The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject PoorMearns, Andrew
Religion
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor
Mearns, Andrew
Poor -- England -- London
The misery and sin caused by drink in these districts have often been
told, but these horrors can never be set forth either by pen or artist's
pencil. In the district of Euston Road is one public-house to every 100
people, counting men, women and children. Immediately around our chapel
in Orange Street, Leicester Square, are 100 gin-palaces, most of them
very large; and these districts are but samples of what exists in all
the localities which we have investigated. Look into one of these
glittering saloons, with its motley, miserable crowd, and you may be
horrified as you think of the evil that is nightly wrought there; but
contrast it with any of the abodes which you find in the fetid courts
behind them, and you will wonder no longer that it is crowded. With its
brightness, its excitement and its temporary forgetfulness of misery, it
is a comparative heaven to tens of thousands. How can they be expected
to resist its temptations? They could not live if they did not drink,
even though they know that by drinking they do worse than die. All kinds
of depravity have here their schools. Children who can scarcely walk are
taught to steal, and mercilessly beaten if they come back from their
daily expeditions without money or money's worth. Many of them are taken
by the hand or carried in the arms to the gin-palace, and not seldom may
you see mothers urging and compelling their tender infants to drink the
fiery liquid. Lounging at the doors and lolling out of windows and
prowling about street corners were pointed out several well-known
members of the notorious band of "Forty Thieves," who, often in
conspiracy with abandoned women, go out after dark to rob people in
Oxford Street, Regent Street and other thoroughfares. Here you pass a
coffee-house, there a wardrobe shop, there a tobacconist's, and there a
grocer's, carrying on a legitimate trade no doubt, but a far different
and more remunerative one as well, especially after evening sets
in,--all traps to catch the unwary. These particulars indicate but
faintly the moral influences from which the dwellers in these squalid
regions have no escape, and by which is bred "infancy that knows no
innocence, youth without modesty or shame, maturity that is mature in
nothing but suffering and guilt, blasted old age that is a scandal on
the name we bear."
Another difficulty with which we have to contend, and one in large
measure the cause of what we have described, is the
POVERTY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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