Here is a small selection from the multitude of standout quotes to be found in the “Labour and the Poor” series.
Here on a door-step crouches some shoeless child, whose day’s begging has not brought it enough to purchase it even the twopenny bed that its young companions in beggary have gone to.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
The water is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
…as the man sat at his meals in his small shop, if he put his hand against the wall behind him, it would be covered with the soil of his neighbour’s privy, sopping through the wall. At the back of the house was an open sewer, and the privies were full to the seat.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
There will be a week’s food for the children of one; there will be clothes got out of pawn for another; till, in a few weeks, the alms will be exhausted—the subject, by all but a few, forgotten—and the same dreary monotony of starvation will again be their lot.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
…the quenching of the thirst and cooking of the food with water saturated with the very excrements of their fellow-creatures, should make Jacob’s Island notorious as the Jessore of England.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Weavers were all a-getting poorer, and masters all a-getting country houses. His master had been a-losing terrible, he said, and yet he’d just taken a country mansion. They only give you work just to oblige you, as an act of charity, and not to do themselves any good—oh, no!
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Any one who has ventured a visit to the last-named of these places in particular, will not wonder at the ravages of the pestilence in this malarious quarter, for it is bounded on the north and east by filth and fever, and on the south and west by want, squalor, rags, and pestilence.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
On entering the precincts of the pest island, the air has literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness comes over any one unaccustomed to imbibe the musty atmosphere.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Across some parts of the stream whole rooms have been built, so that house adjoins house; and here, with the very stench of death rising through the boards, human beings sleep night after night, until the last sleep of all comes upon them years before its time.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
…the rich know nothing of the poor—the mass of misery that festers beneath the affluence of London and of the great towns is not known to their wealthy occupants.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
What’s life to me? Labour—labour—labour—and for what? Why for less and less food every month. Ah, but the people can’t bear it much longer; flesh, and blood, and bones must rise against it before long.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
That’s cotton partly, you see, sir, just for the manufacturers to cheat the public, and get a cheap article, and have all the gold out of the poor working creatures they can, and don’t care nothing about them. But death, Billy—death gets all the gold out of them. They’re playing a deep game, but Death wins after all.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
It is consoling to moralize in our easy chairs, after a good dinner, and to assure ourselves that we should do differently. Self-denial is not very difficult when our stomachs are full and our backs are warm; but let us live a month of hunger and cold, and assuredly we should be as self-indulgent as they.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Respecting their clothing, fourteen had no shirts to their backs, five had no shoes, and forty-two had shoes that scarcely held together.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
The lodgers—male and female—men, women, boys, and girls—all lie huddled together on the floor; the average nightly muster being about thirty of the most miserable and infamous of human beings—a mass of poverty, filth, vice, and crime—an assemblage of all that is physically loathsome and morally odious—a chaos of want, intemperance, ignorance, disease, libidinism, rags, dirt, villany, and shamelessness, that can be paralleled in no other part of the globe but this, the first city of the world—the focus of wealth and intellect—the pinnacle of civilization and charity.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
There may be discovered whole families, houseless and penniless, huddled close together—children cradled as it were in vice and crime, cheek by jowl with the vilest prostitutes and the meanest thieves.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
I was unprepared for the amount of suffering that I have lately witnessed. I could not have believed that there were human beings toiling so long and gaining so little, and starving so silently and heroically, round about our very homes.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
If the people of England do not make some effort to remove from their commercial system this foul stain of grinding the workpeople to utter starvation, they deserve to suffer from such another visitation as that from which we have just been released.
Letter to the Editor – Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
I hadn’t a pinch of snuff for two days, until a friend gave us a bit out of his box. It came very acceptable, I can assure you; it quite revived me; that’s all I’m extravagant in.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
My husband’s been dead two years next January. I had some children, but they’re no trouble to me. They’re all dead, thank God. Yes, indeed, I’m thankful that they are dead.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
They’re some of ’em as big as good sized kittens. One of our men caught hold of one the other day by the tail, and he found it trying to release itself, and the tail slipping through his fingers; so he put up his left hand to stop it, and the rat caught hold of his finger, and the man’s got an arm now as big as his thigh.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Never in all history was such a sight seen or such tales heard. There, in the dim haze of the large bare room in which they met, sat women and girls, some with babies suckling at their breasts—others in rags—and even these borrowed, in order that they might come and tell their misery to the world.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Ah! it would make your heart ache if you was to go to Farringdon-market early, this cold weather, and see the poor little things there without shoes and stockings, and their feet quite blue with the cold—oh, that they are, and many on ’em don’t know how to set one foot before the t’other, poor things!
