Mystic London Part 6

CHAPTER XIX.

THE WIFESLAYER'S "HOME."

There is something very weird and strange in that exceptional avocation which takes one to-day to a Lord Mayor's feast or a croquet tournament, to-morrow to a Ritualistic service, next day to the home of a homicide.

I am free to confess that each has its special attractions for me. I am very much disposed to "magnify my office" in this respect, not from any foolish idea that I am "seeing life," as it is termed, but still from a feeling that the proper study of mankind _is_ man in all his varied aspects.

It need not always be a morbid feeling that takes one to the scene of a murder or other horrible event, though, as we well know, the majority of those who visit such localities do go out of mere idle curiosity. It may be worth while, however, for some who look a little below the surface of things, to gauge, as it were, the genius loci, and see whether, in the influences surrounding the spot and its inhabitants there be anything to afford a clue as to the causes of the crime.

In summing up the evidence concerning a certain tragedy at Greenwich, where a man killed his wife by throwing a knife, the coroner "referred to the horrible abode--a coal cellar--in which the family, nine in number, had resided, which was unfit for human habitation, and ought to have been condemned by the parish authorities." Having seen and described in these pages something of how the poor are housed in the cellars of St. Giles's and Bethnal Green, and traced the probable influences of herding together the criminal and innocent in the low lodging-houses, it occurred to me to visit the scene of this awful occurrence, and see how far the account given before the coroner's jury was correct.

With this view I took the train to Greenwich, and, consulting the first policeman I met, was by him directed to Roan Street as the scene of the tragedy. Roan Street I found to be a somewhat squalid by-street, running out of Skelton Street, close--it seemed significantly close--to the old parish church. One could not help thinking of the familiar proverb, "The nearer the church, the farther from G.o.d." The actual locality is called Munyard's Row, being some dozen moderate-sized houses in Roan Street, let out in lodgings, the particular house in question being again, with a horrible grotesqueness, next door but one to a beer-shop called the "Hit or Miss!" I expected to find Roan Street the observed of all observers, but the nine days' wonder was over since what d.i.c.kens called the "ink-widge." Indeed, a homicide has ceased to be a nine days'

wonder now. This only happened on Sat.u.r.day; and when I was there, on the following Wednesday, Roan Street had settled down into its wonted repose. A woman with a child was standing on the door-step, and, on my inquiring if I could see the kitchen, referred me to Mrs. Bristow at the chandler's shop, who farms the rent of these populous tenements; for Munyard's Row is peopled "from garret to bas.e.m.e.nt," and a good way underground too.

Mrs. Bristow, a civil, full-flavoured Irishwoman, readily consented to act cicerone, and we went through the pa.s.sage into the back garden, where all the poor household furniture of the homicide's late "home" was stacked. It did not occupy a large s.p.a.ce, consisting only of the bedstead on which the poor woman sat when the fatal deed was done, two rickety tables, and two chairs. These were all the movables of a family of nine. The mattress was left inside--too horrible a sight, after what had taken place, to be exposed to the light of day.

We pa.s.sed--Honora Bristow and myself--with a "gossip" or two, who had come to see what I was after, into the back kitchen, for the wifeslayer had two rooms en suite, though the family elected to occupy only one.

The floor of this apartment was either mother earth, or, if flagged, so grimed with filth as to be a very fair resemblance of the soil. Here stood only that terrible memento, the drenched mattress. In the front kitchen--which, let me state, would have been palatial in comparison with the Seven Dials or Spitalfields, had it been only clean--there was very little light, for the window, which was well down below the surface of the pavement, had not a whole pane in it, and the broken ones had been stuffed up with old rags which were very protuberant indeed. That window alone would show that the menage had not been a judicious one.

"He was a quiet man," said Honora, "and gave trouble to no one. He and his wife never had a word." The gossips all believed that the story of the throwing the knife was true, notwithstanding the medical evidence went against it. The boy of twelve, who provoked the father to throw the knife, was evidently the incubus of the wretched home. "Almost before the breath was out of his mother, that boy was searching about the bed to see if he could find any ha'pence," said Honora. That boy was evidently not satisfactory. His evidence was refused by the Coroner, because he could not read or write. But then what had been the child's surroundings? They have been described above. The man himself had a patriarchal family of seven, from a girl of seventeen down to a baby of two, and all, as we have seen, slept in one room, though there were two, and though a bucket of whitewash would have made the pair habitable, besides giving the lad some useful employment.

