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_ It is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have
its appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave my
lodging in Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should no more
think of altering my route by the way, or turning back and leaving
a part of it unachieved, than I should think of fraudulently
violating an agreement entered into with somebody else. The other
day, finding myself under this kind of obligation to proceed to
Limehouse, I started punctually at noon, in compliance with the
terms of the contract with myself to which my good faith was
pledged.
On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walk as my beat,
and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the
same. There is many a ruffian in the streets whom I mentally
collar and clear out of them, who would see mighty little of
London, I can tell him, if I could deal with him physically.
Issuing forth upon this very beat, and following with my eyes three
hulking garrotters on their way home,--which home I could
confidently swear to be within so many yards of Drury-lane, in such
a narrow and restricted direction (though they live in their
lodging quite as undisturbed as I in mine),--I went on duty with a
consideration which I respectfully offer to the new Chief
Commissioner,--in whom I thoroughly confide as a tried and
efficient public servant. How often (thought I) have I been forced
to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of
nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy
magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did, at that
present speaking, dwell in a street or court which no man dared go
down, and how that the worthy magistrate had heard of the dark
reputation of such street or court, and how that our readers would
doubtless remember that it was always the same street or court
which was thus edifyingly discoursed about, say once a fortnight.
Now, suppose that a Chief Commissioner sent round a circular to
every division of police employed in London, requiring instantly
the names in all districts of all such much-puffed streets or
courts which no man durst go down; and suppose that in such
circular he gave plain warning, 'If those places really exist, they
are a proof of police inefficiency which I mean to punish; and if
they do not exist, but are a conventional fiction, then they are a
proof of lazy tacit police connivance with professional crime,
which I also mean to punish'--what then? Fictions or realities,
could they survive the touchstone of this atom of common sense? To
tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature of
news as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as
was never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam
and gas and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the
sanctuaries and stews of the Stuarts! Why, a parity of practice,
in all departments, would bring back the Plague in two summers, and
the Druids in a century!
Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned a
wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of
trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the
other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to
raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it, but
of both sexes, were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling,
fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and
hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I
had over-turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of
that wolfish gripe, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion
in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs
and arms and dirt, the money might be. In raising the child, I had
drawn it aside out of the main thoroughfare, and this took place
among some wooden hoardings and barriers and ruins of demolished
buildings, hard by Temple Bar.
Unexpectedly, from among them emerged a genuine police-constable,
before whom the dreadful brood dispersed in various directions, he
making feints and darts in this direction and in that, and catching
nothing. When all were frightened away, he took off his hat,
pulled out a handkerchief from it, wiped his heated brow, and
restored the handkerchief and hat to their places, with the air of
a man who had discharged a great moral duty,--as indeed he had, in
doing what was set down for him. I looked at him, and I looked
about at the disorderly traces in the mud, and I thought of the
drops of rain and the footprints of an extinct creature, hoary ages
upon ages old, that geologists have identified on the face of a
cliff; and this speculation came over me: If this mud could
petrify at this moment, and could lie concealed here for ten
thousand years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our
successors on the earth could, from these or any marks, by the
utmost force of the human intellect, unassisted by tradition,
deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a polished
state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected
children in the streets of its capital city, and was proud of its
power by sea and land, and never used its power to seize and save
them!
After this, when I came to the Old Bailey and glanced up it towards
Newgate, I found that the prison had an inconsistent look. There
seemed to be some unlucky inconsistency in the atmosphere that day;
for though the proportions of St. Paul's Cathedral are very
beautiful, it had an air of being somewhat out of drawing, in my
eyes. I felt as though the cross were too high up, and perched
upon the intervening golden ball too far away.
Facing eastward, I left behind me Smithfield and Old Bailey,--fire
and faggot, condemned hold, public hanging, whipping through the
city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful
ancestral landmarks, which rude hands have rooted up, without
bringing the stars quite down upon us as yet,--and went my way upon
my beat, noting how oddly characteristic neighbourhoods are divided
from one another, hereabout, as though by an invisible line across
the way. Here shall cease the bankers and the money-changers; here
shall begin the shipping interest and the nautical-instrument
shops; here shall follow a scarcely perceptible flavouring of
groceries and drugs; here shall come a strong infusion of butchers;
now, small hosiers shall be in the ascendant; henceforth,
everything exposed for sale shall have its ticketed price attached.
All this as if specially ordered and appointed.
