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—.
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; butone 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 ishisbusiness. 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 asthat. 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 abonâ fidebargain 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 thatevery 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 housedand 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 simplicityinto 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 proportionof 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 thewildness 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 welcometo 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 stringof 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 woreoneslipper; 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 dirtyface 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 proceedingswere 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 wasnotthe “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? Youhavecome 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’tknow 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;nowp’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, “youaremistaken. 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 porterin 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 childrenfive 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.”
“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 porterin 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 childrenfive 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 toproduce 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.
The London Errand Boy.—His Drudgery and Privations.—His Temptations.—The London Boy after Dark.—The Amusements provided for him.
Thelaw 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, bethey 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. Somethingelse 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 somethingnice 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 momentaryevil 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 influencewith 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 itshould 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 areallchildren 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 compelledto 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 thereadingis; the piece won’t be spoke, it’ll beacted, 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 MasterTomkins 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-gateman’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 spellthrough a “penny number.” It whets his appetite merely. It is one thing toreadabout 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 considerableamount 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 theproprietor 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, betokeningthe 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, butyouhave 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.
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.
Thecurious 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 theunlucky “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, itmay 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 muchreal 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 theirhome. 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 wouldnot 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’sRents. 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 leastdisturbed 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.