The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

It is then that the problem faces most workers, but there is not in ordinary callings the sharp contrast that exists among the unfortunate of the theatre world.

To have money, friends, fame, and public favour at one period of your life, and then to know poverty, loneliness, neglect—that is the experience that adds bitterness to the cup of sorrow many an old favourite has to drain to the dregs before the merciful curtain falls.

It happened to me once, behind the scenes, to find lying on the mimic battlefield of a Drury Lane drama three corpses, and each of the "supers" who impersonated a soldier, with nothing to say and nothing to do but fall down at a given cue, had been a popular actor, and the lessee and manager of a London theatre. On the stage of the great national theatre I saw in a pantomime procession of Shakespearean characters King Lear represented by an actor who had once played the part on those very boards as the bright particular star of the evening.

The theatrical profession is the most generous in the world. When it hears of a sad case, the more fortunate comrades of one who has fallen by the way come to the rescue. A private subscription is made; a benefit is organized; the sympathy shown is whole-hearted, generous, and practical. But it often happens that the tragedy is only discovered by accident. The wounded comrade has hidden himself away and suffered in silence, too proud to let his pitiable condition be known.

In my wanderings along the shores on which our social wreckage is cast, I come frequently upon men and women who have strutted their hour upon the stage—men and women who had at one time fortune at their feet in the entertainment world, and have come to the workhouse or the common lodging-house.

To the people with whom they associate they are unknown. When they have their day out from the workhouse, when they come ragged and wretched from the lodging-house, and pass the hours as best they can, they attract no attention.

A woman in weather-stained clothes, with a battered hat on her unkempt hair, with the skirts of her dress caked with the mud of the streets, does not appeal to the curiosity of the well-to-do people who pass her by. They do not imagine that there is any mystery about this woman, still young, still good-looking, who has sunk so low. They let her go by, and if they think about her at all, it is as a tramp—a homeless vagabond who sleeps in the parks or on the Embankment.

But if they had known when she had passed them who this woman was, everyone would have turned to look after her. For her portrait was for years in the illustrated papers, the dramatic critics wrote of her enthusiastically, and the leading managers competed for her services.

She was found one evening in the park, ill, dazed, apparently dying. She had crawled under a hedge to sleep, and there she had attracted the attention of some tramps who were "camping" near at hand. One of them went and found a policeman, and the poor woman was carried to the workhouse infirmary. There, by certain old letters found upon her, her identity was revealed, and presently it became known to the profession that one whom they had all regarded with affection and esteem was homeless, penniless, starving.

The response to an appeal was generous; everything that sympathy and help and skilful treatment could do was done; but the once famous actress only recovered a little of her strength to pass away soon afterwards in an asylum.