Chapter I: DO not mean the old wall of London, that which was built by the (2)

She was stouter and stronger than most girls. They gave her a skirt of sacking, and put her where her strength would be of use. She liked the movement, she liked the exercise of her strong arms, and she liked the noise of the place; she liked the dinner-hour, with its talking and laughing; she liked the factory better than the school; she liked the pay-day, and the money which she kept for herself.

I say that she liked the work and the sense of society and animation. About a year afterward, however, a strange and distressing restlessness seized her. Whether she was attracted by the talk of the other girls, or whether it was an instinctive yearning for change and fresh air, I know not. The thing was infectious. Many other girls compared their symptoms, and found them the same. Finally, the restlessness proving altogether too much for the children, they took hands, thirty of them, and one Saturday afternoon, without bag or baggage, they ran away.

They ran through Wapping and along Thames Street, which is empty on Saturday afternoon; they ran across London Bridge, they poured into London Bridge Station. One of the girls knew the name of the station they wanted; it was in Kent. They took tickets, and they went off.

They had gone hopping.

Thousands of Londoners in the season go hopping. I wish I could dwell upon the delights of the work. Unfortunately, like the summer, it is too soon over. While it lasts the hoppers sleep in barns, they work in the open, they breathe fresh air, they get good pay, they enjoy every evening a singsong and a free-and-easy. The beer flows like a rivulet; everybody is thirsty, everybody is cheerful, everybody is friendly.

When it was over Liz returned, browned and refreshed and strengthened, but fearful of the consequences, because she had deserted her work. But she was fortunate. They took her back into the factory, and so she went on as before.

Let us follow her through a single day. She had to be at the factory at half-past seven in the morning, and, with an hour off for dinner, to work till six. She made her breakfast on tea, bread and margarine, and a “relish.” The relish included many possibilities. It depended mainly on the day of the week. It is obvious that what one can afford on a Monday is unattainable on a Friday. On Monday it might be a herring or a haddock, an egg or a rasher of bacon. On Friday and Saturday it would be a sprig of water-cress or a pickle.

With all factory girls dinner is a continual source of anxiety and disappointment, for the ambitions of youth are lofty, and the yearnings of youth are strong, and the resources of youth are scanty. Within the factory there were, for those who chose to use them, frying-pans and a gas-stove. The girls might cook their food for themselves. There was also hot water for making tea; but the factory girl detests cooking, and may be trusted to spoil and make unfit for human food whatever cooking is intrusted to her. Besides, there were the eating-houses. Here, if you please, were offered to the longing eyes of Liz, always hungry at half-past twelve, daily temptations to extravagance. Just think what the bill of fare every day offered to a girl of discernment in the matter of dinner.

Saveloy and Pease Pudding
German Sausages and Black Pudding
Fried Fish and Pickles
Meat-pie
Pie-crust and Potatoes
Fagots and Mustard Pickle
Beans, Potatoes, Greens, Currant Pudding
Jam Pudding

The mere choice between these delicacies was bewildering, and, alas! on many days only the cheapest were attainable. Every day Liz pondered over the list and calculated the price. The meat-pie at twopence—glorious! But could she afford twopence? The jam pudding at one halfpenny! It seems cheap, and a good lump too, with a thick slab of red jam—plum jam—laid all over the top. But yet, even a halfpenny is sometimes dear. You see that dinner is wanted on seven days in the week. It was impossible to afford jam pudding every day. Fagots, again. They are only a penny hot, and three farthings cold. A fagot is a really toothsome preparation. In appearance it is a square cake. In composition it contains the remnants and odd bits of a butcher’s shop—beef, veal, mutton, lamb, with fat and gristle contributed by all the animals concerned. The whole is minced or triturated. It is treated with spices and shreds of onion, and is then turned out in shapes and baked. No one in the position of our Liz can withstand the temptation of a fagot. The rich people who keep the shops, she believes, live exclusively on fagots. Wealth cannot purchase anything better than a fagot.

To begin with, she had only five shillings a week. When we consider the Sunday dinner, her clothes and her boots, her share of the rent, her breakfast, her amusements, her clubs, of which we shall speak immediately, I do not think that she was justified in laying out more than twopence, or at the most twopence halfpenny, on her daily dinner. A meat-pie with potatoes, a fagot with mustard pickles and greens, and a jam pudding would absorb the whole of her daily allowance. It left this growing girl hungry after eating all of it.

Meantime, the factory people are as careful about their girls as can be expected. They insist on their making a respectable appearance and wearing a hat. In many other ways they look after them. There is a good deal of paternal kindliness in the London employer, especially when he is in a large way.

