would actually be that fifteen shillings a month in pocket, for the
small trouble of entering the little stranger with her own interesting
little flock. And what a well-bred, cheerful, and kindly-behaved little
flock it must be, to have no objection to add to its number a young child
aged one month or twelve, sick or well! Fancy such an estimable person
as the widow lady appraising her parental care at so low a figure as
three-and-ninepence a week—sevenpence farthing a day, including Sundays!
But, after all, that is not so cheap as the taking the whole and sole
charge of a child, sick or well, mind you, to nourish and clothe, and
educate it from the age of two months till twelve years, say! To be
sure, the widow lady stipulates that the child she is ready to “adopt”
must be under two months, and we all know how precarious is infantine
existence, and at what a wonderfully low rate the cheap undertakers bury
babies in these days.
Another of the precious batch of eleven speaks plainer, and comes to the
point without any preliminary walking round it:—
ADOPTION.—A person wishing a lasting and comfortable home for a young
child of either sex will find this a good opportunity. Advertisers
having no children of their own are about to proceed to America.
Premium, Fifteen pounds. Respectable references given and required.
Address F. X—.
All that is incomplete in the above is the initials; but one need not ask
for the “O” that should come between the “F” and “X.” After perusing the
pithy advertisement, I interpreted its meaning simply this:—Any person
possessed of a child he is anxious to be rid of, here is a good chance
for him. Perhaps “F. X.” is going to America; perhaps he’s not. That is
_his_ business. The party having a child to dispose of, need not trouble
itself on that score. For “respectable references” read “mutual
confidence.” I’ll take the child, and ask no questions of the party, and
the party shall fork over the fifteen pounds, and ask no questions of me.
That will make matters comfortable for both parties, ’specially if the
meeting is at a coffee-house, or at some public building, for if I don’t
know the party’s address, of course he can have no fear that I shall turn
round on him, and return the child on his hands. The whole affair might
be managed while an omnibus is waiting to take up a passenger. A simple
matter of handing over a bulky parcel and a little one—the child and the
money—and all over, without so much as “good night,” if so be the party
is a careful party, and wouldn’t like even his voice heard.
It may be objected that the seduced factory girl is scarcely likely to
become the victim of “F. X.,” inasmuch as she never had fifteen pounds to
call her own in the whole course of her life, and is less likely than
ever to grow so rich now. And that is quite true, but as well as a
seduced, there must be a seducer. Not a man of position and means,
probably; more likely the fast young son of parents in the butchering, or
cheesemongering, or grocery interest—a dashing young blade, whose ideas
of “seeing life” is seeking that unwholesome phase of it presented at
those unmitigated dens of vice, the “music halls,” at one of which
places, probably, the acquaintance terminating so miserably, was
commenced. Or, may be, instead of the “young master,” it is the shopman
who is the male delinquent; and, in either case, anything is preferable
to a “row,” and an exposure. Possibly the embarrassed young mother, by
stress of necessity, and imperfect faith in the voluntary goodness of her
lover, is driven to make the best of the defensive weapons that chance
has thus placed in her hands, and her urging for “some little assistance”
becomes troublesome. This being the case, and the devil stepping in with
“F. X.’s” advertisement in his hand, the difficulty is immediately
reduced to one of raising fifteen pounds. No more hourly anxiety lest
“something should turn up” to explode the secret under the very nose of
parents or master, no more restrictions from amusements loved so well
because of a dread lest that pale-faced baby-carrying young woman should
intrude her reproachful presence, and her tears, into their midst. Only
one endeavour—a big one, it is true, but still, only one—and the ugly
ghost is laid at once and for ever! Perhaps the young fellow has friends
of whom he can borrow the money. May be he has a watch, and articles of
clothing and jewellery, that will pawn for the amount. If he has
neither, still he is not entirely without resources. Music-halls and
dancing-rooms cannot be patronised on bare journeyman’s wages, and
probably already the till has bled slightly—let it bleed more copiously!
And the theft is perpetrated, and “F. X.” releases the guilty pair of the
little creature that looks in its helplessness and innocence so little
like a bugbear. And it isn’t at all unlikely that, after all, papa
regards himself as a fellow deserving of condemnation, perhaps, but
entitled to some pity, and, still more, of approval for his
self-sacrificing. Another fellow, finding himself in such a fix, would
have snapped his fingers in Polly’s face, and told her to do her worst,
and be hanged to her; but, confound it all, he was not such a brute as
_that_. Having got the poor girl into trouble, he had done all he could
to get her out of it—clean out of it, mind you. Not only had he done all
that he could towards this generous end, but considerably more than he
ought; he had risked exposure as a thief, and the penalty of the
treadmill, and all for her sake! And so thick-skinned is the young
fellow’s morality, that possibly he is really not aware of the
double-dyed villain he has become; that to strip his case of the specious
wrappings in which he would envelop it, he is nothing better than a mean
scoundrel who has stooped to till-robbery in order to qualify himself as
an accessory to child murder, or worse—the casting of his own offspring,
like a mangy dog, on the streets, to die in a gutter, or to live and grow
up to be a terror to his kind—a ruffian, and a breeder of ruffians. Nor
need it be supposed that this last is a mere fancy sketch. There can be
no doubt that if the history of every one of the ten thousand of the
young human pariahs that haunt London streets could be inquired into, it
would be found that no insignificant percentage of the whole were
children abandoned and left to their fate by mock “adopters,” such as “F.
X.”
It is these “adopters” of children who should be specially looked after,
since, assuming that heartless roguery is the basis of their business
dealing, it becomes at once manifest that their main source of profit
must lie in their ability to get rid of their hard bargains as soon as
possible. From fifteen to five-and-twenty pounds would appear to be the
sums usually asked, and having once got possession of the child, every
day that the mockery of a _bonâ fide_ bargain is maintained, the value of
the blood-money that came with it diminishes. The term “blood-money,”
however, should be accepted in a qualified sense. It is quite common for
these people to mention as one of the conditions of treaty that a sickly
child would not be objected to, and provided it were very sickly, it
might in ordinary cases have a fair chance of dying a natural death; but
the course commonly pursued by the professional childmonger is not to
murder it either by sudden and violent means, or by the less merciful
though no less sure process of cold, neglect, and starvation. Not only
does death made public (and in these wide-awake times it is not easy to
hide a body, though a little one, where it may not speedily be found)
attract an amount of attention that were best avoided, but it also
entails the expenses of burial. A much easier way of getting rid of a
child,—especially if it be of that convenient age when it is able to walk
but not to talk, is to convey it to a strange quarter of the town and
there abandon it.
And there is something else in connection with this painful phase of the
question of neglected children that should not be lost sight of. It must
not be supposed that every child abandoned in the streets is discovered
by the police and finds its way first to the station-house, and finally
to the workhouse. Very many of them, especially if they are
pretty-looking and engaging children, are voluntarily adopted by
strangers. It might not be unreasonably imagined that this can only be
the case when the cruel abandonment takes place in a neighbourhood
chiefly inhabited by well-to-do people. And well would it be for the
community at large if this supposition were the correct one; then there
would be a chance that the poor neglected little waif would be well cared
for and preserved against the barbarous injustice of being compelled to
fight for his food even before he had shed his milk-teeth. But wonderful
as it may seem, it is not in well-to-do quarters that the utterly
abandoned child finds protection, but in quarters that are decidedly the
worst to do, and that, unfortunately, in every possible respect than any
within the city’s limits. The tender consideration of poverty for its
kind is a phase of humanity that might be studied both with instruction
and profit by those who, through their gold-rimmed spectacles regard
deprivation from meat and clothes and the other good things of this world
as involving a corresponding deficiency of virtue and generosity. They
have grown so accustomed to associate cherubs with chubbiness, and
chubbiness with high respectability and rich gravies, that they would, if
such a thing were possible, scarcely be seen conversing with an angel of
bony and vulgar type. Nevertheless, it is an undoubted fact, that for
one child taken from the streets in the highly respectable West-end, and
privately housed and taken care of, there might be shown fifty who have
found open door and lasting entertainment in the most poverty-stricken
haunts of London.
In haunts of vice too, in hideous localities inhabited solely by loose
women and thieves. Bad as these people are, they will not deny a hungry
child. It is curious the extent to which this lingering of nature’s
better part remains with these “bad women.” Love for little children in
these poor creatures seems unconquerable. It would appear as though
conscious of the extreme depth of degradation to which they have fallen,
and of the small amount of sympathy that remains between them and the
decent world, they were anxious to hold on yet a little longer, although
by so slender a thread as unreasoning childhood affords. As everyone can
attest, whose duty it has been to explore even the most notorious sinks
of vice and criminality, it is quite common to meet with pretty little
children, mere infants of three or four years old, who are the pets and
toys of the inhabitants, especially of the women. The frequent answer to
the inquiry, “Who does the child belong to?” is, “Oh, he’s anybody’s
child,” which sometimes means that it is the offspring of one of the
fraternity who has died or is now in prison, but more often that he is a
“stray” who is fed and harboured there simply because nobody owns him.
But as may be easily understood, the reign of “pets” of this sort is of
limited duration. By the time the curly-headed little boy of four years
old grows to be six, he must indeed be an inapt scholar if his two years’
attendance at such a school has not turned his artless simplicity into
mischievous cunning, and his “pretty ways” into those that are both
audacious and tiresome. Then clubbing takes the place of caressing, and
the child is gradually left to shift for himself, and we meet him shortly
afterwards an active and intelligent nuisance, snatching his hard-earned
crust out of the mire as a crossing sweeper, fusee, or penny-paper
selling boy, or else more evilly inclined, he joins other companions and
takes up the trade of a whining beggar. Even at that tender age his eyes
are opened to the ruinous fact that as much may be got by stealing as by
working, and he “tails on,” a promising young beginner, to the army of
twenty thousand professional thieves that exact black mail in London.
Supposing it to be true, and for my part I sincerely believe it, that the
ranks of neglected children who eventually become thieves, are recruited
in great part from the castaways of the mock child adopter, then is
solved the puzzle how it is that among a class the origin of almost every
member of which can be traced back to the vilest neighbourhood of
brutishness and ignorance, so many individuals of more than the average
intellect are discovered. Any man who has visited a reformatory for boys
must have observed this. Let him go into the juvenile ward or the
school-room of a workhouse, either in town or country, and he will find
four-fifths of the lads assembled wearing the same heavy stolid look,
indicative of the same desperate resignation to the process of learning
than which for them could hardly be devised a punishment more severe.
But amongst a very large proportion of the boys who have been rescued not
merely from the gutter but out of the very jaws of the criminal law, and
bestowed in our reformatories, how different is their aspect!
Quick-witted, ready of comprehension, bold-eyed, shrewdly-observant, one
cannot but feel that it is a thousand pities that such boys should be
driven to this harbour of refuge—that so much good manhood material
should come so nigh to being wrecked. But how is it that with no more
promising nurses than squalor and ignorance the boys of the reformatory
should show so much superior to the boys whom a national institution,
such as a workhouse is, has adopted, and had all to do with since their
infancy? The theory that many of the boys who by rapid steps in crime
find their way to a reformatory, are bastard children, for whose
safe-keeping the baby farmer was once briefly responsible, goes far
towards solving the riddle. The child-adopting fraternity is an
extensive one, and finds clients in all grades of society, and there can
be little doubt that in instances innumerable, while Alley Jack is paying
the penalty of his evil behaviour by turning for his bread on the
treadmill, his brothers, made legitimate by the timely reformation and
marriage of Alley Jack’s father, are figuring in their proper sphere, and
leisurely and profitably developing the intellect they inherit from their
brilliant papa. Alley Jack, too, has his share of the family talent—all
the brain, all the sensitiveness, all the “blood” of the respectable
stock a reckless sprig of which is responsible for Jack’s being. It is
only in the nature of things to suppose that Jack’s blood is tainted with
the wildness of wicked papa; and here we have in Alley Jack a type of
that bold intellectual villain whose clique of fifty or so, as Lord
Shaftesbury recently declared, is more to be dreaded than as many hundred
of the dull and plodding sort of thief, the story of whose exploits
figure daily in the newspapers.
We have, however, a little wandered away from the subject in hand, which
is not concerning neglected children who have become thieves, but
neglected children, simply, whose future is not as yet ascertained.
Speaking of the professional child farmer, it has been already remarked
that his sole object, as regards these innocents that are adopted for a
sum paid down, is to get rid of them as secretly and quickly as possible.
And assuming the preservation of health and life in the little mortal to
be of the first importance, there can be no question that he has a better
chance of both, even though his treacherous “adopter” deserts him on a
doorstep, than if he were so kindly cruel as to tolerate his existence at
the “farm.” It is those unfortunate infants who are not “adopted,” but
merely housed and fed at so much per week or month, who are the greater
sufferers. True, it is to the interest of the practitioners who adopt
this branch of baby-farming to keep life in their little charges, since
with their death terminates the more or less profitable contract entered
into between themselves and the child’s parent or guardian; but no less
true is it that it is to the “farmers’” interest and profit to keep down
their expenditure in the nursery at as low an ebb as is consistent with
the bare existence of its luckless inhabitants. The child is welcome to
live on starvation diet just as long as it may. It is very welcome
indeed to do so, since the longer it holds out, the larger the number of
shillings the ogres that have it in charge will be enabled to grind out
of its poor little bones. These are not the “farmers” who append to
their advertisements the notification that “children of ill-health are
not objected to.” They are by far too good judges for that. What they
rejoice in is a fine, robust, healthy-lunged child, with whom some such
noble sum as a shilling a day is paid. Such an article is as good as a
gift of twenty pounds to them. See the amount of privation such a child
can stand before it succumbs! The tenacity of life in children of
perfectly sound constitution is proverbial. A ha’p’orth of bread, and a
ha’p’orth of milk daily will suffice to keep the machinery of life from
coming to a sudden standstill. By such a barely sufficient link will the
poor little helpless victim be held to life, while what passes as natural
causes attack and gradually consume it, and drag it down to its grave.
