basket. Save the half blank sheets of letters; these are useful to the poor for the making out of bills and for occasional correspondence with absent relations.
At a trifling expense a few little chimney ornaments may be purchased at the Portland Bazaar or elsewhere for the amusement of some of the decrepid old people. The poor are strangely fond of these toys, as also of rude pictures of sacred subjects. Pictures out of old books, cut out and pasted on a yard of holland, bound with tape, and rolled up and fastened with a button and buttonhole, will be a boon to many a poor child as well as mother. I am desirous of impressing upon those who feel willing to work in concert with others and myself, according to our simple plan, the necessity for this sort of needlework in many districts. Money and food tickets sustain the body, but don’t clothe the shivering infants. Mothers have no time to make clothes for their little ones; and poor parents, I may say, have generally large families. The little creatures wear out their clothes as fast as and faster than our own children do theirs. They require continual washing, mending, and making for. How is it possible for the mothers to work for bread and make up coats for eight in family at the same time, “with one pair of hands,” as is their own expression, “to do it all?”
The larger part of the poor women in London get a living by charing and laundry work. The wages of the husband will not pay the six shillings rent for two rooms, and the schooling of two or three boys and girls, and “keep the wolf from the door” as well. The wife, then, must go out to work also. A mechanic, working for the shops in his own neighbourhood, or for those at the West End, makes from 18s. to 1l. per week; a labourer the same sum. This leaves but a small surplus for clothes, I assure you, if any at all, after the rent is paid and the food consumed at the end of the week. I know as a fact that most wives who are too delicate, or are unable for other reasons to go out to work, never eat meat themselves, and they and their children mainly subsist on bread and dripping, treacle-water, and tea. Sometimes a luxury is improvised in the way of a herring, or an ounce or two of salt butter and a herring. This I know to be the fare of a poor family who, out of 1l. 5s. per week, have 6s. 6d. rent to pay, and to support five young children. The poor man must eat one good meal of meat now and then in the week, as his health would decline for want of proper nourishment, and his work would flag wofully in consequence. On the return of the wives from the wash-tub or charing they have only time to wash their children and put them to bed. All day some of the children have been at the ragged or national schools; perhaps one boy has been carrying about newspapers, and parcels, or doctor’s medicines, for 3s. 6d. per week; another has had the care of the baby, as well as a small child, and has spent his time on different doorsteps, exposed to the temptation of marbles, pitch and toss, and countless perils to himself and charges in street affrays and mêlées of different kinds throughout the day. He is probably ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-mannered, because he cannot be spared to go to school.
On Saturday the mother usually stays at home if she have no big daughter “to do her house up,” and washes up everything in her two rooms—house, clothes, children, and herself poor thing,—in order that she and her family may be decent on Sunday, and start afresh to labour for their livelihood on Monday. We never choose Saturday for our visiting day, as we have some scruples in intruding on the general hard washing, hard slapping, and hard struggles for the mastery between the poor striving mother and her necessarily neglected children. What time has she, or what means have they, to make clothes for the babies? They are clean only once a week, and how do they clothe themselves, these London poor? my readers may ask. There are in very dirty streets and close thoroughfares small shops, called marine stores. At these places, in addition to dripping, grease, and kitchen stuff, corks, bits of iron, copper, and old metal pots, bottles and empty boxes, children’s old clothes sometimes are offered for sale, and are resold at a very low price. Besides these places there are small pawn shops and “leaving shops” everywhere. Here raiment of all sorts, large and small, can be purchased. The mother can fit herself out, and her husband too, at these shops; but they pay dear for the cheap article, as the children’s clothes are often filled with infection, and indeed must be. The poor in London live sometimes by pawning one thing after another, through a hard winter, or under stress of sickness. The clothes of the child just dead of typhus fever are taken to the pawnshop, and turned into money. A drunken wife or mother will take the blankets and sheets from her dead husband’s bed, and pawn them. This husband, perhaps, has died of small pox. A woman who goes to help at a gentleman’s house, after a dinner party, may be often rewarded for clandestine services to the cook by a faded stuff or cotton dress. I should think there is hardly a charwoman coming backwards and forwards to help the cook on occasions like these, who could not tell us this was the reward she received for the gin she procured and the