An Englishman's castle ;

Front matter

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE QUEEN'S POOR.

Contents

PAGK

I. AN englishman's CASTLE 1

II. THE PLEASURES OF THE POOR .... 32

II

It is commonly stated that the working-classes as a whole demand more and more of what are some-, what strangely termed ' associated pleasures.' My acquaintances among the poor, and they are numerous, live almost entirely without these pleasures : they seldom enter theatre, dancing saloon, music hall, or concert room ; they seem to have little or no connection with the vast crowds hanging round football and cricket matches, or on the outskirts of racecourses ; they are not often to be found listening to improving lectures, nor attending political meetings, nor crowding into police-courts, and except very early and very late in life, they are not even regular attendants at church or chapel. Such enjoyments as they have seem to me to be of an entirely domestic nature ; if not ' sacred ' they are at least ' home-felt delights,' and most of them can be savoured in solitude, or at any rate in solitude a deux.

Strong sensation of almost any description is among the chief pleasures of the poor, and it is for this reason that at certain periods newspapers are largely bought by persons who would not dream of buying them regularly, as so many workmen and elderly persons of both sexes do, for the sake^of their general contents. * If there 's a good murder,' a woman told me in South London, ' every one 's out with their penny or their halfpenny, whether they can afford it or whether they can't,' and a respectable old person nearly treble her age said frankly, ' I do enjoy a good murder, especially when there 's a long trial after.' In many large towns the evening paper rarely fails to be of a sufficiently exciting type to fill the yawning gap between supper and bed. A friend of mine, knowing that her cook's mother lived alone on a small parish allowance, eked out by what her daughter could give her, said, ' You can have my daily paper for your mother if you like to take it to her. I have always finished with it by three or four.' ' Oh,' was the indifferent reply, ' mother always haves her evenin' paper. She wouldn't sleep without it.'

If the scene of the murder is not in England men take comparatively little interest in it, but women (though warned off foreign politics even by the professed admirers of their ' Potential faculty in everything ') are more cosmopolitan, and if it should be double or treble, or pecuHarly atrocious in character, it will excite their attention almost as much as if it were in the next street. There is a tragic story, usually dated from some village in Hungary spelled with a haphazard arrangement of the letters c, z, and h, which has reappeared every few years as far back as my memory reaches. A young child throws a bank-note into the fire. The father, in sudden rage, stuns it with a fearful blow on the head. The mother snatches up the helpless body and runs into the open air to try and restore consciousness, but finds that life is extinct. Returning to the hut, she discovers that the baby has fallen into a tub of water and is

c drowned. The father, overcome with remorse, immediately hangs himself, and the mother becomes raving mad. Sometimes the bank-note takes the more probable form of a lottery ticket, but there are few other variations. Women have assured me that they have ' cried by the hour ' over this relation. Curiously enough, an American murder creates very little excitement ; there seems to be a damping undercurrent of thought that perhaps it is ' only their fun.'

The more educated people are, the more sensitive their imagination becomes, and the smaller the dose of sensationalism needed to excite it. We all like to be moved, lifted, not perhaps out of our grooves, if we are fortunate enough to have any, but out of the consciousness of the sticky soil of our daily Hves. This is what the poor ask also, and the violence of the sensation demanded does not prove the hardness of their heart, but the dullness of their imagination.

Revengefulness is not a marked or common trait among the English poor, and is rarely fostered against members of their own class, but one cannot deny that in certain parts of the country a large amount of pleasure is derived from actual and imaginary, but chiefly imaginary, paying off of old scores. * Men 's always sayin' they '11 punch other men's heads, or wring their necks round,' said a pretty young girl impatiently, ' and then they don't do nothing of the kind ! ' ' Surely that shows their wisdom ? ' I suggested, but she agreed very reluctantly. In a county where fewer threats are made and more are carried out, and where a grudge is remembered and nourished for twenty or thirty years, a woman told me that her mother, who would now be about seventy-five years of age, had once attended a public execution, and had gone a day's journey by road in order to do so. Involuntarily I expressed horror, forgetting that all mothers are above and beyond criticism, and she explained reprovingly, ' Mother knew the man that was murdered, so she had to go. His friends expected it.'

Under the long reign of law, ' wild justice,' and the fierce joy of executing it, are dying out, but traces can always be found even among the most gentlybred children, and among all the aged who are of an uncultivated type, or whose brain-power has become weakened. It is, in fact, one of the many bonds and resemblances between the two extremes of life which cause them, as Sir Thomas More said, ' to delight extravagantly the one in the other.' The old man in the workhouse who can draw down a reproof from master or matron upon the head of a comrade is as much pleased as a spiteful child.

