HUDDLED TOGETHER IN LONDON.

We are a little too apt to pride ourselves on our material growth, and to overlook the quality in the quantity of our population. Thirty millions of people in the United Kingdom-one-tenth of whom belong to London proper-make a very pretty figure in returns and official documents, until they come to be carefully sifted and examined. Taken in the bulk, with a lofty statistical disregard of minds and souls, they show an undoubted advance in capital and prosperity. Taken in detail, in a kind of house-to-house visitation, they show that the spreading limbs of a great city may be healthy and vigorous, while its heart may gradually become more choked up and decayed.

A vast deal of life that skulks or struggles in London is only familiar to the hard-working clergy, certain medical practitioners, and a few parochial officers. It burrows in holes and corners, at the back of busy thoroughfares, where few know of its existence, or care to follow it. The largest and most painstaking directories pass it by; writers upon London reject it as too mean, too repulsive, or too obscure; and novelists, when they condescend to touch it, for the sake of obtaining contrasts, paint it in the colours of imagination, rather than in the hard outlines of fact. Its records, if truthfully given, have little romance, little beauty, and little variety. Poverty, ignorance, dirt, immorality, crime, are the five great divisions of its history. Immovability, love of place, a determination to huddle together, are some of its chief characteristics; and the growth of many courts and alleys, disgraceful to humanity, is the sure result. Whatever is demanded in London, whether in defiance of law or public decency, is promptly supplied; and ill-constructed, ill-ventilated, lurking nests of dwellings, exist in every quarter of the metropolis, in obedience to this rule of trade.

they no longer represent the worst parts of London. I have merely taken a broad glance round the metropolis, to show that overcrowding amongst the poor, with all its attendant evils, is not peculiar to any particular parish or district.

The features of this huddling together vary slightly in different neighbourhoods, being governed, in some degree, by the character of the houses. In neighbourhoods that have "seen better days"-where family mansions that were once inhabited by city merchants, or the leading clerks and managers in banks or offices, have sunk gradually through all the different grades of lodginghouses, "classical and commercial" schools, down to workshops for cabinet-makers, turners, or gingerbeer brewers-the overcrowding takes the form of living in what are called "tenements." The old mansion, faded and dilapidated, with its garden cut off, it may be, for a skittle-ground or a factory, is let out to a dozen or fifteen families, according to the number of its rooms. Its broad staircase, broken, shattered, and muddy, is always open to the street; and its long, narrow windows are patched with rags and paper. Its broad closets and storechambers are now filled with ragged children, who share their rough beds with coals, coke, wood, and a few cooking utensils. Its dark wainscotings, scratched and chipped, are hung with damp yellow clothes, that are always "in the wash;" its passages are often strewn with oyster-shells and broken tobacco-pipes; and its fore-court is filled with ashes, one or two rusty, broken saucepans, like old hats, and sometimes with a dead cat,the playthings of the crowd of dirty children, who roll about on its hard, black earth. The iron railings that once closed it in from the thoroughfare have been long torn away, stolen, destroyed, sold; and all that remains of the low wall in which they were fixed may be a few rotten, jagged bricks standing on one side. I can find scores of such houses-containing forty, fifty, or even sixty human beings, surrounded by neigh

and different workshops, or pierced by the yellow arches of metropolitan railways-that stand within two miles of the Bank of England, and that once were looked upon as pleasant country retreats!

