“Yes, indeed,” resumed the blind woman, “for when I first went dark, I was forced to send to my parish, and had 6d. twice a week, and a half-quartern loaf, and that was only allowed for three weeks, and then there was the house for me. Oh dear, after that I didn’t know what I could do to get a bit of bread. At first I was so frightened and nervous, I was afraid of every noise. That was when I was quite dark; and I am often frightened at nothing still, and tremble as I stand in the lane. I was at first greatly distressed, and in pain, and was very down-hearted. I was so put about that I felt as if I was a burden to myself, and to everybody else. If you lose your sight as I did, sir, when you’re not young, it’s a long time before you learns to be blind. [So she very expressly worded it.] A friend advised me to sell tapes and cottons, and boot-laces, in the street, as better than doing nothing; and so I did. But at first I was sure every minute I should be run on. The poor woman that lodges with me bought some things for me where she buys her own—at Albion-house, in the Borough. O, I does very badly in my trade, very badly. I now clear only 2d., 3d., or 4d. a day; no, I think not more than 1s. 6d. a week; that is all. Why, one day this week I only sold a ha’porth of pins. But what I make more than pays my rent, and it’s a sort of employment; something to do, and make one feel one’s not quite idle. I hopes to make more now that nights are getting long, for I can then go into the lane (Leather-lane) of an evening, and make 1d. or 2d. extra. I daren’t go out when it’s long dark evenings, for the boys teases me, and sometimes comes and snatches my tapes and things out of my hands, and runs away, and leaves me there robbed of my little stock. I’m sure I don’t know whether it’s young thieves as does it, or for what they calls a lark. I only knows I loses my tapes. Do I complain to the police, do you say, sir? I don’t know when a policeman’s passing, in such a crowded place. Oh yes, I could get people to complain for me, but perhaps it would be no good; and then I’m afraid of the police; they’re so arbitry. [Her word.] It’s not very long since one of them—and I was told afterwards he was a sergeant, too—ordered me to move on. ‘I can’t move on, sir,’ said I, ‘I wish I could, but I must stand still, for I’m blind.’ ‘I know that,’ says he, ‘but you’re begging.’ ‘No, I’m not,’ says I, ‘I’m only a trying to sell a few little things, to keep me out of the work’us.’ ‘Then what’s that thing you have tied over your breast?’ says he. ‘If you give me any more of your nonsense, I’ll lock you up;’ and then he went away. I’m terrified to think of being taken to the station.”
The matter which called forth the officer’s wrath, was a large card, tied from the poor woman’s shoulders, on which was printed, in large letters, “PLEASE TO BUY OF THE POOR BLIND.” “Ay,” said the blind woman’s companion, with a bitterness not uncommon on the part of street-sellers on such occasions, “and any shopkeeper can put what notice he likes in his window, that he can, if it’s ever such a lie, and nothing’s said if he collects a crowd; oh dear, no. But we mus’n’t say our lives is our own.”
“Yes, sir,” said the blind woman, as I questioned her further, “there I stands, and often feels as if I was half asleep, or half dreaming; and I sometimes hardly knows when I dreams, and what I thinks; and I think what it was like when I had my eyesight and was among them, and what it would be like if I had my eyesight again; all those people making all that noise, and trying to earn a penny, seems so queer. And I often thinks if people suffered ever so much, they had something to be thankful for, if they had their eyesight. If I’d been dark from a child, I think I shouldn’t have felt it so much. It wouldn’t have been like all that lost, and I should be handier, though I’m not bad that way as it is, but I’m afraid to go out by myself. Where I lives there’s so many brokers about, I should run against their furniture. I’m sometimes not spoken to for an hour and more. Many a day I’ve only took 1d. Then I thinks and mopes about what will become of me, and thinks about my children. I don’t know who buys of me, but I’m sure I’m very thankful to all as does. They takes the things out of my hands, and puts the money into them. I think they’re working-people as buys of me, but I can’t be sure. Some speaks to me very kind and pleasant. I don’t think they’re ladies that speaks kind. My husband used to say that if ladies went to places like the Lane, it was on the sly, to get something cheap, and they did’nt want to be seen there, or they might be counted low. I’m sure he was right. And it ain’t such as them as buys of a poor blind woman out of kindness. No, sir, it’s very seldom indeed that I get more than the regular price. A halfpenny a knot for my tapes; and a halfpenny and a farthing for pins; and a halfpenny and a penny a dozen for shirt-buttons; and three a penny when I sells boot-laces; and a halfpenny a piece when I has stay-laces. I sells good things, I know, for the friend as gets them wouldn’t deceive me, and I never has no complaints of them.
“I don’t know any other blind woman in the trade besides myself. No, I don’t associate with blind people. I wasn’t brought up, like, to such a thing, but am in it by accident. I can’t say how many blind women there may be in my line in the streets. I haven’t the least notion. I took little notice of them, God forgive me, when I had my eyesight, and I haven’t been thrown among them since. Whether there’s many of them or not, they’re all to be pitied.
“On a Sunday I never stirs out, except to chapel, with my lodger or my son. No, sir, not a Roman Catholic chapel, but a Protestant. When it’s not very fine weather we goes to the nearest, but you hears nothing but what’s good in any of them. Oh dear, no.
“I lives on tea and bread and butter all the week—yes, I can make it ready myself—except on Sundays, when my son has his dinner here, and we has a bit of cheap meat; not often fish; it’s troublesome. If bread and things wasn’t cheap I couldn’t live at all, and it’s hardly living as it is. What can any one do on all that I can earn? There’s so many in the streets, I’m told, in my line, and distress drives more and more every week—everybody says so, and wages is so bad, and there’s such under-selling, that I don’t know whatever things will come to. I’ve no ’spectation of anything better in the time that has to come, nothing but misery, God help me. But I’m sure I should soon fret to death in a work’us.”
The poor woman lodging with the blind street-seller is herself in the same trade, but doing most in boot and stay-laces. She has a sharp and pinched outline of countenance, as if from poverty of diet, and is indeed wretchedly poor, earning only about 6d. a day, if so much. She is about the same age as her landlady, or somewhat younger, and has apparently been good-looking, and has still an intelligent expression. She lodged with the blind woman during her husband’s lifetime, when he rented two rooms, letting her one, and she had lived with the present widow in this way about fourteen years. She speaks cheerfully and seems an excellent companion for a blind person. On my remarking that they could neither of them be very cross-tempered to have lived so long together, the lodger said, laughingly, “O, we have a little tiff now and then, sir, as women will, you know; but it’s not often, and we soon are all right again. Poor people like us has something else to think of than tiffs and gossipping.”
The Blind Street-Seller of Boot-Laces.
The character, thoughts, feelings, regrets, and even the dreams, of a very interesting class of street-folk—the blind—are given in the narratives I now proceed to lay before the reader, from blind street-folk; but a few words of general introduction are necessary.
It may be that among the uneducated—among those whose feelings and whose bodies have been subjected to what may be called the wear and tear of poverty and privation—there is a tendency, even when misfortunes the most pitiable and undeserved have been encountered, to fall from misery into mendicancy. Even the educated, or, as the street people more generally describe them, those “who have seen better days,” sometimes, after the ordeal of the streets and the low lodging-houses, become trading mendicants. Among such people there may be, in one capacity or other, the ability and sometimes the opportunity to labour, and yet—whether from irrepressible vagabondism, from utter repugnance to any settled mode of subsistence (caused either by the natural disposition of the individual, or by the utter exhaustion of mind and body driving him to beg)—yet, I say, men of this class become beggars and even “lurkers.”