Some dock-labourers lunch on too much beer and too little bread; for they are held in thraldom by certain unrighteous publicans, who still pursue, with great contentment and delectation to themselves, but to the defrauding, ruin, and misery of their customers, the atrocious trade, now well nigh rooted from the manufacturing and mining districts, known as the “tommy-shop” system. I think I need scarcely explain what this system is, for, under its twin denomination of “truck,” it has already formed a subject for Parliamentary inquiry. Let it suffice to say, that the chief feature in the amiable system consists in giving the labourer a fallacious and delusive credit to the amount of his weekly wages, and supplying him with victuals and drink (chiefly the latter) at an enormous rate of profit. The labourer is paid by his foreman in tickets instead of cash, and invariably finds himself at the end of the week victimised, or, to use a more expressive, though not so genteel a term, diddled, to a heart-rending extent. Dock-labourers who are in regular gangs and regularly employed, are the greatest sufferers by this unjust mode of payment. As to the casual toilers who crowd about the gates at early morning in the hope of being engaged for a working day, they are paid half a crown, and are free to squander or to hoard the thirty pence as they list. That industrious and peaceable body of men, the coalwhippers, groaned for a long period under the iniquities of the truck system; they are now protected by a special Act of Parliament, renewed from time to time; but the dock-labourers yet eat their bread leavened by a sense of injustice. There are none to help them; for they have no organisation, and very few friends. It is perfectly true that the dock-companies have nothing whatsoever to do with the social servitude under which their labourers groan; and that it is private speculators who work the system for their own aggrandisement; but the result to the labourer is the same. I don’t think it matters to Quashie, the negro slave, when he is beaten, whether the cowhide be wielded by Mr. Simon Legree, the planter, or by Quimbo, the black driver.
Look at these labourers, and wonder. For it is matter for astonishment to know that among these meanly-clad, frequently ragged men, coarse, dirty, and repulsive in aspect, there are very many who have been tenderly bred and nurtured; who have been, save the mark, gentlemen! who have received University educations and borne the Queen’s commission. And here also are the draff and husks of foreign immigration; Polish, German, and Italian exiles. They have come to this—down to this—up to this, if you choose; come to the old, old level, as old as Gardener Adam’s time, of earning the daily bread by the sweat of the brow. It were better so than to starve; better so than to steal.
ONE O’CLOCK P.M.: DINING ROOMS IN BUCKLERSBURY.
What time the dock-labourers have finished lunch, another very meritorious class of human ants begin their prandial repasts. With just one thought at the vast number of merchants’, brokers’, shipping-agents’, warehousemen’s, wholesale dealers’ counting-houses that exist in London city, you will be able to form an idea of the legions of clerks, juniors and seniors, who, invariably early-breakfasting men, must get seriously hungry at one p.m. Some I know are too proud to dine at this patriarchal hour. They dine, after office hours, at Simpson’s, at the Albion, at the London, or, save us, at the Wellington. They go even further west, and patronise Feetum’s, or the Scotch Stores in Regent Street, merely skating out, as it were, for a few minutes at noon, for a snack at that Bay Tree to which I have already alluded. Many, and they are the married clerks, bring neat parcels with them, containing sandwiches or bread-and-cheese, consuming those refreshments in the counting-house. In the very great houses, it is not considered etiquette to dine during office-hours, save on foreign-post nights. As to the extremely junior clerks, or office-boys, as they are irreverently termed, they eat whatever they can get, and whenever they can get it, very frequently getting nothing at all. But there are yet hundreds upon hundreds of clerks who consume an orthodox dinner of meat, vegetables, and cheese—and on high days and holidays pudding—at one p.m. Their numbers are sufficient to cram almost to suffocation the eating-houses of Cheapside, the Poultry, Mark Lane, Cornhill, and especially Bucklersbury. Of late years there has been an attempt to change the eating-houses of Cheapside into pseudo “restaurants.” Seductive announcements, brilliantly emblazoned, and showily framed and glazed, have been hung up, relating to “turtle” and “venison;” salmon, with wide waddling mouths, have gasped in the windows; and insinuating mural inscriptions have hinted at the existence of “Private dining-rooms for ladies.” Now, whatever can ladies—though I have the authority of Mr. Charles Dibdin and my own lips for declaring that there are fine ones in the city—want to come and dine in Cheapside for? At these restaurants they give you things with French names, charge you a stated sum for attendance, provide the pale ale in silver tankards, and take care of your hat and coat; but I like them not—neither, I believe, do my friends, the one-o’clock-dining clerks. Either let me go to Birch’s or the Anti-Gallican, or let me take my modest cut of roast and boiled, my “one o’ taters,” my “cheese and sallary,” at an eating-house in Bucklersbury—such a one as my alter ego, Mr. M’Connell, has here presented for your edification. And his pictured morals must eke out my written apophthegms—for this sheet is full.
