VICTIMS.
The industrious classes of the middle rank are, on the one hand,attracted onwardsto wealth and respectability, by contemplating men, formerly of their own order, who having, as the saying is, feathered their nests, now lie at ease, a kind ofconscripti patres; while they are, on the other hand,repelledfrom the regions of poverty and disgrace by the sight of a great many wretched persons, who having, under the influence of some unhappy star, permitted their good resolutions of industry and honour to give way, are sunk from their former estate, and now live—if living it can be called—in a state of misery and ignominy almost too painful to be thought of. There may be a use in this—as there is a use for beacons and buoys at sea. But oh, the desolation of such a fate! As different as the condition of a vessel which ever bends its course freely and gallantly over the seas, on some joyous expedition of profit or adventure, compared with one which has been deprived of all the means of locomotion, and chained down upon some reef of rocks, merely to tell its happier companions that it is to be avoided; so different is the condition of a man still engaged in the hopeful pursuits of life, and one who has lost all its prospects.
The progress of men who live by their daily industry,through this world, may be likened, in some respects, to the march of an army through an enemy’s country. He who, from fatigue, from disease, from inebriety, from severe wounds, or whatever cause, falls out of the line of march, and lays him down by the wayside, is sure, as a matter of course, to be destroyed by the peasantry; once let the column he belongs to pass on a little way ahead, and death is his sure portion. It is a dreadful thing to fall behind the onward march of the world.
Victims—the word placed at the head of this article—is a designation for those woe-begone mortals who have had the misfortune to drop out of the ranks of society. Every body must know more or less ofvictims, for every body must have had to pay a smaller or greater number of half-crowns in his time to keep them from starvation. It happens, however, that the present writer has hada great deal to do with victims; and he therefore conceives himself qualified to afford his neighbours a little information upon the subject. It is a subject not without its moral.
Avictimmay become so from many causes. Some men are wrong placed in the world by their friends, and ruin themselves. Some are ill married, and lose heart. Others have tastes unsuited to the dull course of a man of business, as for music, social pleasures, the company of menout of their own order, and so forth. Other men have natural imperfections of character, and sink down, from pure inability to compete with rivals of more athletic constitution. But the grand cause of declension in life is inability to accommodate circumstances and conduct.
Suppose a man to have broken credit with the world, and made that treaty of perpetual hostility with it, which,quasi lucus a non lucendo, is called acessio bonorum—what is he to do next? One thing is dead clear: he no more appears on Prince’s Street or the bridges. They are to him as a native and once familiar land, from which he is exiled for ever. His migrations from one side of the town to the other are now accomplished by by-channels,which, however well known to our ancestors, are in the present day dreamt of by nobody, except, perhaps, the author of the Traditions of Edinburgh. I once came full upon avictimin Croftangry, a wretched alley near the Palace of Holyrood House; he looked the very Genius of the place! But the ways ofvictimsare in general very occult. Sometimes I have altogether lost sight of one for several years, and given him up for dead. But at length he would re-appear amidst the crowd at a midnight fire, as salmon come from the deepest pools towards the lighted sheaf of the fisherman, or as some old revolutionary names that had disappeared from French history for a quarter of a century, came again above board on the occasion of the late revolution at Paris. At one particular conflagration, which happened some years ago, I observed severalvictims, who had long vanished from the open daylight streets, come out to glare with their bleared eyes upon the awful scene—perhaps unroosted from their dens by the progress of the “devouring element.” But—what is avictimlike?
