Henry Mayhew

“ If the incomprehensibility of the wealth rises to sublimity, assuredly the want that co-exists with it is equally incomprehensible and equally sublime. Pass from the quay and warehouses to the courts and alleys that surround them, and the mind is as bewildered with the destitution of the one place as it is with the superabundance of the other. Many come to see the riches, but few the poverty, abounding in absolute masses round the far-famed port of London. ”

“ In the warehouses are stored goods that are as it were ingots of untold gold. Above and below ground you see piles upon piles of treasure that the eye cannot compass. The wealth appears as boundless as the very sea it has traversed. The brain aches in an attempt to comprehend the amount of riches before, above, and beneath it. There are acres upon acres of treasure, more than enough, one would fancy, to stay the cravings of the whole world, and yet you have but to visit the hovels grouped round about all this amazing excess of riches to witness the same amazing excess of poverty. ”

“ Now the appeal is made in Irish blarney—now in broken English. Indeed, it is a sight to sadden the most callous, to see thousands of men struggling for only one day’s hire; the scuffle being made the fiercer by the knowledge that hundreds out of the number there assembled must be left to idle the day out in want. To look in the faces of that hungry crowd is to see a sight that must be ever remembered. Some are smiling to the foreman to coax him into remembrance of them; others, with their protruding eyes, eager to snatch at the hoped-for pass. ”

“ Here is a herd of the most wretched and friendless people in the world, lying down close to the earth as sheep; here are some two centuries of outcasts, whose days are an unvarying round of suffering, enjoying the only moments when they are free from pain and care—life being to them but one long painful operation as it were, and sleep the chloroform which, for the time being, renders them insensible.
The sight sets the mind speculating on the beggars’ and the outcasts’ dreams. ”

“ The courts and alleys round about the dock swarm with low lodging-houses; and are inhabited either by the dock-labourers, sack-makers, watermen, or that peculiar class of the London poor who pick up a living by the water-side. The open streets themselves have all more or less a maritime character. Every other shop is either stocked with gear for the ship or for the sailor. The windows of one house are filled with quadrants and bright brass sextants, chronometers, and huge mariners’ compasses, with their cards trembling with the motion of the cabs and waggons passing in the street. ”

“ You can’t imagine, sir, what a curse the street business often becomes, with its insults and starvations. The day before my wife was confined, I jumped and labour’d doing Jim Crow for twelve hours—in the wet, too—and earned one shilling and threepence; with this I returned to a home without a bit of coal, and with only half-a-quartern loaf in it. I know it was one shilling and threepence; for I keep a sort of log of my earnings and my expenses; you’ll see on it what I’ve earn’d as clown, or the funnyman, with a party of acrobats, since the beginning of this year. ”

“ What though there be a brisk and a slack season in the cabinet-makers’ trade, as in the majority of others? Slack or brisk, the garret-master must produce the same excessive quantity of goods. In the hope of extricating himself from his overwhelming poverty, he toils on, producing more and more; and yet the more he produces the more hopeless does his position become, for the greater the stock that he thrusts into the market the lower does the price of his labour fall, until at last he and his own family work for less than he himself could earn, a few years back, by his own unaided labour. ”

“ It is, indeed, a ragged congress of nations—a convocation of squalor and misery—of destitution, degradation, and suffering, from all the corners of the earth.
Nearly every shade and grade of misery, misfortune, vice, and even guilt, are to be found in the place; for characters are not demanded previous to admission, want being the sole qualification required of the applicants. The Asylum for the Houseless is at once the beggar’s hotel, the tramp’s town-house, the outcast’s haven of refuge—the last dwelling, indeed, on the road to ruin. ”

“ Beyond that a man has no right to go; indeed, anything extra only makes him stupid. Under the old system, I used to be obliged to buy rum; and, over and over again, I’ve had to pay fifteen-pence for half-a-pint of rum in a ginger-beer bottle; and have gone into the street and sold it for sixpence, and got a steak with the money. No man can say drink has ruined my constitution, for I’ve only had two pennyworth of antibilious pills in twenty-five years; and I will say, a little beer does a man more good than harm, and too much does a man more harm than good. ”

