The London Underworld in the Victorian Period: Authentic First-Person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves and Prostitutes: v. 1

by Mayhew, Henry

  The following cases of genuine distress fell under my notice. My readers will observe the difference of tone, the absence of clap-trap, and desire to enlarge upon a harrowing fact of those unfortunates who have been reduced to beggary, compared with the practised shuffle and conventional whine of the mendicant by profession.

  I was standing with a friend at the counter of a tavern in Oxford Street, when a man came in and asked me to help him with a penny.

  I saw at a glance that he was a workman at some hard-working trade. His face was bronzed, and his large, hard hands were unmistakably the hands of a labourer. He kept his eyes fixed on me as he spoke, and begged with a short pipe in his mouth.

  I asked him if he would have some beer?

  “Thank ye, sir, I don’t want beer so much as I want a penny loaf. I haven’t tasted since morn, and I’m not the man I was fifteen year ago, and I feel it.”

  “Will you have some bread-and-cheese and beer?” I asked.

  “Thank ye, sir; bread-and-cheese and beer, and thank ye, sir; for I’m beginning to feel I want something.”

  I asked the man several questions, and he made the following statement:—

  “I’m a miner, sir, and I’ve been working lately five mile from Castleton in Darbyshire. Why did I leave it? Do you want me to tell the truth, now—the real truth? Well then I’ll tell you the real truth. I got drunk—you asked me for the real truth, and now you’ve got it. I’ve been a miner all my life, and been engaged in all the great public works. I call a miner a man as can sink a shaft in anything, barring he’s not stopped by water. I’ve got a wife and two children. I left them at Castleton. They’re all right. I left them some money. I’ve worked in eighteen inches o’ coal. I mean in a chamber only eighteen inches wide. You lay on your side and pick like this. (Here he threw himself on the floor, and imitated the action of a coal-miner with his pick.) I’ve worked under young Mr. Brunel very often. He were not at all a gentleman unlike you, sir, only he were darker. My last wages was six shilling a-day. I expect soon to be in work again, for I know lots o’ miners in London, and I know where they want hands. I could get a bed and a shilling this minute if I knew where my mates lived; but to-day, when I got to the place where they work, they’d gone home, and I couldn’t find out in what part of London they lived. We miners always assist each other, when we’re on the road. I’ve worked in lead and copper, sir, as well as coal, and have been a very good man in my time. I am just forty year old, and I think I’ve used myself too much when I were young. I knows the Cornish mines well. I’m sure to get work in the course of the week, for I’m well known to many on ’em up at Notting Hill. I once worked in a mine where there were a pressure of fifty pound to the square foot of air. You have to take your time about everything you do there—you can’t work hard in a place like that. Thank you, sir, much obliged to you.”

  One evening in the parish of Marylebone an old man who was selling lucifer-matches put his finger to his forehead, and offered me a box. “Ha’penny a box, sir,” he said.

  I told him to follow me; an old woman also accompanied us. He made the following statement:—

  “My name is John Wood—that’s my wife. I am sixty-five years of age; she’s seventy-five—ten years older than I am. I kept a shop round this street, sir, four-and-twenty years. I’ve got a settlement in this parish, but we neither of us like to go into the union—they’d separate us, and we like to be together for the little time we shall be here. The reason we went to the bad was, I took a shop at Woolwich, and the very week I opened it, I don’t know how many hundred men were not discharged from the Arsenal and Dockyard. I lost £350 there; after that we tried many things; but everything failed. This is not a living. I stood four hours last night, and took twopence-ha’penny. We lodge in Warde’s Buildings. We pay one and ninepence a-week. We’ve got sticks of our own,—that is a bed, and a table. We are both of us half-starved. It is hard—very hard. I’m as weak as a rat, and so is my wife. We’ve tried to do something better, but we can’t. If I could get some of the folks that once knew me to assist me, I might buy a few things, and make a living out of them. We’ve been round to ’em to ask ’em, but they don’t seem inclined to help us. People don’t, sir, when you’re poor. I used to feel that myself one time, but I know better now. Good night, sir, and thank you.”

  In the same neighbourhood I saw an elderly man who looked as if he would beg of me if he dared. I turned round to look at him, and saw that his eyes were red as if with crying, and that he carried a rag in his hand with which he kept dabbing them. I gave him a few pence.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said; “God bless you. Excuse me, sir, but my eyes is bad—I suffer from the erysipelas—that is what brought me to this. Kindness rather overcomes me—I’ve not been much used to it of late.”