The father was of no particular occupation, picking up odd jobs, and leaning largely to the shrimp trade. He stood high in Honora Bristow's regards as having regularly paid his _1s. 9d._ a week for five years, or, at least, being some _5s._ behind now; a sum which will probably be covered by the chattels in the back garden. The poor home was silent then. The mother lay calmly in the dead-house, after the post-mortem examination, "terrible cut and hacked about," said the one gossip who had ventured to go and see her quondam friend. The father was in Maidstone Gaol. The little children were being taken care of by the grandmother until such time as the mother should have been buried, when they would gravitate to the workhouse.

In the meantime the boy, aet. twelve, the cause of all the mischief, disports himself in Munyard's Row as though nothing had happened.

Perhaps he is the most difficult part of the problem; but the whole question of the home is a puzzling one. The boy is evidently the product of the home. It very much concerns the community that such produce should become extinct; and therefore the sooner some improvements can be introduced into such homes the better. In the first place, there is decidedly too little light. Suns.h.i.+ne, under any circ.u.mstances, would have been impossible there. The advisability of human beings burrowing underground may be questioned, whether in cellars or genteel underground kitchens.

Then again, one bedroom--nay, one bedstead--for father, mother, and seven children ranging from seventeen to two is decidedly deficient.

This sounds almost too horrible to be true; but I was careful to ascertain that the eldest girl, though in domestic service in Greenwich, slept at the "home." More horrible still is the fact disclosed, that they had a second room, yet had not the decency to use it. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." They lived according to their light; but they had very little light, literally or figuratively. Surely we want to teach our poor the simple rules of hygiene. One of the gossips, a clean, healthy little woman, with a fine baby at her breast, referred with pride to her poor kitchen, identical in all respects, save dirt, with the home.

Then, again, there was one thing that struck me forcibly, and that was the sort of qualified reprobation with which these good gossips--really decent people in their way--spoke of the habit of throwing knives.

Honora had once thrown one at her daughter of eighteen, but never meant to do so again. And all this under the bells of the old parish church of Greenwich in the year of grace 1870!

Clearly, however, the first question is what to do with the boy, aet.

twelve. Comporting himself as he did in the face of the awful tragedy he had caused, this young gentleman must clearly not be lost sight of, or it will be the worse for himself and those with whom he is brought into contact. Nay, in a few years, he will become a centre of influence, and radiate around him another such "home," worse, perhaps, than the first.

Let our Social Science so far break through the programme it may have laid down as to touch on this very appropriate subject of squalid homes, and its next sitting may be a very useful one indeed.

CHAPTER XX.

BATHING IN THE FAR EAST.

Visions of Oriental splendour and magnificence float across the imagination at the mere mention of the storied East. Soaring above all the routine of ordinary existence and the commonplaces of history, that creative faculty within us pictures Pactolus with its golden sands; or recalls from the legendary records of childhood the pomp of Aladdin's Princess going to her luxurious bath; or brings back to mind the almost prosaic minuteness with which the Greek poet describes the bath of Ulysses when he returned from his wanderings. In the East the bath has ever been an inst.i.tution--not merely a luxury, but a necessity; and it is a proof of the eclectic tendencies of our generation that we have domesticated here in the West that great inst.i.tution, the Hammam, or Turkish bath, which the Romans were wise enough to adopt, after their Eastern experience, more than two thousand years ago. Of none of these Oriental splendours, however, has the present narrative to tell. I ask those interested in social questions to take a very early Sunday expedition to the East End of London, and catch a glimpse of those whom, after what I have to relate, it would be libel to call the "Great Unwashed." We will look at East London engaged in the interesting process of performing its ablutions.

Very enjoyable is a Sat.u.r.day afternoon stroll in Victoria Park. Those gentlemen of London who sit at home at ease are apt to think of the East End as a collection of slums, with about as much breathing s.p.a.ce for its congregated thousands as that supplied to the mites in a superannuated Ches.h.i.+re cheese. Let us pa.s.s through Bethnal Green Road, and, leaving behind the new Museum, go under a magic portal into the stately acres which bear the name of our Sovereign. On our right is the Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, of which the foundation-stone was laid by the Prince Consort, and the new wing of which our Orientals hope one day to see opened by her Majesty in person. Most convincing test of all is the situation of this Consumptive Hospital--showing the salubrity of the Eastern breezes. Inside the imposing gate the visitor will find extensive cricket-grounds interspersed with broad pastures, whose flocks are the reverse of Arcadian in hue. Cricket-b.a.l.l.s whiz about us like sh.e.l.ls at Inkermann; and the suggestive "Thank you" of the scouts forces the pa.s.ser-by into unwonted activity as he s.h.i.+es the ball to the bowler.

