About My Father's Business

GIVING REST TO THE WEARY

We have not yet done with this wonderful district of Soho. It is one of those attractive quarters of London, which is interesting alike for its historical associations and for memorable houses that were once inhabited by famous men. In essays, letters, fiction – all through that period which has been called the Augustan age of English literature – we find allusions to it; and after that time it continued to be the favourite resort of artists, men of letters, wealthy merchants, and not a few statesmen and eminent politicians. In Leicester Square, Hogarth laughed, moralised, and painted. The house of Sir Joshua Reynolds stands yet in that now renovated space, and a well-known artist has a studio there to-day. But the tide of fashion has receded since powdered wigs and sedan chairs disappeared. The tall stately houses are many of them dismantled, or are converted into manufactories and workshops. The great iron extinguishers which still adorn the iron railings by the doorsteps have nearly rusted away. It must be a century since the flambeaux carried by running footmen were last thrust into them, when great rumbling, creaking coaches drew up and landed visitors before the dimly-lighted portals. Silence and decay are the characteristics of many a once goodly mansion; and the houses themselves are not unfrequently associated with the relief of that poverty which is everywhere so apparent as to appeal to almost every form of charity. Before one such house we are standing now, its quietly opening door revealing a broad lofty hall, from which a great staircase, with heavy baluster of black oak and panelled walls leads to the spacious rooms above. This mansion is historical, too, in its way, for we are at the corner of Soho Square, in Greek Street, and are about to enter what was once the London residence of the famous Alderman Beckford, and his equally famous son – the man who inherited the mysterious and gorgeously furnished palace at Fonthill, the author of "Vathek," the half-recluse who bought Gibbon's extensive library at Lausanne, that he might have "something to amuse him when he went that way," and afterwards went that way, read himself nearly blind, and then made a friend a present of all the books, sold Fonthill, went abroad, and set about building another mysterious castle in a strange land.

In that big committee-room on the first floor, which we shall visit presently, there was to be seen, four or five years ago, a stupendous chimney-piece of oak, elaborately carved, and said to have been a masterpiece of Grinling Gibbons. It was taken down and sold for a handsome sum of money, to augment the funds of the Institution which now occupies the old mansion, for the door at which we enter receives other guests than those who once thronged it – suffering, depressed, poverty-stricken, weary men and women, who come here to seek the rest that is offered to them in the quiet rooms – the restoration of meat and drink and refreshing sleep, the comfort of hopeful words and friendly aid. It is named "The House of Charity," and the work that its supporters have set themselves to do is carried on so silently – I had almost said so secretly – that the stillness you observe within the building, as we stand here waiting for the lady who superintends the household, is suggestive alike of the repose which is essential to the place, and of a severe earnestness not very easy to define.

Members of the same committee, whose earnest hearty work is apparent at Newport Market and at the Soup Kitchen in Ham Yard, are helping this House of Charity, which has the Archbishop of Canterbury for its patron and the Bishop of London for its visitor.

Here, in the two large sitting-rooms opening from the hall, we may see part of what is being done, in giving rest to the weary and upholding them who are ready to faint. One is for men, the other for women, who have been received as inmates, for periods extending from a fortnight to a longer time, according to the necessities of each case, and the probability of obtaining suitable employment. Of course the aid is intended to be only temporary – though in some peculiar cases it is continued till the applicant recovers from weakness following either uninfectious illness or want. There can be, of course, no actual sick-nursing here; but in a warm and comfortable upper room, near the dormitory, which we shall see presently – a room which is the day-nursery of a few children who are also admitted – I have seen young women, one who was suffering from a consumptive cough, another an out-patient at an hospital for disease of the hip, and wearing an instrument till she could be admitted as a regular case. They were both sitting cosily at their tea, and were employed at needlework, as most of the women are who find here a temporary home. For it is one of the beneficent results of an influential committee, that a number of cases are sent to hospitals or to convalescent homes, and so are restored; but till this can be done they are fed and tended – fed with food more delicate than that of the ordinary meal – and are allowed to rest in peace and to regain strength.

But we are still in the men's sitting-room, where several poor fellows are looking at the lists of advertisements in the newspapers for some announcement of a vacant situation. A supply of books is also provided both for men and women, and the latter are just now engaged in mending or making their clothes.