Those who wish to search London for gross examples of overcrowded dwellings may find them in the centre, or in any one of the four outskirts. Soho, St. James's, Westminster, and St. Martin'sin-the-Fields, can lay no claim to purity in this re-bourhoods crowded with gas factories, cooperages, spect; and that part of Westminster known as Tothill Fields is notoriously one of the greatest offenders. In the west there is Knightsbridge, rendered filthy and immoral by the presence of its large military barracks, with Chelsea, and Brentford; in the south there are Lambeth, Walworth, embracing Lock's Fields, and the Borough, with its notorious Kent Street; in the north there is Agar Town, built on a swamp, and running down to the canal in every stage of dirt and decay, with Somers' Town, Kentish Town, and Camden Town, each contributing its share to the general mass of misery; and in the east there are St. George's, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, and overgrown Shoreditch. A melancholy list like this could be filled up for pages by any one familiar with the back streets of London. I have not touched upon Milton's Golden Lane, in the heart of Cripplegate and St. Luke's; upon the corners of Clerkenwell, of "merry Islington," and a dozen other districts; and I have purposely omitted St. Giles's and Saffron Hill, because

The changes in London house-property, which seem to obey a certain law, under which a once aristocratic street will sink, step by step, into a colony of tenement holders, are particularly striking in central parts of the metropolis. St. James's, Westminster, a parish or district that has often been ignorantly represented as the refined neighbour of St. Giles's, cries out loudly, through its officers of health, against the nuisances arising from huddling together. In Dr. Lankester's report of last year, he complains of the number of kitchens occupied, contrary to law, and the Sanitary Inspector, Mr. Morgan, gives a list every year of similar nuisances discovered and remedied. A house that is crowded in the kitchen is also crowded from parlours to garrets; and the result is, that passages, outbuildings, and approaches,

ways, and rough-headed, barefooted, slinking children may be often seen oozing out from them on to the public pavement. Many people pass by these rolling bundles of rags, and look at them as they would at rats or mongrel dogs; but many others follow them into their noisome hidingplaces, plant mission-houses in their very midst, and seek to give them that sense of decency, through the medium of education and religion, without which no improvement in their condition can ever be expected.

belonging to everybody, are Icoked after by nobody. The overcrowding in this West-end district, within a stone's throw of Piccadilly, Regent Street, and the Clubs, has at times been so great, that it has been found necessary to apply a "rule of space" to such dwelling-rooms, giving every individual five hundred cubic feet of space. By these compulsory means the population of the parish has been re-distributed; and though it has been found impossible to induce any of the residents to remove to any distance, the evils of huddling together have been somewhat alleviated. We will take Shoreditch, in its main thoroughIn another part of these useful and interesting fare, and select a few specimens of its courts and reports, allusion is made to the huddling together alleys, not that they are necessarily the worst in of animals in connexion with the overcrowding of the Metropolis, but because, having touched upon human dwellings. In addition to thirteen licensed the West in some measure from report and hearsay, slaughter-houses, which add to the evils of hud- it may be as well to make an actual survey in the dling together, we find that more than two hun- East. Starting, then, from Shoreditch Church todred cows are crowded into a small space at the wards the Eastern Counties' Railway, we shall backs of certain houses. A great deal has been observe a winding row of shops on each side, done to remedy the nuisances arising from these presenting every appearance of thriving business. places; but much more is required. In one place There are steaming eating-houses, which fill the -in the very centre of the spot where the cholera air with the scent of boiled greens; cheap clothiers, spent its chief fury in 1854-five-and-twenty to whose doors are guarded by waxen-faced dummies, thirty of these animals are reported as herding in dressed in the stiffest and most shining suits of the room of a dwelling-house! The huddling cloth and moleskin; glittering gin-palaces, that together of horses, as an adjunct of human over- smell of stale beer, rum, and sawdust; coffeecrowding, is another nuisance requiring a check. houses letting beds at a dozen prices, from fourIt shows itself through ill-kept, ill-drained stables, pence to eighteen-pence a night; butchers, who and is generally found at the back of mansions encroach upon the footway with greasy arbours of whose fronts are all luxury and architectural mag- meat; boot-shops and tea-shops, with enormous nificence. In this parish of palaces and hovels emblems of trade projecting from their upper win(according to Dr. Lankester's and Mr. Morgan's dows; corn-chandlers, smelling of seeds and hay, reports of 1859-60), there are nearly four hundred and giving a pleasant country air to their immedistables, containing nearly eleven hundred horses. ate neighbourhood; and old, triangular-topped, Over these stables are a number of those low-wooden-houses, standing over low shops, where routed, small-windowed rooms, peculiar to every London mews, in which nine hundred persons reside, who form one-fortieth part of the whole population of the parish.

