Practicable Socialism, New SeriesBarnett, S. A. (Samuel Augustus)
Religion
Practicable Socialism, New Series
Barnett, S. A. (Samuel Augustus)
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class
Many visit the public-houses and try to drink themselves out of their
gloom. “To get drunk,” we have been told, is “the shortest way out of
Manchester,” and many citizens in every city go at any rate some
distance along this way. They find they live a larger, fuller life as,
standing in the warm bright bar, they drink and talk as if they were
“lords”. The returns which suggest that the drink bill of a workman’s
family is 5s. or 6s. a week prove how popular is this use of leisure,
and they who begin a holiday by drinking probably spend the rest of it
in sleeping. The identification of rest with sleep is very common, and a
workman who knows he has a fair claim to rest thinks himself justified
in sleeping or dozing hour after hour during Saturday and Sunday.
“What,” I once asked an engineer, “should I find most of your mates
doing if I called on Sunday?” His answer was short: “Sleeping”.
Another large body of workers as soon as they are free hurry off
to some form of excitement. They go in their thousands to see a
football-match, they yell with those who yell, they are roused by the
spectacle of battle, and they indulge in hot “sultry” talk. Or they
go to some race or trial of strength on which bets are possible. They
feel in the rise and fall of the chance of winning a new stirring of
their dull selves, and they dream of wealth to be enjoyed in wearing a
coat with a fur collar and in becoming owners of sporting champions. Or
they go to music halls--1,250,000 go every week in London--where if the
excitement be less violent it still avails to move their thoughts into
other channels. They see colour instead of dusky dirt, they hear songs
instead of the clash of machinery, they are interested as a performer
risks his life, and the jokes make no demands on their thoughts. The
theatres probably are less popular, at any rate among men, but they
attract great numbers, especially to plays which appeal to generous
impulses. An audience enjoys the easy satisfaction of shouting down
a villain. The same sort of excitement is that provided on Sunday
mornings in the clubs, where in somewhat sordid surroundings, a few
actors and singers try to stir the muddled feelings of their audience
by appeals, which are more or less vulgar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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