sweet poetry from morning to night. I hardly know
whether it is my fault, or the effect of a weakness in
Leigh Hunt's character, that I should be sensible of a
regret of this nature, when, at the same time, I sincerely
believe that he has found an infinity of better things in
the world whither he has gone.
At our leave-taking, he grasped me warmly by both
hands, and seemed as much interested in our whole
party as if he had known us for years. All this was
genuine feeling, a quick, luxuriant growth out of his
heart, which was a soil for flower-seeds of rich and rare
varieties, not acorns, but a true heart, nevertheless.
Several years afterwards I met him for the last time at a
London dinner-party, looking sadly broken down by
infirmities ; and my final recollection of the beautiful
old man presents him arm in arm with, nay, if I mistake
not, partly embraced and supported by, another beloved
and honored poet, whose minstrel-name, since he has a
week-day one for his personal occasions, I will venture
to speak. It was Barry Cornwall, whose kind introduc-
tion had first made me known to Leigh Hunt.
OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH
POVERTY
BECOMING an inhabitant of a great English town, I
often turned aside from the prosperous thorough-
fares, (where the edifices, the shops, and the bustling crowd
differed not so much from scenes with which I was fa-
miliar in my own country,) and went designedly astray
among precincts that reminded me of some of Dickens's
grimiest pages. There I caught glimpses of a people
and a mode of life that were comparatively new to my
observation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric spectacle,
exceedingly undelightful to behold, yet involving a sin-
gular interest and even fascination in its ugliness.
Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over the
world, being the symbolic accompaniment of the foul
incrustation which began to settle over and bedim all
earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple ;
ever since which hapless epoch, her daughters have
chiefly been engaged in a desperate and unavailing
struggle to get rid of it. But the dirt of a poverty-
stricken English street is a monstrosity unknown on our
side of the Atlantic. It reigns supreme within its own
limits, and is inconceivable everywhere beyond them.
We enjoy the great advantage, that the brightness and
dryness of our atmosphere keep everything clean that
the sun shines upon, converting the larger portion of our
impurities into transitory dust which the next wind can
sweep away, in contrast with the damp, adhesive grime
that incorporates itself with all surfaces (unless continu-
ally and painfully cleansed) in the chill moisture of the
English air. Then the all-pervading smoke of the city,
abundantly intermingled with the sable snow-flakes of
bituminous coal, hovering overhead, descending, and
alighting on pavements and rich architectural fronts, on
254
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 255
the snowy muslin of the ladies, and the gentlemen's
starched collars and shirt-bosoms, invests even the
better streets in a half-mourning garb. It is beyond the
resources of Wealth to keep the smut away from its
premises or its own fingers' ends ; and as for Poverty, it
surrenders itself to the dark influence without a struggle.
Along with disastrous circumstances, pinching need,
adversity so lengthened out as to constitute the rule of
life, there comes a certain chill depression of the spirits
which seems especially to shudder at cold water. In
view of so wretched a state of things, we accept the
ancient Deluge not merely as an insulated phenomenon,
but as a periodical necessity, and acknowledge that noth-
ing less than such a general washing-day could suffice
to cleanse the slovenly old world of its moral and mate-
rial dirt.
Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are
numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets, and are set
off with the magnificence of gilded door-posts, tarnished
by contact with the unclean customers who haunt there.
Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs,
or broken-nosed teapots, or any such make-shift recep-
tacle, to get a little poison or madness for their parents,
who deserve no better requital at their hands for having
engendered them. Inconceivably sluttish women enter
at noon-day and stand at the counter among boon-com-
panions of both sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in
a bumper together, and quaffing off the mixture with a
relish. As for the men, they lounge there continually,
drinking till they are drunken, drinking as long as
they have a halfpenny left, and then, as it seemed to
me, waiting for a sixpenny miracle to be wrought in
their pockets, so as to enable them to be drunken again.