The progress of avictim’sgradual deterioration depends very much upon the question, whether he has, according to the old joke, failed with a waistcoat or a full suit. Suppose the latter contingency: he keeps up a decent appearance for some months after the fatal event, perhaps even making several attempts to keep up a few of his old acquaintance. It won’t do, however; the clothes get worn—threadbare—slit—torn—patched—darned; let ink, thread, and judicious arrangement of person, do their best. The hat, the shoes, and the gloves, fail first; he then begins to wear a suspicious deal of whitey-brown linen in the way of cravat. Collars fail. Frills retire. The vest is buttoned to the uppermost button, or even, perhaps, with a supplementary pin (a pin is the most squalid object in nature or art) at top. Still at this period he tries to carry a jaunty, genteel air; he has not yet all forgot himself to rags. But, see, the buttons begin to show something like new moons at one side; these moons becomefull; theychange; and thenthe button is only a little wisp of thread and rags, deprived of all power of retention over the button-hole. His watch has long been gone to supply the current wants of the day. The vest by and bye retires from business, and the coat is buttoned up to the chin. About this period, he perhaps appears in a pair of nankeen trousers, which, notwithstanding the coldness of the weather, he tries to sport in an easy, genteel fashion, as if it were his taste. If you meet him at this time, and inquire how he is getting on in the world, he speaks very confidently of some excellent situation he has a prospect of, which will make him better than ever; it is perhaps to superintend a large new blacking manufactory which is to be set up at Portobello, and for which two acres of stone bottles, ten feet deep, have already been collected from all the lumber-cellars in the country; quite a nice easy business; nothing to do but collect the orders and see them executed; good salary, free house, coal, candle, andblacking; save a pound a-year on the article of blacking alone. Or it is some otherconcernequally absurd, but which the disordered mind of the poor unfortunate is evidently rioting over with as much enjoyment as if it were to make him once more what he had been in his better days. At length—but not perhaps till two or three years have elapsed—he becomes that lamentable picture of wretchedness which is his ultimate destiny; a mere pile of clothes without pile—a deplorable—avictim.
As a picture of an individualvictim, take the following:—My earliest recollections of Mr Kier refer to his keeping a seed-shop in the New Town of Edinburgh. He was a remarkably smart active man, and could tie up little parcels of seeds with an almost magical degree of dispatch. When engaged in that duty, your eye lost sight of his fingers altogether, as you cease to individualise the spokes of a wheel when it is turned with great rapidity. He was the inventor of a curious tall engine, with a peculiar pair of scissors at top, for cutting fruit off trees. This he sent through Prince’s Street every day with one of his boys, whowas instructed every now and then to draw the string, so as to make the scissors close as sharply as possible. The boy would watch his men—broad-skirted men with top-boots—and, gliding in before them, would make the thing playclip. “Boy, boy,” the country gentleman would cry, “what’s that?” The boy would explain; the gentleman would be delighted with the idea of cutting down any particular apple he chose out of a thickly laden and unapproachable tree; and, after that, nothing more was required than to give him the card of the shop. Mr Kier, however, was not a man of correct or temperate conduct. He used to indulge even in forenoon potations. Opposite to his shop there was a tavern, to which he was in the habit of sending a boy every day for a tumbler of spirits and water, which the wretch was carefully enjoined to carry under his apron. One day the boy forgot the precaution, and carried the infamous crystal quite exposed in his hand across the open and crowded street. Mr Kier was surveying his progress both in going and returning; and when he observed him coming towards the shop, with so damnatory a proof of his malpractices holden forth to the gaze of the world, he leaped and danced within his shop window like a supplejack in a glass case. The poor boy came in quite innocently, little woting of the crime he had committed, or the reception he was to meet with, when, just as he had deposited the glass upon the counter, a blow from the hand of his master stretched him insensibly in a remote corner of the shop, among a parcel of seed-bags. As no qualities will succeed in business unless perfectly good conduct be among the number, and, above all things, an absence from tippling, Kier soon became avictim. After he first took to thebent, to use Rob Roy’s phrase, I lost sight of him for two or three years. At length I one day met him on a road a little way out of town. He wore a coat buttoned to the chin, and which, being also very long in the breast, according to a fashion which obtained about the year 1813, seemed to enclose his whole trunk from neck to groin. With theusual cataract of cravat, he wore a hat the most woe-begone, the most dejected, the most melancholy I had ever seen. His face was inflamed and agitated, and as he walked, he swung out his arms with a strange emphatic expression, as if he were saying, “I am an ill-used man, but I’ll tell it to the world.” Misery had evidently given him a slight craze, as it almost always does when it overtakes a man accustomed in early life to better things. Some time afterwards I saw him a little revivified through the influence of anew second-hand coat, and he seemed, from a small leathern parcel which he bore under his arm, to be engaged in some small agency. But this was a mere flash before utter expiration. He relapsed to the Cowgate—to rags—to wretchedness—to madness—immediately after. When I next saw him, it was in that street, the time midnight. He lay in the bottom of a stair, more like a heap of mud than a man. A maniac curse, uttered as I stumbled over him, was the means of my recognising it to be Kier.