Then there are roundabouts uncountable, and gymnasia abundant. There are bosquets for the love-makers, and gla.s.sy pools, studded with islands innumerable, over which many a Lady of the Lake steers her shallop, while Oriental sailor-boys canoe wildly along. There are flower-beds which need not blush to be compared with Kew or the Crystal Palace. But it is not with such that we are now concerned. On one of those same lakes over which, on Sat.u.r.day evening, sailors in embryo float their mimic craft--and one young gentleman, slightly in advance of the rest, directs a very miniature steams.h.i.+p--we see boards suggesting that daily, from four to eight A.M., the Orientals may immerse themselves in the limpid and most tempting waters. The depth, they are paternally informed, increases towards the centre, buoys marking where it is six feet; so that our Eastern friends have no excuse for suicide by drowning.

East London birds are early birds, and to catch them at their bath you must be literally up with the lark. Towards six o'clock is the most fas.h.i.+onable hour for our metropolitan Pactolus; and, as it is some miles distant from what can, by any stretch of courtesy, be called the West End, and as there are no workmen's trains on a Sunday morning, a long walk or cab drive is inevitable for all who would witness the disporting of our amphibious Orientals. Rising thus betimes on a recent "Sunday morning before the bells did ring," I sped me to the bathing pond, judiciously screened off by shrubs from the main path. It was between the appointed hours that I arrived; and, long before I saw anything, the ringing laughter of the young East reached me through the shrubs.

Threading the path which led to the lake, I found the water literally alive with men, boys, and hobbledehoys, revelling in the water like young hippopotami on the Nile. Boys were largely in the ascendant--boys from ten to fifteen years of age swam like young Leanders, and sunned themselves on the bank, in the absence of towels, as the preparative to dressing, or smoked their pipes in a state of nature. It is only just to say that while I remained, I heard little if any language that could be called "foul." Very free and easy, of course, were the remarks, and largely ill.u.s.trative of the vulgar tongue; not without a share of light chaff directed against myself, whose presence by the lake-side puzzled my young friends. I received numerous invitations to "peel" and have a dip; and one young urchin a.s.sured me in the most patronizing way possible that he "wouldn't laugh at me" if I could not get on. The language may not have been quite so refined as that which I heard a few days before from the young gentlemen with tall hats and blue ties at Lord's; but I do say advisedly that it would more than bear comparison with that of the bathers in the Serpentine, where my ears have often been a.s.sailed with something far worse than anything I heard in East London. In the matter of clothes, too, the apparel of our young friends was indeed Eastern in its simplicity; yet they left it unprotected on the bank with a confidence that did honour to our common humanity in general, and to the regulations of Victoria Park in particular. Swimming in some sort was almost universal among the bathers, showing that their visit to the water was not an isolated event in their existence, but a constant as it is a wholesome habit. The Oriental population were for the most part apparently well fed; and one saw there lithe and active frames, either careering gracefully along in the old style of swimming, or adopting the new and scientific method which causes the human form divine to approach very nearly to the resemblance of a rather excited grampus.

But inexorable Time warns the youthful bathers that they must sacrifice to the Graces; and some amusing incidents occur during the process.

Generally speaking, though the amount of attire is not excessive, considerable effort in the way of pinning and hitching is required to get things in their proper places. A young gentleman was reduced to inexpressible grief, and held up to the scorn of his fellow-bathers, by the fact that, in the course of his al fresco toilette, one of his feet went through his inexpressibles in an honourable quarter, instead of proceeding by the proper route; the error interested his friends vastly--for they are as critical as the most fastidious could be of any singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his embarra.s.sing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he was rescued from his ign.o.ble position by some grown-up friend. Then, the young East is p.r.o.ne to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume, before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those conditions is a trial even to the experienced. Some, pale from their long immersion--for theirs was no transient dip--grew paler still after they had discussed the pipe or cigar demanded of them by rigorous custom. Fas.h.i.+on reigns supreme among the gamins of the East as well as among the ladies of the West. Off they went, however, cleaner and fresher than before--tacitly endorsing by their matutinal amus.e.m.e.nt the motto that has come down from the philosopher of old, and even now reigns supreme from Bermondsey to Belgravia, that "water is a most excellent thing."

