The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0063/00631.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 16KB | 314 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00631}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Anthology Of Shorter Works
(A) Walk In A Workhouse}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{old
sir
bed
little
another
pauper
workhouse
kind
upon
women}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       Anthology Of Shorter Works
Book:        (A) Walk In A Workhouse
Author:      Dickens, Charles

(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, here 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 other who were recovering returned their thanks
to Heaven.

     Among this congregation, were some evil-looking young women, and
bettle-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
nightly noise made her worse, and was driving her mad - which was perfectly
evident.  The case was noted for enquiry 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 mangey 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 here, and the
room was not yet quite re-arranged; 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