Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present

by Thomas Miller

How grateful the generality of the poor are for favours! They return the donor thanks, sincere thanks—they can offer God no more.

We pay our poor-rates because we are forced; but is a parochial board to be the limits of our charity, is there nothing required beyond food, raiment, and household shelter, for the poor? Ask Joseph Brown, and he will point with a proud finger towards Bethnal-green, to those whom he led forth like a second Moses, out of a wilderness of bricks, mortar, and ruins, to a land where summer reigns, where he smote the rock, and sent the gushing waters bubbling and sparkling among a thousand brick-dried and dusty hearts.

At his bidding the little doubled-up old woman left off roasting chestnuts at the corner of the street, and went out to see them grow; the pale-faced girl for one day ceased her cry of water-cresses, and saw the clear brook in which they stood; while the pretty flower-girl gazed with wonderment over the gardens of Havering Bower, and thought how fresh and beautiful the flowers looked there compared with those she sold in the streets of London. The old man, bent with age, left his box of lucifer-matches (the beggar’s last shield) at home, and went to see the butterfly once more alight on the blossoms. And Joseph Brown walked at the head of these immortal souls, these poor outcasts of earth—many of them we trust angels on their march to heaven, whose folded wings may in another state touch our own, when we kneel with bowed head and clasped hands on the star-paved floor of heaven, blushing to think how many tribulations they waded through without a murmur, while we looked on nor extended a helping hand.

The last trumpet, when it awakes the dead, will have no soft and silvery sound for the silken sons and daughters of luxury, but send out the same earth-rending peal, and startle all from their long deep slumber.

These Bethnal-green holiday-people were a poor and homely race, looking what they really are, a badly-fed and badly-housed populace. They are small in stature and limb, and unwholesome in appearance, like flowers crammed into the bit of ground behind the smoky alleys in which they live, that dwindle and pine, and get less and less every year they live: so were these poor people—they had neither bulk, bone, nor muscle: they were like the trees in our city streets compared with the giant oaks of Sherwood Forest. Some of the girls were rather pretty but pensive; they seemed happy, and yet it did not look natural for them to appear so; you could not tell how it was, yet you “felt” it to be so. The ugliest and dirtiest were to all appearance the happiest; they saw only the present, they left the past behind them, quite sure that the old cares, privations, and sorrows would not run away while they were absent. Peace be with them, and all happiness attend such careful pastors as the Rev. Joseph Brown, Rev. Thomas French the curate of Bildeston, the Rev. R. H. Herschell, and all the kind friends who assist them by contributing their mite to these Holidays of the Poor. We place their names in our pages with a feeling of pleasure.

During one of our rural wanderings in summer, we chanced to stumble upon a holiday group of charity-school children, both boys and girls, which had been brought into the quietude of the country by half-a-score of pleasure-vans. They had not all the freedom we should have liked to have seen them enjoy: if one or two straggled a little out of bounds, they were called back. Poor little things! they seemed to envy the bees and birds that flew about, and to wish that they had no teachers to watch over them. We fancied how little some of them had slept on the previous night, through thinking about their country excursion; how often they had looked at the sky, and hoped that it would not rain—that it would surely be fair one day in the year, the only day on which they had a holiday. It made us sigh to look at some of them—they were such little specimens of humanity, especially when, on inquiry, we found that many of them were fatherless and motherless. They seemed to look on Nature with that childish wonder which is pleased with every thing it sees: they gathered the white dead-nettle, the ox-eye, and red poppy, and thought that such were beautiful flowers; little darlings, that could only sob and weep when they were beaten, and nestle closer to one another for comfort, seeming to look about with their pretty eyes as if seeking for some friend to protect them. Others we saw with forbidding countenances, who had no doubt been beaten and starved, and felt a savage satisfaction in punishing such as were less than themselves, as if copying the examples they had suffered under.

Some had eaten their dinners before reaching their journey’s end, and gazed with longing eyes on such as had been more provident; though we strongly suspected that many had been tempted by false promises and the hopes of sharing the dinner of their companion—hopes not likely to be realised in many cases, judging from what we saw.

