had never had to do with. They were always (he added) as we saw
them. And of us visitors (I add) they knew nothing whatever,
except that we were there.
It was audacious in me, but I took another liberty with Pangloss.
Prefacing it with the observation that, of course, I knew
beforehand that there was not the faintest desire, anywhere, to
hush up any part of this dreadful business, and that the Inquest
was the fairest of all possible Inquests, I besought four things of
Pangloss. Firstly, to observe that the Inquest WAS NOT HELD IN
THAT PLACE, but at some distance off. Secondly, to look round upon
those helpless spectres in their beds. Thirdly, to remember that
the witnesses produced from among them before that Inquest, could
not have been selected because they were the men who had the most
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to tell it, but because they happened to be in a state admitting of
their safe removal. Fourthly, to say whether the coroner and jury
could have come there, to those pillows, and taken a little
evidence? My official friend declined to commit himself to a
reply.
There was a sergeant, reading, in one of the fireside groups. As
he was a man of very intelligent countenance, and as I have a great
respect for non-commissioned officers as a class, I sat down on the
nearest bed, to have some talk with him. (It was the bed of one of
the grisliest of the poor skeletons, and he died soon afterwards.)
'I was glad to see, in the evidence of an officer at the Inquest,
sergeant, that he never saw men behave better on board ship than
these men.'
'They did behave very well, sir.'
'I was glad to see, too, that every man had a hammock.' The
sergeant gravely shook his head. 'There must be some mistake, sir.
The men of my own mess had no hammocks. There were not hammocks
enough on board, and the men of the two next messes laid hold of
hammocks for themselves as soon as they got on board, and squeezed
my men out, as I may say.'
'Had the squeezed-out men none then?'
'None, sir. As men died, their hammocks were used by other men,
who wanted hammocks; but many men had none at all.'
'Then you don't agree with the evidence on that point?'
'Certainly not, sir. A man can't, when he knows to the contrary.'
'Did any of the men sell their bedding for drink?'
'There is some mistake on that point too, sir. Men were under the
impression - I knew it for a fact at the time - that it was not
allowed to take blankets or bedding on board, and so men who had
things of that sort came to sell them purposely.'
'Did any of the men sell their clothes for drink?'
'They did, sir.' (I believe there never was a more truthful
witness than the sergeant. He had no inclination to make out a
case.)
'Many?'
'Some, sir' (considering the question). 'Soldier-like. They had
been long marching in the rainy season, by bad roads - no roads at
all, in short - and when they got to Calcutta, men turned to and
drank, before taking a last look at it. Soldier-like.'
'Do you see any men in this ward, for example, who sold clothes for
drink at that time?'
The sergeant's wan eye, happily just beginning to rekindle with
health, travelled round the place and came back to me. 'Certainly,
sir.'
'The marching to Calcutta in the rainy season must have been
severe?'
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'It was very severe, sir.'
'Yet what with the rest and the sea air, I should have thought that
the men (even the men who got drunk) would have soon begun to
recover on board ship?'
'So they might; but the bad food told upon them, and when we got
into a cold latitude, it began to tell more, and the men dropped.'
'The sick had a general disinclination for food, I am told,
sergeant?'
'Have you seen the food, sir?'
'Some of it.'
'Have you seen the state of their mouths, sir?'
If the sergeant, who was a man of a few orderly words, had spoken
the amount of this volume, he could not have settled that question
better. I believe the sick could as soon have eaten the ship, as
the ship's provisions.
I took the additional liberty with my friend Pangloss, when I had
left the sergeant with good wishes, of asking Pangloss whether he
had ever heard of biscuit getting drunk and bartering its
nutritious qualities for putrefaction and vermin; of peas becoming
hardened in liquor; of hammocks drinking themselves off the face of
the earth; of lime-juice, vegetables, vinegar, cooking
accommodation, water supply, and beer, all taking to drinking
together and going to ruin? 'If not (I asked him), what did he say
in defence of the officers condemned by the Coroner's jury, who, by
signing the General Inspection report relative to the ship Great
Tasmania, chartered for these troops, had deliberately asserted all
that bad and poisonous dunghill refuse, to be good and wholesome
food?' My official friend replied that it was a remarkable fact,
that whereas some officers were only positively good, and other
officers only comparatively better, those particular officers were
superlatively the very best of all possible officers.
