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,
Page 104
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
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,
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,
Page 105
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
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 f
ound 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 pockethandkerchiefs;
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
Page 106
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
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
Page 107
Dickens, Charles - Reprinted Pieces
some weeks.
If this girl had stolen her mistress's watch, I do not hesitate to
&
nbsp; 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 byeways
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