Highways and Byways in London

by Emily Constance Baird Cook

Those who are interested in the children of the poor,—and who is not?—should read Mr. Charles Morley's sympathetic "Studies in Board Schools," a considerable portion of which refers to Walworth and the Borough. The redeeming of the infant population of London is surely a noble work, and nowhere are the parental methods of the Board Schools so well set forth as in that delightful volume, real with the reality of life, and, like life itself, something between laughter and tears. Life has few mysteries for the Borough child, whose garments are strange and weird, whose voice "soon loses any infantine sweetness it may possess. Some of the ragged mites of girls of the Borough will even rap out an oath which would shock your ears who live over the water. But they mean nothing. It is like sailors' language, only sound and a little temper. Why, even the chirrup of the Borough sparrow has a minatory ring about it." Mr. Morley goes on to tell of a kindly institution dubbed "the Farm House" (strange name in such surroundings!), where, owing to Mr. G. R. Sims and the "Referee," six or seven hundred hungry school-children are, like the sparrows and sea-gulls, fed daily during the long winter:

"The Farm House" (he says), "is a strange mansion to find in the heart of the Marshalsea—just over the way is the site of the famous prison. The graveyard of St. George the Martyr is now a public garden, grim enough, to be sure, with its black tombstones and soot-laden balsam poplars. On one of the walls is placed a board on which is printed the legend: 'This stands on the site of the Marshalsea Prison described (or words to this effect) in Charles Dickens's well-known novel, Little Dorrit.' The Farm House was once the town dwelling of the Earls of Winchester. It has an ancient time-worn front, a court, mysterious chambers, old oak panels upon which you can just make out some of the old Winchester ladies and gentlemen; a curious old staircase; and I daresay a ghost or two if one went into the matter. But for a long time past it has been a common lodging-house. Beds in a haunted chamber may be had at fourpence a night. Many a strange history could those white-washed walls tell if they could speak, I dare say—of the good old days in Henry the Eighth's time, and even of more recent years. Many a man who began life with the hopefullest prospects has been glad to hide his head in the old Farm House, down Marshalsea way, Borough."

"Misery," continues this writer, "is strangely prolific; every hovel, every court, every alley teems with children," "little mothers" carrying heavy babies, like Miss Dorothy Tennant's tender picture, A Load of Care ... that heavy, heavy baby, weighing down that tiny, tiny nurse.... Nota Bene: There always is a baby. By the time a little wool appears on the head of number one, number two appears, and so on—well, nearly ad infinitum. There is no doubt whatever that babies are the bugbears of the Borough ratepayers."

The Board Schools in these districts teach, it appears, not only "the three R's," but also housewifery, house-cleaning, cooking, and other most necessary accomplishments:

"Housewifery" (says Mr. Morley) "is the birthright of the children of the poor.... Every mite of a girl down in the East or South ... is a housewife by the time she is six.... Often enough when times are hard and funds very low—when father is out o' work, and mother's bad in bed—does the poor little mother set forth with scrubbing-brush in hand, and clean the door-steps of the prosperous for twopence or threepence, according to the size and number of the steps. She probably lights the fire of a morning; it is her delight to go shopping to the remarkable establishment where most of the necessities of life are to be obtained by the farthing's-worth; and with the mysteries of marketing she is very well acquainted indeed. You should just see her in Bermondsey, the Walworth Road, the Dials, the New Cut, or Whitechapel on a Sunday morning, when these localities are alive with poor people buying their dinners. Road and footpath are blocked with stalls and barrows, and flesh, fish, fowl and vegetables are all jumbled together in confusion that is apparently inextricable. But little mother knows her way about, and whether it is red meat or white meat, beef, mutton or rabbit, trust her for getting a bargain, for keeping a sharp eye on weight and measure. A farden is a farden in districts where a penny is a substantial coin of the realm."

The "Surrey Side" is noted for its hospitals, as well as its prisons and its slums; and of these "Guy's Hospital," on the left of the Borough High Street,—an eighteenth-century foundation, due to the wealth of a Lombard Street bookseller named Thomas Guy,—is one of the most important. This Guy was in his way a miser, and his savings were vastly increased by dealings in South Sea stock,—showing that some good, at any rate, was wrought by the terrible "Bubble" that ruined so many thousands. Yet the hospital narrowly escaped losing the rich man's bequest. He was on the point of marrying his pretty maid, Sally, when, his bride offending him by officious interference, he broke off the marriage, and endowed the present hospital with his great wealth. A blackened brass statue of the founder stands in the courtyard of the edifice.

If Chaucer, with his ever memorable Canterbury Pilgrims, did much to immortalise the Southwark of mediæval times, Dickens, the child of a later era, has done at least as much for the Southwark of his day. In the Borough High Street, close to the site of the demolished Marshalsea Prison, stands St. George's Church, chiefly remarkable for the fact that Dickens has here placed the marriage of his heroine, "Little Dorrit," the Child of the Marshalsea. This was always a district of prisons; the natural sequence, one would think, of Southwark merry-making. Of the two Marshalsea prisons established here at different times, the earlier, nearer to London Bridge, was abolished in 1849; the later, so graphically described by Dickens, was not pulled down till 1887, after having been let for forty years as a lodging for tramps and vagabonds. Relics of it are now hard to find. Dickens, who knew it well as a boy, thus describes (in the preface to Little Dorrit) his search for it in later life:

"I found the outer front courtyard metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to Marshalsea Place, the houses in which I recognized, not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose to my mind's eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer.... Whoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years."

Dickens's boyish recollections of the ancient debtors prison have, as was perhaps natural, sometimes more than a tinge of bitterness; here he passed to and fro during wretched childish years, between the daily drudgery of covering blacking pots at "Murdstone and Grinby's," down by Hungerford Stairs. More wretched, indeed, far, than any modern Borough waif, was this neglected and sensitive child of genius. The intense torture of his degradation (as he thought it) was never wholly forgotten. In this connection he tells (in Forster's Life) a pathetic little story. No boy at the blacking office, it seems, knew where or how he lived; and once, being taken ill there, and helped towards home by a kindly fellow-worker, the child Dickens said good-bye to his friend by Southwark Bridge:

"I was too proud" (he says) "to let him know about the prison; and after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the steps of a house near Southwark-bridge on the Surrey side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was Mr. Robert Fagin's house."