[-133-]
Chapter IX
Of
other Rookeries we may not speak. We will not pause to describe St.
George's-in-the-Borough, with its back courts, where the refuse of Ireland
vegetate ; or Kent Street,- the thieves' district,- which years since drew forth
the indignation of the topographist; or Pearl Row, St. George's Road, Southwark;
or Red House, Old Gravel Lane, Borough; or a lodging house for thieves at the
back of Holborn, where 100 thieves are to be seen, at eleven o'clock at night,
on an average, six sometimes in one bed ; or the lower part of Bell Street,
Paddington, for the lower class of thieves, such as costermongers, &c.; or
the courts and alleys leading out of Tooley Street, City, all the courts
inhabited by Irish thieves, &c.; or Rents Buildings, York Street,
Westminster, inhabited by pickpockets and juvenile thieves; or many others which
will suggest themselves to the reader.
Sufficient has been said to set at work those who are willing
to labour in the cause, to show what Rookeries are, to stimulate us to remove
them.
The condition of such colonies is not to be wondered at, when
they, who have no visible means of subsistence, [-134-]
are numbered by thousands! Criminals pass every year through the
metropolitan gaols, by tens of thousands; there are criminal districts in the
metropolis, districts the hotbeds of particular crimes, so that one parish is a
school for coiners, another for burglars, another for shoplifters, another for
horse stealers; parts of the metropolis, if mapped out by a moral geologist,
would present as many varieties as a district in which the surface was in one
place clay, in another chalk, in another limestone, in another gravel, and the
like.
It is not generally known that more than two millions are
maintained by the charitable resources of the country, or during their penal
confinement. That many of these might be restored to independence, if you could
rouse them from the moral torpor of despair; that Rookeries hide the
listlessness of departed hope, and the indolence of broken hearts. Compelled to
herd with the worst of his species, because he cannot afford better lodging, the
honest artisan is tempted to forget the lessons of his youth; and, forced into
precarious occupation, because his stated trade has failed him, he soon adopts
it as his own. Do you think that vice alone is the parent of degeneracy, or that
social evils result only from the recklessness of the poor; that recklessness
itself is never the offspring of ill-paid labour and exhausted industry; that
sickness has never thrust the ardent from the place his toil had won, or even
change of fashion cast a blight upon the skill by which he earned his bread?
And yet think not we are unthankful for the charities [-135-]
so liberally dealt out through this land; the sick are visited, the
maimed and the cripple healed, the houseless sheltered, the prostitute
reclaimed, the orphan housed, the idiot cared for, the blind taken in. Schools
there are, waiting only for the sanction of a better system to instruct the
nation ; Hospitals, where skill is tasked and science lends her aid ; Prisons,
where a wise effort would reclaim those whom justice punishes; and, last of all,
a Poor Law, whose shelter each may claim, not as by favour, but by right.
Yes, the energies of this noble country need only to be
roused, her eyes opened to the wretchedness she well might relieve. We want not
so much larger resources - for indiscriminate relief creates more poverty than
it dispels - but rather a better distribution of the resources we possess. We
want fellow-feeling spread over the surface of the country, not confined to
particular classes; we want those, who at heart are just and generous, to look
into the anomalies they have often sanctioned unconsciously among their own
tenants, and to do that justice to their own dependents, which the stranger, if
he claimed it, would receive at their hands. We would that the country should be
awakened, not to enact some new Poor Law, or swell the resources on which the
existing one depends; we would diminish rather than increase the rates-they more
than double the amount at which they ought to be assessed. Up to this very time,
and with all our experience, the problem has not been solved - whether a Poor
Law does not create much of the poverty it [-136-] relieves?
We would deal a death-blow to begging by giving scope for honest toil, and raise
men to independence by the pride which comfort gives, - by a sense that labour
earns the blessings which a father's love claims for his offspring.
We may rail against Rookeries as we will; we may club
together to put them down; yet selfishness, when chartered, or when not
denounced by law, will be too powerful even for the strength of the many. We
write no verdict against voluntary effort,-but, has it answered the purpose of
legislative enactment ? Have the efforts of Dissenters and of Churchmen combined
provided for the educational or religious wants of the mass ? Yet rivalry has
not been wanting,-the fierce conflict of opposite interests,- the traditions of
our Great Struggle, in which the King was slain, and the Church dismantled, have
bequeathed a portion of their bitterness to these times; religious zeal and
religious strife, two of the strongest feelings of the human mind, have not
accomplished an end for which both contended, though on different grounds. Let
the law, then, denounce Rookeries,- the law which the people may evoke, and
which the Legislature, the echo of the people's voice, will enact; which the
righteous energy of a Russell would gladly sanction, the far-sighted prudence of
a Peel assent to, and the indignant eloquence of a D'Israeli demand.
