The Uncommercial Traveller
by
Charles Dickens
Part 1 out of 8
Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER
CHAPTER I--HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS
Allow me to introduce myself--first negatively.
No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, no
waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round of
beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is
especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally
addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and
railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public
entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of
its brandy or sherry. When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually
rated at a low figure in the bill; when I come home from my
journeys, I never get any commission. I know nothing about prices,
and should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man
into ordering something he doesn't want. As a town traveller, I am
never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and
volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a
number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller,
I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by
a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station,
quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.
And yet--proceeding now, to introduce myself positively--I am both
a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the
road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human
Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy
goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and
there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London--now about the city
streets: now, about the country by-roads--seeing many little
things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I
think may interest others.
These are my chief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller.
CHAPTER II--THE SHIPWRECK
Never had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter
circumstances. Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another day
to live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that
morning.
So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright light
of the sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, that it
was hard to imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to come,
than it was that very day. The Tug-steamer lying a little off the
shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat
alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the
Lighter, the methodical figures at work, all slowly and regularly
heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea, all seemed as
much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself. The
tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours and a half;
there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards of my
feet: as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to
keep it from lying horizontally on the water, had slipped a little
from the land--and as I stood upon the beach and observed it
dimpling the light swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over
it.
So orderly, so quiet, so regular--the rising and falling of the
Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat--the turning of the
windlass--the coming in of the tide--that I myself seemed, to my
own thinking, anything but new to the spot. Yet, I had never seen
it in my life, a minute before, and had traversed two hundred miles
to get at it. That very morning I had come bowling down, and
struggling up, hill-country roads; looking back at snowy summits;
meeting courteous peasants well to do, driving fat pigs and cattle
to market: noting the neat and thrifty dwellings, with their
unusual quantity of clean white linen, drying on the bushes; having
windy weather suggested by every cotter's little rick, with its
thatch straw-ridged and extra straw-ridged into overlapping
compartments like the back of a rhinoceros. Had I not given a lift
of fourteen miles to the Coast-guardsman (kit and all), who was
coming to his spell of duty there, and had we not just now parted
company? So it was; but the journey seemed to glide down into the
placid sea, with other chafe and trouble, and for the moment
nothing was so calmly and monotonously real under the sunlight as
the gentle rising and falling of the water with its freight, the
regular turning of the windlass aboard the Lighter, and the slight
obstruction so very near my feet.
O reader, haply turning this page by the fireside at Home, and
hearing the night wind rumble in the chimney, that slight
obstruction was the uppermost fragment of the Wreck of the Royal
Charter, Australian trader and passenger ship, Homeward bound, that
struck here on the terrible morning of the twenty-sixth of this
October, broke into three parts, went down with her treasure of at
least five hundred human lives, and has never stirred since!
From which point, or from which, she drove ashore, stern foremost;
on which side, or on which, she passed the little Island in the
bay, for ages henceforth to be aground certain yards outside her;
these are rendered bootless questions by the darkness of that night
and the darkness of death. Here she went down.
Even as I stood on the beach with the words 'Here she went down!'
in my ears, a diver in his grotesque dress, dipped heavily over the
side of the boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to the bottom.
On the shore by the water's edge, was a rough tent, made of
fragments of wreck, where other divers and workmen sheltered
themselves, and where they had kept Christmas-day with rum and
roast beef, to the destruction of their frail chimney. Cast up
among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great spars of the
lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into
the strangest forms. The timber was already bleached and iron
rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the prevailing
air the whole scene wore, of having been exactly the same for years
and years.
Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the
nearest hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at
about daybreak by the wind that had begun to strip his roof off,
and getting upon a ladder with his nearest neighbour to construct
some temporary device for keeping his house over his head, saw from
the ladder's elevation as he looked down by chance towards the
shore, some dark troubled object close in with the land. And he
and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the sea
mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the
stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild
village hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had
given the alarm. And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the
waterfall, and down the gullies where the land drains off into the
ocean, the scattered quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part
of Wales had come running to the dismal sight--their clergyman
among them. And as they stood in the leaden morning, stricken with
pity, leaning hard against the wind, their breath and vision often
failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever forming
and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool which was a part
of the vessel's cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained upon
the land when the foam melted, they saw the ship's life-boat put
off from one of the heaps of wreck; and first, there were three men
in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there were but two; and
again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and there was but
one; and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that one, with
his arm struck through the broken planks and waving as if for the
help that could never reach him, went down into the deep.
It was the clergyman himself from whom I heard this, while I stood
on the shore, looking in his kind wholesome face as it turned to
the spot where the boat had been. The divers were down then, and
busy. They were 'lifting' to-day the gold found yesterday--some
five-and-twenty thousand pounds. Of three hundred and fifty
thousand pounds' worth of gold, three hundred thousand pounds'
worth, in round numbers, was at that time recovered. The great
bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily coming up. Some loss
of sovereigns there would be, of course; indeed, at first
sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and
wide over the beach, like sea-shells; but most other golden
treasure would be found. As it was brought up, it went aboard the
Tug-steamer, where good account was taken of it. So tremendous had
the force of the sea been when it broke the ship, that it had
beaten one great ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece
of her solid iron-work: in which, also, several loose sovereigns
that the ingot had swept in before it, had been found, as firmly
embedded as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced
there. It had been remarked of such bodies come ashore, too, as
had been seen by scientific men, that they had been stunned to
death, and not suffocated. Observation, both of the internal
change that had been wrought in them, and of their external
expression, showed death to have been thus merciful and easy. The
report was brought, while I was holding such discourse on the
beach, that no more bodies had come ashore since last night. It
began to be very doubtful whether many more would be thrown up,
until the north-east winds of the early spring set in. Moreover, a
great number of the passengers, and particularly the second-class
women-passengers, were known to have been in the middle of the ship
when she parted, and thus the collapsing wreck would have fallen
upon them after yawning open, and would keep them down. A diver
made known, even then, that he had come upon the body of a man, and
had sought to release it from a great superincumbent weight; but
that, finding he could not do so without mutilating the remains, he
had left it where it was.
It was the kind and wholesome face I have made mention of as being
then beside me, that I had purposed to myself to see, when I left
home for Wales. I had heard of that clergyman, as having buried
many scores of the shipwrecked people; of his having opened his
house and heart to their agonised friends; of his having used a
most sweet and patient diligence for weeks and weeks, in the
performance of the forlornest offices that Man can render to his
kind; of his having most tenderly and thoroughly devoted himself to
the dead, and to those who were sorrowing for the dead. I had said
to myself, 'In the Christmas season of the year, I should like to
see that man!' And he had swung the gate of his little garden in
coming out to meet me, not half an hour ago.
So cheerful of spirit and guiltless of affectation, as true
practical Christianity ever is! I read more of the New Testament
in the fresh frank face going up the village beside me, in five
minutes, than I have read in anathematising discourses (albeit put
to press with enormous flourishing of trumpets), in all my life. I
heard more of the Sacred Book in the cordial voice that had nothing
to say about its owner, than in all the would-be celestial pairs of
bellows that have ever blown conceit at me.
We climbed towards the little church, at a cheery pace, among the
loose stones, the deep mud, the wet coarse grass, the outlying
water, and other obstructions from which frost and snow had lately
thawed. It was a mistake (my friend was glad to tell me, on the
way) to suppose that the peasantry had shown any superstitious
avoidance of the drowned; on the whole, they had done very well,
and had assisted readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the
bringing of each body up to the church, but the way was steep, and
a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were
necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it
was not a great price. The people were none the richer for the
wreck, for it was the season of the herring-shoal--and who could
cast nets for fish, and find dead men and women in the draught?
He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard gate,
and opened the church door; and we went in.
It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to
believe that some church has occupied the spot, these thousand
years or more. The pulpit was gone, and other things usually
belonging to the church were gone, owing to its living congregation
having deserted it for the neighbouring school-room, and yielded it
up to the dead. The very Commandments had been shouldered out of
their places, in the bringing in of the dead; the black wooden
tables on which they were painted, were askew, and on the stone
pavement below them, and on the stone pavement all over the church,
were the marks and stains where the drowned had been laid down.
The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could yet see
how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and
where the feet. Some faded traces of the wreck of the Australian
ship may be discernible on the stone pavement of this little
church, hundreds of years hence, when the digging for gold in
Australia shall have long and long ceased out of the land.
Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay here at one time, awaiting
burial. Here, with weeping and wailing in every room of his house,
my companion worked alone for hours, solemnly surrounded by eyes
that could not see him, and by lips that could not speak to him,
patiently examining the tattered clothing, cutting off buttons,
hair, marks from linen, anything that might lead to subsequent
identification, studying faces, looking for a scar, a bent finger,
a crooked toe, comparing letters sent to him with the ruin about
him. 'My dearest brother had bright grey eyes and a pleasant
smile,' one sister wrote. O poor sister! well for you to be far
from here, and keep that as your last remembrance of him!
The ladies of the clergyman's family, his wife and two sisters-in-
law, came in among the bodies often. It grew to be the business of
their lives to do so. Any new arrival of a bereaved woman would
stimulate their pity to compare the description brought, with the
dread realities. Sometimes, they would go back able to say, 'I
have found him,' or, 'I think she lies there.' Perhaps, the
mourner, unable to bear the sight of all that lay in the church,
would be led in blindfold. Conducted to the spot with many
compassionate words, and encouraged to look, she would say, with a
piercing cry, 'This is my boy!' and drop insensible on the
insensible figure.
He soon observed that in some cases of women, the identification of
persons, though complete, was quite at variance with the marks upon
the linen; this led him to notice that even the marks upon the
linen were sometimes inconsistent with one another; and thus he
came to understand that they had dressed in great haste and
agitation, and that their clothes had become mixed together. The
identification of men by their dress, was rendered extremely
difficult, in consequence of a large proportion of them being
dressed alike--in clothes of one kind, that is to say, supplied by
slopsellers and outfitters, and not made by single garments but by
hundreds. Many of the men were bringing over parrots, and had
receipts upon them for the price of the birds; others had bills of
exchange in their pockets, or in belts. Some of these documents,
carefully unwrinkled and dried, were little less fresh in
appearance that day, than the present page will be under ordinary
circumstances, after having been opened three or four times.
