How the Poor Live; and, Horrible London / 1889

by George R. Sims

'You're right, your honour. It's the drink. Yer see, I can't help it. I ain't been sober for five years—ha! ha! ha!—and it's all thro' the trouble as come to me. My boy got into bad company and got lagged and put away for ten years, and I've never been the same since, and it broke my heart, and I took to the drink. And now my old man's took to drink thro' aggravation o' me, and he gets drunk every night of his blessed life. Ha! ha! ha!'

The woman's story is practically true. Before her trouble she and her husband were costermongers and hawkers of fruit. The first of the evils of the foul slums, where honest workers are forced to live, fell upon them in the ruin of the boy reared in a criminal atmosphere. The vicious surroundings were too strong for him, and he became a thief and paid the penalty.

The mother sees her son—idolized in her rough way—taken from her; the den of a home becomes doubly wretched, and the cursed drink-fiend is invoked to charm the sorrow away. That is the first step, 'to drown sorrow.' The steps after that are easy to count. The woman becomes an habitual drunkard, the rooms they live in get dirtier and smaller and fouler, and at last the husband drowns his sorrow too. 'Aggravation' and a constant association with a drunken woman turn the poor fellow to evil ways; himself and a whole family are wrecked, that under better circumstances might have been good and useful citizens. Had these people been able to get a decent room among decent people, the first misfortune that sent them wrong might never have happened. Their case is the case of hundreds.

Of drinking-shops there are plenty in these places; of eating-houses, or shops for the sale of food, very few. So rare are the latter that when we come to one in a dirty, tumble-down street, we stop and examine the contents of the window. I don't know whether to call it a tart-shop, a baker's, or a dripping emporium. There seems to be a little bit of each about it, and half a rice pudding, and a ham-bone, on which a bluebottle has gone to sleep—tired out, perhaps, with looking for the meat—give it the faintest suspicion of being an eating-house. There is also in the window a dilapidated bloater which looks as though it had been run over by an omnibus many years ago.

It is while taking notes of the contents of this tempting emporium of luxuries that we become aware of a very powerful perfume. It seems to rise from beneath where we are standing, and used as we are by this time to the bouquets of the East, we involuntarily step back and contort the muscles of our faces.

Then we see that we have been standing on a grating. Peering down, we can just see into a gloomy little room. To the opened window presently there comes a man in his shirt-sleeves, and looks up at us. His face is deadly white, the eyes are sunken, the cheek-bones hollow, and there is a look in his face that says more plainly than the big ticket of the blind impostor, 'I am starving.' Starving down below there, with only a thin floor between himself and the ham-bone, the ancient herring, the rice pudding, and the treacle tarts.

As the noisome effluvia rises and steams through the grating we begin to appreciate the situation. This food shop is directly over the cellar which gives the odour forth. Pleasant for the customers, certainly. We determine to push our investigation still further, and presently we are down in the cellar below.

The man in his shirt-sleeves—we can guess where the coat is—receives us courteously. His wife apologizes for the wretched condition of the room. Both of them speak with that unmistakable timbre of voice which betokens a smattering of education. In the corner of the room is a heap of rags. That is the bed. There are two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the fast-dying embers of a wretched fire. Furniture the room has absolutely none, but a stool roughly constructed of three pieces of unplaned wood nailed together.

Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the pie-shop; the foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the basement, and the utter neglect of all sanitary precautions.

The man (who has only one arm) is out of work this week, he tells us, but he is promised a job next. To tide over till then is a work of some difficulty, but the 'sticks' and the 'wardrobe' of the family have paid the rent up to now. As to meals—well, they hain't got much appetite. The stench in which they live effectually destroys that. In this instance even bad drainage has its advantages, you see.