Most of these establishments have a significant adver-
tisement of " Beds," doubtless for the accommodation of
their customers in the interval between one intoxication
and the next. I never could find it in my heart, how-
ever, utterly to condemn these sad revellers, and should
certainly wait till I had some better consolation to offer
before depriving them of their dram of gin, though death
256 OUR OLD HOME
itself were in the glass ; for methought their poor souls
needed such fiery stimulant to lift them a little way out
of the smothering squalor of both their outward and in-
terior life, giving them glimpses and suggestions, even
if bewildering ones, of a spiritual existence that limited
their present misery. The temperance-reformers un-
questionably derive their commission from the Divine
Beneficence, but have never been taken fully into its
counsels. All may not be lost, though those good men
fail.
Pawn-brokers' establishments, distinguished by the
mystic symbol of the three golden balls, were conven-
iently accessible ; though what personal property these
wretched people could possess, capable of being esti-
mated in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a
loan, was a problem that still perplexes me. Old
clothes men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and hung out
ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were
butchers' shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighbor-
hood, presenting no such generously fattened carcasses
as Englishmen love to gaze at in the market, no
stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs or
muttons ornamented with carved bas-reliefs of fat on
their ribs and shoulders, in a peculiarly British style of
art, not these, but bits and gobbets of lean meat, sel-
vages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy morsels,
bare bones smitten away from joints by the cleaver,
tripe, liver, bullocks' feet, or whatever else was cheap-
est and divisible into the smallest lots. I am afraid that
even such delicacies came to many of their tables hardly
oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other
little shops you saw half a dozen wizened herrings,
some eggs in a basket, looking so dingily antique that
your imagination smelt them, fly-speckled biscuits, seg-
ments of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco.
Now and then a sturdy milk-woman passed by with a
wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a pail on either
side, filled with a whitish fluid, the composition of which
was water and chalk and the milk of a sickly cow, who
gave the best she had, poor thing ! but could scarcely
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 257
make it rich or wholesome, spending her life in some
close city-nook and pasturing on strange food. I have
seen, once or twice, a donkey coming into one of these
streets with panniers full of vegetables, and departing
with a return cargo of what looked like rubbish and
street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to exist,
except, possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of stock-
ings or a worked collar, or a man whisper something
mysterious about wonderfully cheap cigars. And yet I
remember seeing female hucksters in those regions, with
their wares on the edge of the sidewalk and their own
seats right in the carriage-way, pretending to sell half-
decayed oranges and apples, toffy, Ormskirk cakes,
combs and cheap jewelry, the coarsest kind of crockery,
and little plates of oysters, knitting patiently all day
long, and removing their undiminished stock in trade
at nightfall. All indispensable importations from other
quarters of the town were on a remarkably diminutive
scale : for example, the wealthier inhabitants purchased
their coal by the wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones
by the peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy
spectacle, when an overladen coal-cart happened to pass
through the street and drop a handful or two of its bur-
den in the mud, to see half a dozen women and children
scrambling for the treasure-trove, like a flock of hens
and chickens gobbling up some spilt corn. In this con-
nection I may as well mention a commodity of boiled
snails (for such they appeared to me, though probably a
marine production) which used to be peddled from door
to door, piping hot, as an article of cheap nutriment.