This, in the baby-farmer’s estimation, is a first-rate article—the pride
of the market, and without doubt the most profitable. The safest too.
Children will pine. Taken from their mother, it is only to be expected
that they should. Therefore, when the poor mother, who is working of
nights as well as days, that “nurse’s money” may be punctually paid,
visits her little one, and finds it thin and pale and wasting, she is not
amazed, although her conscience smites her cruelly, and her heart is fit
to break. She is only too thankful to hear “nurse” declare that she is
doing all she can for the little darling. It is her only consolation,
and she goes away hugging it while “nurse” and her old man make merry
over gin bought with that hard, hard-earned extra sixpence that the poor
mother has left to buy baby some little comfort.
I trust and hope that what is here set down will not be regarded as mere
tinsel and wordy extravagance designed to produce a “sensation” in the
mind of the reader. There is no telling into whose hands a book may
fall. Maybe, it is not altogether impossible eyes may scan this page
that have been recently red with weeping over the terrible secret that
will keep but a little longer, and for the inevitable launching of which
provision must be made. To such a reader, with all kindliness, I would
whisper words of counsel. Think not “twice,” but many times before you
adopt the “readiest” means of shirking the awful responsibility you have
incurred. Rely on it, you will derive no lasting satisfaction out of
this “readiest” way, by which, of course, is meant the way to which the
villanous child-farmer reveals an open door. Be righteously courageous,
and take any step rather, as you would I am sure if you were permitted to
raise a corner and peep behind the curtain that conceals the hidden
mysteries of adopted-child murder.
As a volunteer explorer into the depths of social mysteries, once upon a
time I made it my business to invade the den of a child-farmer. The
result of the experiment was printed in a daily newspaper or magazine at
the time, so I will here make but brief allusion to it. I bought the
current number of the newspaper more than once here mentioned, and
discovering, as usual, a considerable string of child-adopting and
nursing advertisements, I replied to the majority of them, professing to
have a child “on my hands,” and signing myself “M. D.” My intention
being to trap the villains, I need not say that in every case my reply to
their preliminary communications was couched in such carefully-considered
terms as might throw the most suspicious off their guard. But I found
that I had under-estimated the cunning of the enemy. Although the
innocent-seeming bait was made as attractive and savoury as possible, at
least half of the farmers to whom my epistles were addressed vouchsafed
no reply. There was something about it not to their liking, evidently.
Three or four of the hungry pike bit, however, one being a lady signing
herself “Y. Z.” In her newspaper advertisement, if I rightly remember,
persons whom it concerned were to address, “Y. Z.,” Post Office, —
Street, Stepney. “Y. Z.” replying to mine so addressed, said that, as
before stated, she was willing to adopt a little girl of weakly
constitution at the terms I suggested, her object being chiefly to secure
a companion for her own little darling, who had lately, through death,
been deprived of his own dear little sister. “Y. Z.” further suggested
that I should appoint a place where we could “meet and arrange.”
This, however, was not what I wanted. It was quite evident from the tone
of the lady’s note that she was not at all desirous that the meeting
should take place at her abode. Again I was to address, “Post Office.”
To bring matters to a conclusion, I wrote, declaring that nothing could
be done unless I could meet “Y. Z.” at her own abode. No answer was
returned to this my last, and it was evidently the intention of “Y. Z.”
to let the matter drop.
I was otherwise resolved, however. I had some sort of clue, and was
resolved to follow it up. By what subtle arts and contrivance I managed
to trace “Y. Z.” from “Post Office” to her abode need not here be
recited. Armed with her real name and the number of the street in which
she resided, I arrived at the house, and at the door of it just as the
postman was rapping to deliver a letter to the very party I had come
uninvited to visit. I may say that the house was of the small four or
five-roomed order, and no more or less untidy or squalid than is commonly
to be found in the back streets of Stepney or Bethnal Green.
“Oxleek” was the original of “Y. Z.,” and of the slatternly,
ragged-haired girl who opened the door I asked if that lady was at home.
The young woman said that she was out—that she had “gone to the Li-ver.”
The young woman spoke with a rapid utterance, and was evidently in a
mighty hurry to get back to some business the postman’s knock had
summoned her from.
“I beg your pardon, miss, gone to the —”
“Li-ver; where you pays in for young uns’ berryins and that,” she
responded; “she ain’t at home, but he is. I’ll call him.”
And so she did. And presently a husky voice from the next floor called
out, “Hullo! what is it?”
“Here’s a gentleman wants yer, and here’s a letter as the postman jest
left.”
“Ask him if he’s the doctor; I’ve got the young un, I can’t come down,”
the husky voice was again heard to exclaim.
To be sure I was not a doctor, not a qualified practitioner that is to
say, but as far as the Oxleek family knew me I was “M.D.;” and pacifying
my grumbling conscience with this small piece of jesuitism, I blandly
nodded my head to the young woman when she recited to me Mr. Oxleek’s
query.
“Then you’d better go up, and p’raps you wouldn’t mind taking this letter
up with you,” said she.
I went up; it was late in the evening and candlelight, in the room on the
next floor that is, but not on the stairs; but had it been altogether
dark, I might have discovered Mr. Oxleek by the stench of his tobacco. I
walked in at the half-open door.
There was Mr. Oxleek by the fire, the very perfection of an indolent,
ease-loving, pipe-smoking, beer-soaking wretch as ever sat for his
portrait. He was a man verging on fifty, I should think, with a pair of
broad shoulders fit to carry a side of beef, and as greasy about the
cuffs and collar of his tattered jacket as though at some early period of
his existence he had carried sides of beef. But that must have been many
years ago, for the grease had all worn black with age, and the shoulders
of the jacket were all fretted through by constant friction against the
back of the easy-chair he sat in. He wore slippers—at least, he wore
_one_ slipper; the other one, all slouched down at heel, had slipped off
his lazy foot a few inches too far for easy recovery, and there it lay.
A villanously dirty face had Mr. Oxleek, and a beard of at least a
month’s growth. It was plain to be seen that one of Mr. Oxleek’s most
favourite positions of sitting was with his head resting against that
part of the wall that was by the side of the mantelshelf, for there,
large as a dinner plate, was the black greasy patch his dirty hair had
made. He had been smoking, for there, still smouldering, was his filthy
little pipe on the shelf, and by the side of it a yellow jug all streaked
and stained with ancient smears of beer.
He was not quite unoccupied, however; he was nursing a baby! He, the
pipe-sucking, beer-swigging, unshaven, dirty, lazy ruffian, was nursing a
poor little creature less than a year old, as I should judge, with its
small, pinched face reposing against his ragged waistcoat, in the pocket
of which his tobacco was probably kept. The baby wore its bedgown, as
though it had once been put to bed, and roused to be nursed. It was a
very old and woefully begrimed bedgown, bearing marks of Mr. Oxleek’s
dirty paws, and of his tobacco dust, and of physic clumsily administered
and spilt. It would appear too much like “piling up the agony” did I
attempt to describe that baby’s face. It was the countenance of an
infant that had cried itself to sleep, and to whom pain was so familiar,
that it invaded its dreams, causing its mites of features to twitch and
quiver so that it would have been a mercy to wake it.
“Evening, sir; take a cheer!” remarked Mr. Oxleek, quite hospitably;
“this is the young un, sir.”
It was very odd. Clearly there was a great mistake somewhere, and yet as
far as they had gone, the proceedings were not much at variance with the
original text. I was “M.D.,” and a doctor was expected. “This was the
young un,” Mr. Oxleek declared, and a young one, a bereaved young one who
had lost his darling playmate, was a prominent feature in his wife’s
letter to me.
“Oh, is that the young one?” I remarked.
“Yes; a heap of trouble; going after the last, I’m afeard.”
“The same symptoms, eh?”
“Just the same. Reg’ler handful she is, and no mistake.”
This then was _not_ the “young un” Mrs. Oxleek had written about. This
was a girl, it seemed.
“Pray, how long is it since a medical man saw the child?” I inquired, I
am afraid in a tone that roused suspicion in Mr. Oxleek’s mind.
“Oh, you know, when he came last week—you’re come instead of him? You
_have_ come instead of him, haven’t you?”
“No, indeed,” I replied. “I’ve come to talk about that advertisement of
yours.”
Mr. Oxleek for a moment looked blank, but only for a moment. He saw the
trap just as he was about to set his foot in it, and withdrew in time.
“Not here,” he remarked, impudently.
“But I must beg your pardon, it is here. You forget. I wrote to you as
M.D.”
By this time Mr. Oxleek had seized and lit his short pipe, and was
puffing away at it with great vigour.
“You’re come to the wrong shop, I tell you,” he replied, from behind the
impenetrable cloud; “we don’t know no ‘M.D.’ nor M.P., nor M. anythink;
it’s a mistake.”
“Perhaps if I show you your wife’s writing, you will be convinced?”
“No, I shan’t; it’s all a mistake, I tell you.”
I sat down on a chair.
“Will your wife be long before she returns?” I inquired.
“Can’t say—oh, here she comes; _now_ p’raps you’ll believe that you’re
come to the wrong shop. My dear, what do we know about M.D.’s, or
advertising, eh?”
“Nothing.”
Mrs. Oxleek was a short, fat woman, with a sunny smile on her florid
face, and a general air of content about her. She had brought in with
her a pot of beer and a quantity of pork sausages for supper.
“Nothing,” she repeated instantly, taking the cue, “who says that we do?”
“This gentleman’s been a tacklin’ me a good ’un, I can tell you!—says
that he’s got your writing to show for summat or other.”
“Where is my writing?” asked Mrs. Oxleek, defiantly.
“This is it, if I am not mistaken, ma’am.” And I displayed it.
“Ah! that’s where it is, you see,” said she, with a triumphant chuckle,
“you _are_ mistaken. You are only wasting your time, my good sir. My
name isn’t ‘Y. Z.,’ and never was. Allow me to light you down-stairs, my
good sir.”
And I did allow her. What else could I do? At the same time, and
although my investigations led to nothing at all, I came away convinced,
as doubtless the reader is, that there was no “mistake,” and that Mr. and
Mrs. Oxleek were of the tribe of ogres who fatten on little children.
Singularly enough, as I revise these pages for the press, there appears
in the newspapers a grimly apt illustration of the above statement. So
exactly do the details of the case in question bear out the arguments
used in support of my views of baby-farming, that I will take the liberty
of setting the matter before the reader just as it was set before the
coroner.
“An investigation of a singular character was held by Mr. Richards on
Thursday night, at the Lord Campbell Tavern, Bow, respecting the
death of Frederick Wood, aged two years and three months.
“Miss A. W—, of Hoxton, said deceased was a sickly child, and ten
months ago witness took it to Mrs. Savill, of 24, Swayton Road, Bow.
She paid her four-and-sixpence a week to take care of the child. She
never saw more than two other babies at Mrs. Savill’s house. She
thought her child was thoroughly attended to. The deceased met with
an accident and its thigh was broken, but the doctor said that the
witness need not put herself out in the slightest degree, for the
child was getting on very well. Witness could not get away from
business more than once a week to see the child. She had not seen
the child for five weeks.
“Mrs. Caroline Savill said she was the wife of a porter in the city.
The deceased had been with her ten months. She put him to bed at
nine o’clock on Saturday night, and at half-past eight on Sunday
morning she said to her daughter, ‘He looks strange,’ and then she
put a looking-glass to his mouth and found that he was dead.
“By the Coroner: She could account for the broken thigh. Last
October when she was taking deceased up to bed, she slipped down and
fell upon the child. She was quite certain that she was sober. It
was a pair of old boots that caused her to slip. She had eleven
children to keep at Bow.
“A Juryman: You keep, in fact, a baby-farm?
“Witness: That I must leave to your generosity, gentlemen. In
continuation, witness stated that out of the eleven children _five
had died_. There had been no inquest on either of them. The
deceased’s bed was an egg-box with some straw in it. The egg-box was
a short one, and was sixteen inches wide. The child could not turn
in it. She never tied deceased’s legs together. She never
discovered that the child’s thigh was broken till the morning
following the night when she fell on it. He cried and she put him to
bed. She fell upon the edge of the stairs and her weight was on him.
She sent for a doctor next day.
“Doctor Atkins said he was called to see the dead body of the
deceased last Sunday. The child had a malformed chest. Death had
arisen from effusion of serum on the brain from natural causes, and
not from neglect. Witness had attended the deceased for the broken
thigh. He believed that the bones had not united when death took
place.
“The jury, after a long consultation, returned a verdict of ‘death
from natural causes;’ and they wished to append a censure, but the
coroner refused to record it.”
That is the whole of the pretty story of which the reader must be left to
form his own opinion. Should that opinion insist on a censure as one of
its appendages, the reader must of course be held personally responsible
for it. It is all over now. The poor little victim whom a Miss of his
name placed with the Bow “child-farmer,” “by leave of your generosity,
gentlemen,” is dead and buried. It would have been a mercy when his
unsteady nurse fell on and crushed him on the edge of the stairs, if she
had crushed his miserable life out, instead of only breaking a thigh.
