THE HOMES OF OUR POOR.

Colonist, Volume II, Issue 162, 10 May 1859, Page 4

THE HOMES OF OUR POOR.

(From the Times, January 12.) ' Some of our readers have imagined that' the article on * Our Homeless Poor' exhausted the subject of London's great destitution, while others whose warm hearts have overflowed at the tale can scarcely bring themselves to believe that such things are true in fact, and that in the wealthiest and most civilized metropolis of the world too large a class of its inhabitants look forward to the winter as a period of such starvation and misery as no mere writing can ever describe. The inmates of a refuge for the destitute, however, represent but a small section of London's want. The people who nightly crawl to its poor shelter are wretched enough, God knows; for nineteentwentieths of the poor outcasts harboured there stand alone in their great misery, and can scarcely recollect the time when they knew a friend or relative in all the world to whom they could turn for food. But, bad as their condition is, there is almost a lower depth of suffering and sorrow, when sickness and famine enter the homes of our poor, and we see that most fearful of all spectacles, a father and mother hid away in wretched hovels with their littles ones starving around them. It is to such scenes as these that we would now take our readers, entreating them only to remember that there is less distress in London now than has been known for the past ten winters. We start from the Ragged School in connexion with the Refuge for the Destitute in Field-lane, and traverse that dreary space of ground known as " The Ruins," where dirt and refuse litter the path, and where each heap is surmounted by a group of tiny forms probing the filth with their wan hands for thrice-burnt cinders, or scattering the piles abroad in eager search for boues.' Most of them are startled as strangers approach and go whooping away in twilight, when you hear their catcalls, slang phrases, and sometimes filthy oaths; for, alas, too often their morality is no better than their food. The "Ruins" lead to Turnmill-street--a wretched locality, where a few dingy shops sell bread, and on the shelves of one or two are seen " cuttings" of bacon mixed up in little piles with the fragmentary refuse of butchers' shops, known amongst the poor as " pieces.'' On the right is c passage like a doorway called Rosealley, the entrance to which is generally blocked up with boys and girls of every a ge' —in every grade of infamy and want. Eaten house in the court seems full; some have lights in the rooms, some have not, but through all the broken windows, stuffed witH rags, the voices of men, women, and children, in tones of suffering, entreaty, or complaint can always be heard; for.j every little den is occupied by many members of poor families. The stairs which give access to the upper portion of these tenements are so foul and crazy that the visitor dreads to trust himself upon them, for they are only used to bear the thinnest and most emaciated forms. Let us, however, ascend one, and take the first case we mcct —any will do—one ie