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
I do not envy the man who can read the simple but dreadful stories told in The Morning Chronicle, and lay the paper down without making some contribution for the sufferers who have been thus brought before his very eyes.
Letter to the Editor – Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
His face was as yellow as clay, and it had more the cold damp look of a corpse than that of a living man. His cheeks were hollowed in with evident want, his temples sunk, and his nostrils pinched close.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
The working tailor’s comfortable first-floor at the West-end is redolent with the perfume of the small bunch of violets that stand in a tumbler over the mantel-piece; the sweater’s wretched garret is rank with the stench of filth and herrings.
Labour and the Poor Vol. I – The Metropolitan Districts.
Once a fortnight I go over to Goulston-square, Whitechapel, and have a warm bath. This is one of the finest things that ever was invented for the working man.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Immediately a pause occurs in their work they fly to the public-house for beer. One coal-backer made a regular habit of drinking sixteen half-pints of beer, with a pennyworth of gin in each, before breakfast every morning.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Poor people, you know, sir, helps poor people, and but for the poor neighbours we might have been found dead some day.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
‘How much does it cost?’ he asked. I told him 1d. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d sooner have half a pint of beer. I haven’t washed my body for these 22 years, and don’t see why I should begin to have anything to do with these new-fangled notions at my time of life.’
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Coal-backing from the ship’s hold is the hardest work that it is possible for a man to do. Going up a ladder sixteen feet high, with 238 lbs. weight on a man’s back, is sufficient to kill any one; indeed, it does kill the men in a few years—they’re soon old men at that work;
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
When I first heerd of a coal-porter doing without beer I thought it a thing onpossible. I made sure they wouldn’t live long. It was part of my education to believe they couldn’t. My grandfather brewed home-brewed beer, and he used to say to me, ‘Drink, my lad, it’ll make thee strong.’
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Many threw away the drink they had to take from the publicans, it was so bad; they drank Thames water rather.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
To look down upon them from the main staircase, as I did, was to survey a very motley scene. There they were—the shirtless, the shoeless, the coatless, the unshaven, the uncouth, aye and the decent and respectable.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
The congregation at the Refuges for the Destitute is indeed a sort of ragged congress of nations—a convocation of squalor and misery—a synopsis of destitution, degradation, and suffering, to be seen perhaps nowhere else…
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
There is a world of wisdom to be learnt at the Asylums for the Houseless Poor. Those who wish to be taught in this, the severest school of all, should pay a visit to Playhouse-yard, and see the homeless crowds gathered about the Asylum, waiting for the first opening of the doors, with their bare feet—blue and ulcerous with the cold—resting for hours on the ice and snow in the streets, and the bleak stinging wind blowing through their rags. To hear the cries of the hungry, shivering children, and the wrangling of the greedy men, scrambling for a bed and a pound of dry bread, is a thing to haunt one for life.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
There are four hundred and odd creatures utterly destitute—mothers with infants at their breasts—fathers with boys holding by their side—the friendless—the penniless—the shirtless—shoeless—breadless—homeless; in a word, the very poorest of this the very richest city of the world.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
I have been twenty or thirty times in prison. I have been in for stealing bread, and a side of bacon, and cheese, and shovels, and other things, generally provisions. I generally learn something new in prison.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
I was in the crowd when Manning and his wife were hanged. I wanted to see if they died game, as I heard them talk so much about them at our house. I was there all night. I did four good handkerchiefs and a rotten one not worth picking up. I saw them hung. I was right under the drop.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
I didn’t pick my oakum one day, it was such hard stuff; 3½ lbs. of it to do from nine to half-past three, so I was put into solitary for three days and three nights, having half a pound of bread and a pint of cold water morning and night; nothing else, and no bed to sleep on.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
I told you I could read and write. I learned that partly at Oxford, and finished my learning at the Juvenile Establishment at Brentford. There I was taught reading, writing, sums, marking, sewing, and scrubbing.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
A ragged cloth jacket hung about him, and was tied, so as to keep it together, with bits of tape. What he had wrapped round for trowsers did not cover one of his legs, while one of his thighs was bare. He wore two odd shoes—one tied to his foot with an old ribbon, the other a woman’s old boot.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
There are, then, no less than 47,669 individuals of the lowest, the filthiest, and most demoralised classes, continually wandering through the country; in other words, there is a stream of vice and disease—a tide of iniquity and fever, continually flowing from town to town, from one end of the land to the other.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
The statement which follows—that of a prostitute, sleeping in the low lodging-houses, where boys and girls are all huddled promiscuously together, discloses a system of depravity, atrocity, and enormity, which certainly cannot be paralleled in any nation, however barbarous, nor in any age, however ‘dark.’