The factory girls of East London have shown a remarkable power of looking after themselves. Once or twice they have even had a strike. On one occasion they made a demonstration which made the government give in. It is old history now. Once there was a certain statesman named Lowe—Bob Lowe, he was irreverently called. He made a considerable stir in his day, which was about five-and-twenty years ago. He was then Chancellor of the Exchequer. To-day I doubt if there are many young people in England under five-and-twenty who could pass an examination in the political career of Bob Lowe. He was a very fine scholar. He had been a fellow and lecturer of his college at Oxford; he had been a barrister practising in Australia, and he was believed to hold in contempt our colonial empire, and to hunger after the time when Great Britain would become a second Holland. Once he conceived the idea of a tax on matches. His scholarship supplied him with a punning motto, “Ex luce lucellum” (“from light a little profit”). The match-makers rebelled. They marched down to Westminster in their thousands. They demonstrated: they stated their grievance. Bob Lowe quailed, and the government withdrew the bill.

Our young friend Liz had nothing to do with this prenatal business, which, had it happened in her own time, she would have greatly enjoyed. Where she showed her native ability was in the establishment of clubs. They were practical clubs; they were organized upon an entirely new and original method. I can best explain it by giving an illustration. Thus, there is the one-pound club. Twenty girls agree to get up a one-pound club. For twenty weeks they have to subscribe each a shilling. To determine the order of taking the money they draw numbered tickets. The girl who draws No. 1 receives twenty shillings in a lump the first week; the girl who draws No. 2 takes the second week’s money, and so on. It is obvious that this method can be applied to anything, provided the girls who draw the earlier numbers play fair. It seems that they generally do. Should they shirk their duty, there are “ructions.” The girl Liz could not, at first, aspire to the one-pound club. But there were humbler clubs—sixpenny, even penny, clubs. Thus, there were boot clubs, calico clubs, petticoat clubs, tea-fight clubs, jewelry clubs, and, but secretly and among the older girls who had sweethearts to consider and to please, there were spirit clubs, for gin and whisky, not for supernatural manifestations. A girl cannot belong to all these clubs at once, but the convenience of belonging to two or three at a time is very great. It enables a provident girl to keep her wardrobe in order by small weekly savings which are not much felt. In the matter of boots, now; if one draws No. 1 there is a new pair at once; suppose the pair lasts for three months, after six weeks another boot club might give the same girl the last number instead of the first, and so on.

Her days were not spent wholly in the factory. At seven in the winter and at six in the summer she was free; she had also her Saturday afternoons and her Sundays. In other words, she had a fair five hours of freedom every day, ten hours of freedom on Saturdays, and the whole of Sunday. Now, five hours a day of continuous freedom from work is as much as in any working community can be expected. It is a third of the waking day. How did Liz get through that time?

She very soon got beyond her mother’s control. It is not, indeed, the custom with many mothers to exercise authority over a girl at work. Liz did what other girls did. She therefore spent most of her evenings in the boulevard of her quarter, a place called Brook Street. Here she walked about, or ran about, or danced arm in arm with other girls, chaffing the lads, whom she treated, if she had the money, to a drink. She went sometimes to a music-hall, where some of the factory girls “did a turn” or danced in the ballet. She wore no hat or bonnet in the street, and she retained the apron which is the badge of her class. She looked on with interest when there was a fight. She listened with a critical mind when there was an exchange of reproaches between two women.

Then a girls’ club got hold of her and persuaded her to come in. The club was run by some of those ladies of whom I have spoken, the same who trade on the affection of the children for their own purposes, which may be described as a mean and underhand attempt to make the little ones learn to prefer good to evil. At this club there was singing every night, there was dancing with one another, there was reading, there was talking; everybody behaved nicely, and for two or three hours it was a restful time, even though young girls do not feel the need of rest or understand its use.

When the club closed, the girls went away. If it was a fine night and not too cold they went back for a while to Brook Street, where there was neither rest nor quiet nor godly talk.

Besides her evenings, the girl had the four bank-holidays, and the holidays of Christmas and Easter. Nobody in London does any work between Thursday in Passion Week and Easter Tuesday, nor does any one work much between Christmas eve, when that falls on Thursday or Friday, and the following Tuesday.

These days and seasons are not only holidays, they are days reserved for weddings and christenings. It is necessary, of course, that a girl who respects herself should make a creditable appearance at such a time. She must therefore save, and save with zeal. Saving up for bank-holiday becomes a passion. Dinner is reduced to the lowest possible dimensions, even to a halfpenny lump of currant pudding, which is as heavy as lead and the most satisfying thing for the money that can be procured.

Bank-holiday demands a complete change of clothes, from the hat to the boots. Everything must be new. There must not be an old frock with a new hat, nor an old pair of boots with a new frock. This means a great deal of saving. It must also be accompanied by a general cleaning up of the windows, the door-steps, the stairs, the rooms. All over London Street before bank-holiday there is unusual movement. Chairs are brought out, and girls stand upon them to clean the ground-floor windows.

