London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 1

by Henry Mayhew

“It’s very sorrowful—very sorrowful indeed to hear that,” said the boot-lace seller to me, on my reading him the account of the blind needle-seller; “it touches me much to hear that. But you see I don’t grieve for the loss of my sight as he do, poor man. I don’t remember ever seeing any object. If there was a thing with many colours in it, I could dissarn the highest colour. I couldn’t tell one from another, but only the highest.

THE BLIND BOOT-LACE SELLER.

[From a Daguerreotype by Beard.]

“I was born in Northumberland,” he said, “about five-and-fifty years ago. My father was a grocer and had 1,000l. worth of freehold property besides his business, which was very large for a small town; his was the principal shop, and in the general line. He had a cart of his own, in which he attended market. I was very comfortably brought up, never wanted for nothing, and had my mother lived I should have had an independent fortune. At five years old, while mother was still alive, I caught the small pox. I had four sisters and one brother, and we all six had it at once; that was before the vaccination was properly established. I’ve heerd said that father did not want to have us inoculated, because of the people coming backwards and forwards to the shop. I only wish vaccination had been in vogue then as it is now, and I shouldn’t have lost my eyes. God bless the man who brought it up, I say; people doesn’t know what they’ve got to thank him for. Well, all my sisters and brothers had not a mark upon them. It laid hold of only me. They couldn’t lay a finger upon me, they was obligated to lift me up in one of my father’s shirts, by holding the corners of it like a sheet. As soon as ever the pock began to decay it took away my eyes altogether. I didn’t lose both my eyeballs till about twenty years after that, though my sight was gone for all but the shadow of daylight and any high colours. At sixteen years of age my left eye bursted; I suffered terribly then—oh terribly! yes, that I did. The black-and-white like all mixed together, the pock came right through the star of the eye the doctor said; and when I was five-and-twenty my other eye-ball bursted, and then my eyes was quite out of my head. Till that time I could see a little bit; I could tell the daylight, and I could see the moon, but not the shape of it. I never could see a star, and do you know I grieved about the loss of that little bit of sight as much as if I was losing the whole of it. As my eye-ball sloughed day by day, I could see the light going away by little, every day till the week’s end. When I looked at the daylight just before it all went, I could see the light look as red as fire—as red as blood; and when it all left me, oh, I was dreadful sorrowful, I thought I was lost altogether. But, I shouldn’t have been so bad off, as I said, if mother had lived, but she died when I was about six year old. I didn’t care much about her, indeed I took a dreadful dislike to her. I heerd her say one day to a person in the shop, that she would sooner see me dead and buried than be as I was, but now I know that it was her fondness for me. Mother catched a cold, and died after six day’s illness. When she was gone, father got to neglect his business. He had no one then to attend to it, and he took and shut up the shop. He lost heart, you see. He took and turned all the tenants out of his property, and furnished all the rooms of a large house suitable for the quality that used to come to the town to bathe. He mortgaged the place for 250l. to buy the furniture, and that was the ruin of him. Eighteen years afterwards the lawyers got the better of him, and all the family was turned out of the door without a penny. My father they’d put in jail before. He died a few years afterwards in the workhouse. When the family was turned out, there was only my eldest brother away at sea, and my eldest sister in sarvice; so me and my three sisters was sent in the wide world without the means of getting a crust or a place to put our heads in. All my sisters after that got into sarvice, and I went to drive some coal carts at North Shields. The coal carts was father’s, and they was all he had left out of his property; so I used to go to Wall’s End and fill the carts, then take them down to North Shields and sell them at the people’s doors. We never used to sell less than the load. I did all this, blind as I was, without a person to guide, and continued at it night and day for about fifteen year. It was well known to the whole country side. I was the talk for miles round. They couldn’t believe I was blind; though they see my eyes was gone, still they couldn’t hardly believe. Then, after the fifteen year, me and my father had a complete fall out. He took an advantage of my sister. He had borrowed 20l. of her, and when he could he wouldn’t pay her. He behaved as bad as father could, and then I broke with him.” (He then went over the whole story, and was affected, even to speechlessness, at the remembrance of his family troubles. Into these there is no necessity to enter here; suffice it, the blind man appears to have behaved very nobly.) “I came away and went to my brother, who was well off at Hull; when I got there, I found he had gone to Russia and died there that very spring. While I was on my way to Hull, I used to go to sleep at the lodging-houses for travellers. I had never been in one before, and there I got to think, from what I heerd, that a roving life was a fine pleasant one. The very first lodging-house I went into was one in Durham, and there persons as was coming the same road persuaded me to go and beg with them, but I couldn’t cheek it; it was too near hand at home. We came on to Darlington, that was 18 miles further, that day. They still kept company with me, and wanted me to beg, but I wouldn’t; I couldn’t face it. I thought people would know me. The next day we started on our way to Northallerton, and then my few shillings was all gone; so that night we went to seek relief, and got a pennyworth of milk, and a penny loaf each and our bed. The parish gave us a ticket to a lodging-house. The next morning we started from Northallerton, and then I was very hungry; all I had the day before was the pennyworth of bread I got from the parish. Then as we got about a mile out of the town, there was a row of houses, and the Scotchman who was with me says, ‘If ye’ll gang up wi’ me, I’ll speak for ye.’ Well, we went up and got 3d., and plenty of bread and butter; almost every house we got something at; then I was highly delighted; thinks I, this is a business—and so I did. We shared with the other man who had come on the road with us, and after that we started once more, and then I was all eager to go on with the same business. You see I’d never had no pleasure, and it seemed to me like a new world—to be able to get victuals without doing anything—instead of slaving as I’d been with a couple of carts and horses at the coal-pits all the time. I didn’t think the country was half so big, and you couldn’t credit the pleasure I felt in going about it. I felt as if I didn’t care for nothing; it was so beautiful to be away there quite free, without any care in the world, for I could see plainly I could always get the best of victuals, and the price of my lodgings. There’s no part in all England like Yorkshire for living. We used to go to all the farm-houses, we wouldn’t miss one if it was half a mile off the road; if the Scotchman who was with me could only see a road he’d take me up it, and we got nice bits of pie and meat, and bread and cake, indeed as much as would serve four people, when we got to the lodging-house at night and a few shillings beside. I soon got not to care about the loss of my brother. At last we got to make so much money that I thought it was made to chuck about the streets. We got it so easy, you see. It was only 4s. or 5s., but then I was only a flatty or I could have made 14s. or 15s. at least. This was in Borough-bridge, and there at a place called, I think, Bridely-hill, there was a lodging-house without never a bed in it at all; but only straw littered on the ground, and here I found upwards of sixty or seventy, all tramps, and living in different ways, pattering, and thieving, and singing, and all sorts; and that night I got to think it was the finest scene I had ever known. I grew pleaseder, and pleaseder, with the life, and wondered how any one could follow any other. There was no drunkenness, but it was so new and strange, and I’d never known nothing of life before, that I was bewildered, like, with over-joy at it. Then I soon got to think I’d have the summer’s pleasure out and wouldn’t go near Hull till the back end of the year, for it was the month of May, that what I’m talking about took place; and so things went on. I never thought of home, or sisters, or anything, indeed. I was so over-joyed that I could think of nothing else. Whenever I got to a new county it seemed like getting into a new nation, and when I heard we were close upon a new place I used to long and long to get into it. At last I left the Scotchman and took up with an old sailor, a man-of-warsman, who was coming up to London to get his pension, and he was a regular ‘cadger’ like the other who had put me ‘fly to the dodge,’ though none of us wer’nt ‘fly’ to nothing then. I can’t tell you, I wanted to, how I longed to be in town, and, as I came through the streets with him, I didn’t know whether I carried the streets or they carried me. You see I had heard people talk about London in North Shields, and I thought there was no poor people there at all—none but ladies and gentlemen and sailors. In London the sailor drew his pension, and he and me got robbed, and then the sailor left me, and then I started off without a penny into the country; and at Stratford-le-Bow I began, for the first time, to say, ‘Pity the poor blind.’ Up to this time I had never axed no one—never spoke, indeed—the cadgers who had been with me had done this for me, and glad to have the chance of sharing with me. A blind man can get a guide at any place, because they know he’s sure to get something. I took only 5d. at Stratford-le-Bow, and then started on my way to Romford; and there, in the lodging-house, I met a blind man, who took me in partnership with him, and larnt me my business complete—that he just did, and since then I’ve been following it, and that’s about two or three and twenty year ago. Since I’ve been in London, and that’s fourteen year, I’ve lived very regular, always had a place, and attended my church. If it hadn’t been for the lodging-houses I should never, may be, have been as I am; though, I must confess, I always had a desire to find out travelling, but couldn’t get hold of any one to put me in the way of it. I longed for a roving life and to shake a loose leg, still I couldn’t have done much else after my quarrel with my father. My sister had offered to lend me money enough to buy a horse and cart for myself, but I didn’t like that, and thought I’d get it of my brother at Hull; and that and the padding kens is solely the cause of my being as I am; and since I first travelled there’s more now than ever—double and treble as many.”

Of the Low Lodging-Houses.

