not much more than a dozen years ago, sir henry campbell-bannerman startled england by stating that thirteen million of our people stood, at all times, on the edge of starvation. he took as a basis the study of the condition of the poor, made by mr charles booth in a great number of volumes, containing a great number of columns of figures, and was alluding in general to the large class that existed on a family income of twenty-three shillings a week. there was something terrible about those figures, so terrible that even the press was shocked. but there was something uninspired and inhuman about mr booth’s columns of figures; it is all very well telling us that so many thousands of people live five in a room, and so many thousands six in a room, and so on, but it does not mean anything. the ordinary man finds it almost as difficult to imagine that kind of life as to visualise a million; he can see six people in a room, but his mind does not bring up the idea of those six people in material attitudes, sleeping, eating, courting, making merry; figures create no microcosm. i suspect that to understand the poor, a little, you need to know very well the places where the poor live. the house is a fairly clear indication of the inhabitant; it is the house he chose, or the house to which he submitted. then who is this poor man? this poor man round whom so many essays have been written? by the fabian society, judicial; by the charity organisation society, severe; by mr john galsworthy, understanding and tender? the poor man is of the same genus as the rich man, but of a different species. (i mean the born poor man as opposed to the born rich man.) the rich man is no better than the poor man; the poor man is no better than the rich man; they are different creatures, made such by different conditions, just as a spaniard and a lancastrian are made different by their various lives. only, and there’s the political rub, englishmen have not to administer the affairs of spaniards, while they do have to administer the affairs of their88 own poor; thus it is important that they should not blunder, because the poor are not good at improving conditions; their attitude is to grin and bear, and then, one day, to cease to bear.
to understand them at all one must take an imaginative leap; if you find this difficult, mr john galsworthy has taken it admirably in the freelands. listen to his description of a labourer’s life:—
‘he gets up summer and winter ... out of a bed that he cannot afford time or money to keep too clean or warm, in a small room that probably has not a large enough window; into clothes stiff with work, and boots stiff with clay; makes something hot for himself, very likely brings some of it to his wife and children; goes out, attending to his digestion crudely and without comfort; works with his hands and feet from half-past six or seven in the morning till past five at night, except that twice he stops for an hour or so and eats simple things that he would not altogether have chosen to eat, if he could have had his will. he goes home to a tea that has been got ready for him, and has a clean-up without assistance, smokes a pipe of shag, reads a newspaper perhaps two days old, and goes out again to work for his own good, in his vegetable patch, or to sit on a wooden bench in an atmosphere of beer and “baccy.” and so, dead tired, but not from directing other people, he drowses himself to early lying again in his doubtful bed.’
one should read, as a contrast, mr galsworthy’s description of the rich man he calls malloring:—
‘your malloring is called with a cup of tea, at, say, seven o’clock, out of a nice, clean, warm bed; he gets into a bath that has been got ready for him; into clothes and boots that have been brushed for him; and goes down to a room where there’s a fire burning already if it’s a cold day, writes a few letters, perhaps, before eating a breakfast of exactly what he likes, nicely prepared for him, and reading the newspaper that best comforts his soul; when he has eaten and read, he lights his cigar or his pipe, and attends to his digestion in the most sanitary and comfortable fashion; then in his study he sits down to the steady direction of89 other people, either by interview or by writing letters, or what not. in this way, between directing people and eating what he likes, he passes the whole day, except that for two or three hours, sometimes indeed seven or eight hours, he attends to his physique by riding, motoring, playing a game, or indulging in a sport that he has chosen for himself. and, at the end of all that, he probably has another bath that has been made ready for him, puts on clean clothes that have been put out for him, goes down to a good dinner that has been cooked for him, smokes, reads, learns, and inwardly digests, or else plays cards, billiards, and acts host until he is sleepy, and so to bed, in a clean, warm bed, in a clean, fresh room.’