The day may arrive perhaps when, having embanked the Thames, we shall follow suit to the Seine and the Rhine, by tenanting it with cheap baths for the many. Until we do so, the stale joke of the "Great Unwashed"

recoils upon ourselves, and is no less symptomatic of defective sanitary arrangements than the possibility of a drought in Bermondsey. But we are forgetting our bathers. They have gone, leaving the place to solitude--some, I hope, home to breakfast, others out among the flower-walks or on the greensward. It is a gloomy, overcast, muggy, unseasonable July morning; and the civil attendant by the lake-side tells me that the gathering has not been so large as usual. The young Orientals--as is the custom of their race--love suns.h.i.+ne. They get little enough of it, Heaven knows. The next bright Sunday morning, any one who happens to be awake between the hours mentioned, and who would like to add to his experiences of metropolitan existence, may do a worse thing, and see many a less pleasant sight, than if he hailed a hansom and drove by the princ.i.p.al entrance of Victoria Park to our Eastern Bath.

CHAPTER XXI.

AMONG THE QUAKERS.

There is no more engaging or solemn subject of contemplation than the decay of a religious belief. Right or wrong, by that faith men have lived and died, perhaps for centuries; and one cannot see it pa.s.s out from the consciousness of humanity without something more than a cursory thought as to the reasons of its decadence. Being led by exceptional causes to take a more than common interest in those forms of belief which lie beyond the pale of the Church of England, I was attracted by a notice in the public journals that on the following morning the Society of Friends would a.s.semble from all parts of England and open a Conference to inquire into the causes which had brought about the impending decay of their body. So, then, the fact of such decay stood confessed. In most cases the very last persons to realize the unwelcome truth are those who hold the doctrines that are becoming effete.

Quakerism must, I felt, be in a very bad condition indeed when its own disciples called together a conference to account for its pa.s.sing away.

Neither men nor communities, as a rule, act crowner's 'quest on their own decease. That faith, it was clear, must be almost past praying for which, disbelieving, as our modern Quietism does, the efficacy of a.s.semblies, and trusting all to the inward illumination of individuals, should yet summon a sort of Quaker Oec.u.menical Council. I thought I should like to probe this personal light myself, and by inquiring of one or two of the members of the body, learn what they thought of the matter. I was half inclined to array myself in drab, and _tutoyer_ the first of the body I chanced to encounter in my walks abroad. But then it occurred to me how very seldom one did meet a Quaker nowadays except in the "month of Maying." I actually had to cast about for some time before I could select from a tolerably wide and heterogeneous circle of acquaintance two names of individuals belonging to the Society of Friends; though I could readily remember half a dozen of every other culte, from Ultramontanes down to Jumpers. These two, at all events, I would "interview," and so forestall the Conference with a little select synod of my own.

It was possible, of course, to find a ludicrous side to the question; but, as I said, I approached it seriously. Sydney Smith, with his incorrigible habit of joking, questioned the existence of Quaker babies--a position which, if proven, would, of course, at once account for the diminution of adult members of the sect. It was true I had never seen a Quaker infant; but I did not therefore question their existence, any more than I believed postboys and certain humble quadrupeds to be immortal because I had never seen a dead specimen of either. The question I acknowledged at once to be a social and religious, not a physiological one. Why is Quakerism, which has lived over two hundred years, from the days of George Fox, and stood as much persecution as any system of similar age, beginning to succ.u.mb to the influences of peace and prosperity? Is it the old story of Capua and Cannae over again?

Perhaps it is not quite correct to say that it is now beginning to decline; nor, as a fact, is this Conference the first inquiry which the body itself has made into its own incipient decay. It is even said that symptoms of such an issue showed themselves as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century; and prize essays have been from time to time written as to the causes, before the Society so far fell in with the customs of the times as to call a council for the present very difficult and delicate inquiry. The first prize essay by William Rountree attributes the falling off to the fact that the early Friends, having magnified a previously slighted truth--that of the Indwelling Word--fell into the natural error of giving it an undue place, so depriving their representations of Christian doctrine of the symmetry they would otherwise have possessed, and influencing their own practices in such a way as to contract the basis on which Christian fellows.h.i.+p rests. A second prize essay, called "The Peculium," takes a still more practical view, and points out in the most unflattering way that the Friends, by eliminating from their system all attention to the arts, music, poetry, the drama, &c., left nothing for the exercise of their faculties save eating, drinking, and making money. "The growth of Quakerism," says Mr.