sure to be a sample ot all the,rest. Groping your way up the steps, then, you enter a room where the ceiling is broken;,, the walls are foul and dirty, but, nevertheless, all parts which can be washed are scrubbed as white as labor can make them. Pacing to and fro with weary steps is a tall thin woman, hushing an infant on her breast that is ill to death with scarlet fever. Huddled together near a dim fire of rags and cinders, the materials of which they have been all day long collecting, are two poor little girls; in the corner of the room is an old mattress, which was sent them a few days since by a benevolent gentleman, but beyond this there is not a vestige of furniture or food in the place. The woman's tale is soon told, for it is a very common one. Her husband had been out of work a month, and while still wearily looking for it day by day, he slipped upon a piece of orange peel and and fractured his ankle badly. He is in the hospital, and she is allowed 2s. a week, and two loaves by the parish. The 2s. pays her rent, the two loaves barely keep life within herself and children. When .we saw them it was Monday night, and none had tasted food since Sunday, morning,' when they had had two pounds of bread among them all. Yet the woman was full., of hope, for she had a bread ticket that would give her a quartern loaf next day, and they counted the minutes with hungry anxiety till the time of that little plenty should arrive. She said, too, in trembling accents which belied her hopes, that she knew her infant would be better in a day or two, when she would go out herself, and God would surely send her something to keep her babies alive. But this is an everyday sample of distress—all London is full of such. Let us go a little deeper into the purlieus of this wretched neighbourhood. The courts are so narrow that no two persons can walk abreast, and even this little space is encroahed upon by old fruit barrows and baskets, the capital and stock-in- trade of the poorest costermongers, who harbour here. You pass through arches where the thieves of this quarter nightly assemble to share the proceeds of their crime, or plan fresh deeds of violence and outrage, till at last the labyrinth terminates in a blind alley full of the filthiest refuse. At the end of this is a small smithy and two ruinous little buildings, which were old even when Jonathan Wild's house stood near them, and the Fleet ditch was a stream up which the barges came. The doors of these houses are always open, so you enter at once into a room like , a cellar on the ground, where a man and his wife and four children are lying together. A few cinders which have been mercifully given them from the smithy are burning in the grate, and near the cherished warmth of this, on two old chairs—the only articles of furniture in the wretched vault—lies a fast-dying child. The other children are crouched beneath the chairs; one that fractured his.arm a fortnight ago has .the little limb in splints, and wrung with pain and hunger adds his wailing to the convulsive coughs and smugglings which mark how rapidly death's hand is closing on his little brother. There needs no tale to say what these must suffer. The father, a poor object, with scarce a month's life in his worn frame, is in the last stage of consumption; the mother is incapacitated by a racking illness from even moving about, and so with their children they are starving slowly. The husband said he had told his piteous tale to the guardians of Clerkenwell and asked for a little—for any outdoor relief; but they replied, to use his own words, that " he was a able-bodied man, who must support his wife and family," and refused even the miserable aid of one small loaf. When we saw the family the poor woman was worse than usual, for she had that day taken her dying child through fog and wet, with scarce a garment to protect its thin frame from the biting air, to see the union doctor. She feared such exposure would kill the baby, but, as she truly said, what could she do ? A gentleman had called upon her a few days before and given her some tracts, and these, with medicine for the sick, were the only things except the chairs in that close and fetid room. Not one of its miserable occupants had tasted aught save water for six-and-twenty hours. In the same house, and in the room above that we have just visited—where the thin cracked floor lets through, with terrible distinctness, the moans and suffocating struggles of the sick child below—lives a widow and four children. This garret presents a most curious aspect, for its corners are filled with scraps and fragments of paper, rags, and cloth of every shape and color, which the children are sorting out in separate heaps, while the widow superintends them all and,works herself. The whole family gain their living—if such slow death deserves that term —by rising early in the morning, when the widow and her children go forth, and each taking a certain district wait till the city warehouses are swept out, when they carefully watch and gather up the rubbish of paper and rags which is cast into the streets. TJntii near midday all are thus occupied, when each returns with a little bundle to the garret where they dwell, and they pass the remainder of the time till night in sorting out and drying the proceeds of their labors. On a fins 'day, bj^ such incessant labor, the poor woman and her children can earn 9d.; in wet or windy weather the most strenuous exertions scarcely .realise a sixpence. Like the rest of their neighbours, they feel starvation more or less severe throughout the winter, and bui for the incalculable good done by those humble societies which distribute coals and bread among such hapless objects, would literally starve outright.. But we need scarcely continue to recapitu^ late such instances; the inmates of every house in the neighbourhood can all tell such tales of woe —can point to sitch ghastly famishing young objects round them as. makes one's heart bleed even to look upon.