We may judge what we ought to do, by considering what has
been done. The Great Fire had scarcely spent its ravages, ere the nation was
roused, even under the [-137-] sensual indolence of
a Charles, even after the exhaustion of a civil conflict, a grievous plague, and
a devouring scourge. She arose as a giant to repair the damage which thousands
had sustained, and remove the relics which the wretchedness of former ages had
bequeathed. How many Rookeries yielded up the ghost amidst the flames, or gave
way before the destroyer, history stops not to tell, - she is concerned only
with the larger streets and the more public edifices which were consumed. Yet it
would do the lawgivers of these times good to peruse the injunctions which were
laid down for the rebuilding of the City; how, when men had just thrown aside a
form of government which a successful revolution achieved, they laid down minute
laws, whereby, if the liberty of the subject was wronged, his life was extended
and his comfort secured.
Did we wield the rod of correction, for which our fingers
tingle, this should be the wholesome sentence we would pass upon the indolence
of law makers:- They should be confined within the precincts of the British
Museum, till they had learned by heart the rules issued and sanctioned for the
rebuilding of the City; they should thumb old Seymour again and again; and,
under a self-correcting memory of the discipline, be once again restored to
write the common sense and the common English of former times. Then Rookeries
would disappear not because an Act proscribed cellars, yet forgot to enforce
the law it had enacted; but because, when the sentence of their death was
pronounced, men were there to see it carried out.
[-138-] Still, let us not speak
only of existing Rookeries. Could you lay an injunction upon the builder-could
you check his labours for the next thirty years, Rookeries would still be
formed, and streets rapidly degenerate; bankruptcy, change of fashion, annual
migration and emigration, decay, the adaptation of dwellings to the purposes of
a public company, obnoxious settlers, change of habits, rise of new trades,
would transform decent dwellings into Rookeries. Yet a law should be
hallowed, not only by a sense of its use and its benevolence, but by the
presence of officers;- they are the visible forms of justice, and they would
check these transformations ;-they would vindicate the claim of the poor to the
air, the light, and the water, which come direct from God. In their presence you
could not confine two families to one room;- you could not make a crumbling den
pay the rent which a decent house does not require ;-you could not mix without
regard to sex the members of different families ;-you could not break down with
impunity the line which divides the artisan from the felon;- at their bidding,
dustmen would do their duty, and water-rate collectors remember the meaning of
value received.
This is, however, a small part of their work,-population
increases, and the working classes have not yet bowed down at the altar of
Malthus; marriage is still popular: the limits of the town will soon overleap
the boundaries our fathers set, and London engulph within its circle the fields
where childhood yet plays; buildings will arise, whose architects have taken a
wholesome [-139-] lesson from the errors of their
forefathers; and luxuries, which the unhappy Past knew not, be the inheritance
of a future generation. Let us look well to it, that Rookeries do not mar our
satisfaction, when the delighted eye wanders over splendid squares, and churches
of medieval riches. Let not the abode of luxury be flanked by a back-ground
where vice riots, allied with squalid misery,- and the palace of the merchant
stand in strong contrast with the hovel of him who is the factor of that
trader's wealth*. [* Since the First Edition was published, much has been done
by the Bill to regulate Lodging Houses.]
We live in an age when heroes and hero-worship are alike gone
by; our merchants are not Howards, our patriots, Hampdens: still, if the large
sacrifice be denied, let not the tithe which justice asks be withheld; the law
we want might still wield a useful power,- Rookeries, at least, would cease to
be built afresh, and perhaps those which exist would die out, for want of
congenial companions; they would soon be limited to certain districts, which the
poor would in time avoid, and thus languish because their occupation was gone.
As the town increased, we should be comforted, because its anomalies declined;
and crime be on the wane, because deprived of its hiding-place, - some future
Agar Town would be spared the pest which clung to it, and an infant Hampstead
learn not its mother tongue from the groans of the poor.
We confess, then, that rules are wanted to confine the evil
within its present limits, if not at once to stay [-140-] the
plague, yet we fear the encounter. Interests, large and many, we say, are mixed
up in this system; we shall have to fight the battle separately with each, -
they only who have warred against the selfishness and traditions of mankind know
the toil before them. Is it, indeed, so ? We doubt it; the landlords whose
interests are at stake in these Rookeries, are not very many, - we speak of the landlords,
not the middle-men; nor are their profits so large; for the excess of rent
paid by the tenant rewards the trouble and swells the gains of those that
intervene between him and the owner. Many, then, must be the houses, and
extensive the plot of ground they cover, before an income swells into the
dimensions which make it powerful, and through which the owner wields an
influence to create alarm; the country magnate, whose interest you would evoke,
and whom you fear to offend, owns whole streets; and thus, though his ground
produces treble the amount it yielded a century since, the size of all the
Rookeries combined, forbids that there should be many who thus unconsciously
deal in things forbidden. You might provoke the hostility of some few, you would
not dare the opposition of a large class, were Rookeries at once swept away.
