2 10 361 https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/Old_Lamps_for_New_Ones/1850-06-15-Old_Lamps_for_New_Ones.pdf 1dfb39f5530f77598214b5f4b6d1a6a7 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500615 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly newspapers Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. The Magician in “Aladdin” may possibly have neglected the study of men, for the study of alchemical books; but it is certain that in spite of his profession he was no conjuror. He knew nothing of human nature, or the everlasting set of the current of human affairs. If, when he fraudulently sought to obtain possession of the wonderful Lamp, and went up and down, disguised, before the flying-palace, crying New Lamps for Old ones, he had reversed his cry, and made it Old Lamps for New ones, he would have been so far before his time as to have projected himself into the nineteenth century of our Christian Era. This age is so perverse, and is so very short of faith – in consequence, as some suppose, of there having been a run on that bank for a few generations – that a parallel and beautiful idea, generally known among the ignorant as the Young England hallucination, unhappily expired before it could run alone, to the great grief of a small but a very select circle of mourners. There is something so fascinating, to a mind capable of any serious reflection, in the notion of ignoring all that has been done for the happiness and elevation of mankind during three or four centuries of slow and dearly-bought amelioration, that we have always thought it would tend soundly to the improvement of the general public, if any tangible symbol, any outward and visible sign, expressive of that admirable conception, could be held up before them. We are happy to have found such a sign at last; and although it would make a very indifferent sign, indeed, in the Licensed Victualling sense of the word, and would probably be rejected with contempt and horror by any Christian publican, it has our warmest philosophical appreciation. In the fifteenth century, a certain feeble lamp of art arose in the Italian town of Urbino. This poor light, Raphael Sanzio by name, better known to a few miserably mistaken wretches in these later days, as Raphael (another burned at the same time, called Titian), was fed with a preposterous idea of Beauty – with a ridiculous power of etherealising, and exalting to the very Heaven of Heavens, what was most sublime and lovely in the expression of the human face divine on Earth – with the truly contemptible conceit of finding in poor humanity the fallen likeness of the angels of GOD, and raising it up again to their pure spiritual condition. This very fantastic whim effected a low revolution in Art, in this wise, that Beauty came to be regarded as one of its indispensable elements. In this very poor delusion, Artists have continued until this present nineteenth century, when it was reserved for some bold aspirants to “put it down.” The Pre-Raphael Brotherhood, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the dread Tribunal which is to set this matter right. Walk up, walk up; and here, conspicuous on the wall of the Royal Academy of Art in England, in the eighty-second year of their annual exhibition, you shall see what this new Holy Brotherhood, this terrible Police that is to disperse all Post-Raphael offenders, has “been and done!” You come – in this Royal Academy Exhibition, which is familiar with the works of WILKIE, COLLINS, ETTY, EASTLAKE, LESLIE, MACLISE, TURNER, STANFIELD, LANDSEER, ROBERTS, DANBY, CRESWICK, LEE, WEBSTER, HERBERT, DYCE, COPE, and others who would have been renowned as great masters in any age or country – you come, in this place, to the contemplation of a Holy Family. You will have the goodness to discharge from your minds all Post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts; all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations; and to prepare yourselves, as benefits such a subject – Pre-Raphaelly considered – for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. Two almost naked carpenters, master and journeyman, worthy companions of this agreeable female, are working at their trade; a boy, with some small flavor of humanity in him, is entering with a vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for the tobacconist’s next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles’s. This, in the nineteenth century, and in the eighty-second year of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Art, is the Pre-Raphael representation to us, Ladies and Gentlemen, of the most solemn passage which our minds can ever approach. This, in the nineteenth century, and in the eighty-second year of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Art, is what Pre-Raphael Art can do to render reverence and homage to the faith in which we live and die! Consider this picture well. Consider the pleasure we should have in a similar Pre-Raphael rendering of a favourite horse, or dog, or cat; and, coming fresh from a pretty considerable turmoil about “desecration” in connexion with the National Post Office, let us extol this great achievement, and commend the National Academy! In further considering this symbol of the great retrogressive principle, it is particularly gratifying to observe that such objects as the shavings which are strewn on the carpenter’s floor are admirably painted; and that the Pre-Raphael Brother is indisputably accomplished in the manipulation of his art. It is gratifying to observe this, because the fact involves no low effort at notoriety; everybody knowing that it is by no means easier to call attention to a very indifferent pig with five legs, than to a symmetrical pig with four. Also, because it is good to know that the National Academy thoroughly feels and comprehends the high range and exalted purposes of Art; distinctly perceives that Art includes something more than the faithful portraiture of shavings, or the skilful colouring of drapery – imperatively requires, in short, that it shall be informed with mind and sentiment; will on no account reduce it to a narrow question of trade-juggling with a palette, palette-knife, and paint-box. It is likewise pleasing to reflect that the great educational establishment foresees the difficulty into which it would be led, by attaching greater weight to mere handicraft, than to any other consideration even to considerations of common reverence or decency; which absurd principle, in the event of a skilful painter of the figure becoming a very little more perverted in his taste, than certain skilful painters are just now, might place Her Gracious Majesty in a very painful position, one of these fine Private View Days. Would it were in our power to congratulate our readers on the hopeful prospects of the great retrogressive principle, of which this thoughtful picture is the sign and emblem! Would that we could give our readers encouraging assurance of a healthy demand for Old Lamps in exchange for New ones, and a steady improvement in the Old Lamp Market! The perversity of mankind is such, and the untoward arrangements of Providence are such, that we cannot lay that flattering unction to their souls. We can only report what Brotherhoods, stimulated by this sign, are forming; and what opportunities will be presented to the people, if the people will but accept them. In the first place, the Pre-Perspective Brotherhood will be presently incorporated, for the subversion of all known rules and principles of perspective. It is intended to swear every P. P. B. to a solemn renunciation of the art of perspective on a soup-plate of the willow pattern; and we may expect, on the occasion of the eighty-third Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in England, to see some pictures by this pious Brotherhood, realising HOGARTH’S idea of a man on a mountain several miles off, lighting his pipe at the upper window of a house in the foreground. But we are informed that every brick in the house will be a portrait; that the man’s boots will be copied with the utmost fidelity from a pair of Bluchers, sent up out of Northamptonshire for the purpose; and that the texture of his hands (including four chilblains, a whitlow, and ten dirty nails) will be a triumph of the Painter’s art. A Society, to be called the Pre-Newtonian Brotherhood, was lately projected by a young gentleman, under articles to a Civil Engineer, who objected to being considered bound to conduct himself according to the laws of gravitation. But this young gentleman, being reproached by some aspiring companions with the timidity of his conception, has abrogated that idea in favour of a Pre-Galileo Brotherhood now flourishing, who distinctly refuse to perform any annual revolution round the Sun, and have arranged that the world shall not do so any more. The course to be taken by the Royal Academy of Art in reference to this Brotherhood is not yet decided upon; but it is whispered that some other large Educational Institutions in the neighbourhood of Oxford are nearly ready to pronounce in favour of it. Several promising Students connected with the Royal College of Surgeons have held a meeting, to protest against the circulation of the blood, and to pledge themselves to treat all the patients they can get, on principles condemnatory of that innovation. A Pre-Harvey-Brotherhood is the result, from which a great deal may be expected by the undertakers. In literature, a very spirited effort has been made, which is no less than the formation of a P. G. A. P. C. B., or Pre-Gower and PreChaucer-Brotherhood, for the restoration of the ancient English style of spelling, and the weeding out from all libraries, public and private, of those and all later pretenders, particularly a person of loose character named SHAKESPEARE. It having been suggested, however, that this happy idea could scarcely be considered complete while the art of printing was permitted to remain unmolested, another society, under the name of the Pre-Laurentius Brotherhood, has been established in connexion with it, for the abolition of all but manuscript books. These MR. PUGIN has engaged to supply, in characters that nobody on earth shall be able to read. And it is confidently expected by those who have seen the House of Lords, that he will faithfully redeem his pledge. In Music, a retrogressive step, in which there is much hope, has been taken. The P. A. B., or Pre-Agincourt Brotherhood has arisen, nobly devoted to consign to oblivion Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and every other such ridiculous reputation, and to fix its Millennium (as its name implies) before the date of the first regular musical composition known to have been achieved in England. As this Institution has not yet commenced active operations, it remains to be seen whether the Royal Academy of Music will be a worthy sister of the Royal Academy of Art, and admit this enterprising body to its orchestra. We have it on the best authority, that its compositions will be quite as rough and discordant as the real old original – that it will be, in a word, exactly suited to the pictorial Art we have endeavoured to describe. We have strong hopes, therefore, that the Royal Academy of Music, not wanting an example, may not want courage. The regulation of social matters, as separated from the Fine Arts, has been undertaken by the Pre-Henry-the-Seventh Brotherhood, who date from the same period as the Pre-Raphael Brotherhood. This society, as cancelling all the advances of nearly four hundred years, and reverting to one of the most disagreeable periods of English History, when the Nation was yet very slowly emerging from barbarism, and when gentle female foreigners, come over to be the wives of Scottish Kings, wept bitterly (as well they might) at being left alone among the savage Court, must be regarded with peculiar favour. As the time of ugly religious caricatures (called mysteries), it is thoroughly Pre-Raphael in its spirit; and may be deemed the twin brother to that great society. We should be certain of the Plague among many other advantages, if this Brotherhood were properly encouraged. All these Brotherhoods, and any other society of the like kind, now in being or yet to be, have at once a guiding star, and a reduction of their great ideas to something palpable and obvious to the senses, in the sign to which we take the liberty of directing their attention. We understand that it is in the contemplation of each Society to become possessed, with all convenient speed, of a collection of such pictures; and that once, every year, to wit upon the first of April, the whole intend to amalgamate in a high festival, to be called the Convocation of Eternal Boobies. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Old Lamps for New Ones' Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (15 June 1850) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-06-15 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-06-15-Old_Lamps_for_New_Ones Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no. 12, 15 June 1850, pp. 265-267. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-265.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-265.html</a>. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Old Lamps for New Ones'. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-06-15-Old_Lamps_for_New_Ones">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-06-15-Old_Lamps_for_New_Ones</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. The Magician in “Aladdin” may possibly have neglected the study of men, for the study of alchemical books; but it is certain that in spite of his profession he was no conjuror. He knew nothing of human nature, or the everlasting set of the current of human affairs. If, when he fraudulently sought to obtain possession of the wonderful Lamp, and went up and down, disguised, before the flying-palace, crying New Lamps for Old ones, he had reversed his cry, and made it Old Lamps for New ones, he would have been so far before his time as to have projected himself into the nineteenth century of our Christian Era. This age is so perverse, and is so very short of faith – in consequence, as some suppose, of there having been a run on that bank for a few generations – that a parallel and beautiful idea, generally known among the ignorant as the Young England hallucination, unhappily expired before it could run alone, to the great grief of a small but a very select circle of mourners. There is something so fascinating, to a mind capable of any serious reflection, in the notion of ignoring all that has been done for the happiness and elevation of mankind during three or four centuries of slow and dearly-bought amelioration, that we have always thought it would tend soundly to the improvement of the general public, if any tangible symbol, any outward and visible sign, expressive of that admirable conception, could be held up before them. We are happy to have found such a sign at last; and although it would make a very indifferent sign, indeed, in the Licensed Victualling sense of the word, and would probably be rejected with contempt and horror by any Christian publican, it has our warmest philosophical appreciation. In the fifteenth century, a certain feeble lamp of art arose in the Italian town of Urbino. This poor light, Raphael Sanzio by name, better known to a few miserably mistaken wretches in these later days, as Raphael (another burned at the same time, called Titian), was fed with a preposterous idea of Beauty – with a ridiculous power of etherealising, and exalting to the very Heaven of Heavens, what was most sublime and lovely in the expression of the human face divine on Earth – with the truly contemptible conceit of finding in poor humanity the fallen likeness of the angels of GOD, and raising it up again to their pure spiritual condition. This very fantastic whim effected a low revolution in Art, in this wise, that Beauty came to be regarded as one of its indispensable elements. In this very poor delusion, Artists have continued until this present nineteenth century, when it was reserved for some bold aspirants to “put it down.” The Pre-Raphael Brotherhood, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the dread Tribunal which is to set this matter right. Walk up, walk up; and here, conspicuous on the wall of the Royal Academy of Art in England, in the eighty-second year of their annual exhibition, you shall see what this new Holy Brotherhood, this terrible Police that is to disperse all Post-Raphael offenders, has “been and done!” You come – in this Royal Academy Exhibition, which is familiar with the works of WILKIE, COLLINS, ETTY, EASTLAKE, LESLIE, MACLISE, TURNER, STANFIELD, LANDSEER, ROBERTS, DANBY, CRESWICK, LEE, WEBSTER, HERBERT, DYCE, COPE, and others who would have been renowned as great masters in any age or country – you come, in this place, to the contemplation of a Holy Family. You will have the goodness to discharge from your minds all Post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts; all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations; and to prepare yourselves, as benefits such a subject – Pre-Raphaelly considered – for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. You behold the interior of a carpenter’s shop. In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. Two almost naked carpenters, master and journeyman, worthy companions of this agreeable female, are working at their trade; a boy, with some small flavor of humanity in him, is entering with a vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for the tobacconist’s next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles’s. This, in the nineteenth century, and in the eighty-second year of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Art, is the Pre-Raphael representation to us, Ladies and Gentlemen, of the most solemn passage which our minds can ever approach. This, in the nineteenth century, and in the eighty-second year of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Art, is what Pre-Raphael Art can do to render reverence and homage to the faith in which we live and die! Consider this picture well. Consider the pleasure we should have in a similar Pre-Raphael rendering of a favourite horse, or dog, or cat; and, coming fresh from a pretty considerable turmoil about “desecration” in connexion with the National Post Office, let us extol this great achievement, and commend the National Academy! In