Notwithstanding all that cynics say, there are wage-earners who take real pleasure in work, even in work that they are paid for doing, but it must be owned that they are not an overwhelming majority. In a county proverbial for laziness, self-praise, and procrastination, I asked a member of an old resident family how any work was ever done at all, and he replied, ' Oh, they don't mind doing other people's work. To do what you are engaged to do is slavery, but to do another man's work for him raises your self-esteem, and you enjoy it. A roundabout way, but we should never get through without it.'

Denigration affords intense and unbounded pleasure among the poor, but, strictly speaking, it is not malicious, at any rate with regard to members of their own class, for they expect the hearer to make his own abatements, and will never be * held to ' what they say, while there are certain things of which they will rarely accuse one another. Mrs. A (and Mr. A, for that matter !) has often, in the deepest confidence, told me hair-raising tales of Mrs. B, and has solemnly abjured all further acquaintance with a bad neighbour, wife, and mother. A few days later I have found her, with Mr. A's consent, performing offices for Mrs. B, which the prospect of canonisation would not induce many of us to perform for our dearest and most respected friends, and Mrs. A and I, better bred than the traditional augurs, have looked at one another without the faintest gleam of a secret understanding. Last week is simply non-existent. What are a few idle words on either side that they should separate neighbours in the hour of need and peril ?

With regard to employers of all classes an enormous amount of calumny finds ready currency ; how much of it is really believed by those who repeat it, or even by those who originate it, it would be difficult to say. In one district, where men and women aHke readily threw up their employment on the lightest of pretexts, I asked an old inhabitant, ' Without a character, how do they manage to get fresh places so easily ? ' ' Oh, they never trouble about a character of their own,' he replied, ' they take away their employer's instead.' Every one whom I asked agreed that this was the local custom. I have observed it in other places, but no employer seemed to suspect that he, personally, was one of the victims.

An acquaintance of mine engaged as an underservant a certain Maud who had had a long succession of what my patients call ' little places with halfladies,' and had invariably been dismissed for ' cheek ' at the end of a few days. Her mother, after landing her safely, returned with such an account of the glories of the situation that her husband, who was a railway guard and prided himself on having ' a notion of things,' reproved her for her folly in placing the girl where she would inevitably be ' shot out ' with more than usual celerity. The entire change of surroundings, however, subdued Maud's natural tendency to impertinence, while in many ways she was subject to less irritation than in her former situations, and she remained for two years. At the end of that time, for reasons which had no connection with the girl, her mistress gave her a month's notice, parting with her on perfectly amicable terms and making her several presents. As time went on, she was faintly surprised that no one applied for the girl's character, but concluded that some one in a hurry for a servant had taken her on trust. Years afterwards, when Maud was a wife and a mother, the explanation was given to her, not out of malice, but as a tremendous joke by another married woman who had been in her service for seven or eight years and appreciated the full absurdity of the tale. It appeared that Maud, who had much enjoyed the pride and novelty of being in high favour with her father, had shirked telling her family that she had received notice to leave until she was obliged to account for her sudden arrival. The tale she told was that her mistress had ordered her to whitewash the back kitchen, that she had refused, and her mistress had slapped her face, that she had then for the first time ' given cheek,' and had been compelled to leave almost immediately.

This remarkable invention, only held together by the family belief in her boundless powers of ' imperence,' was fully accepted ; the uselessness of applying to the mistress for a character seemed clear, and she found a place without one, and kept it until her marriage to a very superior man. The father, although believing the tale, always maintained that the calumniated mistress ' had been the making of 'er.' This is, of course, a very mild specimen, being merely the childish invention of a good-natured girl brought up in decent surroundings ; more malice and a much more varied knowledge of evil account for many of the libels that gain wide circulation and general credence.

