them crowded by laundresses, and charwomen, and haggard old crones from the sister isle, and young wives whose husbands, it may be, are hard at work. There they stand in the streets, with babies in their arms and dirty children in rags by their side, gossiping with women as ill-conditioned as themselves; and as gossiping makes them thirsty, and as drinking makes people drunk, it is not difficult to imagine the state in which many of these women are. In the middle of the day it is very obvious that many of them have had more than enough. How they can afford it always puzzles me—I cannot, I know, and I believe my weekly earnings equal theirs. The pawnbrokers may help them—but their material guarantees cannot be perpetually forthcoming. These gin-drinkers live cheap, I grant. They herd in the horrid slums of Drury-lane—and people say sometimes, Can you wonder that such poor wretches drink? but they forget that it is the drink that makes them such poor wretches. The money these women spend in drink would pay for decent apartments and clothes that would be clean and comfortable, not ragged and filthy, and stinking with every abomination. It is not poverty that creates
drunkenness, but drunkenness that creates poverty, and the poverty thus created—the dreariest kind of all poverty—abounds in Drury-lane. Well, then, exclaims one of the new school, who believes mankind are to be regenerated by fiddling, does not such a place as the Mogul have a beneficial influence? I will answer this by describing the kind of amusement afforded at the Mogul. You are pent up in a room where the air is ten times worse than in any theatre—any crowded chapel—or worse than in the late Reading Room of the British Museum or the House of Commons. You see a little of the worst acting in London—broad farce, chiefly by artists, if I may term them such, who are more remarkable for their weakness than their strength. “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hands,” says Hamlet; but actors of the class you meet in the Mogul never seem to have heard of the Prince of Denmark. There are some people who doubt whether good acting has a beneficial effect, but there are none who doubt that the effect of bad
acting is altogether bad. But the dramatical part of the entertainment constitutes but a small part of the evening’s amusement. There is a lady who sings sentimental songs, and a gentleman who sings comic ones, and another gent, with dismal voice and weary mien, who declares—
“The gurls of dear Old England
Are the gurls of gurls for me-e-eh.”
I am not aware that any of these performers sing songs of an objectionable character; and if a sneer is now and then introduced at what common decent people believe to be good, and true, and righteous, and of beneficial tendency, it is only, perhaps, such as would be approved of by the patrons of the Haymarket. You tell me that this is better than sitting all night at a bar drinking; but, I ask, is not this entertainment itself an excuse for drinking? You see the room is full of men and women evidently belonging to the working classes; now of all men working men can least afford to waste time in such places. All their future emphatically depends upon themselves. More than most men are they called upon to exercise self-denial and to cultivate their powers, if they would achieve independence.
But how can the working men who sit night after night in such places as the Mogul ever hope to rise? yet any night there must be a couple of hundred of such present, for they swarm like bees. They come professedly for the entertainment, but all the while it lasts they are doing a good deal in the drinking line. It is not one glass or two that will satisfy them; and the worst of it is, that many very clever fellows when once they begin drinking do not know when to leave off. In this respect they are like Dr Johnson, who could either feast or fast, but could never be a moderate drinker. They come to the Mogul—perhaps they would never think of sitting all night in a public-house—but they come to the Mogul for the entertainment, and they finish by drinking as if they had come for the drink alone. The Mogul is indeed an educational establishment, but unfortunately it educes the wrong set of faculties. In Drury-lane, of all lanes in the world, there is the least occasion to associate intoxicating drink with happiness. Everywhere the idea is a mischievous delusion and a remnant of barbarism, but there it is a positive curse. At the Mogul you will see the sweetheart with her lover, the mother with
her child,—it may be the sucking babe,—till midnight, breathing an air of tobacco smoke, the husband and the wife, all you say enjoying themselves in a social way, but all, I say, encouraging an appetite which, if it gets the mastery,—and in the majority of cases it does,—will destroy them without mercy. Were the Mogul simply a gin-palace, it would have far less patronage, it would merely have its share of the general trade; but the fact that it provides musical and dramatic entertainments—that it gives decent people an excuse for drinking—that it attracts those whom a common gin-shop would repel—is that precisely which gives it its power for danger. Such places are decoy shops, the more dangerous as drinking in Drury-lane is really disgusting, and enough to make a man a teetotaller for life. The neighbourhood is rich in warnings, but the habitué of the Mogul soon learns to heed them not.
CALDWELL’S.
A stranger, ignorant of our inner life, and unacquainted with our social system, knowing only that we call ourselves a Christian people, and that we boast that Christianity places woman in a peculiarly favoured position, might dwell among us for awhile, and, seeing how woman is flattered and followed, might imagine that our condition was perfect, and that here, at least, woman, the weak, was sheltered by man, the strong. In the dazzling ball-room—on the glittering promenade—he might meet the lovely and the fair, and deem that they were no brilliant exception, but as they were sheltered and loved, so were sheltered and loved all of their common sex. Grieved would he be to find out his mistake; yet more grieved would he be to know that the graceful drapery that added to the beauty that everywhere flashed upon his eye was wrought by tender and delicate women, who, pale and wan, slave at the needle from
morn till eve, and from eve till again the dim grey of morn gleamed in the east—by women withered before their prime—by women who, for no crime, but from their simple desire to live by the honest and honourable labour of their hands, are shut up in heated and unhealthy rooms, debarred from social duties and joys, and who know nothing of life but its wants and woes—by women who can find in slavery itself nothing more forlorn than their melancholy fate—by women to the majority of whom there is no honest way of escape from the lingering death that besets them, but the grave.