THE

DUBLIN REVIEW.

JULY, 1870.

ART. I.-PROTESTANT LONDON.

The Seven Curses of London. By JAMES GREENWOOD, the "Amateur Casual." London Stanley Rivers & Co.

R. GREENWOOD'S is a very valuable book, because he knows London intimately, without having lost by familiarity his sense of that utter horror which its social and moral condition must surely excite in any man when he first becomes acquainted with it. This value can hardly be exaggerated. Nothing is so necessary as to impress upon every well-meaning man and woman in England what the real state of English society is. We are living over a volcano. It is impossible to believe that such a state of things can be permanent. The lifeblood of our country is tainted by a deadly disease; how long it may retain possession without being fatal who can say. This is merely the natural view of the case. But the true view is not the natural but the supernatural; for, whatever things may appear, they really are, what they are in the eyes of God, and nothing else. The truly momentous question therefore is, whether His blessing will permanently rest upon a nation in which a social system, such as Mr. Greenwood exposes, is allowed to go on unchecked; and, whether the social and moral condition of London must not bring down judgment upon us, even if we were as yet unable to trace, upon merely natural principles, the danger which it involves.

Our author enters at once upon his subject. The first of the seven curses of London is its "neglected children," and the first words of his book (which begins without Preface or explanation) are these.

It is a startling fact, that in England and Wales alone at the present time, the number of children under the age of sixteen, dependent more or less upon the parochial authorities for maintenance, amounts to three hundred and fifty thousand.

It is scarcely less startling to learn that annually more than a hundred thousand criminals emerge from the doors of the various prisons, that, for short time or long time, have been their homes, and with no more substantial VOL. XV.-—NO. XXIX. [New Series.]

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advice than to take care that they don't make their appearance there again, are turned adrift once more to face the world, unkind as when they last stole from it. This does not include our immense army of juvenile vagrants. How the information has been arrived at is more than I can tell; but it is an accepted fact, that daily, winter and summer, within the limits of our vast and wealthy city of London, there wander, destitute of proper guardianship, food, clothing, or employment, a hundred thousand boys and girls in fair training for the treadmill and the oakum-shed, and finally for Portland and the convict's mark" (p. 1).

This sentence is a fair specimen of the author's style. It has no special literary force or beauty, nay, there is often a want of order which suggests a less practised writer than he is said to be. In this extract, for instance, the number of convicts among us is introduced in the midst of his statistical statement about the number of neglected children. But the facts he states are so momentous, and he himself is so evidently impressed, nay, carried away by their terrible importance, that none but a cold-blooded critic will find leisure, when reading them, to think of the author's style, or of anything else. One hundred thousand children in our streets under regular training for a life of misery and crime. Consider for a moment what it means. Laws and police, prisons and punishments, will always be necessary, because in every generation there are those who "take to evil courses." They fall before the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and if unrestrained, would prey upon society. There will always be too many of this class; but its numbers will vary according to circumstances, and according to the wisdom and care shown in the education of the rising generation and the government of that already grown up. But it is ever to be remembered, that it is in addition to this class, that we have, according to our author, no less than a hundred thousand children training up for no other way of life, no other profession. It is, as if, like conquerors of old dividing the spoil of a city, we should first set apart a hundred thousand children as the devil's own share, and then go on, to try our chance with him, for good or evil, with regard to the remainder. When we consider how frail infant life seems in our own wellguarded nurseries, it is a marvel how these infants, who run or crawl wild in our streets, like the unowned dogs of an eastern city, manage to live at all. No doubt, with regard to a vast number of them, the answer is, that they do not live, but die. The explanation of the mystery, with regard to a very large proportion of those who are actually reared, is to be found, we believe, in the natural kindness towards children even of the most degraded, especially among women. Mr. Greenwood will agree with us in this, for he says, with more force than grammar

Wonderful as it may seem, it is not in well-to-do quarters that the utterly

abandoned child finds protection, but in quarters that are decidedly the worst-to-do, and that, unfortunately, in every possible respect, than any within the city's limits. The tender consideration of poverty for its kind is a phase of humanity that might be studied both with instruction and profit by those who through their gold-rimmed spectacles regard deprivation from meat and clothes, and the other good things of this world, as involving a corresponding deficiency of virtue and generosity. They have grown so accustomed to associate cherubs with chubbiness, and chubbiness with high respectability and rich gravies, that they would, if such a thing were possible, scarcely be seen conversing with an angel of bony and vulgar type. Nevertheless, it is an undoubted fact, that for one child taken from the streets in the highly-respectable West-end, and privately housed and taken care of, there might be shown fifty who have found open door and lasting entertainment in the most poverty-stricken haunts of London. In haunts of vice too, in hideous localities inhabited solely by loose women and thieves. Bad as these people are, they will not deny a hungry child. It is curious the extent to which this lingering of nature's better part remains with these "bad women." Love for little children in these poor creatures seems unconquerable. As every one can attest, whose duty it has been to explore even the most notorious sinks of vice and criminality, it is quite common to meet with pretty little children, mere infants of three or four years old, who are the pets and toys of the inhabitants, especially of the women. The frequent answer to the inquiry, " Who does the child belong to ?" is, 66 Oh, he's anybody's child," which sometimes means that it is the offspring of one of the fraternity who has died or is now in prison, but more often, that he is "a stray," who is fed and harboured there simply because nobody owns him (p. 41).

We are glad to see the opinion we long ago formed on this subject, confirmed by one who knows our most degraded classes so well. However, he suggests another explanation.

