He was an intelligent-looking man, of about 35, but with nothing very particular in his appearance unless it were a head of very curly hair. He gave me the statement in his own room, which was larger than I have usually found such abodes, and would have been very bare, but that it was somewhat littered with the vessels of his trade as a street-seller of Nectar, Persian Sherbet, Raspberryade, and other decoctions of coloured ginger-beer, with high-sounding names and indifferent flavour: in the summer he said he could live better thereby, with a little costering, than by street-sweeping, but being often a sickly man he could not do so during the uncertainties of a winter street trade. His wife, a decent looking woman, was present occasionally, suckling one child, about two years old—for the poor often protract the weaning of their children, as the mother’s nutriment is the cheapest of all food for the infant, and as the means of postponing the further increase of their family—whilst another of five or six years of age sat on a bench by her side. There was nothing on the walls in the way of an ornament, as I have seen in some of the rooms of the poor, for the couple had once been in the workhouse, and might be driven there again, and with such apprehensions did not care, perhaps, to make a home otherwise than they found it, even if the consumption of only a little spare time were involved.
The husband said:—
“I was brought up as a type-founder; my father, who was one, learnt me his trade; but he died when I was quite a young man, or I might have been better perfected in it. I was comfortably off enough then, and got married. Very soon after that I was taken ill with an abscess in my neck, you can see the mark of it still.” [He showed me the mark.] “For six months I wasn’t able to do a thing, and I was a part of the time, I don’t recollect how long, in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. I was weak and ill when I came out, and hardly fit for work; I couldn’t hear of any work I could get, for there was a great bother in the trade between master and men. Before I went into the hospital, there was money to pay to doctors; and when I came out I could earn nothing, so everything went, yes, sir, everything. My wife made a little matter with charing for families she’d lived in, but things are in a bad way if a poor woman has to keep her husband. She was taken ill at last, and then there was nothing but the parish for us. I suffered a great deal before it come to that. It was awful. No one can know what it is but them that suffers it. But I didn’t know what in the world to do. We lived then in St. Luke’s, and were passed to our own parish, and were three months in the workhouse. The living was good enough, better then than it is now, I’ve heard, but I was miserable.” [“And I was very miserable,” interposed the wife, “for I had been brought up comfortable; my father was a respectable tradesman in St. George’s-in-the-East, and I had been in good situations.”] “We made ourselves,” said the husband, “as useful as we could, but we were parted of course. At the three months’ end, I had 10s. given to me to come out with, and was told I might start costermongering on it. But to a man not up to the trade, 10s. won’t go very far to keep up costering. I didn’t feel master enough of my own trade by this time to try for work at it, and work wasn’t at all regular. There were good hands earning only 12s. a week. The 10s. soon went, and I had again to apply for relief, and got an order for the stone-yard to go and break stones. Ten bushels was to be broken for 15d. It was dreadful hard work at first. My hands got all blistered and bloody, and I’ve gone home and cried with pain and wretchedness. At first it was on to three days before I could break the ten bushels. I felt shivered to bits all over my arms and shoulders, and my head was splitting. I then got to do it in two days, and then in one, and it grew easier. But all this time I had only what was reckoned three days’ work in a week. That is, you see, sir, I had only three times ten bushels of stones given to break in the week, and earned only 3s. 9d. Yes, I lived on it, and paid 1s. 6d. a week rent, for the neighbours took care of a few sticks for us, and the parish or a broker wouldn’t have found them worth carriage. My wife was then in the country with a sister. I lived upon bread and dripping, went without fire or candle (or had one only very seldom) though it wasn’t warm weather. I can safely say that for eight weeks I never tasted one bite of meat, and hardly a bite of butter. When I couldn’t sleep of a night, but that wasn’t often, it was terrible, very. I washed what bits of things I had then myself, and had sometimes to get a ha’porth of soap as a favour, as the chandler said she ‘didn’t make less than a penn’orth.’ If I eat too much dripping, it made me feel sick. I hardly know how much bread and dripping I eat in a week. I spent what money I had in it and bread, and sometimes went without. I was very weak, you may be sure, sir; and if I’d had the influenza or anything that way, I should have gone off like a shot, for I seemed to have no constitution left. But my wife came back again and got work at charing, and made about 4s. a week at it; but we were still very badly off. Then I got to work on the roads every day, and had 1s. and a quartern loaf a day, which was a rise. I had only one child then, but men with larger families got two quartern loaves a day. Single men got 9d. a day. It was far easier work than stone-breaking too. The hours were from eight to five in winter, and from seven to six in summer. But there’s always changes going on, and we were put on 1s. 1½d. a day and a quartern loaf, and only three days a week. All the same as to time of course. The bread wasn’t good; it was only cheap. I suppose there was 20 of us working most of the times as I was. The gangsman, as you call him, but that’s more for the regular hands, was a servant of the parish, and a great tyrant. Yes, indeed, when we had a talk among ourselves, there was nothing but grumbling heard of. Some of the tales I’ve heard were shocking; worse than what I’ve gone through. Everybody was grumbling, except perhaps two men that had been 20 years in the streets, and were like born paupers. They didn’t feel it, for there’s a great difference in men. They knew no better. But anybody might have been frightened to hear some of the men talk and curse. We’ve stopped work to abuse the parish officers as might be passing. We’ve mobbed the overseers, and a number of us, I was one, were taken before the magistrate for it; but we told him how badly we were off, and he discharged us, and gave us orders into the workhouse, and told ’em to see if nothing could be done for us. We were there till next morning, and then sent away without anything being said.