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Some had the regular features of lads born of parents in easy circumstances. The hair of most of the lads was cut very close to the head, showing their recent liberation from prison; indeed, one might tell by the comparative length of the crop, the time that each boy had been out of gaol.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Another lad, about 16, clad in a ragged coat, with a dirty face and matted hair, next came forward and said—My father was a soldier, and when I growed up to about ten years I joined the regiment as a drummer in the Grenadier Guards.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
They stated that they liked to go a ‘death-hunting,’ after seeing one or two executed. It hardened them to it, and at last they all got to thieve under the gallows. They felt rather shocked at the sight of an execution at first; but, after a few repetitions, it soon wore off.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
Every pair of feet that is born, certainly wants a pair of shoes; but unfortunately, as society is at present constituted, they cannot get them. The poor, you see, sir, increase at a greater rate than the rich.
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
We all live in this one room together—there are five of us, four sleep in one bed; that is the man and the wife and the two children, and I lie on the floor. If it wasn’t for them I must go to the workhouse;
Labour and the Poor Vol. II – The Metropolitan Districts.
To behold the metropolis without its smoke—with its thousand steeples standing out against the clear blue sky, sharp and definite in their outlines—is to see London as it is not—without its native element.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
It’s the march of hintellect wots a doing all this ere—it is sir.
Punch and Judy street performer, Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
I have made kites for carrying meat into the air to test the state of the atmosphere during the rage of the cholera.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
Our artificial eyes move so freely, and have so natural an appearance, that one gentleman passed nine doctors without his false eye being detected. There is one lady who has been married three years to her husband, and I believe he doesn’t know that she has a false eye to this day. The generality of persons take out their eyes when they go to bed, and sleep with them either under their pillow, or else in a tumbler of water beside their bed.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
The captain, under the directions of the owners, puts some prime stuff among the top casks, and all the rest is old condemned stores—rotten beef and pork, that’s positively green with putrefaction—and the biscuits are all weevilly; indeed they’re so full of maggots, that the sailors say they’re as rich as Welsh rabbits, when toasted.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
The captain, under the directions of the owners, puts some prime stuff among the top casks, and all the rest is old condemned stores—rotten beef and pork, that’s positively green with putrefaction—and the biscuits are all weevilly; indeed they’re so full of maggots, that the sailors say they’re as rich as Welsh rabbits, when toasted.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
I am 12, and have been three times in prison, once for stealing cigars, once for a piece of calico, and once for some pigs’ feet. I have been twice whipped.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
Pike and Porsini—Porsini was the first original street Punch, and Pike was his apprentice—their names is handed down to prosperity among the noblemen and footmen of the land.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
When I struck up the fust song my woice trembled so as I thought I should never be able to get to the hend of the fust hact. I soon, however, got over that there, and at present I’d play before the whole bench of bishops as cool as a cowcumber.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
People isn’t getting tired of our performances, but stingier—that’s it. Everybody looks at their money now afore they parts with it, and gennelfolks haggles and cheapens us down to shillings and sixpences, as if they was guineas in the holden time.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
Bond-street an’t no good now. Oxford-street, up by Old Cavendish-street, or Oxford-market, or Wells-street, are all favourite pitches for Punch. We don’t do much in the City. People has their heads all full of business there, and them as is greedy after the money an’t no friend of Punch’s.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
If I could swallow a tea-kettle now the people would hardly look at me. Sometimes—indeed a great many times—say twenty—I have brought up oysters out of my stomach after eating them, just as I swallowed them, on the end of the sword.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
At first I slept anywhere. Sometimes I passed the night in the Old Covent-garden Market; at others, in shutter-boxes; and at others, on door-steps near my father’s house. I lived at this time upon the refuse that I picked up in the streets—cabbage stumps out of the market, orange peel, and the like.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
I lost the use of this arm ever since I was three months old. My mother died when I was ten years old, and after that my father took up with an Irishwoman, and turned me and my youngest sister (she was two years younger than me) out into the streets.