Since last October, with one small leg literally in the grave, he must
have had a dismal time of it, poor little chap, and glad, indeed, must
his spirit have been when its clay tenement was lifted out of his coffin
cradle—the egg-box with the bit of straw in it—and consigned to the
peaceful little wooden house that the cemetery claimed. It is all over
with Frederick John Wood; and his mamma, or whoever he was who was at
liberty only once a week to come and see him, is released from the
crushing burden his maintenance imposed on her, and Mrs. Savill by this
time has doubtless filled up the egg-box the little boy’s demise rendered
vacant. Why should she not, when she left the coroner’s court without a
stain on her character? It is all over. The curtain that was raised
just a little has been dropped again, and the audience has dispersed, and
nobody will think again of the tragedy the darkened stage is ready to
produce again at the shortest notice, until the coroner’s constable rings
the bell and the curtain once more ascends.
And so we shall go on, unless the law steps in to our aid. Why does it
not do so? It is stringent and vigilant enough as regards inferior
animals. It has a stern eye for pigs, and will not permit them to be
kept except on certain inflexible conditions. It holds dogs in leash,
and permits them to live only as contributors to Her Majesty’s Inland
Revenue. It holds its whip over lodging-house keepers, and under
frightful pains and penalties they may not swindle a lodger of one out of
his several hundred regulation feet of air; but it takes no heed of the
cries of its persecuted babes and sucklings. Anyone may start as a
professed adopter of children. Anyone however ignorant, and brutal, and
given to slipping down stairs, may start as a baby-farmer, with liberty
to do as she pleases with the helpless creatures placed in her charge.
What she pleases first of all to do, as a matter of course, is to pare
down the cost of her charge’s keep, so that she may make a living of the
parings. As has been seen, she need not even find them beds to lie on;
if she be extra economical, an egg-box with a handful of straw will do as
well.
And is there no remedy for this? Would it not be possible, at least, to
issue licences to baby-keepers as they are at present issued to
cow-keepers? It may appear a brutal way of putting the matter, but it
becomes less so when one considers how much at present the brutes have
the best of it.
CHAPTER IV.
WORKING BOYS.
_The London Errand Boy_.—_His Drudgery and Privations_.—_His
Temptations_.—_The London Boy after Dark_.—_The Amusements provided for
him_.
THE law takes account of but two phases of human existence,—the child
irresponsible, and the adult responsible, and overlooks as beneath its
dignity the important and well-marked steps that lead from the former
state to the latter.
Despite the illegality of the proceeding, it is the intention of the
writer hereof to do otherwise, aware as he is, and as every thinking
person may be, of how critical and all-important a period in the career
of the male human creature, is “boyhood.” Amongst people of means and
education, the grave responsibility of seeing their rising progeny safely
through the perilous “middle passage” is fully recognized; but it is
sadly different with the labouring classes, and the very poor.
It is a lamentable fact that at that period of his existence when he
needs closest watching, when he stands in need of healthful guidance, of
counsel against temptation, a boy, the son of labouring parents, is left
to himself, almost free to follow the dictates of his inclinations, be
they good or had. Nothing than this can be more injudicious, and as
regards the boy’s moral culture and worldly welfare, more unjust. Not,
as I would have it distinctly understood, that the boy of vulgar breeding
is by nature more pregnable to temptation than his same age brother of
genteel extraction; not because, fairly tested with the latter, he would
be the first to succumb to a temptation, but because, poor fellow,
outward circumstances press and hamper him so unfairly.
It has recently come to my knowledge that at the present time there is
striving hard to attract public attention and patronage an institution
styled the “Errand Boys’ Home.” It would be difficult, indeed, to
overrate the importance of such an establishment, properly conducted.
Amongst neglected children of a larger growth, those of the familiar
“errand boy” type figure first and foremost. It would be instructive to
learn how many boys of the kind indicated are annually drafted into our
great criminal army, and still more so to trace back the swift downhill
strides to the original little faltering step that shuffled from the
right path to the wrong.
Anyone who has any acquaintance with the habits and customs of the
labouring classes, must be aware that the “family” system is for the
younger branches, as they grow up, to elbow those just above them in age
out into the world; not only to make more room at the dinner-table, but
to assist in its substantial adornment. The poorer the family, the
earlier the boys are turned out, “to cut their own grass,” as the saying
is. Take a case—one in ten thousand—to be met with to-morrow or any day
in the city of London. Tom is a little lad—one of seven or eight—his
father is a labourer, earning, say, a guinea a week; and from the age of
seven Tom has been sent to a penny-a-week school; partly for the sake of
what learning he may chance to pick up, but chiefly to keep him “out of
the streets,” and to effect a simultaneous saving of his morals and of
his shoe-leather. As before stated, Tom’s is essentially a working
family. It is Tom’s father’s pride to relate how that he was “turned
out” at eight, and had to trudge through the snow to work at six o’clock
of winter mornings; and, that though on account of coughs and chilblains
and other frivolous and childish ailments, he thought it very hard at the
time, he rejoices that he was so put to it, since he has no doubt that it
tended to harden him and make him the man he is.
Accordingly, when Tom has reached the ripe age of ten, it is accounted
high time that he “got a place,” as did his father before him; and, as
there are a hundred ways in London in which a sharp little boy of ten can
be made useful, very little difficulty is experienced in Tom’s launching.
He becomes an “errand boy,” a newspaper or a printing boy, in all
probability. The reader curious as to the employment of juvenile labour,
may any morning at six or seven o’clock in the morning witness the
hurried trudging to work of as many Toms as the pavement of our great
highways will conveniently accommodate, each with his small bundle of
food in a little bag, to last him the day through. Something else he may
see, too, that would be highly comic were it not for its pitiful side.
As need not be repeated here, a boy’s estimate of earthly bliss might be
conveniently contained in a dinner-plate of goodly dimensions. When he
first goes out to work, his pride and glory is the parcel of food his
mother makes up for the day’s consumption. There he has it—breakfast,
dinner, tea! Possibly he might get as much, or very nearly, in the
ordinary course of events at home, but in a piece-meal and ignoble way.
He never in his life possessed such a wealth of food, all his own, to do
as he pleases with. Eight—ten slices of bread and butter, and may
be—especially if it happen to be Monday—a slice of meat and a lump of
cold pudding; relics of that dinner of dinners, Sunday’s dinner!
His, all his, with nobody to say nay; but still only wealth in
prospective! It is now barely seven o’clock, and, by fair eating, he
will not arrive at that delicious piece of cold pork with the crackling
on it until twelve! It is a keen, bracing morning; he has already walked
a mile or more; and it wants yet fully an hour and a half to the factory
breakfast time. It is just as broad as it is long; suppose he draws on
his breakfast allowance just to the extent of one slice? Only one, and
that in stern integrity: the topmost slice without fee or favour! But,
ah! the cruel fragrance of that juicy cut of spare-rib! It has
impregnated the whole contents of the bundle. The crust of that
abstracted slice is as savoury, almost, as the crisp-baked rind of the
original. Six bites—“too brief for friendship, not for fame”—have
consumed it, and left him, alas! hungrier than ever. Shall he?
What—taste of the sacred slice? No. It isn’t likely. The pork is for
his dinner. But the pudding—that is a supplemental sort of article; a
mere extravagance when added to so much perfection as the luscious meat
embodies. And out he hauls it; the ponderous abstraction afflicting the
hitherto compact parcel with such a shambling looseness, that it is
necessary to pause in one of the recesses of the bridge to readjust and
tighten it. But, ah! rash boy! Since thou wert not proof against the
temptation lurking in that slice of bread-and-butter, but faintly odorous
of that maddening flavour, how canst thou hope to save thyself now that
thou hast tasted of the pudding to which the pork was wedded in the
baker’s oven? It were as safe to trust thee at hungry noon with a
luscious apple-dumpling, and bid thee eat of the dough and leave the
fruit. It is all over. Reason, discretion, the admonitions of a
troubled conscience, were all gulped down with that last corner, crusty
bit, so full of gravy. The bridge’s next recess is the scene of another
halt, and of an utterly reckless spoliation of the dwindled bundle. And
now the pork is consumed, to the veriest atom, and nought remains but
four reproachful bread slices, that skulk in a corner, and almost demand
the untimely fate visited on their companions. Shall they crave in vain?
No. A pretty bundle, _this_, to take to the factory for his mates to
see. A good excuse will serve his purpose better. He will engulf the
four slices as he did the rest, and fold up his bag neatly, and hide it
in his pocket, and, when dinner-time comes, he will profess that there is
something nice at home, and he is going there to partake of it; while,
really, he will take a dismal stroll, lamenting his early weakness, and
making desperate vows for the future.
It is not, however, with Tom as the lucky owner of a filled food-bag that
we have here to deal, but with Tom who at least five days out of the six
is packed off to work with just as much bread and butter as his poor
mother can spare off the family loaf. Now “going out to work” is a
vastly different matter from going from home to school, and innocently
playing between whiles. In the first place, the real hard work he has to
perform (and few people would readily believe the enormous amount of
muscular exertion these little fellows are capable of enduring), develops
his appetite for eating to a prodigious extent. He finds the food he
brings from home as his daily ration but half sufficient. What are a
couple of slices of bread, with perhaps a morsel of cheese, considered as
a dinner for a hearty boy who has perhaps trudged from post to pillar a
dozen miles or so since his breakfast, carrying loads more or less heavy?
He hungers for more, and more is constantly in his sight if he only had
the means, a penny or twopence even, to buy it. He makes the
acquaintance of other boys; he is drawn towards them in hungry, envious
curiosity, seeing them in the enjoyment of what he so yearns after, and
they speedily inform him how easy it is to “make” not only a penny or
twopence, but a sixpence or a shilling, if he has a mind. And they are
quite right, these young counsellors of evil. The facilities for petty
pilfering afforded to the shopkeeper’s errand-boy are such as favour
momentary evil impulses. He need not engage in subtle plans for the
purloining of a shilling or a shilling’s worth. The opportunity is at
his fingers’ ends constantly. Usually he has the range of the business
premises. Few people mistrust a little boy, and he is left to mind the
shop where the money-till is, and he has free access to the store-room or
warehouse in which all manner of portable small goods are heaped in
profusion. It is an awful temptation. It is not sufficient to urge that
it should not be, and that in the case of a lad of well-regulated mind it
would not be. It would perhaps be more to the purpose to substitute
“well-regulated meals” for “well-regulated minds.” Nine times out of ten
the confessions of a discovered juvenile pilferer go to prove that he
sinned for his belly’s sake. He has no conscience above his waistband,
poor little wretch; nor can much better be expected, when we consider
that all his life, his experience and observation has taught him that the
first grand aim of human ingenuity and industry is to place a hot baked
dinner on the table of Sundays. To be sure, in the case of his
hardworking father he may never have known him resort to any other than
honest industry; he never found out that his parent was any other than an
honest man; and so long as his father or his employer does not find him
out to be any other than an honest boy, matters may run smoothly.
It is least of all my intention to make out that every errand-boy is a
petty thief; all that I maintain is that he is a human creature just
budding into existence as it were in the broad furrowed field of life,
and that his susceptibilities are tender, and should be protected from
evil influence with even extraordinary care; and that instead of which he
is but too often left to grow up as maybe. In their ignorance and hard
driving necessity, his parents having given him a spell of penny
schooling, and maintained him until he has become a marketable article,
persuade themselves that they have done for him the best they can, and
nothing remains but for him to obey his master in all things, and he will
grow to be as bright a man as his father before him.
It is only necessary to point to the large number of such children, for
they are no better, who annually swell our criminal lists, to prove that
somewhere a screw is sadly loose, and that the sooner it is set right the
better it will be for the nation. The Home for Errand Boys is the best
scheme that has as yet been put forth towards meeting the difficulty.
Its professed object, I believe, is to afford shelter and wholesome food
and healthful and harmless recreation for boys who are virtually without
a home, and who have “only a lodging.” That is to say, a place to which
they may retire to sleep come bed-time, and for which they pay what
appears as a paltry sum when regarded as so many pence per night, but
which tells up to a considerable sum by the end of a week.
The most important feature, however, of such a scheme as the Home for
Errand Boys embraces, does not appear in the vaunted advantage of reduced
cost. Its main attraction is the promise it holds out to provide its
lodgers with suitable amusement after work hours and before bed-time. If
this were done on an extensive scale, there is no telling how much real
substantial good might be accomplished. It is after work hours that boys
fall into mischief. There is no reason why these homes should not have
existence in various parts of London. One such establishment indeed is
of little practical use. If it were possible to establish such places (a
careful avoidance of everything savouring of the “asylum” and the
“reformatory” would of course be necessary) in half a dozen different
spots in the immediate neighbourhood of the city, they would doubtless
meet with extensive patronage. They might indeed be made to serve many
valuable ends that do not appear at a first glance. If these “homes”
were established east, west, north, and south, they might be all under
one management, and much good be effected by recommending deserving
members for employment. There might even be a provident fund, formed by
contributions of a penny or so a week, out of which lads unavoidably out
of employ could be supported until a job of work was found for them.
Allusion has, in a previous page, been made to that dangerous time for
working boys—the time between leaving work and retiring to bed. It would
be bad enough were the boy left to his own devices for squandering his
idle time and his hard-earned pence. This task, however, is taken out of
his hands. He has only to stroll up this street and down the next, and
he will find pitfalls already dug for him; neatly and skilfully dug, and
so prettily overspread with cosy carpeting, that they do not in the least
appear like pitfalls. It may at first sight seem that “neglected
children” are least of all likely to make it worth the while of these
diggers of pits, but it should be borne in mind that the term in question
is here applied in its most comprehensive sense, that there are children
of all ages, and that there are many more ways than one of neglecting
children. It is evident that young boys who are out at work from six
till six say, and after that spend the evening pretty much how they
please, are “neglected” in the most emphatic meaning of the term.
Parents are not apt to think so. It is little that they have to concede
him in return for his contributions to the common stock, and probably
they regard this laxity of supervision as the working boy’s due—as
something he has earned, and which is his by right. The boy himself is
nothing backward in claiming a privilege he sees accorded to so many
other boys, and it is the least troublesome thing in the world for the
parents to grant the favour. All that they stipulate for is that the boy
shall be home and a-bed in such good time as shall enable him to be up
and at work without the loss in the morning of so much as an hour; which
is a loss of just as many pence as may happen.
