Records of Later Life

by Fanny Kemble

Ever yours,

Fanny.

Railway Station, Hull, Friday, 4th.

I have been spending the afternoon crying over the tender mercies of English Christians to their pauper population, till my eyes smart, and itch, and ache, and I shall have neither sight nor voice to read "Coriolanus," which I must do this evening. To this Hull Railway Hotel is attached a magnificent Railway Station (or rather vice [versa]), shaped like a horseshoe, with a spacious broad pavement, roofed with a skylight all round, making a noble ambulatory, of which I have availed myself every day since I have been here for my walking exercise....

I was just starting for my walk to-day, when in came old Mr. Frost, my Hull employer, President of the Literary and Scientific Institution, before which I am giving my present readings, the principal lawyer, and, I believe, Mayor of Hull,—a most charming, accomplished, courteous old gentleman of seventy years and upwards, who, finding that I was about to walk, proposed to accompany me, and we descended to the Station.

As we paced up and down, I remarked, lying in a corner, what I took at first for a bundle of rags. On looking again, however, I perceived there was a live creature in the rags—a boy, whose attitude of suffering and weariness, as he crouched upon the pavement, was the most wretched thing you can imagine. I knelt down by him, and asked him what ailed him: he hardly lifted his face from his hands, and said, "Headache;" and then, coughing horribly, buried his miserable face again. Mr. Frost, seeing I still knelt by him, began to ask him questions; and then followed one of those piteous stories which make one smart all over while one listens to them; parental desertion, mother marrying a second time, cruelty from the step-father, beating, starving, and final abandonment. He did not know what had become of them; they had gone away to avoid paying their rent, and left this boy to shift for himself. "How long ago is that?" said Mr. Frost. "Before snow," said the lad,—the snow has been gone a fortnight and more from this neighborhood, and for all that time the child, by his own account, has wandered up and down, living by begging, and sleeping in barns and stables and passages. The interrogatory was a prolonged one: my friend Mr. Frost is slow by age, and cautious by profession, and a man by nature, and so not irresistibly prompted to seize up such an unfortunate at once in his arms and adopt it for his own. In the course of his answers the boy, among other things, said, "I wouldn't mind only for little brother." "How old is he?" "Going on two year." "Where is he?" "Mother got him." "Oh, well, then, you needn't fret about him; she'll take care of him." "No, she won't; he won't be having nothing to eat, I know he won't." And the boy covered his face again in a sullen despair that was pitiful to see. Now, you know, Hal, this boy was not begging; he did not come to us with a pathetic appeal about his starving little brother: he was lying starving himself, and stupefied, with his head covered over, buried in his rags when I spoke to him; and this touching reminiscence of his poor little step-brother came out in the course of Mr. Frost's interrogatory accidentally, and made my very heart ache. The boy had been in the workhouse for two years, with his mother, before she married this second husband; and, saying that he had been sent to school, and kindly treated, and well fed in the workhouse, I asked him if he would go back thither, and he said yes. So, rather to Mr. Frost's amazement I think, I got a cab, and put the child in, and with my kind old gentleman—who, in spite of evident repugnance to such close quarters with the poor tatterdemalion, would by no means leave me alone in the adventure—we carried the small forsaken soul to the workhouse, where we got him, with much difficulty, temporarily received. The wife of the master of the poor-house knew the boy again, and corroborated much of what he had told us, adding that he was a good boy enough while he was there with his mother; but—would you believe it, Hal?—she also told us that this poor little creature had come to their gate the night before, begging admittance; but that, because he had not a certain written order from a certain officer, the rules of the establishment prevented their receiving him, and he had been turned away of course. I was in a succession of convulsions of rage and crying all this time, and so adjured and besought poor old Mr. Frost to take instant measures for helping the little outcast, that when we left him by the workhouse fire, the woman having gone to get him some food, and I returned blaspheming and blubbering to my inn, he—Mr. Frost—went off in search of a principal police-officer of Hull, from whom he hoped to obtain some further information about the child, which he presently brought back to me. "Oh yes, the magistrate knew the child; he had sent him to prison already several times, for being found lying at night on the wharves and about the streets." So this poor little wretch was sent to prison because literally he had not where to lay his head!... I wouldn't be a man for anything! They are so cruel, without even knowing that they are so: the habit of seeing sin and suffering is such a heart-hardener.

RELIEF AT HAND. Well, the boy is safe in the workhouse now, and is, according to his own wish and inclination, either to be sent to sea or put out apprentice to some trade. I have pledged one of my readings for purposes of outfit or entrance-fee, and Mr. Frost has promised me not to lose sight of the child, so I hope he is rescued from sin and suffering for the present, and perhaps for the future.

Do you remember what infinite difficulty I told you I had had in rescuing that poor little wretch out of the streets of Glasgow? But then she had the advantage of a mother, who drove her into them day after day, to sing her starvation in the miserable mud and rain,—luckily this poor Hull boy's mother had not this interest in him.

I have come home, dear Hal, after my reading, and resume my letter to you, though I am very tired, and shall go to bed before I have finished it.

I do remember Robertson's sermon about Jacob wrestling with the angel, and I remember the passage you refer to. I remember feeling that I did not agree with it. The solemnity of night is very great; and the aspect of the star-sown heavens suggests the idea of God, by the overpowering wonder of those innumerable worlds by which one then sees one's self surrounded,—which affect one's imagination in a reverse way from the daylight beauty of the earth, for that makes God seem as if He were here, in this world, which then is all we see (except its great eye, the sun) of these multitudinous worlds He has created, and that are hanging in countless myriads round us. Night suggests the vastness of creation, as day can never do; and darkness, silence, the absence of human fellowship, and the suspension of human activity, interests, and occupations, leave us a less disturbed opportunity of meditating on our Creator's inconceivable power. The day and the day's beauty make me feel as if God were very near me; the night and the night's beauty, as if I were very far off from Him.