89. A Brutal Husband.
I have just heard of the following case: A poor woman, only twenty-eight years of age, was confined last Wednesday with her seventh child, all living. She has been allowed to live until this affair is over in a deplorable cottage that is condemned. She has been living quite near for about four months, but I and my neighbours have never seen her nor the two youngest children, aged two and a half years and fifteen months, and we are now told they have no clothes to come out in. These two children were born in the workhouse infirmary. We hear that the father, a hay-carter, only did six weeks’ work in a twelvemonth. He must be a most brutal man. He was fighting the poor wife only a fortnight ago, as if she were another man. The poor thing lies there with only an old sheet and quilt for covering, and a poor woman who is attending to the other children has taken the blanket from her own baby to lend her. The very night the baby was born the midwife had to send for a policeman, the husband was carrying on in such a dreadful manner, and was worse afterwards, because they would not let him have the Insurance paper that had just been filled in by the midwife for the Insurance.