STUDY THE HORRIBLE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 12, 15 April 1871, Page 3

STUDY THE HORRIBLE.

" Those who wish to study the ' horrible,' " writes the " Pall Mall Gazette, " need not trouble themselves to go to the seat of war and feast their eyes on maimed and mutilated soldiers, desolate homes, and starving families. They need only get into a cab and tell the cabman to drive ihem to that part of Wapping known as ' the Island ;' and if they are not satisfied with all they see there they will indeed be hard to please. In a late number of the " Builder " is an account of a visit paid to this locality, and it would be well if photographs of the scenes described were allowed to take their place in the shop windows of the cartes-de-visite of half-clothed ballet dancers, and bishops smiling "kindly in their comfortable robes, which are now exhibited for the admiration of street passengers. If a knowledge of the real condition of the homes of many of the poor in this luxurious city were more generally diffused there might be a hope of some remedy. Take the followiug, for instance, as one example of an English home in one of the dismal Wapping courts, where, as the writer says, the outstretched hands can nearly touch the hovels on either side. * A father in the last stage of consumption ; two daughters, nearly marriageable, with hardly sufficient rotting clothing "to cover their shame." The rags that hang around their attenuated frames flutter in strips against their naked legs. They have no stool or chair upon which they can sit. Their father occupies the only stool in the room. They have no employment by which they can earn even a pittance. They are at home starving on a halfchance meal a day, and hiding their raggedness from the world. The walls are bare, there is one bed in the room, and a bundle of dirty rags are upon it. The dying father will shortly follow the dead mother, and when the parish coffin encloses his wasted form, and a pauper's grave closes above him, what shall be his daughters' lot ?' This is but a type of many other homes in the district. Dirt, misery, and disease alone flourish in the wretched neighborhood. ' Fever and small-pox rage,' as the inhabitants say, 'next door, and next door, and over the way, and next door to that, and further down.' The living, dying, and dead are huddled together. The houses have no ventilation, the back yards are receptacles for all sorts of filth and rubbish, the old barrels or vessels that contain the supply of water are thickly coated on the sides with lime, and there is an undisturbed deposit of mud at the bottom. There is no mortuary-house—the dead lie in the dog-holes where they breathed their last, and add to the contagion which spreads through the neighborhood.