Labour and the Poor Vol. III – The Metropolitan Districts.
I pay 12s. a pair for my shoes, and one of my sons tells me it’s foolish to do so, but the shoemaker has as good a right to a good week’s earnings as I have, and to encourage slop work is to help on our own trouble.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IV – The Metropolitan Districts.
She was quick, but told me she could neither read nor write. She couldn’t spare time to learn if she could be taught for nothing. She was eleven, and worked at the lining, and could work, she thought, as well as her mother. She had been thus working since she was six years old.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IV – The Metropolitan Districts.
And you see, the worst of it is this here—children’s labour is of such value now in our trade that there’s more brought into the business every year, so that it’s really for all the world like breeding slaves.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IV – The Metropolitan Districts.
Purify the air of Manchester by quenching its furnaces, and you simply stop the dinners of its inhabitants. The grim machine must either go on, or hundreds of thousands must starve.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
What species of labour is not irksome? Find that out, and nine-tenths of the human race will willingly bind themselves apprentices to acquire it.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
So intensely impure is the atmosphere over Manchester, that the rain water is unfit even for washing until it has stood for some time to purify and settle.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
A set of more animated dirty faces, and brighter twinkling eyes, you would find nowhere. The little fellows were tolerably ragged, to be sure—and some of them shoeless—but full of life, fun, and devilry.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
All the occupants of the room professed themselves unconscious of any smell whatever; but one of them having gone out for a moment, admitted on her return that the sewer was ‘rather bad to-day.’ It turned out that a drain, passing from some other part of the town, ran underneath the house, the stone flags were here and there broken, and through the slimy soil beneath, the fœtid gases rose bubbling up, in such strength as to render it physically impossible for me to draw breath in the apartment.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
Beds were huddled in every corner: some of them on frames—I cannot call them bedsteads—others on the floor. In one of these a man was lying dressed, and beside him slept a well-grown calf.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
The child seemed to be always asleep, and lay with its eyes half open. Its head got terribly big, and its fingernails blue. The mother took the child from the nurse and carried it to the doctor, who said it was poisoned.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
They would think the world couldn’t go on if they hadn’t flesh meat to dinner. But a great lot lived poor in that town. A great lot, too, were fond of fine clothes, particularly the young women, and they would have their backs gay although their bellies pinched for it.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
They were busy sometimes, but they were poor always. Twenty years ago the people lived better than now. They had plenty of substantial food, but at present, where one got it a dozen missed it.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
It looks as if it had been a likely trout stream long ago, but the gudgeon is now the only tenant of its waters. Verily the gudgeon must be a long-enduring fish—patient of foul things—an ichthyologic Job.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
The vilest filth lying unswept and seemingly unheeded—the most noxious stenches filling the air—the grimy houses and ordure-covered stones swarming with a foul, a lazy, and—worse than both—a seemingly contented population.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
There were here three little savages of children—their hair, tangled in filth-clotted masses, hanging over their grimy faces. Their clothes were mere bunches of rags, kept together by strings. A wriggle of their shoulders, and they would be free from all such incumbrances in a moment.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
Well, when I’ve had my coffee—it used to be porridge, but we’ve got more genteel now—I warrant you I’ve a good wash—a wash all over. There’s always warm water ready, and soap. Cold won’t bring the muck off, and besides, warm’s comfortabler like—I get to bed. ‘Too tired to wash, and go to bed without it?’ Bless you, sir, ask the mistress if she would let me do that. No, no. She has over-much respect for the sheets. Pretty sheets they would be if colliers got into them without washing.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
Not till they’re ten years old! Ah, sir, they’re in the pits long, long before that.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
In 1832 she had lost her first husband by cholera. Last autumn she had lost her second by the same disease. It raged awfully all around, and many of the people fled and left their friends dying and dead.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
The police and the gentlemen from Wolverhampton smashed in the windows and broke holes in the wall to let in light and air. One man came crying into her house for the loan of a hammer to knock some of the bricks out of the wall of the back room where his wife was lying ill. He got the hammer, and while he was breaking a hole to give his wife fresh air, she died.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
In one of the cottages in the neighbouring row, out of a family of eight, a father, mother, and six children, all except one child, were swept away. I proceeded to this house, and found it tenanted by two Irish families, consisting of thirteen or fourteen persons.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
There are hundreds of families who habitually pawn their Sunday clothes every Monday morning, and take them out every Saturday evening, paying, of course, a month’s interest upon the loan.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
…with the low and crowded, wards of Nottingham. In Park-ward the mean age at death is 37. In a district close to it, composed of courts and back-to-back houses, the mean age at death is less than 18.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
The eldest (a pale little girl of seven years old) helped her with the stitching. Last week, the poor little creature had earned 1s. 6d. This child had been stitching since she was four years of age.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
The mean duration of life in England is 29.11 years.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
There is a small library connected with the mill, but the superintendent complains that the girls will read hardly anything save the trash of penny romances.