The system of life pursued byvictimsin general, is worthy of being inquired into.Victimshang much about taverns in the outskirts of the town. Perhaps a decent man from Pennycuik, with the honest rustic name of Walter Brown, or James Gowans, migrates to the Candlemaker Row, or the Grassmarket, and sets up a small public house. You may know the man by his corduroy spatterdashes, and the latchets of his shoes drawn through them by two pye-holes. He is an honest man, believing every body to be as honest as himself. Perhaps he has some antiquated and prescribed right to the stance of a hay-stack at Pennycuik, and is not without his wishes to try his fortune in the Parliament House. Well, thevictimssoon scent out his house by the glare of his new sign—thenovitas regni—and upon him they fall tooth and nail. Partly through simplicity, partly by having his feelings excited regarding the stance of the hay-stack, he gives these gentlemen some credit. For a while you may observe a flocking ofvictimstoward his doorway, like the gathering of clean and unclean things to Noah’s ark. But it is not altogether a case of deception.Victims, somehow or other, occasionallyhavemoney. True, it is seldom in greater sums than sixpence. But then, consider the importance of sixpence to a flock ofvictims. Such a sum, judiciously managed, may get the whole set meat and drink for a day. At length, when Walter begins to find his barrels run dry, with little return of money wherewithal to replenish them, and when the joint influence of occasional apparitions of sixpence, and the stance of the hay-stack at Pennycuik, has no longer any effect upon him, why, what is to be done but fly to some other individual, equally able and willing to bleed?
One thing is always very remarkable invictims, namely, their extraordinary frankness and politeness. Avictimmight have been an absolute bear in his better days; but hunger, it is said, will tame a lion, and it seems to have the same effect in subduing the asperities of avictim. Meet avictimwhere you will—that is, before he has become altogether deplorable—and you are amazed at the bland, confidential air which he has assumed; so different, perhaps, from what he sported in better days. His manner, in fact, is most insinuating—into your pocket; and if you do not get alarmed at the symptoms, and break off in time, you are brought down for half a crown as sure as you live.Victimskeep up a kind of constantcivilwar with shops. They mark those which have been recently opened, and where they see only young men behind the counter. They try to establish a kind of credit of face, by now and then dropping in and asking, in a genteel manner, for a sight of a Directory, or for a bit of twine, or for “theleastslip of paper,” occasionally even spending a halfpenny or a penny in a candid, honourable way, with all the air of a person wishing to befriend the shop. In the course of these “transactions,” they endeavour to excite a little conversation, beginning with the weather, gradually expanding to a remark upon the state of business; and, perhaps, endingwith a sympathising inquiry as to the prospects which the worthy shopkeeper himself may have of succeeding in his present situation. At length, having laid down what painters call apriming, they come in some day, in a hurried fiddle-faddle kind of way, and hastily and confidentially ask across the counter, “Mr——[victims are always particular in sayingMaster], have you got such a thing as fourpence in ha’pence? I just want to pay a porter, and happen to have no change.” The specification of “fourpence in ha’pence,” though in reality nonsense, carries the day; it gives a plausibility and credit-worthiness to the demand that could not otherwise be obtained. The unfortunate shopkeeper, carried away by the contagious bustle of thevictim, plunges his hand, quick as thought, into the till, and before he knows where he is, he is minus a groat, and thevictimhas vanished from before him—and the whole transaction, reflected upon three minutes afterwards, seems as if it had been a dream.