The population of these dismal abodes appeared to
consider the sidewalks and middle of the street as their
common hall. In a drama of low life, the unity of place
might be arranged rigidly according to the classic rule,
and the street be the one locality in which every scene
and incident should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and
counterplot, conspiracies for robbery and murder, family
difficulties or agreements, all such matters, I doubt not,
are constantly discussed or transacted in this sky-roofed
saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal-
258 OUR OLD HOME
smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of the English
climate, the only comfortable or wholesome part of life,
for the city poor, must be spent in the open air. The
stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at night,
whole families and neighborhoods together, or sulkily
elbow one another in the daytime, when a settled rain
drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is
worth while (without a practical object in view) to admit
into one's imagination. No wonder that they creep forth
from the foul mystery of their interiors, stumble down
from their garrets, or scramble up out of their cellars, on
the upper step of which you may see the grimy house-
wife, before the shower is ended, letting the raindrops
gutter down her visage ; while her children (an impish
progeny of cavernous recesses below the common sphere
of humanity) swarm into the daylight and attain all that
they know of personal purification in the nearest mud-
puddle. It might almost make a man doubt the existence
of his own soul, to observe how Nature has flung these
little wretches into the street and left them there, so
evidently regarding them as nothing worth, and how all
mankind acquiesce in the great mother's estimate of her
offspring. For, if they are to have no immortality, what
superior claim can I assert for mine ? And how difficult
to believe that anything so precious as a germ of immor-
tal growth can have been buried under this dirt-heap,
plunged into this cesspool of misery and vice ! As often
as I beheld the scene, it affected me with surprise and
loathsome interest, much resembling, though in a far
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a boy, I
used to turn over a plank or an old log that had long lain
on the damp ground, and found a vivacious multitude of
unclean and devilish-looking insects scampering to and
fro beneath it. Without an infinite faith, there seemed
as much prospect of a blessed futurity for those hideous
bugs and many-footed worms as for these brethren of our
humanity and co-heirs of all our heavenly inheritance.
Ah, what a mystery ! Slowly, slowly, as after groping
at the bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope
struggles upward to the surface, bearing the half-drowned
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY
259
body of a child along with it, and heaving it aloft for its
life, and my own life, and all our lives. Unless these
slime-clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling
celestial air, I know not how the purest and most intel-
lectual of us can reasonably expect ever to taste a breath
of it. The whole question of eternity is staked there.
If a single one of those helpless little ones be lost, the
world is lost !
The women and children greatly preponderate in such
places ; the men probably wandering abroad in quest of
that daily miracle, a dinner and a drink, or perhaps slum-
bering in the daylight that they may the better follow out
their cat-like rambles through the dark. Here are women
with young figures, but old, wrinkled, yellow faces, tanned
and blear-eyed with the smoke which they cannot spare
from their scanty fires, it being too precious for its
warmth to be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them
sit on the door-steps, nursing their unwashed babies at
bosoms which we will glance aside from, for the sake of
our mothers and all womanhood, because the fairest spec-
tacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark
abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all
known it to be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I re-
member, smote me with more grief and pity (all the more
poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclina-
tion to smile) than to hear a gaunt and ragged mother
priding herself on the pretty ways of her ragged and
skinny infant, just as a young matron might, when she
invites her lady friends to admire her plump, white-robed
darling in the nursery. Indeed, no womanly character-
istic seemed to have altogether perished out of these poor
souls. It was the very same creature whose tender tor-
ments make the rapture of our young days, whom we
love, cherish, and protect, and rely upon in life and death,
and whom we delight to see beautify her beauty with rich
robes and set it off with jewels, though now fantastically
masquerading in a garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to
handle. I recognized her, over and over again, in the
groups round a door-step or in the descent of a cellar,
chatting with prodigious earnestness about intangible
2 6o OUR OLD HOME
trifles, laughing for a little jest, sympathizing at almost
the same instant with one neighbor's sunshine and an-
other's shadow, wise, simple, sly, and patient, yet easily
perturbed, and breaking into small feminine ebullitions
of spite, wrath, and jealousy, tornadoes of a moment,
such as vary the social atmosphere of her silken-skirted
sisters, though smothered into propriety by dint of a well-
bred habit. Not that there was an absolute deficiency of
good breeding, even here. It often surprised me to wit-
ness a courtesy and deference among these ragged folks,
which, having seen it, I did not thoroughly believe in,
wondering whence it should have come. I am persuaded,
however, that there were laws of intercourse which they
never violated, a code of the cellar, the garret, the
common staircase, the door-step, and the pavement, which
perhaps had as deep a foundation in natural fitness as the
code of the drawing-room.
