Practicable Socialism: Essays on Social Reform

by S. A. Barnett; Mrs. S. A. Barnett

One lady, with the real feeling of hostess-ship, took her Whitechapel guests, as she would any others, into a bedroom to take their outdoor things off. Touching, if amusing, was the remark of a girl of fifteen or thereabouts who, turning to her mother, said, ‘Look, mother, here’s a bed with a room all to itself!’ ‘Has any one really slept in this white bed?’ was asked by another of that same party. While to others of a rather higher class, who have been servants before marriage, the reintroduction to such a house is a great pleasure, though to them not such a revelation as it is to those who have passed all their lives in factories or workshops. It is a welcome reminder of their past, and often suggests little improvements in the arrangement of their homes. It is a means also of diffusing a love of beauty, a sense of harmony, and an artistic taste, not to be despised among those who feel that the ‘Beauty of Holiness’ constitutes its attraction to the right living which leads to Righteousness.

In various ways, too many to describe, but which every hostess can devise, the hours between half-past four and eight can be pleasantly filled, until the drawing in of the long summer evening brings the party to a close. The announcement of supper is generally greeted with, ‘What, go home already?’ or, ‘The time don’t go so fast working days,’ but garden parties must necessarily end with daylight, and for folk up at six in the morning ten or eleven o’clock is a late enough bed hour. Supper is generally a small meal—cake, buns, or pastry, with lemonade, fruit, or cold coffee—simply a light refreshment taken standing; but some of the friends who entertain us like better to give the light meal on the arrival of the guests, and the more substantial one later. The first plan, though, is perhaps better, as the people leave their homes early, and many of them miss their dinner altogether, amid the necessary preparation for the long absence.

‘Good-night, sir, and God bless you for this day!’ was the farewell of one of his guests to his silver-haired host, words which struck him deeply. ‘Dear me, dear me! why did I never think of it before?’ he exclaimed; and really this means of doing good seems so simple and self-evident that it is to be wondered at that those working among the poor should often not know where to take their people for a day’s outing. London suburbs abound with families hardly one of whom does not give a garden party in the course of the summer, and yet how few of these parties are to guests ‘who cannot bid again!’ The expense of such a party is certainly not the reason of its rarity. An entertainment such as I have told about, even when meat is given, does not cost more than a shilling or eighteenpence a head. The trouble cannot be the deterrent motive, for that is nothing to be compared to the trouble of a dinner-party, nor even of any ordinary ‘at home.’ ‘The servants would not like it’ is sometimes urged as a reason, but it is certainly not the experience of those who, having overcome the objections of their servants, have tried it, and found that they entered thoroughly into the spirit of a party at which they had the pleasant duty of entertaining joined to their usual one of serving, and on more than one occasion the hearty welcome given by the servants has added much to the success of our day.

Perhaps, amid the many difficulties to which modern civilisation has brought us, one of the saddest is the mutual ignorance of the lives and minds of members of the same household—an ignorance often leading to division. It may not, I think, be the least important good of these parties that they afford a subject regarding which master and servants can be, anyhow for one day, of one mind and purpose.

Neither does it require the possession of a mansion or park before such an invitation can be sent; in fact, some of the pleasantest parties have been given in the smallest gardens, where kindliness and genial welcome have made up for want of space. One lady, indeed, who was staying for the summer in lodgings in the country gave happy afternoons and pleasant memories to more than eighty people. She asked them in little groups of twelve or fourteen, took them long country rambles, or obtained permission to saunter in a neighbour’s garden, and when the evenings drew in (it was in August) brought them back to her rooms, where a good tea-supper and a few songs brought the entertainment to a close.

The guests need not always be grown people. It is, perhaps, even more important to give the growing girl or the boy just entering into manhood a taste for simple pleasures. Very delightful is the interest and enjoyment of these young things in the country life and wonders. The evening sewing-class, consisting of big girls at work every day in factories; the Bible class of young men; the discussion club; the children-servants (so numerous and so joyless in our great cities)—such little groups can be found around every place of worship, or are known to every one living among or busying himself for the good of the poor. All are open to invitations, and these can be entertained even more easily than their elders. ‘Don’t you remember this or that?’ my young friends often ask about some trivial incident long since vanished from my memory, and when, demurring, I ask ‘When?’ the unfailing answer, varying in form but monotonous in substance, is ‘Why, that day when you took us into the country. You can’t forget. It was grand.’

Strangely ignorant are some of these town-bred folk of things which seem to us always to have been known and never to have been taught. They call every flower a rose, and express wonder at the commonest object. ‘Law! here’s straw a-growing!’ I once heard in a corn-field, and emerging into a fir-wood soon after, we all joined in a laugh at the remark, ‘Why, here’s hundreds of Christmas trees all together.’ Anything, provided it is joined to active movement, without which young things never seem quite happy, serves to amuse and to pass the time. A competition to see which girls shall gather the best nosegays, the proposal to the boys to search for some animal, queer plant, or odd stone, have helped to carry the guests over many miles and through long afternoons. Perhaps one of the nicest things which any young lady can do, even if she is not able or allowed to attempt the larger undertaking of a party, is to take some ten or twelve school boys and girls for a walk on their Saturday afternoon holiday. She need keep them, perhaps, only three or four hours, when milk or lemonade and buns, got at any milk-shop, will serve as a substitute for the usual tea.

But, besides these country parties which town-dwellers are quite unable to give, there is still left to us Londoners the possibility (not to say duty) of inviting the poor to our own houses. Our poor neighbours have not been asked to many such parties, but the few to which they have been bidden have been very pleasant. At one our hostess, but lately returned from the East, had arranged tableaux-vivants introducing Oriental costumes in her drawing-room, and the guests were delighted at seeing the people of the one foreign nation of which they knew anything—the Bible having been the literature which made them conversant with that—as large as life, and all ‘real men and solid women.’ Another time a little charade was got up, and proud was the mother whose baby was pressed into early service as a play-actor. Other friends have entertained us after a visit to the Kensington Museum or Zoological Gardens, while some evenings have been passed in much the same way as by other people who meet for social pleasure; with talk, music, strange foreign things, portfolios, and puzzles, though games may, perhaps, have occupied a somewhat longer time than is usual among guests with more conversational interests. To all of us have these parties given much pleasure—pleasure which is, in truth, healthful and refreshing amid the sorrow and pain so liberally mingled in the life’s cup of the poor. ‘This evening I’ve forgot all the winter’s troubles,’ followed the ‘Good-night’ from the lips of a pain-broken woman; and considering the ‘winter’s troubles’ included the death of a child and the semi-starvation resulting from the almost constant out-of-work condition of the husband, the party seemed a strangely inadequate means of producing even temporarily so large a result.

The efforts made to attend are one of the signs of how much these and the country parties are enjoyed. One woman came, with her puling, pink ten-days-old baby, and both men and women constantly get up from a sick-bed to return to it again as soon as the pleasure is over. ‘We can’t afford to lose it, yer see; they don’t come too often,’ is the sort of answer one usually receives in reply to remonstrance.