I have already spoken of the change that has come over this quarter. Formerly a holiday was celebrated after the manner of the ancient Danes, by long and barbaric drinking bouts. Early in the morning girls would be seen lying helpless on the pavement. Lads ran about carrying bottles of gin, which they offered to every one. These are customs of the past, though complete soberness is not yet quite achieved.

Still, however, the Ratcliffe girl likes to keep her bank-holiday at home among her own people, in her beloved Brook Street. She cheerfully saves up all she can, so that there may be a good sum for bank-holiday, enough for new clothes and something over, something to treat her friends with. And when the day is over she must go back to her work with an empty purse. Well for her if it is not also with an aching head.

When Liz was approaching the age of seventeen she had learned, from every point of view, all that she would ever learn; she had risen as high as she could rise in the factory; she made as good wages as she would ever make; she lived at home, sharing a room with two sisters; she paid her mother sixpence a week for bed and lodging; her character was formed; her acquaintance with good and evil was deep, wide, and intimate; she was steady, as girls of her class go, thanks to those ladies; if she ever drank too much she was ashamed of herself, and as yet she had no sweetheart. She was affectionate and responded to kindness, but she was self-willed, and would bear no thwarting. She was deficient on the side of imagination. She could not enter into the thoughts or the position of any one except herself; that was the natural result of her narrow, groove-like life. She had rules of conduct and of behavior; of religion she had little, if any, discoverable. She never went to church or chapel. She was fond of every kind of excitement, yet the emotional side of religion touched her not. The Irish girls, of whom there are many at Ratcliffe, were Catholics, and sometimes went to church. Once Liz went there, too, and seemed to like the music and the lights, but she did not repeat her visit.

This was her life all through the week. On Sunday, however, she made a difference.

On that morning she lay in bed till ten or eleven. She spent the time before dinner over her wardrobe; at one o’clock she sat down with the family to the most important ceremony of the week, the Sunday dinner. To other people besides the working-folk of Ratcliffe the Sunday dinner is an institution. Pope’s retired citizen, on Sundays, had, we know, two puddings to smoke upon the board. To all people of the middle class the Sunday dinner is the occasion for a little indulgence, for a glass of wine after dinner. To the resident in Ratcliffe it means a big feed, as much as a man can eat, and that of a popular and favorite dish. There are many dishes dear to the heart of the working-man. He loves everything that is confected with, or accompanied by, things of strong taste. If he knew of the delicacy called lobscouse he would have it nearly every Sunday; if he knew of that other delicacy called potato-pot he would order it frequently. As it is, he relies for the most part upon some portion of pig—that creature of “fine miscellaneous feeding.” He loves roast pork, boiled pork, fried pork, baked pork, but especially he loves pig’s head. His wife buys this portion of the animal, stuffs the ears and eyes thereof with sage and onions,—a great deal of sage and much onion,—and sends it to the bakehouse. Pig’s head thus treated and done to a turn is said to have no fellow. It is accompanied by beer, and beer in plenty. The family sit down to this meal when it is brought in from the baker, and continue eating until they can eat no longer. So, in Arabian deserts, if you would win the hearts of the Bedouin you give them a sheep, and they will eat until they can eat no longer. It is part of the Sunday dinner that there is to be no hint or suspicion of any limit, except that imposed by nature. They eat till they can eat no more.

When she was seventeen Liz found a sweetheart.

He was a young fellow of twenty or thereabouts. He had come out of his native village, some place in the quiet country, a dull place, to enjoy the life of London. He was a highly skilled agricultural laborer; there was nothing on the farm that he could not do. He knew the fields and the woods, the wild creatures and the birds; he knew how to plow and to reap; he could keep an allotment full of vegetables all the year round; he understood a stable and a dairy, a paddock and sheepfold. Yet with all this knowledge he came to London, where it was of no earthly use to him. He threw over the best work that a country lad can have, and he became nothing but a pair of hands like this girl’s father. He was a pair of hands; he was a strong back; his sturdy legs were fit to do the commonest, the heaviest, the most weary work in the world. One evening Liz was standing alone on the pavement, looking at something or other—a barrel-organ, a cheap Jack, one of the common sights and sounds—when this young fellow passed along, walking heavily, as one who has walked chiefly over plowed fields. He looked at her. Something in her face,—it was an honest face,—something in her attitude of alertness and the sharp look of her eye struck his imagination. He hitched closer. In Brook Street it is permissible, it is laudable, to introduce yourself. He said huskily: “I’ve seen you here before. What’s your name? Mine is George.”

That was the beginning of it. Presently the other girls met Liz walking proudly along Brook Street with a big, well-set-up young fellow. They moved out of her way. Liz had got a chap. When would their turn come?

Next night they met again. On Sunday she walked with him along the Mile End Road without her apron and in her best hat. It was a parade and proclamation of an engagement. She told her mother, who was glad. “A man,” she said, “is a better friend than a woman. He sticks.” Liz did not tell the ladies of the club, but the other girls did, and the ladies looked grave and spoke seriously to her about responsibilities.