In that lonely place, it had not been easy to obtain even such
common commodities in towns, as ordinary disinfectants. Pitch had
been burnt in the church, as the readiest thing at hand, and the
frying-pan in which it had bubbled over a brazier of coals was
still there, with its ashes. Hard by the Communion-Table, were
some boots that had been taken off the drowned and preserved--a
gold-digger's boot, cut down the leg for its removal--a trodden-
down man's ankle-boot with a buff cloth top--and others--soaked and
sandy, weedy and salt.
From the church, we passed out into the churchyard. Here, there
lay, at that time, one hundred and forty-five bodies, that had come
ashore from the wreck. He had buried them, when not identified, in
graves containing four each. He had numbered each body in a
register describing it, and had placed a corresponding number on
each coffin, and over each grave. Identified bodies he had buried
singly, in private graves, in another part of the church-yard.
Several bodies had been exhumed from the graves of four, as
relatives had come from a distance and seen his register; and, when
recognised, these have been reburied in private graves, so that the
mourners might erect separate headstones over the remains. In all
such cases he had performed the funeral service a second time, and
the ladies of his house had attended. There had been no offence in
the poor ashes when they were brought again to the light of day;
the beneficent Earth had already absorbed it. The drowned were
buried in their clothes. To supply the great sudden demand for
coffins, he had got all the neighbouring people handy at tools, to
work the livelong day, and Sunday likewise. The coffins were
neatly formed;--I had seen two, waiting for occupants, under the
lee of the ruined walls of a stone hut on the beach, within call of
the tent where the Christmas Feast was held. Similarly, one of the
graves for four was lying open and ready, here, in the churchyard.
So much of the scanty space was already devoted to the wrecked
people, that the villagers had begun to express uneasy doubts
whether they themselves could lie in their own ground, with their
forefathers and descendants, by-and-by. The churchyard being but a
step from the clergyman's dwelling-house, we crossed to the latter;
the white surplice was hanging up near the door ready to be put on
at any time, for a funeral service.
The cheerful earnestness of this good Christian minister was as
consolatory, as the circumstances out of which it shone were sad.
I never have seen anything more delightfully genuine than the calm
dismissal by himself and his household of all they had undergone,
as a simple duty that was quietly done and ended. In speaking of
it, they spoke of it with great compassion for the bereaved; but
laid no stress upon their own hard share in those weary weeks,
except as it had attached many people to them as friends, and
elicited many touching expressions of gratitude. This clergyman's
brother--himself the clergyman of two adjoining parishes, who had
buried thirty-four of the bodies in his own churchyard, and who had
done to them all that his brother had done as to the larger number-
-must be understood as included in the family. He was there, with
his neatly arranged papers, and made no more account of his trouble
than anybody else did. Down to yesterday's post outward, my
clergyman alone had written one thousand and seventy-five letters
to relatives and friends of the lost people. In the absence of
self-assertion, it was only through my now and then delicately
putting a question as the occasion arose, that I became informed of
these things. It was only when I had remarked again and again, in
the church, on the awful nature of the scene of death he had been
required so closely to familiarise himself with for the soothing of
the living, that he had casually said, without the least abatement
of his cheerfulness, 'indeed, it had rendered him unable for a time
to eat or drink more than a little coffee now and then, and a piece
of bread.'
In this noble modesty, in this beautiful simplicity, in this serene
avoidance of the least attempt to 'improve' an occasion which might
be supposed to have sunk of its own weight into my heart, I seemed
to have happily come, in a few steps, from the churchyard with its
open grave, which was the type of Death, to the Christian dwelling
side by side with it, which was the type of Resurrection. I never
shall think of the former, without the latter. The two will always
rest side by side in my memory. If I had lost any one dear to me
in this unfortunate ship, if I had made a voyage from Australia to
look at the grave in the churchyard, I should go away, thankful to
GOD that that house was so close to it, and that its shadow by day
and its domestic lights by night fell upon the earth in which its
Master had so tenderly laid my dear one's head.
The references that naturally arose out of our conversation, to the
descriptions sent down of shipwrecked persons, and to the gratitude
of relations and friends, made me very anxious to see some of those
letters. I was presently seated before a shipwreck of papers, all
bordered with black, and from them I made the following few
extracts.
A mother writes:
REVEREND SIR. Amongst the many who perished on your shore was
numbered my beloved son. I was only just recovering from a severe
illness, and this fearful affliction has caused a relapse, so that
I am unable at present to go to identify the remains of the loved
and lost. My darling son would have been sixteen on Christmas-day
next. He was a most amiable and obedient child, early taught the
way of salvation. We fondly hoped that as a British seaman he
might be an ornament to his profession, but, 'it is well;' I feel
assured my dear boy is now with the redeemed. Oh, he did not wish
to go this last voyage! On the fifteenth of October, I received a
letter from him from Melbourne, date August twelfth; he wrote in
high spirits, and in conclusion he says: 'Pray for a fair breeze,
dear mamma, and I'll not forget to whistle for it! and, God
permitting, I shall see you and all my little pets again. Good-
bye, dear mother--good-bye, dearest parents. Good-bye, dear
brother.' Oh, it was indeed an eternal farewell. I do not
apologise for thus writing you, for oh, my heart is so very
sorrowful.
A husband writes:
MY DEAR KIND SIR. Will you kindly inform me whether there are any
initials upon the ring and guard you have in possession, found, as
the Standard says, last Tuesday? Believe me, my dear sir, when I
say that I cannot express my deep gratitude in words sufficiently
for your kindness to me on that fearful and appalling day. Will
you tell me what I can do for you, and will you write me a
consoling letter to prevent my mind from going astray?
A widow writes:
Left in such a state as I am, my friends and I thought it best that
my dear husband should be buried where he lies, and, much as I
should have liked to have had it otherwise, I must submit. I feel,
from all I have heard of you, that you will see it done decently
and in order. Little does it signify to us, when the soul has
departed, where this poor body lies, but we who are left behind
would do all we can to show how we loved them. This is denied me,
but it is God's hand that afflicts us, and I try to submit. Some
day I may be able to visit the spot, and see where he lies, and
erect a simple stone to his memory. Oh! it will be long, long
before I forget that dreadful night! Is there such a thing in the
vicinity, or any shop in Bangor, to which I could send for a small
picture of Moelfra or Llanallgo church, a spot now sacred to me?
Another widow writes:
I have received your letter this morning, and do thank you most
kindly for the interest you have taken about my dear husband, as
well for the sentiments yours contains, evincing the spirit of a
Christian who can sympathise with those who, like myself, are
broken down with grief.
May God bless and sustain you, and all in connection with you, in
this great trial. Time may roll on and bear all its sons away, but
your name as a disinterested person will stand in history, and, as
successive years pass, many a widow will think of your noble
conduct, and the tears of gratitude flow down many a cheek, the
tribute of a thankful heart, when other things are forgotten for
ever.
A father writes:
I am at a loss to find words to sufficiently express my gratitude
to you for your kindness to my son Richard upon the melancholy
occasion of his visit to his dear brother's body, and also for your
ready attention in pronouncing our beautiful burial service over my
poor unfortunate son's remains. God grant that your prayers over
him may reach the Mercy Seat, and that his soul may be received
(through Christ's intercession) into heaven!
His dear mother begs me to convey to you her heartfelt thanks.
Those who were received at the clergyman's house, write thus, after
leaving it:
DEAR AND NEVER-TO-BE-FORGOTTEN FRIENDS. I arrived here yesterday
morning without accident, and am about to proceed to my home by
railway.
I am overpowered when I think of you and your hospitable home. No
words could speak language suited to my heart. I refrain. God
reward you with the same measure you have meted with!
I enumerate no names, but embrace you all.
MY BELOVED FRIENDS. This is the first day that I have been able to
leave my bedroom since I returned, which will explain the reason of
my not writing sooner.
If I could only have had my last melancholy hope realised in
recovering the body of my beloved and lamented son, I should have
returned home somewhat comforted, and I think I could then have
been comparatively resigned.
I fear now there is but little prospect, and I mourn as one without
hope.
The only consolation to my distressed mind is in having been so
feelingly allowed by you to leave the matter in your hands, by whom
I well know that everything will be done that can be, according to
arrangements made before I left the scene of the awful catastrophe,
both as to the identification of my dear son, and also his
interment.
I feel most anxious to hear whether anything fresh has transpired
since I left you; will you add another to the many deep obligations
I am under to you by writing to me? And should the body of my dear
and unfortunate son be identified, let me hear from you
immediately, and I will come again.
Words cannot express the gratitude I feel I owe to you all for your
benevolent aid, your kindness, and your sympathy.
MY DEARLY BELOVED FRIENDS. I arrived in safety at my house
yesterday, and a night's rest has restored and tranquillised me. I
must again repeat, that language has no words by which I can
express my sense of obligation to you. You are enshrined in my
heart of hearts.
I have seen him! and can now realise my misfortune more than I have
hitherto been able to do. Oh, the bitterness of the cup I drink!
But I bow submissive. God MUST have done right. I do not want to
feel less, but to acquiesce more simply.
There were some Jewish passengers on board the Royal Charter, and
the gratitude of the Jewish people is feelingly expressed in the
following letter bearing date from 'the office of the Chief Rabbi:'
REVEREND SIR. I cannot refrain from expressing to you my heartfelt
thanks on behalf of those of my flock whose relatives have
unfortunately been among those who perished at the late wreck of
the Royal Charter. You have, indeed, like Boaz, 'not left off your
kindness to the living and the dead.'
You have not alone acted kindly towards the living by receiving
them hospitably at your house, and energetically assisting them in
their mournful duty, but also towards the dead, by exerting
yourself to have our co-religionists buried in our ground, and
according to our rites. May our heavenly Father reward you for
your acts of humanity and true philanthropy!
