The seven curses of London

by James Greenwood

Now, although not one word can be urged in favour of this iniquitous and shocking arrangement, is it quite certain that a great good is achieved by inducing such a couple to tie themselves together in the sacred bonds of matrimony? It is not a marriage of choice as all marriages should be. If the pair had been bent on church marriage and earnestly desired it, it is absurd to suppose that the few necessary shillings, the price of its performance, would have deterred them. If they held the sacred ceremony of so small account as to regard it as well dispensed with as adopted, it is no very great triumph of the cause of religion and morality that the balance is decided by a gown or a jacket, in addition to the good will of the missionary (who, by-the-bye, is generally the distributor of the alms of the charitable) being thrown into the scale.

To be sure the man is not compelled to yield to the persuasions of those who would make of him a creditable member of society; he is not compelled to it, but he can hardly be regarded as a free agent. If the pair have children already, the woman will be only too anxious to second the solicitation of her friend, and so secure to herself legal protection in addition to that that is already secured to her through her mate’s acquired regard for her. Then it is so difficult to combat the simple question, “Why not?” when all is so generously arranged—even to the providing a real gold ring to be worn in place of the common brass make-believe—and nothing remains but to step round to the parish church, where the minister is waiting, and where in a quarter of an hour, the great, and good, and lasting work may be accomplished. The well-meaning missionary asks, “Why not?” The woman, urged by moral or mercenary motives, echoes the momentous query, and both stand with arms presented, in a manner of speaking, to hear the wavering one’s objection. The wavering one is not generally of the far-seeing sort. In his heart he does not care as much as a shilling which way it is. He does not in the least trouble himself from the religious and moral point of view. When his adviser says, “Just consider how much easier your conscience will be if you do this act of justice to the woman whom you have selected as your helpmate,” he wags his head as though admitting it, but having no conscience about the matter he is not very deeply impressed. Nine times out of ten the summing-up of his deliberation is, “I don’t care; it won’t cost me nothing; let ’em have their way.”

But what, probably, is the upshot of the good missionary’s endeavours and triumph? In a very little time the gilt with which the honest adviser glossed the chain that was to bind the man irrevocably to marriage and morality wears off. The sweat of his brow will not keep it bright; it rusts it. He feels, in his own vulgar though expressive language, that he has been “bustled” into a bad bargain. “It is like this ’ere,” a matrimonial victim of the class once confided to me; “I don’t say as she isn’t as good as ever, but I’m blowed if she’s all that better as I was kidded to believe she would be.”

“But if she is as good as ever, she is good enough.”

“Yes, but you haven’t quite got the bearing of what I mean, sir, and I haint got it in me to put it in the words like you would. Good enough before isn’t good enough now, cos it haint hoptional, don’t you see? No, you don’t. Well, look here. S’pose I borrer a barrer. Well, it’s good enough and a conwenient size for laying out my stock on it. It goes pooty easy, and I pays eighteen pence a week for it and I’m satisfied. Well, I goes on all right and without grumbling, till some chap he ses to me, ‘What call have you got to borrer a barrer when you can have one of your own; you alwis want a barrer, don’t you know, why not make this one your own?’ ‘Cos I can’t spare the money,’ I ses. ‘Oh,’ he ses, ‘I’ll find the money and the barrer’s yourn, if so be as you’ll promise and vow to take up with no other barrer, but stick to this one so long as you both shall live.’ Well, as aforesaid, it’s a tidy, useful barrer, and I agrees. But soon as it’s mine, don’t you know, I ain’t quite so careless about it. I overhauls it, in a manner of speaking, and I’m more keerful in trying the balance of it in hand when the load’s on it. Well, maybe I find out what I never before troubled myself to look for. There’s a screw out here and a bolt wanted there. Here it’s weak, and there it’s ugly. I dwells on it in my mind constant. I’ve never got that there barrer out of my head, and p’raps I make too much of the weak pints of it. I gets to mistrust it. ‘It’s all middling right, just now, old woman—old barrer, I mean,’ I ses to myself, ‘but you’ll be a playing me a trick one day, I’m afraid.’ Well, I go on being afraid, which I shouldn’t be if I was only a borrower.”

“But you should not forget that the barrow, to adopt your own ungallant figure of speech, is not accountable for these dreads and suspicions of yours; it will last you as long and as well as though you had continued a borrower; you will admit that, at least!”

