While I am on this subject, I may as well quote an instance which bears directly upon the interest—the selfish interest—which the better classes have in lending their voices to swell the chorus of complaints which is going up about the present state of things.
Here is an 'interior' to which I would call the special attention of ladies who employ nurse-girls for their children.
This room when we entered it was in a condition beyond description. The lady was washing the baby, and she made that an excuse for the dirt of everything else. Two ragged boys were sitting on the filthy floor, a dirty little girl was in a corner pulling a dirty kitten's tail, and the smoke from the untidiest grate I ever saw in my life was making the half-washed baby sneeze its little head nearly off. The family, all told, that slept in this room was seven. There was a bed and there was a sofa—so I concluded the floor must have been the resting-place of some of them. 'The eldest girl'—materfamilias informed us in answer to our questions—'was gone out. She slept on the sofa.' We knew somebody had slept there, because some rags were on it, which had evidently done duty as bed-clothes.
Outside this room, which opened on to a back-yard, was a dust-bin. We didn't want eyesight to know that—it appealed with sufficient power to another sense. Inside was an odour which made the dust-bin rather a relief.
I have described this place a little graphically for the sake of that eldest girl. It is not from any gallantry to the fair sex that I have done this, but because the young woman in question was, I ascertained, a domestic servant. She was a nursemaid just home from a place at Norwood, and in a week she was going to a place at Clapham. I remembered, as I gazed on the scene, a certain vigorous letter from Mr. Charles Reade which appeared in the Daily Telegraph some years ago about servants 'pigging with their relations at home,' and wanting the best bedroom and a feather-bed with damask furniture when in service. I never so thoroughly realized what 'pigging with their relations' meant before.
Now, if you will take the trouble to think out the possible result of girls going from such pigsties as these straight into well-to-do families, where they will nurse the children and be constantly in the closest contact with the younger members of the family, I think you will see that the dangers of unhealthy homes for the poor may be equally dangerous to a better class. I should like to know how many families now mourning the loss of a little child from fever, or the death of some dear one from small-pox, would have been spared their sorrow had the existence of such places as I have described been rendered impossible by the action of the law!
I do not imagine for one moment that I have seen, or that I am likely to see, the worst phases of the evil which has become one of the burning questions of the hour. But what I have written about I have in every case seen with my own eyes, and in no case have I exaggerated; and yet more than one of my kindly correspondents doubt my story of the dead body being kept, and eventually put out into the street.
With regard to this, let the reader in doubt ask any sanitary inspector or officer of health to whom he can get an introduction, if it is not an appalling fact that the poor have grown so used to discomfort and horrors that they do not look upon a corpse in the room they live, and eat, and sleep in as anything very objectionable!
It often happens there is no money to pay for the funeral, and so, with that inertness and helplessness bred of long years of neglect, nothing at all is done, no steps are taken, and the body stops exactly where it was when the breath left it.
The following incident I take haphazard from the reports of Dr. Liddell, whose recent statement has even attracted Parliamentary attention and led to a question in the House: