The ''appy dossers' are the wretched people who roam about the street houseless, and creep in to sleep on the stairs, in the passages and untenanted cellars of the lodging-houses, with the doors open night and day. No policeman's lantern is ever turned on them, and they crowd together in their rags and make a jolly night of it. Sometimes in among them creeps a starving woman, to die from want and exposure, and she dies while the foul oath and the ribald jests go on; and the 'dossers' who are well enough to be ''appy' make such a noise that a lodger, disturbed in his legitimate rest for which he has paid, comes out and lays about him vigorously at the 'varmints,' and kicks them downstairs, if he can.
Thus not only are many of the licensed lodging-houses and homes of the poor breeding-houses in themselves for crime, disease, and filth, but they are, for lack of supervision, receptacles for that which has already been bred elsewhere, and which is deposited gratis, to swell the collection.
A ''appy dosser' can make himself comfortable anywhere. I heard of one who used to crawl into the dust-bin, and pull the lid down; but I know that to be an untruth, from the simple fact that none of the dust-bins on this class of property have a lid. The contents are left, too, for months to decompose, not only under the eyes of the authorities, but under the noses of the inhabitants. The sanitary inspection of these houses is a farce, and in many cases the vestrymen, who ought to put the law in motion, are themselves the owners of the murder-traps.
How foul, how awful some of these places, where the poor have found their last refuge from Artisans' Dwelling Acts and Metropolitan improvements, are, I dare not tell you. I have been told that the readers of a shilling book don't care to know, and the difficulties of dealing with this subject are increased by my knowledge of the fact that in a truthful account of 'How the Poor Live' there can be but little to attract those who read for pleasure only. Rags—that is to say, the rags of our cold, sunless clime—are never picturesque; squalor and misery can only be made tolerable by the touch of the romancist—and here I dare not romance.
Bad, however, as things are, shocking as is the condition in which thousands and thousands of our fellow-citizens live from the cradle to the grave, it is not an unmixed evil if out of its very repulsiveness grows a remedy for it.
It has got now into a condition in which it cannot be left. For very shame England must do something—nay, for self-preservation, which is the most powerful of all human motives. This mighty mob of famished, diseased, and filthy helots is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous. The barriers that have kept it back are rotten and giving way, and it may do the State a mischief if it be not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread to the homes of the wealthy; its lawless armies may sally forth and give us a taste of the lesson the mob has tried to teach now and again in Paris, when long years of neglect have done their work.
Happily, there is a brighter side. Education—compulsory education—has done much. The new generation is learning at least to be clean if not to be honest. The young mothers of the slums—the girls who have been at the Board Schools—have far tidier homes already than their elders. The old people born and bred in filth won't live out of it. If you gave some of the slumites Buckingham Palace they would make it a pigsty in a fortnight. These people are irreclaimable, but they will die out, and the new race can be worked for with hope and with a certainty of success. Hard as are some of the evils of the Education Act, they are outbalanced by the good, and it is that Act above all others which will eventually bring about the new order of things so long desired.
So important a bearing on the home question has the schooling of the children who are to be the rent-payers of the next generation, that I propose to devote the next chapter to some sketches of School Board life and character; and I will take it in one of the worst districts in London, where the parents are sunk in a state of misery almost beyond belief.
I will show you the children at school who come daily to their work from the foulest and dirtiest dens in London—that awful network of hovels which lie about the Borough and the Mint.