The 'Old Hebrew congregation of Liverpool' thus express themselves
through their secretary:
REVEREND SIR. The wardens of this congregation have learned with
great pleasure that, in addition to those indefatigable exertions,
at the scene of the late disaster to the Royal Charter, which have
received universal recognition, you have very benevolently employed
your valuable efforts to assist such members of our faith as have
sought the bodies of lost friends to give them burial in our
consecrated grounds, with the observances and rites prescribed by
the ordinances of our religion.
The wardens desire me to take the earliest available opportunity to
offer to you, on behalf of our community, the expression of their
warm acknowledgments and grateful thanks, and their sincere wishes
for your continued welfare and prosperity.
A Jewish gentleman writes:
REVEREND AND DEAR SIR. I take the opportunity of thanking you
right earnestly for the promptness you displayed in answering my
note with full particulars concerning my much lamented brother, and
I also herein beg to express my sincere regard for the willingness
you displayed and for the facility you afforded for getting the
remains of my poor brother exhumed. It has been to us a most
sorrowful and painful event, but when we meet with such friends as
yourself, it in a measure, somehow or other, abates that mental
anguish, and makes the suffering so much easier to be borne.
Considering the circumstances connected with my poor brother's
fate, it does, indeed, appear a hard one. He had been away in all
seven years; he returned four years ago to see his family. He was
then engaged to a very amiable young lady. He had been very
successful abroad, and was now returning to fulfil his sacred vow;
he brought all his property with him in gold uninsured. We heard
from him when the ship stopped at Queenstown, when he was in the
highest of hope, and in a few short hours afterwards all was washed
away.
Mournful in the deepest degree, but too sacred for quotation here,
were the numerous references to those miniatures of women worn
round the necks of rough men (and found there after death), those
locks of hair, those scraps of letters, those many many slight
memorials of hidden tenderness. One man cast up by the sea bore
about him, printed on a perforated lace card, the following
singular (and unavailing) charm:
A BLESSING.
May the blessing of God await thee. May the sun of glory shine
around thy bed; and may the gates of plenty, honour, and happiness
be ever open to thee. May no sorrow distress thy days; may no
grief disturb thy nights. May the pillow of peace kiss thy cheek,
and the pleasures of imagination attend thy dreams; and when length
of years makes thee tired of earthly joys, and the curtain of death
gently closes around thy last sleep of human existence, may the
Angel of God attend thy bed, and take care that the expiring lamp
of life shall not receive one rude blast to hasten on its
extinction.
A sailor had these devices on his right arm. 'Our Saviour on the
Cross, the forehead of the Crucifix and the vesture stained red; on
the lower part of the arm, a man and woman; on one side of the
Cross, the appearance of a half moon, with a face; on the other
side, the sun; on the top of the Cross, the letters I.H.S.; on the
left arm, a man and woman dancing, with an effort to delineate the
female's dress; under which, initials.' Another seaman 'had, on
the lower part of the right arm, the device of a sailor and a
female; the man holding the Union Jack with a streamer, the folds
of which waved over her head, and the end of it was held in her
hand. On the upper part of the arm, a device of Our Lord on the
Cross, with stars surrounding the head of the Cross, and one large
star on the side in Indian Ink. On the left arm, a flag, a true
lover's knot, a face, and initials.' This tattooing was found
still plain, below the discoloured outer surface of a mutilated
arm, when such surface was carefully scraped away with a knife. It
is not improbable that the perpetuation of this marking custom
among seamen, may be referred back to their desire to be
identified, if drowned and flung ashore.
It was some time before I could sever myself from the many
interesting papers on the table, and then I broke bread and drank
wine with the kind family before I left them. As I brought the
Coast-guard down, so I took the Postman back, with his leathern
wallet, walking-stick, bugle, and terrier dog. Many a heart-broken
letter had he brought to the Rectory House within two months many;
a benignantly painstaking answer had he carried back.
As I rode along, I thought of the many people, inhabitants of this
mother country, who would make pilgrimages to the little churchyard
in the years to come; I thought of the many people in Australia,
who would have an interest in such a shipwreck, and would find
their way here when they visit the Old World; I thought of the
writers of all the wreck of letters I had left upon the table; and
I resolved to place this little record where it stands.
Convocations, Conferences, Diocesan Epistles, and the like, will do
a great deal for Religion, I dare say, and Heaven send they may!
but I doubt if they will ever do their Master's service half so
well, in all the time they last, as the Heavens have seen it done
in this bleak spot upon the rugged coast of Wales.
Had I lost the friend of my life, in the wreck of the Royal
Charter; had I lost my betrothed, the more than friend of my life;
had I lost my maiden daughter, had I lost my hopeful boy, had I
lost my little child; I would kiss the hands that worked so busily
and gently in the church, and say, 'None better could have touched
the form, though it had lain at home.' I could be sure of it, I
could be thankful for it: I could be content to leave the grave
near the house the good family pass in and out of every day,
undisturbed, in the little churchyard where so many are so
strangely brought together.
Without the name of the clergyman to whom--I hope, not without
carrying comfort to some heart at some time--I have referred, my
reference would be as nothing. He is the Reverend Stephen Roose
Hughes, of Llanallgo, near Moelfra, Anglesey. His brother is the
Reverend Hugh Robert Hughes, of Penrhos, Alligwy.
CHAPTER III--WAPPING WORKHOUSE
My day's no-business beckoning me to the East-end of London, I had
turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving
Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my
idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my
little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one
leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake, and had got past
Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen's Head (with an
ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy
countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient
neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life I
don't know when, and whose coaches are all gone I don't know where;
and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I had got
past Whitechapel Church, and was--rather inappropriately for an
Uncommercial Traveller--in the Commercial Road. Pleasantly
wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly
enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar
refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back
streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans
lumbering along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops
where hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that
I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how to
use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards
Wapping.
Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that I
was going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don't)
in the constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover,
to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same,
since she gave him the 'baccer-box marked with his name; I am
afraid he usually got the worst of those transactions, and was
frightfully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because an
Eastern police magistrate had said, through the morning papers,
that there was no classification at the Wapping workhouse for
women, and that it was a disgrace and a shame, and divers other
hard names, and because I wished to see how the fact really stood.
For, that Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men
of the East, may be inferred from their course of procedure
respecting the fancy-dressing and pantomime-posturing at St.
George's in that quarter: which is usually, to discuss the matter
at issue, in a state of mind betokening the weakest perplexity,
with all parties concerned and unconcerned, and, for a final
expedient, to consult the complainant as to what he thinks ought to
be done with the defendant, and take the defendant's opinion as to
what he would recommend to be done with himself.
Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost my
way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish
frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or
other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I
had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter,
I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks in
some dirty water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely in
the likeness of a young man, with a puffed sallow face, and a
figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the
youngest son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned man
about whom there was a placard on the granite post like a large
thimble, that stood between us.
I asked this apparition what it called the place? Unto which, it
replied, with a ghastly grin and a sound like gurgling water in its
throat:
'Mr. Baker's trap.'
As it is a point of great sensitiveness with me on such occasions
to be equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, I
deeply considered the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the
apparition--then engaged in hugging and sucking a horizontal iron
bar at the top of the locks. Inspiration suggested to me that Mr.
Baker was the acting coroner of that neighbourhood.
'A common place for suicide,' said I, looking down at the locks.
'Sue?' returned the ghost, with a stare. 'Yes! And Poll.
Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane;' he sucked the iron between
each name; 'and all the bileing. Ketches off their bonnets or
shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. Always a
headerin' down here, they is. Like one o'clock.'
'And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?'
'Ah!' said the apparition. 'THEY an't partickler. Two 'ull do for
THEM. Three. All times o' night. On'y mind you!' Here the
apparition rested his profile on the bar, and gurgled in a
sarcastic manner. 'There must be somebody comin'. They don't go a
headerin' down here, wen there an't no Bobby nor gen'ral Cove, fur
to hear the splash.'
According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a
General Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public. In which
modest character I remarked:
'They are often taken out, are they, and restored?'
'I dunno about restored,' said the apparition, who, for some occult
reason, very much objected to that word; 'they're carried into the
werkiss and put into a 'ot bath, and brought round. But I dunno
about restored,' said the apparition; 'blow THAT!'--and vanished.
As it had shown a desire to become offensive, I was not sorry to
find myself alone, especially as the 'werkiss' it had indicated
with a twist of its matted head, was close at hand. So I left Mr.
Baker's terrible trap (baited with a scum that was like the soapy
rinsing of sooty chimneys), and made bold to ring at the workhouse
gate, where I was wholly unexpected and quite unknown.
A very bright and nimble little matron, with a bunch of keys in her
hand, responded to my request to see the House. I began to doubt
whether the police magistrate was quite right in his facts, when I
noticed her quick, active little figure and her intelligent eyes.
The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first.
He was welcome to see everything. Such as it was, there it all
was.
This was the only preparation for our entering 'the Foul wards.'
They were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved
yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body of
the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously behind the
time--a mere series of garrets or lofts, with every inconvenient
and objectionable circumstance in their construction, and only
accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted
for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead.
A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a
change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage
of distress and disease. None but those who have attentively
observed such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of
expression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity
of colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up
and turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for
ever; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow,
looking passively upward from the pillow; the haggard mouth a
little dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and
indifferent, so light, and yet so heavy; these were on every
pallet; but when I stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a
word to the figure lying there, the ghost of the old character came
into the face, and made the Foul ward as various as the fair world.
No one appeared to care to live, but no one complained; all who
could speak, said that as much was done for them as could be done
there, that the attendance was kind and patient, that their
suffering was very heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The
wretched rooms were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such
rooms to be; they would become a pest-house in a single week, if
they were ill-kept.
I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, into
a better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile. There
was at least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former wards
had been like sides of school-boys' bird-cages. There was a strong
grating over the fire here, and, holding a kind of state on either
side of the hearth, separated by the breadth of this grating, were
two old ladies in a condition of feeble dignity, which was surely
the very last and lowest reduction of self-complacency to be found
in this wonderful humanity of ours. They were evidently jealous of
each other, and passed their whole time (as some people do, whose
fires are not grated) in mentally disparaging each other, and
contemptuously watching their neighbours. One of these parodies on
provincial gentlewomen was extremely talkative, and expressed a
strong desire to attend the service on Sundays, from which she
represented herself to have derived the greatest interest and
consolation when allowed that privilege. She gossiped so well, and
looked altogether so cheery and harmless, that I began to think
this a case for the Eastern magistrate, until I found that on the
last occasion of her attending chapel she had secreted a small
stick, and had caused some confusion in the responses by suddenly
producing it and belabouring the congregation.
