Henry Mayhew

“ Giles’s, Church-lane has become one of the most crowded places in London. The houses, none of which are high, are all old, time-blackened, and dilapidated, with shattered window-frames and broken panes. Stretching across the narrow street, from all the upper windows, might be seen lines crossing and recrossing each other, on which hung yellow-looking shirts, stockings, women’s caps, and handkerchiefs looking like soiled and torn paper, and throwing the whole lane into shade. ”

“ The autumnal season of hop-picking is the grand rendezvous for the vagrancy of England and Ireland, the stream of London vagrancy flowing freely into Kent at that period, and afterwards flowing back with increased volume. Men, women, and children are attracted to the hop harvest. The season is over in less than a month, and then the casual labourers engaged in it (and they are nearly all casual labourers) must divert their industry, or their endeavours for a living, into other channels, swelling the amount of casualty in unskilled work or street-trade. ”

“ The bird-catcher’s life has many, and to the constitution of some minds, irresistible charms. There is the excitement of “sport”—not the headlong excitement of the chase, where the blood is stirred by motion and exercise—but still sport surpassing that of the angler, who plies his finest art to capture one fish at a time, while the bird-catcher despises an individual capture, but seeks to ensnare a flock at one twitch of a line. ”

“ The inhabitants of Monmouth-street are a distinct class; a peaceable and retiring race, who immure themselves for the most part in deep cellars, or small back parlours, and who seldom come forth into the world, except in the dusk and coolness of evening, when they may be seen seated, in chairs on the pavement, smoking their pipes, or watching the gambols of their engaging children as they revel in the gutter, a happy troop of infantine scavengers. Their countenances bear a thoughtful and a dirty cast, certain indications of their love of traffic ”

“ They may be seen of all ages, from mere childhood to positive decrepitude, crawling among the barges at the various wharfs along the river; it cannot be said that they are clad in rags, for they are scarcely half covered by the tattered indescribable things that serve them for clothing; their bodies are grimed with the foul soil of the river, and their torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description. ”

“ All men who feel themselves sunk into compulsory labour and a degraded condition are dissatisfied, and eager to throw the blame of their degradation from their own shoulders. But it is evident that these men are unwilling workers, because their work is deprived of its just reward; and although I did not hear of any difficulty being experienced in getting them to work, I was assured by many who knew them well, that they do not go about it with any alertness. Did any one ever hear a pauper whistle or sing at his street-work? ”

“ Be me soul, I don’t know how anybody stands it; it’s the divil’s place of all you ever saw in your life, standing there before them retorts with a long heavy rake, pullin out the red-hot coke for the bare life, and then there’s the rake red-hot in your hands, and the hissin and the bubblin of the wather, and the smoke and the smell—it’s fit to melt a man like a rowl of fresh butther. ”

“ The large employer is enabled to work cheaper by the sheer force of his larger capital. He reduces the cost of production, not by employing a cheaper labour, but by “economizing the labour” that he does employ. The small employer, on the other hand, seeks to keep pace with his larger rival, and strives to work cheap, not by “the economy of labour” (for this is hardly possible in the small way of production) , but by reducing the wages of his labourers. Hence the rule in almost every trade is that the smaller capitalists pay a lower rate of wages. ”

“ He traverses streets of dirty, straggling houses, with now and then an unexpected court, composed of buildings as ill-proportioned and deformed as the half-naked children that wallow in the kennels. Here and there, a little dark chandler’s shop, with a cracked bell hung up behind the door to announce the entrance of a customer, or betray the presence of some young gentleman in whom a passion for shop tills has developed itself at an early age; others, as if for support, against some handsome lofty building, which usurps the place of a low dingy public-house ”

“ Sidney Herbert informed me, that when he was connected with the Ordnance Department the severest punishment they could discover for idleness was the piling and unpiling of cannon shot; but surely this was the consummation of official folly! for idleness being simply an aversion to work, it is almost self-evident that it is impossible to remove this aversion by making labour inordinately irksome and repulsive. Until we understand the means by which work is made pleasant, and can discover other modes of employing our paupers and criminals, all our workhouse and prison discipline is idle tyranny. ”