Oh, how we longed to have had those children under our own guidance for the day, to have taken them to one or another of the sweet spots we knew, so different from the dusty patch of green by the road-side, where the pleasure-vans were drawn up! such spots as we have often described—roads and lanes that lead only to fields; green nooks that seem too beautiful ever to be broken up into highways, as if it would be a sin to crush those lines of white daisies that seem to stretch onward and onward, as if trying to find their way to where, in spring, the primroses and violets and blue-bells nestle on the wood-side banks; spots which for ages have formed an old highway of flowers, over which have flown armies of birds and bees and butterflies; places beside which there ever went singing along with subdued voice some little brook, that seemed to chafe if only a pebble checked its course, as if it murmured at being kept away from the flowers that grew farther on, and which it had come a long way down the hills to look at, from whence the breeze had first blown the tidings about the beauty of the spot in which they grew; and ever over the stream the drooping May-buds waved, as if they tried to match their whiteness against the silver cloud that lay mirrored below, while here and there great trees threw their green arms across it, chequering its onward course with cooling shadows, as if for a little time to give it a pleasant resting-place before it went on again to where the unclouded sunshine falls; for where that pleasant stream goes broadening out, the gaudy dragon-flies meet together to play, and where it runs narrowing in, the black bulrushes, the feathery reeds, and the golden-flowered water-flags nod and bend and rustle together, as if they were never weary of telling one another how pleasant is the scenery around which they grow; spots where the birds seem to come for new songs—sweet notes which they gather from the lapping water and the whistling reeds, and these they sing to the blossoms, and the blossoms breathe them back again to the bees, and the bees whisper them into the bells of the flowers they plunge into, and every insect that alights thereon catches the note, and all day long is humming the low tune high up in the air. To such places as these ought the dear children to be taken, while the pleasure-vans await their return beside the dusty high-road, where only the plantain, the ox-eye, the dead-nettle, and the hemlock grow.

But while the railway rushes on in its lightning-like speed, and the steam-boat tosses the water aside with proud disdain, as if angry that it should for a moment check its course, the slow moving canal-boat, drawn leisurely along by horses, has also its crowd of holiday-people. This is, no doubt, one of the cheapest and safest methods of spending the day after all. Here there is no rushing and thronging as on the railway, no dashing and rocking as in the steam-packet, nor any shaking in going over the ground as in the pleasure-vans. The ripple the boat makes is scarcely heard. You can even distinguish the rustling of the tiny waves among the sedge that sways idly to and fro on the banks of the canal. It is a beautiful sight to see these boats full of holiday passengers, gliding slowly along within a yard or two of the shore in the summer sunshine; to look down and see them all mirrored in the water, even to the little girl that is leaning over the side, and rippling the surface with her hand, beside the woman in the red shawl, that deep down is clear-shadowed. Pleasant it is to stand a little way off; and, while the boat is towed lazily along, to hear some old solemn hymn chanted: low at first, then gradually swelling higher, and to distinguish the children’s voices mingling with those of men and women; and nothing to drown the harmony saving the measured tramp of the horses which haul the boat, the creaking of a gate, or the short sharp crack of the driver’s whip—sounds which disturb not your thoughts. Not that we would have them always singing hymns, or listening to pious addresses, but leave them a little breathing-time to look on nature, to “commune with their own hearts,” to enjoy themselves on the lawn (as the kind curate of Bildeston allowed them to do a year or two ago, after giving them a hearty meal of plum-cake and tea; and, when wearied with their sports and pastimes, sending home, as he did, every poor child with a huge lump of plum-cake in its hand).

In the north of England the school-feasts are called “Potations,” for so is the word sounded, the origin of which we have never been able to discover, nor to find any other meaning for it than that of drinking; yet it signifies a childish feast or holiday in the midland counties. We want a better compound word than “Pic-nic” for these Holidays of the Poor, and hope that some of our learned readers will help us to one.