So, these two old ladies, separated by the breadth of the grating--
otherwise they would fly at one another's caps--sat all day long,
suspecting one another, and contemplating a world of fits. For
everybody else in the room had fits, except the wards-woman; an
elderly, able-bodied pauperess, with a large upper lip, and an air
of repressing and saving her strength, as she stood with her hands
folded before her, and her eyes slowly rolling, biding her time for
catching or holding somebody. This civil personage (in whom I
regretted to identify a reduced member of my honourable friend Mrs.
Gamp's family) said, 'They has 'em continiwal, sir. They drops
without no more notice than if they was coach-horses dropped from
the moon, sir. And when one drops, another drops, and sometimes
there'll be as many as four or five on 'em at once, dear me, a
rolling and a tearin', bless you!--this young woman, now, has 'em
dreadful bad.'
She turned up this young woman's face with her hand as she said it.
This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in the
foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either in
her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy
and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst here.
When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her face
turned up, pondering, and a gleam of the mid-day sun shone in upon
her.
- Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely
troubled, as they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way,
ever get mental glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of
healthy people and healthy things? Whether this young woman,
brooding like this in the summer season, ever thinks that somewhere
there are trees and flowers, even mountains and the great sea?
Whether, not to go so far, this young woman ever has any dim
revelation of that young woman--that young woman who is not here
and never will come here; who is courted, and caressed, and loved,
and has a husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who
never knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon
her? And whether this young woman, God help her, gives herself up
then and drops like a coach-horse from the moon?
I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating
into so hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful
to me. It was something to be reminded that the weary world was
not all aweary, and was ever renewing itself; but, this young woman
was a child not long ago, and a child not long hence might be such
as she. Howbeit, the active step and eye of the vigilant matron
conducted me past the two provincial gentlewomen (whose dignity was
ruffled by the children), and into the adjacent nursery.
There were many babies here, and more than one handsome young
mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young
mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not
appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have
been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft
faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal. I had the pleasure
of giving a poetical commission to the baker's man to make a cake
with all despatch and toss it into the oven for one red-headed
young pauper and myself, and felt much the better for it. Without
that refreshment, I doubt if I should have been in a condition for
'the Refractories,' towards whom my quick little matron--for whose
adaptation to her office I had by this time conceived a genuine
respect--drew me next, and marshalled me the way that I was going.
The Refractories were picking oakum, in a small room giving on a
yard. They sat in line on a form, with their backs to a window;
before them, a table, and their work. The oldest Refractory was,
say twenty; youngest Refractory, say sixteen. I have never yet
ascertained in the course of my uncommercial travels, why a
Refractory habit should affect the tonsils and uvula; but, I have
always observed that Refractories of both sexes and every grade,
between a Ragged School and the Old Bailey, have one voice, in
which the tonsils and uvula gain a diseased ascendency.
'Five pound indeed! I hain't a going fur to pick five pound,' said
the Chief of the Refractories, keeping time to herself with her
head and chin. 'More than enough to pick what we picks now, in
sich a place as this, and on wot we gets here!'
(This was in acknowledgment of a delicate intimation that the
amount of work was likely to be increased. It certainly was not
heavy then, for one Refractory had already done her day's task--it
was barely two o'clock--and was sitting behind it, with a head
exactly matching it.)
'A pretty Ouse this is, matron, ain't it?' said Refractory Two,
'where a pleeseman's called in, if a gal says a word!'
'And wen you're sent to prison for nothink or less!' said the
Chief, tugging at her oakum as if it were the matron's hair. 'But
any place is better than this; that's one thing, and be thankful!'
A laugh of Refractories led by Oakum Head with folded arms--who
originated nothing, but who was in command of the skirmishers
outside the conversation.
'If any place is better than this,' said my brisk guide, in the
calmest manner, 'it is a pity you left a good place when you had
one.'
'Ho, no, I didn't, matron,' returned the Chief, with another pull
at her oakum, and a very expressive look at the enemy's forehead.
'Don't say that, matron, cos it's lies!'
Oakum Head brought up the skirmishers again, skirmished, and
retired.
'And _I_ warn't a going,' exclaimed Refractory Two, 'though I was
in one place for as long as four year--_I_ warn't a going fur to
stop in a place that warn't fit for me--there! And where the
family warn't 'spectable characters--there! And where I
fortunately or hunfort'nately, found that the people warn't what
they pretended to make theirselves out to be--there! And where it
wasn't their faults, by chalks, if I warn't made bad and ruinated--
Hah!'
During this speech, Oakum Head had again made a diversion with the
skirmishers, and had again withdrawn.
The Uncommercial Traveller ventured to remark that he supposed
Chief Refractory and Number One, to be the two young women who had
been taken before the magistrate?
'Yes!' said the Chief, 'we har! and the wonder is, that a pleeseman
an't 'ad in now, and we took off agen. You can't open your lips
here, without a pleeseman.'
Number Two laughed (very uvularly), and the skirmishers followed
suit.
'I'm sure I'd be thankful,' protested the Chief, looking sideways
at the Uncommercial, 'if I could be got into a place, or got
abroad. I'm sick and tired of this precious Ouse, I am, with
reason.'
So would be, and so was, Number Two. So would be, and so was,
Oakum Head. So would be, and so were, Skirmishers.
The Uncommercial took the liberty of hinting that he hardly thought
it probable that any lady or gentleman in want of a likely young
domestic of retiring manners, would be tempted into the engagement
of either of the two leading Refractories, on her own presentation
of herself as per sample.
'It ain't no good being nothink else here,' said the Chief.
The Uncommercial thought it might be worth trying.
'Oh no it ain't,' said the Chief.
'Not a bit of good,' said Number Two.
'And I'm sure I'd be very thankful to be got into a place, or got
abroad,' said the Chief.
'And so should I,' said Number Two. 'Truly thankful, I should.'
Oakum Head then rose, and announced as an entirely new idea, the
mention of which profound novelty might be naturally expected to
startle her unprepared hearers, that she would be very thankful to
be got into a place, or got abroad. And, as if she had then said,
'Chorus, ladies!' all the Skirmishers struck up to the same
purpose. We left them, thereupon, and began a long walk among the
women who were simply old and infirm; but whenever, in the course
of this same walk, I looked out of any high window that commanded
the yard, I saw Oakum Head and all the other Refractories looking
out at their low window for me, and never failing to catch me, the
moment I showed my head.
In ten minutes I had ceased to believe in such fables of a golden
time as youth, the prime of life, or a hale old age. In ten
minutes, all the lights of womankind seemed to have been blown out,
and nothing in that way to be left this vault to brag of, but the
flickering and expiring snuffs.
And what was very curious, was, that these dim old women had one
company notion which was the fashion of the place. Every old woman
who became aware of a visitor and was not in bed hobbled over a
form into her accustomed seat, and became one of a line of dim old
women confronting another line of dim old women across a narrow
table. There was no obligation whatever upon them to range
themselves in this way; it was their manner of 'receiving.' As a
rule, they made no attempt to talk to one another, or to look at
the visitor, or to look at anything, but sat silently working their
mouths, like a sort of poor old Cows. In some of these wards, it
was good to see a few green plants; in others, an isolated
Refractory acting as nurse, who did well enough in that capacity,
when separated from her compeers; every one of these wards, day
room, night room, or both combined, was scrupulously clean and
fresh. I have seen as many such places as most travellers in my
line, and I never saw one such, better kept.
Among the bedridden there was great patience, great reliance on the
books under the pillow, great faith in GOD. All cared for
sympathy, but none much cared to be encouraged with hope of
recovery; on the whole, I should say, it was considered rather a
distinction to have a complication of disorders, and to be in a
worse way than the rest. From some of the windows, the river could
be seen with all its life and movement; the day was bright, but I
came upon no one who was looking out.
In one large ward, sitting by the fire in arm-chairs of
distinction, like the President and Vice of the good company, were
two old women, upwards of ninety years of age. The younger of the
two, just turned ninety, was deaf, but not very, and could easily
be made to hear. In her early time she had nursed a child, who was
now another old woman, more infirm than herself, inhabiting the
very same chamber. She perfectly understood this when the matron
told it, and, with sundry nods and motions of her forefinger,
pointed out the woman in question. The elder of this pair, ninety-
three, seated before an illustrated newspaper (but not reading it),
was a bright-eyed old soul, really not deaf, wonderfully preserved,
and amazingly conversational. She had not long lost her husband,
and had been in that place little more than a year. At Boston, in
the State of Massachusetts, this poor creature would have been
individually addressed, would have been tended in her own room, and
would have had her life gently assimilated to a comfortable life
out of doors. Would that be much to do in England for a woman who
has kept herself out of a workhouse more than ninety rough long
years? When Britain first, at Heaven's command, arose, with a
great deal of allegorical confusion, from out the azure main, did
her guardian angels positively forbid it in the Charter which has
been so much besung?
The object of my journey was accomplished when the nimble matron
had no more to show me. As I shook hands with her at the gate, I
told her that I thought justice had not used her very well, and
that the wise men of the East were not infallible.
Now, I reasoned with myself, as I made my journey home again,
concerning those Foul wards. They ought not to exist; no person of
common decency and humanity can see them and doubt it. But what is
this Union to do? The necessary alteration would cost several
thousands of pounds; it has already to support three workhouses;
its inhabitants work hard for their bare lives, and are already
rated for the relief of the Poor to the utmost extent of reasonable
endurance. One poor parish in this very Union is rated to the
amount of FIVE AND SIXPENCE in the pound, at the very same time
when the rich parish of Saint George's, Hanover-square, is rated at
about SEVENPENCE in the pound, Paddington at about FOURPENCE, Saint
James's, Westminster, at about TENPENCE! It is only through the
equalisation of Poor Rates that what is left undone in this wise,
can be done. Much more is left undone, or is ill-done, than I have
space to suggest in these notes of a single uncommercial journey;
but, the wise men of the East, before they can reasonably hold
forth about it, must look to the North and South and West; let them
also, any morning before taking the seat of Solomon, look into the
shops and dwellings all around the Temple, and first ask themselves
'how much more can these poor people--many of whom keep themselves
with difficulty enough out of the workhouse--bear?'