A single stride at Houndsditch Church, no wider than sufficed to
cross the kennel at the bottom of the Canon-gate, which the debtors
in Holyrood sanctuary were wont to relieve their minds by skipping
over, as Scott relates, and standing in delightful daring of
catchpoles on the free side,--a single stride, and everything is
entirely changed in grain and character. West of the stride, a
table, or a chest of drawers on sale, shall be of mahogany and
French-polished; east of the stride, it shall be of deal, smeared
with a cheap counterfeit resembling lip-salve. West of the stride,
a penny loaf or bun shall be compact and self-contained; east of
the stride, it shall be of a sprawling and splay-footed character,
as seeking to make more of itself for the money. My beat lying
round by Whitechapel Church, and the adjacent sugar-refineries,--
great buildings, tier upon tier, that have the appearance of being
nearly related to the dock-warehouses at Liverpool,--I turned off
to my right, and, passing round the awkward corner on my left, came
suddenly on an apparition familiar to London streets afar off.
What London peripatetic of these times has not seen the woman who
has fallen forward, double, through some affection of the spine,
and whose head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now
droops over the back of one of her arms at about the wrist? Who
does not know her staff, and her shawl, and her basket, as she
gropes her way along, capable of seeing nothing but the pavement,
never begging, never stopping, for ever going somewhere on no
business? How does she live, whence does she come, whither does
she go, and why? I mind the time when her yellow arms were naught
but bone and parchment. Slight changes steal over her; for there
is a shadowy suggestion of human skin on them now. The Strand may
be taken as the central point about which she revolves in a half-
mile orbit. How comes she so far east as this? And coming back
too! Having been how much farther? She is a rare spectacle in
this neighbourhood. I receive intelligent information to this
effect from a dog--a lop-sided mongrel with a foolish tail,
plodding along with his tail up, and his ears pricked, and
displaying an amiable interest in the ways of his fellow-men,--if I
may be allowed the expression. After pausing at a pork-shop, he is
jogging eastward like myself, with a benevolent countenance and a
watery mouth, as though musing on the many excellences of pork,
when he beholds this doubled-up bundle approaching. He is not so
much astonished at the bundle (though amazed by that), as the
circumstance that it has within itself the means of locomotion. He
stops, pricks his ears higher, makes a slight point, stares, utters
a short, low growl, and glistens at the nose,--as I conceive with
terror. The bundle continuing to approach, he barks, turns tail,
and is about to fly, when, arguing with himself that flight is not
becoming in a dog, he turns, and once more faces the advancing heap
of clothes. After much hesitation, it occurs to him that there may
be a face in it somewhere. Desperately resolving to undertake the
adventure, and pursue the inquiry, he goes slowly up to the bundle,
goes slowly round it, and coming at length upon the human
countenance down there where never human countenance should be,
gives a yelp of horror, and flies for the East India Docks.
Being now in the Commercial Road district of my beat, and
bethinking myself that Stepney Station is near, I quicken my pace
that I may turn out of the road at that point, and see how my small
eastern star is shining.
The Children's Hospital, to which I gave that name, is in full
force. All its beds are occupied. There is a new face on the bed
where my pretty baby lay, and that sweet little child is now at
rest for ever. Much kind sympathy has been here since my former
visit, and it is good to see the walls profusely garnished with
dolls. I wonder what Poodles may think of them, as they stretch
out their arms above the beds, and stare, and display their
splendid dresses. Poodles has a greater interest in the patients.
I find him making the round of the beds, like a house-surgeon,
attended by another dog,--a friend,--who appears to trot about with
him in the character of his pupil dresser. Poodles is anxious to
make me known to a pretty little girl looking wonderfully healthy,
who had had a leg taken off for cancer of the knee. A difficult
operation, Poodles intimates, wagging his tail on the counterpane,
but perfectly successful, as you see, dear sir! The patient,
patting Poodles, adds with a smile, 'The leg was so much trouble to
me, that I am glad it's gone.' I never saw anything in doggery
finer than the deportment of Poodles, when another little girl
opens her mouth to show a peculiar enlargement of the tongue.
Poodles (at that time on a table, to be on a level with the
occasion) looks at the tongue (with his own sympathetically out) so
very gravely and knowingly, that I feel inclined to put my hand in
my waistcoat-pocket, and give him a guinea, wrapped in paper.
On my beat again, and close to Limehouse Church, its termination, I
found myself near to certain 'Lead-Mills.' Struck by the name,
which was fresh in my memory, and finding, on inquiry, that these
same lead-mills were identified with those same lead-mills of which
I made mention when I first visited the East London Children's
Hospital and its neighbourhood as Uncommercial Traveller, I
resolved to have a look at them.
Received by two very intelligent gentlemen, brothers, and partners
with their father in the concern, and who testified every desire to
show their works to me freely, I went over the lead-mills. The
purport of such works is the conversion of pig-lead into white-
lead. This conversion is brought about by the slow and gradual
effecting of certain successive chemical changes in the lead
itself. The processes are picturesque and interesting,--the most
so, being the burying of the lead, at a certain stage of
preparation, in pots, each pot containing a certain quantity of
acid besides, and all the pots being buried in vast numbers, in
layers, under tan, for some ten weeks.
