But, as “General” Booth says, “A home is a home be it ever so low, and the desperate tenacity with which the poor cling to the last wretched semblance of one is very touching. There are vile dens, fever-haunted and stenchful crowded courts, where the return of summer is dreaded because it means the unloosing of myriads of vermin which render night unbearable, which (the dens) nevertheless are regarded as havens of rest by their hard-working occupants. They can scarcely be said to be furnished. A chair, a mattress, and a few miserable sticks constitute all the furniture of the single room in which they have to sleep and breed and die; but they cling to it as a drowning man to a half-submerged raft.... So long as the family has a lair into which it can creep at night, the married man keeps his footing, but when he loses that solitary foothold, there arrives the time, if there be such a thing as Christian compassion, for the helping hand to be held out to save him from the vortex that sucks him downward, aye, downward to the hopeless under-strata of crime and despair.”
Truly in such cases one realises the truth of these lines:—
“God made the country, and man made the town,
What wonder then that health and virtue, gifts
That can alone make sweet the bitter draft
That life holds out to all, should most abound
And least be threatened in the fields and groves.”
Booth writes chiefly of the East of London; but of all overcrowded vile dens, perhaps none are so bad as those in the West End, frequently not a stone’s-throw from fashionable thoroughfares and luxurious residences.
At Notting Dale, Kensington, is a district comprising five streets, consisting entirely of common lodging-houses and “furnished rooms,” whose occupants are thieves, rogues, professional beggars, hawkers, and “unfortunates.” It has been rightly named the “West End Avernus,” and so offensive are the habits of its unwashed crowds, that the policeman on his beat is often compelled to hold his handkerchief to his nose as he passes by.
Still lower in the grade of accommodation for a married labourer is the “part of one room” system; and, lowest of all, the common lodging-house, where over-crowding is inevitable.
In one alley in Spitalfields there were last year ten houses in whose fifty-one rooms (none of them more than 8 ft. by 9 ft.—about the size of a biggish bathroom) no fewer than 254 human beings were distributed; from two to nine in each apartment, but nine in the room was not the maximum.
There is an old story to the effect that a district visitor, sympathising with an occupant of some such lodging as the above in St. Giles’-in-the-Fields, where four families respectively tenanted the four corners, was met with the philosophic reply, “Oh, yes, we should have been comfortable enough if the landlord hadn’t gone and let the middle of the room to a fifth family.”
Think of all this, fathers and mothers, who jealously guard your children from every possible source of moral contamination, whose daughters’ modesty would be startled if accidentally a bedroom window momentarily revealed their toilettes, whose children at boarding-schools feel sensitive about dressing and undressing before others.
Yet this is nothing! A well-known rector in the East End says: “From one of my parochial buildings I have seen through the thinly-veiled windows of a house, four men and six women retiring for the night in one room, all of them respectable, hard-working people, and the majority of them sleeping in beds on the floor,” the rent per week being eight shillings.