I had yet other matter for reflection as I journeyed home, inasmuch
as, before I altogether departed from the neighbourhood of Mr.
Baker's trap, I had knocked at the gate of the workhouse of St.
George's-in-the-East, and had found it to be an establishment
highly creditable to those parts, and thoroughly well administered
by a most intelligent master. I remarked in it, an instance of the
collateral harm that obstinate vanity and folly can do. 'This was
the Hall where those old paupers, male and female, whom I had just
seen, met for the Church service, was it?'--'Yes.'--'Did they sing
the Psalms to any instrument?'--'They would like to, very much;
they would have an extraordinary interest in doing so.'--'And could
none be got?'--'Well, a piano could even have been got for nothing,
but these unfortunate dissensions--' Ah! better, far better, my
Christian friend in the beautiful garment, to have let the singing
boys alone, and left the multitude to sing for themselves! You
should know better than I, but I think I have read that they did
so, once upon a time, and that 'when they had sung an hymn,' Some
one (not in a beautiful garment) went up into the Mount of Olives.
It made my heart ache to think of this miserable trifling, in the
streets of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I
walked along, 'Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be done!'
So I decoyed myself into another train of thought to ease my heart.
But, I don't know that I did it, for I was so full of paupers, that
it was, after all, only a change to a single pauper, who took
possession of my remembrance instead of a thousand.
'I beg your pardon, sir,' he had said, in a confidential manner, on
another occasion, taking me aside; 'but I have seen better days.'
'I am very sorry to hear it.'
'Sir, I have a complaint to make against the master.'
'I have no power here, I assure you. And if I had--'
'But, allow me, sir, to mention it, as between yourself and a man
who has seen better days, sir. The master and myself are both
masons, sir, and I make him the sign continually; but, because I am
in this unfortunate position, sir, he won't give me the counter-
sign!'
CHAPTER IV--TWO VIEWS OF A CHEAP THEATRE
As I shut the door of my lodging behind me, and came out into the
streets at six on a drizzling Saturday evening in the last past
month of January, all that neighbourhood of Covent-garden looked
very desolate. It is so essentially a neighbourhood which has seen
better days, that bad weather affects it sooner than another place
which has not come down in the World. In its present reduced
condition it bears a thaw almost worse than any place I know. It
gets so dreadfully low-spirited when damp breaks forth. Those
wonderful houses about Drury-lane Theatre, which in the palmy days
of theatres were prosperous and long-settled places of business,
and which now change hands every week, but never change their
character of being divided and sub-divided on the ground floor into
mouldy dens of shops where an orange and half-a-dozen nuts, or a
pomatum-pot, one cake of fancy soap, and a cigar box, are offered
for sale and never sold, were most ruefully contemplated that
evening, by the statue of Shakespeare, with the rain-drops coursing
one another down its innocent nose. Those inscrutable pigeon-hole
offices, with nothing in them (not so much as an inkstand) but a
model of a theatre before the curtain, where, in the Italian Opera
season, tickets at reduced prices are kept on sale by nomadic
gentlemen in smeary hats too tall for them, whom one occasionally
seems to have seen on race-courses, not wholly unconnected with
strips of cloth of various colours and a rolling ball--those
Bedouin establishments, deserted by the tribe, and tenantless,
except when sheltering in one corner an irregular row of ginger-
beer bottles, which would have made one shudder on such a night,
but for its being plain that they had nothing in them, shrunk from
the shrill cries of the news-boys at their Exchange in the kennel
of Catherine-street, like guilty things upon a fearful summons. At
the pipe-shop in Great Russell-street, the Death's-head pipes were
like theatrical memento mori, admonishing beholders of the decline
of the playhouse as an Institution. I walked up Bow-street,
disposed to be angry with the shops there, that were letting out
theatrical secrets by exhibiting to work-a-day humanity the stuff
of which diadems and robes of kings are made. I noticed that some
shops which had once been in the dramatic line, and had struggled
out of it, were not getting on prosperously--like some actors I
have known, who took to business and failed to make it answer. In
a word, those streets looked so dull, and, considered as theatrical
streets, so broken and bankrupt, that the FOUND DEAD on the black
board at the police station might have announced the decease of the
Drama, and the pools of water outside the fire-engine maker's at
the corner of Long-acre might have been occasioned by his having
brought out the whole of his stock to play upon its last
smouldering ashes.
And yet, on such a night in so degenerate a time, the object of my
journey was theatrical. And yet within half an hour I was in an
immense theatre, capable of holding nearly five thousand people.
What Theatre? Her Majesty's? Far better. Royal Italian Opera?
Far better. Infinitely superior to the latter for hearing in;
infinitely superior to both, for seeing in. To every part of this
Theatre, spacious fire-proof ways of ingress and egress. For every
part of it, convenient places of refreshment and retiring rooms.
Everything to eat and drink carefully supervised as to quality, and
sold at an appointed price; respectable female attendants ready for
the commonest women in the audience; a general air of
consideration, decorum, and supervision, most commendable; an
unquestionably humanising influence in all the social arrangements
of the place.
Surely a dear Theatre, then? Because there were in London (not
very long ago) Theatres with entrance-prices up to half-a-guinea a
head, whose arrangements were not half so civilised. Surely,
therefore, a dear Theatre? Not very dear. A gallery at three-
pence, another gallery at fourpence, a pit at sixpence, boxes and
pit-stalls at a shilling, and a few private boxes at half-a-crown.
My uncommercial curiosity induced me to go into every nook of this
great place, and among every class of the audience assembled in it-
-amounting that evening, as I calculated, to about two thousand and
odd hundreds. Magnificently lighted by a firmament of sparkling
chandeliers, the building was ventilated to perfection. My sense
of smell, without being particularly delicate, has been so offended
in some of the commoner places of public resort, that I have often
been obliged to leave them when I have made an uncommercial journey
expressly to look on. The air of this Theatre was fresh, cool, and
wholesome. To help towards this end, very sensible precautions had
been used, ingeniously combining the experience of hospitals and
railway stations. Asphalt pavements substituted for wooden floors,
honest bare walls of glazed brick and tile--even at the back of the
boxes--for plaster and paper, no benches stuffed, and no carpeting
or baize used; a cool material with a light glazed surface, being
the covering of the seats.
These various contrivances are as well considered in the place in
question as if it were a Fever Hospital; the result is, that it is
sweet and healthful. It has been constructed from the ground to
the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every
corner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the
appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium--with every
face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably raked
and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in the
great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence--is
highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness. The
stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery, cellarage,
height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala at Milan, or
the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris, than any
notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia Theatre
at Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke's Hospital in the Old-street-
road, London. The Forty Thieves might be played here, and every
thief ride his real horse, and the disguised captain bring in his
oil jars on a train of real camels, and nobody be put out of the
way. This really extraordinary place is the achievement of one
man's enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient
old building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-and-
twenty thousand pounds. To dismiss this part of my subject, and
still to render to the proprietor the credit that is strictly his
due, I must add that his sense of the responsibility upon him to
make the best of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a
highly agreeable sign of these times.
As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently
show, were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the
night as one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking about
me at my neighbours. We were a motley assemblage of people, and we
had a good many boys and young men among us; we had also many girls
and young women. To represent, however, that we did not include a
very great number, and a very fair proportion of family groups,
would be to make a gross mis-statement. Such groups were to be
seen in all parts of the house; in the boxes and stalls
particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent
appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses
there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian
and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our
young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them,
slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our
pockets, and occasionally twisted our cravats about our necks like
eels, and occasionally tied them down our breasts like links of
sausages, and occasionally had a screw in our hair over each cheek-
bone with a slight Thief-flavour in it. Besides prowlers and
idlers, we were mechanics, dock-labourers, costermongers, petty
tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders,
slop-workers, poor workers in a hundred highways and byways. Many
of us--on the whole, the majority--were not at all clean, and not
at all choice in our lives or conversation. But we had all come
together in a place where our convenience was well consulted, and
where we were well looked after, to enjoy an evening's
entertainment in common. We were not going to lose any part of
what we had paid for through anybody's caprice, and as a community
we had a character to lose. So, we were closely attentive, and
kept excellent order; and let the man or boy who did otherwise
instantly get out from this place, or we would put him out with the
greatest expedition.
We began at half-past six with a pantomime--with a pantomime so
long, that before it was over I felt as if I had been travelling
for six weeks--going to India, say, by the Overland Mail. The
Spirit of Liberty was the principal personage in the Introduction,
and the Four Quarters of the World came out of the globe,
glittering, and discoursed with the Spirit, who sang charmingly.
We were delighted to understand that there was no liberty anywhere
but among ourselves, and we highly applauded the agreeable fact.
In an allegorical way, which did as well as any other way, we and
the Spirit of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and Pins, and
found them at war with a potentate who called in to his aid their
old arch enemy Rust, and who would have got the better of them if
the Spirit of Liberty had not in the nick of time transformed the
leaders into Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Harlequina,
and a whole family of Sprites, consisting of a remarkably stout
father and three spineless sons. We all knew what was coming when
the Spirit of Liberty addressed the king with a big face, and His
Majesty backed to the side-scenes and began untying himself behind,
with his big face all on one side. Our excitement at that crisis
was great, and our delight unbounded. After this era in our
existence, we went through all the incidents of a pantomime; it was
not by any means a savage pantomime, in the way of burning or
boiling people, or throwing them out of window, or cutting them up;
was often very droll; was always liberally got up, and cleverly
presented. I noticed that the people who kept the shops, and who
represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, and so forth, had
no conventionality in them, but were unusually like the real thing-
-from which I infer that you may take that audience in (if you wish
to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, Angels, or such like,
but they are not to be done as to anything in the streets. I
noticed, also, that when two young men, dressed in exact imitation
of the eel-and-sausage-cravated portion of the audience, were
chased by policemen, and, finding themselves in danger of being
caught, dropped so suddenly as to oblige the policemen to tumble
over them, there was great rejoicing among the caps--as though it
were a delicate reference to something they had heard of before.
