A GIN PUBLIC IN THE NEW CUT.
In Waterloo Road, close upon the Victoria theatre, I saw one of these "gin publics," the doors of which were choked with customers passing in and out from the adjoining theatre. There were negroes, Malays and Chinamen, with an overflowing majority of Cockneys, in the "public," all of whom were busily engaged in assuaging their thirst, or firing up their stomach furnaces. Not a little puzzled was I, to see women with small children in their arms, drinking alongside of sooty coal-bargemen—negroes, and young children, who had been driven by their miserable parents to beg coppers wherewith to procure them gin. It was a dreadful scene to witness, and the smiling fiend behind the bar was positively fat and enjoying the haggardness in some of his customers' faces.
I had been told that there was a theatre on the Surrey side of the river, in which, if I visited it, I might find all the unwashed elements of the London democracy at home, and one evening I found myself before its door, after a long journey.
IN THE GALLERY OF THE "VIC."
This was the "Royal Victoria Theatre," New Cut, Lambeth. The Bowery, in its palmiest and most glorious days, could not hold a candle to this histrionic temple. Its tragedies and dramas of the highway robber and George Barnewell apprentice school are not, perhaps, to be equaled in any theatre in the world. The Porte St. Martin, in Paris, is a mere training-school of horror compared with this, the most bloodthirsty of places of amusement. There were two entrances—one for the aristocracy of Lambeth, the other for the underfed plough-holders, or, rather, for the Costermongers. The aristocratic entrance had a dark, dirty box-office, illumined by a pair of gas-jets that could hardly find air to flutter in, so strong was the stench of men and filthy materialism.
Over the door of the box-office was a sign, "Pit, 6d.; gallery, 3d.; private stage boxes, 2s." The crowds pushed hard and fast to get an entrance. They came in swarms of fustian and corduroys, with unkempt hair, the bosoms of some of the costerwomen almost laid bare with the shoving and crushing; the lads and men wearing heavy hob-nailed shoes, such shoes as are never seen in America excepting on the feet of emigrants, who stream through the gates of Castle Garden from the waste of Atlantic waters—and these heavy hob-nailed shoes did wonders in hurrying the progress of the front ranks, by repeated applications to the calves and ankles of those who had the good or bad luck to stand nearest the door of the theatre.
After a severe struggle, in which some greasy corduroys are ripped and several caps lost, and a number of babies squeezed—who are in the arms of girls hardly old enough, one would think, to be their lawful mothers—we get clear of the mob, shouting, screaming, and whistling, and pass up the dirty, rickety stairs to the three-penny Gallery of the "Vic," as the theatre is called by the class who frequent it; and now a sight presents itself to the writer such as is seldom seen, and never in any city but London.
