It is not simply that some well-to-do people are ignorant regarding details of the lives of the poor. It is that not a single one among the cultivated and comfortably off people, with whom I came to mix later on, had any conception at all regarding the nature and character of the sort of life I saw all round me during my first two years in London. I consider that London's cab horses were substantially better off than the section of London's poor among whom I lived in places like South Tottenham, the purlieus of that long unlovely highway--the Seven Sisters Road.
Had I been of a more gregarious and social bent, the experience must have broken my heart, or unhinged my mind, I think. But, from the very first day, I began systematically to avoid intercourse with those about me; and in time this became more and more important to me. So much so indeed that, as I remember it, quite a large proportion of my many changes of lodgings were due to some threatened intimacy, some difficulty over avoiding a fellow lodger. Other moves were due to plagues of insects, appalling odours, persistent fighting and screaming in the next room, wife-beating; in one case a murder; in another the fact that a sodden wretch smashed my door in, under the impression that I had hidden his wife, by whose exertions he had lived, and soaked, for years. I must have removed more than a score of times in those two years, and more than once it was to seek a cheaper lodging--cheaper than the previous hell!
No, it would never do for me to attempt a detailed record of this period. Even consideration of it in outline causes the language of melodrama to spring to the pen. Melodrama! What drama ever conceived in the mind of man could plumb the reeking depths of the life of the vicious among London's poor? Things may be a little better nowadays. Beyond all question, the way of the aspirant in Grub Street appears vastly smoother than in my time. It is all cut and dried now, they say--schools of journalism, literary agents, organisations of one sort and another. But with regard to the life of the very poor, of the submerged, I have seen signs in the twentieth century which to my experienced eye suggested that no fundamental change had taken place since I lived among these cruelly debased people.
One would never dare to say it in print, of course, but I know very well that, while I lived among them, I was perfectly convinced that, for very many--not for all, of course, but for very many--there could be no fundamental improvement this side of the grave. For them the only really suitable and humane institution, I told myself a hundred times, would be a place of compulsory euthanasia--comfortably equipped lethal cubicles. For some there would be little need of the compulsory element. Police court officials (especially the court missionaries, the only philanthropic workers who earned my admiration; and they, of course, belonged to a properly organised corps, working on salary) know something of these people; but the big, bright, busy world of cleanly, educated folk know less of them than they know of prehistoric fauna.
I have lived under the same roof with men who beat their wives every week of their lives, and figured in police courts every month of their lives, when not in prison; with women who, in their lives, had swallowed up a dozen small homes, through the pawn-shops and in the form of gin; with men and women who, so degraded were they, were like as not to kick an infant as they passed if they saw one on the ground; with human beings who had fallen so very low that on my honour I had far liefer share a room with a hog than with one of them. Yes, the close companionship of swine would have been much less distasteful; and, be it noted, less unwholesome. I have written articles about Australian wattle blossom, about the bush and the sea--oh, about a thousand things!--with nothing more than a few inches of filthy lath and plaster between my aching head and such human wrecks as these.
'Quite brutal!' one has heard some ignorant innocent exclaim, when accident gave him a fleeting glimpse of a denizen of the under world. Brutal! I know something of brutes, and something of London's under world, and I am well assured no brute known to zoology ever reaches the loathsome depths touched by humanity's lowest dregs. It would sicken me to recall instances in proof of this; but I have known scores of them. The beast brutes have no alcohol. That makes a world of difference. They are actuated mainly by such cleanly motives as healthy hunger. They have no nameless vices; and they live in surroundings which make dirt, as dirt exists among humanity's under world, impossible. In changing my lodging I have fled from neighbours who, at times, sheltered acquaintances of whom it might literally be said that you could not walk upon pavement they had trodden without risk of physical contamination.
Drink! A man occupied a room next to mine, at one time, of which his mother was the tenant. Somewhere, I was told, he had at least one wife, upon whom he sponged, and children. (His kind invariably beget children, many children.) This man was in middle life, and his mother, a frail creature, was old. She had some small store of money; enough, I was told, for the few more months she was likely to live, and to save her from a pauper funeral. She had some lingering internal complaint. When the man had finished drinking his mother's little hoard away, he drove her out of doors--not merely with shameful words, but with blows--to get work, and earn liquor for him. Incredible as it seems she did get work, and he did take her earnings, and drink them, for a number of weeks. Then came the morning when she could not leave her bed. That week the rest of her furniture was sold, and the son drank it. On Saturday night he threw his mother from her bed to the floor, removed the bed and bedding, and drank them. She was dead when he returned, and on Sunday morning he took from his murdered mother's body the wedding ring which she, miraculously, had preserved to the end, and drank that. No one slew him. There was no lethal chamber for him. He did not even figure in a police court for this particular murder.
People think L'Assommoir dreadful, horrible. I cannot imagine what stayed Zola's hand; I am at a loss to account for his astonishing reticence, if he really knew anything of the worst degradation for which drink is accountable. In two short years I must have come upon a score of instances in every respect as horrible as that I have mentioned. And some that were worse; yes, more vile; too vile to recall even in thought. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons-- Oh! shame and degradation unspeakable! I do not know if any section of the community is to blame. I do know that the glory and brightness of life, the romance and the splendour of life--beauty, chivalry, loyalty, pomp, grandeur, nobility--all have been for ever robbed of some of their refulgence for me, as the result of two years in the under world of London. Life could never be quite the same again.
I stood at the base of a statue and watched the stately passage among her cheering subjects of the most venerable lady in Christendom. My very soul thrilled loyalty to Queen Victoria, loyalty that was proud and glad. And on the instant it was stabbed by the thought of another widowed mother, flung from the death-bed her worn fingers had toiled to save, and flung to die on the floor, by her son. The shame of it, in Christian London!
Were the poor always with us? Probably. But the awful human vermin that I knew, were they always with us? I doubt it; nay, I do not believe it. I believe they are part of England's sin, of England's modern wickedness. I believe they are the maggots bred out of the sore upon which our modern industrialism is based. When I looked upon the vilest of this city spawn, if my rising gorge permitted thought at all, I always had visions of little shrinking children whipped to work in English factories and mines and potteries; of souls ground out of anæmic bodies that Manchester might fatten. Free trade--licensed slaughter! The rights of the individual--the sacred liberty of the subject! Oh, I know it made England the emporium of the world, and built up some splendid fortunes, and--well, I believe it gave us the human vermin of our cities.