Another, and perhaps a more national phase of dirt, misery, and overcrowding in London, is to be found in our thousands of repulsive courts and alleys. Our huddling together in "tenements" may be copied from the common "flat" dwellings in Edinburgh, amongst which, in a three hours' walk, some two years ago, I saw more filth, crime, sickness, and poverty, than I ever saw gathered within the same space in any part of the United Kingdom. I have made depressing journeys in every part of London, in Dublin, in Liverpool, in Bristol, Birmingham, and other important towns; but I honestly declare that the layers upon layers of social degradation which I saw in the Cowgate and the High Street, Edinburgh, made me feel more sick at heart than I have ever felt before, or since.

The great brotherhood of vice, ignorance, dirt, and misfortune, however, is not confined to one city, or even one country; and what Edinburgh nourishes in her outcast flats, London welcomes to her black thousands of courts and alleys. There is a wonderful family likeness in all these holes and corners of the poor and thoughtless, and, with the exception of a few unimportant details, when we have sketched the picture of one, we have drawn them all. They lie closely-few people know how closely-at the backs of thronged high

loaves or other necessaries are sold down many steps. Standing along the line of kerb-stone, and so forming a close avenue of trade through which the foot-passengers must walk, are a number of stall-keepers of different degrees of capital and im. portance, who have earned a right to their position (as they have in Tottenham Court Road, and a few other parts of London) by long squatting custom and usage. They sell fruit and vegetables upon shutters, water-cresses upon tea-trays, songs upon clothes'-horses, toys out of baskets, fish upon barrows, baked potatoes out of cans, and almost everything, in fact, but meat, and bread, and beer. They belong to that large army of small London street traders, who number one hundred thousand strong, and the least favoured of whom are engaged in a perpetual war with policemen and magistrates. They earn a scanty livelihood, honestly and hardly; rise early and in all weathers to catch the various markets; and stand all day in the bitter cold, or the scorching heat. Sometimes they carry heavy burdens on their heads, or push them through the mud; and, altogether, they lead very blank, unlightened, cheerless lives.

This panorama may be always seen by even the most hurried or unobservant passenger who walks along Shoreditch; but there are other aspects of the neighbourhood which require something like digging out. Peep on one side of the hay-bundle standing at the corn-chandler's door; look through the group of rough, idle loungers, leaning against the corner of the gin-shop; or dive under the flut