My hand and my heart fail me, in writing my record of this journey.
The spectacle of the soldiers in the hospital-beds of that
Liverpool workhouse (a very good workhouse, indeed, be it
understood), was so shocking and so shameful, that as an Englishman
I blush to remember it. It would have been simply unbearable at
the time, but for the consideration and pity with which they were
soothed in their sufferings.
No punishment that our inefficient laws provide, is worthy of the
name when set against the guilt of this transaction. But, if the
memory of it die out unavenged, and if it do not result in the
inexorable dismissal and disgrace of those who are responsible for
it, their escape will be infamous to the Government (no matter of
what party) that so neglects its duty, and infamous to the nation
that tamely suffers such intolerable wrong to be done in its name.
CHAPTER IX - CITY OF LONDON CHURCHES
If the confession that I have often travelled from this Covent
Garden lodging of mine on Sundays, should give offence to those who
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never travel on Sundays, they will be satisfied (I hope) by my
adding that the journeys in question were made to churches.
Not that I have any curiosity to hear powerful preachers. Time
was, when I was dragged by the hair of my head, as one may say, to
hear too many. On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree,
and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have
in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown,
have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair
as a pur
ification for the Temple, and have then been carried off
highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a
potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler
and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite
steamed out of me. In which pitiable plight I have been haled out
of the place of meeting, at the conclusion of the exercises, and
catechised respecting Boanerges Boiler, his fifthly, his sixthly,
and his seventhly, until I have regarded that reverend person in
the light of a most dismal and oppressive Charade. Time was, when
I was carried off to platform assemblages at which no human child,
whether of wrath or grace, could possibly keep its eyes open, and
when I felt the fatal sleep stealing, stealing over me, and when I
gradually heard the orator in possession, spinning and humming like
a great top, until he rolled, collapsed, and tumbled over, and I
discovered to my burning shame and fear, that as to that last stage
it was not he, but I. I have sat under Boanerges when he has
specifically addressed himself to us - us, the infants - and at
this present writing I hear his lumbering jocularity (which never
amused us, though we basely pretended that it did), and I behold
his big round face, and I look up the inside of his outstretched
coat-sleeve as if it were a telescope with the stopper on, and I
hate him with an unwholesome hatred for two hours. Through such
means did it come to pass that I knew the powerful preacher from
beginning to end, all over and all through, while I was very young,
and that I left him behind at an early period of life. Peace be
with him! More peace than he brought to me!
Now, I have heard many preachers since that time - not powerful;
merely Christian, unaffected, and reverential - and I have had many
such preachers on my roll of friends. But, it was not to hear
these, any more than the powerful class, that I made my Sunday
journeys. They were journeys of curiosity to the numerous churches
in the City of London. It came into my head one day, here had I
been cultivating a familiarity with all the churches of Rome, and I
knew nothing of the insides of the old churches of London! This
befell on a Sunday morning. I began my expeditions that very same
day, and they lasted me a year.
I never wanted to know the names of the churches to which I went,
and to this hour I am profoundly ignorant in that particular of at
least nine-tenths of them. Indeed, saying that I know the church
of old GOWER'S tomb (he lies in effigy with his head upon his
books) to be the church of Saint Saviour's, Southwark; and the
church of MILTON'S tomb to be the church of Cripplegate; and the
church on Cornhill with the great golden keys to be the church of
Saint Peter; I doubt if I could pass a competitive examination in
any of the names. No question did I ever ask of living creature
concerning these churches, and no answer to any antiquarian
question on the subject that I ever put to books, shall harass the
reader's soul. A full half of my pleasure in them arose out of
their mystery; mysterious I found them; mysterious they shall
remain for me.
Where shall I begin my round of hidden and forgotten old churches
in the City of London?
