East London

by Walter Besant

Dr. Barnardo’s Home, Stepney Causeway.

Those who have read Defoe’s “Colonel Jack” will remember the wonderful picture which he presents of the London street boy. That boy has never ceased to live in and about the streets. Sometimes he sleeps in the single room rented by his father, but the livelong day he spends in the streets; he picks up, literally, his food; he picks it up from the coster’s barrow, from the baker’s counter, from the fishmonger’s stall, when nobody is looking. For such boys as these there are Barnardo’s Homes, where waifs and strays to any number are admitted, brought up, trained to a trade, and then sent out to the colonies. Five thousand children are in these homes. The history is very simple. Dr. Barnardo, a young Irish medical student, came to London with the intention of giving up his own profession and becoming a preacher. He began by preaching in the streets; he picked up a child, wandering, homeless and destitute, and took it home to his lodgings; he found another and another, and took them home too. So it began; the children became too many for his own resources; they still kept dropping in; he took a house for them, and let it be known that he wanted support. The rest was easy. He has always received as much support as he wanted, and he has already trained and sent out to the colonies nearly ten thousand children. There are also many less important homes and associations for indigent children, homes for homeless boys, homes, refuges, and societies for girls; industrial homes, female protection societies, orphanages, in long array. Most of these societies are, however, limited as to income; a great part of their funds goes in management expenses. If they would be persuaded to unite, a great deal more might be done, while each society, with its honorary officers, could be carried on in accordance with the intentions and ideas of its founders and supporters.

Homes and schools for the boys and girls, hospitals for the adult, there remain the aged. Dotted about all over London there are about a hundred and fifty almshouses; of these about half are situated in and about East London. Not that the people of East London have been more philanthropic in their endowments than those of the west, but, before there was any city of East London, almshouses were planted here on account of the salubrity and freshness of the air and the cheapness of the ground. Some of these have been moved farther afield, their original sites being built over. The People’s Palace, for instance, is built upon the site of the Bancroft almshouses, founded in 1728 for the maintenance and education of one hundred poor. Their original house has gone, but the charity is still maintained.

I have always been astonished to think that this most excellent form of charity, one least of all liable to be abused, has gone out of fashion. If I were rich I should rejoice in creating and founding an almshouse for the admission and maintenance of as many old men and old women as I could afford, or as the college which I should build would admit. There are still some delightful almshouses left in London, although so many have been removed; those that remain stand beside the crowded thoroughfares, each one a lesson in charity and pity; there is the stately Trinity Almshouse in the Whitechapel road, with its two courts and its chapel and its statue of the founder and the good old men, the master mariners, who live there; and close beside, unless it has been lately removed, an almshouse of the humbler kind, but quite homely and venerable. My almshouse, if I were privileged to build and endow one, should have its refectory, as well as its chapel; my old people should have their dinner together, and their common hall for society in the winter evenings; they should have, as well, their gardens and their quadrangle and the sense of belonging to a foundation beautiful in its buildings, as well as charitable in its objects.

The existing almshouses by themselves go very little way toward keeping the aged out of the workhouse; but there are other aids which carry us on a little farther, societies which give annuities and pensions to various persons. On the list more than a hundred different trades are represented. Among them is one for flower girls and water-cress venders. This, however, despite its unpretending title, has grown into a very large and important society. Under this title are conducted industrial and servants’ training homes, a cottage hospital, a home for waif girls, an orphanage, a shelter and clubroom for street flower-sellers, and a seaside holiday home for blind and helpless and crippled girls, ineligible for ordinary homes—the whole with an income of over £7000, and giving assistance to 12,000 girls a year. This, like the association for befriending young servants, has grown gradually out of small beginnings, and in a space of thirty years has attained to its present dimensions.

So numerous are the societies and the charities of every kind that one thinks there ought not to be any distress, any destitution, any vice in this City of London. Alas! It is a city of five millions, and out of this multitude there are many who will not work, many who deliberately desire the life of vice and crime, and still more who, if the Helping Hand offers relief without question or condition, will swell the numbers of those who are wilfully helpless and deliberately destitute. The power of working is easily lost, and with difficulty regained. The administration of charitable funds is a most difficult task.

Fourteen years ago, in a time of exceptional distress, the Lord Mayor, in the kindness of his unreflecting heart, opened a subscription for the relief of the unemployed. A very large sum was collected in a few days. Of course this became known not only over all London, but over the whole country. Then there began a mighty migration; wave after wave of hungry applicants arrived by every train; the glorious prospect of obtaining a gift of money without doing anything for it attracted thousands; they gave up work in order to be eligible; they magnified the amount of the gift, in anticipation; when the day of distribution arrived they fought for admission, they threatened to brain the distributors, they took tickets which entitled them to food and sold them at the public house; in the end that act of charity developed and strengthened the pauper spirit in hundreds of thousands; those who had been working for the better exercise of charity were in despair; to this day the memory of that day of free gifts, without question and without conditions, lies in the mind of the working-man who will not work, and nerves him for another spell of idleness and starvation.

In this attempt to stay the hand that grants the unthinking dole the Charity Organization Society stands in the forefront. It has offices and branches everywhere; it intervenes between the rich man and the poor; it says to the former, “Never give him money, you will only keep him poor; make him understand that money means conditions of work and effort; do not turn the unemployed into a pauper.” To the workhouses the Charity Organization Society says, “Do not give outdoor relief; do not accustom the sturdy poor to look for doles of bread and orders on the butcher. Make them go into the house if they want help.” It is better to be cruel when kindness means weakness, and doles mean pauperizing. The temptation to give is like the temptation to take opiates. To give relieves the discomfort of knowing how others are suffering. To give brings food to the children, fire to the hearth; it also enables the breadwinner to spend in drink what he should take home to his wife, and it makes the wives and children accustomed to receive alms, and to look to alms for the supplies which are only deficient through their own improvidence and vice. The Charity Organization Society is known and detested by every thriftless loafer, every beggar, every impostor, every begging-letter writer in the country; it is also known and detested by that large class of sentimentalists who give money wherever there is none, who bribe the women by doles to come to church, and who interpret certain words of our Lord, as they were interpreted by the monastic houses, into an injunction to give without question and to relieve without condition.

I come next to a form of philanthropic endeavor concerning which it is difficult to speak unless in terms of extravagant admiration.