tering garments that hang across outside the cheap nary house, which contains little more than one clothier's window, and you will see a dark, damp room covered with a loft, will fetch four shillings opening in the wall, like the channel of a sewer a week. These would be high prices for Hoxton, passing under and between the houses, and leading and parts of Kingsland, a mile farther out of town, to one of the wretched courts and alleys. You but not even the knowledge of this fact will preenter the passage, picking your way to the bottom, vail upon the huddlers to move. In some cases and find a little square of low, black houses, that these courts are choked up with every variety of look as if they were built as a penal settlement for nuisance; their approaches wind round by the dwarfs. The roofs are depressed, the doors are worst kind of slaughter-houses; they lie in the narrow, the windows are pinched up, and the whole midst of rank stables and offensive trades; they square can almost be touched on each side by a are crowded with pigs, with fowls, and with dogs; full-grown man. At the further end you will they are strewn with oyster-shells and fish-refuse; observe a tap, enclosed in a wooden frame, that they look upon foul yards and soaking heaps of supplies the water for the whole court, with a stale vegetable refuse; their drainage lies in pools dust-bin, etc., which are openly used by all. In wherever it may be thrown; the rooms of their the middle of the little sooty square, standing in the wretched dwellings have not been repaired or whitepuddles always formed by the sinking stones, you washed for years; they are often smothered with will see three or four barrows belonging to street smoke which beats down upon them from some vendors, and you will gather from this, that some neighbouring factory, whose chimney is beyond of the stall-keepers you have noticed in the tho- the control of the Act of Parliament; rag-wareroughfare outside, retire to these dark hiding-places houses have their close store-rooms looking them when their labour is done. Glancing over the tat- full in the face; and cats'-meat preparers boil their tered green curtain at one of the black windows, cauldrons amongst them without fear. In most you will see a room like a gloomy well, and in its cases the inhabitants, as we might fully expect, are depths perhaps a knotted old woman crouching over not superior to their surroundings, and in places a small glow-worm of coal, gleaming in a grate full like Bowl Court, Plough Yard, which contains a of dust; or the frowning face of some idle male in- half Irish colony, they form the greatest nuisance habitant of the court, whose expression somehow of all. An Irish landlord or landlady will rent a reminds you of the felon's dock. If you pass to the room at about two shillings a week, and then take right or left, you may find other oven-like entrances in as many families, or individuals, at a small leading to other similar courts; or you may go out nightly rental, as the floor can possibly hold. into the main thoroughfare, and, seeing a similar Red Lion Court, near the Shoreditch corner of the passage a few yards farther on, you may explore it Kingsland Road, is another bad specimen of these to find yourself in another twin huddling-place of alleys, being overcrowded with men and their the poor. The plan and design of this second court families engaged in the water-cress trade. Pierce's will be in all respects the same as those of the first, Court, New Inn Yard, Shoreditch, is another of showing that the same master-mind has created the worst; and the whole line of Holywell Lane, them both. Who the owners of this class of pro- on either side, is full of these holes and corners. perty are, may remain a mystery; they draw In summer or winter they are always crowded with their rents in short, sharp payments, and they have children, who almost live in the open air, and so no reason to complain of the unprofitable character preserve their health in what must be thorough of their investments. These settlements, of which hotbeds of disease. Some of the alleys, which are there may be fifty scattered at the backs of the sometimes called "rents," sometimes "rows," and houses on each side of Shoreditch, within the space sometimes "walks"-situated on the other side of half a mile, were all built thirty, forty, sixty, of the Curtain Road, down Holywell Mount—still and even eighty years ago, when building regula- maintain a little of a certain rural aspect which tions were not so strict as they are now; and they they must have had in full bloom, when they were were nearly all framed to meet that desire of the first built and occupied. Their houses are not English people to have a "house to themselves." larger, but they have each a piece of ground in Many of the better class of huddlers in these courts front, which, though it grows nothing, to all apand alleys still cling to them from this feeling, pearance, but broken, uneven railings, serves to although they know they could get a superior lodg- ventilate the place, and keep the opposite dwelling at a lower rental even in the immediate neigh- ings at a proper distance. In other alleys, even bourhood. Others cling to them from a wish, as in the thickest part of Shoreditch, there is, here they express it, to be "near their bread," and they and there, a desire shown to be clean; and I may put up with many inconveniences rather than mention one little, ill-constructed court in Holyremove a mile farther from the scene of their well Lane, which is quite a flower in the wilderemployment. If all the merchants in the city of ness. Its entrance is low and gloomy, but the London were of this way of thinking, the crowding rugged stones on its footway are carefully swept, in the business part of the metropolis would be and the uneven steps leading down to its little row similar to what it is in these courts, and there of houses, are white with hearthstone. The first would be a similar action upon city rents. The dwelling-a small room, with a staircase like a value of house property in these holes and corners ladder, leading up into the top loft (the plan upon of Shoreditch must be rising rather than falling,- which nearly all the small houses in these courts the natural result of this determination on the part appear to be built) has nothing about it to acof these poor huddlers in London to cling to par- count for its luxurious look, and yet it seems to be ticular spots. An ordinary room, in one of these a palace compared with its neighbours. Its owner courts, will fetch two shillings a week, and an ordi- | is a humble working man, with one child, and a