Self-praise is the milder side of denigration, and self-pity (often in the disguise of self-criticism) comes between the two. Men and women alike especially delight to praise their own easy good-nature and the way in which it is imposed on by the worthless, their inborn tendency to get the worst of every bargain, their integrity, and their ceaseless industry, ' not an idle bone in me ! ' I recollect one old woman whose spinster daughter worked for her some sixteen hours a day. The mother, although in excellent health, never left her easy-chair by the fireside, except twice a week when she made a supply of bad bread and worse cakes, but I seldom saw her without hearing her heave a disparaging sigh, pointed by a glance at her devoted slave, and exclaim from the depths of her capacious chest, ' What they 11 do when / 'm gone. Lord only knows ! '

Another virtue constantly claimed by the speakers and denied to their neighbours is that of wise economy. Men most frequently accuse one another of eating and drinking too much, while the favourite charge brought by women against women is that of being careless with their clothes. They are not wrong in buying them, but in wearing them. It is not extravagant to have an expensively furnished parlour, but to make any use of it is unpardonable. ' Now there 's Lizabuth,' one worthy woman used to tell me nearly every time we met, ' I don't say but what she isn't good-natured and fond of her children, and I 've never heard her husband make no complaint, but Sunday clo'es or workaday, it 's all the same to her, and always was. And if you was to go into the house this very minute, you 'd find both them boys in the front room, and Lizabuth, as like as not, with the baby in her arms lookin' on at 'em ! Why, you won't find a break in my parlour carpet, and we bought it when we was first married. Oh yes, she 's good-hearted enough, but juss look at our Mary — there 's a contrast ! ' To try and induce her to look at Mary with seeing eyes was my main object in going to the house. Lizabuth, in spite of a somewhat premature marriage, was a handsome and vigorous young woman, while the clean and tidy and economical Mary was fading away from anaemia before any real strain had been thrown on her constitution.

The general ascription to the poor of the virtue of humihty is a literary fiction of ancient date and extraordinary vitality. Perhaps the rich were formerly more arrogant and less incHned to apologise for their existence than they are now, but the poor can never have been humble, and they certainly are not humble now. Their education has never yet been suflficiently liberal to enable them to attain that crowning grace ; it is the painful joy of those who look before and after.' My patients and their friends generally managed to be extremely well satisfied with themselves, even when quite uncensorious persons saw little in their conduct that called for admiration. If the account could not be made balance in any other way, they boldly took credit for the sins that they might have committed ; while when they were really up to, or beyond, any standard by which they could reasonably be tried, they constantly reminded one of La Rochefoucauld's well-known saying, ' Our pride is often increased by what we retrench from our other faults.' The only approach to timidity and fear to demand even acknowledged rights was among families which had supplied the nation with many soldiers and sailors. Their strongest conviction appeared to be that there * was such a lot of 'em,' and that they were therefore unimportant.

A very large number of earnest workers among the poor are apt to be misled by what Adam Smith calls ' the dislike to pride and vanity ' which ' generally disposes us to rank the persons whom we accuse of these vices rather below than above the common level. In this judgment, however, I think we are most frequently in the wrong, and that both the proud and the vain man are often (perhaps for the most part) a good deal above it ; though not near so much as either the one really thinks himself, or as the other wishes you to think him. . . . Pride is frequently attended with many respectable virtues . . . vanity with many amiable ones.'

Only those intimately acquainted with the homes of the poorest of the stationary poor can realise the virtues that are implied by the existence of rows of decently kept ' mean streets.' Religious philanthropists of the always popular repairs-while-you-wait school boldly utter the opinion that the condition of the inhabitants of drunken, thriftless slums is less * heartbreaking,' less ' unspiritual,' less ' godless ' than what they choose to call the ' dead level ' of the streets which make no such dramatic claim upon their services. Less prejudiced persons would discern that the dwellers on the dead level have in reality reached a point of civilisation from which it is comparatively easy to make a fresh and real advance, for self-control and the essentials of morality are already there. Nature knows nothing of short-cuts, and has always stamped with approval the man whose motto is, ' Let us stay a little that we may come to an end the sooner.'

All workers among the poor should take to heart this story of a little boy who, at the close of a three weeks' drought last summer, was given a watering-can with which he busied himself until bedtime. When he awoke he heard a steady drip, drip, and in much displeasure asked his nurse, ' Why is it raining ? ' ' Because God sends it.' ' But why ? ' ' Because He thought we needed it.' ' H'm'm — then He can't have seen me with my watering-can yesterday ! '

As PhiUips Brooks says in one of his sermons, ' Besides all the pain of seeing how men disown the care of their fellows, there is another pain which is often yet more painful, as we see how men who do attempt to help their brethren, help them all wrong, with such ignorant and clumsy hands that they do them more harm than good. Meddlesomeness, arrogance, foolish indulgence, wanton severity, wooden insistence upon a way of goodness which God never meant for the man whom you are trying to make good, opposition to good impulses because they happen to be in other lines than yours, fussiness, suspicion, jealousy, all of these evils come in, and others with them, to make sometimes worse than worthless the most sincere desire of some good man to help and guide his neighbour. Blind leading the blind everywhere ! What, it seems to me, all these good people need is this : the larger view of the life they are anxious for. . . . The time must come, if you are ever really going to be of deepest use to that man when, out of something which he says or does, these two truths come to you about him, that he is larger in his nature, more mysterious than you can grasp, and that he is the son of God, led by his Father, over and above your care.'