Between thirty and forty inmates can be received at one time, and those who are in search of employment, or who require to go out during the day, may leave the house after breakfast, and return either to dinner or to tea. There are, indeed, few restrictions when once preliminary inquiries and the recommendation of a member of the committee result in the admission of an applicant; and it is easy to see how deeply and thankfully many of these poor depressed men and women, beaten in the battle of life, with little hope of regaining a foothold, weak, dispirited, destitute, and with no strength left to struggle under the burden that weighs them down, find help and healing, food and sleep, advice, and very often a recommendation which places them once more in a position of comfort and independence. A large proportion of those who are admitted are provided with situations either permanently or for a period long enough to enable them to turn round the difficult corner from poverty and dependence to useful and appropriate employment. Some are sent to Homes, hospitals, or orphanages, and many return to their own homes. From those homes they have wandered, hoping to find the world easier than it has proved to be, and in going back to them they have fallen by the wayside.

There are sometimes remarkable varieties here – emigrants waiting for ships to sail that will bear them to another land; men of education, such as tutors, engineers, engravers, and professional men, who have been unsuccessful, or have lost their position, often through no immediate fault of their own. Of course, the large class of genteel poverty is largely represented in the five or six hundred cases which make the average number of yearly inmates. Clerks, shopmen, and travellers are about as numerous as servants, porters, and pages. Poor women, many of whom are ladies by birth or previous position and education, find the House of Charity a refuge indeed, and feel that the person who has charge of the household arrangements, as well as those who have charge of the inmates, the accounts and correspondence, may be appealed to with an assurance of true sympathy. Here, beside the two sitting-rooms, is a large room which we will call the refectory; it is plainly furnished, with separate tables for men and women, and the quantity and description of the food supplied is such as would be provided in a respectable and well-ordered family – tea or coffee and plenty of good bread-and-butter morning and evening, meat, bread and vegetables, for dinner, and a supper of bread and cheese. There are no "rations," nor any special limit as to quantity, and if one could forget the distress which brings them hither, the family might be regarded as belonging to some comfortable business establishment, with good plain meals and club-room on each side the dining-hall for meeting in after working hours.

Let us go upstairs, and look at the dormitories, which occupy respectively the right and left side of the building, and we shall see that they are so arranged as to secure that privacy, the want of which would be most repulsive to persons of superior condition. Each long and lofty room is divided into a series of enclosures or cabins by substantial partitions about eight feet high, and in each of these separate rooms – all of which are lighted by several windows or by gas-branches in the main apartment – there is a neat comfortable bed and bedstead, with space for a box, a seat, and a small table or shelf.

A resident chaplain or warden conducts morning and evening prayer in the chapel, which is built on part of the open area at the back of the building; and I would have you consider, not only that to many of these weary souls this sacred spot may come to be associated with that outcome to renewed life for which their presence in the Institution gives them reason to hope, but that it is most desirable for the invalids, who frequently form so large a portion of the congregation, to be able to attend worship without practically leaving the house.

Not only because of the sick and the physically feeble, however, does the House of Charity represent a work that needs vast extension.

The case-book would reveal a series of stories none the less affecting because they are entered plainly, briefly, and without waste of words. They need few touches of art to make them painfully interesting. They tell of ladies, wives of professional men, brought to widowhood and sudden poverty; of men of education cast adrift through failure or false friendship, and not knowing where to seek bread; of children left destitute or deserted under peculiar circumstances; of women removed from persecution, and girls from the tainted atmosphere of vice; of weary wanderers who, in despair of finding such a shelter, and dreading the common lodging-house, have spent nights in the parks; of foreigners stranded on the shore of a strange city; of ministers of the gospel brought low; of friendless servant-girls, ill-treated, defrauded of their wages, or discharged almost penniless, and cast loose amidst the whirlpool of London streets.

But, as I have already intimated, it is not alone for its temporary aid in affording a home that the House of Charity is distinguished; it affords a good hope also, by seeking to obtain situations, for cases where peculiar circumstances make such a search difficult – for bereaved and impoverished ladies, and for educated men, as well as for domestic servants and ordinary employés. Its supporters give their special aid to the work, and, as they number amongst them many ladies and gentlemen of considerable social influence, employment is frequently found for those whose misfortunes would otherwise be almost irretrievable.