It may not be here out of place to make more definite allusion to the
“pitfalls” above-mentioned. Pitfall broadest and deepest is the
theatrical exhibition, known as the “penny gaff.” Some considerable time
since I wrote on this subject in the columns of the “Morning Star;” and
as precisely the old order of things prevails, and the arguments then
used against them apply with equal force now, I will, with the reader’s
permission, save myself further trouble than that which transcription
involves.
Every low district of London has its theatre, or at least an humble
substitute for one, called in vulgar parlance a “gaff.” A gaff is a
place in which, according to the strict interpretation of the term, stage
plays may not be represented. The actors of a drama may not correspond
in colloquy, only in pantomime, but the pieces brought out at the “gaff”
are seldom of an intricate character, and the not over-fastidious
auditory are well content with an exhibition of dumb show and gesture,
that even the dullest comprehension may understand. The prices of
admission to these modest temples of the tragic muse, are judiciously
regulated to the means of the neighbourhood, and range from a penny to
threepence. There is no “half-price for children,” and for the simple
reason that such an arrangement would reduce the takings exactly fifty
per cent. They are _all_ children who support the gaff. Costermonger
boys and girls, from eight or nine to fourteen years old, and errand boys
and girls employed at factories. As before mentioned, every district has
its own “gaff.” There is one near Peter Street, Westminster; a second in
the New Cut, at Lambeth; a third in Whitecross Street; a fourth, fifth,
and sixth between Whitechapel Church and Ratcliff Highway. It may,
without fear of contradiction, be asserted, that within a circuit of five
miles of St. Paul’s, at least twenty of these dangerous dens of amusement
might be enumerated.
At best of times they are dangerous. The best of times being when
current topics of a highly sensational character are lacking, and the
enterprising manager is compelled to fall back on some comparatively
harmless stock piece. But the “gaff” proprietor has an eye to business,
and is a man unlikely to allow what he regards as his chances to slip by
him. He at once perceives a chance in the modern mania that pervades the
juvenile population for a class of literature commonly known as “highly
sensational.” He has no literature to vend, but he does not despair on
that account. He is aware that not one in five of the youth who honour
his establishment with their patronage can read. If he, the worthy gaff
proprietor, had any doubts on the subject, he might settle them any day
by listening at his door while an admiring crowd of “regular customers”
flocking thereto speculated on the pleasures of the night as foretold in
glowing colours on the immense placards that adorn the exterior of his
little theatre. They can understand the pictures well enough, but the
descriptive legends beneath them are mysteries to which few possess the
key. If these few are maliciously reticent, the despair of the benighted
ones is painful to witness, as with puckered mouths and knitted brows
they essay to decipher the strange straight and crooked characters, and
earnestly consult with each other as to when and where they had seen the
like. Failing in this, the gaff proprietor may have heard them exclaim
in tones of but half-assured consolation, “Ah, well! it doesn’t matter
what the _reading_ is; the piece won’t be spoke, it’ll be _acted_, so we
are sure to know all about it when we come to-night.”
Under such circumstances, it is easy enough to understand the agonized
anxiety of low-lived ignorant Master Tomkins in these stirring times of
Black Highwaymen, and Spring Heel Jacks, and Boy Detectives. In the shop
window of the newsvendor round the corner, he sees displayed all in a
row, a long line of “penny numbers,” the mere illustrations pertaining to
which makes his heart palpitate, and his hair stir beneath his ragged
cap. There he sees bold highwaymen busy at every branch of their
delightful avocation, stopping a lonely traveller and pressing a pistol
barrel to his affrighted head, and bidding him deliver his money or his
life; or impeding the way of the mail coach, the captain, hat in hand,
courteously robbing the inside passengers (prominent amongst whom is a
magnificent female with a low bodice, who evidently is not insensible to
the captain’s fascinating manner), while members of his gang are seen in
murderous conflict with the coachman and the guard, whose doom is but too
surely foreshadowed. Again, here is a spirited woodcut of a booted and
spurred highwayman in headlong flight from pursuing Bow Street officers
who are close at his heels, and in no way daunted or hurt by the contents
of the brace of pistols the fugitive has manifestly just discharged point
blank at their heads.
But fairly in the way of the bold rider is a toll-gate, and in a state of
wild excitement the toll-gate keeper is seen grasping the long bar that
crosses the road. The tormenting question at once arises in the mind of
Master Tomkins—is he pushing it or pulling it? Is he friendly to the
Black Knight of the Road or is he not? Master T. feels that his hero’s
fate is in that toll-gate man’s hands; he doesn’t know if he should
vastly admire him or regard him with the deadliest enmity. From the
bottom of his heart he hopes that the toll-gate man may be friendly. He
would cheerfully give up the only penny he has in his pocket to know that
it were so. He would give a penny for a simple “yes” or “no,” and all
the while there are eight good letter-press pages along with the picture
that would tell him all about it if he only were able to read! There is
a scowl on his young face as he reflects on this, and bitterly he thinks
of his hardhearted father who sent him out to sell fusees when he should
have been at school learning his A B C. Truly, he went for a short time
to a Ragged School, but there the master kept all the jolly books to
himself—the “Knight of the Road” and that sort of thing, and gave him to
learn out of a lot of sober dry rubbish without the least flavour in it.
Who says that he is a dunce and won’t learn? Try him now. Buy a few
numbers of the “Knight of the Road” and sit down with him, and make him
spell out every word of it. Never was boy so anxious after knowledge.
He never picked a pocket yet, but such is his present desperate spirit,
that if he had the chance of picking the art of reading out of one, just
see if he wouldn’t precious soon make himself a scholar?
Thus it is with the neglected boy, blankly illiterate. It need not be
supposed, however, that a simple and quiet perusal of the astounding
adventures of his gallows heroes from the printed text would completely
satisfy the boy with sufficient knowledge to enable him to spell through
a “penny number.” It whets his appetite merely. It is one thing to
_read_ about the flashing and slashing of steel blades, and of the gleam
of pistol barrels, and the whiz of bullets, and of the bold highwayman’s
defiant “ha! ha!” as he cracks the skull of the coach-guard, preparatory
to robbing the affrighted passengers; but to be satisfactory the marrow
and essence of the blood-stirring tragedy can only be conveyed to him in
bodily shape. There are many elements of a sanguinary drama that may not
well be expressed in words. As, for instance, when Bill Bludjon, after
having cut the throat of the gentleman passenger, proceeds to rob his
daughter, and finding her in possession of a locket with some grey hair
in it, he returns it to her with the observation, “Nay, fair lady, Bill
Bludjon may be a thief: in stern defence of self he may occasionally shed
blood, but, Perish the Liar who says of him that he respects not the grey
hairs of honourable age!” There is not much in this as set down in
print. To do Bill justice, you must see how his noble countenance lights
as his generous bosom heaves with chivalrous sentiments; how defiantly he
scowls, and grinds his indignant teeth as he hisses the word
“_Liar_!”—how piously he turns his eyes heavenward as he alludes to
“honourable old age.” It is in these emotional subtleties that the hero
rises out of the vulgar robber with his villanous Whitechapel cast of
countenance, and his great hands, hideous with murder stains, must be
witnessed to be appreciated. It is the gaff proprietor’s high aim and
ambition to effect this laudable object, and that he does so with a
considerable amount of, at least, pecuniary success, is proved by his
“crowded houses” nightly.
Now that the police are to be roused to increased vigilance in the
suppression, as well as the arrest of criminality, it would be as well if
those in authority directed their especial attention to these penny
theatres. As they at present exist, they are nothing better than
hot-beds of vice in its vilest forms. Girls and boys of tender age are
herded together to witness the splendid achievements of “dashing
highwaymen,” and of sirens of the Starlight Sall school; nor is this all.
But bad as this is, it is really the least part of the evil. The penny
“gaff” is usually a small place, and when a specially atrocious piece
produces a corresponding “run,” the “house” is incapable of containing
the vast number of boys and girls who nightly flock to see it. Scores
would be turned away from the doors, and their halfpence wasted, were it
not for the worthy proprietor’s ingenuity. I am now speaking of what I
was an actual witness of in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch. Beneath the
pit and stage of the theatre was a sort of large kitchen, reached from
the end of the passage, that was the entrance to the theatre by a flight
of steep stairs. There were no seats in this kitchen, nor furniture of
any kind. There was a window looking toward the street, but this was
prudently boarded up. At night time all the light allowed in the kitchen
proceeded from a feeble and dim gas jet by the wall over the fire-place.
Wretched and dreary-looking as was this underground chamber, it was a
source of considerable profit to the proprietor of the “gaff” overhead.
As before stated, when anything peculiarly attractive was to be seen, the
theatre filled within ten minutes of opening the besieged doors. Not to
disappoint the late comers, however, all who pleased might pay and go
downstairs until the performance just commenced (it lasted generally
about an hour and a half) terminated. The prime inducement held out was,
that “then they would be sure of good seats.” The inevitable result of
such an arrangement may be easier guessed than described. For my part, I
know no more about it than was to be derived from a hasty glance from the
stair-head. There was a stench of tobacco smoke, and an uproar of
mingled youthful voices—swearing, chaffing, and screaming, in boisterous
mirth. This was all that was to be heard, the Babel charitably rendering
distinct pronouncing of blasphemy or indecency unintelligible. Nor was
it much easier to make out the source from whence the hideous clamour
proceeded, for the kitchen was dim as a coal cellar, and was further
obscured by the foul tobacco smoke the lads were emitting from their
short pipes. A few were romping about—“larking,” as it is termed—but the
majority, girls and boys, were squatted on the floor, telling and
listening to stories, the quality of which might but too truly be guessed
from the sort of applause they elicited. A few—impatient of the
frivolity that surrounded them, and really anxious for “the play”—stood
apart, gazing with scowling envy up at the ceiling, on the upper side of
which, at frequent intervals, there was a furious clatter of hobnailed
boots, betokening the delirious delight of the happy audience in full
view of Starlight Sall, in “silk tights” and Hessians, dancing a Highland
fling. Goaded to desperation, one or two of the tormented ones down in
the kitchen reached up with their sticks and beat on the ceiling a
tattoo, responsive to the battering of the hobnailed boots before
mentioned. This, however, was a breach of “gaff” rule that could not be
tolerated. With hurried steps the proprietor approached the kitchen
stairs, and descried me. “This ain’t the theeater; you’ve no business
here, sir!” said he, in some confusion, as I imagined. “No, my friend, I
have no business here, but _you_ have a very pretty business, and one for
which, when comes the Great Day of Reckoning, I would rather you answered
than me.” But I only thought this; aloud, I made the gaff proprietor an
apology, and thankfully got off his abominable premises.
CHAPTER V.
THE PROBLEM OF DELIVERANCE.
_Curious Problem_.—_The Best Method of Treatment_.—_The_ “_Child of the
Gutter_” _not to be Entirely Abolished_.—_The Genuine Alley-Bred
Arab_.—_The Poor Lambs of the Ragged Flock_.—_The Tree of Evil in Our
Midst_.—_The Breeding Places of Disease and Vice_.
THE curious problem—“What is the best method of treatment to adopt
towards improving the condition of neglected children, and to diminish
their number for the future?” has been attempted for solution from so
many points of attack, and by means so various, that a bare enumeration
of the instances would occupy much more space than these limited pages
afford.
We may never hope entirely to abolish the child of the gutter. To a
large extent, as has been shown, he is a natural growth of vices that
seem inseparable from our social system: he is of the world, the flesh,
and the devil; and, until we purge our grosser nature, and become
angelic, we must tolerate him as we must the result of all our
ill-breeding. It is a thousand pities that it should be so, because, as
I have endeavoured in these pages to show, the neglected child issuing
from the source here hinted at, is by far the most unmanageable and
dangerous. Blood is thicker than any water, not excluding ditch water;
and the chances are that the unlucky “love-child” will not remain content
to grovel in the kennel to which an accident of birth consigned him, but,
out of his rebellious nature, conceive a deadly hatred against the world
that has served him so shabbily, and do his best to be revenged on it.
It is not of the neglected child of this breed that I would say a few
concluding words, but of the genuine alley-bred Arab of the City; the
worthy descendant of a tribe that has grown so used to neglect that it
regards it as its privilege, and fiercely resents any move that may be
taken towards its curtailment.
If ever a distressed creature had friends surely this one has. From time
immemorial it has been the pet of the philanthropist. Unsavoury,
unsightly bantling as it is, he is never tired of fondling it, spending
his time and money over it, and holding it up to the commiseration of a
humane public, and building all manner of homes and asylums for it; but
he still remains on hand. If he would grow up, and after being bound
’prentice to a wholesome trade cease to trouble us, there would be some
satisfaction in the business; but it never grows up. It is like the
borrowed beggar’s brat, that, in defiance of the progress of time, never
emerges from its bedgown, and never grows too big to be tucked under one
arm, leaving the other at liberty to arrest the charitable passer-by.
To be sure it is a great consolation to know that despite our
non-success, the poor little object of our solicitude is in no danger of
being dropped in hopelessness and abandoned, but it would be encouraging
to discover that we were making some progress with our main design, which
can be nothing less than the complete extinction of children of the
“gutter” tribe, such as we are now discussing.
As it is, we are making scarcely any progress at all. I am aware that
statistics are against this statement, that the triumphant reports of
this and that charity point to a different conclusion. This home has
rescued so many little ones from the streets—that asylum can show a
thousand decently clad and educated children that but for its efforts
would at this moment be either prowling the streets, picking up a more
precarious living than the stray dog picks up, or leading the life of a
petty thief, and rapidly earning his right to penal servitude.
