Fifty years ago, though that Act had been passed, the great mass of the people were still outside the government. They were governed by a class who desired, on the whole, to be just, and wished well to the people, provided their own interests were not disturbed, as when the most philanthropic manufacturers loudly cried out as soon as it was proposed to restrict the hours of labour. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the working classes should at that time regard all governments with hostility, and Religion and Laws as chiefly intended to repress the workers and to safeguard the interests of landlords and capitalists. This fact is abundantly clear from the literature which the working men of 1837 delighted to read.
As regards their religion, there was already an immense advance in the spread of the Nonconformist sects and the multiplication of chapels. As for the churches, I am very certain that the working man does not go much to church even yet, but fifty years ago he attended service still less often. A contemporary who pretends to know asserts that nine out of ten among the working men were professed infidels, whose favourite reading was Paine, Carlile, and Robert Taylor, the author of ‘The Devil’s Chaplain.’ Further, he declares that not one working man in a hundred ever opened a Bible.
I refrain from dwelling upon this state of things as compared with that of the present, but it appears from a census taken by a recent weekly newspaper (which, however, omitted the mission churches and services in school-rooms and other places) that about one person in nine now attends church or chapel on a Sunday.
As regards drink, a question almost as delicate as that of religion, it is reported that in London alone three millions of pounds were spent every year in gin, which seems a good deal of money to throw away with nothing to show for it. But figures are always misleading. Thus, if everybody drank his fair share of this three millions, there would be only a single glass of gin every other day for every person; and if half the people did not drink at all, there would be only one glass of gin a day for those who did. Still, we must admit that three millions is a sum which shows a widespread love of gin. As for rum, brandy, and Hollands, the various forms of malt liquor, fancy drinks, and compounds, let us reserve ourselves for the chapter on Taverns. Suffice it here to call attention to the fact that there was no blue ribbon worn. Teetotallers there were, it is true, but in very small numbers; they were not yet a power in the land; there was none of the everlasting dinning about the plague spot, the national vice, and the curse of the age, to which we are now accustomed. Honest men indulged in a bout without subsequent remorse, and so long as the drink was unadulterated they did themselves little harm. Without doubt, if the men had become teetotallers, there would have been very much more to spend in the homes, and the employers would, also without doubt, have made every effort to reduce the wages accordingly, so as to keep up the old poverty. That is what the former school of philosophers called a Law of Political Economy. The wages of a skilled mechanic fifty years ago seem to have never risen above thirty shillings a week, while food, clothes, and necessaries were certainly much dearer than at present. He had savings banks, and he sometimes put something by, but not nearly so much as he can do now if he is thrifty and in regular work. It is quite clear that he was less thrifty in those days than now, that he drank more, and that he was even more reckless, if that is possible, about marriage and the multiplication of children.
As for the material condition of the people, there cannot be a doubt that it has been amazingly improved within the last fifty years. It is not true, as stated in a very well known work, that the poor have become poorer, though the rich have certainly become richer. The skilled working man is better paid now than then, his work is more steady, his hours are shorter. He is better clad, with always a suit of clothes apart from his working dress; he is better taught; he is better mannered; he has holidays; he has clubs; he is no longer forbidden to combine; he can co-operate; he holds meetings; he has much better newspapers to read; his food is better and cheaper; he has model lodging houses. Not only is he actually better; he is relatively better compared with the richer classes, while for the last ten years these have been growing poorer every day, although still much richer than they were fifty years ago. Moreover, it is becoming more difficult in every line, owing to the upward pressure of labour, to become rich.
His amusements no longer have the same brutality which used to characterise them. The Ring was his chief delight, and a well-fought battle between two accomplished bruisers caused his heart to leap with joy. Unhappily the Ring fell, not because the national sentiment concerning pugilism changed, but by its own vices, and because nearly every fight was a fight on the cross; so that betting on your man was no longer possible, and every victory was arranged beforehand. There are now signs of its revival, and if it can be in any way regulated it will be a very good thing for the country. Then there was dog-fighting, which is still carried on in certain parts of the country. Only a few years ago I saw a dozen dog-fights, each with its ring of eager lookers-on, one Sunday morning upon the sands between Redcar and Saltburn. All round London, again, there were ponds, quantities of ponds, all marked in the maps of the period and now all filled up and built over. Some, for instance, were in the fields on the east side of Tottenham Court Road. Hither, on Sundays, came the London working man with ducks, cats, and dogs, and proceeded to enjoy himself with cat-hunts and duck-hunts in these ponds. There were also bull-and-bear-baitings and badger-drawings. As for the fairs, Bartholomew and Greenwich, one is sorry that they had to be abolished, but I suppose that London had long been too big for a fair, which may be crowded but must not be mobbed. A real old fair, with rows of stalls crammed with all kinds of things which looked ever so much prettier under the flaring lamps than in the shops, with Richardson’s Theatre, the Wild Beast Show, the wrestlers and the cudgel-players, the boxers, with or without the gloves, the dwarfs, giants, fat women, bearded women, and monsters, was a truly delightful thing to the rustics in the country; but in London it was incongruous, and even in Arcadia a modern fair is apt to lose its picturesque aspect towards nightfall. On the whole, it is just as well for London that it has lost its ancient fairs.
It is not in connection with working men, but with the whole people, that one speaks of prisons. I do not think that our prison system at the present day is every thing that it might be. There have been one or two books published of late years, which make one uncomfortable in thinking of the poor wretches immured in these abodes of solitary suffering. Still, if one has to choose between a lonely cell and the society of the prison birds by day and night, one would prefer the former. Some attempts had been made in Newgate and elsewhere to prevent the prisoners from corrupting each other, but with small success. Those who were tried and sentenced were separated from those who were waiting their trial; the boys were separated from the men, the girls from the women. Yet the results of being committed to prison, for however short a period, were destructive of all morals and the last shred of principle. Not a single girl or woman who went into prison modest and virtuous but became straightway ashamed of her modesty and virtue, and came out of the prison already an abandoned woman. Not a man or boy who associated with the prisoners for a week but became a past master in all kinds of wickedness. In the night rooms they used to lock up fifteen or twenty prisoners together, and leave them there all night to interchange their experiences—and what experiences! Only those who were under sentence of death had separate cells. These poor wretches were put into narrow and dark rooms, receiving light only from the court in which the criminals are permitted to walk during the day. They slept on a mat, and in former days had but twenty-four hours between sentence and execution, with bread and water for all their food.
Transportation still went on, with the horrors of the convict ship, the convict hulks, and the convict establishments of New South Wales and Tasmania. The ‘horrors’ of the system have always seemed to me as forming an unessential part of the system. With better management on modern ideas, transportation should be far better than the present system of hopeless punishment by long periods of imprisonment. We can never return to transportation as far as any colony is concerned, but I venture to prophesy that the next change of the penal laws will be the re-establishment of transportation with the prospect of release, a gift of land, and a better chance for an honest life.
Meantime the following lines belong to Fifty Years Ago. They are the Farewell of convicts about to sail for Botany Bay:
THE DARBY DAY.