“ When, however, Society sees two or three, or even some half-dozen of you relapse into your former practices, they jump to the conclusion that the same is the case with you all. They, in fact, think that relapses are the rule and amendment the exception, instead of the fact being quite the other way. This is like the self-delusion of the London apprentices, who fancy there are more wet Sundays in a year than rainy week-days, simply because they want to get out on Sundays, and are particularly vexed when the bad weather keeps them at home. ”

“ When I first go into a public-house I go into the tap-room, and say, ‘Would you like to hear a tune, gentlemen, or see a dance, or a little bit of amusement?’ If they say ‘No,’ I stand still, and begin a talking, to make ’em laugh. I’m not to be choked off easy. I say, ‘Come, gentlemen, can’t you help a poor fellow as is the best dancer in England? ”

“ But with the unskilled labourer the amount of remuneration is seldom much above subsistence-point, if it be not very frequently below it. Such a labourer, commercially considered, is, as it were, a human steam-engine, supplied with so much fuel in the shape of food, merely to set him in motion. If he can be made to perform the same amount of work with half the consumption, why a saving of one-half the expense is supposed to be effected. Indeed, the grand object in the labour-market of the present day appears to be to economise human fuel. ”

“ It is astonishing to mark the difference between the poor artisan and the labourer. The one seems alive to his poverty, and to feel it more acutely than the other. The labourer is more accustomed to “rough it,” as it is called; but the artisan, earning better wages, and used to better ways, appears among the houseless poor as a really pitiable character. Carpenters are among the classes of mechanics in which there appears to be the greatest amount of destitution, and I selected this man as a fair average specimen of the body. ”

“ It is impossible to mistake the Asylum if you go there at dark, just as the lamp in the wire cage over the entrance-door is being lighted. This is the hour for opening; and ranged along the kerb is a kind of ragged regiment, drawn up four deep, and stretching far up and down the narrow lane, until the crowd is like a hedge to the roadway. Nowhere in the world can a similar sight be witnessed. ”

“ When I came home I strived as hard as any man to get an honest livelihood. I tried every experiment—I went all up and down Whitechapel, but no, the police would not allow me—they picked me out as a marked man. Then I worked fifteen or sixteen months at the Docks, but lately that employment has been very slack, and I have tried all the offices in vain for the last fortnight. I leave you to consider, therefore, what a man is to do when he strives to get a living and can’t. No man in all London has seen more trouble than I have. ”

“ Hence, restless with want, they wander in hordes across the land, making, in vain hope, for London, as the great emporium of wealth—the market of the world. But London is as overstocked with hands as every other nook and corner of the country. ”

“ That there are such things as miracles of instantaneous reformation, I don’t deny; but the first thing wanted is some society to give men what will keep them from starving, clothe them, and find them in a lodging; and when they are thus placed in decent comfort, and made, as a necessary consequence, more kindly in their nature, other people may then come to them and try to make them religious. To attempt, however, to proselytise men who are famishing, appears to me a mockery and a delusion, and only the most depraved class of criminals would, I believe, yield to it. ”

“ Some people, when they teach their children for any entertainment, torture the little things most dreadful. There is a great deal of barbarity practised in teaching children for the various lines. It’s very silly, because it only frightens the little things, and some children often will do much more by kindness than ill-usage. Now there are several children that I know of that have been severely injured whilst being trained for the Risley business. Why, bless your soul, a little thing coming down on it’s head, is done for the remainder of it’s life. ”

“ At night one might see rockets ascending in the air from many of the suburbs of London, and the little back-gardens in such places as the Hampstead-road and Kennington, and, after dusk, suddenly illuminated with the blaze of the tar-barrel, and one might hear in the streets even banging of crackers mingled with the laughter and shouts of boys enjoying the sport. ”

“ A labouring man, or mechanic, deprived of employment in a particular town, sets out on a journey to seek work in some other part of the country. The mere fact of his so journeying to seek work shows that he has a natural aversion to become a burden to the parish. He is no sooner, however, become an inmate of the casual wards, and breakfasts and sups off the bounty of the workhouse, than he learns a most dangerous lesson—he learns how to live by the labour of others. ”

