Part 4 (1/2)

Out of the dissecting-room, beyond the narrow precincts of the hospital, masked in gay clothes, with faces all red with paint and wrinkled with idiotic leer, stand side by side the living and the dead.

The princ.i.p.al London Hospitals are the following:-1. St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in West Smithfield, first founded in the twelfth century, and refounded by Henry VIII. in 1546. The building, a s.p.a.cious quadrangular structure, is princ.i.p.ally modern, having been finished in 1770. It makes up 580 beds. In 1848,71,573 were relieved by this hospital, viz., 5,826 inpatients, 19,149 out-patients, and 46,598 casual ditto. Necessity is the only recommendation to this inst.i.tution; and patients are received without limitation. The medical staff is equal to any in the metropolis.

The staircase was gratuitously painted by Hogarth. 2. Guy's Hospital, St. Thomas's Street, Southwark, founded in 1721, contains accommodation for 580 in-patients, and has an excellent museum and theatre of anatomy.

This magnificent hospital, which consists of two quadrangles and two wings, was founded and endowed by Thomas Guy, a bookseller, who expended 18,793 upon the building, and left 219,419 for its endowment-the largest sum, perhaps, that has ever been expended by any individual on similar purposes. Recently, however, Guy's Hospital has met with another benefactor, but little inferior, in point of liberality, to its founder; a citizen, of the name of Thomas Hunt, having bequeathed to it, in 1829, the princely sum of 200,000! The medical school attached to this hospital, while under the superintendence of the late Sir Astley Cooper, was one of the most extensive, and probably, also, the best in the empire. 3. St. Thomas's Hospital, in High Street, Borough, was formed out of two other charities by Edward VI., and rebuilt in 1693. Additions were made in 1732, and a large part was rebuilt in 1836. It contains 18 wards, and 428 beds. It has an income of about 25,000 a year, derived almost wholly from rents of estates in London and the country. 4. St.

George's Hospital, near Hyde Park Corner, lately rebuilt, has a fine front, 200 feet in length, facing the Green Park. It accommodates 460 in-patients. 5. The Middles.e.x Hospital, near Oxford Street, founded in 1745, has 285 beds, and relieves numerous out-patients. 6. London Hospital, in Whitechapel, was founded in 1740. Its wards accommodate about 250 patients. 7. Westminster Hospital, rebuilt in 1833, near the Abbey, has 174 beds; but three wards, containing s.p.a.ce for fifty additional beds, are unfurnished, notwithstanding there is a great demand for hospital accommodation. 8. The Marylebone and Paddington Hospital, opened in 1850, has 150 beds, which it is proposed to increase to 376, supposing the necessary funds to be forthcoming. This, and the four last mentioned hospitals, depend wholly, or almost wholly, on voluntary subscriptions, which are said to be very insufficient to meet the demands upon them. The University College and King's College Hospitals, and Charing Cross Hospital, are smaller establishments of the same nature, each accommodating about 120 patients, and there are other establishments of the same description. Medical schools are connected with the above hospitals, in which lectures are delivered by the officers, and which are attended by several hundreds of students. Within the last few years the number of medical students has considerably decreased.

PORTLAND PLACE.

The worst effects of drunkenness are, perhaps, after all, its indirect ones. It is a sad sight to see man stricken down in his prime, and woman in her beauty; to see individuals' hopes and prospects blighted; to see in that carcase staggering by the utter wreck and ruin of an immortal soul. But this is but a small portion of the damage done to humanity by the ravages of intemperance. Look at our great social evil. I need not name it. No one who walks the streets of London by night requires to be informed what that is. Has drink nothing to do with it? Ask that unfortunate, who has just commenced her evening's walk. She will tell you that when she parted with her innocence she had previously been drugged with drink; that if it were not for drink she could not pursue her unhallowed career; that her victims are stimulated by drink; and that without the gin-palace or the public-house she and such as she could not exist. I do not now speak of the worst forms of prost.i.tution, of the gin-palaces in the East frequented by drunken sailors, where women are kept as a source of attraction and revenue; but of the better cla.s.ses, of the das.h.i.+ng women who are supplied with expensive dresses by respectable Oxford-street tradesmen in the expectation of being paid by some rich victim; the women whom you meet dressed so gay in Regent-street or Portland-place.