The Pantomime was succeeded by a Melo-Drama. Throughout the
evening I was pleased to observe Virtue quite as triumphant as she
usually is out of doors, and indeed I thought rather more so. We
all agreed (for the time) that honesty was the best policy, and we
were as hard as iron upon Vice, and we wouldn't hear of Villainy
getting on in the world--no, not on any consideration whatever.
Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed.
Many of us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the
neighbouring public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us
had sandwiches and ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established
for us in the Theatre. The sandwich--as substantial as was
consistent with portability, and as cheap as possible--we hailed as
one of our greatest institutions. It forced its way among us at
all stages of the entertainment, and we were always delighted to
see it; its adaptability to the varying moods of our nature was
surprising; we could never weep so comfortably as when our tears
fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we
choked with sandwich; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so
deformed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what
would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever
Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped
stockings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back
upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to
bed.
This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night. Being Saturday
night, I had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey;
for, its object was to compare the play on Saturday evening with
the preaching in the same Theatre on Sunday evening.
Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly damp
and muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre. I drove up
to the entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have come on
foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I am happy
to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. Having
nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they looked at
me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty inducing me
to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark corner, they at
once forgot me, and applied themselves to their former occupation
of looking at the mud and looking in at the closed doors: which,
being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted passage within to be
seen. They were chiefly people of respectable appearance, odd and
impulsive as most crowds are, and making a joke of being there as
most crowds do.
In the dark corner I might have sat a long while, but that a very
obliging passer-by informed me that the Theatre was already full,
and that the people whom I saw in the street were all shut out for
want of room. After that, I lost no time in worming myself into
the building, and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box that had
been kept for me.
There must have been full four thousand people present. Carefully
estimating the pit alone, I could bring it out as holding little
less than fourteen hundred. Every part of the house was well
filled, and I had not found it easy to make my way along the back
of the boxes to where I sat. The chandeliers in the ceiling were
lighted; there was no light on the stage; the orchestra was empty.
The green curtain was down, and, packed pretty closely on chairs on
the small space of stage before it, were some thirty gentlemen, and
two or three ladies. In the centre of these, in a desk or pulpit
covered with red baize, was the presiding minister. The kind of
rostrum he occupied will be very well understood, if I liken it to
a boarded-up fireplace turned towards the audience, with a
gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove and leaning
forward over the mantelpiece.
A portion of Scripture was being read when I went in. It was
followed by a discourse, to which the congregation listened with
most exemplary attention and uninterrupted silence and decorum. My
own attention comprehended both the auditory and the speaker, and
shall turn to both in this recalling of the scene, exactly as it
did at the time.
'A very difficult thing,' I thought, when the discourse began, 'to
speak appropriately to so large an audience, and to speak with
tact. Without it, better not to speak at all. Infinitely better,
to read the New Testament well, and to let THAT speak. In this
congregation there is indubitably one pulse; but I doubt if any
power short of genius can touch it as one, and make it answer as
one.'
I could not possibly say to myself as the discourse proceeded, that
the minister was a good speaker. I could not possibly say to
myself that he expressed an understanding of the general mind and
character of his audience. There was a supposititious working-man
introduced into the homily, to make supposititious objections to
our Christian religion and be reasoned down, who was not only a
very disagreeable person, but remarkably unlike life--very much
more unlike it than anything I had seen in the pantomime. The
native independence of character this artisan was supposed to
possess, was represented by a suggestion of a dialect that I
certainly never heard in my uncommercial travels, and with a coarse
swing of voice and manner anything but agreeable to his feelings, I
should conceive, considered in the light of a portrait, and as far
away from the fact as a Chinese Tartar. There was a model pauper
introduced in like manner, who appeared to me to be the most
intolerably arrogant pauper ever relieved, and to show himself in
absolute want and dire necessity of a course of Stone Yard. For,
how did this pauper testify to his having received the gospel of
humility? A gentleman met him in the workhouse, and said (which I
myself really thought good-natured of him), 'Ah, John? I am sorry
to see you here. I am sorry to see you so poor.' 'Poor, sir!'
replied that man, drawing himself up, 'I am the son of a Prince!
MY father is the King of Kings. MY father is the Lord of Lords.
MY father is the ruler of all the Princes of the Earth!' &c. And
this was what all the preacher's fellow-sinners might come to, if
they would embrace this blessed book--which I must say it did some
violence to my own feelings of reverence, to see held out at arm's
length at frequent intervals and soundingly slapped, like a slow
lot at a sale. Now, could I help asking myself the question,
whether the mechanic before me, who must detect the preacher as
being wrong about the visible manner of himself and the like of
himself, and about such a noisy lip-server as that pauper, might
not, most unhappily for the usefulness of the occasion, doubt that
preacher's being right about things not visible to human senses?
Again. Is it necessary or advisable to address such an audience
continually as 'fellow-sinners'? Is it not enough to be fellow-
creatures, born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day, dying to-
morrow? By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by our
common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laughter and
our common tears, by our common aspiration to reach something
better than ourselves, by our common tendency to believe in
something good, and to invest whatever we love or whatever we lose
with some qualities that are superior to our own failings and
weaknesses as we know them in our own poor hearts--by these, Hear
me!--Surely, it is enough to be fellow-creatures. Surely, it
includes the other designation, and some touching meanings over and
above.
Again. There was a personage introduced into the discourse (not an
absolute novelty, to the best of my remembrance of my reading), who
had been personally known to the preacher, and had been quite a
Crichton in all the ways of philosophy, but had been an infidel.
Many a time had the preacher talked with him on that subject, and
many a time had he failed to convince that intelligent man. But he
fell ill, and died, and before he died he recorded his conversion--
in words which the preacher had taken down, my fellow-sinners, and
would read to you from this piece of paper. I must confess that to
me, as one of an uninstructed audience, they did not appear
particularly edifying. I thought their tone extremely selfish, and
I thought they had a spiritual vanity in them which was of the
before-mentioned refractory pauper's family.
All slangs and twangs are objectionable everywhere, but the slang
and twang of the conventicle--as bad in its way as that of the
House of Commons, and nothing worse can be said of it--should be
studiously avoided under such circumstances as I describe. The
avoidance was not complete on this occasion. Nor was it quite
agreeable to see the preacher addressing his pet 'points' to his
backers on the stage, as if appealing to those disciples to show
him up, and testify to the multitude that each of those points was
a clincher.
But, in respect of the large Christianity of his general tone; of
his renunciation of all priestly authority; of his earnest and
reiterated assurance to the people that the commonest among them
could work out their own salvation if they would, by simply,
lovingly, and dutifully following Our Saviour, and that they needed
the mediation of no erring man; in these particulars, this
gentleman deserved all praise. Nothing could be better than the
spirit, or the plain emphatic words of his discourse in these
respects. And it was a most significant and encouraging
circumstance that whenever he struck that chord, or whenever he
described anything which Christ himself had done, the array of
faces before him was very much more earnest, and very much more
expressive of emotion, than at any other time.
And now, I am brought to the fact, that the lowest part of the
audience of the previous night, WAS NOT THERE. There is no doubt
about it. There was no such thing in that building, that Sunday
evening. I have been told since, that the lowest part of the
audience of the Victoria Theatre has been attracted to its Sunday
services. I have been very glad to hear it, but on this occasion
of which I write, the lowest part of the usual audience of the
Britannia Theatre, decidedly and unquestionably stayed away. When
I first took my seat and looked at the house, my surprise at the
change in its occupants was as great as my disappointment. To the
most respectable class of the previous evening, was added a great
number of respectable strangers attracted by curiosity, and drafts
from the regular congregations of various chapels. It was
impossible to fail in identifying the character of these last, and
they were very numerous. I came out in a strong, slow tide of them
setting from the boxes. Indeed, while the discourse was in
progress, the respectable character of the auditory was so manifest
in their appearance, that when the minister addressed a
supposititious 'outcast,' one really felt a little impatient of it,
as a figure of speech not justified by anything the eye could
discover.
The time appointed for the conclusion of the proceedings was eight
o'clock. The address having lasted until full that time, and it
being the custom to conclude with a hymn, the preacher intimated in
a few sensible words that the clock had struck the hour, and that
those who desired to go before the hymn was sung, could go now,
without giving offence. No one stirred. The hymn was then sung,
in good time and tune and unison, and its effect was very striking.
A comprehensive benevolent prayer dismissed the throng, and in
seven or eight minutes there was nothing left in the Theatre but a
light cloud of dust.
That these Sunday meetings in Theatres are good things, I do not
doubt. Nor do I doubt that they will work lower and lower down in
the social scale, if those who preside over them will be very
careful on two heads: firstly, not to disparage the places in
which they speak, or the intelligence of their hearers; secondly,
not to set themselves in antagonism to the natural inborn desire of
the mass of mankind to recreate themselves and to be amused.
There is a third head, taking precedence of all others, to which my
remarks on the discourse I heard, have tended. In the New
Testament there is the most beautiful and affecting history
conceivable by man, and there are the terse models for all prayer
and for all preaching. As to the models, imitate them, Sunday
preachers--else why are they there, consider? As to the history,
tell it. Some people cannot read, some people will not read, many
people (this especially holds among the young and ignorant) find it
hard to pursue the verse-form in which the book is presented to
them, and imagine that those breaks imply gaps and want of
continuity. Help them over that first stumbling-block, by setting
forth the history in narrative, with no fear of exhausting it. You
will never preach so well, you will never move them so profoundly,
you will never send them away with half so much to think of. Which
is the better interest: Christ's choice of twelve poor men to help
in those merciful wonders among the poor and rejected; or the pious
bullying of a whole Union-full of paupers? What is your changed
philosopher to wretched me, peeping in at the door out of the mud
of the streets and of my life, when you have the widow's son to
tell me about, the ruler's daughter, the other figure at the door
when the brother of the two sisters was dead, and one of the two
ran to the mourner, crying, 'The Master is come and calleth for
thee'?--Let the preacher who will thoroughly forget himself and
remember no individuality but one, and no eloquence but one, stand
up before four thousand men and women at the Britannia Theatre any
Sunday night, recounting that narrative to them as fellow
creatures, and he shall see a sight!