“ I like to meet a sweep—understand me, not a grown sweeper—old chimney-sweepers are by no means attractive—but one of those tender novices blooming through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the cheek—such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little professional notes sounding like the peep peep of a young sparrow ”

“ Sanitarily regarded, the cleansing of a town is one of the most important objects that can engage the attention of its governors; the removal of its refuse being quite as necessary for the continuance of the existence of a people as the supply of their food. In the economy of Nature there is no loss: this the great doctrine of waste and supply has taught us; the detritus of one rock is the conglomerate of another; the evaporation of the ocean is the source of the river; the poisonous exhalations of animals the vital air of plants; and the refuse of man and beasts the food of their food. ”

“ Experience tells us that this is true; for who that has had an opportunity of visiting the habitations of the poor—the dwellers in ill-furnished rooms and garrets—has not remarked the more than half-starved slop needle-woman, the wretched half-naked children of the casually employed labourer, as the dock-man, or those whose earnings are extorted from them by their employers, such as the ballast-man, sitting crouched around the smouldering embers in the place where the fire ought to be? ”

“ I was told by an experienced carman, that he, or any one with far less than his experience, could in a moment detect, merely by the mode in which a man would put the harness on a horse and yoke him to the cart, whether he was likely to prove a master of his craft in that line or not. My informant had noticed, more especially many years ago, when labour was not so abundantly obtainable as it was last year, that men out of work would offer him their services as carmen even if they had never handled a whip in their lives, as if little more were wanted than to walk by the horse’s side. ”

“ Many wondrous tales are still told among the people of men having lost their way in the sewers, and of having wandered among the filthy passages—their lights extinguished by the noisome vapours—till, faint and overpowered, they dropped down and died on the spot. Other stories are told of sewer-hunters beset by myriads of enormous rats, and slaying thousands of them in their struggle for life, till at length the swarms of the savage things overpowered them, and in a few days afterwards their skeletons were discovered picked to the very bones. ”

“ The shop in which I work is for all the world like a prison; the silent system is as strictly carried out there as in a model gaol. If a man was to ask any common question of his neighbour, except it was connected with his trade, he would be discharged there and then. If a journeyman makes the least mistake, he is packed off just the same. A man working at such places is almost always in fear; for the most trifling things he’s thrown out of work in an instant. And then the quantity of work that one is forced to get through is positively awful ”

“ And I am convinced, after long deliberation, that such institutions could not but tend to produce a rapid and marked improvement in the character of the London Hawkers.
This is the only way evident to me of meeting the evil of our present street-life—an evil which is increasing every day, and which threatens, ere long, almost to overwhelm us with its abominations. To revile the street-people is stark folly. Their ignorance is no demerit to them, even as it is no merit to us to know the little that we do. ”

“ As in other departments of commerce, both in our own capital, in many of our older cities, and in the cities of the Continent, the locality appropriated to this traffic is one of narrow streets, dark alleys, and most oppressive crowding. The traders seem to judge of a Rag-fair garment, whether a cotton frock or a ducal coachman’s great-coat, by the touch, more reliably than by the sight; they inspect, so to speak, with their fingers more than their eyes. But the business in Petticoat and Rosemary lanes is mostly of a retail character. ”

“ One of their body knew of ten who were at work live-fish selling, and there might be as many more, he thought, “working” the remoter suburbs of Blackheath, Croydon, Richmond, Twickenham, Isleworth, or wherever there are villa residences of the wealthy. This is the season when the gold and silver fish-sellers, who are altogether a distinct class from the bird-sellers of the streets, resort to the country, to vend their glass globes, with the glittering fish swimming ceaselessly round and round. The gold fish-hawkers are, for the most part, of the very best class of the street-sellers. ”

“ Thus, it is evident, that the means of labour have increased at a more rapid pace than the labouring population. But the increase in “property” of the country, in that which is sometimes called the “staple” property, being the assured possessions of the class of proprietors or capitalists, as well as in the profits, prove that, if the labourers of the country have been hungering for want of employment, at least the wealth of the nation has kept pace with the increase of the people, while the profits of trade have exceeded it. ”

