The lower-class women of London do wear a semblance of a toilette: fur mantles in rags, battered, greasy hats with faded flowers, flounced skirts in tatters—an apology for a costume, in short.
But here, there is nothing of all that. No finery, not even a hat. The tartan seems to take the place of all.
The attributions of this tartan are multiple. It is as useful to the women of the lower classes in the great Scotch towns as the reindeer is to the Laplander.
This tartan serves them as a hood when it is cold; as an umbrella when it rains; as a blanket in winter nights; as a mattress in summer ones; as a basket when they go to market; a towel when they do their own and their children's dry-polishing; a cradle for their babies, which they carry either slung over their back, Hottentot fashion, or hanging in front, like the kangaroos. When poverty presses hard, the tartan goes to the pawnbroker's shop, whence it issues in the form of a sixpence or a shilling, according to its value. After living in them they live on them, and so these useful servants pass from external to internal use, and appease the hunger or thirst of their owners for a day or two. A very godsend this tartan, as you see.
A Glasgow police inspector told me that, having one day to make a search at a pawnbroker's in the town, he had found more than fifteen hundred of these shawls on the premises. "Many of those poor borrowers are Irish," he said. Did he say this to pass on to a neighbour that which seemed to him a disgrace to his own country? In any case, it is a fact that there are a great number of Irish in Glasgow.
No doubt poverty, with its accompaniments of shame and vice, exists in all great cities; but here it has a distressing aspect that it presents in no other country. The Arab beggar makes one smile as he majestically drapes around him his picturesque, multicoloured rags; the lazzarone, lying on the quay of Naples under the radiant Italian sky, is a prince compared to the wretch who drags out his existence in the dirty streets or garrets of Glasgow.
"But there is money in Glasgow."
In Paris, the newspapers are sold in shops or pretty kiosks kept by clean, tidy, respectable women. In London and other large English towns, the papers are cried in the streets by low-class men and boys. In Glasgow and Edinburgh the work is done by ragged children, who literally besiege you as you walk the streets: poor little girls half-naked, shivering, and starving, with their feet in the mud, try to earn a few pence to appease their own hunger, or, perhaps, furnish an unnatural parent with the means of getting tipsy. Others have a little stock of matches that they look at with an envious eye, one fancies, as one thinks of Andersen's touching tale.
Oh, pity for the poor little children!