WITH THE POOR AND NEEDY

All hope abandon, ye who enter here," would, as we might fancy, be an appropriate inscription for many a wretched court and alley in the greatest and most opulent city in the world – a city distinguished for its claims to be regarded as the centre of civilisation; as the exemplar of benevolence, and of active Christianity. It is one of the marvellous results of the vast extent of this metropolis of England that there are whole districts of foul dwellings crowded with a poverty-stricken population, which yet are almost ignored, so far as public recognition of their existence is concerned. Legislation itself does not reach them, in the sense of compelling the strict observance of Acts of Parliament framed and presumably enforced for the purpose of maintaining sanitary conditions; philanthropy almost stands appalled at the difficulty of dealing with a chronic necessity so widely spread, a misery and ignorance so deep and apparently impregnable; sentimentalism sighs and turns away with a shiver, or is touched to the extent of relieving its overcharged susceptibilities by the comfortable expedient of the smallest subscription to some association in the neighbourhood. True, active, practical religion alone, of all the agencies that have operated in these places, gains ground inch by inch, and at last exercises a definite and beneficial influence, by taking hold of the hearts and consciences of the people themselves, and working from within the area of vice and misery, till the law of love, beginning to operate where the law of force had no influence, a change, gradual but sure, here a little and there a little, is effected.

We are continually hearing of the "dwellings of the poor;" and can scarcely take up a newspaper without noting the phrase, "one of the worst neighbourhoods in London," connected with some report of crime, outrage, or suffering; yet how few of us are really familiar with the actual abodes of the more degraded and miserable of our fellow-citizens! how quickly, how gladly, we dismiss from our memory the account of an inquest where the evidence of the cause of death of some unfortunate man, woman, or child, without a natural share of light, air, food, and water, reveals hideous details of want and wretchedness, which we might witness only a few streets off, and yet are unconscious of their nearness to us in mere physical yards and furlongs, because they are so far from us spiritually, in our lack of sympathy and compassion.

Even at the time that these lines are being written I have before me a report of an examination by the coroner into the circumstances attending the death of a woman seventy years of age, who obtained a miserable and precarious living by stay-making, and who was found dead in the back kitchen of a house. Her death was alleged to have been brought about by the unhealthiness of the house in which she lived, although the landlord was a medical officer of health for one of the metropolitan districts.

In this case the alleged landlord, who was actually a medical officer of health, answered the charge made against him by the statement that he had only just come into possession of the property, and had at once set about putting it in repair. It is to be hoped that this was the case, and, indeed, the evidence of the sanitary inspector went to show that it was so; but the question remains: How is it that dwellings are permitted to be thus overcrowded, and to become actual centres of pestilence in the midst of entire neighbourhoods, where, for one foul tenement to have an infamous reputation amidst such general filth and dilapidation, it must indeed be, as one member of the jury said this place was, "so bad, that no gentleman would keep his dog there?"

Keep his dog indeed! Why I know whole rows and congeries of intersecting courts and alleys where a country squire would no more think of kennelling his hounds than he would dream of stabling his horses! There has during the past few years been a tolerably determined stand made against the introduction of pigsties into the back-yards of some of the hovels about Mile End and Bethnal Green; and though cow-sheds are not altogether abolished everywhere in close and overbuilt localities, there are some precautions taken to diminish the sale of infected milk by an inspection of the laystalls, and the enforcement of lime-whiting and ventilation in the sheds. Costermongers' donkeys are the only animals besides dogs and cats which are commonly to be found in London slums now, and as these can be stowed in any shanty just outside the back door, or can be littered down in a spare corner of a cellar, they remain, in costermongering districts, without much opposition on the part of the local authorities. For, after all, what can these authorities do? Under the 35th section of the Sanitary Act, power was given to them to register all houses let out by non-resident landlords, who were under a penalty of forty shillings for not keeping their houses in repair, well supplied with water, drainage clear, &c. To those who have an intimate acquaintance with the density of population in whole acreages of London slums, there is something almost ludicrous in these words, especially when they are read in the light of the fact that the landlords of such places are frequently parochial magnates or officials who know how to make things pleasant with subordinate sanitary inspectors.