further considering this symbol of the great retrogressive principle, it is particularly gratifying to observe that such objects as the shavings which are strewn on the carpenter’s floor are admirably painted; and that the Pre-Raphael Brother is indisputably accomplished in the manipulation of his art. It is gratifying to observe this, because the fact involves no low effort at notoriety; everybody knowing that it is by no means easier to call attention to a very indifferent pig with five legs, than to a symmetrical pig with four. Also, because it is good to know that the National Academy thoroughly feels and comprehends the high range and exalted purposes of Art; distinctly perceives that Art includes something more than the faithful portraiture of shavings, or the skilful colouring of drapery – imperatively requires, in short, that it shall be informed with mind and sentiment; will on no account reduce it to a narrow question of trade-juggling with a palette, palette-knife, and paint-box. It is likewise pleasing to reflect that the great educational establishment foresees the difficulty into which it would be led, by attaching greater weight to mere handicraft, than to any other consideration even to considerations of common reverence or decency; which absurd principle, in the event of a skilful painter of the figure becoming a very little more perverted in his taste, than certain skilful painters are just now, might place Her Gracious Majesty in a very painful position, one of these fine Private View Days. Would it were in our power to congratulate our readers on the hopeful prospects of the great retrogressive principle, of which this thoughtful picture is the sign and emblem! Would that we could give our readers encouraging assurance of a healthy demand for Old Lamps in exchange for New ones, and a steady improvement in the Old Lamp Market! The perversity of mankind is such, and the untoward arrangements of Providence are such, that we cannot lay that flattering unction to their souls. We can only report what Brotherhoods, stimulated by this sign, are forming; and what opportunities will be presented to the people, if the people will but accept them. In the first place, the Pre-Perspective Brotherhood will be presently incorporated, for the subversion of all known rules and principles of perspective. It is intended to swear every P. P. B. to a solemn renunciation of the art of perspective on a soup-plate of the willow pattern; and we may expect, on the occasion of the eighty-third Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in England, to see some pictures by this pious Brotherhood, realising HOGARTH’S idea of a man on a mountain several miles off, lighting his pipe at the upper window of a house in the foreground. But we are informed that every brick in the house will be a portrait; that the man’s boots will be copied with the utmost fidelity from a pair of Bluchers, sent up out of Northamptonshire for the purpose; and that the texture of his hands (including four chilblains, a whitlow, and ten dirty nails) will be a triumph of the Painter’s art. A Society, to be called the Pre-Newtonian Brotherhood, was lately projected by a young gentleman, under articles to a Civil Engineer, who objected to being considered bound to conduct himself according to the laws of gravitation. But this young gentleman, being reproached by some aspiring companions with the timidity of his conception, has abrogated that idea in favour of a Pre-Galileo Brotherhood now flourishing, who distinctly refuse to perform any annual revolution round the Sun, and have arranged that the world shall not do so any more. The course to be taken by the Royal Academy of Art in reference to this Brotherhood is not yet decided upon; but it is whispered that some other large Educational Institutions in the neighbourhood of Oxford are nearly ready to pronounce in favour of it. Several promising Students connected with the Royal College of Surgeons have held a meeting, to protest against the circulation of the blood, and to pledge themselves to treat all the patients they can get, on principles condemnatory of that innovation. A Pre-Harvey-Brotherhood is the result, from which a great deal may be expected by the undertakers. In literature, a very spirited effort has been made, which is no less than the formation of a P. G. A. P. C. B., or Pre-Gower and PreChaucer-Brotherhood, for the restoration of the ancient English style of spelling, and the weeding out from all libraries, public and private, of those and all later pretenders, particularly a person of loose character named SHAKESPEARE. It having been suggested, however, that this happy idea could scarcely be considered complete while the art of printing was permitted to remain unmolested, another society, under the name of the Pre-Laurentius Brotherhood, has been established in connexion with it, for the abolition of all but manuscript books. These MR. PUGIN has engaged to supply, in characters that nobody on earth shall be able to read. And it is confidently expected by those who have seen the House of Lords, that he will faithfully redeem his pledge. In Music, a retrogressive step, in which there is much hope, has been taken. The P. A. B., or Pre-Agincourt Brotherhood has arisen, nobly devoted to consign to oblivion Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and every other such ridiculous reputation, and to fix its Millennium (as its name implies) before the date of the first regular musical composition known to have been achieved in England. As this Institution has not yet commenced active operations, it remains to be seen whether the Royal Academy of Music will be a worthy sister of the Royal Academy of Art, and admit this enterprising body to its orchestra. We have it on the best authority, that its compositions will be quite as rough and discordant as the real old original – that it will be, in a word, exactly suited to the pictorial Art we have endeavoured to describe. We have strong hopes, therefore, that the Royal Academy of Music, not wanting an example, may not want courage. The regulation of social matters, as separated from the Fine Arts, has been undertaken by the Pre-Henry-the-Seventh Brotherhood, who date from the same period as the Pre-Raphael Brotherhood. This society, as cancelling all the advances of nearly four hundred years, and reverting to one of the most disagreeable periods of English History, when the Nation was yet very slowly emerging from barbarism, and when gentle female foreigners, come over to be the wives of Scottish Kings, wept bitterly (as well they might) at being left alone among the savage Court, must be regarded with peculiar favour. As the time of ugly religious caricatures (called mysteries), it is thoroughly Pre-Raphael in its spirit; and may be deemed the twin brother to that great society. We should be certain of the Plague among many other advantages, if this Brotherhood were properly encouraged. All these Brotherhoods, and any other society of the like kind, now in being or yet to be, have at once a guiding star, and a reduction of their great ideas to something palpable and obvious to the senses, in the sign to which we take the liberty of directing their attention. We understand that it is in the contemplation of each Society to become possessed, with all convenient speed, of a collection of such pictures; and that once, every year, to wit upon the first of April, the whole intend to amalgamate in a high festival, to be called the Convocation of Eternal Boobies. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_[No.2]/1850-05-08-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No2.pdf 88a01503efab170bebe0f9e9be71a383 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500608 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly magazine Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. HALLOA! You won’t let me begin that Natural History of you, eh? You will always be doing something or other, to take off my attention? Now, you have begun to argue with the Undertakers, have you? What next! Ugh! you are a nice set of fellows to be discussing, at this time of day, whether you shall countenance that humbug any longer. “Performing” funerals, indeed! I have heard of performing dogs and cats, performing goats and monkeys, performing ponies, white-mice, and canary-birds; but, performing drunkards at so much a day, guzzling over your dead, and throwing half of you into debt for a twelvemonth, beats all I ever heard of. Ha, ha! The other day there was a person “went and died” (as our Proprietor’s wife says) close to our establishment. Upon my beak I thought I should have fallen off my perch, you made me laugh so, at the funeral! Oh my crop and feathers, what a scene it was! I never saw the Owl so charmed. It was just the thing for him. First of all, two dressed-up fellows came trying to look sober, but they couldn’t do it – and stuck themselves outside the door. There they stood, for hours, with a couple of crutches covered over with drapery: cutting their jokes on the company as they went in, and breathing such strong rum and water into our establishment over the way, that the Guinea Pig (who has a poor little head) was drunk in ten minutes. You are so proud of your humanity. Ha, ha! As if a pair of respectable crows wouldn’t have done it much better? By-and-bye, there came a hearse and four, and then two carriages and four; and on the tops of ‘em, and on all the horses’ heads, were plumes of feathers, hired at so much per plume; and everything, horses and all, was covered over with black velvet, till you couldn’t see it. Because there were not feathers enough yet, there was a fellow in the procession carrying a board of ‘em on his head, like Italian images; and there were about five-and-twenty or thirty other fellows (all hot and red in the face with eating and drinking) dressed up in scarves and hat-bands, and carrying – shut-up fishing-rods, I believe – who went draggling through the mud, in a manner that I thought would be the death of me; while the “Black Jobmaster” – that’s what he calls himself – who had let the coaches and horses to a furnishing undertaker, who had let ‘em to a haberdasher, who had let ‘em to a carpenter, who had let ‘em to the parish-clerk, who had let ‘em to the sexton, who had let ‘em to the plumber painter and glazier who had got the funeral to do, looked out of the public-house window at the corner, with his pipe in his mouth, and said – for I heard him – “that was the sort of turn-out to do a gen-teel party credit.” That! As if any two-and-sixpenny masquerade, tumbled into a vat of blacking, wouldn’t be quite as solemn, and immeasurably cheaper! Do you think I don’t know you? You’re mistaken if you think so. But perhaps you do. Well! Shall I tell you what I know? Can you bear it? Here it is then. The Black Jobmaster is right. The root of all this, is the gen-teel party. You don’t mean to deny it, I hope? You don’t mean to tell me that this nonsensical mockery isn’t owing to your gentility. Don’t I know a Raven in a Cathedral Tower, who has often heard your service for the Dead? Don’t I know that you almost begin it with the words, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out”? Don't I know that in a monstrous satire on those words, you carry your hired velvets, and feathers, and scarves, and all the rest of it, to the edge of the grave, and get plundered (and serve you right!) in every article, because you WILL be gen-teel parties to the last? Eh? Think a little! Here’s the plumber painter and glazier come to take the funeral order which he is going to give to the sexton, who is going to give it to the clerk, who is going to give it to the carpenter, who is going to give it to the haberdasher, who is going to give it to the furnishing undertaker, who is going to divide it with the Black Jobmaster. “Hearse and four, Sir?” says he. “No, a pair will be sufficient.” “I beg your pardon, Sir, but when we buried Mr. Grundy at number twenty, there was four on ‘em, Sir; I think it right to mention it.” “Well, perhaps there had better be four.” “Thank you, Sir. Two coaches and four, Sir, shall we say?” “No. Coaches and pair.” “You’ll excuse my mentioning it, Sir, but pairs to the coaches, and four to the hearse, would have a singular appearance to the neighbours. When we put four to anything, we always carry four right through.” “Well! say four!” “Thank you, Sir. Feathers of course?” “No. No feathers. They’re absurd.” “Very good, Sir. No feathers?” “No.” “Very good, Sir. We can do fours without feathers, Sir, but it’s what we never do. When we buried Mr. Grundy, there was feathers, and – I only throw it out, Sir – Mrs. Grundy might think it strange.” “Very well! Feathers!” “Thank you, Sir,” – and so on. Is it and so on, or not, through the whole black job of jobs, because of Mrs. Grundy and the gen-teel party? I suppose you’ve thought about this? I suppose you’ve reflected on what you’re doing, and what you’ve done? When you read about those poisonings for the burial society money, you consider how it is that burial societies ever came to be, at all? You perfectly understand you who are not the poor, and ought to set ‘em an example – that, besides making the whole thing costly, you’ve confused their minds about this burying, and have taught ‘em to confound expence and show, with respect and affection. You know all you’ve got to answer for, you genteel parties? I’m glad of it. I believe it’s only the monkeys who are servile imitators, is it? You reflect! To be sure you do. So does Mrs. Grundy and she casts reflections – don’t she? What animals are those who scratch shallow holes in the ground in crowded places, scarcely hide their dead in ‘em, and become unnaturally infected by their dead, and die by thousands? Vultures, I suppose. I think you call the Vulture an obscene bird? I don’t consider him agreeable, but I never caught him misconducting himself in that way. My honourable friend, the dog – I call him my honourable friend in your Parliamentary sense, because I hate him – turns round three times before he goes to sleep. I ask him why? He says he don’t know; but he always does it. Do you know how you ever came to have that board of feathers carried on a fellow’s head? Come. You’re a boastful race. Show yourselves superior to the dog, and tell me! Now, I don’t love many people; but I do love the undertakers. I except them from the censure I pass upon you in general. They know you so well, that I look upon ‘em as a sort of Ravens. They are so certain of your being genteel parties, that they stick at nothing. They are sure they’ve got the upper hand of you. Our proprietor was reading the paper, only last night, and there was an advertisement in it from a sensitive and libelled undertaker, to wit, that the allegation “that funerals were unnecessarily expensive, was an insult to his professional brethren.” Ha! ha! Why he knows he has you on the hip. It’s nothing to him that their being unnecessarily expensive is a fact within the experience of all of you as glaring as the sun when there’s not a cloud. He is certain that when you want a funeral “performed,” he has only to be down upon you with Mrs. Grundy, to do what he likes with you and then he’ll go home, and laugh like a Hyæna. I declare (supposing I wasn’t detained against my will by our proprietor) that, if I had any arms, I’d take the undertakers to ‘em! There's another, in the same paper, who says they’re libelled, in the accusation of having disgracefully disturbed the meeting in favour of what you call your General Interment Bill. Our establishment was in the Strand, that night. There was no crowd of undertakers’ men there, with circulars in their pockets, calling on ‘em to come in coloured clothes to make an uproar; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who got in with forged orders to yell and screech; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who made a brutal charge at the platform, and overturned the ladies like a troop of horse. Of course not. I know all about it. But and lay this well to heart, you Lords of the creation, as you call yourselves! it is these undertakers’ men to whom, in the last trying, bitter grief of life, you confide the loved and honoured forms of your sisters, mothers, daughters, wives. It is to these delicate gentry, and to their solemn remarks, and decorous behaviour, that you entrust the sacred ashes of all that has been the purest to you, and the dearest to you, in this world. Don’t improve the breed! Don't change the custom! Be true to my opinion of you, and to Mrs. Grundy! I nail the black flag of the black Jobmaster to our cage – figuratively speaking – and I stand up for the gen-teel parties. So (but from different motives) does the Owl. You’ve got a chance, by means of that bill I’ve mentioned – by the bye, I call my own a General Interment Bill, for it buries everything it gets hold of – to alter the whole system; to avail yourselves of the results of all improved European experience; to separate death from life; to surround it with everything that is sacred and solemn, and to dissever it from everything that is shocking and sordid. You won’t read the bill? You won’t dream of helping it? You won’t think of looking at the evidence on which it’s founded – Will you? No. That’s right! Gen-teel parties, step forward, if you please, to the rescue of the black Jobmaster! The rats are with you. I am informed that they have unanimously passed a resolution that the closing of the London churchyards will be an insult to their professional brethren, and will oblige ‘em “to fight for it.” The Parrots are with you. The Owl is with you. The Raven is with you. No General Interments. Carrion for ever! Ha, ha! Halloa! Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'From the Raven in the Happy Family' (No.2) Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (8 June 1850) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-06-08 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission. Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-05-08-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No2 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no. 11, 8 June 1850, pp. 241-242. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-241.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-241.html</a>. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'From the Raven in the Happy Family' (No.2). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-06-08-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No2">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-06-08-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No2</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. HALLOA! You won’t let me begin that Natural History of you, eh? You will always be doing something or other, to take off my attention? Now, you have begun to argue with the Undertakers, have you? What next! Ugh! you are a nice set of fellows to be discussing, at this time of day, whether you shall countenance that humbug any longer. “Performing” funerals, indeed! I have heard of performing dogs and cats, performing goats and monkeys, performing ponies, white-mice, and canary-birds; but, performing drunkards at so much a day, guzzling over your dead, and throwing half of you into debt for a twelvemonth, beats all I ever heard of. Ha, ha! The other day there was a person “went and died” (as our Proprietor’s wife says) close to our establishment. Upon my beak I thought I should have fallen off my perch, you made me laugh so, at the funeral! Oh my crop and feathers, what a scene it was! I never saw the Owl so charmed. It was just the thing for him. First of all, two dressed-up fellows came trying to look sober, but they couldn’t do it – and stuck themselves outside the door. There they stood, for hours, with a couple of crutches covered over with drapery: cutting their jokes on the company as they went in, and breathing such strong rum and water into our establishment over the way, that the Guinea Pig (who has a poor little head) was drunk in ten minutes. You are so proud of your humanity. Ha, ha! As if a pair of respectable crows wouldn’t have done it much better? By-and-bye, there came a hearse and four, and then two carriages and four; and on the tops of ‘em, and on all the horses’ heads, were plumes of feathers, hired at so much per plume; and everything, horses and all, was covered over with black velvet, till you couldn’t see it. Because there were not feathers enough yet, there was a fellow in the procession carrying a board of ‘em on his head, like Italian images; and there were about five-and-twenty or thirty other fellows (all hot and red in the face with eating and drinking) dressed up in scarves and hat-bands, and carrying – shut-up fishing-rods, I believe – who went draggling through the mud, in a manner that I thought would be the death of me; while the “Black Jobmaster” – that’s what he calls himself – who had let the coaches and horses to a furnishing undertaker, who had let ‘em to a haberdasher, who had let ‘em to a carpenter, who had let ‘em to the parish-clerk, who had let ‘em to the sexton, who had let ‘em to the plumber painter and glazier who had got the funeral to do, looked out of the public-house window at the corner, with his pipe in his mouth, and said – for I heard him – “that was the sort of turn-out to do a gen-teel party credit.” That! As if any two-and-sixpenny masquerade, tumbled into a vat of blacking, wouldn’t be quite as solemn, and immeasurably cheaper! Do you think I don’t know you? You’re mistaken if you think so. But perhaps you do. Well! Shall I tell you what I know? Can you bear it? Here it is then. The Black Jobmaster is right. The root of all this, is the gen-teel party. You don’t mean to deny it, I hope? You don’t mean to tell me that this nonsensical mockery isn’t owing to your gentility. Don’t I know a Raven in a Cathedral Tower, who has often heard your service for the Dead? Don’t I know that you almost begin it with the words, “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out”? Don't I know that in a monstrous satire on those words, you carry your hired velvets, and feathers, and scarves, and all the rest of it, to the edge of the grave, and get plundered (and serve you right!) in every article, because you WILL be gen-teel parties to the last? Eh? Think a little! Here’s the plumber painter and glazier come to take the funeral order which he is going to give to the sexton, who is going to give it to the clerk, who is going to give it to the carpenter, who is going to give it to the haberdasher, who is going to give it to the furnishing undertaker, who is going to divide it with the Black Jobmaster. “Hearse and four, Sir?” says he. “No, a pair will be sufficient.” “I beg your pardon, Sir, but when we buried Mr. Grundy at number twenty, there was four on ‘em, Sir; I think it right to mention it.” “Well, perhaps there had better be four.” “Thank you, Sir. Two coaches and four, Sir, shall we say?” “No. Coaches and pair.” “You’ll excuse my mentioning it, Sir, but pairs to the coaches, and four to the hearse, would have a singular appearance to the neighbours. When we put four to anything, we always carry four right through.” “Well! say four!” “Thank you, Sir. Feathers of course?” “No. No feathers. They’re absurd.” “Very good, Sir. No feathers?” “No.” “Very good, Sir. We can do fours without feathers, Sir, but it’s what we never do. When we buried Mr. Grundy, there was feathers, and – I only throw it out, Sir – Mrs. Grundy might think it strange.” “Very well! Feathers!” “Thank you, Sir,” – and so on. Is it and so on, or not, through the whole black job of jobs, because of Mrs. Grundy and the gen-teel party? I suppose you’ve thought about this? I suppose you’ve reflected on what you’re doing, and what you’ve done? When you read about those poisonings for the burial society money, you consider how it is that burial societies ever came to be, at all? You perfectly understand you who are not the poor, and ought to set ‘em an example – that, besides making the whole thing costly, you’ve confused their minds about this burying, and have taught ‘em to confound expence and show, with respect and affection. You know all you’ve got to answer for, you genteel parties? I’m glad of it. I believe it’s only the monkeys who are servile imitators, is it? You reflect! To be sure you do. So does Mrs. Grundy and she casts reflections – don’t she? What animals are those who scratch shallow holes in the ground in crowded places, scarcely hide their dead in ‘em, and become unnaturally infected by their dead, and die by thousands? Vultures, I suppose. I think you call the Vulture an obscene bird? I don’t consider him agreeable, but I never caught him misconducting himself in that way. My honourable friend, the dog – I call him my honourable friend in your Parliamentary sense, because I hate him – turns round three times before he goes to sleep. I ask him why? He says he don’t know; but he always does it. Do you know how you ever came to have that board of feathers carried on a fellow’s head? Come. You’re a boastful race. Show yourselves superior to the dog, and tell me! Now, I don’t love many people; but I do love the undertakers. I except them from the censure I pass upon you in general. They know you so well, that I look upon ‘em as a sort of Ravens. They are so certain of your being genteel parties, that they stick at nothing. They are sure they’ve got the upper hand of you. Our proprietor was reading the paper, only last night, and there was an advertisement in it from a sensitive and libelled undertaker, to wit, that the allegation “that funerals were unnecessarily expensive, was an insult to his professional brethren.” Ha! ha! Why he knows he has you on the hip. It’s nothing to him that their being unnecessarily expensive is a fact within the experience of all of you as glaring as the sun when there’s not a cloud. He is certain that when you want a funeral “performed,” he has only to be down upon you with Mrs. Grundy, to do what he likes with you and then he’ll go home, and laugh like a Hyæna. I declare (supposing I wasn’t detained against my will by our proprietor) that, if I had any arms, I’d take the undertakers to ‘em! There's another, in the same paper, who says they’re libelled, in the accusation of having disgracefully disturbed the meeting in favour of what you call your General Interment Bill. Our establishment was in the Strand, that night. There was no crowd of undertakers’ men there, with circulars in their pockets, calling on ‘em to come in coloured clothes to make an uproar; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who got in with forged orders to yell and screech; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who made a brutal charge at the platform, and overturned the ladies like a troop of horse. Of course not. I know all about it. But and lay this well to heart, you Lords of the creation, as you call yourselves! it is these undertakers’ men to whom, in the last trying, bitter grief of life, you confide the loved and honoured forms of your sisters, mothers, daughters, wives. It is to these delicate gentry, and to their solemn remarks, and decorous behaviour, that you entrust the sacred ashes of all that has been the purest to you, and the dearest to you, in this world. Don’t improve the breed! Don't change the custom! Be true to my opinion of you, and to Mrs. Grundy! I nail the black flag of the black Jobmaster to our cage – figuratively speaking – and I stand up for the gen-teel parties. So (but from different motives) does the Owl. You’ve got a chance, by means of that bill I’ve mentioned – by the bye, I call my own a General Interment Bill, for it buries everything it gets hold of – to alter the whole system; to avail yourselves of the results of all improved European experience; to separate death from life; to surround it with everything that is sacred and solemn, and to dissever it from everything that is shocking and sordid. You won’t read the bill? You won’t dream of helping it? You won’t think of looking at the evidence on which it’s founded – Will you? No. That’s right! Gen-teel parties, step forward, if you please, to the rescue of the black Jobmaster! The rats are with you. I am informed that they have unanimously passed a resolution that the closing of the London churchyards will be an insult to their professional brethren, and will oblige ‘em “to fight for it.” The Parrots are with you. The Owl is with you. The Raven is with you. No General Interments. Carrion for ever! Ha, ha! Halloa! https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/A_Walk_in_a_Workhouse/1850-05-25-A_Walk_in_a_Workhouse.pdf 3f1338c55cb42a0d5989319026e02cf6 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500525 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly newspaper Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. A few Sundays ago, 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 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 re. 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 monkies. “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 mad-women 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 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, in all probability, have been infinitely better off. Bearing in mind, in the present brief description of this walk, not only the facts already stated in this Journal, in reference to the Model Prison at Pentonville, but the general treatment of convicted prisoners under the associated silent system too, it must be once more distinctly set before the reader, that 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 there 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 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 at night. Divers of them had been there some long time. “Are they never going away?” was the natural enquiry. “Most of them are crippled, in some form or other,” said the Wardsman, “and not fit for anything.” They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyænas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do. The big-headed idiot shuffling his feet along the pavement, in the sunlight outside, was a more agreeable object everyway. Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs dayrooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of old people, in upstairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life, God knows how – this was the scenery through which the walk lay, for two hours. In some of these latter chambers, there were pictures stuck against the wall, and a neat display of crockery and pewter on a kind of sideboard now and then it was a treat to see a plant or two; in almost every ward, there was a cat. In all of these Long Walks of aged and infirm, some old people were bed-ridden, and had been for a long time; some were sitting on their beds half-naked; some dying in their beds; some out of bed, and sitting at a table near the fire. A sullen or lethargic indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again, I thought were generally apparent. On our walking into the midst of one of these dreary perspectives of old men, nearly the following little dialogue took place, the nurse not being immediately at hand: “All well here?” No answer. An old man in a Scotch cap sitting among others on a form at the table, eating out of a tin porringer, pushes back his cap a little to look at us, claps it down on his forehead again with the palm of his hand, and goes on eating. “All well here?” (repeated.) No answer. Another old man sitting on his bed, paralytically peeling a boiled potato, lifts his head, and stares. “Enough to eat?” No answer. Another old man, in bed, turns himself and coughs. “How are you to day?” To the last old man. That old man says nothing; but another old man, a tall old man of a very good address, speaking with perfect correctness, comes forward from somewhere, and volunteers an answer. The reply almost always proceeds from a volunteer, and not from the person looked at or spoken to. “We are very old, Sir,” in a mild, distinct voice. “We can’t expect to be well, most of us.” “Are you comfortable?” “I have no complaint to make, Sir.” With a half shake of his head, a half shrug of his shoulders, and a kind of apologetic smile. “Enough to eat?” “Why, Sir, I have but a poor appetite,” with the same air as before; “and yet I get through my allowance very easily” “But,” showing a porringer with a Sunday dinner in it; “here is a portion of mutton, and three potatoes. You can't starve on that?” “Oh dear no, Sir,” with the same apologetic air. “Not starve.” “What do you want?” “We have very little bread, Sir. It’s an exceedingly small quantity of bread.” The nurse, who is now rubbing her hands at the questioner’s elbow, interferes with, “It ain’t much raly, Sir. You see they’ve only six ounces a day, and when they’ve took their breakfast, there can only be a little left for night, Sir.” Another old man, hitherto invisible, rises out of his bedclothes, as out of a grave, and looks on. “You have tea at night?” The questioner is still addressing the well-spoken old man. “Yes, Sir, we have tea at night.” “And you save what bread you can from the morning, to eat with it?” “Yes, Sir if we can save any.” “And you want more to eat with it?” “Yes, Sir.” With a very anxious face. The questioner, in the kindness of his heart, appears a little discomposed, and changes the subject. “What has become of the old man who used to lie in that bed in the corner?” The nurse don’t remember what old man is referred to. There has been such a many old men. The well-spoken old man is doubtful. The spectral old man who has come to life in bed, says, “Billy Stevens.” Another old man who has previously had his head in the replace, pipes out, “Charley Walters.” Something like a feeble interest is awakened. I suppose Charley Walters had conversation in him. “He’s dead!” says the piping old man. Another old man, with one eye screwed up, hastily displaces the piping old man, and says: “Yes! Charley Walters died in that bed, and – and” “Billy Stevens,” persists the spectral old man. “No, no! and Johnny Rogers died in that bed, and – and they’re both on ‘em dead – and Sam’l Bowyer;” this seems very extraordinary to him; “he went out!” With this he subsides, and all the old men (having had quite enough of it) subside, and the spectral old man goes into his grave again, and takes the shade of Billy Stevens with him. As we turn to go out at the door, another previously invisible old man, a hoarse old man in a flannel gown, is standing there, as if he had just come up through the floor. “I beg your pardon, Sir, could I take the liberty of saying a word?” “Yes; what is it?”  “I am greatly better in my health, Sir; but what I want, to get me quite round,” with his hand on his throat, “is a little fresh air, Sir. It has always done my complaint so much good, Sir. The regular leave for going out, comes round so seldom, that if the gentlemen, next Friday, would give me leave to go out walking, now and then – for only an hour or so, Sir!-” Who could wonder, looking through those weary vistas of bed and in infirmity, that it should do him good to meet with some other scenes, and assure himself that there was something else on earth? Who could help wondering why the old men lived on as they did; what grasp they had on life; what crumbs of interest or occupation they could pick up from its bare board; whether Charley Walters had ever described to them the days when he kept company with some old pauper woman in the bud, or Billy Stevens ever told them of the time when he was a dweller in the far-off foreign land called Home! The morsel of burnt child, lying in another room, so patiently, in bed, wrapped in lint, and looking stedfastly at us with his bright quiet eyes when we spoke to him kindly, looked as if the knowledge of these things, and of all the tender things there are to think about, might have been in his mind as if he thought, with us, that there was a fellow-feeling in the pauper nurses which appeared to make them more kind to their charges than the race of common nurses in the hospitals – as if he mused upon the Future of some older children lying around him in the same place, and thought it best, perhaps, all things considered, that he should die – as if he knew, without fear, of those many coffins, made and unmade, piled up in the store below and of his unknown friend, “the dropped child,” calm upon the box-lid covered with a cloth. But there was something wistful and appealing, too, in his tiny face, as if, in the midst of all the hard necessities and incongruities he pondered on, he pleaded, in behalf of the helpless and the aged poor, for a little more liberty and a little more bread. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'A Walk in a Workhouse' Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (25 May 1850) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-05-25 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-05-25-A_Walk_in_a_Workhouse Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no. 9, 25 May 1850, pp. 204-207. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-204.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-204.html</a>. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'A Walk in a Workhouse'. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-25-A_Walk_in_a_Workhouse">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-25-A_Walk_in_a_Workhouse</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. A few Sundays ago, 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 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 re. 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 monkies. “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 mad-women 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 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, in all probability, have been infinitely better off. Bearing in mind, in the present brief description of this walk, not only the facts already stated in this Journal, in reference to the Model Prison at Pentonville, but the general treatment of convicted prisoners under the associated silent system too, it must be once more distinctly set before the reader, that 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 there 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 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 at night. Divers of them had been there some long time. “Are they never going away?” was the natural enquiry. “Most of them are crippled, in some form or other,” said the Wardsman, “and not fit for anything.” They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyænas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do. The big-headed idiot shuffling his feet along the pavement, in the sunlight outside, was a more agreeable object everyway. Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs dayrooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of old people, in upstairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life, God knows how – this was the scenery through which the walk lay, for two hours. In some of these latter chambers, there were pictures stuck against the wall, and a neat display of crockery and pewter on a kind of sideboard now and then it was a treat to see a plant or two; in almost every ward, there was a cat. In all of these Long Walks of aged and infirm, some old people were bed-ridden, and had been for a long time; some were sitting on their beds half-naked; some dying in their beds; some out of bed, and sitting at a table near the fire. A sullen or lethargic indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again, I thought were generally apparent. On our walking into the midst of one of these dreary perspectives of old men, nearly the following little dialogue took place, the nurse not being immediately at hand: “All well here?” No answer. An old man in a Scotch cap sitting among others on a form at the table, eating out of a tin porringer, pushes back his cap a little to look at us, claps it down on his forehead again with the palm of his hand, and goes on eating. “All well here?” (repeated.) No answer. Another old man sitting on his bed, paralytically peeling a boiled potato, lifts his head, and stares. “Enough to eat?” No answer. Another old man, in bed, turns himself and coughs. “How are you to day?” To the last old man. That old man says nothing; but another old man, a tall old man of a very good address, speaking with perfect correctness, comes forward from somewhere, and volunteers an answer. The reply almost always proceeds from a volunteer, and not from the person looked at or spoken to. “We are very old, Sir,” in a mild, distinct voice. “We can’t expect to be well, most of us.” “Are you comfortable?” “I have no complaint to make, Sir.” With a half shake of his head, a half shrug of his shoulders, and a kind of apologetic smile. “Enough to eat?” “Why, Sir, I have but a poor appetite,” with the same air as before; “and yet I get through my allowance very easily” “But,” showing a porringer with a Sunday dinner in it; “here is a portion of mutton, and three potatoes. You can't starve on that?” “Oh dear no, Sir,” with the same apologetic air. “Not starve.” “What do you want?” “We have very little bread, Sir. It’s an exceedingly small quantity of bread.” The nurse, who is now rubbing her hands at the questioner’s elbow, interferes with, “It ain’t much raly, Sir. You see they’ve only six ounces a day, and when they’ve took their breakfast, there can only be a little left for night, Sir.” Another old man, hitherto invisible, rises out of his bedclothes, as out of a grave, and looks on. “You have tea at night?” The questioner is still addressing the well-spoken old man. “Yes, Sir, we have tea at night.” “And you save what bread you can from the morning, to eat with it?” “Yes, Sir if we can save any.” “And you want more to eat with it?” “Yes, Sir.” With a very anxious face. The questioner, in the kindness of his heart, appears a little discomposed, and changes the subject. “What has become of the old man who used to lie in that bed in the corner?” The nurse don’t remember what old man is referred to. There has been such a many old men. The well-spoken old man is doubtful. The spectral old man who has come to life in bed, says, “Billy Stevens.” Another old man who has previously had his head in the replace, pipes out, “Charley Walters.” Something like a feeble interest is awakened. I suppose Charley Walters had conversation in him. “He’s dead!” says the piping old man. Another old man, with one eye screwed up, hastily displaces the piping old man, and says: “Yes! Charley Walters died in that bed, and – and” “Billy Stevens,” persists the spectral old man. “No, no! and Johnny Rogers died in that bed, and – and they’re both on ‘em dead – and Sam’l Bowyer;” this seems very extraordinary to him; “he went out!” With this he subsides, and all the old men (having had quite enough of it) subside, and the spectral old man goes into his grave again, and takes the shade of Billy Stevens with him. As we turn to go out at the door, another previously invisible old man, a hoarse old man in a flannel gown, is standing there, as if he had just come up through the floor. “I beg your pardon, Sir, could I take the liberty of saying a word?” “Yes; what is it?”  “I am greatly better in my health, Sir; but what I want, to get me quite round,” with his hand on his throat, “is a little fresh air, Sir. It has always done my complaint so much good, Sir. The regular leave for going out, comes round so seldom, that if the gentlemen, next Friday, would give me leave to go out walking, now and then – for only an hour or so, Sir!-” Who could wonder, looking through those weary vistas of bed and in infirmity, that it should do him good to meet with some other scenes, and assure himself that there was something else on earth? Who could help wondering why the old men lived on as they did; what grasp they had on life; what crumbs of interest or occupation they could pick up from its bare board; whether Charley Walters had ever described to them the days when he kept company with some old pauper woman in the bud, or Billy Stevens ever told them of the time when he was a dweller in the far-off foreign land called Home! The morsel of burnt child, lying in another room, so patiently, in bed, wrapped in lint, and looking stedfastly at us with his bright quiet eyes when we spoke to him kindly, looked as if the knowledge of these things, and of all the tender things there are to think about, might have been in his mind as if he thought, with us, that there was a fellow-feeling in the pauper nurses which appeared to make them more kind to their charges than the race of common nurses in the hospitals – as if he mused upon the Future of some older children lying around him in the same place, and thought it best, perhaps, all things considered, that he should die – as if he knew, without fear, of those many coffins, made and unmade, piled up in the store below and of his unknown friend, “the dropped child,” calm upon the box-lid covered with a cloth. But there was something wistful and appealing, too, in his tiny face, as if, in the midst of all the hard necessities and incongruities he pondered on, he pleaded, in behalf of the helpless and the aged poor, for a little more liberty and a little more bread. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/A_Card_from_Mr._Booley/1850-05-18-A_Card_from_Mr_Booley.pdf ed05492c1ccfa2dc1f07c08fc2763753 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500518 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. MR. BOOLEY (the great traveller) presents his compliments to the conductor of Household Words, and begs to call his attention to an omission in the account given in that delightful journal, of MR. BOOLEY’S remarks, in addressing the Social Oysters. MR. BOOLEY, in proposing the health of MR. THOMAS GRIEVE, in connexion with the beautiful diorama of the route of the Overland Mail to India, expressly added (amid much cheering from the Oysters) the names of MR. TELBIN his distinguished coadjutor; MR. ABSOLON, who painted the figures; and MR. HERRING, who painted the animals. Although MR. BOOLEY’S tribute of praise can be of little importance to those gentlemen, he is uneasy in finding them left out of the delightful Journal referred to. MR. BOOLEY has taken the liberty of endeavouring to give this communication an air of novelty, by omitting the words ‘Now, Sir,’ which are generally supposed to be essential to all letters written to Editors for publication. It may be interesting to add, in fact, that the Social Oysters considered it impossible that MR. BOOLEY could, by any means, throw off the present communication, without availing himself of that established form of address. Highbury Barn, Monday Evening. Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly magazine Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'A Card from Mr. Booley' Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no. 8, 18 May 1850, pp. 175-176. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-175.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-175.html</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-05-18 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission. Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-05-18-A_Card_from_Mr_Booley Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'A Card from Mr. Booley'. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-18-A_Card_from_Mr_Booley">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-18-A_Card_from_Mr_Booley</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (18 May 1850) Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. MR. BOOLEY (the great traveller) presents his compliments to the conductor of Household Words, and begs to call his attention to an omission in the account given in that delightful journal, of MR. BOOLEY’S remarks, in addressing the Social Oysters. MR. BOOLEY, in proposing the health of MR. THOMAS GRIEVE, in connexion with the beautiful diorama of the route of the Overland Mail to India, expressly added (amid much cheering from the Oysters) the names of MR. TELBIN his distinguished coadjutor; MR. ABSOLON, who painted the figures; and MR. HERRING, who painted the animals. Although MR. BOOLEY’S tribute of praise can be of little importance to those gentlemen, he is uneasy in finding them left out of the delightful Journal referred to. MR. BOOLEY has taken the liberty of endeavouring to give this communication an air of novelty, by omitting the words ‘Now, Sir,’ which are generally supposed to be essential to all letters written to Editors for publication. It may be interesting to add, in fact, that the Social Oysters considered it impossible that MR. BOOLEY could, by any means, throw off the present communication, without availing himself of that established form of address. Highbury Barn, Monday Evening. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/The_Begging_Letter-Writer/1850-05-18-The_BeggingLetter_Writer.pdf c0840b007095f936f3070c7398212218 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500518 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly newspaper Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. He is a ‘Household Word.’ We all know something of him. The amount of money he annually diverts from wholesome and useful purposes in the United Kingdom, would be a set-off against the Window Tax. He is one of the most shameless frauds and impositions of this time. In his idleness, his mendacity, and the immeasurable harm he does to the deserving, - dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us, - he is more worthy of Norfolk Island than three-fourths of the worst characters who are sent there. Under any rational system, he would have been sent there long ago. I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence. I ought to know something of the Begging-Letter Writer. He has besieged my door, at all hours of the day and night; he has fought my servant; he has lain in ambush for me, going out and coming in; he has followed me out of town into the country; he has appeared at provincial hotels, where I have been staying for only a few hours; he has written to me from immense distances, when I have been out of England. He has fallen sick; he has died, and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory scene; he has been his own son, his own mother, his own baby, his idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather. He has wanted a great coat, to go to India in; a pound, to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots, to take him to the coast of China; a hat, to get him into a permanent situation under Government. He has frequently been exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence. He has had such openings at Liverpool posts of great trust and confidence in merchants’ houses, which nothing but seven and-sixpence was wanting to him to secure that I wonder he is not Mayor of that flourishing town at the present moment. The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a most astounding nature. He has had two children, who have never grown up; who have never had anything to cover them at night; who have been continually driving him mad, by asking in vain for food; who have never come out of fevers and measles (which, I suppose, has accounted for his fuming his letters with tobacco smoke, as a disinfectant); who have never changed in the least degree, through fourteen long revolving years. As to his wife, what that suffering woman has undergone, nobody knows. She has always been in an interesting situation through the same long period, and has never been confined yet. His devotion to her has been unceasing. He has never cared for himself; he could have perished – he would rather, in short – but was it not his Christian duty as a man, a husband, and a father, to write begging letters when he looked at her? (He has usually remarked that he would call in the evening for an answer to this question.) He has been the sport of the strangest misfortunes. What his brother has done to him would have broken anybody else’s heart. His brother went into business with him, and ran away with the money; his brother got him to be security for an immense sum, and left him to pay it; his brother would have given him employment to the tune of hundreds a-year, if he would have consented to write letters on a Sunday; his brother enunciated principles incompatible with his religious views, and he could not (in consequence) permit his brother to provide for him. His landlord has never shown a spark of human feeling. When he put in that execution I don’t know, but he has never taken it out. The broker’s man has grown grey in possession. They will have to bury him some day. He has been attached to every conceivable pursuit. He has been in the army, in the navy, in the church, in the law; connected with the press, the fine arts, public institutions, every description and grade of business. He has been brought up as a gentleman; he has been at every college in Oxford and Cambridge; he can quote Latin in his letters (but generally misspells some minor English word); he can tell you what Shakespeare says about begging, better than you know it. It is to be observed, that in the midst of his afflictions he always reads the newspapers; and rounds off his appeals with some allusion, that may be supposed to be in my way, to the popular subject of the hour. His life presents a series of inconsistencies. Sometimes he has never written such a letter before. He blushes with shame. That is the first time; that shall be the last. Don’t answer it, and let it be understood that, then, he will kill himself quietly. Sometimes (and more frequently) he has written a few such letters. Then he encloses the answers, with an intimation that they are of inestimable value to him, and a request that they may be carefully returned. He is fond of enclosing something – verses, letters, pawnbrokers’ duplicates, anything to necessitate an answer. He is very severe upon ‘the pampered minion of fortune,’ who refused him the half-sovereign referred to in the enclosure number two – but he knows me better. He writes in a variety of styles; sometimes in low spirits; sometimes quite jocosely. When he is in low spirits, he writes down-hill, and repeats words – these little indications being expressive of the perturbation of his mind. When he is more vivacious, he is frank with me; he is quite the agreeable rattle. I know what human nature is, - who better? Well! He had a little money once, and he ran through it – as many men have done before him. He finds his old friends turn away from him now – many men have done that before him, too! Shall he tell me why he writes to me? Because he has no kind of claim upon me. He put sit on that ground, plainly; and begs to ask for the loan (as I know human nature) of two sovereigns, to be repaid next Tuesday six weeks, before twelve at noon. Sometimes, when he is sure that I have found him out, and that there is no chance of money, he writes to inform me that I have got rid of him at last. He has enlisted into the Company’s service, and is off directly – but he wants a cheese. He is informed by the serjeant that it is essential to his prospects in the regiment that he should take out a single-Gloucester cheese, weighing from twelve to fifteen pounds. Eight or nine shillings