CHAPTER V--POOR MERCANTILE JACK
Is the sweet little cherub who sits smiling aloft and keeps watch
on life of poor Jack, commissioned to take charge of Mercantile
Jack, as well as Jack of the national navy? If not, who is? What
is the cherub about, and what are we all about, when poor
Mercantile Jack is having his brains slowly knocked out by penny-
weights, aboard the brig Beelzebub, or the barque Bowie-knife--when
he looks his last at that infernal craft, with the first officer's
iron boot-heel in his remaining eye, or with his dying body towed
overboard in the ship's wake, while the cruel wounds in it do 'the
multitudinous seas incarnadine'?
Is it unreasonable to entertain a belief that if, aboard the brig
Beelzebub or the barque Bowie-knife, the first officer did half the
damage to cotton that he does to men, there would presently arise
from both sides of the Atlantic so vociferous an invocation of the
sweet little cherub who sits calculating aloft, keeping watch on
the markets that pay, that such vigilant cherub would, with a
winged sword, have that gallant officer's organ of destructiveness
out of his head in the space of a flash of lightning?
If it be unreasonable, then am I the most unreasonable of men, for
I believe it with all my soul.
This was my thought as I walked the dock-quays at Liverpool,
keeping watch on poor Mercantile Jack. Alas for me! I have long
outgrown the state of sweet little cherub; but there I was, and
there Mercantile Jack was, and very busy he was, and very cold he
was: the snow yet lying in the frozen furrows of the land, and the
north-east winds snipping off the tops of the little waves in the
Mersey, and rolling them into hailstones to pelt him with.
Mercantile Jack was hard at it, in the hard weather: as he mostly
is in all weathers, poor Jack. He was girded to ships' masts and
funnels of steamers, like a forester to a great oak, scraping and
painting; he was lying out on yards, furling sails that tried to
beat him off; he was dimly discernible up in a world of giant
cobwebs, reefing and splicing; he was faintly audible down in
holds, stowing and unshipping cargo; he was winding round and round
at capstans melodious, monotonous, and drunk; he was of a
diabolical aspect, with coaling for the Antipodes; he was washing
decks barefoot, with the breast of his red shirt open to the blast,
though it was sharper than the knife in his leathern girdle; he was
looking over bulwarks, all eyes and hair; he was standing by at the
shoot of the Cunard steamer, off to-morrow, as the stocks in trade
of several butchers, poulterers, and fishmongers, poured down into
the ice-house; he was coming aboard of other vessels, with his kit
in a tarpaulin bag, attended by plunderers to the very last moment
of his shore-going existence. As though his senses, when released
from the uproar of the elements, were under obligation to be
confused by other turmoil, there was a rattling of wheels, a
clattering of hoofs, a clashing of iron, a jolting of cotton and
hides and casks and timber, an incessant deafening disturbance on
the quays, that was the very madness of sound. And as, in the
midst of it, he stood swaying about, with his hair blown all manner
of wild ways, rather crazedly taking leave of his plunderers, all
the rigging in the docks was shrill in the wind, and every little
steamer coming and going across the Mersey was sharp in its blowing
off, and every buoy in the river bobbed spitefully up and down, as
if there were a general taunting chorus of 'Come along, Mercantile
Jack! Ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-used, hocussed, entrapped,
anticipated, cleaned out. Come along, Poor Mercantile Jack, and be
tempest-tossed till you are drowned!'
The uncommercial transaction which had brought me and Jack
together, was this:- I had entered the Liverpool police force, that
I might have a look at the various unlawful traps which are every
night set for Jack. As my term of service in that distinguished
corps was short, and as my personal bias in the capacity of one of
its members has ceased, no suspicion will attach to my evidence
that it is an admirable force. Besides that it is composed,
without favour, of the best men that can be picked, it is directed
by an unusual intelligence. Its organisation against Fires, I take
to be much better than the metropolitan system, and in all respects
it tempers its remarkable vigilance with a still more remarkable
discretion.
Jack had knocked off work in the docks some hours, and I had taken,
for purposes of identification, a photograph-likeness of a thief,
in the portrait-room at our head police office (on the whole, he
seemed rather complimented by the proceeding), and I had been on
police parade, and the small hand of the clock was moving on to
ten, when I took up my lantern to follow Mr. Superintendent to the
traps that were set for Jack. In Mr. Superintendent I saw, as
anybody might, a tall, well-looking, well-set-up man of a soldierly
bearing, with a cavalry air, a good chest, and a resolute but not
by any means ungentle face. He carried in his hand a plain black
walking-stick of hard wood; and whenever and wherever, at any
after-time of the night, he struck it on the pavement with a
ringing sound, it instantly produced a whistle out of the darkness,
and a policeman. To this remarkable stick, I refer an air of
mystery and magic which pervaded the whole of my perquisition among
the traps that were set for Jack.
We began by diving into the obscurest streets and lanes of the
port. Suddenly pausing in a flow of cheerful discourse, before a
dead wall, apparently some ten miles long, Mr. Superintendent
struck upon the ground, and the wall opened and shot out, with
military salute of hand to temple, two policemen--not in the least
surprised themselves, not in the least surprising Mr.
Superintendent.
'All right, Sharpeye?'
'All right, sir.'
'All right, Trampfoot?'
'All right, sir.'
'Is Quickear there?'
'Here am I, sir.'
'Come with us.'
'Yes, sir.'
So, Sharpeye went before, and Mr. Superintendent and I went next,
and Trampfoot and Quickear marched as rear-guard. Sharp-eye, I
soon had occasion to remark, had a skilful and quite professional
way of opening doors--touched latches delicately, as if they were
keys of musical instruments--opened every door he touched, as if he
were perfectly confident that there was stolen property behind it--
instantly insinuated himself, to prevent its being shut.
Sharpeye opened several doors of traps that were set for Jack, but
Jack did not happen to be in any of them. They were all such
miserable places that really, Jack, if I were you, I would give
them a wider berth. In every trap, somebody was sitting over a
fire, waiting for Jack. Now, it was a crouching old woman, like
the picture of the Norwood Gipsy in the old sixpenny dream-books;
now, it was a crimp of the male sex, in a checked shirt and without
a coat, reading a newspaper; now, it was a man crimp and a woman
crimp, who always introduced themselves as united in holy
matrimony; now, it was Jack's delight, his (un)lovely Nan; but they
were all waiting for Jack, and were all frightfully disappointed to
see us.
'Who have you got up-stairs here?' says Sharpeye, generally. (In
the Move-on tone.)
'Nobody, surr; sure not a blessed sowl!' (Irish feminine reply.)
'What do you mean by nobody? Didn't I hear a woman's step go up-
stairs when my hand was on the latch?'
'Ah! sure thin you're right, surr, I forgot her! 'Tis on'y Betsy
White, surr. Ah! you know Betsy, surr. Come down, Betsy darlin',
and say the gintlemin.'
Generally, Betsy looks over the banisters (the steep staircase is
in the room) with a forcible expression in her protesting face, of
an intention to compensate herself for the present trial by
grinding Jack finer than usual when he does come. Generally,
Sharpeye turns to Mr. Superintendent, and says, as if the subjects
of his remarks were wax-work:
'One of the worst, sir, this house is. This woman has been
indicted three times. This man's a regular bad one likewise. His
real name is Pegg. Gives himself out as Waterhouse.'
'Never had sitch a name as Pegg near me back, thin, since I was in
this house, bee the good Lard!' says the woman.
Generally, the man says nothing at all, but becomes exceedingly
round-shouldered, and pretends to read his paper with rapt
attention. Generally, Sharpeye directs our observation with a
look, to the prints and pictures that are invariably numerous on
the walls. Always, Trampfoot and Quickear are taking notice on the
doorstep. In default of Sharpeye being acquainted with the exact
individuality of any gentleman encountered, one of these two is
sure to proclaim from the outer air, like a gruff spectre, that
Jackson is not Jackson, but knows himself to be Fogle; or that
Canlon is Walker's brother, against whom there was not sufficient
evidence; or that the man who says he never was at sea since he was
a boy, came ashore from a voyage last Thursday, or sails tomorrow
morning. 'And that is a bad class of man, you see,' says Mr.
Superintendent, when he got out into the dark again, 'and very
difficult to deal with, who, when he has made this place too hot to
hold him, enters himself for a voyage as steward or cook, and is
out of knowledge for months, and then turns up again worse than
ever.'
When we had gone into many such houses, and had come out (always
leaving everybody relapsing into waiting for Jack), we started off
to a singing-house where Jack was expected to muster strong.
The vocalisation was taking place in a long low room up-stairs; at
one end, an orchestra of two performers, and a small platform;
across the room, a series of open pews for Jack, with an aisle down
the middle; at the other end a larger pew than the rest, entitled
SNUG, and reserved for mates and similar good company. About the
room, some amazing coffee-coloured pictures varnished an inch deep,
and some stuffed creatures in cases; dotted among the audience, in
Sung and out of Snug, the 'Professionals;' among them, the
celebrated comic favourite Mr. Banjo Bones, looking very hideous
with his blackened face and limp sugar-loaf hat; beside him,
sipping rum-and-water, Mrs. Banjo Bones, in her natural colours--a
little heightened.
