Tales of Mean Streets

? It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leadenhall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will say: a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums hat hide human cree

rderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as a place whence begging letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all perennially insolvent, and everybody always wants a day in the country. Many and misty are people’s notions of the East End; and

se twenty feet high, with three square holes to carry the windows, and an oblong hole to carry the door, is not a pleasing object; and each

d each set of holes: this, unless “young men lodgers” are taken in, or there are grown sons paying for bed and board. As for the grown daughters they marry as soon as may be. Domestic service is a social descent, and little und

in this wise costs fourpence a week, and for this fourpence a fierce rivalry rages between night-watchmen and policemen. The night-watchman — a sort of by-blow of the ancient “Charley,” and himself a fast vanishing quantity — is the real professional performer; but he goes to the wall, because a large connection must be worked if the pursuit is to pay at fourpence a knocker. Now,

ere and there, and the puny squall of croupy infants. After this, a new trotting of little feet to docks, gas-works, and ship-yards with father’s dinner in a basin and a red handkerchief, and so to the board school again. More muffled scrubbing and more squalling, and perhaps a feeble attempt or two at decorating the blankness of a square hole here and there by pouring

, potatoes, and batter-pudding — the lucky little feet these, with Sunday boots on them, when father is in good work and has brought home all his money; not the poor little feet in worn shoes

e unresting little feet, and from under painful little velvet caps and straw hats stare solemn little faces toweled to a polish. Thus disposed and arrayed, they fare gravely thr

await the opening of the beer-shop round the corner. Thus goes Sunday in this street, and every Sunday is the same as every other Sunday, so that one monotony is broken

ars and rumors of wars, public rejoicings; but the trotting of the little feet will be neither quickened nor stayed. Those quaint little women, the girl-children of this street, who use a motherly management toward all girl-things younger than themselves, and toward

try. But she bore children, and her voice cracked. Then her man died, and she sung no more. They took away her home, and wit

sunken, red eyes. She has other sources of income than the candles and the bootlaces: she washes and chars all day, and she sews cheap shirts at night. Two “young men lodgers,” moreover, sleep upstairs, and the children sleep in the back room; she herself is supposed not to sleep at all. The policeman does not knock here in the morning — the widow wakes the lodgers herself; and nobody in the street behind ever looks out of window before going to bed, no matter how late, without seeing a lig

use cleaner than the widow’s is ruled by a despotic Scotch woman, who drives every hawker off her whitened step, and rubs her door handle if

o live through lives as flat and colorless as the day’s life in this street. Existence dawns, and the doctor-watchman’s door-knock resounds along the row of rectangular holes. Then a muffled cry announces that a small new being has come to trudge and sweat its way in the appointed groove. Later, the trotting

in pairs. There is no exchange of promises, no troth-plight, no engagement, no love-talk. They patrol the streets side by side, usually in silence, sometimes with fatuous chatter. There are no dances, no tennis, no water-parties, no picnics to bring them together: so they must walk out, or be unacquainted. If two of them grow dissatisfied with each other’s company, nothing is easier than to separate and walk out with somebody else. When by these means each has found a fit mate (or thinks so), a ring is bought, and the odd association becomes a regul

uits it would be sinful. Nobody reads poetry or romance. The very words are foreign. A Sunday paper in some few houses provides such reading as this street is disposed to achieve. No

oes to church on Sunday and pays for his seat. At the opposite end, turnings lead to streets less rigidly respectable: some where “Mangling done here” stares from windows, and where doors are left

ssible that one or two among them, at some point in a life of ups and downs, may have been indebted to a coal and blanket fund; but whoso

ded as a sort of learned degree, and at its meeting debates are held and papers smugly read by lamentably self-satisfied young men lodgers, whose only preparation f

tuous maze. This street of the square holes is hundreds of miles long. That it is planned in short lengths is true, but there is no other way in the world th