George did stick to her. He was an honest lad; he had chosen his sweetheart, and he stuck to her. When he had money he gave her treats. He took her by train to Epping Forest, to North Woolwich Gardens, to the theater, to the music-hall. In his way he loved the girl. She would not leave the club, but she gave him part of every evening. He talked to her about the country life he had left behind him. He told her the stories about poachers which belong to every village ale-house. It pleased him to recall the past he had thrown away. All day long he carried heavy bales and boxes and burdens backward and forward. It was monotonous work, cheered only by the striking of the hours and the thought of the coming evening. The poor lad’s day was hallowed by his evening walk.

Six months later Liz was married. It was on the August bank-holiday. The wedding took place at St. James’s Church, Ratcliffe. It was celebrated in a style which did honor to the quarter. The bride was dressed in heliotrope satin. She wore a large hat of purple plush. The bridesmaids were brilliantly attired in frocks of velveteen, green and crimson and blue. They too wore hats of plush. After the ceremony they adjourned to the residence of the bride, where a great feast was spread. The rejoicing lasted all day and all night. When the young couple began their wedded life it was with an empty purse and a week of borrowed food. I hope that George will not get drunk, will not knock his wife down, and will not take the strap to her. If he does, we must comfort ourselves with the thought that to Liz it will be no new thing, hitherto unknown in the land, not an unnatural thing when the drink is in a man, and, unless repeated in soberness, a trifle to be endured and forgotten and forgiven, even seventy times seven.

Here we must leave our girl. She is now a wife. For a little while she will go on at the factory; then she will stay at home. London Street will be enriched by half a dozen children all her own. Like their mother, these children will play in the dust and the mud; like her, they will go to school and be happy; like her, they will go to work in the factory. Liz will be repeated in her children. As long as she lives she will know and enjoy the same life, with the same pleasures, the same anxieties, the same luck. She will “do” for her girls when they grow up. Now and then she will be taken on as a casual at the old factory. London Street will always be her whole world; she will have no interests outside, and when she dies it will be only the vanishing of one out of the multitudes which seem, as I said at the beginning, to be all alike, all living the same life, all enduring, hoping, loving, suffering, sinning, giving, helping, condoling, mourning, in the same kindly, cruel, beneficent, merciless, contradictory, womanly fashion that makes up the life of London Street.

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VI

THE KEY OF THE STREET

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VI

THE KEY OF THE STREET

DURING our walk along the riverside we passed here and there small groups of men, either two and three together or in companies of ten or a dozen. They were “hanging around,” hands in pockets, an empty pipe between their lips, with a slouching, apathetic air; in every case a public house was within very easy reach; in most cases the public house afforded them door-posts and walls against which to lean. They were observed in large numbers around the dock-gates and in long lines leaning against the dock-walls. There was no alertness or activity in the look or the carriage of any of these men; on the other hand, there was no dejection or unhappiness. Had we stopped to ask any of them what they were doing they would have assumed for the moment an imitation of readiness indicated by a slight stiffening of the knee-joints, the withdrawal of the hands from the pocket, and the attitude of attention by which they gave the inquirer to understand that they were waiting for a job.

This is their trade—waiting for a job; it appears to be a trade which takes the spirit out of a man, which makes him limp, which makes him unwilling to undertake that job when it arrives, which tempts him to look for any other way of getting food than the execution of that job, which narrows his views of life so that the haven where he would be is nothing but the bar of the public house, and the only joy he desires is the joy of endeavoring to alleviate a thirst that nothing can assuage.

This manner of life can hardly be reckoned among the more noble. It demands no skill and no training. What they mean by a job is the fetching or carrying something, either in the way of transferring cargo from ship to quay or carrying something from one house to another. If it is the former, if one of these fellows gets taken on at the docks, he enters with a sigh; his work is not worth a fourth part of that done by one of the regular staff, and as soon as he has earned enough for the day’s wants he retires, he goes back to his street corner and his public house, he once more seizes on the momentary rapture of a drink, and he rejoins his limp companions.

I have considered the daily life of the factory girl. Let me now consider that of the casual hand, almost as important an element on the riverside as the girl.

In most cases he is a native of the place; he was born on the riverside; he has been brought up on the riverside; he was born and brought up conveniently near the public house, beside which he wastes the leaden hours of his dreary life. A country lad cannot easily become a creature so weak and limp; the father of the casual hand was himself in the same profession, his mother was a factory girl like her of whom we have been speaking.

