SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE LONDON SLUMS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume I, Issue 137, 21 May 1884, Page 2

SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE LONDON SLUMS.

The slums of London are, especially on & Saturday, a sight never to be forgotten (says writer in the London Neivs.) The publichouses and gin palaces then take in onefourth of the earnings of the denizens of the slums. Mechanics and laborers crowd the public houses, drinking away their wages, and women squander the money that would purchase food, for the lack of which their children are dying. One group rivets the eye of an observer at once. It consists of an old grey-haired dame, a woman of 40, and a girl of about 19, with a baby in her arms. All these are in a state which is best described

“ maudlin.” They have finished one lot gin, and the youngest woman is ordering another round. It is a great grandmother, grandmother, and a mother and her babyfour generations together—and they are all dirty, dishevelled, and drunk except the baby, and even that poor little mite may have its first taste of alcohol presently. It is no uncommon sight in these places to see a mother wet a baby’s lips with gin and water. The process is called “giving the young un’ a taste,” and the baby’s father will look on and enjoy the joke immensely. But the t? ne to see the result of a Saturday night’s heavy drinking in a low neighbourhood is after the houses are closed. Then you meet dozens of poor wretches reeling home to their miserable dens. Some of them roll across the roadway and fall, cutting themselves till the blood flows. Every penny in some instances has gone in drink. One dilapidated, ragged wretch I met one Saturday night was gnawing a baked potato. By his side stood a thinly clad woman bearing a baby in her arms, and in hideous language she reproached him for his selfishness. She had fetched him out of a public-hause with his last half-penny in his pocket. With that half-penny he had bought the baked potato which he refused to share with her. Turn

out of the main thoroughfare and into the dimly lighted back streets and you come upon scene after scene, to the grim, grotesque horror of which only the pencil of a Dore could do justice. Women with hideous, distorted faces are rolling from side to side, shrieking aloud snatches of popular songs, plentifully interlarded with the vilest expressions. Men aS drunk as themselves meet them ; there is a interchange of ribald jests and foul oaths, then a quarrel and a shower of blows. Down from one dark court rings a cry of murder, and a woman, her face hideously gashed, makes across the narrow road, pursued by a howling madman. It is only a drunken husband having a row with his wife.