The Great Unknown

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Title:     The Great Unknown
Author: Henry W. Nevinson [More Titles by Nevinson]

There are strange regions where the monotony of ignoble streets is broken only by an occasional church, a Board School, or a public-house. From the city's cathedral to every point of the compass, except the west, they stretch almost without limit till they reach the bedraggled fields maturing for development. They form by far the larger part of an Empire's capital. Each of them is, in fact, a vast town, great enough, as far as numbers go, to make the Metropolis of a powerful State. Out of half a dozen of them, such as Islington, Bethnal Green, or Bermondsey, the County Council could build half a score of Italian republics like the Florence or Pisa of old days, if only it had the mind. Each possesses a character, a peculiar flavour, or, at the worst, a separate smell. Many of them are traversed every day by thousands of rich and well-educated people, passing underground or overhead. Yet to nearly all of us they remain strange and almost untrodden. We do not think of them when we think of London. Them no pleasure-seeker counts among his opportunities, no foreigner visits as essential for his study of the English soul. Not even our literary men and Civil Servants, who talk so much about architecture, discuss their architecture in the clubs. Not one in a thousand of us has ever known a human soul among their inhabitants. To the comfortable classes the Libyan desert is more familiar.

At elections, even politicians remember their existence. From time to time a philanthropist goes down there to share God's good gifts with his poorer brethren, or to elevate the masses with tinkling sounds or painted boards. From time to time an adventurous novelist is led round the opium-shops, dancing-saloons, and docks, returning with copy for tales of lust and murder that might just as well be laid in Siberia or Timbuctoo. When we scent an East End story on its way, do we not patiently await the battered head, the floating corpse, the dynamiter's den, or a woman crying over her ill-begotten babe? Do we not always get one or other of the lot? To read our story-tellers from Mr. Kipling downward, one might suppose the East End to be inhabited by bastards engaged in mutual murder, and the marvel is that anyone is left alive to be the subject of a tale. You may not bring an indictment against a whole nation, but no sensational writer hesitates to libel three million of our fellow-citizens. Put it in Whitechapel, and you may tell what filthy lie you please.

About once in a generation some "Bitter Cry" pierces through custom, and the lives of "the poor" become a subject for polite conversation and amateur solicitude. For three months, or even for six, that subject appears as the intellectual "_roti_" at dinner-tables; then it is found a little heavy, and cultured interest returns to its natural courses of plays, pictures, politics, a dancing woman, and the memorials of Kings. It is almost time now that the poor came up again, for a quarter of a century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men's collars and women's skirts have run their full orbit since. Excellent books have appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life--books such as Charles Booth's _London_ or Mr. Richard Free's _Seven Years Hard_, to mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last philanthropic debauch. Nothing has roused that fury of charitable curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its victims gasping for the next excitement. The time was, perhaps, ripe, but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson's book, _Across the Bridges_. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.

Mr. Paterson's experience lay on the south side of the river, and the district possesses peculiarities of its own. On the whole, I think, the riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East End. Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were growing when Shakespeare acted there. The population is more distinctly English than on the north side. Where the poverty is extreme it is more helpless. Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good. The smell is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets. Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves their aspect. It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders, monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness knows how they would make a living then!

It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where the working classes of London chiefly live. Matthew Arnold said our lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin. What characterises them and their streets is poverty. Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste. Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of discomfort--the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the perpetual stench of the poor. In winter the five or six children in a bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still asleep, so as not to disturb each other. In a hot summer the bugs drive the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep. Cleanliness is an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty's reach as diamonds. The foul skin, the unwashed clothes, the layer of greasy smuts, the boots that once fitted someone, and are now held on by string, the scraps of food bought by the pennyworth, the tea, condensed milk, fried fish, bread and "strawberry flavour," the coal bought by the "half-hundred," the unceasing noise, the absence of peace or rest, the misery of sickness in a crowd--all such things may be counted among the outward conditions of unhappiness, and only people who have never known them would call them trivial. But by the unhappiness that springs from poverty I mean far worse than these.