This man—he never seems to be more than five-and-thirty, or less than thirty—is one of the very few survivors of a numerous family; the riverside families are very large if you count the graves, for the mortality of the young fills the graveyards very rapidly; most of this man’s brothers and sisters are dead—one can hardly, looking at the man himself and his surroundings, say that they are “gone before”; it is best to say only that they are gone, we know not whither. He himself has been so unfortunate, if we may put the case plainly, as to escape the many perils of infancy and childhood. He has not been “overlaid” as a baby, nor run over as a child, nor carried off with diphtheria, scarlatina, croup, or any other of the disorders which continually hover about these streets, nor has he been the victim of bad nourishment and food which was unsuited to him. He has become immune against contagion and infection; wet feet and cold and exposure have been unable to kill him; the close and fetid air of the one-family living room has carried off his brothers and sisters, but has not been able to strike him down; he is like a soldier who has come unscathed through a dozen battles and a malarious campaign. Surely, therefore, this man ought to be a splendid specimen of humanity, strong and upright. The contrary is the case, however. You observe that he is by no means the kind of Briton we should like to exhibit; he hath a sallow complexion, his shoulders are sloping and narrow, his chest is hollow, his walk is shambling, he has no spring in his feet, his hands betray by their clumsiness his ignorance of any craft, he is flat-footed, his eye lacks intelligence, he is low-browed, the intellectual side of him has not been cultivated or even touched; if you talked with him you would find that he has few ideas, that his command of language is imperfect, and that he is practically inarticulate. The best thing that could happen to such a man would be compulsory farm work, but no farmer would have him on any terms, and he himself would refuse such work; he means to go on as he always goes on, to wait outside the public house for the casual job.

As a child and as a boy he was made to attend school—indeed, he liked nothing better than the hours of school. His mother, who found that in order to send the children off clean and tidy to school she had herself to get up early, and, besides, had to assume for herself some outward appearance of cleanliness, threw every possible obstacle in the way of school attendance. But she was firmly overruled by the school-board visitor and by the magistrate. Therefore she abandoned opposition and acquiesced, though with sadness too deep for words, in the inevitable.

The boy remained at school until his fourteenth year, when he was allowed to leave, on passing the fourth standard. If you ask what he had learned one might refer you to any of the “readers” used in London Board-schools, but probably these interesting and valuable works are not within easy reach. It must suffice, therefore, to explain, as in the case of Liz, that the elementary school readers, as a rule, contain selections, snippets, and scraps of knowledge, and that if a boy who passed the fourth standard remembered them all, from the first to the fourth inclusive, they would carry him a very little way indeed toward the right understanding of the round world and all that is therein.

Now comes the question, What good will the boy’s education be to him in the life that lies before him? Truly, in the case of the casual hand, little or none. For, you see, although, apart from the encyclopedic snippets and the scraps, the boy has learned to read and to write, he never needs the latter accomplishment at all, and, as regards the former, he has no books; his father had no books, his friends have no books. But all the world read newspapers. Not all the world; there is a considerable section, including the casual hand and certain others whom we shall meet immediately, who never read the papers. This boy is not going to read the papers; his father never did, his friends never do, he will not. Why should he? The papers contain nothing that is of the least importance to him; they are apparently in a conspiracy to make it impossible for such as himself to drink unless they work. He speedily forgets his scraps of information, and he gets no more from the usual sources.

You must not, however, imagine that he never learns anything. It is impossible for any boy to grow up in a crowded street in complete ignorance. Something he must learn; some views of life he must be forced to frame, though unconsciously. He will grow up in ignorance of the things which form actual life in other circles, but it is with a riverside lad as with a village lad. The latter, brought up in the country, acquires insensibly a vast mass of information and knowledge about the things of the country—the fields, the hedges, the woods, the birds, the creatures—without book, without school, without master; so the riverside lad, by running about on the Stairs and the foreshore, acquires a vast mass of information about the port and the river and the ships and the ways of those who go down to the deep. He knows the tides, he knows the jetsam and the flotsam of the tides, he trudges and wades in the mud of the foreshore to pick up what the tide leaves for him; he knows all the ships, where they come from, whither they are bound, the great liner which puts in at the West India docks, the packet boats, the coasters, the colliers, the Norwegian timber ships, he knows them all; he knows their rig, he knows their names and when to expect them—the river and all that floats upon it are known to him as a book is known to the student. Were it not for the work, the physical activity, the discipline, the obedience, expected of the man before the mast, he would be a sailor. Concerning the imports and the exports of London he knows more than any official of the Board of Trade—that is to say, figures concern him not, but he knows the bales and the casks and the crates and the boxes: are not his friends engaged every day in discharging cargo and taking it in? All this, you will acknowledge, means a good, solid lump of knowledge which may occupy his brain and give him materials for thought and conversation—if he ever did think, which is doubtful, and if he could converse, which is not at all doubtful.