They draw a considerable amount of their sustenance from the markets. And really it seems that by some miraculous dispensation of Providence, garbage was for their sakes robbed of its poisonous properties, and endowed with virtues such as wholesome food possesses. Did the reader ever see the young market-hunters at such a "feed," say in the month of August or September? It is a spectacle to be witnessed only by early risers, who can get as far as Covent Garden by the time that the wholesale dealing in the open falls slack, which will be about eight o'clock, and it is not to be believed unless it is seen. They will gather about a muck-heap, and gobble up plums, a sweltering mass of decay, and oranges and apples that have quite lost their original shape and colour, with the avidity of ducks and pigs. I speak according to my knowledge, for I have seen them at it. I have seen one of these gaunt, wolfish little children, with his tattered cap full of plums of a sort, one of which I would not have permitted a child of mine to eat for all the money in the Mint, and this at a season when the sanitary authorities, in their desperate alarm at the spread of cholera, had turned bill-stickers, and were begging and imploring the people to abstain from this, that, and the

other, and especially to beware of fruit, unless perfectly sound and ripe. Judging from the earnestness with which this last provision was urged, there must have been cholera enough to have slain a dozen strong men in that little ragamuffin's cap, and yet he munched on till that frowsy receptacle was emptied, finally licking his fingers with a relish. It was not for me forcibly to dispossess the boy of a prize which made him the envy of his plumless companions, but I spoke to the market beadle about it, asking him if it would not be possible, knowing the propensities of these poor little wretches, so to dispose of the poisonous offal that they could not get at it. But he replied, that it was nothing to do with him what they ate so long as they kept "their hands from picking and stealing." Furthermore, he politely intimated, that "unless I had nothing better to do," there was no call for me to trouble myself about the "little warmint" whom nothing would hurt. He confided to me his private belief that they "were made inside something after the orsestrech, and that farriers' nails would not come amiss to 'em, if only they could get 'em down." However. . . . that real danger is incurred by allowing [fruit offal] to be consumed as it is now, there cannot be a question. Perhaps it is too much to assume that the poor little beings whom hunger prompts to feed off garbage, do so with impunity. It is not improbable that in many cases they slink home to die in their holes, like poisoned rats. That they are never missed in the market is no proof of the contrary. Their identification is next to impossible, for they are as like each other as apples in a sieve, or peas in one pod. Moreover, to tell their number is out of the question. It is as incomprehensible as is their nature. They swarm as bees do, and arduous indeed would be the task of the individual who undertook to reckon up the small fry of a single alley of the hundreds that abound in Squalor's regions. They are of as small account in public estimation as stray street curs, and, like them, it is only when they evince a propensity for barking and biting that their existence is recognized. Should death, to-morrow morning, make a clean sweep of the unsightly little scavengers who grovel for a meal amongst the market heaps of offal, next day would see the said heaps just as industriously surrounded (p. 10).

We have indulged ourselves in this long extract as a fair specimen, both of the author's style and of the cordial sympathy which he feels and expresses for the classes who are too generally either wholly overlooked, or regarded merely as nuisances to be got rid of. This generous tone runs through his volume; when he is speaking of "professional thieves" and "fallen women as well as of "neglected children." To return to the children, however; it is impossible to exaggerate the sense of blank misery with which his picture fills us. That multitudes come to a premature death is really the most consolatory fact connected with them. The fault of the book is a defect of order and arrangement, which makes it doubly difficult to think of any remedy for the social condition he unveils, because, while you are thinking of one part of the subject, you find yourself unexpectedly in another. But this defect is small compared with its many merits. We must add, what is not a

defect so much as a testimony to the monstrous and complicated evils of the existing state of things, that he hardly anywhere suggests a remedy, and that the few suggestions of the sort which he does make are lamentably out of proportion to the evils he describes. As far as we remember, his only practical suggestions are, that the "rookeries," where so many of the lower classes of London poor are accumulated, should be pulled down, and that emigration on a large scale should be encouraged. Both excellent in their way, no doubt; but if both were fully carried out, one can hardly imagine that any perceptible diminution would be effected in the huge, sweltering mass of sin and misery.

We have touching descriptions of poverty. For instance, he visits a family of six, occupying, night and day, one small room, three children of which had been wholly and absolutely without clothes for three months, and "so hideously dirty that every rib bone in their poor, wasted bodies showed plain, and in colour like mahogany"; in another the baby had for a cradle a gooseberrysieve, "with a wisp of hay to lie on "; and when he entered, the elder boy was undergoing vigorous discipline for allowing the donkey to eat the "darlint clane out o' bed." These ludicrous scenes are really the only relief of the gloom which covers the whole.

The second chapter gives a miserable account of the "mothers " of these "neglected children." Mr. Greenwood believes that the evil originates, in great measure, because, in modern society, men who would formerly have been content to work for wages, must needs set up as masters, and "live by scheming the labour of others, that is, of little children-any one." "When their hands' cease to be children, these enterprising tradesmen no longer require their services, they are despatched to make room for a new batch of small toilers, eager to engage themselves on terms which the others have learned to despise, while these last unfortunates are cast adrift to win their bread-somehow." He adds that any one who posts himself, "between the hours of twelve and two, at the foot of London or Blackfriars Bridge," will see "the young girl of the slop-shop or the city 'warehouse,' hurrying homeward, on the chance of finding a meagre makeshift, something hot,' that may serve as a dinner."

Haggard, weary-eyed infants, who never could have been babies, little slips of things, whose heads are scarcely above the belt of the burly policeman, lounging out his hours of duty on the bridge, but who show a brow on which, in lines indelible, are scored the dreary account of the world's hard dealings with them. Painfully puckered mouths have these, and an air of such sad, sage experience, that one might fancy, not that these were young people, who would one day grow to be old women, but rather that, by some inversion of the natural order of things, they had once been old and were growing young again; that they had been seventy at least, but had doubled