When Lord Ashley became Earl of Shaftesbury, and took possession of the family estate, he writes: ‘Inspected a few cottages—filthy, close, indecent, unwholesome.’ All England was a whited sepulchre, full of dead men’s bones. But the climax of wickedness was only to be seen in a low London lodging-house; let us enter one.
Mint Street, Borough, was better known than trusted some years not very long ago. It was a nasty place to go down of a night, especially if you happened to be the owner of a watch or had a sovereign or two in your pocket, nor did the police much care to explore its mysteries. Somehow or other the place bore a bad name, and has ever done so since the days of Jonathan Wild and his merry men, who at one time are reported to have resided there. In its low lodging-houses were to be found the very scum of the earth—the virtuous and deserving poor, as they would have us believe they are, always in search of employment, which they unfortunately never find—who are dishonest, and lazy, and improvident, and drunken, and dissolute, very much against their own inclination, and to their own intense disgust—the victims of the wicked landlord or wickeder capitalist. They live in the lodging-houses of the district, which are generally pretty full, at the rate of fourpence a night, except when the hop-picking is on, when away the inmates tramp by the hundred down to the pleasant hop-gardens of Kent, or Sussex, or Hampshire, carrying with them all the filth and squalor of the town, tainting the air and polluting the fair face of Nature as they pass along. It is true that now the city missionary follows in their steps, otherwise it would be a bad look-out indeed.
Turning down into the street, avoiding the policeman who happened to be on duty at the time, one summer evening might be seen a man and a woman. They were tired and dusty, and had evidently travelled far. On both was the mark of Cain, and they were fleeing from justice to quarters where guilt and shame find convenient repose. They knocked at a door, where, after they had been surveyed through a wicket, they were received on the payment of such small sum as the deputy-keeper was legitimately entitled to charge. It was a big room into which they entered, with a great fire at one end, at which various cooking operations were going on; and on the benches at the side some slept, or smoked, or talked, or read, as the fancy suited them. Behind was a yard, in which one or two were engaged in the process familiarly known as cleaning themselves up.
Neither the place nor the company would have been attractive to a decent working man. There was a foulness in the air and talk of the place which would have revolted him, yet in that crowd of needy and disreputable creatures were men who had been to college and had had the benefit of a University education, and women who had known something of the sunshine of life; alas! all—all were given over to evil, utterly lost and reprobate. It was not ignorance, not misfortune, not a wicked world, that had made them what they were. They had been the architects of their own lives. They had to lie on the beds they had made. Society is much troubled about them. What if society were to leave them alone, and to look better after the really deserving poor, who are always present with us—who are so low down in the world as to be compelled to take wages on which they cannot possibly live—who require and deserve the utmost sympathy from all classes of the community in their sorrow and distress and struggles? These are the weak, whose burdens the strong are bidden, in the Book to which most of us appeal for instruction and guidance, to bear.
‘Why, ye’re soon back again,’ said one of the inmates, engaged in the interesting operation of frying a Yarmouth bloater—‘you’re soon back again; I thought you was down at Sloville.’
‘Lor’ bless you! we han’t been near Sloville for years.’
‘Ah, I remember, I heard you were in the Black Country.’
‘Yes, we was there, but the fact was we had to hook it!’
‘Oh, I see, up to the old trick!’ said he with a smile.
‘Perhaps,’ was the reply.