i challenge you to say that this is exaggerated. if you like, say you don’t care; but don’t say it isn’t true. and i will not preach at you, but suggest, to such as detect in me sentimentality, that if we belong to a refined and gifted class into whose hands the world has been given, if, indeed, we are refined and gifted people, a condition such as that of the poor man should offend our ?sthetic sense. i have known a rather larger number of poor men than is usual in my class; i have not known them very well, because the worst of the difference between the rich and the poor is that the poor cannot trust the rich; they know them too well. the poor know that the rich conduct against them the class-war, and so they are defensive, inclined either to say the thing that will procure a tip, or a post as office-boy for little tommy, or they will turn savagely on you to show you they are as good as you, and tell you that though margarine is good enough for you, their inborn good taste makes it impossible for them to consume anything but the best butter. one does not get together, any more than that spaniard and that lancastrian would get together, after five years of ollendorff. still, if one passionately wants to understand, one sometimes, for a moment, perceives the shadow of a hint of what another creature is. i remember perceiving it, for the first time, in the midst of an alien family in widegate street, just off petticoat lane; i had been sent by the firm who employed me to make searching inquiries and to dispense small bounties.90 my aliens were, i think, german jews, who called themselves russian refugees because it sounded more appealing; they were not a pleasant crowd; the man was a great, big, heavy, fat fellow, with greasy, black hair, a rather surly brigand; there was a woman, too, lying in a corner, dirtier than the man, presumably because she had been lying there for some time; there were four little children, exceedingly fat and well kept, the usual mystery of jewish poverty; there was an extraordinarily old woman who sat next to the woman on the floor, and from the beginning to the end of the interview said not a word and moved not a feature. but the horror of it came from the woman on the floor, who also said not a word: there was no furniture in the room, not a table, not a chair, not even a bed; the woman lay on a few crumpled newspapers ... and had, the night before, given birth to a child, who lay naked between her indescribably filthy bodice and her breast. they were there, all together, in the midst of life, left and abandoned, hungrily desirous of the moment when the great industrial machine of london would be ready to consume them. impostors, perhaps, but if so, hard is the way of imposture and slender the wages thereof.
i remember thinking, after that, as i went along petticoat lane, that is become middlesex street, how much the district resembled the people. there is no petticoat lane now; middlesex street holds nothing picturesque or national; even its open-air market on sunday morning can be paralleled by any saturday afternoon scene in the little streets of edgware road, or in walker’s court, soho. it is a street mainly of warehouses; widegate street and sandys row exhibit the oddity of narrow crookedness and no more. petticoat lane, where the shops are paltry, and the folk divide into too fat and too lean, is not even a mean street. its one charm is the prevalent, handsome young jewess, aged about fourteen, with high tasselled boots, and plenty of silk stocking, containing plenty of leg. she is a fine girl; she haunts you all along whitechapel road, and so to mile end, with her rude air of wealth and wealth-consciousness. i don’t know how she does it; with very little money, some crude colour and91 some light furs, she suggests opulence. there is something matronly about her, too; she looks so marriageable ... and when one looks into the humid softness of her brown eyes, one finds a limitless rectitude of morals, which may arise from a limitless power to resist temptation.
her thick mouth is tight closed; her stays are tight; her mind is tight. she is fair and square, and will give her husband value for his money, but somehow one feels it a pity that all she will give him is value.
those girls are part of a certain reckless gaiety that pervades whitechapel. i like whitechapel road; the streets that run off it are indeed tragic with dirt and desolation, but the road itself, which is the pleasure-house of the inhabitants, is full of vitality. at all times it is thickly peopled, mostly with foreign jews of all types, many of them scrubby little men with beards, who gesticulate in groups at street corners, and argue with their co-religionists. some are in a state of offensive prosperity. those jewish crowds are more alive than the average london crowd; their eyes shine more, as if they were more capable of conceiving desire. they are at their most intense before the many open-air stalls, where you may buy boots and clothing, flowers, toys, and books, and music, and furniture, and every food you know, and some you do not; and teasers for ladies, and surprises for gents, and penny boxes of tricks that will make you popular at a social evening, and collections of jokes of ancient lineage. it is a wonderful show; it is, in many ways, more wonderful than williamson’s bonanza in the brixton road, because it is cheaper, because a penny goes farther, and thus the penn’orth is more hotly desired. all that points to another side of the poor, the side mr galsworthy never sees: their joys.
