Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and PresentMiller, Thomas
Philosophy
Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present
Miller, Thomas
London (England) -- Description and travel
These Bethnal-green holiday-people were a poor and homely race, looking
what they really are, a badly-fed and badly-housed populace. They are
small in stature and limb, and unwholesome in appearance, like flowers
crammed into the bit of ground behind the smoky alleys in which they
live, that dwindle and pine, and get less and less every year they live:
so were these poor people--they had neither bulk, bone, nor muscle: they
were like the trees in our city streets compared with the giant oaks of
Sherwood Forest. Some of the girls were rather pretty but pensive; they
seemed happy, and yet it did not look natural for them to appear so; you
could not tell how it was, yet you "felt" it to be so. The ugliest and
dirtiest were to all appearance the happiest; they saw only the present,
they left the past behind them, quite sure that the old cares,
privations, and sorrows would not run away while they were absent. Peace
be with them, and all happiness attend such careful pastors as the Rev.
Joseph Brown, Rev. Thomas French the curate of Bildeston, the Rev. R. H.
Herschell, and all the kind friends who assist them by contributing
their mite to these Holidays of the Poor. We place their names in our
pages with a feeling of pleasure.
During one of our rural wanderings in summer, we chanced to stumble upon
a holiday group of charity-school children, both boys and girls, which
had been brought into the quietude of the country by half-a-score of
pleasure-vans. They had not all the freedom we should have liked to have
seen them enjoy: if one or two straggled a little out of bounds, they
were called back. Poor little things! they seemed to envy the bees and
birds that flew about, and to wish that they had no teachers to watch
over them. We fancied how little some of them had slept on the previous
night, through thinking about their country excursion; how often they
had looked at the sky, and hoped that it would not rain--that it would
surely be fair one day in the year, the only day on which they had a
holiday. It made us sigh to look at some of them--they were such little
specimens of humanity, especially when, on inquiry, we found that many
of them were fatherless and motherless. They seemed to look on Nature
with that childish wonder which is pleased with every thing it sees:
they gathered the white dead-nettle, the ox-eye, and red poppy, and
thought that such were beautiful flowers; little darlings, that could
only sob and weep when they were beaten, and nestle closer to one
another for comfort, seeming to look about with their pretty eyes as if
seeking for some friend to protect them. Others we saw with forbidding
countenances, who had no doubt been beaten and starved, and felt a
savage satisfaction in punishing such as were less than themselves, as
if copying the examples they had suffered under.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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