Yet again I doubt whether I may not have been utter-
ing folly in the last two sentences, when I reflect how
rude and rough these specimens of feminine character
generally were. They had a readiness with their hands
that reminded me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines
in Fielding's novels. For example, I have seen a woman
meet a man in the street, and, for no reason perceptible
to me, suddenly clutch him by the hair and cuff his ears,
an infliction which he bore with exemplary patience,
only snatching the very earliest opportunity to take to his
heels. Where a sharp tongue will not serve the purpose,
they trust to the sharpness of their finger-nails, or incar-
nate a whole vocabulary of vituperative words in a re-
sounding slap, or the downright blow of a doubled fist.
All English people, I imagine, are influenced in a far
greater degree than ourselves by this simple and honest
tendency, in cases of disagreement, to batter one an-
other's persons ; and whoever has seen a crowd of
English ladies (for instance, at the door of the Sistine
Chapel, in Holy Week) will be satisfied that their bel-
ligerent propensities are kept in abeyance only by a
merciless rigor on the part of society. It requires a vast
deal of refinement to spiritualize their large physical en-
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 261
dowments. Such being the case with the delicate orna-
ments of the drawing-room, it is the less to be wondered
at that women who live mostly in the open air, amid the
coarsest kind of companionship and occupation, should
carry on the intercourse of life with a freedom unknown
to any class of American females, though still, I am re-
solved to think, compatible with a generous breadth of
natural propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see them
(of all ages, even elderly, as well as infants that could
just toddle across the street alone) going about in the
mud and mire, or through the dusky snow and slosh of
a severe week in winter, with petticoats high uplifted
above bare, red feet and legs ; but I was comforted by
observing that both shoes and stockings generally reap-
peared with better weather, having been thriftily kept
out of the damp for the convenience of dry feet within
doors. Their hardihood was wonderful, and their
strength greater than could have been expected from
such spare diet as they probably lived upon. I have
seen them carrying on their heads great burdens under
which they walked as freely as if they were fashionable
bonnets ; or sometimes the burden was huge enough
almost to cover the whole person, looked at from behind,
as in Tuscan villages you may see the girls coming
in from the country with great bundles of green twigs
upon their backs, so that they resemble locomotive
masses of verdure and fragrance. But these poor
English women seemed to be laden with rubbish, in-
congruous and indescribable, such as bones and rags,
the sweepings of the house and of the street, a merchan-
dise gathered up from what poverty itself had thrown
away, a heap of filthy stuff analogous to Christian's
bundle of sin.
Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected a certain
gracefulness among the younger women that was alto-
gether new to my observation. It was a charm proper
to the lowest class. One girl I particularly remember, in
a garb none of the cleanest and nowise smart, and her-
self exceedingly coarse in all respects, but yet endowed
with a sort of witchery, a native charm, a robe of simple
262 OUR OLD HOME
beauty and suitable behavior that she was born in and
had never been tempted to throw off, because she had
really nothing else to put on. Eve herself could not
have been more natural. Nothing was affected, nothing
imitative ; no proper grace was vulgarized by an effort
to assume the manners or adornments of another sphere.
This kind of beauty, arrayed in a fitness of its own, is
probably vanishing out of the world, and will certainly
never be found in America, where all the girls, whether
daughters of the upper-tendom, the mediocrity, the cot-
tage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of dress and
deportment, seldom accomplishing a perfectly triumphant
hit or an utterly absurd failure. Those words, "genteel"
and "ladylike," are terrible ones and do us infinite mis-
chief, but it is because (at least, I hope so) we are in a
transition state, and shall emerge into a higher mode of
simplicity than has ever been known to past ages.