Hopping up ladders, and across planks, and on elevated perches,
until I was uncertain whether to liken myself to a bird or a brick-
layer, I became conscious of standing on nothing particular,
looking down into one of a series of large cocklofts, with the
outer day peeping in through the chinks in the tiled roof above. A
number of women were ascending to, and descending from, this
cockloft, each carrying on the upward journey a pot of prepared
lead and acid, for deposition under the smoking tan. When one
layer of pots was completely filled, it was carefully covered in
with planks, and those were carefully covered with tan again, and
then another layer of pots was begun above; sufficient means of
ventilation being preserved through wooden tubes. Going down into
the cockloft then filling, I found the heat of the tan to be
surprisingly great, and also the odour of the lead and acid to be
not absolutely exquisite, though I believe not noxious at that
stage. In other cocklofts, where the pots were being exhumed, the
heat of the steaming tan was much greater, and the smell was
penetrating and peculiar. There were cocklofts in all stages; full
and empty, half filled and half emptied; strong, active women were
clambering about them busily; and the whole thing had rather the
air of the upper part of the house of some immensely rich old Turk,
whose faithful seraglio were hiding his money because the sultan or
the pasha was coming.
As is the case with most pulps or pigments, so in the instance of
this white-lead, processes of stirring, separating, washing,
grinding, rolling, and pressing succeed. Some of these are
unquestionably inimical to health, the danger arising from
inhalation of particles of lead, or from contact between the lead
and the touch, or both. Against these dangers, I found good
respirators provided (simply made of flannel and muslin, so as to
be inexpensively renewed, and in some instances washed with scented
soap), and gauntlet gloves, and loose gowns. Everywhere, there was
as much fresh air as windows, well placed and opened, could
possibly admit. And it was explained that the precaution of
frequently changing the women employed in the worst parts of the
work (a precaution originating in their own experience or
apprehension of its ill effects) was found salutary. They had a
mysterious and singular appearance, with the mouth and nose
covered, and the loose gown on, and yet bore out the simile of the
old Turk and the seraglio all the better for the disguise.
At last this vexed white-lead, having been buried and resuscitated,
and heated and cooled and stirred, and separated and washed and
ground, and rolled and pressed, is subjected to the action of
intense fiery heat. A row of women, dressed as above described,
stood, let us say, in a large stone bakehouse, passing on the
baking-dishes as they were given out by the cooks, from hand to
hand, into the ovens. The oven, or stove, cold as yet, looked as
high as an ordinary house, and was full of men and women on
temporary footholds, briskly passing up and stowing away the
dishes. The door of another oven, or stove, about to be cooled and
emptied, was opened from above, for the uncommercial countenance to
peer down into. The uncommercial countenance withdrew itself, with
expedition and a sense of suffocation, from the dull-glowing heat
and the overpowering smell. On the whole, perhaps the going into
these stoves to work, when they are freshly opened, may be the
worst part of the occupation.
But I made it out to be indubitable that the owners of these lead-
mills honestly and sedulously try to reduce the dangers of the
occupation to the lowest point.
A washing-place is provided for the women (I thought there might
have been more towels), and a room in which they hang their
clothes, and take their meals, and where they have a good fire-
range and fire, and a female attendant to help them, and to watch
that they do not neglect the cleansing of their hands before
touching their food. An experienced medical attendant is provided
for them, and any premonitory symptoms of lead-poisoning are
carefully treated. Their teapots and such things were set out on
tables ready for their afternoon meal, when I saw their room; and
it had a homely look. It is found that they bear the work much
better than men: some few of them have been at it for years, and
the great majority of those I observed were strong and active. On
the other hand, it should be remembered that most of them are very
capricious and irregular in their attendance.
American inventiveness would seem to indicate that before very long
white-lead may be made entirely by machinery. The sooner, the
better. In the meantime, I parted from my two frank conductors
over the mills, by telling them that they had nothing there to be
concealed, and nothing to be blamed for. As to the rest, the
philosophy of the matter of lead-poisoning and workpeople seems to
me to have been pretty fairly summed up by the Irishwoman whom I
quoted in my former paper: 'Some of them gets lead-pisoned soon,
and some of them gets lead-pisoned later, and some, but not many,
niver; and 'tis all according to the constitooshun, sur; and some
constitooshuns is strong and some is weak.' Retracing my footsteps
over my beat, I went off duty. _
Read next: CHAPTER XXXVI - A FLY-LEAF IN A LIFE
Read previous: CHAPTER XXXIV - MR. BARLOW
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