This is, however, the lowest line of argument which we ought
to be ashamed, in the face of higher motives, to adopt. Many pocket rents they
scarce know from what source, because their fathers did so ; their steward is
ignorant of the miseries of those whose landlord is his master, and it only
needs to point out the sufferings their [-141-] carelessness
has entailed on others, at once to end it; or, if they still persist, shame must
do what conscience cannot, and the law enforce what private interests forbid.
Yet individuals are not alone to blame; these houses suffer
from other annoyances, which the law has entailed on them; and which, if you
pass an Act of Parliament to-morrow, to humanise within a given time all the
landlords of London, would still remain. Nearly eight hundred houses, in an
aristocratic district of the Metropolis suffer from want of ventilation,-so that
the political satirist has been found a true prophet, when he wrote-
"One for a tax upon the wind,
Pitt only
taxed the light,
And one for an excise on mind-
The intellectual
eight."
Many windows are stopped up, that the landlord - I beg his
pardon, the middle-man-may escape the heavy pressure of the window-tax * [*Thank
God! since the publication of the First Edition, the Window Tax has been
abolished.]; yet here, according to the well-known adage, the raven escapes, and
the dove suffers. The houses in these districts have about them signs of a not
venerable antiquity; they retain all past discomforts, and are destitute of all
modern improvements ; they transmit the evils without the virtues of the age,
whose type they are, burdened with the taxes which blissful Eden knew not.
Shifting sashes are seldom found; and, to use the words of a report on this [-142-]
subject, "modern means of obtaining a supply of atmospheric air, and
producing ventilation, are scarcely known, and very little appreciated by the
poorer classes." A country gentleman, of moderate income, one just
trembling on the verge of squirearchy - one who is gradually working his way
into that estimable corporation, has his house, containing three or four sitting
rooms, seven or eight bed-rooms, his laundry, his drying ground, his coachman's
cottage, his ornamental and kitchen-garden, piggery, kennel, stable,
&c.-each a distinct province. Now, suppose population to be quadrupled-an
invasion to take place, his house to be garrisoned, as many homes were in the
Civil War, and suppose him and his family limited to one room,- linen to be
washed there, dried there-victuals to be cooked there, eaten there-family to sit
there, sleep there, read there, dress there, and you have some faint idea of the
discomforts of a poor man's dwelling. But, says Sterne, "darken the little
light which remains," reduce the three windows to two,- bring the piggery,
stable, and kennel, within ten yards of the house, and even then what is it to A
Rookery? You say we are supposing a case well-nigh impossible; that, even if
it were so, the trial would be so much the greater, in proportion to the habits,
education, rank, previous means of the person so affected. Do you think that no
decayed gentleman has ever been obliged in dens like these to hide a broken
heart,- that ruin among this class is so very uncommon? Those who have
visited [-143-] Rookeries have known too many
parallels; but yet, concede that we have referred to isolated cases, - ask
yourself, is the distinction between the small proprietor, and the well-ordered
mechanic so vast, the gulph which separates them so profound, that the one
should be surrounded by most of the luxuries which the individual can enjoy,-the
other be destitute of most of the necessaries that life requires? Should this be
so, when, if the mechanic be ingenious or fortunate, he may live to see his son
High Sheriff of the county?
We are not blaming any one class; our aristocracy are not
savage tyrants, they are English gentlemen,- kind, generous, delighting not
merely to relieve the wants, they encourage the sports, and promote the
happiness of their tenants; our merchants are not penurious traders, they are an
open-handed, open-hearted race; the bane of all this is thoughtlessness, and a
clinging to old traditions.
Amidst the homes of the aristocracy, Dorsetshire labourers
are generating a plague, and Dorsetshire poverty has raised the county to the
bad elevation of the prime nursery of crime. And the porters, mechanics,
labourers, the very shopmen of' the Metropolis, waste out their lives amidst
Rookeries whose social discomforts demoralise their minds, whose polluted
atmosphere ruins their health. Men are not worse than their fathers,-are they
better? We have averred that the gulph is daily growing wider which separates
the higher and middle ranks from the working classes. Grant, if you will, that [-144-]
the wages of the working man are not in proportion lower than they were a
hundred years since,-still, the population is larger, competition greater,-for
then emigration was an evil which men tried to check. Goldsmith, in that model
of political wisdom, The Traveller, laments over the countryman leaving
the home of his fathers, as though the country were deprived of something whose
services it might need. It would be difficult to prove that Rookeries were
crowded then as now, and the middle class knew not a tithe of the comfort they
now enjoy. We wonder not that luxury should increase with wealth; such has ever
been the rule, though refinement in luxury has been also the first symptom of a
state's decay; yet, when a particular class remains stationary, and in broad
contrast with the advancement of all else but itself, then there is danger-then
there is a sore in the nation's body which, would she live, must be healed.
