Reprinted Pieces

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'Do we ever get madmen?' said Waterloo, in answer to an inquiry of
mine. 'Well, we DO get madmen. Yes, we have had one or two;
escaped from 'Sylums, I suppose. One hadn't a halfpenny; and
because I wouldn't let him through, he went back a little way,
stooped down, took a run, and butted at the hatch like a ram. He
smashed his hat rarely, but his head didn't seem no worse - in my
opinion on account of his being wrong in it afore. Sometimes
people haven't got a halfpenny. If they are really tired and poor
we give 'em one and let 'em through. Other people will leave
things - pocket-handkerchiefs mostly. I HAVE taken cravats and
gloves, pocket-knives, tooth-picks, studs, shirt-pins, rings
(generally from young gents, early in the morning), but
handkerchiefs is the general thing.'

'Regular customers?' said Waterloo. 'Lord, yes! We have regular
customers. One, such a worn-out, used-up old file as you can
scarcely picter, comes from the Surrey side as regular as ten
o'clock at night comes; and goes over, I think, to some flash house
on the Middlesex side. He comes back, he does, as reg'lar as the
clock strikes three in the morning, and then can hardly drag one of
his old legs after the other. He always turns down the water-
stairs, comes up again, and then goes on down the Waterloo Road.
He always does the same thing, and never varies a minute. Does it
every night - even Sundays.'

I asked Waterloo if he had given his mind to the possibility of
this particular customer going down the water-stairs at three
o'clock some morning, and never coming up again? He didn't think
THAT of him, he replied. In fact, it was Waterloo's opinion,
founded on his observation of that file, that he know'd a trick
worth two of it.

'There's another queer old customer,' said Waterloo, 'comes over,
as punctual as the almanack, at eleven o'clock on the sixth of
January, at eleven o'clock on the fifth of April, at eleven o'clock
on the sixth of July, at eleven o'clock on the tenth of October.
Drives a shaggy little, rough pony, in a sort of a rattle-trap arm-
chair sort of a thing. White hair he has, and white whiskers, and
muffles himself up with all manner of shawls. He comes back again
the same afternoon, and we never see more of him for three months.
He is a captain in the navy - retired - wery old - wery odd - and
served with Lord Nelson. He is particular about drawing his
pension at Somerset House afore the clock strikes twelve every
quarter. I HAVE heerd say that he thinks it wouldn't be according
to the Act of Parliament, if he didn't draw it afore twelve.'

Having related these anecdotes in a natural manner, which was the
best warranty in the world for their genuine nature, our friend
Waterloo was sinking deep into his shawl again, as having exhausted
his communicative powers and taken in enough east wind, when my
other friend Pea in a moment brought him to the surface by asking
whether he had not been occasionally the subject of assault and
battery in the execution of his duty? Waterloo recovering his
spirits, instantly dashed into a new branch of his subject. We
learnt how 'both these teeth' - here he pointed to the places where
two front teeth were not - were knocked out by an ugly customer who
one night made a dash at him (Waterloo) while his (the ugly
customer's) pal and coadjutor made a dash at the toll-taking apron
where the money-pockets were; how Waterloo, letting the teeth go
(to Blazes, he observed indefinitely), grappled with the apron-
seizer, permitting the ugly one to run away; and how he saved the
bank, and captured his man, and consigned him to fine and
imprisonment. Also how, on another night, 'a Cove' laid hold of
Waterloo, then presiding at the horse-gate of his bridge, and threw
him unceremoniously over his knee, having first cut his head open
with his whip. How Waterloo 'got right,' and started after the
Cove all down the Waterloo Road, through Stamford Street, and round
to the foot of Blackfriars Bridge, where the Cove 'cut into' a
public-house. How Waterloo cut in too; but how an aider and
abettor of the Cove's, who happened to be taking a promiscuous
drain at the bar, stopped Waterloo; and the Cove cut out again, ran
across the road down Holland Street, and where not, and into a
beer-shop. How Waterloo breaking away from his detainer was close
upon the Cove's heels, attended by no end of people, who, seeing
him running with the blood streaming down his face, thought
something worse was 'up,' and roared Fire! and Murder! on the
hopeful chance of the matter in hand being one or both. How the
Cove was ignominiously taken, in a shed where he had run to hide,
and how at the Police Court they at first wanted to make a sessions
job of it; but eventually Waterloo was allowed to be 'spoke to,'
and the Cove made it square with Waterloo by paying his doctor's
bill (W. was laid up for a week) and giving him 'Three, ten.'
Likewise we learnt what we had faintly suspected before, that your
sporting amateur on the Derby day, albeit a captain, can be - 'if
he be,' as Captain Bobadil observes, 'so generously minded' -
anything but a man of honour and a gentleman; not sufficiently
gratifying his nice sense of humour by the witty scattering of
flour and rotten eggs on obtuse civilians, but requiring the
further excitement of 'bilking the toll,' and 'Pitching into'
Waterloo, and 'cutting him about the head with his whip;' finally
being, when called upon to answer for the assault, what Waterloo
described as 'Minus,' or, as I humbly conceived it, not to be
found. Likewise did Waterloo inform us, in reply to my inquiries,
admiringly and deferentially preferred through my friend Pea, that
the takings at the Bridge had more than doubled in amount, since
the reduction of the toll one half. And being asked if the
aforesaid takings included much bad money, Waterloo responded, with
a look far deeper than the deepest part of the river, HE should
think not! - and so retired into his shawl for the rest of the
night.

Then did Pea and I once more embark in our four-oared galley, and
glide swiftly down the river with the tide. And while the shrewd
East rasped and notched us, as with jagged razors, did my friend
Pea impart to me confidences of interest relating to the Thames
Police; we, between whiles, finding 'duty boats' hanging in dark
corners under banks, like weeds - our own was a 'supervision boat'
- and they, as they reported 'all right!' flashing their hidden
light on us, and we flashing ours on them. These duty boats had
one sitter in each: an Inspector: and were rowed 'Ran-dan,' which -
for the information of those who never graduated, as I was once
proud to do, under a fireman-waterman and winner of Kean's Prize
Wherry: who, in the course of his tuition, took hundreds of gallons
of rum and egg (at my expense) at the various houses of note above
and below bridge; not by any means because he liked it, but to cure
a weakness in his liver, for which the faculty had particularly
recommended it - may be explained as rowed by three men, two
pulling an oar each, and one a pair of sculls.

Thus, floating down our black highway, sullenly frowned upon by the
knitted brows of Blackfriars, Southwark, and London, each in his
lowering turn, I was shown by my friend Pea that there are, in the
Thames Police Force, whose district extends from Battersea to
Barking Creek, ninety-eight men, eight duty boats, and two
supervision boats; and that these go about so silently, and lie in
wait in such dark places, and so seem to be nowhere, and so may be
anywhere, that they have gradually become a police of prevention,
keeping the river almost clear of any great crimes, even while the
increased vigilance on shore has made it much harder than of yore
to live by 'thieving' in the streets. And as to the various kinds
of water-thieves, said my friend Pea, there were the Tier-rangers,
who silently dropped alongside the tiers of shipping in the Pool,
by night, and who, going to the companion-head, listened for two
snores - snore number one, the skipper's; snore number two, the
mate's - mates and skippers always snoring great guns, and being
dead sure to be hard at it if they had turned in and were asleep.
Hearing the double fire, down went the Rangers into the skippers'
cabins; groped for the skippers' inexpressibles, which it was the
custom of those gentlemen to shake off, watch, money, braces,
boots, and all together, on the floor; and therewith made off as
silently as might be. Then there were the Lumpers, or labourers
employed to unload vessels. They wore loose canvas jackets with a
broad hem in the bottom, turned inside, so as to form a large
circular pocket in which they could conceal, like clowns in
pantomimes, packages of surprising sizes. A great deal of property
was stolen in this manner (Pea confided to me) from steamers;
first, because steamers carry a larger number of small packages
than other ships; next, because of the extreme rapidity with which
they are obliged to be unladen for their return voyages. The
Lumpers dispose of their booty easily to marine store dealers, and
the only remedy to be suggested is that marine store shops should
be licensed, and thus brought under the eye of the police as
rigidly as public-houses. Lumpers also smuggle goods ashore for
the crews of vessels. The smuggling of tobacco is so considerable,
that it is well worth the while of the sellers of smuggled tobacco
to use hydraulic presses, to squeeze a single pound into a package
small enough to be contained in an ordinary pocket. Next, said my
friend Pea, there were the Truckers - less thieves than smugglers,
whose business it was to land more considerable parcels of goods
than the Lumpers could manage. They sometimes sold articles of
grocery and so forth, to the crews, in order to cloak their real
calling, and get aboard without suspicion. Many of them had boats
of their own, and made money. Besides these, there were the
Dredgermen, who, under pretence of dredging up coals and such like
from the bottom of the river, hung about barges and other undecked
craft, and when they saw an opportunity, threw any property they
could lay their hands on overboard: in order slyly to dredge it up
when the vessel was gone. Sometimes, they dexterously used their
dredges to whip away anything that might lie within reach. Some of
them were mighty neat at this, and the accomplishment was called
dry dredging. Then, there was a vast deal of property, such as
copper nails, sheathing, hardwood, &c., habitually brought away by
shipwrights and other workmen from their employers' yards, and
disposed of to marine store dealers, many of whom escaped detection
through hard swearing, and their extraordinary artful ways of
accounting for the possession of stolen property. Likewise, there
were special-pleading practitioners, for whom barges 'drifted away
of their own selves' - they having no hand in it, except first
cutting them loose, and afterwards plundering them - innocents,
meaning no harm, who had the misfortune to observe those foundlings
wandering about the Thames.