The existence of avictimis the most precarious thing, perhaps, in the world. He is a man with no continuing dinner-place. He dines, as the poor old Earl of Findlater used to say, at the sign of the Mouth. It is a very strange thing, and what no one could supposea priori, that the necessitous are greatly indebted to the necessitous. People of this sort form a kind of community by themselves, and are more kind to each other mutually than is any other particular branch of the public to them as a class. Thus, the little that any one has, is apt to be shared by a great many companions, and all have a mouthful. The necessitous are also very much the dupes of the necessitous: they are all, as it were, creatures of prey, the stronger constantly eating up the weaker. Thus, avictimin the last stage preys upon men who are entering the set; and all prey more or less upon poor tradesmen, such as the above Walter Brown or James Gowans, who are only liable to such a spoliation because they are poor, and anxious for business. We have known avictim, for instance, who had long passed the conditionof beingjail-worthy, live in a great measure upon a man who had just begun a career of victimization by being thrown into jail. This creature was content to be a kind of voluntary prisoner for the sake of sharing the victuals and bed of his patron. It would astonish any man, accustomed, day after day, to go home to a spread table at a regular hour, to know the strange shifts which victims have to make in order to satisfy hunger—how much is done by raising small hard-wrung subsidies from former acquaintance—how much by duping—how much by what the Scotch people very expressively callskeching—how much by subdivision of mites among the wretches themselves. Yourvictimis often witty, can sing one good comic song, has a turn for mimicry, or at least an amusing smack of worldly knowledge; and he is sometimes so lucky as to fall in with patrons little above himself in fortune, but still having something to give, who afford him their protection on account of such qualifications.
By way of illustrating these points, take the following instances of what may be called thefag-victim.
Nisbet of ——, in Lanarkshire, originally a landed gentleman and an advocate at the Scottish bar, was a blood of the first water in the dissolute decade 1780-90, when, if we are to believe Provost Creech, it was a gentleman’s highest ambition, in his street dress and manner of walking, to give an exact personation of the character of Filch in the Beggars’ Opera. Nisbet at that period dressed a good deal above Filch, however he might resemble him in gait. He had a coat edged all round with gold lace, wore a gold watch on each side (an extravagant fashion then prevalent), and with his cane, bag-wig, and gold-buckled shoes, was really a fine figure of the pre-revolutionary era. His house was in the Canongate—a good flat in Chessels’s Court—garrisoned only by a female servant called Nanny. Nisbet at length squandered away the whole of his estate, and became avictim. All the world fell away from him; but Nanny still remained. From the entailed family flatin Chessels’s Court, he had to remove to a den somewhere about the Netherbow: Nanny went with him. Then came the period of wretchedness: Nanny, however, still stuck fast. The unfortunate gentleman could not himself appear in his woe-begone attire upon those streets where he had formerly shone a resplendent sun; neither could he bring his well-born face to solicit his former friends for subsidies. Nanny did all that was necessary. Foul day and fair day, she was to be seen gliding about the streets, either petitioning tradesmen for goods to her master on credit, or collecting food and money from the houses of his acquaintance. If a liquid alms was offered, she had a white tankard, streaked with smoky-looking cracks, for its reception; if the proffered article was a mass of flesh, she had a plate or a towel. There never was such a forager. Nisbet himself used to call her “true and trusty,” by way of a compliment to her collective powers; and he finally found so much reason to appreciate her disinterested attachment, that, on reaching the usual fatal period of fifty, he made her his wife! What was the catastrophe of their story, I never heard.
The second, and only other instance of thefag-victimwhich can be given here, is of a still more touching character than the above, and seems to make it necessary for the writer of this trifling essay to protest, beforehand, against being thought a scoffer at the misery of his fellow creatures. He begs it to be understood, that, however light be the language in which he speaks, he hopes that he can look with no other than respectful feelings upon human nature, in a suffering, and, more especially, a self-denying form.