“ The dust and cinders from our fires, the “slops” from the washing of our houses, the excretions of our bodies, the detritus and “surface-water” of our streets, have all their offices to perform in the great scheme of creation; and if left to rot and fust about us not only injure our health, but diminish the supplies of our food. The filth of the thoroughfares of the metropolis forms, it would appear, the staple manure of the market-gardens in the suburbs ”

“ The rag grinders, with their squalid, dust-strewn garments, powdered to a dull grayish hue, and with their bandages tied over the greater part of their faces, move about like reanimated mummies in their swathings, looking most ghastly. The wages of these poor creatures do not exceed 7s. or 8s. a week. The men are much better paid, none of them making less than 18s. a week, and many earning as much as 22s. Not one of them, however, will admit that he found the trade injurious. The dust tickles them a little, they say, that is all. ”

“ No slaves work like we do. At some of the strapping shops the foreman keeps continually walking about with his eyes on all the men at once. At others the foreman is perched high up, so that he can have the whole of the men under his eye together. I suppose since I knew the trade that a man does four times the work that he did formerly. I know a man that’s done four pairs of sashes in a day, and one is considered to be a good day’s labour. What’s worse than all, the men are every one striving one against the other. Each is trying to get through the work quicker than his neighbours. ”

“ And if wages are low now, and employment is precarious on account of this, what will not both work and pay sink to when the number is again increased, and the people clamouring for employment are at least treble what they are at present? When the wife has been taught to compete for work with the husband, and son and daughter to undersell their own father, what will be the state of our labour market then?
But the labour of wives, and children, and apprentices, is not the only means of glutting a particular trade with hands. ”

“ Whenever the shore-men come near a street grating, they close their lanterns and watch their opportunity of gliding silently past unobserved, for otherwise a crowd might collect over head and intimate to the policeman on duty, that there were persons wandering in the sewers below. The shore-workers never take dogs with them, lest their barking when hunting the rats might excite attention. As the men go along they search the bottom of the sewer, raking away the mud with their hoe, and pick, from between the crevices of the brick-work, money, or anything else that may have lodged there. ”

“ Now these are surely anomalies which it is high time, in these free-trade days, should cease. The endeavour to obtain an honest and independent livelihood should subject no man to fine or imprisonment; nor should the poor hawker—the neediest perhaps of all tradesmen—be required to pay 4l. a year for the liberty to carry on his business when the wealthy shopkeeper can do so “scot-free.” Moreover, it is a glaring iniquity that the rich tradesman should have it in his power, by complaining to the police, to deprive his poorer rival of the right to dispose of his goods in the streets. ”

“ Now if we take into consideration that in the immense suburbs of the metropolis, there are branching off from almost every street, labyrinths of courts and alleys, teeming with human beings, and that almost every room has its separate family—for it takes a multitude of poor to make one rich man—we may be able to arrive at the conclusion that by far the greater proportion of coals brought into London are consumed by the poorer classes. ”

“ Some economists argue that, as paupers are consumers, they should, whenever they are able to work, be made producers also, or otherwise they exhaust the national wealth, to which they do not contribute. This might be a sound axiom were there work sufficient for all. But in an over-populated country there is not work enough, as is proven by the mere fact of the over-population; and the able-bodied paupers are paupers simply because they cannot obtain work, so that to employ those who are out of work is to throw out those who are in work, and thus to pauperize the self-supporting. ”

“ Beneath this ragged canopy, the street literally swarmed with human beings—young and old, men and women, boys and girls, wandering about amidst all kinds of discordant sounds. The footpaths on both sides of the narrow street were occupied here and there by groups of men and boys, some sitting on the flags and others leaning against the wall, while their feet, in most instances bare, dabbled in the black channel alongside the kerb, which being disturbed sent up a sickening stench. ”

“ What wonder, then, that the necessities of such a class of individuals should have created a special race of employers, known by the significant name of ‘slaughter-house men’—or that these, being aware of the inability of the ‘garret masters’ to hold out against any offer, no matter how slight a remuneration it affords for their labour, should continually lower and lower their prices, until the entire body of the competitive portion of the cabinet trade is sunk in utter destitution and misery? ”