T. Hanc.o.c.k, the author of this outspoken essay, "lies in its enthusiastic tendency. The submission of Quakers to the commercial tendency is signing away the life of their own schism. Pure enthusiasm and the pursuit of money (which _is_ an enthusiasm) can never coexist, never co-operate; but," he adds, "the greatest loss of power reserved for Quakerism is the rea.s.sumption by the Catholic Church of those Catholic truths which Quakerism was separated to witness and to vindicate."

I confess myself, however, so far Quaker too that I care little for the written testimony of friends or foes. I have, in all my religious wanderings and inquiries, adopted the method of oral examination; so I found myself on a recent November morning speeding off by rail to the outskirts of London to visit an ancient Quaker lady whom I knew very slenderly, but who I had heard was sometimes moved by the spirit to enlighten a little suburban congregation, and was, therefore, I felt the very person to enlighten me too, should she be thereunto moved. She was a venerable, silver-haired old lady, clad in the traditional dress of her sect, and looking very much like a living representation of Elizabeth Fry. She received me very cordially; though I felt as if I were a fussy innovation of the nineteenth century breaking in upon the sacred, old-fas.h.i.+oned quiet of her neat parlour. She "thee'd and thou'd"

me to my heart's content: and--to summarize the conversation I held with her--it was to the disuse of the old phraseology and the discarding of the peculiar dress that she attributed most of the falling off which she was much too shrewd a woman of the world to shut her eyes to. These were, of course, only the outward and visible signs of a corresponding change within; but this was why the Friends fell off, and gravitated, as she confessed they were doing, to steeple-houses, water-dipping, and bread-and-wine-wors.h.i.+p. She seemed to me like a quiet old Prophetess Anna chanting a "Nunc Dimittis" of her own on the pa.s.sing away of her faith. She would be glad to depart before the glory had quite died out.

She said she did not hope much from the Conference, and, to my amazement, rather gloried in the old irreverent t.i.tle given by the Independents to her forefathers from their "quaking and trembling" when they heard the Word of G.o.d, though she preferred still more the older t.i.tle of "Children of the Light." She was, in fact, a rigid old Conservative follower of George Fox, from the top of her close-bordered cap to the skirts of her grey silk gown. I am afraid my countenance expressed incredulity as to her rationale of the decay; for, as I rose to go, she said, "Thou dost not agree, friend, with what I have said to thee--nay, never shake thy head; it would be wonderful if thou didst, when our own people don't. Stay; I'll give thee a note to my son in London, though he will gainsay much of what I have told thee." She gave me the letter, which was just what I wanted, for I felt I had gained little beyond a pleasant experience of old-world life from my morning's jaunt. I partook of her kindly hospitality, was shown over her particularly cosy house, gardens, and hothouses, and meditated, on my return journey, upon many particulars I learnt for the first time as to the early history of Fox; realizing what a consensus there was between the experiences of all illuminati. I smiled once and again over the quaint t.i.tle of one of Fox's books which my venerable friend had quoted to me--viz., "A Battle-door for Teachers and Professors to learn Plural and Singular. _You_ to _Many_, and _Thou_ to _One_; Singular, One, _Thou_; Plural, Many, _You_." While so meditating, my cab deposited me at the door of a decidedly "downy" house, at the West End, where my prospective friend was practising in I will not mention which of the learned professions. Both the suburban cottage of the mother and the London menage of the son a.s.sured me that they had thriven on Quakerism; and it was only then I recollected that a poor Quaker was as rare a personage as an infantile member of the Society.

The young man--who neither in dress, discourse, nor manner differed from an ordinary English gentleman--smiled as he read his mother's lines, and, with a decorous apology for disturbing the impressions which her discourse might have left upon me, took precisely the view which had been latent in my own mind as to the cause of the Society's decay.