What may be the ultimate result of an Act of Parliament "for improving the dwellings of the poor" it is not at present easy to say; but assuredly any plan which commences by a general and imperfectly discriminative destruction of existing houses, hovels though they may be, will only have the effect of crowding more closely the already fœtid and swarming tenements where, for half-a crown a week, eight or ten people eat, live, and sleep in a single apartment. It was only the other day, in a district of which I shall presently speak more definitely, that a "mission woman" was called in to the aid of a family, consisting of a man, his wife, his wife's brother – who was there as a lodger – and five or six children, all of whom occupied one room, where the poor woman had just given birth to an infant. The place was almost destitute of furniture; beds of straw and shavings, coverlets of old coats and such ragged clothing as could be spared; little fire and little food. Such destitution demanded that the "maternity box," or a suddenly-extemporised bag of baby-clothing and blankets, should be fetched at once; and though the mission there is a poor one, with terrible needs to mitigate, a constant demand for personal work and noble self-sacrifice, such cases are every-day events, such demands always to be answered by some kind of helpful sympathy, even though the amount of relief afforded is necessarily small and temporary in character.

Not in one quarter of London alone, but dotted here and there throughout its vastly-extending length and breadth – from St. Pancras, and further away northward, to Bethnal Green and all that great series of poverty-stricken townships and colonies of casual labour, on the east; from the terrible purlieux of Southwark, the districts where long rows of silent houses, in interminable streets, chill the unaccustomed wayfarer with vague apprehensions, where "Little Hell" and the knots and tangles of that "Thief-London" which has found a deplorable Alsatia in the purlieux of the Borough and of Bermondsey; and so round the metropolitan circle, westward to the neighbourhood of aristocratic mansions and quiet suburban retreats, where the garotter skulks and the burglar finds refuge; further towards the centre of the town, in Westminster, not a stone's-throw from the great legislative assembly, which, while it debates in St. Stephen's on sanitation and the improvement of dwellings, scarcely remembers all that may be seen in St. Peter's, about Pye Street, and remembers Seven Dials and St Giles's only as traditional places, where "modern improvements" have made a clean sweep, just as the Holborn Viaduct and the metropolitan Railway swept away Field Lane, and the new meat market at Smithfield put an end for ever to the horrible selvage of Cloth Fair – and only left the legends of Jonathan Wild's rookery and the "blood-bowl house."

But the very mention of these places brings the reflection that not in outlying districts, but in the very heart of London, in the core of the great city itself, the canker of misery, poverty, and vice is festering still. What is the use of eviction, when the law punishes houselessness, and the Poor Law cannot meet any sudden demand, nor maintain any continuous claim on the part of the houseless? Summarily to thrust a score or so of wretched families into the streets is to make them either criminals or paupers. They must find some place of shelter; and if they are to live by their labour, they must live near their labour, the wages of which are, at best, only just sufficient to procure for them necessary food and covering for their bodies.

In the neighbourhood to which I have already referred, four thousand evictions have taken place, or, at any rate, the population has diminished from 22,000 to 18,000, because of a small section of a large puzzle map of courts and alleys having been taken down in order to build great blocks of warehouses. The consequence is, that in the remaining tangle of slums the people herd closer, and that a large number of poor lodgers have gone to crowd other tenements not far distant, and which were already peopled beyond legal measure.

For this acreage of vice and wretchedness of which I speak is close to the great city thoroughfares – almost within sound of Bow Bells. It is about a quarter of a mile in extent each way, lying between the Charterhouse and St. Luke's, close to the new meat market at Smithfield on one side, and Finsbury Square on the other. One entrance to it is directly through Golden Lane, Barbican; the other close to Bunhill Fields burial ground, along a passage which bears the significant name of "Chequer Alley." It is a maze of intersecting and interlocking courts, streets, and alleys, some of them without any thoroughfare, some reached by ascending or descending steps, many of them mere tanks, the walls of which are represented by hovels inhabited by costermongers, French-polishers, dock-labourers, chair-makers, workers at all kinds of underpaid labour and poor handicrafts. Many of the women go out to work at factories, or at charing, and the children are – or at least were – left to the evil influences of the streets, till another and a more powerful influence began to operate, slowly, but with the impetus of faith and love, to touch even this neglected and miserable quarter of London with "the light that lighteth every man."