And these very evils, whose remedy we ask, or whose removal
we cry out for-what are they but the abuse, the perversion, or the withholding
of the very commonest, cheapest blessings which God has given to man ?
Blessings, to supply which, it costs us nothing;- the air comes fresh from
heaven; the light, science can neither create has nor destroy; the water, whose
beds the Hand above has hallowed, which He has inlaid with a cement, the natural
receptacle of the stores they contain, those stores being inexhaustible, would
flow spontaneously did we open a channel for it ; once sink the well, and it
will [-145-] ever keep running; once unclog the
avenues you have choked up, repeal the abuses you have made, and Nature
will itself supply our wants. When a Committee appointed by a parish of note,
went their rounds, they declare that, among the eight hundred houses they
visited, "not one single instance was found of a continuous supply of water
by Water Companies; and, although there did not appear to be an actual want of
the article, yet the supply being intermittent, and of short duration, does not
maintain a sufficient quantity in the various, and, sometimes, very limited,
receptacles found in poor dwellings, to meet the requirements of houses crowded
with families, and to enable the occupants to assist in promoting health by
cleansing their persons as well as frequently washing their linen, and scouring
the rooms they inhabit." Yet, small as is the supply, even then it is not
pure; an analysis would prove that it has collected many impurities in its
transit; its reservoirs are badly placed, and the pipes frequently in
juxtaposition with the sewers, so that the supplies of the one and the
outpourings of the other have been sometimes mingled.
A gentleman hires a house-the landlord at once taking care
that it shall be well lit, supplied with water and with air; does the roof show
signs of leakage when some August deluge sweeps away a house or two in Middle
Row, the landlord repairs it; has the water been turned off during the
non-occupancy of the house, the landlord issues his sign-manual, and obedient
water-rate [-146-] collectors turn on the supply.
It is part of the owner's duty to provide, not merely that there should be water
for all the purposes of cleanliness and comfort, but that the cisterns which
supply it, and the pump from which it is drawn, are in working condition; that
no giant nuisance shall rear its head in the vicinity-that no haunts of
immorality should pollute the neighbourhood. Should the unconscious tenant enter
upon a house, forgetting to make these inquiries; should he take a house upon
trust, supposing that it was furnished with the comforts and free from the
annoyances we have mentioned, and yet, after all, find he was deceived, the law
would throw its aegis of protection around him, would compel the landlord to
supply the comforts that were wanting, to remove the evils complained of, or
else that his tenant should be released from his agreement. Such suits as these
we have supposed are known to every lawyer, and numberless are the instances in
which a respectable jury, instructed by those judges whom it is the high boast
of England to rear, has granted the protection which the claimant had a right to
ask.
But were redress cut off in this quarter, do you think that
no other means would be adopted to bring the landlord to his senses? The tenant
would most probably quit the house, at some expense to himself perhaps, and at
some annoyance, but then the place would be marked as a plague spot; it would
not, as in the year of the fatal epidemic 1665, be lettered with the red sign
which kept the neighbours at a distance, still it would be quite [-147-]
as much shunned; it would have the bad name attached to it; other landlords in
the neighbourhood would exalt the merits of their respective tenements by
contrast with the condemned one, or, if the annoyance were one which infringed
the laws of morality, would readily join in removing that which tainted the
character of the district.
We have already then disbursed sums quite sufficient to
remove the annoyances and evils of which we complain. We assert, again, that in
this country there is no want of generosity,-of readiness to pay reasonable
imposts. Who can doubt this, when the rates of one parish for sewerage alone in
twenty-two years, amount to £.565,000? Nevertheless, there is a sad want of
management, of that prudence, economy, watching of details, &c. which
characterises the expenditure of private individuals. We want an Act, compiled
and carried out by practical men, who have added this principle to their present
conventional morality,-that the man who cheats the government, or a corporation,
is as great a scoundrel as he who cheats the individual. After railway
exposures, some will say this is too much to expect,-we hope not, for the credit
of the country. Yet, what is the conclusion we draw from these statements,-is it
not the old conclusion, we have before stated, that, if there were no middle-men
between the landlord and the tenant, many of the evils denounced would cease to
exist?
There would be responsible persons at hand, men made
responsible by the appearance of their names in [-148-]
leases and agreements, to set in order these abuses. Men who could at once be
appealed to - dealt with by law - exposed for contumacy. It is the present
system of letting which is in fault, which the Legislature must amend ere the
evil is dealt with at its root.
Before we conclude our labours, we must describe the method
now pursued of letting out lodgings to the poor, as well as the means by which
rents are collected, because we are satisfied that very few know,-even some of
the landlords themselves may be ignorant of the process, - for ignorance alone
can account for their apathy or give a shadow of justification to their neglect.