LETTER III.
S—— Vicarage.
I took yesterday an afternoon’s country-drive to a neighboring town, with no idea of finding anything of note-worthy interest, but it strikes me that one or two little matters that made a mark in my memory, may be worth recording. England is so paved and hedged with matter to think about, that you can scarce stir without pencilling by the way.
I strolled towards a very picturesque church while the ladies of my party were shopping. The town (Abingdon) is a tumbled-up, elbowy, crooked old place, with the houses all frowning at each other across the gutters, and the streets narrow and intricate. The church was a rough antique, with the mendings of a century or two on the originally beautiful turrets and windows, but as I walked around it, I came upon the church-yard, hemmed in at awkward angles by three long and venerable buildings. Two of these seemed to have been built with proper reference to the climate, for the lower stories were faced with covered galleries, wherein the occupants might take the air, and yet be sheltered from the rain. Through the low arches of one of the galleries, I saw a couple of old men pacing up and down, and on inquiring of one of them, I found it was a poor-house, of curious as well as ancient endowment—the funds being devoted to the support of twenty-five widowers and as many widows. What else, (beside being left destitute) was necessary to make one a recipient of the charity, I could not learn of my informant. He ushered me, however, into his apartment, and a charming little rubbishy, odd-angled, confused cupboard it was! I could not but mentally congratulate him on the difference between his snuggery for one, (for each man had a niche to himself,) and the dreadfully whitewashed halls, like new churches that have never been prayed in, in which the poor are elsewhere imprisoned. He had old shoes lying in one corner, and a smoked print stuck against the wall, and things hung up and stuffed away untidily, here and there—in short, it looked like a home! The whole building was but a row of these single rooms—a long, one-storied and narrow structure, and behind was a garden with a portion divided off to each pensioner—his window so near that he could sit in-doors and inhale the fragrance from flowers of his own tending. I rather think every man was his own turnkey and superintendent.
But we visited in the course of the afternoon, a poor-house which was in direct contrast to this. Abingdon is distinguished for possessing the model work-house of the new Union System, which has diminished the burthensome cost of the poor, to the country, one half. It used to be customary to give the helpless paupers two shillings a week, and let them shift for themselves, if they preferred it. Now, the poor of half a dozen villages, more or less, are provided for in one “improved” work-house, and if they do not live in it, they can receive nothing. And, to live in it, they must work and submit to the discipline.
The new work-house was a building of three long wings, in the form of a Y; the superintendent’s room placed in the crotch, and his windows commanding a complete view of the two sides of each wing. The gardens and workshops were in the angles, and there was scarce an inch of the premises that was not overlooked from the centre. We were kindly shown over the different apartments. The cleanliness was enough to discourage a fly. A smell of soap-and-water’s utmost completely impregnated the atmosphere. The grain of the scrubbed tables stood on end. The little straight beds looked as if it must be a bold man who would crook his legs in them. The windows were too high for a child or a short person to look out. It was like an insane hospital or a prison. In one of the first rooms we entered, was a delicate and pretty child of seven or eight years of age, a new inmate. Her mother, who was her only relative, had just died in a neighboring village, and left her quite alone in the world. She was shut up in a room with an old woman, for by the “regulations,” she was to be separated some days from the other children, to make sure that she brought no disease into the work-house. But the sight of the poor little sobbing thing, sitting on the middle of a long clean bench, with no object to look at within the four white walls, except a table and a soured old woman, looked very little like “charity.” And the hopeless down-hill of her sob sounded as if she felt but little like one newly befriended. “She’s done nothing but cry all the day long!” said the old woman. Fortunately I had a pocket full of sweets, intended for a happier child, and I was able to make one break in her long day’s monotony.
In another room we found ten or twelve old women, who were too decrepid for work of any kind. But they had laps left![[6]] And in each one’s lap lay a baby. The old knees were trotting with the new-born of pauper mothers, and but for its dreadful uniformity—each old trunk grafted with a bud, and trunks and buds dressed and swathed in the poor-house uniform—this room full of life’s helpless extremities would have seemed the happiest of all. They cuddled up their druling charges as we approached the benches on which they sat, and chirruped their toothless “tsup! tsup! tsup!” as if each was proud of her charge. One of the old women complained bitterly of not being allowed to have a pinch of snuff. The reason why, was because the others would want it too, or demand an equivalent, paupers being cared for by system. The unhappy and improvident creature had educated a superfluous want!
The sick rooms were marked with the same painful naked neatness. Old people, disposed of to die, economically tucked up in rows against the wall, with no person to come near them except the one to nurse a dozen, form a dreadful series. Really, there should be some things sacred from classification. The fifth acts of dramas, like whole human lives, should not pass like the shelving of utensils that are one degree short of worthless. I stood looking for a minute or two at an old man whose only reply to “well, how are you now?” was a hopeless lifting and dropping of the eyelids, and I wondered whether a life was worth having, that had such possible terminations in its dark lottery.
The children’s school seemed under more genial charge, and there were prints hung upon the walls of their school-room. The weaving and spinning-rooms looked cheerful also. Some thirty boys singing hymns together while at work, and seeming contentedly employed. To the old of both sexes, however, this kind of poor-house is utterly repulsive, I was told, and the taking refuge in it is considered by the poor hardly better than starvation. One of the rules seems to bear very hard—married paupers (an old couple for instance,) being put into different wards, and only permitted to see each other once a week, and then in the presence of superintendents.
The flower-beds at the front door were in great splendor with the lillies in bloom. I called the door keeper’s attention to the inappropriateness of this particular ornament to the threshold of a work-house. “They toil not, neither do they spin,” etc., etc., etc.
| [6] | Bloomers please take notice. |