Dickens's England Read Online Free PDF Page B

the day den of the establishment, with little happetite for breakfast, but feelin’ the necessity of havin’ some in order to kill time. A greasy-collared, jerkin’, lank-’aired waiter casts a second-’and badly-washed web over a slip of a table, in a stewy, red-curtained box, into which the sun beats with unmitigated wengeance. A Britannia-metal teapot, a cup, a plate, a knife and a japanned tea-caddy make their appearance. Then comes a sugar-basin, followed by a swarm of flies, that ’unt it as the ’ounds would a fox, and a small jug of “sky-blue” [watered milk], which the flies use as a bath durin’ the repast on the sugar. A half-buttered muffin mounts a waterless slop-basin; a dirty egg accompanies some toasted wedges of bread; the waiter points to a lump of carrion wot he calls beef, on a dusty sideboard, and promises the Post as soon as it is out of ’and. Sixteen gents sit at sixteen slips of table, lookin’ at each other with curiosity or suspicion, but never a word is exchanged by any on them. Presently they begin to wacate their slips of wood . . . and the coffee-room is gradually emptied into the crowded streets.’
    R.S. Surtees, Handley Cross (1845)
    (II)
    [In the Low Lodging-Houses]
    â€˜Why, sir,’ said one man, who had filled a commercial situation of no little importance, but had, through intemperance, been reduced to utter want, ‘I myself have slept in the top room of a house not far from Drury Lane, and you could study the stars, if you were so minded, through the holes left by the slates having been blown off the roof. It was a fine summer’s night, and the openings in the roof were then rather an advantage, for they admitted air, and the room wasn’t so foul as it might have been without them.’ . . . He had slept in rooms so crammed with sleepers – he believed there were 30 where 12 would have been a proper number – that their breaths in the dead of night and in the unventilated chamber, rose (I use his own words) ‘in one foul, choking steam of stench.’ . . .
    In some of these lodging-houses, the proprietor – or, I am told, it might be more correct to say, the proprietress, as there are more women than men engaged in the nefarious trade carried on in these houses – are ‘fences’, or receivers of stolen goods in a small way. Their ‘fencing’, unless as the very exception, does not extend to any plate, or jewellery, or articles of value, but is chiefly confined to provisions, and most of all to those which are of ready sale to the lodgers.
    Of very ready sale are ‘fish got from the gate’ (stolen from Billingsgate); ‘sawney’ (thieved bacon), and ‘flesh found in Leadenhall’ (butcher’s meat stolen from that market). . . . Some of the ‘fences’ board, lodge and clothe two or three boys or girls, and send them out regularly to thieve, the fence usually taking all the proceeds, and if it be the young thief has been successful, he is rewarded with a trifle of pocket-money, and is allowed plenty of beer and tobacco. . . .
    In some of these establishments, men and women, boys and girls – but perhaps in no case, or in very rare cases, unless they are themselves consenting parties – herd together promiscuously. . . . Boys have boastfully carried on loud conversations, and from distant parts of the room, of their triumphs over the virtue of girls, and girls have laughed at and encouraged the recital. Three, four, five, six and even more boys and girls have been packed, head and feet, into one small bed; some of them perhaps never met before. On such occasions any clothing seems often enough to be regarded as merely an incumbrance. . . . The indiscriminate admixture of the sexes among adults, in many of these places, is another evil. Even in some houses considered of the better sort, men and women, husbands and wives, old and young, strangers