VICTORIAN MORALS
24.
respected some of the inferior orders of the Church of England,
Mayhew was told that
if
they were to join any religion it would be
the Catholic. But by and large they were freethinkers. The patterers
hawked on the streets- and this sometimes took courage-Hone's
notorious parodies of the catechism and the litany, and after Hone's
trial and acquittal, he had become with them a "hero." Especially
were the patterers, who were the intellectuals among the costers,
skeptical and atheistical. Some of them had actually had a classical
education and thus had the knowledge to back up their scoffing:
"Most of them," said Mayhew, "scoffed at the Bible, or perverted
its
paslages...." The patterers possessed a high degree of sophistica–
tion generally and were, in politics, "liberal Tories" who hated the
Whigs and lamented the death of Peel.
But what troubled Mayhew the most about the costers was their
imperfect concept and practice of marriage and home life, which the
middle class had enshrined at the apex of its system of values. Only
one tenth of the couples living together were married, and none of
them had any notion of "legitimate" or "illegitimate" children. They
thought of the marriage ceremony as constituting a waste of time and
money, and the women of illegal unions were as faithful as those of
legal ones. But none of them, married or not, had strict notions about
fidelity, and in hard times it was considered no crime for a woman
to depart from the path of virtue in order to provide for a fire or a
meal. Desertions, heavy drinking, and the accompanying brutality
were, of course, frequent, but it didn't seem to matter much.
As
one
informant told Mayhew:
They sometimes take a little drop themselves, the women do, and get
beaten
by
their husbands for it, and hardest beaten
if
the man's drunk
himself. They're sometimes beaten for other things, too, or for nothing
at
all.
But they seem to like the men better for their beating them. I
never could make that out.
The whole idea of "home" was foreign to the costers. They
worked in and often took their meals in the street. Leisure time was
given over to the beer-shop, the dancing room, or the theater. The
very
word "home," according to Mayhew, was seldom used by
them. The parent-child relation was likewise different from the one
that prevailed in the middle class. Either
it
was established upon a
