East London

by Walter Besant

The submerged do not, as a rule, give trouble to the police, nor are they a terror to the householder; they do not rob, they do not brawl, they do not get up riots, they do not “demonstrate,” they endure in quiet. Their misery might make them dangerous if they were to unite; but they cannot unite, they have no leader, they have no prophet; they want nothing except food and warmth, they accuse nobody, they are not revolutionaries; they are quite aware—those of them who have any power of thought left—that no change in the social order could possibly benefit them. They live simply, each man clothed with his own misery as with a gaberdine. And they know perfectly well that their present wretchedness is due to themselves and their own follies and their own vices. They have lost whatever spirit of enterprise they may once have possessed; in many cases long habits of drink have destroyed their power of will and energy.

Many causes have made them what they are. As many men, so many causes. They cannot be reduced to a class; they come from every social station—many of them are highly educated men, born of gentle-folk, some of county families, some of the professional classes. Their tale of woe, if you ask it, is always the lamentation of the luckless; it should be the lamentation of a sinner. Incompetence, especially that kind of incompetence which belongs to an indolent habit of mind and body; the loss of one situation after another, the throwing away of one chance after the other, the shrinking from work either bodily or mental, which grows upon a man until for very nervousness he is unable to do any work; the worn-out patience of friends and relations, drink—always drink; dismissal which involves the loss of character, the habit begun in boyhood of choosing always the easier way; sickness, which too commonly drives a man out of work and sends him on to the streets in search of casual jobs; crime and the gaol—all these causes work in the same direction; they reduce the unfortunate victim to the condition of hopelessness and helplessness which is the note of the submerged.

I think that where the case is one in which the former social standing was good the most common cause is loss of character. This does not mean, necessarily, the taint of dishonesty. It means, in many cases, simply incompetence. How shall a clerk, a shop assistant, find another place when he can only give reference to a former employer who can say nothing in his praise? He goes down, he takes a worse place with lower pay, he continues in his incompetence, he is again dismissed. He falls lower still. In any country it is a terrible thing for a young man to lose his character; it is fatal in a country where laborers of his kind, at the only work he can do, are redundant; while men with good character can be obtained, who will employ a man without a character? For such a man it would seem as if a new country—a new name—were the only chance left for him. He tries the new country. Alas! Incompetence is no more wanted there than at home. If, as sometimes happens, such an one yields to the temptation that is always before the penniless and falls into crime, it is no longer a descent along the familiar easy slope; it is a headlong plunge which the unfortunate man makes, once for all, into the Male-bolge of the submerged.

I was once in a London police court looking on at the day’s cases which were brought up one after the other before the magistrate. The drunk and disorderly came first; these were soon dismissed; indeed, there is a terrible monotony about them; the reporters do not take the trouble even to listen or to make a note of them unless the prisoner is a man of some note. Then followed the case of a young man, apparently four- or five-and-twenty years of age. He was described as a clerk; he was dressed in the uniform of his craft, with a black coat and a tall hat; it was the cold, early spring, and he had no overcoat or wrapper or collar or neckerchief of any kind, and he was barefooted. The sight of him filled one with a kind of terror. Now, the face of that poor wretch told its own story; it was a handsome face, with regular features, light hair, and blue eyes. As a boy he must have been singularly attractive; as a child, lovely. But now the face was stamped and branded with the mark of one who has always followed the Easy Way; his weak mouth, his shifting eyes, the degradation of what had once promised to be a face of such nobility and beauty, proclaimed aloud his history. I could see the boy at school who would do no more work than he was obliged to do; the young clerk at five shillings a week, who would do no more than he was bidden, and that without intelligence or zeal; the lad rising, as even the junior clerk rises, by seniority; the billiard-room, the public house, the wasted evenings, the betting, the evil companions, the inevitable dismissal for incompetence, the difficulty of finding another place, the influence of friends not too influential, the second dismissal, the tramp up thousands of stairs in search of a vacant desk where character was not required, borrowing of small sums, with faithful promises of repayment, the consequent loss of friends, the alienation even of brothers, the inevitable destitution, the pawning of all but the barest necessaries of clothes, even at last parting with his boots—all this was revealed by the mere aspect of the man. He was charged with stealing a pair of boots to replace those which he had pawned. There was no shame in his face; the thing had come at last which he had felt coming so long. It was not shame, it was a look of resigned hopelessness; he was become the foot-ball of fate, he was henceforth to be kicked about here and there as fate in her gamesome moods might choose. Practically there was no defense; he had nothing to say; he only shook his head; the magistrate was lenient because it was a first offense. Leniency in such a case is only apparent, though the magistrate means well, for a fortnight in prison is as ruinous for the rest of a man’s life as a twelvemonth. So he stepped out of the dock, and presently the wheels of Black Maria—sometimes called the Queen’s omnibus—rolled out into the street with the day’s freight of woe and retribution.