There is another kind of knowledge which the riverside lad picks up. It is the knowledge of the various ways, means, tricks, craft, and cunning by which many of his friends and contemporaries get through life without doing any work. It is with him as with men in other lines; he knows how things are done, but he cannot do them himself; he lacks courage, he lacks the necessary manner, he lacks the necessary quickness; he would be a rogue if he could; he admires successful roguery, but he is unable to imitate or to copy or to practise roguery. Not everyone can defy the law even for a brief spell between the weary periods of “stretch.”

From picking up trifles unguarded and unwatched on the shore to doing the same thing in the streets is but a step. There are plenty of these lads who learn quite early to prey upon the petty trader. I have been told by one of his victims how to watch for and to observe the youthful prowler. You place yourself in one of the busy streets lined with shops in some position, perhaps at a shop-door, where you may observe without being suspected; it is like Jefferies’ rule for observing the wild creatures; assume an attitude of immobility; the people pass up and down, all occupied with their own affairs, unobservant; presently comes along a boy, long-armed, long-legged; his step is silent and slouching, his eyes beneath the peak of his cap glance furtively round; the stall is unprotected; the goods exposed for sale are only guarded by a child, who is looking the other way; then, in a moment, the hand darts out, snatches something, and the lad with the long and slouching step goes on without the least change in his manner, unsuspected. He is ready to pick up anything—a loaf from the baker, an apple from the coster’s cart, an onion from the green-grocer; nothing comes amiss. And he does it for the honor and the glory of it and the joy in the danger. He is not going to become an habitual criminal, not at all; that career requires serious work; he is going to become a casual hand, and he will remember pleasantly in his manhood the cunning and the sleight-of-hand with which as a boy he knew how to lift things from shop and stall and barrow.

I have spoken of the unguarded things upon the foreshore at low tide. There are still lingering by the riverside survivals of the good old days when the whole people lived in luxury on the robberies they committed from the ships loading and unloading in the river. There are barges which go up and down with the tide. At ebb tide they lie in the mud; the men in charge go ashore to drink; the boys then climb on board in search of what they can get. If the barge is laden with sugar they cut holes in the bags and fill their pockets, their hats, their boots, their handkerchiefs with the stuff, which they carry ashore and sell. They get a halfpenny a pound for their plunder. If the barge is laden with coals they carry off all that their clothes will hold; one goes before to warn the rest of danger; plenty of houses on the way are open to them; it is a comparatively safe and certainly a pleasant way of earning a penny or two. It is also a way which brings with it its own punishment. For the great and ever present temptation with the riverside lad is to shirk work; a physical shrinking from hard work is his inheritance; every way by which he can be relieved from work strengthens this physical shrinking; not at one step, not suddenly, does a young man find work impossible for him; the casual hand grows slowly more casual; the waiter on fortune’s jobs grows steadily more inclined to wait; he finds himself tied to the lamp-post opposite the public house; chains bind him to the doors; within is his shrine, his temple, his praying place, his idol; he keeps his hands in his pockets while he keeps his eyes on the swinging door and suffers his mind to dwell all day long on the fragrance of the beery bar.

Every year there are thousands of boys who leave the London Board-schools, their “education” completed, with no chance of an apprenticeship to any trade, their hands absolutely untrained, just a hanging pair of hands, prehensile, like the monkey’s tail. It is indeed lucky that they are prehensile, otherwise what would be the lot of their owners?

They leave school; they have to face the necessity of making a livelihood for themselves, of earning their daily bread, perhaps for sixty long years to come, without knowing any single one of the many arts and crafts by which men live and provide for their families and themselves. At the outset it appears to be a hopeless task. Of course, it is the greatest possible misfortune for a lad to learn no trade. If we consider the waste of intellectual power alone, where there is no training to skilled labor, it must be acknowledged to be the greatest misfortune that can befall a boy at the outset. Still, all is not lost. For a steady lad, willing to work, this misfortune may be partly overcome. There are many openings for such a boy. Let us consider, for instance, what lines of work he may attempt, keeping only to those which require no previous training and no skill.

He hears of these openings from other boys; he has heard of such openings all his life. For instance, he would very much like to enter the service of the City of London, as one of the boys whose business it is to keep the streets clean. You may see these boys, in a red uniform, running about among the horses and omnibuses in Cheapside; they are always under the horses’ feet, but they never get run over; they are active and smart lads; they seem to take a pride in doing their humble work rapidly and thoroughly. They receive very good pay, which helps to keep up their spirits—6_s._ 6_d._ a week, rising to 9_s._ or 10_s._ Even better than this is the railway service, where a smart lad may very soon get 9_s._ a week. He may then rise to the position of a railway porter. Now, at the great London stations, in which the trains are coming in and going out all day long, and every passenger with luggage is good for a tip of threepence or sixpence, no one knows what the weekly earnings of a railway porter may be. Things are whispered; nothing is known for certain; the position, however, is recognized as one of the prizes in the profession of the unskilled hand.