We were now going in and out, with little noise and great nicety,
among the tiers of shipping, whose many hulls, lying close
together, rose out of the water like black streets. Here and
there, a Scotch, an Irish, or a foreign steamer, getting up her
steam as the tide made, looked, with her great chimney and high
sides, like a quiet factory among the common buildings. Now, the
streets opened into clearer spaces, now contracted into alleys; but
the tiers were so like houses, in the dark, that I could almost
have believed myself in the narrower bye-ways of Venice.
Everything was wonderfully still; for, it wanted full three hours
of flood, and nothing seemed awake but a dog here and there.

So we took no Tier-rangers captive, nor any Lumpers, nor Truckers,
nor Dredgermen, nor other evil-disposed person or persons; but went
ashore at Wapping, where the old Thames Police office is now a
station-house, and where the old Court, with its cabin windows
looking on the river, is a quaint charge room: with nothing worse
in it usually than a stuffed cat in a glass case, and a portrait,
pleasant to behold, of a rare old Thames Police officer, Mr.
Superintendent Evans, now succeeded by his son. We looked over the
charge books, admirably kept, and found the prevention so good that
there were not five hundred entries (including drunken and
disorderly) in a whole year. Then, we looked into the store-room;
where there was an oakum smell, and a nautical seasoning of
dreadnought clothing, rope yarn, boat-hooks, sculls and oars, spare
stretchers, rudders, pistols, cutlasses, and the like. Then, into
the cell, aired high up in the wooden wall through an opening like
a kitchen plate-rack: wherein there was a drunken man, not at all
warm, and very wishful to know if it were morning yet. Then, into
a better sort of watch and ward room, where there was a squadron of
stone bottles drawn up, ready to be filled with hot water and
applied to any unfortunate creature who might be brought in
apparently drowned. Finally, we shook hands with our worthy friend
Pea, and ran all the way to Tower Hill, under strong Police
suspicion occasionally, before we got warm.

A WALK IN A WORKHOUSE

ON a certain Sunday, I formed one of the congregation assembled in
the chapel of a large metropolitan Workhouse. With the exception
of the clergyman and clerk, and a very few officials, there were
none but paupers present. The children sat in the galleries; the
women in the body of the chapel, and in one of the side aisles; the
men in the remaining aisle. The service was decorously performed,
though the sermon might have been much better adapted to the
comprehension and to the circumstances of the hearers. The usual
supplications were offered, with more than the usual significancy
in such a place, for the fatherless children and widows, for all
sick persons and young children, for all that were desolate and
oppressed, for the comforting and helping of the weak-hearted, for
the raising-up of them that had fallen; for all that were in
danger, necessity, and tribulation. The prayers of the
congregation were desired 'for several persons in the various wards
dangerously ill;' and others who were recovering returned their
thanks to Heaven.