  He made the following statement:

  “I have been a gentleman’s servant, sir, but I lost my place through the erysipelas. I was mad with it, and confined in Bedlam for four years. The last place I was in service at was Sir H——H——’s (he mentioned the name of an eminent banker). Sir H——was very kind to me. I clean his doorplate now, for which I get a shilling a-week—that’s all the dependence I have now. The servants behave bad to me. Sir H——said that I was to go into the kitchen now and then; but they never give me anything. I don’t get half enough to eat, and it makes me very weak. I’m weak enough naturally, and going without makes me worse. I lodge over in Westminster. I pay threepence a-night, or eighteenpence a-week. There are three others in the same room as me. I hold horses sometimes, and clean knives and forks when I can get it to do; but people like younger men than me to do odd jobs. I can’t do things quick enough, and I’m so nervous that I ain’t handy. I can go into the workhouse, and I think I shall in the winter; but the confinement of it is terrible to me. I’d like to keep out of it if I can. My shilling a-week don’t pay my rent, and I find it very hard to get on at all. Nobody can tell what I go through. I suppose I must go into the workhouse at last. They’re not over kind to you when you’re in. Every day the first thing I try to get is the threepence for my lodging. I pay nightly, then I don’t have anything to pay on Sundays. I don’t know any trade; gentlemen’s servants never do. I used to have the best of everything when I was in service. God bless you, sir, and thank you. I’m very much obliged to you.”

  DISASTER BEGGARS.

  THIS CLASS of street beggars includes shipwrecked mariners, blown-up miners, burnt-out tradesmen, and lucifer droppers. The majority of them are impostors, as is the case with all beggars who pursue begging pertinaciously and systematically. There are no doubt genuine cases to be met with, but they are very few, and they rarely obtrude themselves. Of the shipwrecked mariners I have already given examples under the head of Naval and Military Beggars. Another class of them, to which I have not referred, is familiar to the London public in connection with rudely executed paintings representing either a shipwreck, or more commonly the destruction of a boat by a whale in the North Seas. This painting they spread upon the pavement, fixing it at the corners, if the day be windy, with stones. There are generally two men in attendance, and in most cases one of the two has lost an arm or a leg. Occasionally both of them have the advantage of being deprived of either one or two limbs. Their misfortune so far is not to be questioned. A man who has lost both arms, or even one, is scarcely in a position to earn his living by labour, and is therefore a fit object for charity. It is found, however, that in most instances the stories of their misfortunes printed underneath their pictures are simply inventions, and very often the pretended sailor has never been to sea at all. In one case which I specially investigated, the man had been a bricklayer, and had broken both his arms by falling from a scaffold. He received some little compensation at the time, but when that was spent he went into the streets to beg, carrying a paper on his breast describing the cause of his misfortune. His first efforts were not successful. His appearance (dressed as he was in workman’s clothes) was not sufficiently pi
cturesque to attract attention, and his story was of too ordinary a kind to excite much interest. He had a very hard life of it for some length of time; for, in addition to the drawback arising from the uninteresting nature of his case, he had had no experience in the art of begging, and his takings were barely sufficient to procure bread. From this point I will let him tell his own story:—

  A Shipwrecked Mariner.

