Alton Locke, the subject of this autobiography, is the son of poor parents. His father had failed in business as a grocer, having imprudently started a small shop, without adequate capital, in an obscure district of London, where indeed there were far too many such already, and died, "as many small tradesmen do, of bad debts and a broken heart, and left us beggars." Alton's mother was a woman of a sterner mood. Reared in the most rigid tenets of the Baptist sect, and steeped in the austerest Calvinism, she regarded this world necessarily as a place of tribulation and inevitable woe, and fought and struggled on right earnestly, mortifying every natural affection in her bosom, except love to her children, and exhibiting that only through the medium of severity and restraint.
"My mother," says Alton, "moved by rule and method; by God's law, as she considered, and that only. She seldom smiled. Her word was absolute. She never commanded twice without punishing. And yet there were abysses of unspoken tenderness in her, as well as clear, sound, womanly sense and insight. But she thought herself as much bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had been some ascetic of the middle ages—so do extremes meet! It was 'carnal,' she considered. She had as yet no right to have any 'spiritual affection' for us. We were still 'children of wrath and of the devil'—not yet 'convinced of sin,' 'converted, born again.' She had no more spiritual bond with us, she thought, than she had with a heathen or a Papist. She dared not even pray for our conversion, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject. For though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear logical sense would yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had it not been decided from all eternity? We were elect, or we were reprobate. Could her prayers alter that?"
A gruesome carline this, and a revolting contrast to dear old Mause Headrigg, who not only prayed morning and night, but never doubted as to the destiny of Cuddie! Mrs Locke's conversation, however, had its charms; for we find that, in a small way, she was fond of entertaining ministers of her own persuasion at tea, and Alton's ire was early kindled by the precipitancy with which on such occasions the sugar and muffins disappeared. The old lady, moreover, had a kind of ancestral pride, being traditionally descended from a Cambridgeshire puritan who had turned out under Cromwell; and of a winter night she would tell the children long stories about the glorious times when Englishmen arose to smite kings and prelates. Of course these things had their effect. Little Alton did not become a fanatic, for this kind of religious training is never palatable to the young: he became, indeed, a sceptic as soon as he could think for himself, with a nice little germ of radicalism ready to expand whenever circumstances would permit of its development.
That period quickly arrived. Alton's paternal uncle had been as fortunate in business as his brother was unlucky, and was now a kind of city magnate—purse-proud, yet not altogether oblivious of his poorer kith and kin. He had an only son, who was to be the inheritor of his wealth, and who, being destined for the Church, was undergoing the necessary education. To this relative, who made her an annual petty allowance, Mrs Locke applied for advice regarding her son, now a cadaverous lad of fifteen, with a weak constitution, and a tendency to the manufacture of verse; and by his advice and recommendation, Alton was introduced to a tailoring establishment at the West End. Uncle certainly might have done something better for him; but perhaps he had George Barnwell in his eye: and, moreover, any superior settlement would probably have spoilt the story. Here is his first entry into the new scene:
"I stumbled after Mr Jones up a dark, narrow, iron staircase, till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house. I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to work—perhaps through life! A low lean-to room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and wretchedness that made me shudder. The windows were tight-closed, to keep out the cold winter air: and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes, chequering the dreary look-out of chimney-tops and smoke. The conductor handed me over to one of the men."
This is intended, or at all events given, as an accurate picture of a respectable London tailoring establishment, where the men receive decent wages. Such a house is called an "honourable" one, in contradistinction to others, now infinitely the more numerous, which are springing up in every direction under the fostering care of competition. As it is most important that no doubt should be left in the minds of any as to the actual condition of the working classes, we quote, not from Alton Locke, but from one pamphlet out of many which are lying before us, a few sentences explanatory of the system upon which journeymen tailors in London are compelled to work. The pamphlet, for aught we know, may be written by the author of the novel; but it is clear, specific, and apparently well-vouched.