Some years ago, there flourished, in one of the principal thoroughfares of Edinburgh, a fashionable perfumer, the inheritor of an old business, and a man of respectable connections, who, falling into dissolute habits, became of course very much embarrassed, and, finally, “unfortunate.” In his shop,
“From youth to age a reverend ’prenticegrew;”
“From youth to age a reverend ’prenticegrew;”
“From youth to age a reverend ’prenticegrew;”
“From youth to age a reverend ’prenticegrew;”
a man, at the time of his master’s failure, advanced to nearly middle life, but who, having never been any where else since he was ten or twelve years of age, than behind Finlay’s counter—Sundays and meal-hours alone excepted—was still looked upon by his master as “the boy of the shop,” and so styled accordingly. This worthy creature had, in the course of time, become as a mere piece of furniture in the shop; his soul hadfraternized(to use a modern French phrase) with his situation. The drawers and shottles, the combs, brushes, and bottles, had entered into and become part of his own existence; he took them all under the wide-spreading boughs of his affections; they were to him, as the infant to the mother, part of himself. He was on the best terms with every thing about the shop; the handles of all things were fitted to his hand; every thing came to him, to use a proverbial expression of Scotland, like the bowl of a pint-stoup. In fact, like a piece of wood placed in a petrifying spring, this man might be said to have been transfigured out of his original flesh and blood altogether, and changed into a creature participating in the existence and qualities of certain essences, perfumes, wigs, pomades, drawers, wig-blocks, glass cases, and counters forming thematerielof Mr Finlay’s establishment. Such a being was, as may be supposed, a useful servant. He knew all the customers; he knew his master’s whole form of practice, all his habits, and every peculiarity of his temper. And then the fidelity of the creature; but that was chiefly shown in the latter evil days of the shop, and during the victimhood of his master. As misfortune came on, the friendship of master and man became more intensely familiar and intimate than it had ever been before. As the proudest man, met by a lion in the desert, makes no scruple to coalesce with his servant in resisting it, so was Finlay induced, by the devouring monster Poverty, to descend to the level, and make a companion, of his faithful “boy.” They would at last go to the same tavern together, take the same Sunday walks—were, in reality, boon companions. In all Finlay’sdistresses, the “boy” partook; if any thing “occurred about a bill,” as Crabbe says, it was the “boy” who had the chief dolour of its accommodation; he would scour the North and South Bridges, with his hat off, borrowing small silver al’improviste, as if to make up change to a customer, till he had the necessary sum amassed. The “boy” at length became very much demoralised: he grew vicious towards the world, to be the more splendidly virtuous to his master: one grand redeeming quality, after the manner of Moses’ serpent, had eaten up all the rest. It were needless to pursue the history of the shop through all its stages of declension. Through them all the “boy” survived, unshaken in his attachment. The shop might fade, grow dim, and die, but the “boy” never. The goods might be diminished, the Duke of Wellington might be sold for whisky, and his lady companions pawn their wigs for mutton pies; but the “boy” was a fixture. There was no pledging away his devoted, inextinguishable friendship. The master at lastwent tothe Canongate jail—I saywent to, in order to inform the sentimental part of mankind that imprisonment is seldom done in the active voice, people generally incarcerating themselves with the most philosophical deliberation, and not the least air of compulsion in the matter. The shop was still kept open, and the “boy” attended it. But every evening did he repair to the dreary mansion, to solace his master with the news of the day, see after his comforts, and yield up the prey which, jackall-like, he had collected during the preceding four-and-twenty hours. This prey, be it remarked, was not raised from the sale of any thing in the shop. Every saleable article had by this time been sold. The only furniture was now a pair of scissors and a comb, together with the announcement, “Hair-cutting rooms,” in the window. By means of these three things, however, the “boy” contrived generally tofleecethe public of a few sixpences in the day; and all these sixpences, with the exception of a small commission for his own meagre subsistence, went to his master at the Canongatejail. Often, in the hour between eight and nine in the evening, have they sat in that small dingy back-room behind the large hall, enjoying a bottle of strong ale, drunk out of stoneware tumblers—talking over all their embarrassments, and speculating how to get clear of them. Other prisoners had their wives or their brothers to see after them; but we question if any one had, even in these relations of kindred, a friend so attached as the “boy.” At length, after a certain period, this unfortunate tradesman was one evening permitted to walk away, arm in arm, with his faithful “young man,” and the world was all before them where to choose.
For a considerable period all trace of the attached pair is lost. No doubt their course was through many scenes of poignant misery; for at the only part of their career upon which I have happened to obtain any light, the “boy” was wandering through the streets of Carlisle, in the dress and appearance of a very old beggar, and singing the songs wherewith he had formerly delighted the citizens of Edinburgh in Mrs Manson’s or Johnnie Dowie’s, for the subsistence of his master, who, as ascertained by my informant, was deposited in a state of sickness and wretchedness transcending all description, in a low lodging-house in a back street. Such is the fag-victim, following his master
“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”
“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”
“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”
“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”
and such, I may add, are the virtues which sometimes adorn the most vicious and degraded walks of life, where, to the eyes of ordinary observers, there appears no redeeming feature whatsoever.