it is true that the joyous side of poverty is much less evident than the unhappy side; this because the pleasures of the poor are either localised within their own homes (instead of outcropping in restaurants), or because they are confined every year to a limited number of delirious days. also, the places in which they live are mostly so abominable that it is difficult for men of our sort to92 understand that delight may dwell in a slum a little more easily, and a little longer than love in a cottage.
the slums are so evident to our eyes; they are everywhere. for instance, there is an unexpected little slum in the middle of mayfair, round shepherd market and shepherd street. i believe the whole place is insanitary and should be pulled down (i have no love for the picturesque). it is surprising to think that the inhabitants of mayfair must now and then go through the little, cramped market with the small, dirty houses, yet fail to discover that here, between curzon street and piccadilly, stands a knot of public-houses at one of which, perhaps, sam weller was asked to take part in a swarry of boiled mutton; the hypothetical investigator from grosvenor square would be surprised to find out that here one can buy a shirt for 3s. 6d., sweets by the ounce, underclothes for 2s. 11d., and that for 2d. a hungry man can purchase a meat pie. it is like that all over london, in belgravia, in marylebone, just as in st giles’s. they have not quite slain st giles’s, the street-improvers, and there still is charm in seven dials, where once seven little public-houses stood at seven little corners, and each public-house had a dial. you told the time by tossing up or averaging. and now there is but one dial left, and it has lost its hands. (hush, my soul! do not let the spirit of mr e. v. lucas invade thee.)
shepherd’s market
there is more truth in the frank slums over the river. i once enjoyed the services of a supernumerary postman, who frequently came to my house to make experiments on the garden, to put up shelves, to interfere with the gas, or to drown kittens. in the end he went too far, for he attempted to cure the ball-cock of some obscure disease, and it responded to his treatment by flooding the kitchen three feet deep. but before that tragic day (you should have seen my cat swim), i visited him in rotherhithe, because, among his many supernumerary trades, he numbered that of vine grower. against the back of his house in west lane he had, indeed, managed to grow a splendid, muscular-looking vine, which produced great quantities of grapes; these grapes, when eaten, reproduced what is probably the flavour of vitriol, but he93 was very proud of them, and ate them, and he kept his vine in condition by occasionally watering its roots with a bucket of bullock’s blood. he received this free, because he kept the slaughterer’s books in his spare time. but all this is by the way, and there are many respectable old gentlemen who do all these things and are thought none the worse of; as everybody knows, lunacy in the poor is originality in the rich. what was interesting about the supernumerary’s home was the breadth of west lane, that is really a dingy square of bare earth planted with trees whose every sooty leaf whispers: ‘oh! had i the wings of a dove!’ it is a square of crumbling georgian frontages not devoid of a certain splendour. that discovery is one of the keys to the condition of the poor. you find this not only in rotherhithe, but in clapham, in brixton, in the new kent road; here and there, behind the board of a photographer, where are exposed pictures of young men with all their hair brushed off their foreheads, and of young girls with all their hair brushed into their eyes, you see a beautiful old house with a porch of the adams type. many of these streets, such as old kent road, such as tooley street, have become wholly commercial, have turned into long lines of gray warehouses and decaying side streets, haunted by many children; some, like jamaica road, and most of bermondsey, have entirely fallen into the hands of the grayest commerce, but here and there you are bound to find a still splendid georgian house, looking rather like a distressed irish lady, who does her best to keep her transformation combed, and to maintain the traditions of the ballymullins of county mayo. these houses are in the hands of the poor, which means that, originally intended for prosperous people with several servants, they have been cut up into tenements; this also means that the stairs have not been mended since the days of william iv.; that queen victoria came to the throne, and married and mourned, that disraeli passed reform bills while no bathrooms were put in; that the tap went on running in the backyard, where georgian wealth used to fill the jugs; it means that the old house has lost most of its glass, and is running with mice and stinking with beetles; that the drains have been left by the94 local to a higher authority. part of the tragedy of the poor is that few houses have been built for them, and that they have to adapt themselves to houses discarded by the rich, which are not meant for them, which are not usable by them. the rooms are so large that the poor cannot afford them unless they overcrowd them; or they have tiny windows because they were limited by the old window tax. there is only one thing to do for them, as is the case with most institutions: blow them up.