“It’s a sad life, sir, is a parish worker’s. I wish to God I could get out of it. But when a man has children he can’t stop and say ‘I can’t do this,’ and ‘I won’t do that.’ Last week, now, in costering, I lost 6s.” [he meant that his expenses, of every kind, exceeded his receipts by 6s.], “and though I can distil nectar, or anything that way” [this was said somewhat laughingly], “it’s only when the weather’s hot and fine that any good at all can be done with it. I think, too, that there’s not the money among working men that there once was. Anything regular in the way of pay must always be looked at by a man with a family.
“Of course the streets must be properly swept, and if I can sweep them as well as Mr. Dodd’s men, for I know one of them very well, why should I have only 3s. 4½d. a week and three loaves, and he have 16s., I think it is? I don’t drink, my wife knows I don’t” [the wife assented], “and it seems as if in a parish a man must be kept down when he is down, and then blamed for it. I may not understand all about it, but it looks queer.”
From an unmarried man, looking like a mere boy in the face, although he assured me he was nearly 24, as far as he knew, I heard an account of his labour and its fruits as a parish scavager; also of his former career, which partakes greatly in its characteristics of the narratives I gave, toward the close of the first volume, of deserted, neglected, and runaway children.
He lived from his earliest recollection with an old woman whom he first called “grandmother,” and was then bid to call “aunt,” and she, some of the neighbours told him, had “kept him out of his rights,” for she had 4s. a week with him, so that there ought to have been money coming to him when he grew up. I have sometimes heard similar statements from the ignorant poor, for it is agreeable enough to them to fancy that they have been wronged out of fortunes to which they were justly entitled, and deprived of the position and consequence in life which they ought to have possessed “by rights.” In the course of my inquiries among the poor women who supply the slop milliners’ shops with widows’ caps, cap fronts, women’s collars, &c., &c., I was told by one middle-aged cap-maker, a very silly person, that she would be worth 100,000l., “if she had her rights.” What those “rights” were she could not explain, only that there was and had been a great deal of money in the family, and of course she had a right to her share, only she was kept out of it.
The youth in question never heard of a father, and had been informed that his mother had died when he was a baby. From what he told me, I think it most probable that he was an illegitimate child, for whose maintenance his father possibly paid the 4s. a week, perhaps to some near relative of the deceased mother. The old woman, as well as I could make the matter out from his narrative, died suddenly, and, as little was known about her, she was buried by the parish, and the lad, on the evening of the funeral, was to have been taken by the landlord of the house where they lodged into the workhouse; but the boy ran away before this could be accomplished; the parish of course not objecting to be relieved of an incumbrance. He thought he was then about twelve or thirteen years of age, and he had before run away from two schools, one a Ragged-school, to which he had been sent, “for it was so confining,” he said, “and one master, not he as had the raggeds, leathered him,” to use his own words, “tightly.” He knew his letters now, he thought, but that was all, “and very few,” he said, gravely, “would have put up with it so long as I did.” He subsisted as well as he could by selling matches, penny memorandum books, onions, &c., after he had run away, sleeping under hedges in the country, or in lodging-houses in town, and living on a few pence a day, or “starving on nothink.” He was taken ill, and believed it was of a fever, at or somewhere about Portsmouth, and when he was sufficiently recovered, and had given the best account he could of himself, was passed to his parish in London. The relieving officer, he said, would have given him a pair of shoes and half-a-crown, and let him “take his chance, but the doctor wouldn’t sartify any ways.” He meant, I think, that the medical officer found him too ill to be at large on his own account. He discharged himself, however, in a few weeks from this parish workhouse, as he was convalescent. “The grub there, you see, sir,” he said, “was stunning good when I first went, but it fell off.” As the probability is that there was no change in the diet, it may not be unfair to conclude that the regular meals of the establishment were very relishable at first, and that afterwards their very regularity and their little variation made the recipient critical.