Labour and the Poor Vol. V – The Manufacturing Districts.
As you look at the crazy fabric, you marvel how it stands. It is so twisted and distorted, that it seems as if it never had been strong and compact, and as if, from the very first, it had been erected, not as a human abode, but as a humble monument to dilapidation. But let us enter.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
And such a room! The small window in the roof admits just light enough to enable you to discern its character and dimensions. The rafters, which are all exposed, spring from the very floor, so that it is only in the very centre of the apartment that you have any chance of standing erect. The thatch oozes through the wood work which supports it, the whole being begrimed with smoke and dust, and replete with vermin.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
It not unfrequently happens that the clothes worn by the parents in the day time form the chief part of the covering of the children by night.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
It would almost seem as if, in these and other places which might be named, filth was regarded as a distinct department of industry, in which men were emulous to excel.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
Both the slave and the horse are fed even when circumstances compel them to be idle. But a heavy rain on a summer afternoon frequently consigns an English labourer and his family to want for the day.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
Having deposited the straw in the stye, and spread it into a comfortable litter for the pig, which she scratched for some time on the back—addressing it, at the same time, in a language which it seemed to understand, but which I didn’t—she turned round, leant again upon the fork, and waited to be interrogated.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
The poor child was bare about the neck and shoulders, which were crimsoned all over from the flagellation which it had received. It had on its feet shoes that might have fitted the mother, but it had no stockings, and its little legs were bare up to the knees, if such a term can be used of legs literally encrusted with filth. It is a positive fact that they were so covered with dirt that you could not, from the ankle to the knee, discover the colour of the skin. Nor was this the filth of a day. The incrustation was the growth of weeks. It was as we saw it that the poor child lay down at night and arose in the morning.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
The house was much infested with rats, which increased in numbers, despite all the cats, traps, and other appliances for rat killing in the neighbourhood. Different members of the family had been aroused from their slumbers by being bitten by them.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
Some of the best workmen of this parish, sir, went off to America, and they are doing so yet, and will be ready, in case of a war, to come agin us.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
To do justice to the filthy aggregate of human dwellings passing under that name, is scarcely possible. There are hardly half a dozen houses in it fit to be inhabited, and yet almost every hovel swarms with more than its proper complement of inmates.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
Upon his next visit the mother had expired, the daughter had become a mother, and, huddled together in the upper room, lay the corpse, the living mother and her child, seven other children, and the husband, who had been for some time out of work.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
The eldest boy, twelve years old, appeared, as he walked, more like a moving heap of rags and tatters than anything bearing the semblance of a human being. How his rags were kept on was a mystery which I believe none could solve, and if they had been taken off, it would have been impossible for the owner to have put them on again.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
Three heaps of shreds, more filthy, if possible, than those upon the backs of the wretched children, and more loathsome from the vermin which they harboured, showed the spots where each group of this miserable family sought in sleep the short-lived bliss of unconsciousness of misery. The fetid smell of the room was overpowering.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
Some rain had fallen on the night previous to my visit, and the contents of this open cesspool, oozing through the walls, were streaming sluggishly down the path to the house. A part of this filthy fluid was absorbed by the ground, but some parts of it not unfrequently found their way into the house, the floor of which, as if to invite its entrance, was nearly a foot lower than the ground outside.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
The old man continued for some time to denounce the acts of his employer in a state of the greatest excitement, which he displayed by gnashing his gums—for there were no teeth in his head—clenching his fist, and shaking his head as he muttered indistinctly his imprecations on the person whom he considered had wronged him.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VI – The Rural Districts.