“ The improvidence of the casual dock-labourer is due, therefore, not to any particular malformation of his moral constitution, but to the precarious character of his calling. His vices are the vices of ordinary human nature. Ninety-nine in every hundred similarly circumstanced would commit similar enormities. If the very winds could whistle away the food and firing of wife and children, I doubt much whether, after a week’s or a month’s privation, we should many of us be able to prevent ourselves from falling into the very same excesses. ”

“ A romarnce is far different to a hopera, you know; for one is interesting, and the other is dull and void of apprehension. The romance is the interesting one, and of the two I likes it the best; but let every one speak as they find—that’s moral. Jack Sheppard, you know, is a romarnce, and a fine one; but Punch is a hopera—a huproar, we calls it, and the most pleasing and most interesting of all as was ever produced, Punch never was beat and never will, being the oldest performance for many hundred years, and now handed down to prosperity (there’s a fine moral in it, too) . ”

“ I do not allude to these gentlemen with the slightest inclination unduly to censure them. The truth is, with questions affecting labour and the poor they have little sympathy. The labourer, in their eyes, is but a machine; so many labourers are as so many horse-power. ”

“ Many are without shirts; with their bare skin showing through the rents and gaps of their clothes, like the hide of a dog with the mange. Some have their greasy coats and trousers tied round their wrists and ankles with string, to prevent the piercing wind from blowing up them. A few are without shoes; and these keep one foot only to the ground, while the bare flesh that has had to tramp through the snow is blue and livid-looking as half-cooked meat. ”

“ Frequently when I am playing the fool in the streets, I feel very sad at heart. I can’t help thinking of the bare cupboards at home; but what’s that to the world? I’ve often and often been at home all day when it has been wet, with no food at all, either to give my children or take myself, and have gone out at night to the public-houses to sing a comic song or play the funnyman for a meal—you may imagine with what feelings for the part—and when I’ve come home I’ve call’d my children up from their beds to share the loaf I had brought back with me. ”

“ What wonder, then, that—taught either in no school at all, or else in that meretricious one which makes crime a glory, and dresses up vice as virtue—these poor lads should be unprincipled in every act they do—that they should be either literally actuated by no principles at all, or else fired with the basest motives and purposes, gathered from books which distort highway robbery into an act of noble enterprise, and dignify murder as justifiable homicide? ”

“ So far from such being the fact, however, the labour at the docks appears to be not only more onerous, but doubly as precarious as that of weaving; while the average earnings of the entire class seems to be less. What, then, it will be asked, constitutes the inducement for the change? Why does the weaver abandon the calling of his life, and forsake an occupation that at least appears to have, and actually had in the days of better prices, a refining and intellectual tendency? Why does he quit his graceful art for the mere muscular labour of the human animal? ”

“ A good jackdaw, well trained to a happy family, is the life of the cage next to the monkey. He’s at all the roguishness and mischief that it is possible for a man to be at. If he sees a cat or a dog, or anything asleep and quiet, he’ll perch on its head, and peck away to rouse it. He’s very fond of pitching on the top of the cat and turning the fur over, or pecking at the ears, till the cat turns round, and then he’s off. If there’s a rat in his way, he’ll peck at its nose till it turns round, and then peck at its tail. ”

“ The sleeping-wards at the Asylum are utterly unlike all preconceived notions of a dormitory. There is not a bedstead to be seen, nor is even so much as a sheet or blanket visible. The ward itself is a long, bare, whitewashed apartment, with square post-like pillars supporting the flat-beamed roof, and reminding the visitor of a large unoccupied store-room—such as are occasionally seen in the neighbourhood of Thames-street and the Docks. ”

“ Now, all “steady labour”—that is to say, the continuance of any labour for any length of time—is naturally irksome to us. We are all innately erratic—prone to wander both in thought and [370] action; and it is only by a vigorous effort, which is more or less painful to us at first, that we can keep ourselves to the steady prosecution of the same object, to the repeated performance of the same acts, or even to continuous attention to the same subject. Labour and effort are more or less irksome to us all. ”