"It appears that there are two distinct tailor trades—the 'honourable' trade, now almost confined to the West End, and rapidly dying out there; and the 'dishonourable' trade of the show-shops and slop-shops—the plate-glass palaces, where gents—and, alas! those who would be indignant at that name—buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors' own slang: slang is new and expressive enough though, now and then. The honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade has it all its own way. The honourable part of the trade is declining at the rate of one hundred and fifty journeymen per year; the dishonourable increasing at such a rate, that in twenty years it will have absorbed the whole tailoring trade, which employs upwards of twenty-one thousand journeymen. At the honourable shops the work is done, as it was universally thirty years ago, on the premises, and at good wages. In the dishonourable trade, the work is taken home by the men, to be done at the very lowest possible prices, which decrease year by year, almost month by month. At the honourable shops, from 36s. to 24s. is paid for a piece of work for which the dishonourable shop pays from 22s. to 9s. But not to the workman; happy is he if he really gets two-thirds or half of that. For at the honourable shops the master deals directly with his workmen; while at the dishonourable ones, the greater part of the work, if not the whole, is let out to contractors, or middle men—'sweaters,' as their victims significantly call them—who in their turn let it out again, sometimes to the workmen, sometimes to fresh middlemen; so that out of the price paid for labour on each article, not only the workmen, but the sweater, and perhaps the sweater's sweater, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth have to draw their profit. And when the labour price has been already beaten down to the lowest possible, how much remains for the workmen after all these deductions, let the poor fellows themselves say!"[50]
These sweaters are commonly Jews, to which persuasion also the majority of the dishonourable proprietors belong. Few people who emerge from the Euston Square Station are left in ignorance as to the fact, it being the insolent custom of a gang of hook-nosed and blubber-lipped Israelites to shower their fetid tracts, indicating the localities of the principal dealers of their tribe, into every cab as it issues from the gate. These are, in plain terms, advertisements of a more odious cannibalism than exists in the Sandwich Islands. Very often have we wished that the miscreant who so assailed us were within reach of our black-thorn cudgel, that we might have knocked all ideas of fried fish out of his head for at least a fortnight to come! In these days of projected Jewish emancipation, the sentiment may be deemed an atrocious one, but we cannot retract it. Shylock was and is the true type of his class; only that the modern London Jew is six times more personally offensive, mean, sordid, and rapacious than the merchant of the Rialto. And why should we stifle our indignation? Dare any one deny the truth of what we have said? It is notorious to the whole world that these human leeches acquire their wealth, not by honest labour and industry, but by bill-broking, sweating, discounting, and other nefarious arts, which inevitably lead the unfortunate victims who have once trafficked with the tribe of Issachar, to the spunging houses of which they have the monopoly; nor can the former escape from these loathsome dens—if they ever escape at all—without being stripped as entirely as any turkey when prepared for the spit at the genial season of Christmas. Talk of Jewish legislation indeed! We have had too much of it already in our time, from the days of Ricardo, the instigator of Sir Robert Peel's earliest practices upon the currency, down to those of Nathan Rothschild, the first Baron of Jewry, for whose personal character and upright dealings the reader is referred to Mr Francis' Chronicles of the Stock Exchange.
It is little wonder if men who know not what a scruple of conscience is, should amass enormous fortunes. It is much to be regretted that our present state of society affords them such ample opportunities. We allude not now to the plundering of heirs expectant, or the wheedling of young men just fresh from the colleges, and launched upon the town, to their ruin—to fraudulent dodges for affecting unnatural oscillations of stocks, or those more deliberate schemes which result in important public changes being effected for the private emolument of a synagogue. Bad as these things are—shameful and abhorrent as they must be to every mind alive to the ordinary feelings of rectitude—they are not yet so bad or so shameful as the deliberate rapine which is exercised upon the poor by the off-scourings of the Caucasian race. Read the following account by a working tailor of their doings, and then settle the matter with your conscience, whether it is consistent with the character of a Christian gentleman to have dealings with such inhuman vampires:—
"In 1844 I belonged to the honourable part of the trade. Our house of call supplied the present show-shop with men to work on the premises. The prices then paid were at the rate of 6d. per hour. For the same driving-capes that they paid 18s. then, they give only 12s. now. For the dress and frock coats they gave 15s. then, and now they are 14s. The paletots and shooting coats were 12s.; there was no coat made on the premises under that sum. At the end of the season they wanted to reduce the paletots to 9s. The men refused to make them at that price when other houses were paying as much as 15s. for them. The consequence of this was, the house discharged all the men, and got a Jew middleman from the neighbourhood of Petticoat Lane to agree to do them all at 7s. 6d. a piece. The Jew employed all the poor people who were at work for the slop warehouses in Houndsditch and its vicinity. This Jew makes on an average 500 paletots a week. The Jew gets 2s. 6d. profit out of each; and having no sewing trimmings allowed to him, he makes the workpeople find them. The saving in trimmings alone to the firm, since the workmen left the premises, must have realised a small fortune to them. Calculating men, women, and children, I have heard it said that the cheap house at the West End employs 1000 hands. The trimmings for the work done by these would be about 6d. a week per head, so that the saving to the house since the men worked on the premises has been no less than £1300 a year; and all this is taken out of the pockets of the poor. The Jew who contracts for making the paletots is no tailor at all. A few years ago he sold sponges in the street, and now he rides in his carriage. The Jew's profits are 500 half-crowns, or £60 odd per week; that is upwards of £3000 a-year."