This, and much more, is doubtless true, but there remains the grim fact
that our filthy byways still swarm with these dirty, ragged,
disease-stricken little ones, and as plentifully as of yore they infest
our highways, an eyesore and a shuddering to all decent beholders. If
there has occurred any recent diminution in their number, I should
rejoice to know it; but that such is in the least degree the fact,
certainly I am not justified in assuming in the face of the urgent
appeals daily put forth by the wise in such matters, and who never tire
of urging on the benevolently disposed, that never was there such need as
now to be up and stirring.
And it can never be otherwise while we limit our charitable doing to
providing for those poor lambs of the ragged flock as fast as they are
bred, and cast loose on the chance of their being mercifully kidnapped
and taken care of. As with indiscriminate giving to beggars, it may be
urged that we can never go wrong in ministering to the distress of the
infantine and helpless. Opportunities of doing so should perhaps be
joyfully hailed by us as affording wholesome exercise of our belief in
the Christian religion, but we may rely on it that the supply of the
essential ingredient towards the said exercise will never be unequal to
the demand. Our charitable exertion flows in too narrow a channel. It
is pure, and of depth immeasurable, but it is not broad enough. We have
got into a habit of treating our neglected children as an evil
unavoidable, and one that must be endured with kindly and pious
resignation. We have a gigantic tree of evil rooted in our midst, and
our great care is to collect the ripe seeds it drops and provide against
their germinating, and we expend as much time and money in the process as
judiciously applied would serve to tear up the old tree from its
tenacious holding, and for ever destroy its mischievous power. No doubt
it may be justly claimed by the patrons and supporters of homes and
asylums, that by rescuing these children from the streets they are saved
from becoming debased and demoralized as were the parents they sprang
from, and so, in course of time, by a steady perseverance in their
system, the breed of gutter prowlers must become extinct; but that is a
tedious and roundabout method of reform that can only be tolerated until
a more direct route is discovered, and one that can scarcely prove
satisfactory to those who look forward to a lifetime return for some of
their invested capital.
We may depend on it that we shall never make much real progress in our
endeavours to check the growth of these seedlings and offshoots of ragged
poverty and reckless squalor until we turn our attention with a settled
purpose to the haunts they are bred in. Our present system compels us
even in its first preliminary steps to do violence against nature. We
cannot deal with our babies of the gutter effectually, and with any
reasonable chance of success, until we have separated them entirely from
their _home_. We may tame them and teach them to feed out of our hands,
and to repeat after us the alphabet, and even words of two and three
syllables. We may even induce them to shed their bedraggled feathers and
adopt a more decent plumage; but they can never be other than restless
and ungovernable, and unclean birds, while they inhabit the vile old
parent nest.
It is these vile old nests that should be abolished. While they are
permitted to exist, while Rosemary Lane, and Peter Street, Westminster,
and Back Church Lane in Whitechapel, and Cow Cross and Seven Dials, and a
hundred similar places are tolerated and allowed to flourish, it is
utterly impossible to diminish the race of children of the gutter. Why
should these breeding places of disease and vice and all manner of
abomination be permitted to cumber the earth? There is but one opinion
that these horrid dens are the sources from which are derived two-thirds
of our neglected ragged urchin population. Further, it is generally
conceded, that it is not because of the prevalence of extreme poverty
there; the filthy little public-houses invariably to be found lurking in
the neighbourhood of rags and squalor would not be so prosperous if such
were the case. It is the pestilential atmosphere of the place that will
let nothing good live in it. You may never purify it. It is altogether
a rotten carcase; and if you stuff it to the mouth with chloride of lime,
and whitewash it an inch thick, you will make nothing else of it. It is
a sin and a disgrace that human creatures should be permitted to herd in
such places. One and all should be abolished, and wholesome habitations
built in their stead. Half measures will not meet the case. That has
been sufficiently proved but recently, when, not for morality or decency
sake, but to make room for a railway, a few score of these odious
hole-and-corner “slums” were razed to the ground.
The result was to make bad worse. The wretched occupants of the doomed
houses clung to them with as much tenacity as though each abode were an
ark, and if they were turned out of it, it would be to drown in the
surrounding flood. When the demolishers came with their picks and
crows—the honest housebreakers,—and mounted to the roof, the garret
lodgers retreated to the next floor, and so on, debating the ground step
by step before the inexorable pickaxe, until they were driven into the
cellar and could go no lower. Then they had to run for it; but, poor
purblind wretches, they had lived so long in dungeon darkness, that the
broad light of day was unbearable. Like rats disturbed from a drain, all
they desired was to escape out of sight and hide again; and again, like
rats, they knew of neighbouring burrows and scuttled to them with all
speed.
Ousted from Slusher’s Alley, they sought Grimes’s Rents. Grimes’s Rents
were already fully occupied by renters, but the present was a calamity
that might overtake anyone, and the desired shelter was not refused. It
was a mere matter of packing a little closer. The donkey that lodged in
the cellar was turned into the wash-house, and there was a commodious
apartment for a large family, and nothing was easier than to rig up an
old counterpane on an extended string, so converting one chamber into
two. Hard as it is to believe, and in mockery of all our Acts of
Parliament for the better ordering of lodging-houses, and our legal
enactments regulating the number of cubic feet of air every lodger was
entitled to and might insist on, in hundreds of cases this condition of
things exists at the present writing. Within a stone’s cast of the
Houses of Parliament, where sit six hundred wise gentlemen empanelled to
make what laws they please for improving the condition of the people,
every one of the said six hundred being an educated man of liberal mind,
and fully recognising the Christian maxim that godliness and cleanliness
are identical, may be found human creatures housed in places that would
ruin the health of a country-bred pig were he removed thereto. In these
same places parents and grown up and little children herd in the same
room night and day. Sickness does not break up the party, or even the
presence of grim Death himself. Singularly enough, however, more
ceremony is observed with new life than with old Death. A missionary
friend related to me the case of a family of five inhabiting one small
room, and the youngest boy, aged thirteen, died. The domestic
arrangements, however, were not in the least disturbed by the melancholy
event; the lad’s coffin was laid against the wall, and meals were cooked
and eaten and the two beds made and occupied as usual until the day of
burial. A little while after, however, the mother gave birth to a child,
and my friend visiting the family found it grouped on the landing
partaking of a rough-and-ready tea. It was voted “undacent to be
inthrudin’” until next day. However, the decent scruples of the head of
the family did not hold out beyond that time, and by the evening of the
next day the old order of things was quite restored.
How in the name of goodness and humanity can we, under such
circumstances, hope to be delivered from the curse of neglected children?
II.—Professional Thieves.
CHAPTER VI.
THEIR NUMBER AND THEIR DIFFICULTIES.
_Twenty Thousand Thieves in London_.—_What it Means_.—_The Language of_
“_Weeds_.”—_Cleverness of the Pilfering Fraternity_.—_A Protest Against a
Barbarous Suggestion_.—_The Prisoner’s great Difficulty_.—_The Moment of
Leaving Prison_.—_Bad Friends_.—_What Becomes of Good Resolutions and the
Chaplain’s Counsel_?—_The Criminal’s Scepticism of Human Goodness_.—_Life
in_ “_Little Hell_.”—_The Cow Cross Mission_.
THE happily ignorant reader, whose knowledge of the criminal classes is
confined to an occasional glance through the police court and Sessions
cases as narrated in his morning newspaper, will be shocked and amazed to
learn that within the limits of the City of London alone, an army of male
and female thieves, twenty thousand strong, find daily and nightly
employment.
It is easy to write “twenty thousand,” and easier still to read the
words. Easier than all to pass them by with but a vague idea of their
meaning, and perhaps a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders for the poor,
hard-worked policemen who must have such a terrible time of it in keeping
such an enormous predatory crew in anything like order. Still, and
without the least desire to be “sensational,” I would ask the reader,
does he fully comprehend what twenty thousand thieves in London means?
Roughly estimating the population of the metropolis as numbering three
millions, it means that amongst us one person in every hundred and fifty
is a forger, a housebreaker, a pickpocket, a shoplifter, a receiver of
stolen goods or what not; a human bird of prey, in short, bound to a
desperate pursuit of that terrible course of life into which vice or
misfortune originally casts him; a wily, cunning man-wolf, constantly on
the watch, seeking whom he may devour.
Almost every member of this formidable host is known to the “police,” but
unfortunately this advantage is almost counterbalanced by the fact that
the police are as well known to the majority of the twenty thousand. To
their experienced eyes, it is not the helmet and the blue coat that makes
the policeman. Indeed, they appear to depend not so much on visual
evidence as on some subtle power of scent such as the fox possesses in
discovering the approach of their natural enemy. They can discover the
detective in his innocent-looking smock-frock or bricklayer jacket, while
he is yet distant the length of a street. They know him by his step, or
by his clumsy affectation of unofficial loutishness. They recognise the
stiff neck in the loose neckerchief. They smell “trap,” and are superior
to it.
There is a language current amongst them that is to be met with in no
dictionary with which I am acquainted. I doubt if even the “slang
dictionary” contains more than a few of the following instances that may
be accepted as genuine. It will be seen that the prime essential of
“thieves’ latin” is brevity. By its use, much may in one or two words be
conveyed to a comrade while rapidly passing him in the street, or, should
opportunity serve, during a visit to him while in prison.
To erase the original name or number from a stolen watch, and substitute
one that is fictitious—_christening Jack_.
To take the works from one watch, and case them in another—_churching
Jack_.
Poultry stealing—_beak hunting_.
One who steals from the shopkeeper while pretending to effect an honest
purchase—_a bouncer_.
One who entices another to play at a game at which cheating rules, such
as card or skittle sharping—_a buttoner_.
The treadmill, _shin scraper_ (arising, it may be assumed, on account of
the operator’s liability, if he is not careful, to get his shins scraped
by the ever-revolving wheel).
To commit burglary—_crack a case_, or _break a drum_.
The van that conveys prisoners to gaol—_Black Maria_.
A thief who robs cabs or carriages by climbing up behind, and cutting the
straps that secure the luggage on the roof—_a dragsman_.
Breaking a square of glass—_starring the glaze_.
Training young thieves—_kidsman_.
To be transported or sent to penal servitude—_lagged_.
Three years’ imprisonment—_a stretch_.
Half stretch—_six months_.
Three months’ imprisonment—_a tail piece_.
To rob a till—_pinch a bob_.
A confederate in the practice of thimble rigging—_a nobbler_.
One who assists at a sham street row for the purpose of creating a mob,
and promoting robbery from the person—_a jolly_.
A thief who secretes goods in a shop while a confederate distracts the
attention of the shopkeeper is—_a palmer_.
A person marked for plunder—_a plant_.
Going out to steal linen in process of drying in gardens—_going snowing_.
Bad money—_sinker_.
Passer of counterfeit coins—_smasher_.
Stolen property generally—_swag_.
To go about half-naked to excite compassion—_on the shallow_.
Stealing lead from the roof of houses—_flying the blue pigeon_.
Coiners of bad money—_bit fakers_.
Midnight prowlers who rob drunken men—_bug hunters_.
Entering a dwelling house while the family have gone to church—_a dead
lurk_.
Convicted of thieving—_in for a ramp_.
A city missionary or scripture reader—_gospel grinder_.
Shop-lifting—_hoisting_.
Hidden from the police—_in lavender_.
Forged bank notes—_queer screens_.
Whipping while in prison—_scroby_ or _claws for breakfast_.
Long-fingered thieves expert in emptying ladies’ pockets—_fine wirers_.
The condemned cell—_the salt box_.
The prison chaplain—_Lady Green_.
A boy thief, lithe and thin and daring, such a one as housebreakers hire
for the purpose of entering a small window at the rear of a dwelling
house—_a little snakesman_.
So pertinaciously do the inhabitants of criminal colonies stick to their
“latin,” that a well-known writer suggests that special religious tracts,
suiting their condition, should be printed in the language, as an almost
certain method of securing their attention.
There can be no question that that of the professional thief is a
bitterly severe and laborious occupation, beset with privations that
moral people have no conception of, and involves an amount of mental
anxiety and torment that few human beings can withstand through a long
lifetime. Some years ago a clergyman with a thorough acquaintance with
the subject he was handling, wrote on “Thieves and Thieving,” in the
“Cornhill Magazine,” and _apropos_ of this benumbing atmosphere of dread,
that constantly encompasses even the old “professional,” he says:—
“But if an acquaintance with the thieves’ quarters revealed to me the
amazing subtlety and cleverness of the pilfering fraternity, it also
taught me the guilty fear, the wretchedness, the moral guilt, and the
fearful hardships that fall to the lot of the professional thief.
They are never safe for a moment, and this unceasing jeopardy
produces a constant nervousness and fear. Sometimes when visiting
the sick, I have gently laid my hand on the shoulder of one of them,
who happened to be standing in the street. The man would ‘start like
a guilty thing upon a fearful summons,’ and it would take him two or
three minutes to recover his self-possession sufficiently to ask me
‘How are you to-day, sir?’ I never saw the adage, ‘Suspicion always
haunts the guilty mind,’ so painfully illustrated as in the thieves’
quarter, by the faces of grey-haired criminals, whose hearts had been
worn into hardness by the dishonouring chains of transportation.
When, in the dusk of the evening, I have spoken to one of them as he
stood idly on the public-house steps, I have spoken in a low and
altered tone, so that he might not at first recognise me: again the
guilty start as the man bent forward, anxiously peering into my
face.”