“I don’t know. Last, yes! That’s the beggaring part of it. Ah, well! p’raps it’s all right, but I’m blest if I can stand being haunted like I am now.”

Nothing that I could say would add force to the argument of my costermonger friend, as set forth in his parable of the “barrer.” Applying it to the question under discussion, I do not mean to attribute to the deceptiveness of the barrow or to its premature breaking down, the spilling into the gutter of all the unhappy children there discovered. My main reason for admitting the evidence in question was to endeavour to show that as a pet means of improving the morality of our courts and alleys, and consequently of diminishing the gutter population, the modern idea of arresting fornication and concubinage, by dragging the pair there and then to church, and making them man and wife, is open to serious objections. The state of matrimony is not good for such folk. It was never intended for them. It may be as necessary to healthful life as eating is, but no one would think of taking a man starved, and in the last extremity for lack of wholesome aliment, and setting before him a great dish of solid food. It may be good for him by-and-by, but he must be brought along by degrees, and fitted for it. Undoubtedly a great source of our abandoned gutter children may be found in the shocking herding together of the sexes in the vile “slums” and back places of London, and it is to be sincerely hoped that some wise man will presently devise a speedy preventive.

In a recent report made to the Commissioners of Sewers for London, Dr. Letheby says: “I have been at much pains during the last three months to ascertain the precise conditions of the dwellings, the habits, and the diseases of the poor. In this way 2,208 rooms have been most circumstantially inspected, and the general result is that nearly all of them are filthy or overcrowded or imperfectly drained, or badly ventilated, or out of repair. In 1,989 of these rooms, all in fact that are at present inhabited, there are 5,791 inmates, belonging to 1,576 families; and to say nothing of the too frequent occurrence of what may be regarded as a necessitous overcrowding, where the husband, the wife, and young family of four or five children are cramped into a miserably small and ill-conditioned room, there are numerous instances where adults of both sexes, belonging to different families, are lodged in the same room, regardless of all the common decencies of life, and where from three to five adults, men and women, besides a train or two of children, are accustomed to herd together like brute beasts or savages; and where every human instinct of propriety and decency is smothered. Like my predecessor, I have seen grown persons of both sexes sleeping in common with their parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins, and even the casual acquaintance of a day’s tramp, occupying the same bed of filthy rags or straw; a woman suffering in travail, in the midst of males and females of different families that tenant the same room, where birth and death go hand in hand; where the child but newly born, the patient cast down with fever, and the corpse waiting for interment, have no separation from each other, or from the rest of the inmates. Of the many cases to which I have alluded, there are some which have commanded my attention by reason of their unusual depravity—cases in which from three to four adults of both sexes, with many children, were lodging in the same room, and often sleeping in the same bed. I have note of three or four localities, where forty-eight men, seventy-three women, and fifty-nine children are living in thirty-four rooms. In one room there are two men, three women, and five children, and in another one man, four women, and two children; and when, about a fortnight since, I visited the back room on the ground floor of No. 5, I found it occupied by one man, two women, and two children; and in it was the dead body of a poor girl who had died in childbirth a few days before. The body was stretched out on the bare floor, without shroud or coffin. There it lay in the midst of the living, and we may well ask how it can be otherwise than that the human heart should be dead to all the gentler feelings of our nature, when such sights as these are of common occurrence.

“So close and unwholesome is the atmosphere of some of these rooms, that I have endeavoured to ascertain, by chemical means, whether it does not contain some peculiar product of decomposition that gives to it its foul odour and its rare powers of engendering disease. I find it is not only deficient in the due proportion of oxygen, but it contains three times the usual amount of carbonic acid, besides a quantity of aqueous vapour charged with alkaline matter that stinks abominably. This is doubtless the product of putrefaction, and of the various fœtid and stagnant exhalations that pollute the air of the place. In many of my former reports, and in those of my predecessor, your attention has been drawn to this pestilential source of disease, and to the consequence of heaping human beings into such contracted localities; and I again revert to it because of its great importance, not merely that it perpetuates fever and the allied disorders, but because there stalks side by side with this pestilence a yet deadlier presence, blighting the moral existence of a rising population, rendering their hearts hopeless, their acts ruffianly and incestuous, and scattering, while society averts her eye, the retributive seeds of increase for crime, turbulence and pauperism.”