will the superman be bred by the l.c.c.? i do not know, but i am sure that the superman will not be bred in any numbers in the middle of the stench of the past. evil and old are almost synonyms, and i confess that i like better the vulgarity of the suburban street, with its concrete that pretends to be stone, and its plaster beams that pretend to be wood, its wooden pillars that pretend to be marble. i like it better, with its bay windows, so built that no article of furniture will fit it, with its awful ingle nooks, its sham gables and its sham dormer windows, than the awful old georgian houses near lamb’s conduit street, where, crowded together under a ceiling still flecked with gold, on which naked cherubs sprawl, a dozen russian furriers sit and scratch. for the hideous modern house can at least be clean; it is small; it is washable; a through draught can be arranged; a very little it opens the window on life.
in the sense of housing we have never housed our poor; hardly anywhere, up to 1900 or so, have we done anything but run up rude brick boxes as shelters, or adapt the dwellings of the rich. hence, i believe, a stricken, scrofulous generation. yes, i know there is a charm about all this black filth, as if, indeed, flowers did sprout from dunghills. it is the charm of contrast, it is singularity. you feel it in every poor region. you feel it at the elephant and castle, for instance, though why the elephant should alone be famous, while at the two opposite corners sit the rockingham and alfred’s head, equally great public-houses, i do not know; you feel it in the rowdiness of london road, and in a sort of ‘none-of-your-lip’ air that hangs over newington95 causeway. you feel it still more in deptford; indeed, deptford is a pitiful place, all gray stone and gray slate, but the smell of the sea hangs about it, and as it lies along the docks, often above these slate roofs, above the timber stacks of strange wood, you see the tangled masts and cranes cut out against the sky, patterns evidently designed by nevinson. i remember once seeing on the shoulder of an old woman who kept a stationer’s shop, a gorgeous parrot. it had a yellow and blue body, scarlet feathers in its tail, a bill of ebony, and eyes like molten gold. it sat on her shoulder, thinking of things old as the willow pattern. the parrot looked out upon deptford high street, through the flaming topaz of its eyes at the young men who passed now and then, sun-burnt starvelings of the merchant service, in blue jerseys; the sailors rolled and the parrot thought, and in the heat the east breathed from the logs of mahogany and sandalwood. but under all that, under all that theatrical charm was buried the same old thing, the bad old house made to fit the bad new time.
yet, the poor are not as unhappy as they look. they do not, in the accepted sense, live a life of pleasure, but to say that they have no pleasures, or can have none because they are poor, is a mistake. the poor have cheap pleasures, pleasures which many of us do not care for, and they take no part in what we choose to call pleasures. if i were compelled to say something sweeping, i should say that the rich have less pleasures than the poor; they are free from more pains, but that is not the same thing. the pleasures of the poor reside much more than do ours in animal comforts; whereas the rich take a good dinner and its wines as a matter of course, the poor make a feast of a joint or a gallon of beer. things such as these, food, drink, warmth, second-class travelling, arm-chairs, extra blankets, translate themselves, not into the mere satisfaction of needs, but into recognisable pleasures. it is so in the whole field of their amusements, the cinema, the music-hall, the football and cricket fields, where many watch matches, and a few play them; it is so in regard to bank holidays, to journeys to southend or margate, to bathing, to visiting the chamber of horrors, to being photographed. all these things96 matter more to the poor than they do to the rich, and you will realise that this is true, if you recall that you have never met an underpaid clerk or a working girl who did not passionately look forward to holidays. on the other hand, you are all familiar with the state of mind of a well-to-do family, who solemnly discuss one may evening, ‘where shall we go in august?’ when the poor discuss where they shall go to in august, and most of them mean on august bank holiday, they do not come together in the spirit of profound misery and grim hostility that characterises the respectable classes. they do not go away because they must go away in august, nor must they go away in august because everybody goes away in august: it costs them something to go away. the holiday is a treat, and is not a part of the household budget estimated for in every income. i need not stress this, but we all know that when estimates are prepared one must put in rent, rates, taxes, doctor, dentist, chemist ... holidays. that is not pleasure. but it is pleasure when alf tells ethel that he has had a rise, and that they can this year rise to cromer instead of ramsgate. the difference is still more remarkable if we recall the ‘thank-god-that’s-over’ attitude of the rich when, at last, their holiday is done, and the beneficent train pants into paddington or victoria. i have known many poor young men and women, and never met one who had not enjoyed a perfect holiday. i have met some who had passed seven days in a mackintosh, and even then had enjoyed a perfect holiday.
