London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

When the slack season among rubbish-carters commences, nearly one-fifth of the operatives are discharged. These take to scavaging or dustman’s work, as well as that of navigators, or, indeed, any form of unskilled labour, some obtaining full employ, but the greater part being able to “get a job only now and then.” Those masters who keep their men on throughout the year are some of them large dust contractors, some carmen, some dairymen, and (in one or two instances in the suburbs, as at Hackney) small farmers. The dust-contractors and carmen, who are by far the more numerous, find employment for the men employed by them as rubbish-carters in the season, either at the dust-yard or carrying sand, or, indeed, carting any materials they may have to move—the wages to the men remaining the same; indeed such is the transient character of the rubbish-carting trade, that there are no masters or operatives who devote themselves solely to the business.

The Effects of Casual Labour in General.

Having now pointed out the causes of casual labour, I proceed to set forth its effects.

All casual labour, as I have said, is necessarily uncertain labour; and wherever uncertainty exists, there can be no foresight or pro-vidence. Had the succession of events in nature been irregular,—had it been ordained by the Creator that similar causes under similar circumstances should not be attended with similar effects,—it would have been impossible for us to have had any knowledge of the future, or to have made any preparations concerning it. Had the seasons followed each other fitfully,—had the sequences in the external world been variable instead of invariable, and what are now termed “constants” from the regularity of their succession been changed into inconstants,—what provision could even the most prudent of us have made? Where all was dark and unstable, we could only have guessed instead of reasoned as to what was to come; and who would have deprived himself of present enjoyments to avoid future privations, which could appear neither probable nor even possible to him? Pro-vidence, therefore, is simply the result of certainty, and whatever tends to increase our faith in the uniform sequences of outward events, as well as our reliance on the means we have of avoiding the evils connected with them, necessarily tends to make us more prudent. Where the means of sustenance and comfort are fixed, the human being becomes conscious of what he has to depend upon; and if he feel assured that such means may fail him in old age or in sickness, and be fully impressed with the certainty of suffering from either, he will immediately proceed to make some provision against the time of adversity or infirmity. If, however, his means be uncertain—abundant at one time, and deficient at another—a spirit of speculation or gambling with the future will be induced, and the individual get to believe in “luck” and “fate” as the arbiters of his happiness rather than to look upon himself as “the architect of his fortunes”—trusting to “chance” rather than his own powers and foresight to relieve him at the hour of necessity. The same result will necessarily ensue if, from defective reasoning powers, the ordinary course of nature be not sufficiently apparent to him, or if, being in good health, he grow too confident upon its continuance, and, either from this or other causes, is led to believe that death will overtake him before his powers of self-support decay.

The ordinary effects of uncertain labour, then, are to drive the labourers to improvidence, recklessness, and pauperism.

Even in the classes which we do not rank among labourers, as, for instance, authors, artists, musicians, actors, uncertainty or irregularity of employment and remuneration produces a spirit of wastefulness and carelessness. The steady and daily accruing gains of trade and of some of the professions form a certain and staple income; while in other professions, where a large sum may be realized at one time, and then no money be earned until after an interval, incomings are rapidly spent, and the interval is one of suffering. This is part of the very nature, the very essence, of the casualty of employment and the delay of remuneration. The past privation gives a zest to the present enjoyment; while the present enjoyment renders the past privation faint as a remembrance and unimpressive as a warning. “Want of providence,” writes Mr. Porter, “on the part of those who live by the labour of their hands, and whose employments so often depend upon circumstances beyond their control, is a theme which is constantly brought forward by many whose lot in life has been cast beyond the reach of want. It is, indeed, greatly to be wished, for their own sakes, that the habit were general among the labouring classes of saving some part of their wages when fully employed, against less prosperous times; but it is difficult for those who are placed in circumstances of ease to estimate the amount of virtue that is implied in this self-denial. It must be a hard trial for one who has recently, perhaps, seen his family enduring want, to deny them the small amount of indulgences, which are, at the best of times, placed within their reach.”

It is easy enough for men in smooth circumstances to say, “the privation is a man’s own fault, since, to avoid it, he has but to apportion the sum he may receive in a lump over the interval of non-recompense which he knows will follow.” Such a course as this, experience and human nature have shown not to be easy—perhaps, with a few exceptions, not to be possible. It is the starving and not the well-fed man that is in danger of surfeiting himself. When pestilence or revolution are rendering life and property casualties in a country, the same spirit of improvident recklessness breaks forth. In London, on the last visitation of the plague, in the reign of Charles II., a sort of Plague Club indulged in the wildest excesses in the very heart of the pestilence. To these orgies no one was admitted who had not been bereft of some relative by the pest. In Paris, during the reign of terror in the first revolution, the famous Guillotine Club was composed of none but those who had lost some near relative by the guillotine. When they met for their half-frantic revels every one wore some symbol of death: breast pins in the form of guillotines, rings with death’s-heads, and such like. The duration of their own lives these Guillotine Clubbists knew to be uncertain, not merely in the ordinary uncertainty of nature, but from the character of the times; and this feeling of the jeopardy of existence, from the practice of violence and bloodshed, wrought the effects I have described. Life was more than naturally casual. When the famine was at the worst in Ireland, it was remarked in the Cork Examiner, that in that city there never had been seen more street “larking” or street gambling among the poor lads and young men who were really starving. This was a natural result of the casualty of labour and the consequent casualty of food. Persons, it should be remembered, do not insure houses or shops that are “doubly or trebly hazardous;” they gamble on the uncertainty.

Mr. Porter, in his “Progress of the Nation,” cites a fact bearing immediately upon the present subject.

“The formation of a canal, which has been in progress during the last five years, in the north of Ireland (this was written in 1847), has afforded steady employment to a portion of the peasantry, who before that time were suffering all the evils, so common in that country, which result from the precariousness of employment. Such work as they could previously get came at uncertain intervals, and was sought by so many competitors, that the remuneration was of the scantiest amount. In this condition of things the men were improvident, to recklessness; their wages, insufficient for the comfortable sustenance of their families, were wasted in procuring for themselves a temporary forgetfulness of their misery at the whiskey-shop, and the men appeared to be sunk into a state of hopeless degradation. From the moment, however, that work was offered to them which was constant in its nature and certain in its duration, and on which their weekly earnings would be sufficient to provide for their comfortable support, men who had been idle and dissolute were converted into sober hard-working labourers, and proved themselves kind and careful husbands and fathers; and it is stated as a fact, that, notwithstanding the distribution of several hundred pounds weekly in wages, the whole of which must be considered as so much additional money placed in their hands, the consumption of whiskey was absolutely and permanently diminished in the district. During the comparatively short period in which the construction of this canal was in progress, some of the most careful labourers—men who most probably before then never knew what it was to possess five shillings at any one time—saved sufficient money to enable them to emigrate to Canada.”