“—all amid the rigours of the year,
In the wild depth of winter, while without
The ceaseless winds blow ice.”——
Perhaps, sir, I give too much room to my feelings. My intention was but to inform you of a regretted change in a scene which you have noticed and admired in the Every-Day Book. Should you consider it worthy of further notice in the Table Book, you will oblige me by putting it forward in what form best pleases yourself.
I remain, &c.
So and So.
Sept. 19, 1827.
This communication, accompanied by the real name and address of its warmhearted writer, revived my recollections and kindled my feelings. I immediately wrote to a friend, who lives in the vicinage of Hagbush-lane, requesting him to hasten to the site of the old cottage, which was quite as well known to him as to me, and bring me a drawing of the place in its present state, with such particulars of the razing of the edifice as he could obtain. His account, as I collect it from verbal narration, corroborates that of my correspondent.
So complete has been the devastation, that a drawing of the spot whereon the cottage stood would merely be a view of the level earth. My friend walked over it, and along Hagbush-lane, till he came into the new road, (leading from the King’s Head at Holloway to the lower road from London to Kentish Town.) Immediately at the corner of the continuation of Hagbush-lane, which begins on the opposite side of the new road, he perceived a new hut, and near it the expelled occupant of the cottage, which had been laid waste in the other part of the lane. On asking the old man respecting the occasion and manner of his ejectment, he cried. It was a wet and dreary day; and the poor fellow in tears, and his hastily thrown up tenement, presented a cheerless and desolate scene. His story was short. On the Thursday, (mentioned in the letter,) so early as five in the morning, some men brought a ladder, a barrow, and a pickaxe, and ascending the ladder began to untile the roof, while the old man and his wife were in bed. He hastily rose; they demanded of him to unlock the door; on his refusing they burst it open with the pick-axe, and having thus forced an entrance compelled his wife to get up. They then wantonly threw out and broke the few household utensils, and hewed down the walls of the dwelling. In the little garden, they rooted up and destroyed every tree, shrub, and vegetable; and finally, they levelled all vestiges which could mark the place, as having been used or cultivated for the abode and sustenance of human beings. Some of the less destructible requisites of the cottage they trundled in the barrow up the lane, across the road, whither the old man and his wife followed, and were left with the few remnants of their miserable property by the housebreakers. On that spot they put together their present hut with a few old boards and canvass, as represented in the [engraving], and there they remain to tell the story of their unredressed wrongs to all who desire the particulars.
The old man represents the “ringleader,” as he calls him, in this last work of ruin, to be the foreman of a great cow-keeping landholder and speculator, to whose field-possessions the cottage on the waste was adjacent. Who employed this “ringleader” and his followers? Who was the instigating and protecting accessary before and after this brutal housebreaking, and wilful waste?
The helpless man got his living by selling small beer, and a little meat, cooked by his wife, to others as poor and helpless as themselves; and they eked out their existence by their garden produce. In the summer of 1825 I heard it said, that their cottage was the resort and drinking-place of idle and disorderly persons. I took some pains to ascertain the fact; but could never trace it beyond—the most dubitable authority—general report. It is quite true, that I saw persons there whom I preferred not to sit down with, because their manners and habits were different from my own; yet I not unfrequently took a cup of the old man’s beer among them, and silently watched them, and sometimes talked with them; and, for any thing that I could observe—and I know myself to be a close observer—they were quite as honourable and moral, as persons of more refined language and dress, who frequent respectable coffee-houses. I had been, too, withinside the cottage, which was a place of rude accommodation for no more than its settled occupants. It was on the outside that the poor couple entertained their customers, who usually sat on the turf seat against the foot-path side of the hut, or on an empty barrel or two, or a three-legged milking-stool. On the hedge side of the cottage was a small low lean-to, wherein the old man kept a pig to fatten. At the front end was an enclosure of a few feet of ground, with domestic fowls and their callow broods, which ran about cackling, and routing the earth for their living. In the rear of the cottage was a rod or two of ground banked off, and well planted with potatoes, cabbages, and other garden stuff, where I have often seen the old man fully employed in weeding and cultivating; digging up old, or preparing for new crops, or plashing and mending his little fences. Between his vegetables, and his live stock, and his few customers, he had enough to do; and I never saw him idle. I never saw him sitting down to drink with them; and if he had, there was nothing among them but the small beer. From the early part of the spring to the end of the year just mentioned, I have been past and loitered near the cottage at all hours of the day, from the early dawn, before even the sun, or the inmates had risen, till after they had gone to rest, and the moon was high, and the stars were in their courses. Never in the hours I spent around the place by day or night, did I see or hear any persons or practices that would be termed disorderly by any but the worst judges of human nature and morals—the underbred overpolite, and vulgarly overdressed. There I have seen a brickmaker or two with their wives and daughters sitting and regaling, as much at home, and as sober and innocent, as parties of French ladies and gentlemen at Chedron’s in Leicester-square; and from these people, if spoken to civilly, there was language as civil. There I have seen a comfortably dressed man, in a clean shirt, and a coat and hat as good as a Fleet-street tradesman’s, with a jug of small “entire” before him, leisurely at work on a pair of shoes, joining in the homely conversation, and in choruses of old English songs, raised by his compeers. There, too, I have heard a company of merry-hearted labourers and holiday-making journeymen, who had straggled away from their smithies and furnaces in the lanes of London, to breathe the fresh air, pealing out loud laughter, while the birds whistled over their heads from the slender branches of the green elms. In the old man I saw nothing but unremitting industry; and in his customers nothing but rude yet inoffensive good-nature. He was getting his bread by the sweat of his brow, and his brow was daily moistened by labour.
When I before related something of this poor man’s origin,[359] and his former endurances, I little suspected that I should have to tell that, after the parochial officers of Islington had declined to receive him into the poor-house, the parish would suffer him to be molested as a labourer on its waste. He has been hunted as a wild beast; and, perhaps, had he been a younger man, and with vindictive feelings, he might have turned round upon his enemies, and lawlessly avenged himself for the lawless injuries inflicted on him. Vagrancy is easily tempted to criminality, and the step is short.
It is scarcely three weeks since the old cottager was in a snug abode of his own handmaking, with a garden that had yielded support to him and his wife through the summer, and roots growing in it for their winter consumption. These have been mercilessly laid waste at the coming-in of the inclement season. Will no one further investigate the facts, and aid him in obtaining “indemnity for the past, and security for the future?”