IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND IN THE AUTUMN OF 1851.

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BY FREDERIKA BREMER.

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It is two years since I first found myself in England. When I was in England in the autumn of 1849, the cholera was there. A dense, oppressive atmosphere rested over its cities, as of a cloud pregnant with lightning. Hearses rolled through the streets. The towns were empty of people; for all who had the means of going had fled into the country; they who had not were compelled to remain. I saw shadowy figures, clad in black, stealing along the streets, more like ghosts than creatures of flesh and blood. Never before had I seen human wretchedness in such a form as I beheld it in Hull and in London. Wretchedness enough may be found, God knows, even in Stockholm, and it shows itself openly enough there in street and market. But it is there most frequently an undisguised, an unabashed wretchedness. It is not ashamed to beg, to show its rags, or its drunken countenance. It is a child of crime; and that is perhaps the most extreme wretchedness. But it is less painful to behold, because it seems to be suffering only its own deserts. One is more easily satisfied to turn one’s head aside and pass on. One thinks, “I cannot help that!”

In England, however, misery had another appearance; it was not so much that of degradation as of want, pallid want. It was meagre and retiring; it ventured not to look up, or it looked up with a glance of hopeless beseeching—so spirit-broken! It tried to look respectable. Those men with coats and hats brushed till the nap was gone; those pale women in scanty, washed-out, but yet decent clothes—it was a sight which one could hardly bear. In a solitary walk of ten minutes in the streets of Hull, I saw ten times more want than I had seen in a ten months’ residence in Denmark.

The sun shone joyously as I traveled through the manufacturing districts; saw their groups of towns and suburbs; saw their smoking pillars and pyramids towering up everywhere in the wide landscape—saw glowing gorges of fire open themselves in the earth, as if it were burning—a splendid and wonderfully picturesque spectacle, reminding one of fire-worshipers of ancient and modern time, and of their altars. But I heard the mournful cry of the children from the factories; the cry which the public voice has made audible to the world; the cry of the children, of the little ones who had been compelled by the lust of gain of their parents and the manufacturers, to sacrifice life, and joy, and health, in the workshops of machinery; the children who lie down in those beds which never are cold, the children who are driven and beaten till they sink insensibly into death or fatuity—that living death; I heard the wailing cry of the children, which Elizabeth Barrett interpreted in her affecting poem; and the wealthy manufacturing districts, with their towns, their fire-columns, their pyramids, seemed to me like an enormous temple of Moloch, in which the mammon-worshipers of England offered up even children to the burning arms of their god—children, the hope of the earth, and its most delicious and most beautiful joy!