Thoroughly at one with them still on the doctrine of the illuminating power of the Spirit in the individual conscience, he treated the archaic dress, the obsolete phraseology, the obstinate opposition to many innocent customs of the age, simply as anachronisms. He pointed with pride to the fact that our greatest living orator was a member of the Society; and claimed for the underlying principle of Quakerism--namely, the superiority of a conscience void of offence over written scripture or formal ceremony--the character of being in essence the _broadest_ creed of Christendom. Injudicious retention of customs which had grown meaningless had, he felt sure, brought down upon the body that most fatal of all influences--contempt. "You see it in your own Church," he said. "There is a school which, by reviving obsolete doctrines and practices, will end in getting the Church of England disestablished as it is already disintegrated. You see it even in the oldest religion of all--Judaism. You see, I mean, a school growing into prominence and power which discards all the acc.u.mulations of ages, and by going back to real antiquity, at once brings the system more into unison with the century, and prevents that contempt attaching to it which will accrue wherever a system sets its face violently against the tone of current society." He thought the Conference quite unnecessary. "There needs no ghost come from the dead to tell us that, Horatio," he said, cheerily.

"They will find out that Quakerism is not a proselytizing religion," he added; "which, of course, we knew before. They will point to the fas.h.i.+onable attire, the gold rings, and lofty chignons of our younger sisters as direct defiance of primitive custom. I am unorthodox enough"--and he smiled as he used that word--"to think that the attire is more becoming to my younger sisters, just as the Society's dress is to my dear mother." That young man, and the youthful sisters he told me of, stood as embodied answers to the question I had proposed to myself.

They were outward and visible evidences of the doctrine of Quaker "development." The idea is not dead. The spirit is living still. It is the spirit that underlies all real religion--namely, the personal relation of the human soul to G.o.d as the source of illumination. That young man was as good a Quaker at heart as George Fox or William Penn themselves; and the "apology" he offered for his transformed faith was a better one than Barclay's own. I am wondering whether the Conference will come to anything like so sensible a conclusion as to why Quakerism is declining.

CHAPTER XXII.

PENNY READINGS.

Who has ever penetrated beneath the surface of clerical society--meaning thereby the sphere of divinities (mostly female) that doth hedge a curate of a parish--without being sensible of the eligibility of Penny Readings for a place in Mystic London? When the Silly Season is at its very bathos; when the monster gooseberries have gone to seed and the showers of frogs ceased to fall; after the matrimonial efforts of Margate or Scarborough, and before the more decided business of the Christmas Decorations, then there is deep mystery in the penetralia of every parish. The great scheme of Penny Readings is being concocted, and all the available talent of the district--all such as is "orthodox" and "correct"--is laid under contribution.

It is true to a proverb that we English people have a knack of doing the best possible things in the worst possible way; and that not unfrequently when we do once begin doing them we do them to death. It takes some time to convince us that the particular thing is worth doing at all; but, once persuaded, we go in for it with all our British might and main. The beard-and-moustache movement was a case in point. Some years ago a moustache was looked upon by serious English people as decidedly reckless and dissipated. A beard was fit only for a bandit.

Nowadays, the mildest youth in the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation may wear a moustache without being denounced as "carnal," and paterfamilias revels in the beard of a sapeur, no misopogon daring to say him nay. To no "movement," however, does the adage "Vires acquirit eundo" apply more thoroughly than to that connected with "Penny Readings." Originally cropping up timidly in rustic and suburban parishes, it has of late taken gigantic strides, and made every parish where it does _not_ exist, rural or metropolitan, very exceptional indeed. There was a sound principle lying at the bottom of the movement, in so far as it was designed to bring about a fusion of cla.s.ses; though, perhaps, it involved too much of an a.s.sumption that the "working man" had to be lectured to, or read to, by his brother in purple and fine linen. Still the theory was so far sound. Broad cloth was to impart to fustian the advantages it possessed in the way of reading, singing, fiddling, or what not; and that not gratuitously, which would have offended the working man's dignity, but for the modest sum of one penny, which, whilst Lazarus was not too poor to afford, Dives condescended to accept, and apply to charitable purposes.

Such being, in brief, the theory of the Penny Reading movement, it may be interesting to see how it is carried out in practice. Now, in order to ascertain this, I availed myself of several opportunities afforded by the commencement of the Penny Reading season, which may be said to synchronize very nearly with the advent of London fogs, and attended the opening of the series in several widely different localities. In describing my experiences it would perhaps be invidious to specify the exact locality where they were gathered. I prefer to collate those experiences which range from Campden Hill to Camden Town inclusive. Amid many distinguis.h.i.+ng traits there are common elements traceable in all, which may enable us to form some estimate of the working of the scheme, and possibly to offer a few words of advice to those interested therein.