Then there are the factories—matches, jam, all kinds of factories—into which, if a boy is fortunate enough to be taken, he may make at the outset 5_s._ or 6_s._ a week. It is, however, generally felt that there is a lack of interest about factory work. A much more enviable occupation is that of a van boy, whose very simple duty is to sit behind among the boxes and parcels, in order to take care that none of them are stolen and that none drop off into the street. One is expected to assist in loading and unloading, which means somewhat heavy work, but the greater part of the day is spent in being pleasantly carried up and down the streets of London and enjoying a moving panorama of the town in all its quarters. There are great possibilities for the van boy; if he is ambitious he may hope to become, in course of time, even driver of the van, a post of real distinction and responsibility, with “good money,” although the hours may be long.

Some boys, without taking thought for the future, jump at the post of beer boy to a barge. It is attractive, it is light work, it is well paid, but it leads to nothing. One would not recommend any young friend to accept this post. Generally a barge is loaded and unloaded by one or two gangs of men, seven in a gang. Each of these men pays the beer boy twopence a day, so that if there are two gangs to the barge he will make 2_s._ 4_d._ a day, or 14_s._ a week, his simple duty being to carry beer to the men at work from the nearest public house. The work seems easy, but it requires activity; the gangs are thirsty, tempers are quick, and cuffs are frequent.

This kind of errand situation is very easy to get; in every trade an errand boy is wanted. I am surprised that no one has magnified the post and preached upon the necessity, for the conduct of the internal trade of the country, of the errand boy. As yet he has not found his prophet. Thus a green-grocer is lost without his errand boys; a suburban green-grocer in a flourishing way of business will have twenty boys in his employ; every small draper, every shopkeeper, in fact, small or great, must have his errand boy—but this is a post reserved for older lads. Some one must carry round the things; it is the boy who has learned no trade; the carriage of the basket is the first use to which he puts his unskilled hands. I believe that five shillings a week is the recognized pay for the situation. In one way or another, however, the boy finds some kind of place and begins to earn a living.

As a rule, these boys live well. For breakfast they have bread and butter and tea, with a “relish,” such as an egg or a piece of bacon; at twelve they take their dinner at one of the humbler coffee-houses which abound in the streets of East London; it consists of more bread and butter and tea, with half a steak and potatoes. For tea they go to another coffee-house; they can get two thick slices of bread for a halfpenny each; butter or jam costs another halfpenny; a cup of coffee costs a halfpenny, or a whole pint may be had for a penny. In the evening their favorite supper is the dish familiarly known as “ha’porth and ha’porth”—that is, fish and potatoes at a halfpenny each. So far their life is healthy, with plenty of work and plenty of food, and, in most cases, strong drink is neither desired nor taken. The craving for drink comes later. The dangerous time of life is the age when the boy passes into manhood. Then the simple meals at the coffee-house no longer suffice. Then it becomes necessary to have beer, and beer in ever-increasing quantities. Then the boy grows out of his work; he becomes too big to carry beer for the bargees or to go round with the newspapers, or to sit at the back of the van, or to carry about cabbages in a basket.

What is he to do next?

There are, even for a grown man, many situations which demand no training and no apprenticeship. In all the warehouses, in the great shops, in offices of every kind, there are wanted men to fetch and carry, to load and unload, to pack and unpack. In the docks there are wanted troops of men to load and to unload. In the markets and on the railways there are wanted men to carry and to set out the goods. In every kind of business servants must be had to do that part of the work which requires no skill. Unfortunately the supply is greater than the demand. There are many lads who get into the service of companies, railways, or factories, and remain in steady work all their working lives in the same employment. There are, on the other hand, a great number who have to hang about on the outskirts of regular work, who are taken on in times of pressure and find it difficult to get work when times are slack; these are the men who become the casual hands; these are the men who hang about the dock-gates and loaf round street corners.

The process of degeneration by which the promising lad sinks into the casual hand is easy to follow.

The work, whatever it may be, is finished at half-past six or seven. The lads have, therefore, like the factory girl already considered, four or five solid hours every evening to get through. The other day I was looking through some statistics of work in the eighteenth century. It then began at six, sometimes at half-past five; it left off at eight in the evening, with the exception of those trades which could not be carried on by the light of tallow candles. The people went to bed before ten. The time for supper, rest, and recreation was therefore reduced to two hours. There was no Saturday afternoon holiday. All through the pre-Reformation time there had been a Saturday half-holiday, because Saturday was reckoned as the eve of a saint’s day, and every eve of an important saint’s day was a half-holiday. The Reformation swept away this grateful respite from work. Therefore, except for Sunday, the craftsman’s working-day was practically the whole day long.

We have changed these long for shorter hours; the people have now a long evening to themselves and the Saturday half-holiday, as well as Sunday.