Among this congregation, were some evil-looking young women, and
beetle-browed young men; but not many - perhaps that kind of
characters kept away. Generally, the faces (those of the children
excepted) were depressed and subdued, and wanted colour. Aged
people were there, in every variety. Mumbling, blear-eyed,
spectacled, stupid, deaf, lame; vacantly winking in the gleams of
sun that now and then crept in through the open doors, from the
paved yard; shading their listening ears, or blinking eyes, with
their withered hands; poring over their books, leering at nothing,
going to sleep, crouching and drooping in corners. There were
weird old women, all skeleton within, all bonnet and cloak without,
continually wiping their eyes with dirty dusters of pocket-
handkerchiefs; and there were ugly old crones, both male and
female, with a ghastly kind of contentment upon them which was not
at all comforting to see. Upon the whole, it was the dragon,
Pauperism, in a very weak and impotent condition; toothless,
fangless, drawing his breath heavily enough, and hardly worth
chaining up.

When the service was over, I walked with the humane and
conscientious gentleman whose duty it was to take that walk, that
Sunday morning, through the little world of poverty enclosed within
the workhouse walls. It was inhabited by a population of some
fifteen hundred or two thousand paupers, ranging from the infant
newly born or not yet come into the pauper world, to the old man
dying on his bed.

In a room opening from a squalid yard, where a number of listless
women were lounging to and fro, trying to get warm in the
ineffectual sunshine of the tardy May morning - in the 'Itch Ward,'
not to compromise the truth - a woman such as HOGARTH has often
drawn, was hurriedly getting on her gown before a dusty fire. She
was the nurse, or wardswoman, of that insalubrious department -
herself a pauper - flabby, raw-boned, untidy - unpromising and
coarse of aspect as need be. But, on being spoken to about the
patients whom she had in charge, she turned round, with her shabby
gown half on, half off, and fell a crying with all her might. Not
for show, not querulously, not in any mawkish sentiment, but in the
deep grief and affliction of her heart; turning away her
dishevelled head: sobbing most bitterly, wringing her hands, and
letting fall abundance of great tears, that choked her utterance.
What was the matter with the nurse of the itch-ward? Oh, 'the
dropped child' was dead! Oh, the child that was found in the
street, and she had brought up ever since, had died an hour ago,
and see where the little creature lay, beneath this cloth! The
dear, the pretty dear!

The dropped child seemed too small and poor a thing for Death to be
in earnest with, but Death had taken it; and already its diminutive
form was neatly washed, composed, and stretched as if in sleep upon
a box. I thought I heard a voice from Heaven saying, It shall be
well for thee, O nurse of the itch-ward, when some less gentle
pauper does those offices to thy cold form, that such as the
dropped child are the angels who behold my Father's face!

In another room, were several ugly old women crouching, witch-like,
round a hearth, and chattering and nodding, after the manner of the
monkeys. 'All well here? And enough to eat?' A general
chattering and chuckling; at last an answer from a volunteer. 'Oh
yes, gentleman! Bless you, gentleman! Lord bless the Parish of
St. So-and-So! It feed the hungry, sir, and give drink to the
thusty, and it warm them which is cold, so it do, and good luck to
the parish of St. So-and-So, and thankee, gentleman!' Elsewhere, a
party of pauper nurses were at dinner. 'How do YOU get on?' 'Oh
pretty well, sir! We works hard, and we lives hard - like the
sodgers!'

In another room, a kind of purgatory or place of transition, six or
eight noisy madwomen were gathered together, under the
superintendence of one sane attendant. Among them was a girl of
two or three and twenty, very prettily dressed, of most respectable
appearance and good manners, who had been brought in from the house
where she had lived as domestic servant (having, I suppose, no
friends), on account of being subject to epileptic fits, and
requiring to be removed under the influence of a very bad one. She
was by no means of the same stuff, or the same breeding, or the
same experience, or in the same state of mind, as those by whom she
was surrounded; and she pathetically complained that the daily
association and the nightly noise made her worse, and was driving
her mad - which was perfectly evident. The case was noted for
inquiry and redress, but she said she had already been there for
some weeks.

If this girl had stolen her mistress's watch, I do not hesitate to
say she would have been infinitely better off. We have come to
this absurd, this dangerous, this monstrous pass, that the
dishonest felon is, in respect of cleanliness, order, diet, and
accommodation, better provided for, and taken care of, than the
honest pauper.