It was a Friday night, and Friday night was considered not a good
night for Jack. At any rate, Jack did not show in very great force
even here, though the house was one to which he much resorts, and
where a good deal of money is taken. There was British Jack, a
little maudlin and sleepy, lolling over his empty glass, as if he
were trying to read his fortune at the bottom; there was Loafing
Jack of the Stars and Stripes, rather an unpromising customer, with
his long nose, lank cheek, high cheek-bones, and nothing soft about
him but his cabbage-leaf hat; there was Spanish Jack, with curls of
black hair, rings in his ears, and a knife not far from his hand,
if you got into trouble with him; there were Maltese Jack, and Jack
of Sweden, and Jack the Finn, looming through the smoke of their
pipes, and turning faces that looked as if they were carved out of
dark wood, towards the young lady dancing the hornpipe: who found
the platform so exceedingly small for it, that I had a nervous
expectation of seeing her, in the backward steps, disappear through
the window. Still, if all hands had been got together, they would
not have more than half-filled the room. Observe, however, said
Mr. Licensed Victualler, the host, that it was Friday night, and,
besides, it was getting on for twelve, and Jack had gone aboard. A
sharp and watchful man, Mr. Licensed Victualler, the host, with
tight lips and a complete edition of Cocker's arithmetic in each
eye. Attended to his business himself, he said. Always on the
spot. When he heard of talent, trusted nobody's account of it, but
went off by rail to see it. If true talent, engaged it. Pounds a
week for talent--four pound--five pound. Banjo Bones was undoubted
talent. Hear this instrument that was going to play--it was real
talent! In truth it was very good; a kind of piano-accordion,
played by a young girl of a delicate prettiness of face, figure,
and dress, that made the audience look coarser. She sang to the
instrument, too; first, a song about village bells, and how they
chimed; then a song about how I went to sea; winding up with an
imitation of the bagpipes, which Mercantile Jack seemed to
understand much the best. A good girl, said Mr. Licensed
Victualler. Kept herself select. Sat in Snug, not listening to
the blandishments of Mates. Lived with mother. Father dead. Once
a merchant well to do, but over-speculated himself. On delicate
inquiry as to salary paid for item of talent under consideration,
Mr. Victualler's pounds dropped suddenly to shillings--still it was
a very comfortable thing for a young person like that, you know;
she only went on six times a night, and was only required to be
there from six at night to twelve. What was more conclusive was,
Mr. Victualler's assurance that he 'never allowed any language, and
never suffered any disturbance.' Sharpeye confirmed the statement,
and the order that prevailed was the best proof of it that could
have been cited. So, I came to the conclusion that poor Mercantile
Jack might do (as I am afraid he does) much worse than trust
himself to Mr. Victualler, and pass his evenings here.
But we had not yet looked, Mr. Superintendent--said Trampfoot,
receiving us in the street again with military salute--for Dark
Jack. True, Trampfoot. Ring the wonderful stick, rub the
wonderful lantern, and cause the spirits of the stick and lantern
to convey us to the Darkies.
There was no disappointment in the matter of Dark Jack; HE was
producible. The Genii set us down in the little first floor of a
little public-house, and there, in a stiflingly close atmosphere,
were Dark Jack, and Dark Jack's delight, his WHITE unlovely Nan,
sitting against the wall all round the room. More than that: Dark
Jack's delight was the least unlovely Nan, both morally and
physically, that I saw that night.
As a fiddle and tambourine band were sitting among the company,
Quickear suggested why not strike up? 'Ah, la'ads!' said a negro
sitting by the door, 'gib the jebblem a darnse. Tak' yah pardlers,
jebblem, for 'um QUAD-rill.'
This was the landlord, in a Greek cap, and a dress half Greek and
half English. As master of the ceremonies, he called all the
figures, and occasionally addressed himself parenthetically--after
this manner. When he was very loud, I use capitals.
'Now den! Hoy! ONE. Right and left. (Put a steam on, gib 'um
powder.) LA-dies' chail. BAL-loon say. Lemonade! TWO. AD-
warnse and go back (gib 'ell a breakdown, shake it out o' yerselbs,
keep a movil). SWING-corners, BAL-loon say, and Lemonade! (Hoy!)
THREE. GENT come for'ard with a lady and go back, hoppersite come
for'ard and do what yer can. (Aeiohoy!) BAL-loon say, and leetle
lemonade. (Dat hair nigger by 'um fireplace 'hind a' time, shake
it out o' yerselbs, gib 'ell a breakdown.) Now den! Hoy! FOUR!
Lemonade. BAL-loon say, and swing. FOUR ladies meet in 'um
middle, FOUR gents goes round 'um ladies, FOUR gents passes out
under 'um ladies' arms, SWING--and Lemonade till 'a moosic can't
play no more! (Hoy, Hoy!)'
The male dancers were all blacks, and one was an unusually powerful
man of six feet three or four. The sound of their flat feet on the
floor was as unlike the sound of white feet as their faces were
unlike white faces. They toed and heeled, shuffled, double-
shuffled, double-double-shuffled, covered the buckle, and beat the
time out, rarely, dancing with a great show of teeth, and with a
childish good-humoured enjoyment that was very prepossessing. They
generally kept together, these poor fellows, said Mr.
Superintendent, because they were at a disadvantage singly, and
liable to slights in the neighbouring streets. But, if I were
Light Jack, I should be very slow to interfere oppressively with
Dark Jack, for, whenever I have had to do with him I have found him
a simple and a gentle fellow. Bearing this in mind, I asked his
friendly permission to leave him restoration of beer, in wishing
him good night, and thus it fell out that the last words I heard
him say as I blundered down the worn stairs, were, 'Jebblem's elth!
Ladies drinks fust!'
The night was now well on into the morning, but, for miles and
hours we explored a strange world, where nobody ever goes to bed,
but everybody is eternally sitting up, waiting for Jack. This
exploration was among a labyrinth of dismal courts and blind
alleys, called Entries, kept in wonderful order by the police, and
in much better order than by the corporation: the want of gaslight
in the most dangerous and infamous of these places being quite
unworthy of so spirited a town. I need describe but two or three
of the houses in which Jack was waited for as specimens of the
rest. Many we attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark that
we felt our way with our hands. Not one of the whole number we
visited, was without its show of prints and ornamental crockery;
the quantity of the latter set forth on little shelves and in
little cases, in otherwise wretched rooms, indicating that
Mercantile Jack must have an extraordinary fondness for crockery,
to necessitate so much of that bait in his traps.
Among such garniture, in one front parlour in the dead of the
night, four women were sitting by a fire. One of them had a male
child in her arms. On a stool among them was a swarthy youth with
a guitar, who had evidently stopped playing when our footsteps were
heard.
'Well I how do YOU do?' says Mr. Superintendent, looking about him.
'Pretty well, sir, and hope you gentlemen are going to treat us
ladies, now you have come to see us.'
'Order there!' says Sharpeye.
'None of that!' says Quickear.
Trampfoot, outside, is heard to confide to himself, 'Meggisson's
lot this is. And a bad 'un!'
'Well!' says Mr. Superintendent, laying his hand on the shoulder of
the swarthy youth, 'and who's this?'
'Antonio, sir.'
'And what does HE do here?'
'Come to give us a bit of music. No harm in that, I suppose?'
'A young foreign sailor?'
'Yes. He's a Spaniard. You're a Spaniard, ain't you, Antonio?'
'Me Spanish.'
'And he don't know a word you say, not he; not if you was to talk
to him till doomsday.' (Triumphantly, as if it redounded to the
credit of the house.)
'Will he play something?'
'Oh, yes, if you like. Play something, Antonio. YOU ain't ashamed
to play something; are you?'
The cracked guitar raises the feeblest ghost of a tune, and three
of the women keep time to it with their heads, and the fourth with
the child. If Antonio has brought any money in with him, I am
afraid he will never take it out, and it even strikes me that his
jacket and guitar may be in a bad way. But, the look of the young
man and the tinkling of the instrument so change the place in a
moment to a leaf out of Don Quixote, that I wonder where his mule
is stabled, until he leaves off.
I am bound to acknowledge (as it tends rather to my uncommercial
confusion), that I occasioned a difficulty in this establishment,
by having taken the child in my arms. For, on my offering to
restore it to a ferocious joker not unstimulated by rum, who
claimed to be its mother, that unnatural parent put her hands
behind her, and declined to accept it; backing into the fireplace,
and very shrilly declaring, regardless of remonstrance from her
friends, that she knowed it to be Law, that whoever took a child
from its mother of his own will, was bound to stick to it. The
uncommercial sense of being in a rather ridiculous position with
the poor little child beginning to be frightened, was relieved by
my worthy friend and fellow-constable, Trampfoot; who, laying hands
on the article as if it were a Bottle, passed it on to the nearest
woman, and bade her 'take hold of that.' As we came out the Bottle
was passed to the ferocious joker, and they all sat down as before,
including Antonio and the guitar. It was clear that there was no
such thing as a nightcap to this baby's head, and that even he
never went to bed, but was always kept up--and would grow up, kept
up--waiting for Jack.
Later still in the night, we came (by the court 'where the man was
murdered,' and by the other court across the street, into which his
body was dragged) to another parlour in another Entry, where
several people were sitting round a fire in just the same way. It
was a dirty and offensive place, with some ragged clothes drying in
it; but there was a high shelf over the entrance-door (to be out of
the reach of marauding hands, possibly) with two large white loaves
on it, and a great piece of Cheshire cheese.
'Well!' says Mr. Superintendent, with a comprehensive look all
round. 'How do YOU do?'
'Not much to boast of, sir.' From the curtseying woman of the
house. 'This is my good man, sir.'
'You are not registered as a common Lodging House?'
'No, sir.'
Sharpeye (in the Move-on tone) puts in the pertinent inquiry, 'Then
why ain't you?'
'Ain't got no one here, Mr. Sharpeye,' rejoin the woman and my good
man together, 'but our own family.'
'How many are you in family?'
The woman takes time to count, under pretence of coughing, and
adds, as one scant of breath, 'Seven, sir.'
But she has missed one, so Sharpeye, who knows all about it, says:
'Here's a young man here makes eight, who ain't of your family?'
'No, Mr. Sharpeye, he's a weekly lodger.'
'What does he do for a living?'
The young man here, takes the reply upon himself, and shortly
answers, 'Ain't got nothing to do.'
The young man here, is modestly brooding behind a damp apron
pendent from a clothes-line. As I glance at him I become--but I
don't know why--vaguely reminded of Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth,
and Dover. When we get out, my respected fellow-constable
Sharpeye, addressing Mr. Superintendent, says:
Back to Full Books
|