Consider what this means to a lad of sixteen, one of the riverside lads. He has, we have seen, no books and no desire for reading; a free library offers no attractions to him; he has no study or pursuit of any kind; he does not wish to learn anything; and he has four hours, perhaps five, to get through every evening, except Saturday, when he has nine hours, and Sunday, when he has the whole day—say sixteen hours. In every week he has actually forty-five long hours in which to amuse himself as best he can. What is that boy to do? He must do something which brings with it excitement and activity; his blood is restless; he knows not what he wants; it is an age which has its ideals, and his are of the heroic kind, but too often of a perverted heroism.

A few of them, but in proportion very few indeed, belong to the boys’ clubs which are scattered about East London. They are the fortunate boys; they contract friendships with the young men—gentlemen always—who run the club; they can learn all kinds of things if they like; they work off their restlessness and get rid of the devil in the gymnasium with the boxing-gloves and with the single stick; they contract habits of order and discipline; they become infected with some of the upper-class ideals, especially as regards honor and honesty, purity and temperance; the fruits of the time spent in the club are seen in their after life; these are the lads who lead the steady lives and become the supporters of order and authority. A few again, but very few, get the chance of polytechnic classes and continuation schools, but these things are mostly above the riverside folk. Here and there a class is formed and taught by ladies in one or other of the minor arts, such as wood-carving, in which the lads quickly take great delight.

Setting aside these, what becomes of all the rest?

They have the music-hall; there are half a dozen music-halls in which the gallery is cheap; they go to one of these places two or three times a week in winter; they have the public house, but these lads are not, as a rule, slaves to drink so early in life; their own lodgings are not inviting either for comfort or for rest or for society. They have, however, the street.

It is the street which provides the casual hand; it is also the street which produces the drunkard, the loafer, the man who cannot work, the man who will not work, the street rough, the street sneak, and the street thief. The long evening spent in the street nourishes and encourages these and such as these of both sexes.

It is of course the old story—the abuse of liberty. We shorten the hours of work, and we offer nothing in the place of work, except the street; we leave the lads, whom we thought to benefit, to their own devices, and to discover, if they can, the way to turn the hours thus rescued from drudgery into a means of climbing to a higher life. We leave them, even, in complete ignorance as to any higher life at all. Their own idea of employing their idle time is to do nothing, to amuse themselves, and, as the street is the only place where they can find amusement for nothing, they go into the street.

They begin by walking about in little companies of two and three; by way of asserting their early manhood the boys smoke cheap cigarettes, called, I believe, “fags”; also, by way of asserting their own importance—no one knows the conceit and vanity of lads of fifteen and sixteen, the age between the boy and the man—they occupy a great deal of the pavement, they hustle each other, regardless of other people; they get up impromptu fights and sham fights; they wrestle; they make rushes among the crowd; they push about the girls of their own age, who are by no means backward in appreciating and returning these delicate attentions; they whistle and sing, and practise the calls of the day and the locality. A very favorite amusement, in which they are joined and assisted by the girls, is to get up a little acting in dumb show; some of them are excellent mimics. I have, for instance, read more than once in the columns of temperance organs or the letters of philanthropists, tearful or indignant, most melancholy accounts of precocious drunkenness among the boys and girls of East London—that poor East London! “I have seen,” writes the visitor to Ratcliffe and Shadwell, “with my own eyes, boys and girls, quite young boys and girls, reeling about drunk,—actually drunk, hopelessly drunk,—the girls, poor creatures, worse than the boys. I spoke to one. She was no more than thirteen or so—a pretty child, but helplessly intoxicated. When I spoke to her she tried to reply, but became inarticulate; she gasped, she laughed—the awful laugh of a drunkard! She made a gesture of helplessness, she fell sideways on the pavement, and would not rise. Her companions, as far gone as herself, only laughed. A sad sight, truly, in a civilized country!”

A very sad sight, indeed! This observer, however, did not understand that the personation of drunken people is one of the favorite amusements of the boys and girls in the evening streets. They have every day opportunities of studying their subject. A life school exists in every street, and is thrown open every night, and the fidelity with which every stage of drunkenness is represented by these young actors would be remarkable even on the boards of Drury Lane. Had the indignant writer of that letter known so simple a fact his pity and his wrath would have been reserved for a more worthy object.

Acting and running and shouting are amusing as far as they go, but they are not enough. The blood is very restless at seventeen; it wants exercise in reality. This restlessness is the cause of the certain street companies of which the London papers have recently spoken with indignation. They are organized originally for local fights. The boys of Cable Street constitute themselves, without asking the permission of the War Office, into a small regiment; they arm themselves with clubs, with iron bars, with leather belts to which buckles belong, with knotted handkerchiefs containing stones—a lethal weapon—with sling and stones, with knives even, with revolvers of the “toy” kind, and they go forth to fight the lads of Brook Street. It is a real fight; the field is presently strewn with the wounded; the police have trouble in putting a stop to the combat; with broken heads, black eyes, and bandaged arms, the leaders appear next day before the magistrate.