I met this poor creature afterward; I came upon him carrying a pair of boards; I stumbled over him as he sat in the sun in St. James’s Park, monumental in shabbiness; I met him once or twice shambling about the Embankment, which was his favorite boulevard—a place where no work can be picked up, and for that reason, I suppose, dear to him. London is a very big city, but such men as this have their haunts; they are too weak of will to wander far from the way of habit; it requires an effort, a moment of energetic decision, to change his daily walk from the Embankment to the Strand. I never saw him, except on that one occasion when he was a sandwich man, doing any kind of work; I never saw him begging; I never saw him in a shelter at night; I know not how he lived or how, if ever, he procured a renewal of his rags when they fell off him. Presently it occurred to me that I had not seen him lately. I looked about for him. By this time I took an interest in the case; had he asked me for money I should have given him some, I dare say. Why not? The indiscriminate giving of alms is, one knows and has been taught for years, a most mischievous thing; but in this case money will not lift a man out of the slough, nor will it plunge him deeper; give him money and he will devour it; refuse him money and he will go on just in the same way. But I have never seen him since, and I am sure that in some workhouse infirmary he lay lingering awhile with pneumonia, which carries off most of the half-fed and the ill-clad, and that he died without murmuring against his fate, resigned and hopeless. I dare say that those who composed his limbs in death admired the singular beauty of the face. For lo! a marvel—when the debased soul, which has also debased the face, goes out of the body, the face resumes the delicacy and the nobility for which it was originally intended.

Another case of a submerged. I knew something of the man, not the man himself. He began very well; he was clever in some things; he could play more than one instrument, he was a companionable person; he got into the civil service by open competition very creditably; for some ten or twelve years he lived blamelessly. It was known by his friends that he was always thirsty; he would drink large quantities of tea for breakfast; he drank pints of cold water with his pipe. Presently his friends began to whisper—things. Then openly there were said—things. Then I was told that A. A. had been turned out of his place, and that meant a good many—things. For certain reasons I was interested in the man. One evening in July I strolled in St. James’s Park after dinner; the air was balmy; the benches of the park were nearly full. I found a vacant seat and sat down. Beside me was a youngish man; by the light of the gas-lamp I observed that the brim of his hat was broken, and that in other respects rags were his portion. He entered into conversation by a question as to some race-horse, to which I pleaded ignorance. He then began to talk about himself. It was, as I have said above, the lamentation of the luckless. “One man,” he said, “may steal a pig, another may not look over the garden-wall. I, sir, am what I am; in rags, as you see; penniless, or I should not be here; tormented by thirst, and no means of procuring a drink. I, sir, am the man who looked over the garden-wall.” He went on; suddenly the story became familiar to me; he was the man of whose decline and fall I had heard so much.

He had not abandoned his grand air, for which he was always distinguished. I offered him a cigar. He examined it critically. “A brand of this kind,” he said, “I keep in tea for three years.” He lit it. “A gentleman,” he reminded me, “is not lowered by bad luck, nor is he disgraced by having to do work belonging to the service—the menial service. The other day I was a sandwich man—in Bond Street. I met my brother face to face. I have a brother—” the poor man is a member of the Travelers and a few other clubs of that kind. “He will do nothing for me. At sight of me he winced; he changed color. Do you think I flinched? Not so, sir. The disgrace was his; he felt it.” And so on; he was instructive. I believe his friends shipped him off somewhere.

Some of the submerged contrive to make their own livelihood; they are even able, as a rule, to take a bed at the Sixpenny Hotel. One of these institutions has, indeed, the credit of being the chosen haunt of the brokendown gentlemen. Here they are all broken down together; to meet here, to cook their own suppers, to rail at fortune like kings deposed is an agreeable diversion. At least they talk with each other in the language to which they are accustomed. And there is always something about the manner of the brokendown “swell” which distinguishes him from those of lower beginnings. There is something of the old gallantry left; he does not sit down and hang a head and moan like the poor bankrupt small trader; so long as the sixpence is forthcoming he is not unhappy.

It is a strange company; they were once soldiers, sports-men, billiard players, betting men, scholars, journalists, poets, novelists, travelers, physicians, actors. One of the submerged of whom I heard had been a reader of some learned language at one of our universities; another was a clergyman—not, if the story about him was true, quite admirable professionally; both these gentlemen, however, found it best, after a time, to exchange the Sixpenny Hotel for the workhouse, where they are at least free from the anxiety about the sixpence.

One more illustration of the submerged who has been a gentleman. I met him once, only once. It was in Oxford Street; he was standing before the window of a very artistic and attractive shop—a china and glass shop. The window was most æsthetically “dressed”; it contained, besides Venetian glass and other glass of wondrous cunning and beauty, a small dinner-table set out with flowers, glass, silver plate, costly china of new design, some white napery, and those pretty little lights—called fairy lights—which were a few years ago fashionable.