How the Poor Live; and, Horrible London / 1889

by George R. Sims

The 'deputy' comes for the money every day, and it is pay or go with the occupants. If the man who has taken one of these furnished rooms for his 'home, sweet home,' does not get enough during the day to pay his rent, out he goes into the street with his wife and children, and enter another family forthwith.

The tenants have not, as a rule, much to be flung after them in the shape of goods and chattels. The clothes they stand upright in, a battered kettle, and, perhaps, a bundle, make up the catalogue of their worldly possessions.

This kind of rough-and-ready lodging is the resource of thousands of industrious people earning precarious livelihoods, and they rarely rise above it to the dignity of taking a room by the week. The great struggle is to get over Saturday, and thank God for Sunday. Sunday is a free day, and no deputy comes to disturb its peaceful calm. The Saturday's rent, according to the custom of the country, makes the tenant free of the apartments until Monday.

It is the custom to denounce the poor as thriftless, and that they are so I grant. The temptation to trust to luck and let every day take care of itself is, it must be remembered, great. Life with them is always a toss-up, a daily battle, an hourly struggle. Thousands of them can never hope to be five shillings ahead of the world if they keep honest. The utmost limit of their wage is reached when they have paid their rent, kept themselves and their horribly large families from starvation, and bought the few rags which keep their limbs decently covered. With them the object of life is attained when the night's rent is paid, and they do not have to hesitate between the workhouse or a corner of the staircase in some doorless house.

There is a legend in one street I know of—a man who once saved half a crown, and lost it through a hole in his pocket. The moral of that legend may have impressed itself upon the whole population and discouraged thrift for evermore; but be that as it may, the general rule is, 'what you make in a day spend in a day.' It is needless to add that this precept brings its practisers perpetually within measurable distance of absolute pennilessness. They live and die on the confines of it. I am wrong; they invariably die on the wrong side of the border, and are buried at somebody else's expense.

Drink is the curse of these communities; but how is it to be wondered at? The gin-palaces flourish in the slums, and fortunes are made out of men and women who seldom know where to-morrow's meal is coming from.

Can you wonder that the gaudy gin-palaces, with their light and their glitter, are crowded? Drink is sustenance to these people; drink gives them the Dutch courage necessary to go on living; drink dulls their senses and reduces them to the level of the brutes they must be to live in such sties.

The gin-palace is heaven to them compared to the hell of their pestilent homes. A copper or two, often obtained by pawning the last rag that covers the shivering children on the bare floor at home, will buy enough vitriol-madness to send a woman home so besotted that the wretchedness, the anguish, the degradation that await her there have lost their grip. To be drunk with these people means to be happy. Sober—God help them!—how could they be aught but wretched?

There is not only temptation to drink wrought by the fearful surroundings of the poor; a positive craving for it is engendered by the foul and foetid atmosphere they continually breathe. I have often wondered that the advocates of temperance, with the immense resources of wealth and organization they command, have not given more attention to the overcrowding and the unsanitary condition of the dwellings of the poor, as one of the great causes of the abuse of stimulants.

It is not only that crime and vice and disorder flourish luxuriantly in these colonies, through the dirt and discomfort bred of intemperance of the inhabitants, but the effect upon the children is terrible. The offspring of drunken fathers and mothers inherit not only a tendency to vice, but they come into the world physically and mentally unfit to conquer in life's battle. The wretched, stunted, misshapen child-object one comes upon in these localities is the most painful part of our explorers' experience. The county asylums are crowded with pauper idiots and lunatics, who owe their wretched condition to the sin of the parents, and the rates are heavily burthened with the maintenance of the idiot offspring of drunkenness.