see also George Godwin in London Shadows - click here
It was the hour of the unyoking of men. In the highways and byways of
Clerkenwell there was a thronging of released toilers, of young and old, of
male and female. Forth they streamed from factories and workrooms, anxious to
make the most of the few hours during which they might live for themselves.
Great numbers were still bent over their labour, and would be for hours to
come, but the majority had leave to wend stablewards. Along the main
thoroughfares the wheel-track was clangorous; every omnibus that clattered by
was heavily laden with passengers; tarpaulins gleamed over the knees of those
who sat outside. This way and that the lights were blurred into a misty
radiance; overhead was mere blackness, whence descended the lashing rain.
There was a ceaseless scattering of mud; there were blocks in the traffic,
attended with rough jest or angry curse; there was jostling on the crowded
pavement. Public-houses began to brighten up, to bestir themselves for the
evening's business. Streets that had been hives of activity since early
morning were being abandoned to silence and darkness and the sweeping wind.
At noon to-day there was sunlight on the Surrey hills; the fields and lanes
were fragrant with the first breath of spring, and from the shelter of
budding copses many a primrose looked tremblingly up to the vision of blue
sky. But of these things Clerkenwell takes no count; here it had been a day
like any other, consisting of so many hours, each representing a fraction of
the weekly wage. Go where you may in Clerkenwell, on every hand are multiform
evidences of toil, intolerable as a nightmare. It is not as in those parts of
London where the main thoroughfares consist of shops and warehouses and
workrooms, whilst the streets that are hidden away on either hand are devoted
in the main to dwellings Here every alley is thronged with small industries;
all but every door and window exhibits the advertisement of a craft that is
carried on within. Here you may see how men have multiplied toil for toil's
sake, have wrought to devise work superfluous, have worn their lives away in
imagining new forms of weariness. The energy, the ingenuity daily put forth
in these grimy burrows task the brain's power of wondering. But that those
who sit here through the livelong day, through every season, through all the
years of the life that is granted them, who strain their eyesight, who
overtax their muscles, who nurse disease in their frames, who put resolutely
from them the thought of what existence might be -- that these do it all
without prospect or hope of reward save the permission to eat and sleep and
bring into the world other creatures to strive with them for bread, surely
that thought is yet more marvellous.
Workers in metal, workers in glass and in enamel, workers in weed, workers in
every substance on earth, or from the waters under the earth, that can be
made commercially valuable. In Clerkenwell the demand is not so much for rude
strength as for the cunning fingers and the contriving brain. The
inscriptions on the house-fronts would make you believe that you were in a
region of gold and silver and precious stones. In the recesses of dim byways,
where sunshine and free air are forgotten things, where families herd
together in dear-rented garrets and cellars, craftsmen are for ever handling
jewellery, shaping bright ornaments for the necks and arms of such as are
born to the joy of life. Wealth inestimable is ever flowing through these
workshops, and the hands that have been stained with gold-dust may, as likely
as not, some day extend themselves in petition for a crust. In this house, as
the announcement tells you, business is carried on by a trader in diamonds,
and next door is a den full of children who wait for their day's one meal
until their mother has come home with her chance earnings. A strange enough
region wherein to wander and muse. Inextinguishable laughter were perchance
the fittest result of such musing; yet somehow the heart grows heavy, somehow
the blood is troubled in its course, and the pulses begin to throb hotly.
George Gissing, The Nether World, 1889