The alleys that wind away from this poor place, called Eagle-court, are even lower, dimmer, and more tortuous than before, till at last they emerge near Peters-lane, Oovv-cross, where live the family who gain a wretched meal a day by dragging down the bills and posters as we have already mentioned in a previous article. To this poor man we have unwittingly done injustice, and through confusing his case with that of another outcast family statedjthat his two eldest sons were constantly in prison. His daughter is in a reformatory it is true, but none of his sons have ever been convicted of dishonesty, and seven of them still crowd together with their parents in the foul and noisome chamber which serves as a home for all. It is, indeed, a poor and filthy room. In one corner, upon a pile of old sacks and paper, crouching beneath their ragged clothing, lie four little naked boys—some ' asleep, some fretfully whining for food. In another corner the father and mother, with three more children, have their miserable bed. The rest of the room is occupied by an old table and a large pile of newly-torn-down bills, which are laid out to dry;. The father and children are in bed,-the mother is working by a rushlight, trying "&o to ...stitch the wretched tatters of her c|ildreri's garments that they can put them,on in the morning. They say that they haveja hard life—which one can well believe in looking at the skeleton young forms around— and that bills now a days are pasted down so tight and put up so high that it is but seldom they, can manage with constant labor to earn more than Bd. a-day, and even for poor sum the younger branches of the family have always to work standing on their parents' shoulders to reach the highest placards. The "gentleman" who buys the fragments, too, has grown more scrupulous of late, and, in addition to requiring that the paper should be dry, will allow them no money for any scraps which have mud upon them, though the \" gentleman" takes them also. Last winter, while the poor old man, who is now seventy, was carrying home is morning load of bills, he slipped and broke his ribs, and this accident at once so reduced the earnings of the family that he was compelled to apply to the Board of Guardians for out-door relief. But we must let him tell his tale in his own words. He said, " I went before the Board, and I says, ' Gentlemen, Providence has broke my ribs, and 1 wants out-door relief very bad, for my children is starving.' And the board ses to me, 4We aint agoing to give you any relief cos you're a living in indultry;' and I says, «What do you mean by living in indultry ? My wife's dead, and my good woman's husband's dead, and I must have somebody to look after my children and keep my bits of things together.' But the board ses, *It aint; no matter; you can't have no relief, while you're a living in indultry;' so they turned me out." It might, however, have shocked the pious feelings of the Board if this old man had told them what we can tell our readers, that he was most anxious to be married to the woman he lived with, and that the benevolent managers of the Field-lane Refuge had, for this purpose, begged a clergyman to forego his marriage fees, as the poor old man could not pay . them, but the rev. gentleman refused to bate a single penny. Happily, however, all were not so mercenary, and within the last few days the poor people have been married. Near this house lives a widow woman, who is starving with her two children. When we entered her garret she was at work trying to form from scraps and rags a patch-work-covering for their mattrass—the fourth of the kind she had commenced this winter and been compelled, when half finished, to i sell for bread. This poor woman's landlords are a wealthy firm in the city, and as she owes two week's rent (35.), she has received a notice that if all is not paid in full before the end of the present week she will be turned into the streets. Leaving Cow-cross we again wander through alleys, visiting house after house, where every room discloses fresh scenes of woe, and where hunger and sickness seem to reign supreme, and ravage unchecked among their miserable occupants. We have gradually described a complete circle from the place at which we started, and are now again near the Field-lane ragged school, where you can just hear the monotonous chant of the hungry infants, drawling forth, "Twenty pence are one and eightpence," and so on upwards till they reach amounts in pence which the poor children will never know save bytheir multiplication tables. Near here stands a wretched house, the old and broken stairs of which are almost dangerous to mount. At the top garret of all, upon a floor so frail and., shattered that it is no longer safe for any, sits a' poof"woman with an Want across her knees and three children huddled close to her for warmth upon the floor around her. The place is deadly cold, for there is no fire in the room, but as the child upon her lap is sick and dying the mother has borrowed a small candle from a neighbour, and by its dim light watches in silence the painful working of her infant's features. Her case is very sad. Her husband has broken a blood vessel, and is in the hospital dying. She has 2s. a week and two loaves from the parish, but Is. 6d. of this goes in rent, and she with her infants are slowly but very surely dying of starvation. But it was neither, hunger, coldj'nor sickness which had bowed this woman to despair —it was the conduct of her eldest boy, her favorite, her hope and pride, who once, she said, had been so good, but latterly had fallen into low company, and was now a thief, and constantly in prison. The term of his last imprisonment".'" for suspicion; only for suspicion," she said, was up that very morning, and she had written to the governor of the gaol, imploring Him to make her boy come home to her at once, but it was night and still he bad not come. It was early yet, she said; he might have got work, and would be home a little late

—she was sure he had got work, and turning to our kind conductor, she said with trembling accents, " Don't you think he's got work, Sir; isn't it that that keeps him out so late?" Still the forebodings of her own heart misgave her, and crying " Oh! Jemmy, Jemmy, if you have gone wrong again twill kill me," she hid her face upon her little child, and sobbed as if her heart was breaking.—We are under the ragged school again, arid the little children who have come from homes such as we have seen, and languished through one day's more misery and want, are preparing to leave, some for the refuge beneath, some to the still greater destitution of their own foul rooms. They are singing a most plaintive hymn before they part, arid ■'"you- can distinguish the melancholy cadence of their little voices as they say— What tho'we suffer here below, There's One above looks down with love, And He'll have pity on our woe When we meet him in the promised land, For we have a home in the promised land, When Our Lord calls we shall arise To meet him in the promised land. : Will this narrative console Lord Ebury's startled feelings and diminish the grief in which he ' deplores the spirit in which these articles are written ?' With such scenes around us we must learn to look with more equanimity upon the spiritual destitution of Ashantees, and strive for the day when we shall Have as many and as well paid missionaries among our own poor as we have now among the blacks. We at least have shown the path; it rests with the public to follow it. Most earnestly do we hope that some higher good than mere donations will result from these appeals, and that that great time which comes to all may not find us with our duties to the poor still unfulfilled • when we meet them in the promised land.'