The definition of happiness as "an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence, in a fully developed life" is ancient now, but I have never found a better. From happiness so defined, poverty excludes our working-classes in the lump, almost without exception. For them an energy of the soul along the lines of excellence is almost unknown, and a fully developed life impossible. In both these respects their condition has probably become worse within the last century. If there is a word of truth in what historians tell us, a working-man must certainly have had a better chance of exercising an energy of his soul before the development of factories and machinery. What energy of the personal soul is exercised in a mill-hand, a tea-packer, a slop-tailor, or the watcher of a thread in a machine? How can a man or woman engaged in such labour for ten hours a day at subsistence wage enjoy a fully developed life? It seems likely that the old-fashioned workman who made things chiefly with his own hands and had some opportunity of personal interest in the work, stood a better chance of the happiness arising from an energy of the soul. His life was also more fully developed by the variety and interest of his working material and surroundings. This is the point to which our prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest possible happiness.

The second offspring of poverty in these working regions of our city is waste. And I have called waste the twin brother of unhappiness because the two are very much alike. By waste I do not here mean the death-rate of infants, though that stands at one in four. No one, except an exploiter of labour, would desire a mere increase in the workpeople's number without considering the quality of the increase. But by waste I mean the multitudes of boys and girls who never get a chance of fulfilling their inborn capacities. The country's greatest shame and disaster arise from the custom which makes the line between the educated and the uneducated follow the line between the rich and the poor, almost without deviation. That a nature capable of high development should be precluded by poverty from all development is the deepest of personal and national disasters, though it happen, as it does happen, several thousand times a year. Physical waste is bad enough--the waste of strength and health that could easily be retained by fresh air, open spaces, and decent food, and is so retained among well-to-do children. This physical waste has already created such a broad distinction that foreigners coming among us detect two species of the English people. But the mental waste is worse. It is a subject that Mr. Paterson dwells upon, and he speaks with authority, as one who has taught in the Board Schools and knows the life of the people across the bridges from the banana-box to the grave.

"Boys who might become classical scholars," he writes, "stick labels on to parcels for ten years, others who have literary gifts clear out a brewer's vat. Real thinkers work as porters in metal warehouses, and after shouldering iron fittings for eleven hours a day, find it difficult to set their minds in order.... With even the average boy there is a marked waste of mental capital between the ages of ten and thirty, and the aggregate loss to the country is heavy indeed."

At fourteen, just when the "education" of well-to-do boys is beginning, the working boy's education stops. For ten or eleven years he has been happy at school. He has looked upon school as a place of enjoyment--of interest, kindliness, warmth, cleanliness, and even quiet of a kind. The school methods of education may not be the best. Mr. Paterson points out all that is implied in the distinction between the "teachers" of the Board Schools and the "masters" of the public schools. Too much is put in, not enough drawn out from the child's own mind. The teacher cannot think much of individual natures, when faced with a class of sixty. Yet it would be difficult to overrate the service of the Board Schools as training grounds for manners, and anyone who has known the change in our army within twenty-five years will understand what I mean. At fourteen the boy has often reached his highest mental and spiritual development. When he leaves school, shades of the prison-house begin to close upon him. He jumps at any odd job that will bring in a few shillings to the family fund. He becomes beer-boy, barber's boy, van-boy, paper-boy, and in a year or two he is cut out by the younger generation knocking at the door. He has learnt nothing; he falls out of work; he wanders from place to place. By the time he is twenty-two, just when the well-to-do are "finishing their education," his mind is dulled, his hope and interest gone, his only ambition is to get a bit of work and keep it. At the best he develops into the average working-man of the regions I have called unknown. Mr. Paterson thus describes the class:

"These are the steady bulk of the community, insuring the peace of the district by their habits and opinions far more effectively than any vigilance of police or government. Yet, if they are indeed satisfactory, how low are the civic standards of England, how fallen the ideals and beauties of Christianity! No man that has dreams can rest content because the English worker has reached his high level of regular work and rare intoxication."

One does not rest content; far from it. But the perpetual wonder is, not that "the lower classes are brutalised," but that this brutality is so tempered with generosity and sweetness. It is not their crime that surprises, but their virtue; not their turbulence or discontent, but their inexplicable acquiescence. And yet there are still people who sneer at "the mob," "the vulgar herd," "the great unwashed," as though principles, gentility, and soap were privileges in reward of merit, and not the accidental luck of money's chaotic distribution.

[The end]
Henry W. Nevinson's essay: The Great Unknown

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