would buy it. He does not ask for money, after what has passed; but if he calls at nine to-morrow morning, may he hope to find a cheese? And is there anything he can do to show his gratitude in Bengal? Once, he wrote me rather a special letter proposing relief in kind. He had got into a little trouble by leaving parcels of mud done up in brown paper, at people’s houses, on pretence of being a Railway-Porter, in which character he received carriage money. This sportive fancy he expiated in the House of Correction. Not long after his release, and on a Sunday morning, he called with a letter (having first dusted himself all over), in which he gave me to understand that, being resolved to earn an honest livelihood, he had been travelling about the country with a cart of crockery. That he had been doing pretty well, until the day before, when his horse had dropped down dead near Chatham, in Kent. That this had reduced him to the unpleasant necessity of getting into the shafts himself, and drawing the cart of crockery to London a somewhat exhausting pull of thirty miles. That he did not venture to ask again for money; but that if I would have the goodness to leave him out a donkey, he would call for the animal before breakfast! At another time, my friend (I am describing actual experiences) introduced himself as a literary gentleman in the last extremity of distress. He had had a play accepted at a certain Theatre – which was really open; its representation was delayed by the indisposition of a leading actor – who was really ill; and he and his were in a state of absolute starvation. If he made his necessities known to the Manager of the Theatre, he put it to me to say what kind of treatment he might expect? Well! we got over that difficulty to our mutual satisfaction. A little while afterwards he was in some other strait – I think Mrs. Southcote, his wife, was in extremity – and we adjusted that point too. A little while afterwards, he had taken a new house, and was going headlong to ruin for want of a water-butt. I had my misgivings about the water-butt, and did not reply to that epistle. But, a little while afterwards, I had reason to feel penitent for my neglect. He wrote me a few broken-hearted lines, informing me that the dear partner of his sorrows died in his arms last night at nine o’clock! I dispatched a trusty messenger to comfort the bereaved mourner and his poor children: but the messenger went so soon, that the play was not ready to be played out; my friend was not at home, and his wife was in a most delightful state of health. He was taken up by the Mendicity Society (informally it afterwards appeared), and I presented myself at a London Police-Office with my testimony against him. The Magistrate was wonderfully struck by his educational acquirements, deeply impressed by the excellence of his letters, exceedingly sorry to see a man of his attainments there, complimented him highly on his powers of composition, and was quite charmed to have the agreeable duty of discharging him. A collection was made for the ‘poor fellow,’ as he was called in the reports, and I left the court with a comfortable sense of being universally regarded as a sort of monster. Next day, comes to me a friend of mine, the governor of a large prison, ‘Why did you ever go to the Police-Office against that man,’ says he, ‘without coming to me first? I know all about him and his frauds. He lodged in the house of one of my warders, at the very time when he first wrote to you; and then he was eating spring-lamb at eighteen-pence a pound, and early asparagus at I don’t know how much a bundle!’ On that very same day, and in that very same hour, my injured gentleman wrote a solemn address to me, demanding to know what compensation I proposed to make him for his having passed the night in a ‘loathsome dungeon.’ And next morning, an Irish gentleman, a member of the same fraternity, who had read the case, and was very well persuaded I should be chary of going to that Police-Office again, positively refused to leave my door for less than a sovereign, and, resolved to besiege me into compliance, literally ‘sat down’ before it for ten mortal hours. The garrison being well provisioned, I remained within the walls; and he raised the siege at midnight, with a prodigious alarum on the bell. The Begging-Letter Writer often has an extensive circle of acquaintance. Whole pages of the Court Guide are ready to be references for him. Noblemen and gentlemen write to say there never was such a man for probity and virtue. They have known him, time out of mind, and there is nothing they wouldn’t do for him. Somehow, they don’t give him that one pound ten he stands in need of; but perhaps it is not enough – they want to do more, and his modesty will not allow it. It is to be remarked of his trade that it is a very fascinating one. He never leaves it; and those who are near to him become smitten with a love of it, too, and sooner or later set up for themselves. He employs a messenger – man, woman, or child. That messenger is certain ultimately to become an independent Begging-Letter Writer. His sons and daughters succeed to his calling, and write begging-letters when he is no more. He throws off the infection of begging-letter writing, like the contagion of disease. What Sydney Smith so happily called ‘the dangerous luxury of dishonesty’ is more tempting, and more catching, it would seem, in this instance than in any other. He always belongs to a Corresponding-Society of Begging-Letter Writers. Any one who will, may ascertain this fact. Give money to day, in recognition of a begging-letter, - no matter how unlike a common begging-letter, - and for the next fortnight you will have a rush of such communications. Steadily refuse to give; and the begging-letters become Angels’ visits, until the Society is from some cause or other in a dull way of business, and may as well try you as anybody else. It is of little use enquiring into the Begging-Letter Writer’s circumstances. He may be sometimes accidentally found out, as in the case already mentioned (though that was not the first enquiry made); but apparent misery is always a part of his trade, and real misery very often is, in the intervals of spring-lamb and early asparagus. It is naturally an incident of his dissipated and dishonest life. That the calling is a successful one, and that large sums of money are gained by it, must be evident to anybody who reads the Police Reports of such cases. But, prosecutions are of rare occurrence, relatively to the extent to which the trade is carried on. The cause of this, is to be found (as no one knows better than the Begging-Letter Writer, for it is a part of his speculation) in the aversion people feel to exhibit themselves as having been imposed upon, or as having weakly gratified their consciences with a lazy, flimsy substitute for the noblest of all virtues. There is a man at large, at the moment when this paper is preparing for the press (on the 29th of April), and never once taken up yet, who, within these twelvemonths, has been probably the most audacious and the most successful swindler that even this trade has ever known. There has been something singularly base in this fellow’s proceedings: it has been his business to write to all sorts and conditions of people, in the names of persons of high reputation and unblemished honor, professing to be in distress – the general admiration and respect for whom, has ensured a ready and generous reply. Now, in the hope that the results of the real experience of a real person may do something more to induce reflection on this subject than any abstract treatise – and with a personal knowledge of the extent to which the Begging-Letter Trade has been carried on for some time, and has been for some time constantly increasing – the writer of this paper entreats the attention of his readers to a few concluding words. His experience is a type of the experience of many; some on a smaller; some on an infinitely larger scale. All may judge of the soundness or unsoundness of his conclusions from it. Long doubtful of the efficacy of such assistance in any case whatever, and able to recal but one, within his whole individual knowledge, in which he had the least after-reason to suppose that any good was done by it, he was led, last autumn, into some serious considerations. The begging-letters flying about by every post, made it perfectly manifest, That a set of lazy vagabonds were interposed between the general desire to do something to relieve the sickness and misery under which the poor were suffering; and the suffering poor themselves. That many who sought to do some little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening those wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent knaves cumbering society. That imagination, - soberly following one of these knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and comparing it with the life of one of these poor in a cholera-stricken alley, or one of the children of one of these poor, soothed in its dying hour by the late lamented Mr. Drouet, - contemplated a grim farce, impossible to be presented very much longer before God or man. That the crowning miracle of all the miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their youth for of flower or blossom such youth has none the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post-Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last Great Day as anything towards it. The poor never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike their habits. The writers are public robbers; and we who support them are parties to their depredations. They trade upon every circumstance within their knowledge that affects us, public or private, joyful or sorrowful; they pervert the lessons of our lives; they change what ought to be our strength and virtue, into weakness, and encouragement of vice. There is a plain remedy, and it is in our own hands. We must resolve, at any sacrifice of feeling, to be deaf to such appeals, and crush the trade. There are degrees in murder. Life must be held sacred among us in more ways than one sacred, not merely from the murderous weapon, or the subtle poison, or the cruel blow, but sacred from preventible diseases, distortions, and pains. That is the first great end we have to set against this miserable imposition. Physical life respected, moral life comes next. What will not content a Begging-Letter Writer for a week, would educate a score of children for a year. Let us give all we can; let us give more than ever. But let us give, and do, with a high purpose; not to endow the scum of the earth, to its own greater corruption, with the offals of our duty. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Begging Letter-Writer' Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-05-18 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-05-18-The_BeggingLetter_Writer Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no. 8, 18 May 1850, pp. 169-172. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-169.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-169.html</a>. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'The Begging-Letter Writer'. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-18-The_BeggingLetter_Writer">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-18-The_BeggingLetter_Writer</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (18 May 1850) Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. He is a ‘Household Word.’ We all know something of him. The amount of money he annually diverts from wholesome and useful purposes in the United Kingdom, would be a set-off against the Window Tax. He is one of the most shameless frauds and impositions of this time. In his idleness, his mendacity, and the immeasurable harm he does to the deserving, - dirtying the stream of true benevolence, and muddling the brains of foolish justices, with inability to distinguish between the base coin of distress, and the true currency we have always among us, - he is more worthy of Norfolk Island than three-fourths of the worst characters who are sent there. Under any rational system, he would have been sent there long ago. I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence. I ought to know something of the Begging-Letter Writer. He has besieged my door, at all hours of the day and night; he has fought my servant; he has lain in ambush for me, going out and coming in; he has followed me out of town into the country; he has appeared at provincial hotels, where I have been staying for only a few hours; he has written to me from immense distances, when I have been out of England. He has fallen sick; he has died, and been buried; he has come to life again, and again departed from this transitory scene; he has been his own son, his own mother, his own baby, his idiot brother, his uncle, his aunt, his aged grandfather. He has wanted a great coat, to go to India in; a pound, to set him up in life for ever; a pair of boots, to take him to the coast of China; a hat, to get him into a permanent situation under Government. He has frequently been exactly seven-and-sixpence short of independence. He has had such openings at Liverpool posts of great trust and confidence in merchants’ houses, which nothing but seven and-sixpence was wanting to him to secure that I wonder he is not Mayor of that flourishing town at the present moment. The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a most astounding nature. He has had two children, who have never grown up; who have never had anything to cover them at night; who have been continually driving him mad, by asking in vain for food; who have never come out of fevers and measles (which, I suppose, has accounted for his fuming his letters with tobacco smoke, as a disinfectant); who have never changed in the least degree, through fourteen long revolving years. As to his wife, what that suffering woman has undergone, nobody knows. She has always been in an interesting situation through the same long period, and has never been confined yet. His devotion to her has been unceasing. He has never cared for himself; he could have perished – he would rather, in short – but was it not his Christian duty as a man, a husband, and a father, to write begging letters when he looked at her? (He has usually remarked that he would call in the evening for an answer to this question.) He has been the sport of the strangest misfortunes. What his brother has done to him would have broken anybody else’s heart. His brother went into business with him, and ran away with the money; his brother got him to be security for an immense sum, and left him to pay it; his brother would have given him employment to the tune of hundreds a-year, if he would have consented to write letters on a Sunday; his brother enunciated principles incompatible with his religious views, and he could not (in consequence) permit his brother to provide for him. His landlord has never shown a spark of human feeling. When he put in that execution I don’t know, but he has never taken it out. The broker’s man has grown grey in possession. They will have to bury him some day. He has been attached to every conceivable pursuit. He has been in the army, in the navy, in the church, in the law; connected with the press, the fine arts, public institutions, every description and grade of business. He has been brought up as a gentleman; he has been at every college in Oxford and Cambridge; he can quote Latin in his letters (but generally misspells some minor English word); he can tell you what Shakespeare says about begging, better than you know it. It is to be observed, that in the midst of his afflictions he always reads the newspapers; and rounds off his appeals with some allusion, that may be supposed to be in my way, to the popular subject of the hour. His life presents a series of inconsistencies. Sometimes he has never written such a letter before. He blushes with shame. That is the first time; that shall be the last. Don’t answer it, and let it be understood that, then, he will kill himself quietly. Sometimes (and more frequently) he has written a few such letters. Then he encloses the answers, with an intimation that they are of inestimable value to him, and a request that they may be carefully returned. He is fond of enclosing something – verses, letters, pawnbrokers’ duplicates, anything to necessitate an answer. He is very severe upon ‘the pampered minion of fortune,’ who refused him the half-sovereign referred to in the enclosure number two – but he knows me better. He writes in a variety of styles; sometimes in low spirits; sometimes quite jocosely. When he is in low spirits, he writes down-hill, and repeats words – these little indications being expressive of the perturbation of his mind. When he is more vivacious, he is frank with me; he is quite the agreeable rattle. I know what human nature is, - who better? Well! He had a little money once, and he ran through it – as many men have done before him. He finds his old friends turn away from him now – many men have done that before him, too! Shall he tell me why he writes to me? Because he has no kind of claim upon me. He put sit on that ground, plainly; and begs to ask for the loan (as I know human nature) of two sovereigns, to be repaid next Tuesday six weeks, before twelve at noon. Sometimes, when he is sure that I have found him out, and that there is no chance of money, he writes to inform me that I have got rid of him at last. He has enlisted into the Company’s service, and is off directly – but he wants a cheese. He is informed by the serjeant that it is essential to his prospects in the regiment that he should take out a single-Gloucester cheese, weighing from twelve to fifteen pounds. Eight or nine shillings would buy it. He does not ask for money, after what has passed; but if he calls at nine to-morrow morning, may he hope to find a cheese? And is there anything he can do to show his gratitude in Bengal? Once, he wrote me rather a special letter proposing relief in kind. He had got into a little trouble by leaving parcels of mud done up in brown paper, at people’s houses, on pretence of being a Railway-Porter, in which character he received carriage money. This sportive fancy he expiated in the House of Correction. Not long after his release, and on a Sunday morning, he called with a letter (having first dusted himself all over), in which he gave me to understand that, being resolved to earn an honest livelihood, he