Both in town and country there seems to be a general belief that the poor are dearer to their Maker than the rich. The poor are necessarily ' saved,' but the rich can only be saved by works. As the clergy are all among the rich, this relieves their flocks from any troublesome sense of gratitude. Doctors are not as rich as clergymen, probably because their work is of a more concrete nature and often performed at hours extremely inconvenient to themselves. Nevertheless, and especially in the north of England, my patients appeared to imagine that doctors lived by the mere fact of being employed. ' It 's two days since Jones was here. I shall send for Thompson ! ' a convalescent patient would protest angrily. ' Is Dr. Jones's last year's account settled yet ? ' I would sometimes ask, but the question was considered quite irrelevant.

At the same time, few outsiders have any idea what large doctors' bills are often paid by persons of extremely moderate incomes. I knew one case where a man, whose wages were equal to about thirty- two shillings a week, but were subject to no uncertainty save that of his own health and conduct, both of which were excellent, paid thirty pounds in one year for medical attendance for his Httle daughter. The following year, as her condition had rather deteriorated than improved, and as her mother was worn out with nursing her, she went to hospital for three months. She returned slightly better in health and very much more manageable, as for the first time in her life she had been brought under gentle but steady discipHne. Both parents highly appreciated the results, and took up their burden again with fresh cheerfulness. I wish it were more often possible for hospitals to find room for incurable cases for a few weeks every year. It would keep up the standard of home nursing, give the relatives a much-needed rest, and enable the house to have that * thorough clean ' which it so seldom gets where there is a chronic invalid and no paid service.

In one town there was a doctor whom most of my patients, with the usual perversity of human nature, all longed to employ, in spite of his brusquely expressed determination to have nothing to do with them. He had loud, cheery manners and used very strong language, but his qualifications were the lowest possible, and his practical experience had been almost entirely confined to men in the prime of life. What a limitation this is may be guessed from the fact that a naval Inspector-General of Hospitals, hearing that a little boy who lived a few doors from him had measles, asked as a favour to be allowed to visit the child, because he had never seen a case !

To try and frighten away this class of patient he used to send in bills to £12 cottagers that would hardly have been paid without protest by £60 householders, and it was no empty threat. He waited a very brief time, and then put the bills into the hands of a collector. Close at hand there was an excellent doctor, one of the gentlest and best of men, who was willing, and even anxious, to attend the families likely to be worst served, persons just above those entitled to the free services of the workhouse nominee, and who made his charges strictly in proportion to their means, but his skill and devotion rarely excited either faith, enthusiasm, or gratitude.

We nursed one woman five times through rheumatic fever, and she never expressed, nor do I think she felt, the smallest gratitude to the Association for its services. I afterwards came across a man who had suffered from rheumatic fever nineteen times. I tried to find out if he was grateful to any one for the immeasurable amount of care that he must have received, but found that he was, as the poor express it, 'so ate up with pride ' at the distinguished nature and degree of his sufferings that there was small room left for any other feeling — and perhaps least of all for self-pity.

The proverb that ' no news is good news ' is peculiarly true with regard to the poor. Their belief in the superior dignity and importance of bad news is deeply rooted — it is only the exceptional persons who hasten to recount their blessings. One day a poor woman, a Londoner by birth, whom I had known for many years, came with tears and outcry to tell me that her husband's employer ' had been and give him notice.' It was not an immediately distressing case, as the man had been in steady work for fifteen years, there were no children, his age was only thirtytwo, he bore an excellent character, there was no real scarcity of employment in the district, and he had been given four weeks' notice. The only disquieting point was, that unlike the majority of weekly wage-earners, they had taken a house on a five years' lease, the rent was rather high, and the landlord needy and impatient. I assured the wife that I would do everything in my power to help her husband find another situation, and carried out my promise. After exerting myself and boring my acquaintances for about three weeks, I learnt accidentally that the man's employer had withdrawn the notice (given in a fit of irritation caused by an exceptionally stupid and costly blunder) two days after it was given. This trait of character is constantly displayed even in cases where the relation of a loss is no conceivable gain, and the acknowledgment of a piece of good fortune could result in no deprivation. I read newspaper reports of parents who ' hasten ' to remove their children's names from free dinner lists, etc., the very moment the father obtains employment. I can only say that I have never witnessed such conduct, and that its ceremoniousness is even more remarkable than its scrupulous honesty. Ordinary parents would simply tell their children to ' stop away ' when they found that they could give them a better dinner at home, but unless strict and close inquiries were made they would not openly admit the change in their fortunes.