In such disastrous circumstances as I have been at-
tempting to describe, it was beautiful to observe what a
mysterious efficacy still asserted itself in character. A
woman, evidently poor as the poorest of her neighbors,
would be knitting or sewing on the door-step, just as fifty
other women were ; but round about her skirts (though
wofully patched) you would be sensible of a certain sphere
of decency, which, it seemed to me, could not have been
kept more impregnable in the cosiest little sitting-room,
where the tea-kettle on the hob was humming its good
old song of domestic peace. Maidenhood had a similar
power. The evil habit that grows upon us in this harsh
world makes me faithless to my own better perceptions ;
and yet I have seen girls in these wretched streets, on
whose virgin purity, judging merely from their impression
on my instincts as they passed by, I should have deemed
it safe, at the moment, to stake my life. The next mo-
ment, however, as the surrounding flood of moral un-
cleanness surged over their footsteps, I would not have
staked a spike of thistle-down on the same wager. Yet
the miracle was within the scope of Providence, which
is equally wise and equally beneficent, (even to those
poor girls, though I acknowledge the fact without the
GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 263
remotest comprehension of the mode of it,) whether they
were pure or what we fellow-sinners call vile. Unless
your faith be deep-rooted and of most vigorous growth,
it is the safer way not to turn aside into this region so
suggestive of miserable doubt. It was a place " with
dreadful faces thronged," wrinkled and grim with vice
and wretchedness ; and, thinking over the line of
Milton here quoted, I come to the conclusion that those
ugly lineaments which startled Adam and Eve, as they
looked backward to the closed gate of Paradise, were no
fiends from the pit, but the more terrible foreshadowings
of what so many of their descendants were to be. God
help them, and us likewise, their brethren and sisters !
Let me add, that, forlorn, ragged, care-worn, hopeless,
dirty, haggard, hungry, as they were, the most pitiful
thing of all was to see the sort of patience with which
they accepted their lot, as if they had been born into
the world for that and nothing else. Even the little
children had this characteristic in as perfect develop-
ment as their grandmothers.
The children, in truth, were the ill-omened blossoms
from which another harvest of precisely such dark fruit-
age as I saw ripened around me was to be produced.
Of course, you would imagine these to be lumps of
crude iniquity, tiny vessels as full as they could hold of
naughtiness ; nor can I say a great deal to the contrary.
Small proof of parental discipline could I discern, save
when a mother (drunken, I sincerely hope) snatched her
own imp out of a group of pale, half-naked, humor-eaten
abortions that were playing and squabbling together in
the mud, turned up its tatters, brought down her heavy
hand on its poor little tenderest part, and let it go again
with a shake. If the child knew what the punishment
was for, it was wiser than I pretend to be. It yelled,
and went back to its playmates in the mud. Yet let
me bear testimony to what was beautiful, and more
touching than anything that I ever witnessed in the
intercourse of happier children. I allude to the super-
intendence which some of these small people (too small,
one would think, to be sent into the street alone, had
264 OUR OLD HOME
there been any other nursery for them) exercised over
still smaller ones. Whence they derived such a sense
of duty, unless immediately from God, I cannot tell ; but
it was wonderful to observe the expression of responsi-
bility in their deportment, the anxious fidelity with which
they discharged their unfit office, the tender patience
with which they linked their less pliable impulses to the
wayward footsteps of an infant, and let it guide them
whithersoever it liked. In the hollow-cheeked, large-
eyed girl of ten, whom I saw giving a cheerless over-
sight to her baby-brother, I did not so much marvel at it.
She had merely come a little earlier than usual to the
perception of what was to be her business in life. But
I admired the sickly-looking little boy, who did violence
to his boyish nature by making himself the servant of
his little sister, she too small to walk, and he too small
to take her in his arms, and therefore working a kind
of miracle to transport her from one dirt-heap to another.
Beholding such works of love and duty, I took heart
again, and deemed it not so impossible, after all, for
these neglected children to find a path through the
squalor and evil of their circumstances up to the gate
of heaven. Perhaps there was this latent good in all of
them, though generally they looked brutish, and dull
even in their sports ; there was little mirth among them,
nor even a fully awakened spirit of blackguardism. Yet
sometimes, again, I saw, with surprise and a sense as
if I had been asleep and dreaming, the bright, intelli-
gent, merry face of a child whose dark eyes gleamed
with vivacious expression through the dirt that incrusted
its skin, like sunshine struggling through a very dusty