The revelations of the Blind Boot-Lace Seller concerning the low lodging-houses make me anxious to arouse the public to a full sense of the atrocities committed and countenanced in those infamous places. It will have been noticed that the blind man frankly tells us that he was “taught his business” as a mendicant in one of these houses of call for vagabonds of all kinds—beggars, prostitutes, cheats, and thieves. Up to the time of his starting to see his brother at Hull, he appears to have had no notion of living but by his labour, and, more especially, no wish to make a trade of his affliction. Till then he seems to have been susceptible of some of the nobler impulses of humanity, and to have left his home solely because he refused to be party to a fraud on his own sister. Unfortunately, however, on his way to carry out his generous purposes, he put up for the night at the “travellers’” house in the town where he arrived, at the end of his first day’s journey; from the very minute that he set foot in the place he was a lost man. Here were assembled scores of the most degraded and vicious members of society, lying in ambush, as it were, like tigers in the jungle, ready to spring upon and make a prey of any one who came within the precincts of their lair. To such as these—sworn to live on the labours of others, and knowing almost to a sixpence the value of each human affliction as a means of operating upon both the heart-strings and the purse-strings of the more benevolent of the industrious or the affluent—to such as these, I say, a blind man, unskilled in the art and system of mendicancy, was literally a God-send. A shipwreck or a colliery explosion, as they too well knew, some of the more sceptical of the public might call in question, but a real blind man, with his eye-balls gone, was beyond all doubt; and to inspire faith, as they were perfectly aware, was one of the most important and difficult processes of the beggar’s craft. Besides, of all misfortunes, blindness is one which, to those who have their sight, appears not only the greatest of human privations, but a privation which wholly precludes the possibility of self-help, and so gives the sufferer the strongest claim on our charity. In such a place, therefore, as a low lodging-house, the common resort of all who are resolved not to work for their living, it was almost impossible for a blind man to pass even an hour without every virtuous principle of his nature being undermined, and overtures of the most tempting character being made to him. To be allowed to go partners in so valuable a misfortune was a privilege that many there would strive for; accordingly, as we have seen, the day after the blind man entered the low lodging-house, he who, up to that time, had been, even in his affliction, earning his living, was taken out by one of the “travellers,” and taught how much better a living—how much more of the good things of this world—he could get by mendicancy than by industry; and from the very hour when the blind man learnt this, the most dangerous lesson that any human being can possibly be taught, he became, heart and soul, an ingrained beggar. His description of the delight he felt when he found that he had no longer any need to work—that he could rove about the country as he pleased—without a care, without a purpose—with a perfect sense of freedom, and a full enjoyment of the open air in the day, and the wild licence of the lodging-house society at night, satisfied that he could get as much food and drink, and even money as he needed, solely for the asking for it; his description of this is a frank confession of a few of the charms of vagabondism—charms to which the more sedate are not only strangers, but of which they can form no adequate conception. The pleasure of “shaking a loose leg,” as the vagrants themselves call it, is, perhaps, known only in its intensity by those wayward spirits who object to the restraint of work or the irksomeness of any settled pursuit. The perfect thoughtlessness that the blind man describes as the first effect produced upon him by his vagabondism is the more remarkable, because it seems to have effaced from his mind all regard, even for the sister for whose sake he had quitted his home—though to those who have made a study of the vagrant character it is one of those curious inconsistencies which form the principal feature in the idiosyncrasy of the class, and which, indeed, are a necessary consequence of the very purposelessness, or want of some permanent principle or feeling, which constitutes, as it were, the mainspring of vagabondism. Indeed, the blind man was a strange compound of cunning and good feeling; at one moment he was weeping over the afflictions of others—he was deeply moved when I read to him the sufferings of the Crippled Nutmeg-Grater Seller; and yet, the next minute he was grinning behind his hand, so that his laughter might be concealed from me, in a manner that appeared almost fiendish. Still, I am convinced that at heart he was far from a bad man; there was, amid the degradation that necessarily comes of habitual mendicancy, a fine expression of sympathy, that the better class of poor always exhibit towards the poor; nor could I help wondering when I heard him—the professed mendicant—tell me how he had been moved to tears by the recital of the sufferings of another mendicant—sufferings that might have been as profitable a stock in trade to the one as his blindness was to the other; though it is by no means unusual for objects of charity to have their objects of charity, and to be imposed upon by fictitious or exaggerated tales of distress, almost as often as they impose upon others by the very same means.

I now invite the reader’s attention to the narratives given below as to the character of the low lodging-houses. The individuals furnishing me with those statements, it should be observed, were not “picked” people, but taken promiscuously from a number belonging to the same class. I shall reserve what else I may have to remark on the subject till the conclusion of those statements.

Prisons, tread-mills, penal settlements, gallows, I said, eighteen months ago, in the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ are all vain and impotent as punishments—and Ragged Schools and City missions are of no avail as preventives of crime—so long as the wretched dens of infamy, brutality, and vice, termed “padding-kens” continue their daily and nightly work of demoralization. If we would check the further spread of our criminals—and within the last four years they have increased from 24,000 to 30,000—we must apply ourselves to the better regulation and conduct of these places. At present they are not only the preparatory schools, but the finishing academies for every kind of profligacy and crime.