disappearance of doors and windows? This sort of thing is by no means uncommon in this part of Manchester, where, owing to the lack of conveniences, such deserted ground floors are often used by the whole neighborhood as privies.
1845
CHARLES KINGSLEY
The following selection is from chapter 8 of Alton Locke, a novel by Kingsley (1819? 1875). Under the influence of Thomas Carlyle's writings and also as a result of his own observations, Kingsley, a clergyman, became deeply concerned with the sufferings of the working classes. The speaker here, a young tailor, is accompanied by an elderly Scottish bookseller, Sandy Mackaye.
From Alton Locke
[A LONDON SLUM]
It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and greengrocers' shops the gaslights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slipshod dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat and frostbitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality. Fish stalls and fruit stalls lined the edge of the greasy pavement, sending up odors as foul as the language of sellers and buyers. Blood and sewer water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul vapours rose from cow sheds and slaughterhouses, and the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the backyard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the streets?those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin?the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian!1 and see what London is! and then go to the library which God has given thee?one often fears in vain?and see what science says this London might be!
# ft *
We went on through a back street or two, and then into a huge, miserable house, which, a hundred years ago, perhaps, had witnessed the luxury, and rung to the laughter of some one great fashionable family, alone there in their glory. Now every room of it held its family, or its group of families?a phalanstery2 of all the fiends?its grand staircase, with the carved balustrades rotting and crumbling away piecemeal, converted into a common sewer for all its inmates. Up stair after stair we went, while wails of children, and curses
1. Inhabitant of Belgravia, a wealthy residential posed by the French socialist Charles Fourier district of London. (1772-1837). 2. A kind of model cooperative community pro
.
DICKENS: HARD TIMES / 1573
of men, steamed out upon the hot stifling rush of air from every doorway, till,
at the topmost story, we knocked at a garret door. We entered. Bare it was of
furniture, comfortless, and freezing cold; but, with the exception of the plaster
dropping from the roof, and the broken windows, patched with rags and paper,
there was a scrupulous neatness about the whole, which contrasted strangely
with the filth and slovenliness outside. There was no bed in the room?no
table. On a broken chair by the chimney sat a miserable old woman, fancying
that she was warming her hands over embers which had long been cold, shak
ing her head, and muttering to herself, with palsied lips, about the guardians3
and the workhouse; while upon a few rags on the floor lay a girl, ugly, small
pox-marked, hollow-eyed, emaciated, her only bedclothes the skirt of a large
handsome new riding habit, at which two other girls, wan and tawdry, were
astitching busily, as they sat right and left of her on the floor. The old woman
took no notice of us as we entered; but one of the girls looked up, and, with
a pleased gesture of recognition, put her finger up to her lips, and whispered,
'Ellen's asleep.'
'I'm not asleep, dears,' answered a faint unearthly voice; 'I was only praying. Is that Mr. Mackaye?'
'Aye, my lassies; but ha' ye gotten na fire the nicht?'
'No,' said one of them, bitterly, 'we've earned no fire tonight, by fair trade or foul either.'
1850
3. Members of the local Board of Guardians, the body that supervised the workhouse. CHARLES DICKENS
The following selection is from chapter 5 of Hard Times, a novel by Dickens (1812? 1870). The picture of Coketown was based on his impressions of the raw industrial towns of central and northern England such as Manchester and, in particular, Preston, a cotton-manufacturing center in Lancashire.
From Hard Times
[COKETOWN]
It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and
