The Law and the Poor

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

The good Doctor rolled all that excellent stuff out one evening in 1770 to the Rev. Dr. Maxwell, the assistant preacher of the Temple, who, like Boswell, faithfully recorded what he remembered of it in the morning—I doubt not that if Dr. Johnson had lived in 1670, or 1870, or 1970, or had flourished under Caligula or Nero, he would have rolled out the same sonorous complacent nonsense to some sort of faithful human gramophone who would have recorded the utterances of his master’s voice with a canine credulity in its omniscience.

There is nothing extraordinary in the divergence of the views of Oliver Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson about the law and the poor. The good Doctor held the strong, sensible, Tory view that the system of treating the poor handed down to us by our forefathers was the right and proper system, that it was at least as good as any other system, that nothing anyhow could be learned from the hated foreigner, and that to pander to dreamers and busybodies, who found fault and wanted to alter things, was to start down the broad road of destruction. Oliver Goldsmith might have thought the same thing if he had been an Englishman, but he had the saving grace of Irish blood in his veins, and the true Irish have the power of looking beyond the present, and are often prophets and dreamers of dreams, seeing signs and wonders that we wot not of.

“Sir!” said Dr. Johnson on another occasion, and when he began like that you knew that wisdom was about; “the age is running mad after innovations; all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation.”

It having been argued that this was an improvement—“No, sir (said he eagerly), it is not an improvement; they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?”

And Boswell and Sir William Scott nodded approval, just as you and I would have done or do now when some important old gentleman lays down the law about something of which he knows perhaps even a little less than we do and we are too courteous or cowardly to tell him that at the back of our minds we believe he is talking nonsense.

If you would be gratified by a Tyburn procession, you may see one any day for yourself in Hogarth’s print of the awful end of the Idle Apprentice. The ragged men, women and children bawling dying speeches about the streets, the criminal in the cart sitting beside his coffin, the chaplain exhorting the poor outcast, who, if he still courted popularity, scoffed openly, shouting to his friends on St. Sepulchre’s steps where they stood with their nosegays to give their pal a last greeting. What a solemn impressive scene! All the way up Holborn there is a crowd so great that every twenty or thirty yards the cart is pulled up, and now someone brings out wine and the malefactor drinks a last toast. And when he reaches the fatal tree the ribald mob swears and laughs and shouts out obscene jests. Amid these noises a psalm is sung and the sound of it drowned in filthy tumult. So was the life of a fellow sinner brought to an end in the eighteenth century.

And there were men and women who wanted to abolish it all. It was too much for Dr. Johnson. “Tyburn itself not safe from the fury of innovation!” Fancy that! What a terrible outlook! The law deserting the poor and giving them no more cheap excursions to Tyburn—well might the good Doctor shake his dear old head and prophesy woe.

And when Dr. Johnson upheld the English treatment of the poor in 1770, we may suppose he knew as much about it as a literary professor of to-day knows about what is going on in the workhouse, or the police court, or the County Court of our own time. The belief that the world is the best possible of worlds has its value in making for the stability of things, but mere ignorance of the facts of life, coupled with that strange form of piety which accepts whatever system was good enough for a past age as the only possible system for this, renders the pace of social reform as imperceptible to the human mind as the movements of glaciers.

If a history of the law and the poor were to be written, it would be a story of the lower classes emerging out of slavery into serfdom, out of serfdom into freedom of a limited character, and every age finding new abuses to remedy and trying in some small way to rid the law of some of those traits of barbarism which linger in its old-world features. To each new generation the terrors of the past iniquity of the law are mere nightmares. We can scarcely believe that what we read is true any more than our grandchildren will be able to understand how we were able to tolerate some of the everyday legal incidents of our daily courts.

Less than a hundred years ago at Salford Quarter Sessions there were over two hundred prisoners, all poor and mostly very young, and the law thought nothing of transporting them for life or fourteen years as a punishment for small thefts. And horrible as all this cruelty was, yet I make little doubt that the judges of the time, with very few exceptions, administered the law as humanely as they do to-day. Sir Thomas Starkie, the learned Chairman of the Salford Epiphany Quarter Sessions in 1824, no doubt felt very grieved when he sentenced Martha Myers, aged sixteen, and Mary Mason, twenty-four, to seven years’ transportation. I expect he thought he was “giving them another chance.” Perhaps he was. We do not know. They may have become the mothers of big-limbed colonial aristocrats instead of peopling the Hundred of Salford with another generation of feeble-minded criminals.