TWO P.M.—FROM REGENT STREET TO HIGH CHANGE.
I breathe again. I see before me, broad-spread, a vista of gentility. I have done, for many hours to come, with shabby subjects. No more dams I’ll make for fish—in Billingsgate; nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish, at second-rate eating-houses; nor fetch firing at requiring in Covent Garden or the Docks. Prospero must get a new man, for Caliban has got a new master: Fashion, in Regent Street.
I declare that when I approach this solemnly-genteel theme, my frame dilates, my eyes kindle, my heart dances. I experience an intense desire to array myself in purple and fine linen, knee shorts, lace ruffles, pink silk stockings, diamond buckles, and a silver-hilted sword; to have my hair powdered, and my jewelled tabatière filled with scented rappee; to sit with my feet on a Turkey carpet, before a table inlaid with marqueterie, wax candles in silver sconces (the candles all green, with fillagree bobeches) on either side; and then—while my Dulcinea in a hoop petticoat, a point lace apron, red-heeled mules, a toupet and a mouche on the left cheek, her feathered fan, painted by Fragonard on the finest chicken-skin, lying beside her—plays the minuet from “Ariadne” in an adjoining and gilded salon, decorated in the Style Pompadour, on the harpsichord; and on pink scented note-paper, with a diamond pointed pen and violet ink—the golden pounce-box at my elbow—then under these circumstances and with these luxurious appliances around me, I think I could manage to devote myself to the task of inditing matter concerning Regent Street in the smoothest dythrambics. This is rather a violent contrast to the dry skittle-ground, the cows, and the depraved sow which inspired me in the last chapter; but only take my subject into consideration: only permit me to inoculate you with one drop of the ethereal nectar which should be quaffed by every writer who would look upon Regent Street from a proper point of view. Ladies and gentlemen moving in the polite circles have—but that is long ago—accused me of being of Bohemia, and to that manner born; of writing a great deal too much about the Virginian weed in its manufactured state, and the fermented infusion of malt and hops; publishers have refused to purchase my novels because they contained too many descriptions of “low life;” because my heroes and heroines were too frequently ragged and forlorn creatures, who didn’t go into “society,” who didn’t go to church, who were never seen at the May meetings in Exeter Hall, but who went to public-houses and penny-gaffs instead. Oh, lords and ladies! oh, brilliant butterflies of society! oh, respectable people of every degree! whose ear coarse language wounds, but who would have, believe me, to undergo much coarser deeds from the ragged ones you despise, were it not for the humble efforts of us poor pen-and-ink missionaries; O salt ones of the earth! think that you are but hundreds among the millions of the tattered and torn, who have never studied the “Handbook to Etiquette,” nor heard of Burke and Debrett, and who would eat peas with their knives if they had any peas to eat—Heaven help them! They are around and about you always. I have no greed of gain in advocating their cause, for I am unknown to them, and am of your middle class, and am as liable to be stoned by the ragged ones for having a better coat than they any day. But woe be to you, respectables, if you shut your ears to their plaints and your eyes to their condition. For the stones may fly thick and fast some day; there may be none to help you, and it may be too late to cry for help.