He is never at rest, the wretched professional thief. He goes about with
the tools of war perpetually in his hands, and with enemies in the front
and the rear, and to the right and the left of him. “Anybody, to hear
’em talk,” a thief once remarked to me (he was a thief at present in
possession of liberty; not an incarcerated rogue plying “gammon” as the
incarcerated rogue loves to ply it), “anybody would think, to hear ’em
talk, that it was all sugar with us while we were free, and that our
sufferings did not begin until we were caught, and ‘put away.’ Them that
think so know nothing about it. Take a case, now, of a man who is in for
getting his living ‘on the cross,’ and who has got a ‘kid’ or two, and
their mother, at home. I don’t say that it is _my_ case, but you can
take it so if you like. _She_ isn’t a thief. Ask her what she knows
about me, and she’ll tell you that, wuss luck, I’ve got in co. with some
bad uns, and she wishes that I hadn’t. She wishes that I hadn’t,
p’raps—not out of any sort of Goody-two-shoes feeling, but because she
loves me. That’s the name of it; _we_ haint got any other word for the
feelin’; and she can’t bear to think that I may, any hour, be dragged off
for six mouths, or a year, p’raps. And them’s my feelings, too, and no
mistake, day after day, and Sundays as well as week-days. She isn’t
fonder of me than I am of her, I’ll go bail for that; and as for the
kids, the girl especially, why I’d skid a waggon wheel with my body
rather than her precious skin should be grazed. Well, take my word for
it, I never go out in the morning, and the young ’un sez ‘good bye,’ but
what I think ‘good bye—yes! p’raps it’s good bye for a longer spell than
you’re dreaming about, you poor little shaver.’ And when I get out into
the street, how long am I safe? Why, only for the straight length of
that street, as far as I can see the coast clear. I may find a stopper
at any turning, or at any corner. And when you _do_ feel the hand on
your collar! I’ve often wondered what must be a chap’s feelings when the
white cap is pulled over his peepers, and old Calcraft is pawing about
his throat, to get the rope right. It must be a sight worse than the
_other_ feeling, you’ll say. Well, if it is, I wonder how long the chap
manages to hold up till he’s let go!”
I am the more anxious to remark on these lingering relics of humanity,
and, I may almost say virtue, that, if properly sought, may be discovered
in the most hardened criminals, because, of late, there appears to be a
growing inclination to treat the habitual criminal as though he had
ceased to be human, and had degenerated into the condition of the meanest
and most irreclaimable of predatory animals, fit only to be turned over
to the tender mercies of a great body of huntsmen who wear blue coats
instead of scarlet, and carry staves and handcuffs in place of whips and
horns, and to be pursued to death. I have already taken occasion in the
public newspapers, and I have much pleasure in returning to the charge
here, to exclaim against the barbarous suggestions of a gentleman holding
high position in the police force, Colonel Fraser, Commissioner of the
City Police.
Alluding to the Habitual Criminals Bill, Colonel Fraser says:—
“Parts 1 and 2 of the Bill are chiefly designed to ensure a clearer
police supervision than now exists over convicts at large on licence,
and to extend it to persons who have been, or may be convicted of
felony; but all the pains and penalties to which such persons are
liable are made to depend absolutely on proof being forthcoming that
the alleged offenders are actual licence holders, or convicted
felons, and the great difficulty which so frequently occurs in
obtaining this proof will present serious obstacles to a satisfactory
working of the statute.
“Organized as the English police forces are, it will be most
difficult for them, notwithstanding the contemplated system of
registration, to account satisfactorily for the movements of licence
holders, or to obtain an effective supervision over them, if they are
determined to evade it. But the number of these convicts at large is
insignificant compared with the swarms of repeatedly-convicted
thieves, who give infinitely greater trouble to the police than
licence-holders, and who constantly escape with a light sentence,
from the impossibility of obtaining ready proof of their former
convictions.”
Now comes the remedy for this unsatisfactory state of affairs!
“As a remedy for this, I would suggest that every convict, on being
liberated on licence, and every person after a second conviction of
felony, should be marked in prison, on being set free, in such manner
as the Secretary of State might direct—as has been the practice in
the case of deserters, and men dismissed for misconduct from the
army: such marking to be accepted as sufficient proof of former
convictions.
“The precise mode in which this should be effected is matter of
detail; but, by a simple combination of alphabetical letters, similar
to that employed in distinguishing postage-stamps, no two persons
need bear precisely the same mark, and the arrangement of letters
might be such as to show at a glance, not only the particular prison
in which the offender had been last confined, but also the date of
his last conviction. Copies of these marks, transmitted to the
Central Office of Registration in London, would form an invaluable
record of the history of habitual criminals, and enable the police to
obtain that reliable information as to their antecedents, the want of
which now so commonly enables practised offenders to escape the
consequences of their misdeeds.
“Attempts might, and probably would, be made to alter the appearance
of the tell-tale imprints; but it would be impossible to efface them,
and any artificial discoloration of the skin appearing on the
particular part of the arm, or body, fixed upon for the prison mark,
should be considered as affording sufficient proof of former
convictions; unless the person charged could show—to the satisfaction
of the justice before whom he might be brought—that it was produced
by legitimate means.”
I have ventured to transcribe, in its integrity, the main portion of
Colonel Fraser’s “new idea,” thinking that its importance demanded it.
It is significant of much that is to be regretted, coming from such a
source. It is somewhat excusable, maybe, in a common policeman—who
yesterday may have been an agricultural labourer, or a member of a
community of which no more in the way of education is expected—if he
exhibits a kind of unreasoning, watch-dog antagonism towards the criminal
classes. He is instructed in all sorts of manœuvres, and paid a guinea a
week to act _against_ them—to oppose the weight of his officially-striped
arm, and the full force of his handy staff against them, whenever he
finds plausible excuse for doing so. And, possibly, this is a condition
of affairs one should not be over eager to reform. The policeman, “too
clever by half,” is generally an instrument of injustice, and an
impediment in the way of the law’s impartial acting. So long as the
common constable remains a well-regulated machine, and fulfils his
functions without jarring or unnecessary noise, we will ask no more; but
without doubt we expect, and we have a right to expect, some display of
intelligence and humanity on the part of the chief engineer who directs
and controls these machines. An official of polite education, and
possessed of a thorough knowledge of the ways and means and the various
resources of the enemy it is his duty to provide against, should be
actuated by some more generous sentiment than that which points towards
uncompromising extermination. Colonel Fraser should bear in mind that an
act of criminality does not altogether change a man’s nature. He is a
human creature in which, perhaps through accident, perhaps through
desperate, and to some extent deliberate culture, certain growths,
injurious to the welfare of the commonwealth, have growth; but to brand,
and destroy, and crush under the heel the said creature because of his
objectionable affections, is much like smashing a set of valuable vases
because stagnant water has been permitted to accumulate in them. It may
be urged that if the said vases or men have secreted criminal vice and
fouling until their whole substance has become saturated beyond
possibility of cleansing, then the sooner they are utterly abolished the
better. To this I answer that until the best known methods of cleansing
have been tried on the foul vessels we are not in a position to say that
they are irreclaimable; and again, even provided that you might discover
certain such vessels fit for nothing but destruction, it would be a
monstrous absurdity to issue an edict ordering the annihilation of every
pot of a like pattern. And this is pretty much as Colonel Fraser would
act.
Let the reader for a moment consider what would be the effect if such a
law as that proposed by the Commissioner of Police for the City of London
were passed. In the first place it would, in its immediate operation,
prove immensely unjust to the milder sort of criminal. If we started
anew with our army of twenty thousand to-morrow morning, and every member
of it had been convicted but once, there would be fairness (admitting
just for argument sake only that there is any fairness at all about it)
in holding out the threat that the next man who committed himself should
be branded. But, as the case stands, before a month had elapsed we
should have hundreds of unlucky wretches against whose names but two
felonious commitments stood, bearing the hateful brand, while thousands
of the old and wary of the tribe acquainted with the interior of every
prison in England would, as far as the tell-tale mark is concerned,
appear as innocent as you or I. Nor would any “alphabetical postal
system,” however ingenious and cold-blooded, avoid this difficulty. The
only way of doing full justice to the entire body of felons—the young
beginners and the old practitioners—would be, whenever the latter were
next taken to search all the prison records for convictions against them,
and score them in regular order on the delinquents’ writhing flesh. To
do this, however, Colonel Fraser would have to abandon his idea of
branding on the arm. That member would in many cases afford inadequate
space, even if you brought the chronicle from the shoulder to the finger
tips, and “turned over” and continued the length of the criminal’s palm.
As the newspaper reports frequently show, there are evil doers whose
catalogues of crimes may scarcely be expressed in a century.
But these are the bad ones already so branded and seared in heart and
mind that to prick and scorch an inch of their outward skin would be but
to tickle their vanity, and give them to brag of another scar, got in
their life-long war against society. Short of torturing them or killing
them, it matters little what measures are provided against these
case-hardened villains. But there are scores and hundreds who though
they have earned for themselves the names of criminals, whom to class and
force to herd with the before-mentioned set would be to incur the
greatest responsibility, and one that under existing circumstances it
would be utterly short of wanton brutality to engage in.
As regards the class last mentioned, that is to say, those members who
have at present made no very desperate acquaintance with crime and its
punishment, I believe that if they were but judiciously dealt with a very
large number would be but too glad to escape from their present life of
misery. “Many a thief,” says a writer, whose able remarks are the more
valuable, because they are founded on actual experience and conversation
with the people he treats of; “many a thief is kept in reluctant bondage
to crime from the difficulties he finds in obtaining honest employment,
and earning honest bread. Many thieves are fond of their criminal
calling. They will tell you plainly that they do not intend to work hard
for a pound a week, when they can easily earn five times as much by
thieving in less time and live like gentlemen. But others of them are
utterly weary of the hazard, disgrace, and suffering attaching to their
mode of life. Some of them were once pure, honest, and industrious, and
when they are sick, or in prison, they are frequently filled with bitter
remorse, and make the strongest vows to have done with a guilty life.
“Suppose a man of this sort in prison. His eyes are opened, and he sees
before him the gulf of remediless ruin into which he will soon be
plunged. He knows well enough that the money earned by thieving goes as
fast as it comes, and that there is no prospect of his ever being able to
retire on his ill-gotten gains. He comes out of prison, determined to
reform. But where is he to go? What is he to do? How is he to live?
Whatever may have been done for him in prison, is of little or no avail,
if as soon as he leaves the gaol he must go into the world branded with
crime, unprotected and unhelped. The discharged prisoner must be
friendly with some one, and he must live. His criminal friends will
entertain him on the understood condition that they are repaid from the
booty of his next depredation. Thus the first food he eats, and the
first friendly chat he has, becomes the half necessitating initiative of
future crime. Frequently the newly discharged prisoner passes through a
round of riot and drunkenness immediately on his release from a long
incarceration, as any other man would do in similar circumstances, and
who has no fixed principles to sustain him. And so by reason of the
rebound of newly acquired liberty, and the influence of the old set, the
man is again demoralized. The discharged prisoner leaves gaol with good
resolves, but the moment he enters the world, there rises before him the
dark and spectral danger of being hunted down by the police, and being
recognised and insulted, of being shunned and despised by his fellow
workmen, of being everywhere contemned and forsaken.”
There can be no doubt that to this utter want of friends of the right
sort at the moment of leaving prison, may be attributed a very large
percentage of the persistence in a career of crime by those who have once
made a false step. In this respect we treat our criminals of
comparatively a mild character with greater harshness and severity than
those whose repeated offences have led to their receiving the severest
sentences of the law. The convict who is discharged after serving a term
of five years at Portland, receives ere he quits the gates of Millbank
prison a money gratuity, varying in amount according to the character
that was returned with him from the convict establishment. Nor do the
chances that are afforded him of quitting his old course of life and
becoming an honest man end here. There is the Prisoner’s Aid Society,
where he may obtain a little more money and a suit of working clothes,
and if he really shows an inclination to reform, he may be even
recommended to a situation. Put for the poor wretch who has given
society much less offence, who has become a petty thief, probably not
from choice, but from hard necessity, and who bitterly repents of his
offences, there is no one to take him by the hand and give or lend him so
much as an honest half-crown to make a fair start with. It may be said
that the convict is most in want of help because he _is_ a convict,
because he is a man with whom robberies and violence have become so
familiar, that it is needful to provide him with some substantial
encouragement lest he slide back into the old groove. Further, because
he is a man so plainly branded that the most inexperienced policeman may
know at a glance what he is; whereas, the man who has been but once
convicted may, if he have the inclination, push his way amongst honest
men, and not one of them be the wiser as to the slip he has made. And
that would be all very well if he were assisted in rejoining the ranks of
honest bread-winners, but what is his plight when the prison door shuts
behind him? It was his poverty that urged him to commit the theft that
consigned him to gaol, and now he is turned out of it poorer than ever,
crushed and spirit-broken, and with all his manliness withered within
him. He feels ashamed and disgraced, and for the first few hours of his
liberty he would willingly shrink back for hiding, even to his prison,
because, as he thinks, people look at him so. A little timely help would
save him, but nothing is so likely as desperate “don’t care” to spring
out of this consciousness of guilt, and the suspicion of being shunned
and avoided; and the army of twenty thousand gains another recruit.
This undoubtedly is frequently the case with the criminal guilty of but a
“first offence.” Be he man or lad, however, he will be subject to no
such painful embarrassment on his leaving prison after a second or third
conviction. By that time he will have made friends. He will have found
a companion or two to “work with,” and they will keep careful reckoning
of the date of his incarceration as well as of the duration of his term
of durance. Make no doubt that they will be on the spot to rejoice with
him on his release. They know the exact hour when the prison gate will
open and he will come forth, and there they are ready to shake hands with
him. Ready to “stand treat.” Ready to provide him with that pipe of
tobacco for which he has experienced such frequent longing, and to set
before him the foaming pot of beer. “Come along, old pal!” say they, “we
thought that you’d be glad of a drink and a bit of bacca, and we’ve got a
jolly lot of beef over some baked taters at home!”
