The White Slaves of England

by John C. Cobden

'You are a B for false swearing,

In hell they'll roast you like a herring.'

"Concubinage is very common among patterers, especially on their travels; they have their regular rounds, and call the peregrination 'going on circuit.' For the most part they are early risers; this gives them a facility for meeting poor girls who have had a night's shelter in the union workhouses. They offer such girls some refreshments, swear they are single men, and promise comforts certainly superior to the immediate position of their victims. Consent is generally obtained; perhaps a girl of fourteen or fifteen, previously virtuous, is induced to believe in a promise of constant protection, but finds herself, the next morning, ruined and deserted; nor is it unlikely that, within a month or two, she will see her seducer in the company of a dozen incidental wives. A gray-headed miscreant, called 'Cutler Tom,' boasts of five hundred such exploits; and there is too great reason to believe that the picture of his own drawing is not greatly overcharged."

A reverend gentleman, who had enjoyed the best opportunities for observing the patterers, gave Mr. Mayhew the following information:—

"I have seen fathers and mothers place their boys and girls in positions of incipient enormity, and command them to use language and gestures to each other which would make a harlot blush, and almost a heathen tremble. I have hitherto viewed the patterer as a salesman, having something in his hand, on whose merits, real or pretended, he talks people out of their money. By slow degrees prosperity rises, but rapid is the advance of evil. The patterer sometimes gets 'out of stock,' and is obliged, at no great sacrifice of conscience, to 'patter' in another strain. In every large town, sham official documents, with crests, seals, and signatures, can be got for half-a-crown. Armed with these, the patterer becomes a 'lurker,' that is, an impostor; his papers certify any and every 'ill that flesh is heir to.' Shipwreck is called a 'shake lurk;' loss by fire is a 'glim.' Sometimes the petitioner has had a horse which has dropped dead with the mad staggers; or has a wife ill or dying, and six or seven children at once sickening of the small-pox. Children are borrowed to support the appearance; the case is certified by the minister and churchwardens of a parish which exists only in imagination; and as many people dislike the trouble of investigation, the patterer gets enough to raise a stock in trade, and divides the spoil between the swag-shop and the gin-palace. Sometimes they are detected, and get a 'drag,' (three months in prison.)

"They have many narrow escapes; one occurs to me of a somewhat ludicrous character:—A patterer and lurker (now dead) known by the name of 'Captain Moody,' unable to get a 'fakement' written or printed, was standing almost naked in the streets of a neighbouring town. A gentleman stood still and heard his piteous tale, but, having been 'done' more than once, he resolved to examine the affair, and begged the petitioner to conduct him to his wife and children, who were in a garret on a bed of languishing, with neither clothes, food, nor fire, but, it appeared, with faith enough to expect a supply from 'Him who feedeth the ravens,' and in whose sacred name even a cold 'tater was implored. The patterer, or half-patterer and half-beggar, took the gentleman (who promised a sovereign if every thing was square) through innumerable and intricate windings, till he came to an outhouse or sort of stable. He saw the key outside the door, and begged the gentleman to enter and wait till he borrowed a light of a neighbour to show him up-stairs. The illumination never arrived, and the poor charitable man found that the miscreant had locked him into the stable. The patterer went to the padding-ken, told the story with great glee, and left that locality within an hour of the occurrence."

Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and other provincial cities possess an ignorant and immoral population quite equal, in proportion to the entire population of each city, to that of London. In each may be found a degraded class, with scarcely any ideas of religion or morality, living in the most wretched manner, and practising every species of vice. The cellar-houses, in which many of them live, have been described in another chapter. They are the filthy abodes of a people almost reduced to a brutish condition. In Liverpool parish there is a cellar-population of 20,000, a large number of whom are continually engaged in criminal practices. There are portions of the city of Glasgow which a stranger could scarcely traverse safely at night, and where an amount of vice and misery may be witnessed which is not exceeded in either London or Liverpool.

In the mining and manufacturing districts of England there is much ignorance and more vice. In both, there are schools of a miserable character, but those young persons who can find time to attend them learn nothing beyond reading, writing, and the simplest rules of arithmetic. The mining labour, as carried on in the mines of England, is extremely demoralizing in its tendency, as we have shown in another part of this work. The report of parliamentary commissioners contains some statements in regard to the darkness of mind and corruption of heart among young persons employed in the various trades and manufactures.

The following facts are quoted from the Second Report of the "Children's Employment Commission."