  “I had only taken a penny all day, and I had had no breakfast, and I spent the penny in a loaf. I was three nights behind for my lodging, and I knew the door would be shut in my face if I did not take home sixpence. I thought I would go to the workhouse, and perhaps I might get a supper and a lodging for that night. I was in Tottenham Court-road by the chapel, and it was past ten o’clock. The people were thinning away, and there seemed no chance of anything. So says I to myself I’ll start down the New Road to the work’ouse. I knew there was a work’ouse down that way, for I worked at a ’ouse next it once, and I used to think the old paupers looked comfortable like. It came across me all at once, that I one time said to one of my mates, as we was sitting on the scaffold, smoking our pipes, and looking over the work’ouse wall, ‘Jem, them old chaps there seems to do it pretty tidy; they have their soup and bread, and a bed to lie on, and their bit o’ baccy, and they comes out o’a arternoon and baskes in the sun, and has their chat, and don’t seem to do no work to hurt ’em.’ And Jem he says, ‘it’s a great hinstitooshin, Enery,’ says he, for you see Jem was a bit of a scollard, and could talk just like a book. ‘I don’t know about a hinstitooshin, Jem,’ says I, ‘but what I does know is that a man might do wuss nor goe in there and have his grub and his baccy regular, without nought to stress him, like them old chaps.’ Somehow or other that ’ere conversation came across me, and off I started to the work’ouse. When I came to the gate I saw a lot of poor women and children sitting on the pavement round it. They couldn’t have been hungrier than me, but they were awful ragged, and their case looked wuss. I didn’t like to go in among them, and I watched a while a little way off. One woman kep on ringing the bell for a long time, and nobody came, and then she got desperate, and kep a-pulling and ringing like she was mad, and at last a fat man came out and swore at her and drove them all away. I didn’t think there was much chance for me if they druv away women and kids, and such as them, but I thought I would try as I was a cripple, and had lost both my arms. So I stepped across the road, and was just agoing to try and pull the bell with my two poor stumps when some one tapped me on the shoulder. I turned round and saw it was a sailor-like man, without ne’er an arm like myself, only his were cut off short at the shoulder. ‘What are you agoing to do?’ says he. ‘I was agoing to try and ring the work’ouse bell,’ says I. ‘What for?’ says he. ‘To ask to be took in,’ says I. And then the sailor man looks at me in a steady kind of way, and says, ‘Want to get into the work’ouse, and you got ne’er an arm? Your’e a infant,’ says he. ‘If you had only lost one on ’em now, I could forgive you, but—’ ‘But surely,’ says I, ‘it’s a greater misfortune to lose two nor one; half a loaf’s better nor no bread, they say.’ ‘You’re a infant,’ says he again. ‘One off aint no good; both on ’em’s the thing. Have you a mind to earn a honest living,’ says he, quite sharp. ‘I have,’ says I; ‘anything for a honest crust.’ ‘Then,’ says he, ‘come along o’ me.’ So I went with the sailor man to his lodging in Whitechapel, and a very tidy place it was, and we had beefsteaks and half a gallon o’ beer, and a pipe, and then he told me what he wanted me to do. I was to dress like him in a sailor’s jacket and trousers and a straw ’at, and stand o’ one side of a picture of a shipwreck, vile he stood on the ’tother. And I consented, and he learned me some sailors’ patter, and at the end of the week he got me the togs, and then I went out with him. We did only middlin the first day, but after a bit the coppers tumbled in like winkin’. It was so affectin’ to see two mariners without ne’er an arm between them, and we had crowds round us. At the end of the week we shared two pound and seven shillings, which was more nor a pound than my mate ever did by his self. He always said it was pilin’ the hagony to have two without ne’er an arm. My mate used to say to me, ‘Enery, if your stumps had only been a trifle shorter, we might ha’ made a fortun by this time; but you waggle them, you see, and that frightens the old ladies.’ I did well when Trafalgar Jack was alive. That was my mate, sir; but he died of the cholera, and I joined another pal who had a wooden leg; but he was rough to the kids, and got us both into trouble. How do I mean rough to the kids? Why, you see, the kids used to swarm round us to look at the pictur just like flies round a sugar-cask, and that crabbed the business. My mate got savage with them sometimes, and clouted their heads, and one day the mother o’ one o’ the brats came up a-screaming awful and give Timber Bill, as we called him, into custody, and he was committed for a rogue and vagabond. Timber Bill went into the nigger line arterwards and did well. You may have seen him, sir. He plays the tambourine, and dances, and the folks laugh at his wooden leg, and the coppers come in in style. Yes, I’m still in the old line, but it’s a bad business now.”

  Blown-up Miners.