What becomes of all his good resolutions—of the chaplain’s wholesome
counsel now! “Shut your eyes resolutely to the temptations your old
companions may hold out to you,” were the parting words of that good man;
“if they threaten you, bid them defiance. Let it be the first test of
your good resolves to tell them plainly and boldly that you have done
with them and will have no more to do with them!” Most excellent advice
truly! but how is the emancipated one to act on it? How can he find it
in his heart to dash with cold ingratitude such warmth of generosity and
good nature? What claim has he on them that they should treat him so?
They owe him nothing, and can have no ulterior and selfish object in thus
expending their time and their money on his comfort. All that they
expect in return is, that should either of them fall into trouble similar
to his, he will exert himself for him in the same manner, and surely that
is little enough to ask. Perhaps with the chaplain’s good advice still
ringing in his ears, a sigh of lingering remorse is blended with the
outpuffing of that first delicious pipe, but it is promptly swallowed
down in the draught of free beer, with the grim reflection, perhaps, that
if those professing to be his friends came to his timely assistance as
promptly and substantially as did those his enemies, he might have been
saved the ignominy of entering anew on the old crimeful path.
As I have endeavoured to show, the best time for treating with these
unhardened criminals for their reform, is just before they leave the
prison at the expiration of their sentence, or so soon as they have
crossed its threshold and find themselves free men. But even if they are
here missed and allowed to go their sinful way, it is not absolutely
necessary to postpone the good work until the law lays hold on them
again. The dens to which they retire are not impregnable. They do not
live in fortified caves, the doors of which are guarded by savage dogs
and by members of the gang armed with swords and pistols. It is
wonderful how docile and respectful they will behave towards folk who
visit them, treating them as nothing worse than fellow creatures
suffering under a great misfortune, and not as savage creatures of prey
who have forfeited all claim to human nature, and are fit only to be
scourged and branded. A writer already quoted tells us that during two
years in one of the largest towns in England he had unlimited access to
the thieves’ quarter at all hours and under any circumstances—weddings,
midnight gatherings, “benefit nights,” public houses, he has visited them
all. “How I gained the confidence of the criminal fraternity I cannot
say. I only sought their welfare, never went amongst them without some
good errand, never asked questions about their affairs, or meddled with
things that did not belong to me; and it is due to the thieves themselves
to say that I never received from any of them, whether drunk or sober, an
unkind look or a disrespectful word. . . . I had not pursued my quiet
mission amongst the thieves many months without discovering the damning
fact that they had no faith in the sincerity, honesty, or goodness of
human nature; and that this last and vilest scepticism of the human heart
was one of the most powerful influences at work in the continuation of
crime. They believe people in general to be no better than themselves,
and that most people will do a wrong thing if it serves their purpose.
They consider themselves better than many “square” (honest) people who
practise commercial frauds. Not having a spark of faith in human nature
their ease is all but hopeless; and only those who have tried the
experiment can tell how difficult it is to make a thief believe that you
are really disinterested and mean him well. Nevertheless, the agencies
that are at work for the arrest of crime are all more or less working to
good purpose, and conducing to a good end. Had I previously known
nothing of the zeal and labour that have been expended during the last
few years in behalf of the criminal population, I should have learned
from my intercourse with the thieves themselves, that a new spirit was
getting amongst them, and that something for their good was going on
outside thievedom. The thieves, the worst of them, speak gloomily of the
prospects of the fraternity; just as a Red Indian would complain of the
dwindling of his tribe before the strong march of advancing
civilization.”
In every essential particular can I corroborate the above account. There
are few worse places in London than certain parts of Cow Cross,
especially that part of it anciently known as Jack Ketch’s Warren, or
“Little Hell” as the inhabitants more commonly designate it, on account
of the number of subjects it produced for the operations of the common
hangman. Only that the law is more merciful than of yore, there is
little doubt that the vile nests in question, including “Bit Alley,” and
“Broad Yard,” and “Frying Pan Alley,” would still make good its claim to
the distinguishing title conferred on it. The place indicated swarms
with thieves of every degree, from the seven-year old little robber who
snatches petty articles from stalls and shop-fronts, to the old and
experienced burglar with a wide experience of convict treatment, British
and foreign. Yet, accompanied by a city missionary well known to them, I
have many a time gone amongst them, feeling as safe as though I was
walking along Cheapside. I can give testimony even beyond that of the
writer last quoted. “I never asked questions about their affairs, or
meddled with things that did not concern me,” says the gentleman in
question. I can answer for it that my pastor friend of the Cow Cross
Mission was less forbearing. With seasoned, middle-aged scoundrels he
seldom had any conversation, but he never lost a chance of tackling young
men and lads on the evil of their ways, and to a purpose. Nor was it his
soft speech or polished eloquence that prevailed with them. He was by no
means a gloomy preacher against crime and its consequences; he had a
cheerful hopeful way with him that much better answered the purpose. He
went about his Christian work humming snatches of hymns in the liveliest
manner. One day while I was with him, we saw skulking along before us a
villanous figure, ragged and dirty, and with a pair of shoulders broad
enough to carry sacks of coal. “This,” whispered my missionary friend,
“is about the very worst character we have. He is as strong as a tiger,
and almost as ferocious. “Old Bull” they call him.”
I thought it likely we would pass without recognising so dangerous an
animal, but my friend was not so minded. With a hearty slap on his
shoulder, the fearless missionary accosted him.
“Well, Old Bull!”
“Ha! ’ow do, Mr. Catlin, sir?”
“As well as I should like to see you, my friend. How are you getting
along, Bull?”
“Oh, werry dicky, Mr. Catlin.” And Bull hung his ears and pawed
uncomfortably in a puddle, with one slipshod foot, as though in his heart
resenting being “pinned” after this fashion.
“You find matters going worse and worse with you, ah!”
“They can’t be no worser than they is, that’s _one_ blessin’!”
“Ah, now there’s where you are mistaken, Bull. They can be worse a
thousand times, and they _will_, unless you turn over a fresh leaf. Why
not, Bull? See what a tattered, filthy old leaf the old one is!”
(Bull, with an uneasy glance towards the outlet of the alley, but still
speaking with all respect,) “Ah! it’s all that, guv’nor.”
“Well then, since you _must_ begin on a fresh leaf, why not try the right
leaf—the honest one, eh, Bull. Just to see how you like it.”
“All right, Mister Catlin. I’ll think about it.”
“I wish to the Lord you would, Bull. There’s not much to laugh at, take
my word for that.”
“All right, guv’nor, I ain’t a larfin. I means to be a reg’lar model
some day—when I get time. Morning, Mister Catlin, sir.”
And away went “Old Bull,” with a queer sort of grin on his repulsive
countenance, evidently no better or worse for the brief encounter with
his honest adviser, but very thankful indeed to escape.
“I’ve been up into that man’s room,” said my tough little, cheerful
missionary, “and rescued his wife out of his great cruel hands, when
three policemen stood on the stairs afraid to advance another step.”
He would do more than in his blunt, rough-and-ready way point out to them
what a shameful waste of their lives it was to be skulking in a filthy
court all day without the courage to go out and seek their wretched
living till the darkness of night. He would offer to find them a job; he
made many friends, and was enabled to do so, earnestly exhorting them to
try honest work just for a month, to find out what it was like, and the
sweets of it. And many have tried it; some as a joke—as a whimsical feat
worth engaging in for the privilege of afterwards being able to brag of
it, and returned to their old practice in a day or two; others have tried
it, and, to their credit be it spoken, stuck to it. In my own mind I
feel quite convinced that if such men as Mr. C., of the Cow Cross
Mission, who holds the keys not only of the houses in which thieves
dwell, but, to a large extent, also, a key to the character and
peculiarities of the thieves themselves, were empowered with proper
facilities, the amount of good they are capable of performing would very
much astonish us.
CHAPTER VII.
HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE BRITISH THIEF.
_The Three Classes of Thieving Society_.—_Popular Misapprehensions_.—_A
True Picture of the London Thief_.—_A Fancy Sketch of the_ “_Under-Ground
Cellar_.”—_In Disguise at a Thieves’ Raffle_.—_The Puzzle of_ “_Black
Maria_.”—_Mr. Mullins’s Speech and his Song_.
ALTHOUGH, as most people are aware, the great thief tribe reckons amongst
its number an upper, and a middle, and a lower class, pretty much as
corresponding grades of station are recognised amongst the honest
community, it is doubtful, in the former case, if promotion from one
stage to another may be gained by individual enterprise and talent and
industry. The literature of the country is from time to time enriched by
bragging autobiographies of villains confessed, as well as by the
penitent revelations of rogues reclaimed, but, according to my
observation, it does not appear that perseverance in the humbler walks of
crime lead invariably to the highway of infamous prosperity. It seems to
be an idea too preposterous even to introduce into the pages of Newgate
romance, daring in their flights of fancy as are the authors affecting
that delectable line. We have no sinister antithesis of the well-known
honest boy who tramped from Bristol to the metropolis with
twopence-halfpenny in his pocket, and afterwards became Lord Mayor of
London. No low-browed ragged little thief, who began his career by
purloining a halfpenny turnip from a costermonger’s barrow, is
immortalized in the page of the Newgate Calendar, as finally arrived at
the high distinction of wearing fashionable clothes, and ranking as the
first of swell-mobsmen. It is a lamentable fact, and one that should
have weight with aspirants for the convict’s mask and badge, that the
poor, shabby, hard-working thief so remains, till the end of his days.
There is no more chance of his carrying his shameful figure and miserable
hang-dog visage into tip-top society of his order, than there is of his
attaining the summit of that treadwheel, with the ever-recurring steps of
which he is so painfully familiar.
And if there is a forlorn, abject, harassed wretch in the world it is the
poor, threadbare, timid London thief. I believe the popular supposition
to be that, to turn thief at least ensures for the desperate adventurer
money to squander for the time being; that however severe may be the
penalty paid for the luxury, while “luck” lasts the picker of pockets and
purloiner of his neighbour’s goods has ever at his command means
wherewith to satisfy the cravings of his vices, however extravagant they
may be—money to live on the fat of the land and get drunk and enjoy happy
spells of ease and plenty. This, no doubt, is the tempting picture the
devil holds up for the contemplation of heart-sick honesty, when patient
integrity is growing faint with hunger and long privation; and truly it
seems not an improbable picture. What inducement is there for a man to
persist in a career of dishonesty with its certain and frequent penalties
of prison and hard labour, unless his perilous avocation ensures him
spells, albeit brief ones, of intoxicating enjoyment?
No wonder that the ignorant, sorely-tempted, out-o’-work labourer should
take this view of the case, when men, who by station and education—men
who profess to have gone out of their highly respectable paths in life to
make such inquiries as should qualify them to discuss the matter in
solemn Parliamentary conclave, declare that it is so. A curious
exhibition of the lamentable credulity of our law makers occurred no
longer ago than at the second reading of the Habitual Criminals Bill in
the House of Lords. Naturally the subject was one concerning which their
Lordships could know nothing, except by hearsay, and Earl Shaftesbury
volunteered to put them in possession of such useful information as might
guide them towards a decision as regarded the projected Bill.
It is only fair to state, however, that his Lordship was not personally
responsible for his startling statements. He had them from a
“practitioner,” from a thief, that is to say. His Lordship did not
reveal whether it was a thief at large who was his informant: but that is
scarcely likely. Doubtless it was from some weeping villain, with an eye
to a remission of his sentence, who so frankly confided to the
soft-hearted Earl the various secrets of that terrible trade it was his
intention never, _never_ to work at again! At any rate, whoever the
“practitioner” was, he succeeded in his design completely, as the
horror-stricken visage of his lordship, as he delivered himself of the
astounding revelations, fully attested.
They were to this effect, and the reader will please bear in mind that
they were not tendered to be received at their worth, but as facts which
might he relied on. Within the City of London, Lord Shaftesbury
declared, “crucibles and melting-pots are kept going all day and all
night. I believe that in a very large number of cases the whole of the
plate is reduced within two or three hours of the robbery to ingots of
silver. As for spoons, forks, and jewellery, they are not taken so
readily to the melting-pot; but to well-known places where there is a
pipe, similar to that which your lordships may have seen—I hope none may
have seen it of necessity—in the shop of the pawnbroker. The thief taps,
the pipe is lifted up, and in the course of a minute a hand comes out
covered with a glove, takes up the jewellery, and gives out the money for
it.”
If that conscienceless “practitioner,” who so scandalously gulled the
good Earl, happened to be in enjoyment of liberty when the above quoted
newspaper report was printed, how he must have grinned as he perused it?