“When I left, sir,” he stated, “they guv me 2s. 6d., and a tidy shirt, and a pair of blucherers, and mended up my togs for me decent. I tried all sorts of goes then. I went to Chalk-farm and some other fairs with sticks for throwing, and used to jump among them as throwing was going on, and to sing out, ‘break my legs and miss my pegs.’ I got many a knock, and when I did, oh! there was such larfing at the fun on it. I sold garden sticks too, and garden ropes, and posts sometimes; but it was all wery poor pay. Sometimes I made 10d., but not never I think but twice 1s. a day at it, and oftener 6d., and in bad weather there was nothink to be done. If I made 6d. clear, it was 1d. for cawfee—for I often went out fasting in a morning—and 1d. for bread and butter, and 1d. for pudden for dinner, and another 1d. perhaps for beer—half-pint and a farden out at the public bar—and 2d. for a night’s lodging. I’ve had sometimes to leave half my stock in flue with a deputy for a night’s rest. O, I didn’t much mind the bugs, so I could rest; and next day had to take my things out if I could, and pay a hexter ha’penny or penny, for hintrest, like. Yes, I’ve made 18d. a hevening at a fair; but there’s so many a going it there that one ruins another, and wet weather ruins the whole biling, the pawillion, theaytres and all. I never was a hactor, never; but I’ve thought sometimes I’d like to try my hand at it. I may some day, ’cause I’m tall. I was forced to go to the parish again, for I got ill and dreadful weak, and then they guv me work on the roads. I can’t just say how long it’s since, two or three year perhaps, but I had 9d. a day at first, and reglar work, and then three days and three loaves a week, and then three days and no loaves. I haven’t been at it werry lately. I’ve rayther taken the summer out of myself, but I must go back soon, for cold weather’s a coming. Vy, I lived a good deal on carrying trunks from the busses to Euston Railway; a good many busses stops in the New-road, in the middle of the square. Some was foreigners, and they was werry scaly. No, I never said nothink but once, ven I got two French ha’pennies for carrying a heavy old leather thing, like a coach box, as seemed to belong to a family; and then the railway bobbies made me hold my tongue. I jobbed about in other places too, but the time’s gone by now. O, I had a deal to put up with last winter. What is 9d. a day for three days? and if poor men had their rights, times ’ud be different. I’d like to know where all the money goes. I never counted how many parish sweepers there was; too many by arf. I’ve a rights to work, and it’s as little as a parish can do to find it. I pay 1s. a week for half a bed, and not half enough bed-clothes; but me and Jack Smith sometimes sleeps in our clothes, and sometimes spreads ’em o’ top. No, poor Jack, he hasn’t no hold on a parish; he’s a mud-lark and a gatherer [bone-grubber]. Do I like the overseers and the parish officers? In course not, nobody does. Why don’t they? Well, how can they? that’s just where it is. Ven I haven’t been at sweeping, I’ve staid in bed as long as I was let; but Mother B.—I don’t know no other name she has—wouldn’t stand it after ten. O no, it wern’t a common lodging-house, a sort of private lodging-house perhaps, where you took by the week. If I made nothink but my ninepences, I lived on bread and cawfee, or bread and coker, and sometimes a red herring, and I’ve bought ’em in the Brill at five and six a penny. Mother B. charged ½d. for leave to toast ’em on her gridiron. She is a scaly old ——. I’ve oft spent all my money in a tripe supper at night, and fasted all next day. I used to walk about and look in at the cook-shop windows, and try for a job next day. I’d have gone five miles for anybody for a penn’orth of pudden. No, I never thought of making away with myself; never. Nor I never thought of going for a soldier; it wouldn’t suit me to be tied so. What I want is this here—regular work and no jaw. O, I’m sometimes as miserable as hunger’ll make a parson, if ever he felt it. Yes, I go to church sometimes when I’m at work for the parish, if I’m at all togged. No doubt I shall die in the workus. You see there’s nobody in the world cares for me. I can’t tell just how I spend my money; just as it comes into my head. No, I don’t care about drinking; it don’t agree with me; but there’s some can live on it. I don’t think as I shall ever marry, though who knows?”
The third and last system of parish work is where the labourer is employed regularly, and paid a fixed wage, out of the parochial fund certainly, but not in the same manner as the paupers are paid, nor with any payment in kind (as in loaves), but all in money. The payment in this wise is usually 1s. 6d. a day, and, but for such employment, the poor so employed, would, in most instances, apply for relief.