Once upon a time there was a rascally old n.o.bleman who lived in a big house in Piccadilly. Mr. Raikes describes him as ”a little sharp-looking man, very irritable, and swore like 10,000 troopers, enormously rich, and very selfish.” He sat all day long at a low window, leering at beauty as it pa.s.sed by, and under his window was a groom waiting on horseback to carry his messages to any one whom he remarked in the street. If one did not know that we lived in a highly moral age, one would fancy many such old n.o.blemen lived in the neighbourhood of Portland-place, for in the streets leading thence, and reaching as far back as Tottenham-court-road, we have an immense female population, all existing and centred there, who live by vicious means-all with the common feeling of their s.e.x rooted out and destroyed; all intended by nature to diffuse happiness around; all a curse on all with whom they have to do. In this small circle, there is enough vicious leaven to leaven all London. It is impossible to get a true estimate of their number. Guesses of all kinds have been made, but none are exactly to be depended on. In a great capital like ours, where wealthy sensualists can and do pay enormous sums for the gratification of their whims-(I have seen it stated that on one occasion a gentleman went into a house in Norton-street with a 500 bank-note, and after staying a few hours received but 20 change)-it is not alone the professedly vicious-the cla.s.s whom we call prost.i.tutes-who prost.i.tute themselves. As fine shops are pointed out in fas.h.i.+onable streets, which are said to be houses of the most infamous description, in spite of the display of lace and millinery in the window, so there are thousands of women, supposed to be respectable, and to live in a respectable manner, who yet are to all intents and purposes prost.i.tutes, though they would not be cla.s.sified as such. Now the number of this latter cla.s.s is much exaggerated. Towards the close of the last century, when the population of London amounted to about a million, Dr. Colquhoun, magistrate of the Thames Police, a.s.serted the number of prost.i.tutes to be at least 50,000. If prost.i.tution has followed the same ratio of increase as the population, the number now must be considered as truly appalling. But evidently the Doctor's estimate is exaggerated. At a period much nearer to our own, Mr.

Chadwick puts down the number, excluding the City, at 7,000; Mr. Mayne, at from 8,000 to 10,000. The City Police estimates the number at 8,000, and this estimate is supported by Dr. Ryan, and Mr. Talbot, secretary to the a.s.sociation formed in London for the protection of young girls. This is a very high figure; but a recent French writer tells us that in London, in the higher ranks of life, the proportion of vicious women to virtuous are as one to three! and in the lower ranks virtue does not exist at all!!! At any rate, there is reason to believe that in London there are 5,000 infamous houses. If besides we reckon up the procuresses, the keepers of low gin-palaces and beer-shops, where women are the bait, we are lost and bewildered, and dare not trust ourselves to give in numbers any idea of the persons directly and indirectly connected with prost.i.tution, or of the sum spent annually in London on that vice alone. And all this is carried on in the most methodical way. There are men and women whose constant employment is to search all parts of the metropolis for fresh victims; and to them young girls from the country and servant maids-of-all-work are easy prey. Then letters are written and sent to the clubs and to the patrons of such infamy, and they are furnished with all the particulars, and the price of the victim's willing or unwilling seduction and shame. This state of things is progressive.

Last year the returns of the City missionaries show an increase in their districts of fallen women to the number of 1,035. Of course it is only with the dregs that the City missionary comes in contact. While a woman preserves her health, and youth, and good looks, she lives in better quarters than those into which the City missionary generally finds his way. For a time she is gay; she dresses fine, spends money freely, drinks, and sings, and then prematurely becomes old, and sad, and poor.

Is this ever to be so? Is woman always to sell herself to man? And is man to dream that the smile thus bought is no lie, but a precious truth?

I don't suppose that if men were temperate universal chast.i.ty would be the result; but that we should have less immorality is, I think, an admitted fact. Why are women, prost.i.tutes? Chiefly, we are told, because of poverty; and of all causes of poverty, is not intemperance the greatest? Would you see how one vice is connected with another? Come up Portland-place at night. True, there are no public-houses here, but they are plentiful enough in the neighbourhood; and in them all night the men and painted women from Portland-place madden themselves with drink. Yes, here are the women that should have been British wives and mothers utterly perverted, and dragging down with them many a heart that might have emerged into a n.o.ble life. l.u.s.t and intemperance have slain them.

”Lost, lost, lost for ever!” is the cry that greets us as we look at them.

An a.s.sociation has been formed in this neighbourhood to wipe away this plague spot. In their report, the committee state, when the movement commenced, which issued in the establishment of the a.s.sociation at the close of 1857, the condition of the districts (All Souls and Trinity), comprising the streets lying immediately to the eastward of Portland-place, was perfectly appalling. It was then calculated that in those streets there were not less than 140 notorious houses of ill-fame, containing from six to ten fallen women each, which fearful array of prost.i.tution was swelled by a large number of young women, lodging in the districts, who were known to be gaining their livelihood nominally by working for shops, but princ.i.p.ally by the means of night prost.i.tution.