the poor have pleasures, because they draw more than we can from pleasures; they anticipate more, because they are less spoilt by the experience of pleasures, and have not yet found out that these have mutable faces. to make their good fortune more complete, they are even capable of anticipating pleasure without being disappointed when they attain it. their pleasures are keen, because they are rare. they are keen, because they obtain very little pleasure without paying for it, and as they have little money they must scheme, plan, save; so pleasure becomes a thing to strive for, a true reward; they have to climb the fig tree to secure the figs; they are not cursed with the ownership of the97 fig tree, cannot lie under its boughs until a ripe fig drops into their mouth.
we must not forget, too, that poverty has psychological reactions. mr bernard shaw says that poverty is a disgusting disease, and, on the whole, he is right, but the sufferer has marvellous moments of recovery. in those moments the poor man does what the rich man, by long education, has been taught not to do: he lets himself go. he can hold arms with half a dozen companions and proceed uproariously along a pier, singing abominably an excellent music-hall tune, to the inefficient accompaniment of a concertina or mouth-organ; he can reel out of public-houses in a state of complete indifference to public opinion, instead of being secreted by the club waiter and paternally controlled by a taxi-driver; indeed, the poor man can derive much vanity from his condition, and rise in the esteem of his fellows next day, because he took part in such a spree. (in this country, if you can’t be great, be drunk.) above all, he can make love in public. he can, unashamedly, sit upon a bench in the park, complicatedly intertwined with his beloved, sometimes with two beloveds; nobody minds, and the little god of love will, for a moment, blind the policeman’s bull’s eye. he needs no sussex down, nor footmen, nor thermos flasks, to make a picnic; with the daily mirror beneath the bough, a flask of ginger beer, and her beside him singing, ‘who were you with last night?’ battersea park is paradise enow.
their social functions, too, are more social, and less functional. they do not, in our sense, entertain, that is to say they do not, at given intervals, go through their address book and say: ‘we can’t ask lady so-and-so, because she has refused our last two invitations, and i suppose we must ask the fitz-thompsons. or do you think we could get out of it?’ no, they don’t entertain; they prefer to be entertained, and so, on strictly scheduled occasions, namely, christmas, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and engagements, and on no others, the whole family and a few very old friends are asked to a spread. and it is a spread. it is not compulsory jellies from gunter’s, or game pie from the café royal, or, still98 worse, a dinner no better than every day’s dinner, but merely a little longer; it is a real spread comprising three times the food that is normally eaten, choice food, such as tinned salmon, lobster, trifle with real brandy, stuffed loin of pork, likely to be remembered. if there is wine it is port wine, the real article. the real article and not the rotten routine. so the people they bring together are not the frigid crowd we call acquaintances, whom most of us ask because they have asked us, or because they threaten to do so, people whom we do not know very well and whom we don’t want to know very well, people, therefore, on whom our display cannot make a great impression. the poor ask the people they know well, people who know their exact income. thus they attain a great human pleasure: ostentation. the life of the poor is harsh, but their joys are keen. i used to know a woman who called them the poor poor. what a fool she was!
