HOW THE POOR LIVE, AND HORRIBLE LONDON By George R. Sims London Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly 1889 PREFACE. |The papers which form this volume appeared originally in _The Pictorial World_ and _The Daily News_. The interest now evinced in the great question of Housing the Poor leads me to hope that they will be of assistance to many who are studying the subject, and would desire to have their information in a convenient form for reference. Much that I ventured to prognosticate when 'How the Poor Live' was written has happened since, and I have the permission of the author of 'The Bitter Cry of Outcast London' to say that from these articles he derived the greatest assistance while compiling his famous pamphlet. I have thought it well, all circumstances considered, to let the work stand in its original form, and have in no way added to it or altered it. If an occasional lightness of treatment seems to the reader out of harmony with so grave a subject, I pray that he will remember the work was undertaken to enlist the sympathies of a class not generally given to the study of 'low life.' GEORGE R. SIMS HOW THE POOR LIVE. CHAPTER I. |I commence, with the first of these chapters, a book of travel. An author and an artist have gone hand-in-hand into many a far-off region of the earth, and the result has been a volume eagerly studied by the stay-at-home public, anxious to know something of the world in which they live. In these pages I propose to record the result of a journey into a region which lies at our own doors--into a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office. This continent will, I hope, be found as interesting as any of those newly-explored lands which engage the attention of the Royal Geographical Society--the wild races who inhabit it will, I trust, gain public sympathy as easily as those savage tribes for whose benefit the Missionary Societies never cease to appeal for funds. I have no shipwrecks, no battles, no moving adventures by flood and field, to record. Such perils as I and my fellow-traveller have encountered on our journey are not of the order which lend themselves to stirring narrative. It is unpleasant to be mistaken, in underground cellars where the vilest outcasts hide from the light of day, for detectives in search of their prey--it is dangerous to breathe for some hours at a stretch an atmosphere charged with infection and poisoned with indescribable effluvia--it is hazardous to be hemmed in down a blind alley by a crowd of roughs who have had hereditarily transmitted to them the maxim of John Leech, that half-bricks were specially designed for the benefit of 'strangers;' but these are not adventures of the heroic order, and they will not be dwelt upon lovingly after the manner of travellers who go farther afield.