East London

by Walter Besant

Sometimes they devise other modes of achieving greatness. A year or two ago half a dozen of them thought that it would be a good thing if they were to attend Epsom races on the Derby Day, the great race of the year. One can go to Epsom by road or rail; the latter is the cheaper and the easier way, but the more glorious way is to go by road, as the swells go. They hire a carriage and pair, and get a luncheon hamper from Fortnum and Mason’s, and pay for a stand on the hill—the thing can be done for about £25. These boys thought to emulate the swells; they would drive to Epsom. They therefore helped themselves to a baker’s horse and light cart, and, all in the gray of the morning, drove the whole way in the greatest glory to the race-course. Arrived there they sold the horse and cart to a Gipsy for three pounds, and spent the day in watching the races, in betting on the events, and in feasting. When the glorious day was over and their money all gone they found an outhouse near the common, and there lay down to sleep, intending to walk home in the morning. Now, the baker, on discovering his loss, had gone to the police, and the police, remembering the day and suspecting the truth, for the lads’ thirst for sport was well known, telegraphed to Epsom; the horse and cart were recovered, and in the middle of the night the boys themselves were found. They did return to town in the morning, but not as they left. It was in the roomy vehicle commonly called “Black Maria” that they were taken to the police court, and from the court to the Reformatory, where they still languish.

Sunday Gambling.

The boys are great gamblers. As gambling and betting are strictly forbidden in the streets, they have to find places where they can play undisturbed. Sunday is the day devoted to gambling. The boys get on board a barge, where they sit in the hold and play cards—locally called “darbs”—all day long; sometimes they find an empty house, sometimes a room in a condemned row of crazy tenements. The favorite game, the name of which I do not know, is one in which the dealer holds the bank; he deals a card to every player and one to himself. Each player covers his card with a stake, generally a penny: the cards are turned up; the players pay the dealer for cards below, and are paid for cards above the dealer’s card. It is quite a simple game, and one in which a boy may lose his Saturday wages in a very short time. They also play “heads and tails,” and they are said to bet freely among each other.

At this period of their career some of them begin to read a good deal. Not the newspapers, not any books; their reading is confined to the penny novelette; for them Jack Harkaway performs incredible feats of valor; it is not for them that the maiden of low degree is wedded by the belted earl—that is for the girls; for these lads, to whom a fight is the finest thing in the world, the renowned Jack Harkaway knocks down the wicked captain on the quarter-deck, rescues a whole ship’s company from pirates, performs prodigies at Omdurman. His feats are described in the amazing sheets which he calls “ha’penny bloods” or “penny dreadfuls.” If the boys buy a paper it is one of like mind, such as are written and printed especially and exclusively for him.

They go often, I have said, to the music-hall; there are three or four in their own quarter—the Paragon, Mile End Road; the Foresters, Cambridge Road; and the Queen’s, Poplar. But they go farther afield, and may be found in the galleries of even West-End music-halls to see a popular “turn.” As for concerts and lectures and entertainments given at the Town Hall or other places, they will not go to them. There is too much “class.”

At this time, namely, at sixteen or seventeen, the boys commonly take a sweetheart; they “keep company” with a girl; night after night they walk the streets together; what they talk about no one knows, what vows of constancy they exchange no man hath ever heard or can divine; they take each other, the boy paying when he can, to the music-hall or to the theater; they stand drinks—it is at this period that the fatal yearning for drink begins to fasten itself upon the lad. The “keeping company” is perhaps a worse evil than the growing thirst for drink; it ends, invariably, in the early marriage, which is one of the most deplorable features in the lower life; the young girl of sixteen or seventeen, ignorant of everything, enters upon the married life, and for the rest of her days endures all the wretchedness of grinding poverty, children half-nourished and in rags, a drunken husband and a drunken self. The boys’ clubs, the girls’ clubs, the settlements, of which I shall speak again presently, do all in their power to occupy the young people’s minds with other things; but the club closes at ten, and the street remains open all night.

None of these street boys and girls—or very few, as I have said already—are country-born; the country lads come up to London Town, to the city paved with gold, in thousands, but they are older than these children of the street; they have not learned the fascination which the street exercises upon those who have always lived in it and always played in it.

Their martial tastes should make them enlist, but the discipline forbids enlistment. Many of them, however, belong to the Tower Hamlets Militia, a regiment called out for drill for six weeks every year. They enjoy sporting the uniform ; they like marching; they like the band and the mess in barracks, but they cannot endure the discipline for more than six weeks, even in return for the grandeur and the glory of the thing.

What, then, is the connection between the casual hand and the lads of the street? This: the life of the street is an ordeal through which these lads must pass, since we give them no other choice; some of them emerge without harm; for them the craving for drink has not become a demoniac possession; they have never been haled before the police court; they know not the interior of prison or reformatory; they have not married at seventeen; these are the young fellows who get, and keep, permanent places with “good money,” they are hewers of wood and drawers of water like the children of Gideon, yet they live not in the slums; their homes are in the Monotonies; theirs is a four-or six-roomed house, one of a row, one of a street, a flat in a barrack; their houses and dwelling-places stand side by side miles around. But the life that is led in these streets is not monotonous, because every man has his own life and his own experience, his birth and childhood, his manhood and his age, and these can never be monotonous.