And this conveys no special imputation on the workhouse of the
parish of St. So-and-So, where, on the contrary, I saw many things
to commend. It was very agreeable, recollecting that most infamous
and atrocious enormity committed at Tooting - an enormity which, a
hundred years hence, will still be vividly remembered in the bye-
ways of English life, and which has done more to engender a gloomy
discontent and suspicion among many thousands of the people than
all the Chartist leaders could have done in all their lives - to
find the pauper children in this workhouse looking robust and well,
and apparently the objects of very great care. In the Infant
School - a large, light, airy room at the top of the building - the
little creatures, being at dinner, and eating their potatoes
heartily, were not cowed by the presence of strange visitors, but
stretched out their small hands to be shaken, with a very pleasant
confidence. And it was comfortable to see two mangy pauper
rocking-horses rampant in a corner. In the girls' school, where
the dinner was also in progress, everything bore a cheerful and
healthy aspect. The meal was over, in the boys' school, by the
time of our arrival there, and the room was not yet quite
rearranged; but the boys were roaming unrestrained about a large
and airy yard, as any other schoolboys might have done. Some of
them had been drawing large ships upon the schoolroom wall; and if
they had a mast with shrouds and stays set up for practice (as they
have in the Middlesex House of Correction), it would be so much the
better. At present, if a boy should feel a strong impulse upon him
to learn the art of going aloft, he could only gratify it, I
presume, as the men and women paupers gratify their aspirations
after better board and lodging, by smashing as many workhouse
windows as possible, and being promoted to prison.

In one place, the Newgate of the Workhouse, a company of boys and
youths were locked up in a yard alone; their day-room being a kind
of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down
at night. Divers of them had been there some long time. 'Are they
never going away?' was the natural inquiry. 'Most of them are
crippled, in some form or other,' said the Wardsman, 'and not fit
for anything.' They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or
hyaenas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out,
much as those animals do. The big-headed idiot shuffling his feet
along the pavement, in the sunlight outside, was a more agreeable
object everyway.

Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in
bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs
day-rooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of
old people, in up-stairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life, God
knows how - this was the scenery through which the walk lay, for
two hours. In some of these latter chambers, there were pictures
stuck against the wall, and a neat display of crockery and pewter
on a kind of sideboard; now and then it was a treat to see a plant
or two; in almost every ward there was a cat.

In all of these Long Walks of aged and infirm, some old people were
bedridden, and had been for a long time; some were sitting on their
beds half-naked; some dying in their beds; some out of bed, and
sitting at a table near the fire. A sullen or lethargic
indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything
but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no
use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again,
I thought were generally apparent. On our walking into the midst
of one of these dreary perspectives of old men, nearly the
following little dialogue took place, the nurse not being
immediately at hand:

'All well here?'

No answer. An old man in a Scotch cap sitting among others on a
form at the table, eating out of a tin porringer, pushes back his
cap a little to look at us, claps it down on his forehead again
with the palm of his hand, and goes on eating.

'All well here?' (repeated).

No answer. Another old man sitting on his bed, paralytically
peeling a boiled potato, lifts his head and stares.

'Enough to eat?'

No answer. Another old man, in bed, turns himself and coughs.

'How are YOU to-day?' To the last old man.

That old man says nothing; but another old man, a tall old man of
very good address, speaking with perfect correctness, comes forward
from somewhere, and volunteers an answer. The reply almost always
proceeds from a volunteer, and not from the person looked at or
spoken to.

'We are very old, sir,' in a mild, distinct voice. 'We can't
expect to be well, most of us.'

'Are you comfortable?'

'I have no complaint to make, sir.' With a half shake of his head,
a half shrug of his shoulders, and a kind of apologetic smile.

'Enough to eat?'

'Why, sir, I have but a poor appetite,' with the same air as
before; 'and yet I get through my allowance very easily.'

'But,' showing a porringer with a Sunday dinner in it; 'here is a
portion of mutton, and three potatoes. You can't starve on that?'

'Oh dear no, sir,' with the same apologetic air. 'Not starve.'

'What do you want?'

'We have very little bread, sir. It's an exceedingly small
quantity of bread.'

The nurse, who is now rubbing her hands at the questioner's elbow,
interferes with, 'It ain't much raly, sir. You see they've only
six ounces a day, and when they've took their breakfast, there CAN
only be a little left for night, sir.'

Another old man, hitherto invisible, rises out of his bed-clothes,
as out of a grave, and looks on.

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