Ill-health is such a distinction that servants have unbounded respect for the employers in whose families there is much sickness. One parlour-maid, whose middle-aged master and mistress enjoyed average health and more than average good spirits and courage, always made the utmost of any small ailments that fell to their share. Her favourite replies to any inquiries after them were, ' He 's no ony waur to-day, and ' She 's no a' thegither laid by.' Further questioning would lead her to own, unwillingly, that her master had gone to town after an eight-o'clock breakfast, and that her mistress was out paying calls. All this was a sign of sincere attachment, and a desire to exalt their importance, and a general wish to do as she would be done by.

Eating is too closely associated with drudgery to take a high rank among the pleasures of the poor. If gourmands and gourmets had to be their own cooks and kitchen-maids and waiters they would soon be reformed indifferently, or even altogether. Neither are well-ordered nor well-served meals commonly seen. One has to go astonishingly high in the social scale before one finds tables laid with the least pretence at convenience, much less beauty. In many well-paid artisans' homes even the Sunday dinner is not served in any definite order, but is eaten as it is cooked. It is quite a chance whether vegetables or pudding come first, but meat is generally held over for the second or third course, as the poor rarely eat bread at any meal worthy to be called dinner, and both men and children need to be ' fed up rough ' before they are let loose on expensive viands. Water is never placed on the table ; the child who wants it goes to the tap with a cup. Except when the house-mother has been long enough in service to effect a permanent change in her ideals and habits, the table arrangements always remind me of an untidy, chronic patient who told me, in response to unspoken criticism.

* Me dear, I gets up, y' see, an' I puts on me does as I misses 'em.' In addition to all other negligences and discomforts, the meal is either laid on a very small table, or on a hastily cleared comer of a larger one. Poverty has no necessary connection with the matter. In one of the poorest districts I ever entered, I saw three decently laid dinner-tables within twenty yards of one another.

There is a great deal of voluntary asceticism among the aged poor ; to eat much is synonymous with greed and wastefulness. On the eighty-eighth birthday of one of his parish patients, a doctor sent her a savoury dish to tempt her appetite. The pleasure that she derived from it was to invite two younger women to tea with her, and then to tell every one how they had eaten the whole of it, * except the merest bite that I took out of civility to them, and just for to be able to tell the doctor that I 'd tasted it. I was never one for my meals, never.'

By some of the more thoughtful women cheap food is not regarded as an unalloyed blessing. One of them said to me recently, ' There 's an awful lot of drinking on Sat 'days, and this cheap food 's at the bottom of it. You can drink pretty well all you want to, and yet the children needn't go akshally hungry. A fourpenny foreigner (a rabbit) and three pennorth of vegetables '11 make you as good a dinner as you want. And drink isn't the only thing. Over at the buildin's where my sister lives, it makes me and mother mad to see the airs the women give theirselves, tripping out with their falls and their kid gloves and their umbrellars, and buyin' a few pieces at the cheapy-cheapy's, and their children nipped into tight little clothes and everything too short and too small for 'em, and showin' as much knee as if they was all Hyde Park ! Mother goes off in a shawl to do her shopping, but she goes to a decent butcher, and however small the joint may be, she has it cut off for her. We like our food clean, not pieces that have been lying in a heap for every one to handle.'

Faith in change of air is often as ignorantly held as faith in drugs, even by persons whose station in life is decidedly above that of my patients. Some highly respectable people who made great sacrifices, or rather, a long series of small ones, in order to be able to take their children to the seaside every summer, lamented and wondered that they benefited so little by their stay, and were often ailing for several weeks after their return. It was impossible to ask many questions, but in the course of time I learnt that while at home the family occupied three good bedrooms, used their kitchen until after dinner and their sitting-room for the rest of the day, that they had a small, well-kept garden back and front, that the children were sent to the park for three hours every day, and that they were surrounded by neighbours of the same class and habits. While at the seaside, during the hottest part of the year, father, mother, and three children of five, seven, and eleven shared one bedroom in a terrace house touching the pavement in front and backed by neglected stone yards, and they took their meals in the landlady's kitchen, where all the people of the house slept during the season.