never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the
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1 556 / INDUSTRIALISM: PROGRESS OR DECLINE?
same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.
These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.
You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there?as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done?they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital1 and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and salable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.
1854
1. Maternity hospital. ANONYMOUS
In 1965 A. L. Lloyd, a collector of British folk songs, heard 'Poverty Knock' from a weaver who had learned it sixty years earlier. The song dates from before that.
Poverty Knock1
REFRAIN 2
Poverty, poverty knock! Me loom is a-sayin' all day. Poverty, poverty knock! Gaffer's' too skinny' to pay. the foreman's / stingy
1. The sound of a 19th-century loom. 2. Repeated after each stanza.
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ANONYMOUS: POVERTY KNOCK / 157 5
Poverty, poverty knock! Keepin' one eye on the clock. Ah know ah can guttle0 eat When ah hear me shuttle Go: Poverty, poverty knock!
Up every mornin' at five. Ah wonder that we keep alive. Tired an' yawnin' on the cold mornin', It's back to the dreary old drive.
5 Oh dear, we're goin' to be late. Gaffer is stood at the gate. We're out o' pocket, our wages they're docket0 docked We'll 'a' to buy grub on the slate.3
An' when our wages they'll bring,
10 We're often short of a string.4 While we are fratchin' wi' gaffer for snatchin',5 We know to his brass0 he will cling. money
We've got to wet our own yarn By dippin' it into the tarn.0 pool15 It's wet an' soggy an' makes us feel groggy, An' there's mice in that dirty old barn.
Oh dear, me poor 'ead it sings. Ah should have woven three strings, But threads are breakin' and my back is achin'.
20 Oh dear, ah wish ah had wings.
Sometimes a shuttle flies out, Gives some poor woman a clout. Ther she lies bleedin', but nobody's 'eedin'. Who's goin' t'carry her out?
25 Tuner6 should tackle me loom. 'E'd rather sit on his bum. 'E's far too busy a-courtin' our Lizzie, An' ah cannat get 'im to come.
Lizzie is so easy led.
30 Ah think that 'e teks her to bed. She alius was skinny, now look at her pinny.0 pinaforeIt's just about time they was wed.
3. On credit, as recorded on a piece of slate. 5. Cheating. 'Fratchin' ': quarreling. 4. Not paid for all our work. 'String': a piece of 6. The man who maintains the loom, cloth.
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1 1576
HENRY MAYHEW
In 1849 Mayhew (1812-1887) was asked by the Morning Chronicle to be the metropolitan correspondent for its series 'Labour and the Poor.' His interviews of workers and of street folk, later published as a book, convey a vivid sense of the lives of London's poor.
From London Labour and the London Poor