One natural result of this dense aggregation of depravity in a narrow spot was the front of insolent and shameless defiance which vice had put on. Indecent exhibitions in broad day from the windows of these houses, utterances the most revolting, that startled and shocked the ear of the pa.s.senger who had unwarily penetrated these haunts of infamy, together with the outrageous conduct of the unhappy children of shame, who even before the shades of night had fallen were wont to come forth in hundreds upon the pavements of Portland-place and Regent-street, seemed to indicate a determination that no vestige of respectability should be suffered to linger in a neighbourhood which not thirty years before was as pure and as much resorted to as any of the most favoured districts of western London. The keepers of these houses were many of them foreigners; some were known to the police as determined forgers, gamblers, and thieves. Others, indeed the princ.i.p.al part, were females grown old in the path of depravity, in whose bosom every spark of womanly tenderness had become quenched; who could treat, indeed, with a show of kindness the unhappy girls they had enticed to their doors, so long as they were able to satisfy their exorbitant demands, but who did not hesitate to cast them out into a deeper degradation, or utter dest.i.tution, the moment a decay of their attractions or ill health had disabled them from paying the extravagant charges for their hired rooms and dresses. Riotous and brutal outrages were constantly taking place in these houses, and evidence that crimes of violence and sensuality of the darkest type had been enacted in them came to light. It was, moreover, ascertained that among those wretched traders in sin were those who had embarked in a still more repulsive branch of their guilty trade, and were making large gains by turning their houses into receptacles for young unfallen girls imported from abroad, who were sold over from time to time to the neighbouring brothel keepers. Such was the awful moral pestilence which, up to that time, was raging unchecked, and year by year it was rapidly enlarging the area of its ravages.

At the meeting held to receive this report, the Rev. Mr. Garnier stated that ”he visited himself a house in Norton-street, where in one room he saw a seat placed around so as to hold as many of the poor creatures as possible on a day that was appointed for brothel keepers, to attend and bid for their purchase (hear, and much sensation). The unfortunate girls thus disposed of were brought from abroad, and while connected with the House of Commons he had the best evidence of this, for n.o.blemen and members of parliament showed letters they continually received soliciting them to partake of the depravity (much sensation). The letters spoke of a beautiful girl just imported from Belgium or France, and the n.o.bleman or gentleman, whichever he might be, was asked to visit her, as she was at his service. In one case a letter was received from the rectory district of that parish (Marylebone), in which it was stated that a girl at a certain address was ready to be given up to l.u.s.t to the highest bidder. These letters were addressed to the Speaker as well as the members of the House of Commons, and this, together with the spectacle he (the Rev. gentleman) witnessed in Norton-street, was, he considered, very good evidence of the abominable traffic that was carried on in this country.

”The Rev. Mr. Marks said, within the last fifteen months he was called to visit three Jewesses, painful as the duty was, and this visit was made in the Rev. Mr. Garnier's district. These three girls had been imported for the purposes of prost.i.tution (hear, hear). In one case alone he was enabled to take the poor creature from the abominable vice that threatened her, and sent her home; and he nearly succeeded with another, but with regret-aye, deep regret, he said so-he was prevented. A sum of 200 had been offered to retain the girl, and this sum was offered by the brother of an M.P.”

The discussion of the delicate question, as the _Times_ terms it, has lately received new light in an unexpected quarter. The victims themselves have taken to writing. ”Another Unfortunate” describes her parents. They were drunkards-their chief expense was gin-their children were left to grow up without moral training of any kind. The writer says:-”We heard nothing of religion. Sometimes when a neighbour died we went to the burial, and thus got within a few steps of the church. If a grand funeral chanced to fall in our way we went to see that, too-the fine black horses and nodding plumes-as we went to see the soldiers when we could for a lark. No parson ever came near us. The place where we lived was too dirty for nicely-shod gentlemen. 'The publicans and sinners' of our circ.u.mscribed, but thickly-populated locality had no 'friend' among them. Our neighbourhood furnished many subjects to the treadmill, the hulks, and the colonies, and some to the gallows. We lived with the fear of these things, and not with the fear of G.o.d before our eyes.” From such a training could we expect otherwise? The writer asks what business has society to persecute such as she: a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit; the unfortunate is the fruit, and society is the tree.

It is in vain that we reclaim the women. The only remedy-the only way to put down the social evil-is to reclaim the men.

MARK-LANE.

On a Monday morning, especially on the Eastern Counties lines, the trains running into town have an unusually large number of pa.s.sengers. They consist generally of the jolly-looking fellows who, at the time of the cattle show, take the town by storm, and fill every omnibus and cab, and dining room, and place of public amus.e.m.e.nt, and then as suddenly retire as if they were a Tartar horde, das.h.i.+ng into some rich and luxurious capital, then vanis.h.i.+ng with their booty, none know whither. However, penetrate into Mark-lane, you may see them every Monday and Friday, smelling very strong of tobacco smoke-for, although smoking is absurdly and strictly prohibited on railways, it is a known fact that people will smoke nevertheless-and with the air of men who are not troubled about trifles, and have their pockets well lined with cash. These are the merchants and millers and maltsters of Mark-lane. All England waits for their reports; their decisions affect the prices of grain at Chicago on one side, and far in the ports of the Black Sea on the other. Bread is the staff of life, and its traffic affects the weal or woe of empires.