But what an unpleasant reversal of the joke it would be if the mendacious
statements of the bare-faced villain lead to the passing of a bill
imposing cruelly severe rules for the government of criminals, and the
worthy in question should one fine day find himself groaning under the
same! The most astounding part of the business however, is, that his
lordship should have given credit to such a tissue of fudge. To his
honour be it stated, he should know better. As an indefatigable labourer
amongst the poor and afflicted, his name will be remembered and blest
long after he has passed from among us. It is doubtful if any other man
whose title gives him admission to the House of Lords, could have given
nearly as much practical information on this painful subject, and there
can be no question—and this is the most unfortunate part of the
business—that all that his lordship stated was regarded as real. Every
lord present to listen to and discuss the various clauses of Lord
Kimberley’s Bill, probably took to his vivid imagination the appalling
picture of the underground cellars (to be reached only by known members
of the burglarious brotherhood who could give the sign to the guardian of
the cellar-door), where certain demon-men of the Fagin type presided
constantly over crucibles and melting-pots, wherein bubbled and hissed
the precious brew of gold and silver ornaments dissolved, the supply
being constantly renewed by the bold “cracksmen” who numerously attended
to bring the goods to market. Easier still even was it to conjure before
the mind’s eye the peculiar operations of the “pipe” that Lord
Shaftesbury so graphically described. The deserted-looking house in the
gloomy back street, with the street door always ajar so that customers
might slip in and out at it in an instant—before even the policeman on
beat could wink his sleepy eyes in amazement at the unexpected
apparition; with the sliding panel in the dimly-lighted back kitchen, and
the “spout” just like a pawnbroker’s, and the “gloved hand,” the fingers
of it twitching with eager greed for the gold watch, still warm from the
pocket of its rightful owner! How was it possible to deal with a subject
bristling so with horrors with calmness and dignity? Their lordships had
been given to understand by the mover of the bill that there were fifteen
thousand thieves constantly busy in the Metropolis alone, and Lord
Shaftesbury had informed them that the mysterious “spout” and the
melting-pot were the chief channels for converting stolen goods into
ready money. At this rate, London must be almost undermined by these
gold-melting cellars—the midnight traveller through the great city might
plainly hear and wonder at the strange tap-tapping that met his ears—the
tapping at the “spout” that notified to the owner of the gloved hand that
a new customer was in attendance? It would have been not very surprising
if the Chief Commissioner of Police had been instantly communicated with,
and given instructions at once to arrest every man and woman of the
fifteen thousand, and hold them in safe keeping until their lordships had
resolved on the most efficacious, and at the same time least painful way
of exterminating them.
Seriously, it is impossible almost to exaggerate the amount of mischief
likely to result from such false and inflammatory pictures of an evil
that in its naked self is repulsive enough in all conscience. On the one
hand, it excites amongst the people panic and unnecessary alarm, and
furnishes the undeniable excuse of “self-defence” for any excess of
severity we may be led into; and on the other hand, it tends to magnify
the thief’s importance in the eyes of the thief, and to invest his
melancholy and everlastingly miserable avocations with precisely the same
kind of gallows-glory as is preached by the authors of “Tyburn Dick” or
the “Boy Highwayman.” Curiously enough at the conclusion of his long and
interesting speech, Lord Shaftesbury went a little out of his way to make
mention of the literature of the kind just quoted, to remark on its
intimate bearing on the crime of the country, and to intimate that
shortly the whole question would be brought under their lordships’
consideration. It is doubtful, however, and I say so with extreme
regret, knowing as I well do how shocking even the suspicion of such a
thing must be to Lord Shaftesbury, if in any dozen “penny numbers” of the
pernicious trash in question, the young aspirant for prison fame would
find as much stimulative matter as was provided in his lordship’s speech,
or rather speeches, on the Habitual Criminal question.
No, the affairs of those who affect the criminal walks of life are bad
enough in all conscience, but they are much less romantic than his
lordship has been led to believe. Shorn of the melo-dramatic “bandit”
costume with which they have been temporarily invested they lose nothing
in appalling effect.
Truly, it is hard to understand, but it is an undoubted fact, that the
criminal who in police nomenclature is a “low thief” (to distinguish him,
it may be presumed, from “the respectable thief”) is without exception of
all men the most comfortless and miserable; and should the reader be so
inquisitive as to desire to be informed of the grounds on which I arrive
at this conclusion, I beg to assure him that I do not rely on hearsay,
neither do I depend on what thieves incarcerated for their offences have
told me, holding it to be hardly likely that a prisoner in prison would
vaunt his liking for crime and his eagerness to get back to it. I have
mixed with thieves at liberty, an unsuspected spy in their camp, more
than once. I will quote an example.
This was many years since, and as at the time I published a detailed
account of the visit, I may be excused from more than briefly alluding to
it here. It was at a thieves’ raffle, held at a public-house in one of
the lowest and worst parts of Westminster. I was young in the field of
exploration then, and from all that I had heard and read made up my mind
for something very terrible and desperate. I pictured to myself a band
of rollicking desperadoes, swaggering and insolent, with plenty of money
to pay for bottles of brandy and egg-flip unlimited, and plenty of
bragging discourse of the doughty deeds of the past, and of their
cold-blooded and desperate intentions for the future. Likewise, my
expectations of hope and fear included a rich treat in the shape of
vocalization. It was one thing to hear play-actors on the stage, in
their tame and feeble delineations of the ancient game of “high Toby,”
and of the redoubtable doings of the Knights of the Road, spout such
soul-thrilling effusions as “Nix my Dolly Pals,” and “Claude Duval,” but
what must it be to listen to the same bold staves out of the mouths of
real “roaring boys,” some of them, possibly, the descendants of the very
heroes who rode “up Holborn Hill in a cart,” and who could not well hear
the good words the attendant chaplain was uttering because of the noisy
exchange of boisterous “chaff” taking place between the short-pipe
smoking driver, whose cart-seat was the doomed man’s coffin, and the
gleeful mob that had made holiday to see the fun!
But in all this I was dismally disappointed. I had procured a ticket for
the raffle from a friendly police-inspector (goodness only knows how he
came possessed of them, but he had quite a collection of similar tickets
in his pocket-book), and, disguised for the occasion, I entered the dirty
little dram shop, and exhibited my credential to the landlord at the bar.
So far the business was promising. The said landlord was as ill-looking
a villain as could be desired. He had a broken nose and a wooden leg,
both of which deformities were doubtless symptomatic of the furious
brawls in which he occasionally engaged with his ugly customers. As I
entered he was engaged in low-whispered discourse with three ruffians who
might have been brothers of his in a similar way of business, but
bankrupt, and gone to the dogs. As I advanced to the bar the four
cropped heads laid together in iniquity, separated suddenly, and the
landlord affected a look of innocence, and hummed a harmless tune in a
way that was quite melodramatic.
I intimated my business, and he replied shortly, “Go on through,” at the
same time indicating the back door by a jerk of his thumb over his
shoulder. Now for it! On the other side of the back door I discovered a
stone yard, at the extremity of which was dimly visible in the darkness a
long, low, dilapidated building, with a light shining through the chinks.
This, then, was the robber’s den!—a place to which desperate men and
women who made robbery and outrage the nightly business of their lives,
resorted to squander in riot and debauchery their ill-gotten gains! It
would not have surprised me had I found the doorkeeper armed with a pair
of “trusty barkers,” and every male guest of the company with a
life-preserver sticking out at the breast pocket of his coat.
The door was opened in response to my tap at it. I gave the potman there
stationed my ticket, and I entered. I must confess that my first
sensation as I cast my eye carelessly around, was one of disgust that I
should have been induced to screw up my courage with so much pains for so
small an occasion. The building I found myself in was a skittle-ground,
furnished with forms and tables; and there were present about thirty
persons. As well as I can remember, of this number a third were women,
young generally, one or two being mere girls of sixteen, or so. But
Jenny Diver was not there, nor Poll Maggot, nor Edgeworth Bess. No lady
with ringlets curling over her alabaster shoulders found a seat on the
knee of the gallant spark of her choice. No Captain Macheath was to be
seen elegantly taking snuff out of a stolen diamond snuff-box, or
flinging into the pink satin lap of his lady love a handful of guineas to
pay for more brandy. Poor wretches! the female shoulders there assembled
spoke rather of bone than alabaster, while the washed-out and mended
cotton frocks served in place of pink satin, and hair of most humble
fashion surmounted faces by no means expressive either of genuine
jollity, or even of a desperate determination towards devil-may-careness,
and the drowning of care in the bowl. There were no bowls, even, as in
the good old time, only vulgar pewter porter pots, out of which the
company thankfully swigged its fourpenny. There was no appearance of
hilarity, or joviality even; no more of brag and flourish, or of
affectation of ease and freedom, than though every man and woman present
were here locked up “on remand,” and any moment might be called out to
face that damning piece of kept-back evidence they all along dreaded was
in store for them. To be sure it was as yet early in the evening, and
though the company may have assembled mainly for the purpose of drowning
“dull care,” that malicious imp being but recently immersed, may have
been superior at present to their machinations, and able to keep his ugly
head above the liquid poured out for his destruction. Or may be, again,
being a very powerful “dull care,” of sturdy and mature growth, he might
be able to hold out through many hours against the weak and watery
elements brought to oppose him.
Anyhow, so far as I was able to observe, there was no foreshadowing of
the blue and brooding imp’s defeat. His baneful wings seemed spread from
one end of the skittle-alley to the other, and to embrace even the
chairman, who being a Jew, and merely a receiver of stolen goods, might
reasonably have been supposed to be less susceptible than the rest.
There would seem to prevail, amongst a large and innocent section of the
community, a belief that the thief is a creature distinguished no less by
appearance than by character from the honest host he thrives by. I have
heard it remarked more than once, by persons whose curiosity has led them
to a criminal court when a trial of more than ordinary interest is
proceeding, that really this prisoner or that did not _look_ like a
thief, or a forger, or stabber, as the case might be. “Lord bless us,” I
once heard an elderly lady exclaim, in the case of an oft-convicted
scoundrel of the “swell mob” tribe, over whose affecting trial she had
shed many tears, “Lord bless us!” said she, as the jury found him guilty,
and sentenced him to two years’ hard labour, “so thin, and genteel, and
with spectacles on, too! I declare I should have passed that young man
twenty times without dreaming of calling out for the police.” On the
other hand, there are very many persons less ingenuous than the old lady,
who invariably regard a man through the atmosphere of crime, real or
supposed, that envelopes him, and by means of its distorting influence
make out such a villain as satisfies their sagacity. Had one of this
last order been favoured with a private view of the company assembled to
assist at Mr. Mullins’s raffle, and have been previously informed that
they were one and all thieves, in all probability they would have
_appeared_ thieves; but I am convinced that had they been shown to an
unprepared and unprejudiced observer, his opinion would have been that
the company gathered in the skittle-alley of the “Curly Badger” were no
worse than a poor set of out-o’-work tailors, or French polishers, or
weavers, or of some other craft, the members of which affect the
gentility that black clothes and a tall hat is supposed to confer on the
wearer; nor would an hour in their society, such as I spent, have
sufficed to dissipate the innocent impression. Their expenditure was of
the most modest sort, not one man in six venturing beyond the pot of
beer. Their conversation, though not the most elegant, was least of all
concerning the wretched trade they followed; indeed, the subject was
never mentioned at all, except in melancholy allusion to Peter or Jerry,
who had been recently “copped” (taken), and was expected to pass “a tail
piece in the steel” (three months in prison). There was one observation
solemnly addressed by one elderly man to another elderly man, the purport
of which at the time puzzled me not a little. “Unlucky! Well you may
say it. Black Maria is the only one that’s doin’ a trade now. Every
journey full as a tuppenny omblibus!” I listened intently as prudence
would permit for further reference to the mysterious female who was doing
“all the trade,” and “every journey” was “as full as a twopenny omnibus,”
but nothing in the conversation transpired tending to throw a light on
the dark lady; so I mentally made a note of it for reference to my friend
the inspector. He laughed. “Well, she has been doing a brisk stroke of
business of late, I must say,” said he. “Black Maria, sir, is our van of
that colour that carries ’em off to serve their time.”
But, as before observed, there was nothing in the demeanour of either the
men or women present at Mullins’s raffle to denote either that they
revelled in the nefarious trade they followed, or that they derived even
ordinary comfort and satisfaction from it. To be sure, it may have
happened that the specimens of the thief class assembled before me were
not of the briskest, but taking them as they were, and bearing in mind
the spiritless, hang-dog, mean, and shabby set they were, the notion of
bringing to bear on them such tremendous engines of repression as that
suggested by the humane Commissioner of the City Police appears nothing
short of ridiculous.
At the same time, I would have it plainly understood that my pity for the
thief of this class by no means induces me to advise that no more
effective means than those which at present exist should be adopted for
his abolition. A people’s respect for the laws of the country is its
chief pillar of strength, and those who have no respect for the laws, act
as so many rats undermining the said pillar, and although the rats
assembled at Mullins’s raffle were not of a very formidable breed, their
hatred of the law, and their malicious defiance of it, was unmistakeable.
For instance, the article to be raffled was a silk pocket handkerchief,
and there it was duly displayed hanging across a beam at the end of the
skittle-ground. The occasion of the raffle was, that Mr. Mullins had
just been released after four months’ imprisonment, and that during his
compulsory absence from home matters had gone very bad, and none the less
so because poor Mrs. Mullins was suffering from consumption. In alluding
to these sad details of his misfortune, Mr. Mullins, in returning thanks
for the charity bestowed on him, looked the picture of melancholy.
“Whether she means ever to get on her legs again is more than I can say,”
said he, wagging his short-cropped head dolefully, “there ain’t much
chance, I reckon, when you’re discharged from Brompton incurable. Yes,
my friends, it’s all agin me lately, and my luck’s regler out. But
there’s one thing I must mention” (and here he lifted his head with
cheerful satisfaction beaming in his eyes), “and I’m sure you as doesn’t
know it will be very glad to hear it—the handkerchief wot’s put up to
raffle here is the wery identical one that I was put away for.” And
judging from the hearty applause that followed this announcement, there
can be no doubt that Mr. Mullins’s audience were very glad indeed to hear
it.
But even after this stimulant, the spirits of the company did not rally
anything to speak of. Song singing was started, but nobody sung “Nix my
Dolly Pals,” or “Claude Duval.” Nobody raised a roaring chant in honour
of “ruby wine,” or the flowing bowl, or even of the more humble, though
no less genial, foaming can. There was a comic song or two, but the
ditties in favour were those that had a deeply sentimental or even a
funereal smack about them. The gentleman who had enlightened me as to
Black Maria sang the Sexton, the chorus to wh
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