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It is twenty minutes short of eleven on a Sunday morning, when I
stroll down one of the many narrow hilly streets in the City that
tend due south to the Thames. It is my first experiment, and I
have come to the region of Whittington in an omnibus, and we have
put down a fierce-eyed, spare old woman, whose slate-coloured gown
smells of herbs, and who walked up Aldersgate-street to some chapel
where she comforts herself with brimstone doctrine, I warrant. We
have also put down a stouter and sweeter old lady, with a pretty
large prayer-book in an unfolded pocket-handkerchief, who got out
at a corner of a court near Stationers' Hall, and who I think must
go to church there, because she is the widow of some deceased old
Company's Beadle. The rest of our freight were mere chance
pleasure-seekers and rural walkers, and went on to the Blackwall
railway. So many bells are ringing, when I stand undecided at a
street corner, that every sheep in the ecclesiastical fold might be
a bell-wether. The discordance is fearful. My state of indecision
is referable to, and about equally divisible among, four great
churches, which are all within sight and sound, all within the
space of a few square yards.
As I stand at the street corner, I don't see as many as four people
at once going to church, though I see as many as four churches with
their steeples clamouring for people. I choose my church, and go
up the flight of steps to the great entrance in the tower. A
mouldy tower within, and like a neglected washhouse. A rope comes
through the beamed roof, and a man in the corner pulls it and
clashes the bell - a whity-brown man, whose clothes were once black
- a man with flue on him, and cobweb. He stares at me, wondering
how I come there, and I stare at him, wondering how he comes there.
Through a screen of wood and glass, I peep into the dim church.
About twenty people are discernible, waiting to begin. Christening
would seem to have faded out of this church long ago, for the font
has the dust of desuetude thick upon it, and its wooden cover
(shaped like an old-fashioned tureen-cover) looks as if it wouldn't
come off, upon requirement. I perceive the altar to be rickety and
the Commandments damp. Entering after this survey, I jostle the
clergyman in his canonicals, who is entering too from a dark lane
behind a pew of state with curtains, where nobody sits. The pew is
ornamented with four blue wands, once carried by four somebodys, I
suppose, before somebody else, but which there is nobody now to
hold or receive honour from. I open the door of a family pew, and
shut myself in; if I could occupy twenty family pews at once I
might have them. The clerk, a brisk young man (how does HE come
here?), glances at me knowingly, as who should say, 'You have done
it now; you must stop.' Organ plays. Organ-loft is in a small
gallery across the church; gallery congregation, two girls. I
wonder within myself what will happen when we are required to sing.
There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while
the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I
can hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music,
I look at the books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and
stuff. They belonged in 1754, to the Dowgate family; and who were
they? Jane Comport must have married Young Dowgate, and come into
the family that way; Young Dowgate was courting Jane Comport when
he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the presentation in the
fly-leaf; if Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, why did she die and
leave the book here? Perhaps at the rickety altar, and before the
damp Commandments, she, Comport, had taken him, Dowgate, in a flush
of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it had not turned out in the
long run as great a success as was expected?
The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts. I then
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find, to my astonishment, that I have been, and still am, taking a
strong kind of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and down
my throat. I wink, sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes; the
clergyman winks; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and
probably winks); all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough. The
snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, stone,
iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the decay
of dead citizens in the vaults below? As sure as Death it is! Not
only in the cold, damp February day, do we cough and sneeze dead
citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have got into
the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. We stamp
our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy clouds.
Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on the
sounding-board over the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of air
comes, tumble down upon him.
In this first experience I was so nauseated by too much snuff, made
of the Dowgate family, the Comport branch, and other families and
branches, that I gave but little heed to our dull manner of ambling
through the service; to the brisk clerk's manner of encouraging us
to try a note or two at psalm time; to the gallery-congregation's
manner of enjoying a shrill duet, without a notion of time or tune;
to the whity-brown man's manner of shutting the minister into the
pulpit, and being very particular with the lock of the door, as if
he were a dangerous animal. But, I tried again next Sunday, and
soon accustomed myself to the dead citizens when I found that I
could not possibly get on without them among the City churches.
Another Sunday.
After being again rung for by conflicting bells, like a leg of
mutton or a laced hat a hundred years ago, I make selection of a
church oddly put away in a corner among a number of lanes - a
smaller church than the last, and an ugly: of about the date of
Queen Anne. As a congregation, we are fourteen strong: not
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