  These are simply a variety of the large class of beggars who get their living in the streets, chiefly by frequenting public-houses and whining a tale of distress. The impostors among them—and they are by far the greater number—do not keep up the character of blown-up miners all the year round, but time the assumption to suit some disaster which may give colour to their tale. After a serious coal-mine accident “blown-up miners” swarm in such numbers all over the town that one might suppose the whole of the coal-hands of the north had been blown south by one explosion. The blown-up miner has the general appearance of a navvy; he wears moleskin trousers turned up nearly to the knees, a pair of heavy-laced boots, a sleeved waistcoat, and commonly a shapeless felt hat of the wide-awake fashion. He wears his striped shirt open at the neck, showing a weather-browned and brawny chest. The state of his hands and the colour of his skin show that he has been accustomed to hard work, but his healthy look and fresh colour give the lie direct to his statement that he has spent nearly the whole of his life in working in the dark many hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Many of them do not pretend that they have been injured by the explosion of the mine, but only that they have been thrown out of work. These are mostly excavators and bricklayers’ labourers, who are out of employ in consequence of a stoppage of the works on which they have been engaged, or more often, as I have proved by inquiry, in consequence of their own misconduct in getting drunk and absenting themselves from their labour. These impostors are easily detected. If you cross-question them as to the truth of their stories, and refer to names and places which they ought to be acquainted with if their representations were genuine, they become insolent and move away from you. There are others, however, who are more artful, and whose tales are borne out by every external appearance, and also by a complete knowledge of the places whence they pretend to have come. These men, though sturdy and horny-fisted, have a haggard, pallid look, which seems to accord well with the occupation of the miner. They can converse about mining operations, they describe minutely the incidents of the accident by which they suffered, and they have the names of coal-owners and gangsmen ever ready on their tongues. In addition to this they bare some part of their bodies—the leg or the arm—and show you what looks like a huge scald or burn. These are rank impostors, denizens of Wentworth-street and Brick-lane, and who were never nearer to Yorkshire than Mile-end gate in their lives. Having met with one or two specimens of “real” distressed miners, I can speak with great certainty of the characteristics which mark out the impostor. For many years past there has always been an abundance of work for miners and navigators; indeed the labour of the latter has often been at a premium; cases of distress arise among them only from two causes—ill-health and bodily disaster. If they are in health and found begging it is invariably during a long journey from one part of the country to another. The look and manner o
f these miners forbids the idea of their being systematic mendicants or impostors. They want something to help them on the road, and they will be as grateful for a hunck of bread and cheese as for money. If you cross-question these men they never show an uncomfortable sense of being under examination, but answer you frankly as if you were merely holding a friendly conversation with them. Miners are very charitable to each other, and they think it no shame to seek aid of their betters when they really need it. Of the device called the “scaldrum dodge,” by which beggars of this class produce artificial sores, I shall have to treat by-and-bye.

  Burnt-Out Tradesmen.

  With many begging impostors the assumption of the “burnt-out tradesman” is simply a change of character to suit circumstances; with others it is a fixed and settled rôle. The burnt-out tradesman does not beg in the streets by day; he comes out at night, and his favourite haunts are the private bars of public-houses frequented by good company. In the day-time he begs by a petition, which he leaves at the houses of charitable persons with an intimation that he will call again in an hour. In the evening he is made up for his part. He lurks about a public-house until he sees a goodly company assembled in the private bar, and then, when the “gents,” as he calls them, appear to be getting happy and comfortable, he suddenly appears among them, and moves them by the striking contrast which his personal appearance and condition offers to theirs. Like many others of his class he has studied human nature to some purpose, and he knows at a glance the natures with which he has to deal. Noisy and thoughtless young men, like clerks and shopmen, he avoids. They are generally too much occupied with themselves to think of him or his misfortunes; and having had no experience of a responsible position, the case of a reduced tradesman does not come home to them. A quiet and sedate company of middle-aged tradesmen best suits his purpose. They know the difficulties and dangers of trade, and maybe there are some of them who are conscious that ruin is impending over themselves. To feeling men of this class it is a terrible shock to see a man, who has once been well-to-do like themselves, reduced to get a living by begging. The burnt-out tradesman’s appearance gives peculiar force to his appeal. He is dressed in a suit of black, greasy and threadbare, which looks like the last shreds of the dress suit which he wore on high days and holidays, when he was thriving and prosperous. His black satin stock, too, is evidently a relict of better days. His hat is almost napless; but it is well brushed—indicating care and neatness on the part of its owner. His shoes are mere shapeless envelopes of leather, but the uppers are carefully polished, and the strings neatly tied. When the burnt-out tradesman enters a bar he allows his appearance to have its due effect before he opens his mouth, or makes any other demonstration whatever. In this he seems to imitate the practice of the favourite comedian, who calculates upon being able to bespeak the favour of his audience by merely showing his face. The beggar, after remaining motionless for a moment, to allow the company fully to contemplate his miserable appearance, suddenly and unexpectedly advances one of his hands, which until now has been concealed behind his coat, and exposes to view a box of matches. Nothing can surpass the artistic skill of this mute appeal. The respectable look, and the poor, worn clothes, first of all—the patient, broken-hearted glance accompanied by a gentle sigh—and then the box of matches! What need of a word spoken. Can you not read the whole history? Once a prosperous tradesman, the head of a family, surrounded by many friends. Now, through misfortune, cast out of house and home, deserted by his friends, and reduced to wander the streets and sell matches to get his children bread. Reduced to sell paltry matches! he who was in a large way once, and kept clerks to register his wholesale transactions! It is seldom that this artist requires to speak. No words will move men who can resist so powerful an appeal. When he does speak he does not require to say more than—“I am an unfortunate tradesman, who lost everything I possessed in the world by a disastrous fire—” Here the halfpence interrupt his story, and he has no need to utter another word, except to mutter his humble thanks.