VAGRANT FROM THE REFUGE IN PLAYHOUSE YARD, CRIPPLEGATE.
[From a Photograph.]
These places of shelter for the houseless are only open at certain periods of the year; and at this season a large proportion of the country labourers who are out of employ flock to London, either to seek for work in the wintertime, or to avail themselves of the food and lodging afforded by these charitable institutions. Others, again, who are professional vagrants, tramping through the country, and sleeping at the different unions on their road, come to town as regularly as noblemen every winter, and make their appearance annually in these quarters. Moreover, it is at this season of the year that the sufferings and privations of the really poor and destitute are rendered tenfold more severe than at any other period; and it is at the houses of refuge that the great mass of London, or rather English and Irish, poverty and misery, is to be met with.
The congregation at the Refuges for the Destitute is, indeed, a sort of ragged congress of nations—a convocation of squalor and misery—a synopsis of destitution, degradation, and suffering, to be seen, perhaps, nowhere else.
Nor are the returns of the bodily ailments of the wretched inmates of these abodes less instructive as to their miserable modes of life, their continual exposure to the weather, and their want of proper nutriment. The subjoined medical report of the diseases and bodily afflictions to which these poor creatures are liable, tells a tale of suffering which, to persons with even the smallest amount of pathological knowledge, must need no comment. The catarrh and influenza, the rheumatism, bronchitis, ague, asthma, lumbago—all speak of many long nights’ exposure to the wet and cold; whereas the abscesses, ulcers, the diarrhœa, and the excessive debility from starvation, tell, in a manner that precludes all doubt, of the want of proper sustenance and extreme privation of these, the very poorest of all the poor.
Medical Report for 1848-49. Of the persons who applied at the general asylum, there were afflicted with—
| Catarrh and influenza | 149 |
| Incipient fever | 52 |
| Rheumatism | 50 |
| Atrophy | 3 |
| Dropsy | 3 |
| Incised wounds | 3 |
| Diarrhœa | 60 |
| Cholera | 2 |
| Bronchitis | 13 |
| Abscess | 15 |
| Ulcers | 11 |
| Affections of the head | 12 |
| Ague | 13 |
| Excessive debility from starvation | 17 |
| Inflammation of lungs | 2 |
| Asthma | 10 |
| Epilepsy | 4 |
| Diseased joints | 4 |
| Erysipelas | 3 |
| Rupture | 3 |
| Cramps and pains in bowels | 2 |
| Spitting of blood | 4 |
| Lumbago | 1 |
| Rheumatic ophthalmia | 2 |
| Strumous disease | 2 |
| Sprains | 1 |
| Fractures | 4 |
| Pregnant | 30 |
The returns of the different callings of the individuals seeking for the shelter of the refuges are equally curious and worthy of study. These, however, I shall reserve for my next letter, as, by comparing the returns for each year since the opening of the institution, now thirty years ago, we shall be enabled to arrive at almost an historical account of the distress of the different trades since the year 1820. These tables I am now preparing from the valuable yearly reports of the Society, one of the most deserving among all our charitable institutions, and one which, especially at this bitter season, calls for the support of all those who would give a meal and a bed to such as are too poor to have either.
I will now proceed to a description of the Refuge itself.