The great mass of the population consists of the steady craftsmen, with the foremen, and the managers of departments, and the clerks employed in the factories and the works. I am about to point out some of the ways in which these people brighten and enliven their days.
A certain joyousness has always been the keynote of London life. A volume might be written on the cheerfulness of London; it is not gaiety—Paris or Vienna is a city of gaiety; it is a more valuable possession; the citizen of London is not light-hearted; he is always, in fact, possessed with a wholesome sense of individual responsibility; but he is cheerful, and he loves those amusements which belong to the cheerful temperament. It must also be acknowledged that he loves sport, and everything connected with sport. Now this cheerfulness of London a hundred years ago seemed well-nigh destroyed. The old social life of the City was broken up by the abandonment of the City; the suburban life, without centers of attraction, such as the little City parish, or the ward, or the City company was wont to offer, was dull and monotonous; the working-men, long left to themselves without schools, or leaders, or masters, or discipline of any kind, were sunk deep in a drunken slough, and the industrial side of London had hardly yet sprung into existence. In another place I have considered the suburban life; here let me speak only of the people who make up the crowds of East London. Without apparent centers round which they could group themselves, the people, by instinct, when they found themselves thus massed together, revived the old cheerfulness of their ancestors. East London, for its sports and pastimes, when we look into them, reminds us of London of the twelfth century as described by Fitzstephen—a city always in good spirits, joyous, and given to every kind of sport. Not quite in the same way; the houses are no longer decked with flowers—it would be too ridiculous to decorate a street leading out of the Commercial Road with flowers; nor do we see any longer the old procession where the minstrels went before,—if it was only the tabor and the pipe,—while the lads and lasses followed after. Yet in its own way this new city is full of cheerfulness; it contains so many Hooligans and casuals and outcasts that it ought to go about with a face of dismal lines; but there were outcasts and casuals even in the twelfth century; quite another note will be struck by one who investigates; there is no city more cheerful and more addicted to enjoyment than East London.
Like all industrial cities—you may note the fact especially in Brussels—the young seem out of all proportion to the old; this is of course partly because the young people come out more; they crowd the leading streets and the boulevards; they seem to have nothing to do, and to want nothing but to amuse themselves every evening.
I have already twice called attention to the very remarkable change that has gradually transformed the life of the modern craftsman. We have given him his evenings—all his evenings; we have postponed his going to work by an hour at least, and in many cases by two hours; this means a corresponding extension of the evening, because when a man had to present himself at the workshop at 5:30 or 6 A.M. he had to get up an hour before that time, therefore he had to be in bed by an early hour in the evening. This point is of vital importance; it is affecting the national character for good or evil; it is full of possibilities and it is full of dangers.
Our young people, who are those most to be considered, for obvious reasons, are now in possession of the whole evening. From seven o’clock till bedtime, which may be eleven or twelve, they are free to do what they please; the paternal authority is no longer exercised; they are, in every sense, their own masters. In addition, we give them the Saturday afternoon and the whole of Sunday free from the former obligations of church. We also give them the bank-holidays, with Christmas Day and Good Friday. In other words, we give them, if you will take the trouble to calculate, more than a quarter of the solid year, reckoned by days of twenty-four hours. If we reckon by days of sixteen hours we give them more than one third of the whole year, and we say to them, “Go; do what you please with one third of your lives.” This is a very serious gift; it should be accompanied by admonition as to responsibilities and possibilities. Anything may be done for good or for ill, with a whole third part of the working year to work at it. The gift, so far, and with certain exceptions, as of the ambitious lad who means to rise, and will rise, though it means hours of labor when others are at play, has been, so far, generally interpreted to mean, “Go and do nothing, except look for present enjoyment.”
The winter, by universal consent, comes to an end on Easter Sunday, which may fall as early as the fourth week in March or as late as the fourth week in April. The breath of the English spring is chill, but the snow and the cold rains and the fogs have gone; if the east wind is keen it dries the roads; the bicycles can come out; there is not yet much promise of leaf and flower, but the catkins hang upon the trees and the hedges are turning green, and the days are long and the evenings are light. I think that Easter Monday is the greatest holiday of the year to East London.
It has replaced the old May-day. Formerly, when by the old style May-day fell on what is now the 14th, it came very happily at the real commencement of the English spring. We are liable to east winds and to cold and frost till about the middle of May, after which it is seldom that the east wind returns. On that day the whole City turned out to welcome summer. Think what they had gone through; the streets unpaved, mere morasses of mud and melting snow; the houses with their unglazed windows boarded up with shutters; the long evenings spent crouching round the fire or in bed; no fresh meat, no vegetables, only salted meat and birds, and, to finish with, the forty days of fasting on dried fish, mostly so stale that it would not now be allowed to be offered for sale. And here was summer coming again! Out of the City gates poured the young men and the maidens to gather the branches and blossoms of the white-thorn, to come back laden with the greenery and to dance and sing around the May-pole.
May-day has long ceased to be a popular festival. The Puritans killed it. Yet there still linger some of the old signs of rejoicing. To this day the carmen deck their horses with ribbons and artificial flowers on May-day. Until quite recently there were one or two May-day processions still to be seen in the streets. The chimney-sweeps kept up the custom longest. They came out in force, dressed up with fantastic hats and colored ribbons. In the midst was a moving arbor of green branches and flowers, called Jack in the Green. Beside him ran and danced a girl in gay colors, who was Maid Marian. Before him went a fife and drum or a fiddler, and they stopped at certain points to dance round Jack in the Green. Another procession, discontinued before that of the chimney-sweeps, was that of the milkmaids. The dairy women, dressed in bright colors and having flowers in their hair or in their hats, led along a milch cow covered with garlands. After the cow came a man inside a frame which bore a kind of trophy consisting of silver dishes and silver goblets, lent for the occasion and set in flowers. Of course they had a fiddler, always represented in the pictures as one-legged, but perhaps the absence of a leg was not an essential.
May-day is gone. Its place is taken, and more than taken, by Easter Monday. It is the fourth and last day of the longest holiday in the whole year. From Good Friday to Monday, both inclusive, no work is done, no workshops are opened. The first day, the Day of Tenebræ, the day of fasting and humiliation, is observed by East London as a day of great joy; it is a day on which the men seek their amusements without the women; on this day there are sports, with wrestling and boxing, with foot-ball and athletics; the women, I think, mostly stay at home. On the Saturday little is done but to rest, yet there are railway excursions; many places of amusement, such as the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium (they offer a long round of shows lasting all through the day), are open. Easter Sunday is exactly like any other Sunday. But Monday—Monday is the holiday for all alike, men, women, and children. Poor and miserable must that man be who cannot find something for Easter Monday.
There used to be the Epping Hunt. This absurd burlesque of a hunt was the last survival of the right claimed by the citizens of London to hunt in the forests of Middlesex. On Easter Monday the “hunt” assembled; it consisted of many hundreds of gallant huntsmen mounted on animals of every description, including the common donkey; there were also hundreds of vehicles of every kind bringing people out to see the hunting of the stag. It was a real stag and a real hunt. That is to say, the stag was brought in a cart and turned out, the horsemen forming an avenue for him to run, while the hounds waited for him. There was a plunge, a shout; the stag broke through the horsemen and ran off into the cover of the forest, followed by the whole mob at full gallop; the hounds seem to have been for the most part behind the horses, which was certainly safer for them. The stag was not killed, but was captured and taken away in the cart that brought him. The Epping Hunt is no longer celebrated, nor is Epping Forest any longer one of the haunts of Easter Monday.