The diet of the labourers in this part of Hampshire is as low as their scale of wages would lead one to expect. Its staple consists of bread, cabbage, and turnips.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
From the age of three years many of them are sent to the straw-plait school, where they are taught to plait; but in very few of them is there anything else taught. Probably, the worst feature in connection with this kind of work is, that it affords employment to children so young. As soon as they are able to earn a few pence during the week by their exertions, they are almost certain to be kept constantly to it, and no opportunity is afforded for giving any education to the children.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
The largest number of persons occupying one of these tenements is eight—a man, his wife, and six children, the eldest child aged 16, the youngest an infant. There is no bed in the house, the whole family sleeping on two heaps of straw, confined in two corners of the room by stakes driven into the ground.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
Myriads of animated existences luxuriated in the dirt and filth of the wretched bed and its occupant.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
The exhilirating effects of her last dose had passed off, and had given place to that wretched lowness of spirit in which the life of an opium eater alternates.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
Within a few feet from this was the well containing the liquid which the people drank, its component parts being made up of the overflow of the privy, the refuse from the pigstye, the contents of a ditch into which the slops from the houses were thrown, and the spring of the well itself. The water presented a dull and turbid-looking appearance, and its smell was most offensive.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
Perhaps there is no sense which in the labourer appears more completely obliterated than that of smell. The effluvia from the dung heap, the drain, or the adjoining privy, or the closeness of the room, appear to give them no concern; they will sit, together with their families, unmolested by a stench which, in many cases, has compelled me either to apply my handkerchief to my nose, or hastily to retreat to the door for fresh air.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
Indeed there is very little spirits drunk in these parts, for the opium appears to have almost entirely superseded it, and so deeply has the practice taken root among the people that the drug has come to be considered by them almost as an article of necessity.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
Confirmed opium-eaters may be distinguished with the greatest ease, by the cadaverous and unhealthy appearance of their complexions, the filthiness and slovenliness of their persons and attire, their total disregard of everything appertaining to decency in their habits, and the dirty and disgusting character of their dwellings.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
Sack stealing, also, is another custom of which the farmers complain sadly. Several, who have spoken to me, have stated that they lose every year from forty to fifty sacks. These articles, it appears, are almost universally taken by the labourers, either for the purpose of coverings for their beds, or for nailing up, to keep the wind out of their cottages.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
The Morning Chronicle and other daily newspapers are circulated in the house; and the letters which have appeared in The Morning Chronicle on the subject of “Labour and the Poor” have been read with the utmost interest by the inmates.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
…the poor little creatures go to work, many of ’em as early as four years old. They are so afraid of being late that they’ll jump out of bed at four or five o’clock, and run to look at the church clock to see what time it is—there is always a light in the church clock.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
‘Cheap, cheap!’ is the cry with everybody now-a-days, and they must have cheap shoes, too; no matter about the poor cobbler as makes ’em. But they have to pay dearer for ’em in the end. That’s some satisfaction to us. We have the laugh at ’em, although they don’t think it. We knows our customers, and we puts our work in according.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VII – The Rural Districts.
‘I have had three bad accidents in the works. I fractured my skull, and I often suffer from it now; there is a hole in my head [he showed it]. Next I lost a joint of my thumb; and afterwards I got burnt so badly that I am lame now, and always shall be. I stand the heat pretty well; there are few who live through it so long as I have.’ … and his wife seemed more disposed to complain than he did.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
What between the casualties above and under ground, the very streets are thronged with the maimed and mutilated. In a distance of a hundred yards I once saw three men moving in different directions, two of whom had lost a leg and the other both legs.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
Thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, the idle, the reckless, and the dissolute, here live in a miserable companionship. This neighbourhood formed the main scene of our inquiries; and what I that day saw of misery, degradation, and suffering, I shall remember to the end of my life.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
The eldest girl had a look of intelligence. I judged her to be about nine years old. Like the others she was barefooted, and in rags; her hair was matted, and her hands, face, and neck were black with dirt.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
Here, without sheets or blankets, and with only a filthy counterpane to cover them, these children passed the bitterly cold nights of winter. I thought of the high mortality of infant life in Merthyr, and it seemed to me a mercy, rather than otherwise, that children should be taken away young from such hardships, neglect, and sufferings.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
The first thing we saw on entering was the corpse of a child in a winding-sheet, laid out upon a table; a white handkerchief, folded small, covered its eyes, but did not conceal the features, which, waxy and pallid, death had composed to a smile. Though the child had been dead two days, it was unprovided with a coffin. The odour of the house was almost insupportable.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
I paid rates and taxes for 30 years, but I don’t get much return now. In the first 20 years I saved £300; but my wife started a shop, and was too good-natured in bailing (giving credit), and with one thing and another we lost all. I am starved of cold; if I had a bed-tick for my straw, and a rug to cover me, I should do.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
There is a capacious warm bath erected here for the benefit of the workmen; but there exists a prejudice against the use of it among them: they fancy it will weaken their loins; but they are coming more to adopt it.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
I am told that men coming from a distance and taking employment at the copper-works acclimatise, or die, within a very few months.
