How the Poor Live; and, Horrible London / 1889

by George R. Sims

The public-house, then, is still the centre of attraction for the masses during their leisure—the public-house and its giant offspring, the music-hall. The old Free and Easy, held every Monday or every Saturday, as the case might be, in the bar-parlour or the big room upstairs, is dying the death—the halls have killed it. There are a few still in existence, but the attendance is meagre, and the entertainment is only kept up by ambitious amateurs of the type who sit back in a chair and close their eyes to sing a sentimental ballad, and the young gentlemen who are anxious to exchange the workshop or the counter for the footlights, and try their hand first at the comic songs of Messrs. Arthur Roberts and McDermott before the dozen or so of the bar-parlour frequenters of the Blue Bear who make up the weekly audiences of the 'Free and Easy.'

The old sporting-houses, once the resort of half the blackguardism of the East-End and a good deal of the West, have gone down before the steady bowling of the law. The friendly bouts with the gloves between local 'chickens' and 'novices,' which once were regular Saturday night amusements, are few and far between, and dog-fights and ratting-matches have to be searched for by the curious as diligently as though they were looking for a policeman in a suburban neighbourhood, and the result is generally the same.

That boxing and ratting, and other forms of the 'fancy,' still exist as part of the amusement of the lower orders is perfectly true, but they exist in such a hole-and-corner, out-of-the-way, few-and-far-between style, that they can no longer be classed as among the amusements of those who cannot afford to pay high prices of admission to illegal entertainments.

The noble art of self-defence did undoubtedly linger among the lower orders as a pastime long after it had passed out of favour with the Corinthians, and many of the porters of Billingsgate, Covent Garden, and Smithfield, waterside labourers, costermongers, and street-hawkers are to this day famous as 'bruisers,' and given to indulge their friends at odd times with a display of their prowess on the extreme Q.T., in quiet out-houses and secluded spots where the police are unlikely to mar the harmony of the proceedings. Such meetings, when they do take place, always attract a mob of the lowest riff-raff, and if there be, as is generally the case, a charge for admission, ragged wretches, who look as though a crust of bread and cheese would be of considerable advantage to them, manage in some mysterious way to find the requisite amount of silver, without the production of which the crystal Bar of the Pug's Paradise moves not, and the sporting Peri is sent disconsolate away.

It has been my good or evil fortune, in my desire to know all sorts and conditions of men, to witness some of the latest revivals of glove-fighting; now in drill-sheds, now in top-floors of public-houses, and once in the upper floor of a workshop, which nearly gave way with the weight of accumulated blackguardism collected. These, it is only fair to say, were mostly 'ramps,' or swindles, got up to obtain the gate-money, and generally interrupted by circumstances arranged beforehand by those who were going to 'cut up' the plunder.

As a matter of fact, the suburban racecourse has now absorbed most of the poorer patrons of the ring, and the fighting men—that is, the class who are of the slum order—find employment in connection with the betting-lists and booths. The turf is still as highly patronised as ever in poor districts, in spite of the objection of the police to ready-money betting, and the racing element enters largely into the recreations of the residuum.

This, however, is hardly the class of amusement with which we are concerned, which is more that which engages the attention of the poorer toilers after work-hours. Saturday night is the great night in these districts for the play which prevents Jack being dull, and accordingly it is a Saturday night we select to take a trip once more through the streets of the unfashionable quarters.

We choose the heart of a thickly-populated district, and emerge from comparative quiet into a Babel of sound. A sharp turn brings us from a side-street into one long thoroughfare ablaze with light, and as busy as a fair. It is a fair, in fact; the pavement and the roadway are crowded with a seething mass of human beings side by side with the meat-stalls, the fish-stalls, the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the cheap-finery stalls; there are shooting-galleries, try-your-strength-machines, weighing-chairs, raffling-boards, and nothing is lacking but 'three shies a penny' and a Richardson's show to make a complete picture of an old-fashioned fair.

All the world and his wife are out to-night, and the wildest extravagances are being committed in the way of fish for supper to-night and vegetables for dinner to-morrow. The good housewives, basket on arm, are giving the ready-witted hawker as much repartee over the price of a cabbage as would suffice for a modern comedy.

The workman, released from his toil, is smoking his pipe and listening open-mouthed to the benevolent and leather-lunged gentlemen who are sacrificing household utensils, boots, ornaments, concertinas, and cutlery, at prices which would have cajoled the money from the pocket of a Daniel Dancer. And the golden youth of the neighbourhood, with their best attire on, all cut after one relentless fashion—the mashers of the East—they, too, are out in full force, entering into the wild delirium of reckless pleasure which the scene invites.