Prices low in Mark-lane, and in the garrets of London, in the cellars of Manchester, in the wynds of Edinburgh, there is joy. As we may suppose, the trade in grain is one of the most ancient in the world. There were corn merchants and millers long before Mark-lane was built. Originally the corn merchants of the metropolis a.s.sembled at a place called Bark's Quay, where now the Custom-house stands. Then they moved into Whitechapel, somewhere near Aldgate Church, and then the Corn Exchange in Mark-lane was built. Originally there was but one exchange, that erected in 1749, which is private property, and the money for which was raised in eighty hundred-pound shares; each share at this time being worth 1,300.

This, I believe, is the only metropolitan market for corn, grain, and seeds. The market days are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; hours, ten to three. Wheat is paid for in bills at one month, and other corn and grain in bills at two months. The Kentish hoymen, distinguishable by their sailors' jackets, have stands free of expense, and pay less for metage and dues than others, and the Ess.e.x dealers enjoy some privileges; in both cases said to be in consideration of the men of Kent and Ess.e.x having continued to supply the city when it was ravaged by the plague.

Old Mark-lane consists of an open Doric colonnade, within which the factors have their stands. It resembles the atrium, or place of audience in the Pompeian house, with its impluvium, the place in the centre in which the rain fell. In this market, managed by a committee and secretary, there was no foreign compet.i.tion. At this time there are about seventy-two stands, and more than a hundred subscribers of five guineas each. I believe the stands are from thirty to forty pounds a year. Now at one time this place was quite a close borough. There were more factors than the place could hold, and when a stand was vacant it was given to some poor broken-down man, who would not be likely to interfere with the jolly business which the rest were carrying on. The excluded were very indignant. They planted themselves in Mark-lane.

They did business in the street outside the Exchange. They were men of equal standing and respectability with any of the privileged; and after an immense amount of grumbling and growling, they did as most Englishmen would have done-went to Parliament, and got an Act to have a second Exchange erected side by side with the old one. This second erection was completed in 1826, and in the part.i.tion are now a couple of arches, which were placed there in order that, if at any time the old Exchange were amalgamated with the new-a consummation of which there seems no chance at present-the whole may be formed into one capacious market. The new Exchange has a central Grecian Doric portico, surmounted by imperial arms and agricultural emblems, the ends having corresponding pilasters. Here lightermen and granary-keepers have stands as well as corn merchants, factors, and millers. At the further end of this building there is a seed-market; nor is this all. Attached to the new Exchange is an hotel, in the upper room of which is an auction room for the sale of damaged cargoes; and on the other side-that is, above the old Exchange-is a subscription refreshment room, known as Jack's, where most of the Norfolk flour is sold, a great deal of it being paid for in ready money, and then resold again downstairs, on the usual credit, the profit on such a transaction being the odd threepence or sixpence, which becomes a respectable sum if you buy or sell a thousand quarters. Up here are the millers or their agents in large quant.i.ties. ”We are not,” said one to the writer, ”the rogues the world takes us for. If we don't sell good flour, the bakers can't sell their bread.” Let us hope this is true; but in these days of universal rascaldom, when gold, no matter how dishonestly acquired, makes its possessor an object of respect, and not of scorn, what wonder is it that we believe that there are rogues in grain as well as in other trades? In the middle of the old Exchange you will see an immense number of foreigners; these are Greeks, living all together in the neighbourhood of Finsbury-square, who are gradually getting all the foreign trade-what are our English merchants about?-of the country into their hands. It is the Greeks, not the English, who buy up the corn s.h.i.+pped from the ports of the Black Sea, and pour it into the English market. Besides these Greeks, you will see captains of vessels in great numbers waiting to hear if their cargoes are sold, and where they are to be taken. A busy scene is Mark-lane, especially on a Monday.

The malt tax in 1857 was 6,470,010, which represents an enormous amount of malt, of which a great part is sold in Mark-lane. In the year 1857 there were imported into the United Kingdom 3,473,957 quarters of wheat, 1,701,470 of barley, 1,710,299 of oats, 76,048 of rye, 159,899 of peas, 305,775 of beans, 1,150,783 of Indian corn, 188 of buck-wheat, and 2,763 of bere or bigg; and in the same year there were imported 2,184,176 cwts.

of flour and meal. Then we must not forget the home produce, which is princ.i.p.ally brought into London by s.h.i.+ps, though a great deal of it comes up by rail. In London alone the consumption of wheat in the shape of flour and otherwise may be estimated at upwards of 1,600,000 quarters a year. But Mark-lane is not, like Smithfield, a market for London alone.

On the contrary, it is attended by buyers from all parts of the country.