Labour and the Poor Vol. VIII – Wales.
We place our feet in winter upon a Birmingham fender, and stir a Birmingham grate with a Birmingham poker. We ring for our servants with a Birmingham bell, and we write our letters of business and affection with Birmingham steel pens. Birmingham supplies our tables with spoons and forks, though not with knives, and our bed and window curtains with rods, rings, and ornaments. We cannot dress or undress, whether we be men or women, without being beholden to the aid afforded us by Birmingham.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
…the elder workmen of no town in England more obstinately observe ‘Saint Monday’ than the working men of Birmingham; and it is a common complaint among employers that when trade is good and wages high, they not only keep ‘Saint Monday,’ or ‘shackling day,’ as some call it, for drinking and pleasure making, but add a Tuesday, and even a Wednesday, to the idle days of the week.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
These fire-arms neither underwent, nor were intended to undergo, any proof whatever. Immense numbers of them were made with the certainty that if ever they were fired off, they would burst in the discharge. They were called ‘sham muskets,’ and ‘Dutch guns,’ and were exchanged for slaves on the coast of Africa—a gun for a man.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
I earn about four shillings, but could earn more if I had full work. I have not been to work for a month, but have stayed at home to nurse my little girl, who is ill of the small pox. She is seven months old. The doctor gave her up yesterday, and says she cannot live. If the child dies, I shall return to my work.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
I find numbers of infants entrusted to the care of some old woman, who is past work, or of some girl of ten or eleven years of age, quite unfit to be entrusted with them. The week before last I was called upon to visit and console a family in which a child of five years of age had been left under the care of its elder brother, only nine years old, and had been burned to death in the absence of its mother. Such cases are not rare.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
Many boys of fourteen or fifteen years of age are known to spend their evenings in public-houses when not employed in over-hours of work, and may be seen in the streets on Sundays and Mondays smoking pipes and cigars with all the confidence, and fifty times the impudence, of manhood.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
Articles were made thirty or forty years ago of the very best workmanship, but people want everything so cheap now that really good articles cannot be provided.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
The annual number of deaths in the United Kingdom exceeds, I believe, 400,000, and taking the average weight of metal upon their coffins at 3½ lbs., it would follow that 1,400,000 lbs. or 625 tons of good iron, tin plate, and brass are annually buried with the British people.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
Executions for coining were very frequent in the neighbourhood. I have known as many as three and four people strung up together at one time for that offence. The makers of false copper money used to be burnt in the hand and imprisoned, and I believe they were sometimes transported.
Labour and the Poor Vol. IX – Birmingham.
The Mersey swarms with ships, and the immense line of docks is so closely packed with vessels as to appear at some little distance to form a compact mass, dense as a forest of tall pines in an untrodden wilderness.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I look at the newspapers sometimes. I never look at the politics. I read the ‘police’ first, and the murders, and the robberies. I read the fires and the accidents, or anything wonderful.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I used to sleep in barns, and always got a good breakfast in the morning, and very often a supper of ‘cowal.’ Cowal is very good stuff. It is made of cabbage, beef, ’taturs, and all kinds of vegetables. I often got a breakfast as well as a supper of ‘cowal.’
