John Henry Raleigh
VICTORIAN MORALS AND
THE MODERN NOVEL
The life of the London poor in the nineteenth century was,
for the most part, miserable, and no one who has read Henry May–
hew, that great sociologist, can ever forget his grim and heartbreaking
peoples and scenes.
If
man had set out consciously to fashion a hell
for his fellow men, he could not have done better than nineteenth–
century English culture did with the poor who "lived" off the streets
of London. Indeed Mayhew's descriptions in
London Labour and
the London Poor
sometimes convey a kind of Pandemonium quality
and one can almost sniff the sulphur in the air. His description of
a crowd entering a "Penny Gaff"- a kind of temporary theater which
put on salacious performances- suggests some of the horror:
Forward they came, bringing an overpowering stench with them,
laughing and yelling as they pushed their way through the waiting room.
One woman carrying a sickly child with a bulging forehead, was reeling
drunk, the saliva running down her mouth as she stared about with a
heavy fixed eye. Two boys were pushing her from side to side, while
the poor infant slept, breathing heavily, as if stupified, through the din.
Lads jumping on girls, and
girls
laughing hysterically from being tickled
by
the youths
behind
them, everyone shouting and jumping, presented
a mad scene of frightful enjoyment.
l
But if anything, as over against this evil of stench and noise, the
lonely pathos of individual tragedies is even more frightful: the
blind street-seller who had once been a tailor and had worked in a
room seven feet square, with six other people, from five in the morn–
ing
until ten at night, the room having no chimney or window or
fIre, though no fire was needed even in the winter, and in the sum–
mer it was like an oven. This is what it was like in the daytime, but
"no mortal tongue," the man told Mayhew, could describe what it