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
Hundreds of porters are busily engaged at their work; hundreds of others, equally strong and equally ready, look on with hungry eyes, from the corners of neighbouring streets, unable to obtain a job, and envious of those who have got one;
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
A mob followed at his heels, shouting and hooting, and pelting him with mud and filth all the way to his ship. As he ran the gauntlet down the street the sheet was of very little use to cover him—he might almost as well have been without it. There were hundreds of people after him, men and women, boys and girls, shouting and yelling in the most fearful manner.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
Last week I had three days’ work. It was the best week I have had for six months, and I was able to get my boots out of pawn. I have got them on now, but I expect I shall have to send them back to the pawn-shop next week, if I don’t get a job or two.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I have buried eight of my children. I was very poor when the last died. I was out of work, and had no money to bury it. I borrowed the money of a friend. I owe it yet, and can’t see how I shall ever be able to pay it. If I could get regular work, such work as I used to have before the master porters were invented, I could soon pay it.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
A privy was close to the door, which, as I was informed, was common to four houses, and used by upwards of fifty people. The people of these four houses kept their windows close shut to keep out the smell.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I don’t like to let the children go to the school because they are so ragged. I know the schools are meant for ragged children, but mine are too ragged. I shall let one boy go. He has been out begging to-day, but has not brought home anything.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I like potatoes, but I find bread more nourishing. A cup of tea is the nicest thing I get. I could not do without my tea. I should drink more of it, and take it stronger, if it was not so dear.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I do not send my little girl to the evening school, although I know she might go free. She has no clothes to go in. I know that is no objection at the Ragged School, but I don’t like to let her go without proper clothes.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
He himself had been a year in Liverpool engaged in the business, but during the whole time he had not been able to purchase a single article of clothing for himself. I had no reason to doubt the truth of this statement. Although he had shoes to his feet and a coat to his back, his whole attire, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, was in a state of such miserable dilapidation that it would not have sold for a shilling to the most liberal of dealers in second-hand goods.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The wretched street swarmed with ragged children and dirty women—yellow clothes were stretched out of the windows to dry, and foul smells of sewerage, gas, and nameless filth arose in rank abundance.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
If I should be taken ill and unable to work, I don’t know what I shall do. I suppose I must lie where I fall. There is always the parish or the grave. I sometimes think it scarcely matters which.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
Streams of dirty water run down the sides of these entrances, which are encumbered with nameless filth, as well as garbage and refuse of all kinds. The interior of the courts allows no breath of air to circulate, and each has a privy at the end, common to all the inhabitants of the enclosure.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
I could not help reflecting, when I remembered these facts, and looked upon the swarms of ragged, destitute, dirty, squalid Irishmen awaiting in the streets of Liverpool the sailing of the ships that were to convey them to America, that, however deplorable their present condition, they too, in the course of time, would, in all probability, go and do likewise, and not only elevate themselves far above the miseries of their former state, but help thousands of their friends and relatives to follow them into comfort and prosperity.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The morning sun shone brightly—the sky was without a cloud—a forest of masts from all the surrounding docks pointed their delicate traceries against the deep blue of the heavens, and the star-spangled banner flapped to the fresh breeze.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The steam-tug had no sooner taken her departure than all the passengers were summoned on deck, that their names might be read over, their tickets produced, and a search made in the steerage, and in every hole and corner of the ship, for ‘stow-aways.’
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
What the exhibition wanted in elegance, it made up for in vigorous joyousness. The four danced as if dancing were a business to be gone into with all the mind, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and kept at it till mortal limbs could endure it no longer without a reviving period of repose. As soon as they were thoroughly exhausted, another party of four, including an old dame who looked nearly sixty, stepped into their vacant places, the whole assemblage at this time amounting to upwards of a hundred spectators, looking on with delighted gravity.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The spectators on shore took off their hats and cheered lustily, and the cheer was repeated by the whole body of emigrants on deck, who raised a shout that I supposed, must have been heard at the distance of a mile even in the noisy and busy thoroughfares of Liverpool.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The above document shows that out of 3,228 children, no less than 2,092 had received and were receiving no education whatever. Most readers will understand by this that they receive the education of vice and crime—that they are tutored in the filthy language of the streets and in the arts of mendicancy, and that they are systematically trained to the trade of plunder.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The stranger, on looking up the street, may see more public-houses at a glance than in any other street in Liverpool, or perhaps in the world. Out of less than forty houses he may reckon nearly twenty wine, beer, and spirit shops.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The advertised charge for admission was threepence, but on my tendering that sum to the money-taker at the door, he refused it, and informed me that the charge was sixpence. An explanation was asked and given, from which it appeared that the money-taker decided from the dress of the visitor whether he should pay the greater or the smaller sum. Threepence, he said, was the price to sailors and the working classes only; and sixpence was always charged to gentlemen.
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.
The accident will be a warning to me. No man ought to kick another with his slippers on. It isn’t safe. I shall never do so again without my heavy boots!
Labour and the Poor Vol. X – Liverpool.