had been travelling about the country with a cart of crockery. That he had been doing pretty well, until the day before, when his horse had dropped down dead near Chatham, in Kent. That this had reduced him to the unpleasant necessity of getting into the shafts himself, and drawing the cart of crockery to London a somewhat exhausting pull of thirty miles. That he did not venture to ask again for money; but that if I would have the goodness to leave him out a donkey, he would call for the animal before breakfast! At another time, my friend (I am describing actual experiences) introduced himself as a literary gentleman in the last extremity of distress. He had had a play accepted at a certain Theatre – which was really open; its representation was delayed by the indisposition of a leading actor – who was really ill; and he and his were in a state of absolute starvation. If he made his necessities known to the Manager of the Theatre, he put it to me to say what kind of treatment he might expect? Well! we got over that difficulty to our mutual satisfaction. A little while afterwards he was in some other strait – I think Mrs. Southcote, his wife, was in extremity – and we adjusted that point too. A little while afterwards, he had taken a new house, and was going headlong to ruin for want of a water-butt. I had my misgivings about the water-butt, and did not reply to that epistle. But, a little while afterwards, I had reason to feel penitent for my neglect. He wrote me a few broken-hearted lines, informing me that the dear partner of his sorrows died in his arms last night at nine o’clock! I dispatched a trusty messenger to comfort the bereaved mourner and his poor children: but the messenger went so soon, that the play was not ready to be played out; my friend was not at home, and his wife was in a most delightful state of health. He was taken up by the Mendicity Society (informally it afterwards appeared), and I presented myself at a London Police-Office with my testimony against him. The Magistrate was wonderfully struck by his educational acquirements, deeply impressed by the excellence of his letters, exceedingly sorry to see a man of his attainments there, complimented him highly on his powers of composition, and was quite charmed to have the agreeable duty of discharging him. A collection was made for the ‘poor fellow,’ as he was called in the reports, and I left the court with a comfortable sense of being universally regarded as a sort of monster. Next day, comes to me a friend of mine, the governor of a large prison, ‘Why did you ever go to the Police-Office against that man,’ says he, ‘without coming to me first? I know all about him and his frauds. He lodged in the house of one of my warders, at the very time when he first wrote to you; and then he was eating spring-lamb at eighteen-pence a pound, and early asparagus at I don’t know how much a bundle!’ On that very same day, and in that very same hour, my injured gentleman wrote a solemn address to me, demanding to know what compensation I proposed to make him for his having passed the night in a ‘loathsome dungeon.’ And next morning, an Irish gentleman, a member of the same fraternity, who had read the case, and was very well persuaded I should be chary of going to that Police-Office again, positively refused to leave my door for less than a sovereign, and, resolved to besiege me into compliance, literally ‘sat down’ before it for ten mortal hours. The garrison being well provisioned, I remained within the walls; and he raised the siege at midnight, with a prodigious alarum on the bell. The Begging-Letter Writer often has an extensive circle of acquaintance. Whole pages of the Court Guide are ready to be references for him. Noblemen and gentlemen write to say there never was such a man for probity and virtue. They have known him, time out of mind, and there is nothing they wouldn’t do for him. Somehow, they don’t give him that one pound ten he stands in need of; but perhaps it is not enough – they want to do more, and his modesty will not allow it. It is to be remarked of his trade that it is a very fascinating one. He never leaves it; and those who are near to him become smitten with a love of it, too, and sooner or later set up for themselves. He employs a messenger – man, woman, or child. That messenger is certain ultimately to become an independent Begging-Letter Writer. His sons and daughters succeed to his calling, and write begging-letters when he is no more. He throws off the infection of begging-letter writing, like the contagion of disease. What Sydney Smith so happily called ‘the dangerous luxury of dishonesty’ is more tempting, and more catching, it would seem, in this instance than in any other. He always belongs to a Corresponding-Society of Begging-Letter Writers. Any one who will, may ascertain this fact. Give money to day, in recognition of a begging-letter, - no matter how unlike a common begging-letter, - and for the next fortnight you will have a rush of such communications. Steadily refuse to give; and the begging-letters become Angels’ visits, until the Society is from some cause or other in a dull way of business, and may as well try you as anybody else. It is of little use enquiring into the Begging-Letter Writer’s circumstances. He may be sometimes accidentally found out, as in the case already mentioned (though that was not the first enquiry made); but apparent misery is always a part of his trade, and real misery very often is, in the intervals of spring-lamb and early asparagus. It is naturally an incident of his dissipated and dishonest life. That the calling is a successful one, and that large sums of money are gained by it, must be evident to anybody who reads the Police Reports of such cases. But, prosecutions are of rare occurrence, relatively to the extent to which the trade is carried on. The cause of this, is to be found (as no one knows better than the Begging-Letter Writer, for it is a part of his speculation) in the aversion people feel to exhibit themselves as having been imposed upon, or as having weakly gratified their consciences with a lazy, flimsy substitute for the noblest of all virtues. There is a man at large, at the moment when this paper is preparing for the press (on the 29th of April), and never once taken up yet, who, within these twelvemonths, has been probably the most audacious and the most successful swindler that even this trade has ever known. There has been something singularly base in this fellow’s proceedings: it has been his business to write to all sorts and conditions of people, in the names of persons of high reputation and unblemished honor, professing to be in distress – the general admiration and respect for whom, has ensured a ready and generous reply. Now, in the hope that the results of the real experience of a real person may do something more to induce reflection on this subject than any abstract treatise – and with a personal knowledge of the extent to which the Begging-Letter Trade has been carried on for some time, and has been for some time constantly increasing – the writer of this paper entreats the attention of his readers to a few concluding words. His experience is a type of the experience of many; some on a smaller; some on an infinitely larger scale. All may judge of the soundness or unsoundness of his conclusions from it. Long doubtful of the efficacy of such assistance in any case whatever, and able to recal but one, within his whole individual knowledge, in which he had the least after-reason to suppose that any good was done by it, he was led, last autumn, into some serious considerations. The begging-letters flying about by every post, made it perfectly manifest, That a set of lazy vagabonds were interposed between the general desire to do something to relieve the sickness and misery under which the poor were suffering; and the suffering poor themselves. That many who sought to do some little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening those wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent knaves cumbering society. That imagination, - soberly following one of these knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and comparing it with the life of one of these poor in a cholera-stricken alley, or one of the children of one of these poor, soothed in its dying hour by the late lamented Mr. Drouet, - contemplated a grim farce, impossible to be presented very much longer before God or man. That the crowning miracle of all the miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their youth for of flower or blossom such youth has none the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post-Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last Great Day as anything towards it. The poor never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike their habits. The writers are public robbers; and we who support them are parties to their depredations. They trade upon every circumstance within their knowledge that affects us, public or private, joyful or sorrowful; they pervert the lessons of our lives; they change what ought to be our strength and virtue, into weakness, and encouragement of vice. There is a plain remedy, and it is in our own hands. We must resolve, at any sacrifice of feeling, to be deaf to such appeals, and crush the trade. There are degrees in murder. Life must be held sacred among us in more ways than one sacred, not merely from the murderous weapon, or the subtle poison, or the cruel blow, but sacred from preventible diseases, distortions, and pains. That is the first great end we have to set against this miserable imposition. Physical life respected, moral life comes next. What will not content a Begging-Letter Writer for a week, would educate a score of children for a year. Let us give all we can; let us give more than ever. But let us give, and do, with a high purpose; not to endow the scum of the earth, to its own greater corruption, with the offals of our duty. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_[No.1]/1850-05-11-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No1.pdf 55d6ba3e02f0a3410219aa55b9f43c7a Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500511 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly magazine Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. I won’t bear it, and I don't see why I should. Having begun to commit my grievances to writing, I have made up my mind to go on. You men have a saying, ‘I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ Very good. I may as well get into a false position with our proprietor for a ream of manuscript as a quire. Here goes! I want to know who BUFFON was. I’ll take my oath he wasn’t a bird. Then what did he know about birds especially about Ravens? He pretends to know all about Ravens. Who told him? Was his authority a Raven? I should think not. There never was a Raven yet, who committed himself, you’ll find, if you look into the precedents. There’s a schoolmaster in dusty black knee-breeches and stockings, who comes and stares at our establishment every Saturday, and brings a lot of boys with him. He is always bothering the boys about BUFFON. That’s the way I know what BUFFON says. He is a nice man, BUFFON; and you’re all nice men together, ain’t you? What do you mean by saying that I am inquisitive and impudent, that I go everywhere, that I affront and drive off the dogs, that I play pranks on the poultry, and that I am particularly assiduous in cultivating the good-will of the cook? That’s what your friend BUFFON says, and you adopt him it appears. And what do you mean by calling me ‘a glutton by nature, and a thief by habit?’ Why, the identical boy who was being told this, on the strength of BUFFON, as he looked through our wires last Saturday, was almost out of his mind with pudding, and had got another boy’s top in his pocket! I tell you what. I like the idea of you men, writing histories of us, and settling what we are, and what we are not, and calling us any names you like best. What colors do you think you would show in, yourselves, if some of us were to take it into our heads to write histories of you? I know something of Astley’s Theatre, I hope; I was about the stables there, a few years. Ecod! if you heard the observations of the Horses after the performance, you’d have some of the conceit taken out of you! I don’t mean to say that I admire the Cat. I don’t admire her. On the whole, I have a personal animosity towards her. But, being obliged to lead this life, I condescend to hold communication with her, and I have asked her what her opinion is. She lived with an old lady of property before she came here, who had a number of nephews and nieces. She says she could show you up to that extent, after her experience in that situation, that even you would be hardly brazen enough to talk of cats being sly and selfish any more. I am particularly assiduous in cultivating the good-will of the cook, am I? Oh! I suppose you never do anything of this sort, yourselves? No politician among you was ever particularly assiduous in cultivating the good-will of a minister, eh? No clergyman in cultivating the goodwill of a bishop, humph? No fortune-seeker in cultivating the good-will of a patron, hah? You have no toad-eating, no time-serving, no place-hunting, no lacqueyship of gold and silver sticks, or anything of that sort, I suppose? You haven’t too many cooks, in short, whom you are all assiduously cultivating, till you spoil the general broth? Not you. You leave that to the Ravens. Your friend BUFFON, and some more of you, are mighty ready, it seems, to give us characters. Would you like to hear about your own temper and forbearance? Ask the Dog. About your never overloading or ill-using a willing creature? Ask my brother-in-law’s friend, the Camel, up in the Zoological. About your gratitude to, and your provision for, old servants? I wish I could refer you to the last Horse I dined off (he was very tough), up at a knacker’s yard in Battle Bridge. About your mildness, and your abstinence from blows and cudgels? Wait till the Donkey’s book comes out! You are very fond of laughing at the parrot, I observe. Now, I don’t care for the parrot. I don't admire the parrot’s voice – it wants hoarseness. And I despise the parrot’s livery – considering black the only true wear. I would as soon stick my bill into the parrot’s breast as look at him. Sooner. But if you come to that, and you laugh at the parrot because the parrot says the same thing over and over again, don't you think you could get up a laugh at yourselves ? Did you ever know a Cabinet Minister say of a flagrant job or great abuse, perfectly notorious to the whole country, that he had never heard a word of it himself, but could assure the honourable gentleman that every enquiry should be made? Did you ever hear a Justice remark, of any extreme example of ignorance, that it was a most extraordinary case, and he couldn't have believed in the possibility of such a case – when there had been, all through his life, ten thousand such within sight of his chimney-pots? Did you ever hear, among yourselves, anything approaching to a parrot repetition of the words, Constitution, Country, Public Service, Self-Government, Centralisation, Un-English, Capital, Balance of Power, Vested Interests, Corn, Rights of Labor, Wages, or so forth ? Did you ever? No! Of course you never! But to come back to that fellow BUFFON. He finds us Ravens to be most extraordinary creatures. We have properties so remarkable, that you’d hardly believe it. ‘A piece of money, a teaspoon, or a ring,’ he says, ‘are always tempting baits to our avarice. These we will slily seize upon; and, if not watched, carry to our favorite hole.’ How odd! Did you ever hear of a place called California? I have. I understand there are a number of animals over there, from all parts of the world, turning up the ground with their bills, grubbing under the water, sickening, moulting, living in want and fear, starving, dying, tumbling over on their backs, murdering one another, and all for what? Pieces of money that they want to carry to their favourite holes. Ravens every one of ‘em! Not a man among ‘em, bless you! Did you ever hear of Railway Scrip? I have. We made a pretty exhibition of ourselves about that, we feathered creatures! Lord, how we went on about that Railway Scrip! How we fell down, to a bird, from the Eagle to the Sparrow, before a scarecrow, and worshipped it for the love of the bits of rag and paper uttering from its dirty pockets! If it hadn’t tumbled down in its rottenness, we should have clapped a title on it within ten years, I’ll be sworn! - Go along with you, and your BUFFON, and don’t talk to me! ‘The Raven don’t confine himself to petty depredations on the pantry or the larder’ here you are with your BUFFON again ‘but he soars at more magnificent plunder, that he can neither exhibit nor enjoy. This must be very strange to you men more than it is to the Cat who lived with that old lady, though! Now, I am not going to stand this. You shall not have it all your own way. I am resolved that I won’t have Ravens written about by men, without having men written about by Ravens – at all events by one Raven, and that’s me. I shall put down my opinions about you. As leisure and opportunity serve, I shall collect a natural history of you. You are a good deal given to talk about your missions. That’s my mission. How do you like it? I am open to contributions from any animal except one of your set; bird, beast, or fish, may assist me in my mission, if he will. I have mentioned it to the Cat, intimated it to the Mouse, and proposed it to the Dog. The Owl shakes his head when I confide it to him, and says he doubts. He always did shake his head, and doubt. Whenever he brings himself before the public, he never does anything except shake his head and doubt. I should have thought he had got himself into a sufficient mess by doing that, when he roosted for a long time in the Court of Chancery. But he can’t leave off. He’s always at it. Talking of missions, here’s our Proprietor’s Wife with a mission now! She has found out that she ought to go and vote at elections; ought to be competent to sit in Parliament; ought to be able to enter the learned professions the army and navy, too, I believe. She has made the discovery that she has no business to be the comfort of our Proprietor’s life, and to have the hold upon him of not being mixed up in all the janglings and wranglings of men, but is quite ill-used in being the solace of his home, and wants to go out speechifying. That’s our Proprietor’s Wife’s new mission. Why, you never heard the Dove go on in that ridiculous way. She knows her true strength better. You are mighty proud about your language; but it seems to me that you don’t deserve to have words, if you can’t make a better use of ‘em. You know you are always fighting about ‘em. Do you never mean to leave that off, and come to things a little? I thought you had high authority for not tearing each other's eyes out, about words. You respect it, don’t you? I declare I am stunned with words, on my perch in the Happy Family. I used to think the cry of a Peacock bad enough, when I was on sale in a menagerie, but I had rather live in the midst of twenty peacocks, than one Gorham and a Privy Council. In the midst of your wordy squabbling, you don't think of the lookers-on. But if you heard what I hear in my public thoroughfare, you’d stop a little of that noise, and leave the great bulk of the people something to believe in peace. You are overdoing it, I assure you. I don’t wonder at the Parrot picking words up and occupying herself with them. She has nothing else to do. There are no destitute parrots, no uneducated parrots, no foreign parrots in a contagious state of distraction, no parrots in danger of pestilence, no festering heaps of miserable parrots, no parrots crying to be sent away beyond the sea for dear life. But among you! – Well! I repeat, I am not going to stand it. Tame submission to injustice is unworthy of a Raven. I croak the croak of revolt, and call upon the Happy Family to rally round me. You men have had it all your own way for a long time. Now, you shall hear a sentiment or two about yourselves. I find my last communication gone from the corner where I hid it. I rather suspect the magpie, but he says, ‘Upon his honor.’ If Mr. Rowland Hill has got it, he will do me justice – more justice than you have done him lately, or I am mistaken in my man. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'From the Raven in the Happy Family' (No.1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-05-11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-05-11-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No1 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no. 7, 11 May 1850, pp. 156-158. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-156.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-156.html</a>. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'From the Raven in the Happy Family' (No.1). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-11-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No1">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-05-11-From_the_Raven_in_the_Happy_Family_No1</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (11 May 1850) Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. I won’t bear it, and I don't see why I should. Having begun to commit my grievances to writing, I have made up my mind to go on. You men have a saying, ‘I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ Very good. I may as well get into a false position with our proprietor for a ream of manuscript as a quire. Here goes! I want to know who BUFFON was. I’ll take my oath he wasn’t a bird. Then what did he know about birds especially about Ravens? He pretends to know all about Ravens. Who told him? Was his authority a Raven? I should think not. There never was a Raven yet, who committed himself, you’ll find, if you look into the precedents. There’s a schoolmaster in dusty black knee-breeches and stockings, who comes and stares at our establishment every Saturday, and brings a lot of boys with him. He is always bothering the boys about BUFFON. That’s the way I know what BUFFON says. He is a nice man, BUFFON; and you’re all nice men together, ain’t you? What do you mean by saying that I am inquisitive and impudent, that I go everywhere, that I affront and drive off the dogs, that I play pranks on the poultry, and that I am particularly assiduous in cultivating the good-will of the cook? That’s what your friend BUFFON says, and you adopt him it appears. And what do you mean by calling me ‘a glutton by nature, and a thief by habit?’ Why, the identical boy who was being told this, on the strength of BUFFON, as he looked through our wires last Saturday, was almost out of his mind with pudding, and had got another boy’s top in his pocket! I tell you what. I like the idea of you men, writing histories of us, and settling what we are, and what we are not, and calling us any names you like best. What colors do you think you would show in, yourselves, if some of us were to take it into our heads to write histories of you? I know something of Astley’s Theatre, I hope; I was about the stables there, a few years. Ecod! if you heard the observations of the Horses after the performance, you’d have some of the conceit taken out of you! I don’t mean to say that I admire the Cat. I don’t admire her. On the whole, I have a personal animosity towards her. But, being obliged to lead this life, I condescend to hold communication with her, and I have asked her what her opinion is. She lived with an old lady of property before she came here, who had a number of nephews and nieces. She says she could show you up to that extent, after her experience in that situation, that even you would be hardly brazen enough to talk of cats being sly and selfish any more. I am particularly assiduous in cultivating the good-will of the cook, am I? Oh! I suppose you never do anything of this sort, yourselves? No politician among you was ever particularly assiduous in cultivating the good-will of a minister, eh? No clergyman in cultivating the goodwill of a bishop, humph? No fortune-seeker in cultivating the good-will of a patron, hah? You have no toad-eating, no time-serving, no place-hunting, no lacqueyship of gold and silver sticks, or anything of that sort, I suppose? You haven’t too many cooks, in short, whom you are all assiduously cultivating, till you spoil the general broth? Not you. You leave that to the Ravens. Your friend BUFFON, and some more of you, are mighty ready, it seems, to give us characters. Would you like to hear about your own temper and forbearance? Ask the Dog. About your never overloading or ill-using a willing creature? Ask my brother-in-law’s friend, the Camel, up in the Zoological. About your gratitude to, and your provision for, old servants? I wish I could refer you to the last Horse I dined off (he was very tough), up at a knacker’s yard in Battle Bridge. About your mildness, and your abstinence from blows and cudgels? Wait till the Donkey’s book comes out! You are very fond of laughing at the parrot, I observe. Now, I don’t care for the parrot. I don't admire the parrot’s voice – it wants hoarseness. And I despise the parrot’s livery – considering black the only true wear. I would as soon stick my bill into the parrot’s breast as look at him. Sooner. But if you come to that, and you laugh at the parrot because the parrot says the same thing over and over again, don't you think you could get up a laugh at yourselves ? Did you ever know a Cabinet Minister say of a flagrant job or great abuse, perfectly notorious to the whole country, that he had never heard a word of it himself, but could assure the honourable gentleman that every enquiry should be made? Did you ever hear a Justice remark, of any extreme example of ignorance, that it was a most extraordinary case, and he couldn't have believed in the possibility of such a case – when there had been, all through his life, ten thousand such within sight of his chimney-pots? Did you ever hear, among yourselves, anything approaching to a parrot repetition of the words, Constitution, Country, Public Service, Self-Government, Centralisation, Un-English, Capital, Balance of Power, Vested Interests, Corn, Rights of Labor, Wages, or so forth ? Did you ever? No! Of course you never! But to come back to that fellow BUFFON. He finds us Ravens to be most extraordinary creatures. We have properties so remarkable, that you’d hardly believe it. ‘A piece of money, a teaspoon, or a ring,’ he says, ‘are always tempting baits to our avarice. These we will slily seize upon; and, if not watched, carry to our favorite hole.’ How odd! Did you ever hear of a place called California? I have. I understand there are a number of animals over there, from all parts of the world, turning up the ground with their bills, grubbing under the water, sickening, moulting, living in want and fear, starving, dying, tumbling over on their backs, murdering one another, and all for what? Pieces of money that they want to carry to their favourite holes. Ravens every one of ‘em! Not a man among ‘em, bless you! Did you ever hear of Railway Scrip? I have. We made a pretty exhibition of ourselves about that, we feathered creatures! Lord, how we went on about that Railway Scrip! How we fell down, to a bird, from the Eagle to the Sparrow, before a scarecrow, and worshipped it for the love of the bits of rag and paper uttering from its dirty pockets! If it hadn’t tumbled down in its rottenness, we should have clapped a title on it within ten years, I’ll be sworn! - Go along with you, and your BUFFON, and don’t talk to me! ‘The Raven don’t confine himself to petty depredations on the pantry or the larder’ here you are with your BUFFON again ‘but he soars at more magnificent plunder, that he can neither exhibit nor enjoy. This must be very strange to you men more than it is to the Cat who lived with that old lady, though! Now, I am not going to stand this. You shall not have it all your own way. I am resolved that I won’t have Ravens written about by men, without having men written about by Ravens – at all events by one Raven, and that’s me. I shall put down my opinions about you. As leisure and opportunity serve, I shall collect a natural history of you. You are a good deal given to talk about your missions. That’s my mission. How do you like it? I am open to contributions from any animal except one of your set; bird, beast, or fish, may assist me in my mission, if he will. I have mentioned it to the Cat, intimated it to the Mouse, and proposed it to the Dog. The Owl shakes his head when I confide it to him, and says he doubts. He always did shake his head, and doubt. Whenever he brings himself before the public, he never does anything except shake his head and doubt. I should have thought he had got himself into a sufficient mess by doing that, when he roosted for a long time in the Court of Chancery. But he can’t leave off. He’s always at it. Talking of missions, here’s our Proprietor’s Wife with a mission now! She has found out that she ought to go and vote at elections; ought to be competent to sit in Parliament; ought to be able to enter the learned professions the army and navy, too, I believe. She has made the discovery that she has no business to be the comfort of our Proprietor’s life, and to have the hold upon him of not being mixed up in all the janglings and wranglings of men, but is quite ill-used in being the solace of his home, and wants to go out speechifying. That’s our Proprietor’s Wife’s new mission. Why, you never heard the Dove go on in that ridiculous way. She knows her true strength better. You are mighty proud about your language; but it seems to me that you don’t deserve to have words, if you can’t make a better use of ‘em. You know you are always fighting about ‘em. Do you never mean to leave that off, and come to things a little? I thought you had high authority for not tearing each other's eyes out, about words. You respect it, don’t you? I declare I am stunned with words, on my perch in the Happy Family. I used to think the cry of a Peacock bad enough, when I was on sale in a menagerie, but I had rather live in the midst of twenty peacocks, than one Gorham and a Privy Council. In the midst of your wordy squabbling, you don't think of the lookers-on. But if you heard what I hear in my public thoroughfare, you’d stop a little of that noise, and leave the great bulk of the people something to believe in peace. You are overdoing it, I assure you. I don’t wonder at the Parrot picking words up and occupying herself with them. She has nothing else to do. There are no destitute parrots, no uneducated parrots, no foreign parrots in a contagious state of distraction, no parrots in danger of pestilence, no festering heaps of miserable parrots, no parrots crying to be sent away beyond the sea for dear life. But among you! – Well! I repeat, I am not going to stand it. Tame submission to injustice is unworthy of a Raven. I croak the croak of revolt, and call upon the Happy Family to rally round me. You men have had it all your own way for a long time. Now, you shall hear a sentiment or two about yourselves. I find my last communication gone from the corner where I hid it. I rather suspect the magpie, but he says, ‘Upon his honor.’ If Mr. Rowland Hill has got it, he will do me justice – more justice than you have done him lately, or I am mistaken in my man. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/Pet_Prisoners/1850-04-27-Pet_Prisoners.pdf 90e9b9616f6ee9272b1ce5d97d928903 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500427 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly magazine Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. The system of separate confinement, first experimented on in England at the model prison, Pentonville, London, and now spreading through the country, appears to us to require a little calm consideration and reflection on the part of the public. We purpose, in this paper, to suggest what we consider some grave objections to this system. We shall do this temperately, and without considering it necessary to regard every one from whom we differ, as a scoundrel, actuated by base motives, to whom the most unprincipled conduct may be recklessly attributed. Our faith in most questions where the good men are represented to be all pro, and the bad men to be all con, is very small. There is a hot class of riders of hobby-horses in the field, in this century, who think they do nothing unless they make a steeple-chase of their object, throw a vast quantity of mud about, and spurn every sort of decent restraint and reasonable consideration under their horses' heels. This question has not escaped such championship. It has its steeplechase riders, who hold the dangerous principle that the end justifies any means, and to whom no means, truth and fair- dealing usually excepted, come amiss. Considering the separate system of imprisonment, here, solely in reference to England, we discard, for the purpose of this discussion, the objection founded on its extreme severity, which would immediately arise if we were considering it with any reference to the State of Pennsylvania in America. For whereas in that State it may be inflicted for a dozen years, the idea is quite abandoned at home of extending it usually, beyond a dozen months, or in any case beyond eighteen months. Besides which, the school and the chapel afford periods of comparative relief here, which are not afforded in America. Though it has been represented by the steeplechase riders as a most enormous heresy to contemplate the possibility of any prisoner going mad or idiotic, under the prolonged effects of separate confinement; and although any one who should have the temerity to maintain such a doubt in Pennsylvania would have a chance of becoming a profane St. Stephen; Lord Grey, in his very last speech in the House of Lords on this subject, made in the present session of Parliament, in praise of this separate system, said of it: ‘Wherever it has been fairly tried, one of its great defects has been discovered to be this, that it cannot be continued for a sufficient length of time without danger to the individual, and that human nature cannot bear it beyond a limited period. The evidence of medical authorities proves beyond dispute that, if it is protracted beyond twelve months, the health of the convict, mental and physical, would require the most close and vigilant superintendence. Eighteen months is stated to be the maximum time for the continuance of its infliction, and, as a general rule, it is advised that it never be continued for more than twelve months.’ This being conceded, and it being clear that the prisoner's mind, and all the apprehensions weighing upon it, must be influenced from the first hour of his imprisonment by the greater or less extent of its duration in perspective before him, we are content to regard the system as dissociated in England from the American objection of too great severity. We shall consider it, first in the relation of the extraordinary contrast it presents, in a country circumstanced as England is, between the physical condition of the convict in prison, and that of the hard-working man outside, or the pauper outside. We shall then enquire, and endeavour to lay before our readers some means of judging, whether its proved or probable efficiency in producing a real, trustworthy, practically repentant state of mind, is such as to justify the presentation of that extraordinary contrast. If, in the end, we indicate the conclusion that the associated silent system is less objectionable, it is not because we consider it in the abstract a good secondary punishment, but because it is a severe one, capable of judicious administration, much less expensive, not presenting the objectionable contrast so strongly, and not calculated to pet and pamper the mind of the prisoner and swell his sense of his own importance. We are not acquainted with any system of secondary punishment that we think reformatory, except the mark system of Captain Macconnochie, formerly governor of Norfolk Island, which proceeds upon the principle of obliging the convict to some exercise of self-denial and resolution in every act of his prison life, and which would condemn him to a sentence of so much labour and good conduct instead of so much time. There are details in Captain Macconnochie's scheme on which we have our doubts (rigid silence we consider indispensable); but, in the main, we regard it as embodying sound and wise principles. We infer from the writings of Archbishop Whateley, that those principles have presented themselves to his profound and acute mind in a similar light. We will first contrast the dietary of The Model Prison at Pentonville, with the dietary of what we take to be the nearest workhouse, namely, that of Saint Pancras. In the prison, every man receives twenty-eight ounces of meat weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives eighteen. In the prison, every man receives one hundred and forty ounces of bread weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives ninety-six. In the prison, every man receives one hundred and twelve ounces of potatoes weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives thirty-six. In the prison, every man receives five pints and a quarter of liquid cocoa weekly, (made of flaked cocoa or cocoa-nibs), with fourteen ounces of milk and forty-two drams of molasses; also seven pints of gruel weekly, sweetened with forty-two drams of molasses. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives fourteen pints and a half of milk-porridge weekly, and no cocoa, and no gruel. In the prison, every man receives three pints and a half of soup weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult male receives four pints and a half, and a pint of Irish stew. This, with seven pints of table-beer weekly, and six ounces of cheese, is all the man in the workhouse has to set off against the immensely superior advantages of the prisoner in all the other respects we have stated. His lodging is very inferior to the prisoner’s, the costly nature of whose accommodation we shall presently show. Let us reflect upon this contrast in another aspect. We beg the reader to glance once more at The Model Prison dietary, and consider its frightful disproportion to the dietary of the free labourer in any of the rural parts of England. What shall we take his wages at? Will twelve shillings a week do? It cannot be called a low average, at all events. Twelve shillings a week make thirty-one pounds four a year. The cost, in 1848, for the victualling and management of every prisoner in the Model Prison was within a little of thirty-six pounds. Consequently, that free labourer, with young children to support, with cottage- rent to pay, and clothes to buy, and no advantage of purchasing his food in large amounts by contract, has, for the whole subsistence of himself and family, between four and five pounds a year less than the cost of feeding and overlooking one man in the Model Prison. Surely to his enlightened mind, and sometimes low morality, this must be an extraordinary good reason for keeping out of it! But we will not confine ourselves to the contrast between the labourer’s scanty fare and the prisoner’s ‘flaked cocoa or cocoa-nibs’ and daily dinner of soup, meat, and potatoes. We will rise a little higher in the scale. Let us see what advertisers in the Times newspaper can board the middle classes at, and get a profit out of, too. A LADY, residing in a cottage, with a large garden, in a pleasant and healthful locality, would be happy to receive one or two LADIES to BOARD with her. Two ladies occupying the same apartment may be accommodated for 12s. a week each. The cottage is within a quarter of an hour’s walk of a good market town, 10 minutes’ of a South-Western Railway Station, and an hour’s distance from town. These two ladies could not be so cheaply boarded in the Model Prison. BOARD and RESIDENCE, at £70 per annum, for a married couple, or in proportion for a single gentleman or lady, with a respectable family. Rooms large and airy, in an eligible dwelling, at Islington, about 20 minutes’ walk from the Bank. Dinner hour six o’clock. There are one or two vacancies to complete a small, cheerful, and agreeable circle. Still cheaper than the Model Prison! BOARD and RESIDENCE. - A lady, keeping a select school, in a town, about 30 miles from London, would be happy to meet with a LADY to BOARD and RESIDE with her. She would have her own bed-room and a sitting-room. Any lady wishing for accomplishments would find this desirable. Terms £30 per annum. References will be expected and given. Again, some six pounds a year less than the Model Prison! And if we were to pursue the contrast through the newspaper file for a month, or through the advertising pages of two or three numbers of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, we might probably fill the present number of this publication with similar examples, many of them including a decent education into the bargain. This Model Prison had cost at the close of 1847, under the heads of ‘building ‘and’ repairs’ alone, the insignificant sum of ninety-three thousand pounds – within seven thousand pounds of the amount of the last Government grant for the Education of the whole people, and enough to pay for the emigration to Australia of four thousand, six hundred and fifty poor persons at twenty pounds per head. Upon the work done by five hundred prisoners in the Model Prison, in the year 1848, (we collate these figures from the Reports, and from Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s useful work on the London Prisons,) there was no profit, but an actual loss of upwards of eight hundred pounds. The cost of instruction, and the time occupied in instruction, when the labour is necessarily unskilled and unproductive, may be pleaded in explanation of this astonishing fact. We are ready to allow all due weight to such considerations, but we put it to our readers whether the whole system is right or wrong; whether the money ought or ought not rather to be spent in instructing the unskilled and neglected outside the prison walls. It will be urged that it is expended in preparing the convict for the exile to which he is doomed. We submit to our readers, who are the jury in this case, that all this should be done outside the prison, first; that the first persons to be prepared for emigration are the miserable children who are consigned to the tender mercies of a DROUET, or who disgrace our streets; and that in this beginning at the wrong end, a spectacle of monstrous inconsistency is presented, shocking to the mind. Where is our Model House of Youthful Industry, where is our Model Ragged School, costing for building and repairs, from ninety to a hundred thousand pounds, and for its annual maintenance upwards of twenty thousand pounds a year? Would it be a Christian act to build that, first? To breed our skilful labour there? To take the hewers of wood and drawers of water in a strange country from the convict ranks, until those men by earnest working, zeal, and perseverance, proved themselves, and raised themselves? Here are two sets of people in a densely populated land, always in the balance before the general eye. Is Crime for ever to carry it against Poverty, and to have a manifest advantage? There are the scales before all men. Whirlwinds of dust scattered in mens’ eyes – and there is plenty flying about – cannot blind them to the real state of the balance. We now come to enquire into the condition of mind produced by the seclusion (limited in duration as Lord Grey limits it) which is purchased at this great cost in money, and this greater cost in stupendous injustice. That it is a consummation much to be desired, that a respectable man, lapsing into crime, should expiate his offence without incurring the liability of being afterwards recognised by hardened offenders who were his fellow-prisoners, we most readily admit. But, that this object, howsoever desirable and benevolent, is in itself sufficient to outweigh such objections as we have set forth, we cannot for a moment concede. Nor have we any sufficient guarantee that even this solitary point is gained. Under how many apparently inseparable difficulties, men immured in solitary cells, will by some means obtain a knowledge of other men immured in other solitary cells, most of us know from all the accounts and anecdotes we have read of secret prisons and secret prisoners from our school-time upwards. That there is a fascination in the desire to know something of the hidden presence beyond the blank wall of the cell; that the listening ear is often laid against that wall; that there is an overpowering temptation to respond to the muffled knock, or any other signal which sharpened ingenuity pondering day after day on one idea can devise: is in that constitution of human nature which impels mankind to communication with one another, and makes solitude a false condition against which nature strives. That such communication within the Model Prison, is not only probable, but indisputably proved to be possible by its actual discovery, we have no hesitation in stating as a fact. Some pains have been taken to hush the matter, but the truth is, that when the Prisoners at Pentonville ceased to be selected Prisoners, especially picked out and chosen for the purposes of that experiment, an extensive conspiracy was found out among them, involving, it is needless to say, extensive communication. Small pieces of paper with writing upon them, had been crushed into balls, and shot into the apertures of cell doors, by prisoners passing along the passages; false responses had been made during Divine Service in the chapel, in which responses they addressed one another; and armed men were secretly dispersed by the Governor in various parts of the building, to prevent the general rising, which was anticipated as the consequence of this plot. Undiscovered communication, under this system, we assume to be frequent. The state of mind into which a man is brought who is the lonely inhabitant of his own small world, and who is only visited by certain regular visitors, all addressing themselves to him individually and personally, as the object of their particular solicitude we believe in most cases to have very little promise in it, and very little of solid foundation. A strange absorbing selfishness – a spiritual egotism and vanity, real or assumed – is the first result. It is most remarkable to observe, in the cases of murderers who become this kind of object of interest, when they are at last consigned to the condemned cell, how the rule is (of course there are exceptions,) that the murdered person disappears from the stage of their thoughts, except as a part of their own important story; and how they occupy the whole scene. I did this, I feel that, I confide in the mercy of Heaven being extended to me; this is the autograph of me, the unfortunate and unhappy; in my childhood I was so and so; in my youth I did such a thing, to which I attribute my downfall not this thing of basely and barbarously defacing the image of my Creator, and sending an immortal soul into eternity without a moment's warning, but something else of a venial kind that many unpunished people do. I don’t want the forgiveness of this foully murdered person’s bereaved wife, husband, brother, sister, child, friend; I don’t ask for it, I don’t care for it. I make no enquiry of the clergyman concerning the salvation of that murdered person’s soul; mine is the matter; and I am almost happy that I came here, as to the gate of Paradise. ‘I never liked him,’ said the repentant Mr. Manning, false of heart to the last, calling a crowbar by a milder name, to lessen the cowardly horror of it, ‘and I beat in his skull with the ripping chisel.’ I am going to bliss, exclaims the same authority, in effect. Where my victim went to, is not my business at all. Now, GOD forbid that we, unworthily believing in the Redeemer, should shut out hope, or even humble trustfulness, from any criminal at that dread pass; but, it is not in us to call this state of mind repentance. The present question is with a state of mind analogous to this (as we conceive) but with a far stronger tendency to hypocrisy; the dread of death not being present, and there being every possible inducement, either to feign contrition, or to set up an unreliable semblance of it. If I, John Styles, the prisoner, don’t do my work, and outwardly conform to the rules of the prison, I am a mere fool. There is nothing here to tempt me to do anything else, and everything to tempt me to do that. The capital dietary (and every meal is a great event in this lonely life) depends upon it; the alternative is a pound of bread a day. I should be weary of myself without occupation. I should be much more dull if I didn’t hold these dialogues with the gentlemen who are so anxious about me. I shouldn’t be half the object of interest I am, if I didn’t make the professions I do. Therefore, I John Styles go in for what is popular here, and I may mean it, or I may not. There will always, under any decent system, be certain prisoners, betrayed into crime by a variety of circumstances, who will do well in exile, and o end against the laws no more. Upon this class, we think the Associated Silent System would have quite as good an influence as this expensive and anomalous one; and we cannot accept them as evidence of the efficiency of separate confinement. Assuming John Styles to mean what he professes, for the time being, we desire to track the workings of his mind, and to try to test the value of his professions. Where shall we find an account of John Styles, proceeding from no objector to this system, but from a staunch supporter of it? We will take it from a work called ‘Prison Discipline, and the advantages of the separate system of imprisonment,’ written by the Reverend Mr. Field, chaplain of the new County Gaol at Reading; pointing out to Mr. Field, in passing, that the question is not justly, as he would sometimes make it, a question between this system and the profligate abuses and customs of the old unreformed gaols, but between it and the improved gaols of this time, which are not constructed on his favourite principles.* * As Mr. Field condescends to quote some vapouring about the account given by Mr. Charles Dickens in his ‘American Notes,’ of the Solitary Prison at Philadelphia, he may perhaps really wish for some few words of information on the subject. For this purpose, Mr. Charles Dickens has referred to the entry in his Diary, made at the close of that day. He left his hotel for the Prison at twelve o’clock, being waited on, by appointment, by the gentlemen who showed it to him; and he returned between seven and eight at night; dining in the prison in the course of that time; which, according to his calculation, in despite of the Philadelphia Newspaper, rather exceeds two hours. He found the Prison admirably conducted, extremely clean, and the system administered in a most intelligent, kind, orderly, tender, and careful manner. He did not consider (nor should he, if he were to visit Pentonville to-morrow) that the book in which visitors were expected to record their observation of the place, was intended for the insertion of criticisms on the system, but for honest testimony to the manner of its administration; and to that, he bore, as an impartial visitor, the highest testimony in his power. In returning thanks for his health being drunk, at the dinner within the walls, he said that what he had seen that day was running in his mind; that he could not help reflecting on it; and that it was an awful punishment. If the American officer who rode back with him afterwards should ever see these words, he will perhaps recall his conversation with Mr. Dickens on the road, as to Mr. Dickens having said so, very plainly and strongly. In reference to the ridiculous assertion that Mr. Dickens in his book termed a woman ‘quite beautiful’ who was a Negress, he positively believes that he was shown no Negress in the Prison, but one who was nursing a woman much diseased, and to whom no reference whatever is made in his published account. In describing three young women, ‘all convicted at the same time of a conspiracy,’ he may, possibly, among many cases, have substituted in his memory for one of them whom he did not see, some other prisoner, confined for some other crime, whom he did see; but he has not the least doubt of having been guilty of the (American) enormity of detecting beauty in a pensive quadroon or mulatto girl, or of having seen exactly what he describes; and he remembers the girl more particularly described in this connexion, perfectly. Can Mr. Field really suppose that Mr. Dickens had any interest or purpose in misrepresenting the system, or that if he could be guilty of such unworthy conduct, or desire to do it anything but justice, he would have volunteered the narrative of a man's having, of his own choice, undergone it for two years? We will not notice the objection of Mr. Field (who strengthens the truth of Burns to nature, by the testimony of Mr. Pitt!) to the discussion of such a topic as the present in a work of ‘mere amusement;’ though, we had thought we remembered in that book a word or two about slavery, which, although a very amusing, can scarcely be considered an unmitigatedly comic theme. We are quite content to believe, without seeking to make a convert of the Reverend Mr. Field, that no work need be one of ‘mere amusement;’ and that some works to which he would apply that designation have done a little good in advancing principles to which, we hope, and will believe, for the credit of his Christian office, he is not indifferent. Now, here is John Styles, twenty years of age, in prison for a felony. He has been there five months, and he writes to his sister, ‘Don't fret my dear sister, about my being here. I cannot help fretting when I think about my usage to my father and mother: when I think about it, it makes me quite ill. I hope God will forgive me; I pray for it night and day from my heart. Instead of fretting about imprisonment, I ought to thank God for it, for before I came here, I was living quite a careless life; neither was God in all my thoughts; all I thought about was ways that led me towards destruction. Give my respects to my wretched companions, and I hope they will alter their wicked course, for they don't know for a day nor an hour but what they may be cut o . I have seen my folly, and I hope they may see their folly; but I shouldn't if I had not been in trouble. It is good for me that I have been in trouble. Go to church, my sister, every Sunday, and don't give your mind to going to playhouses and theatres, for that is no good to you. There are a great many temptations.’ Observe! John Styles, who has committed the felony has been ‘living quite a careless life.’ That is his worst opinion of it, whereas his companions who did not commit the felony are ‘wretched companions.’ John saw his ‘folly,’ and sees their ‘wicked course’ It is playhouses and theatres which many unfelonious people go to, that prey upon John’s mind not felony. John is shut up in that pulpit to lecture his companions and his sister, about the wickedness of the unfelonious world. Always supposing him to be sincere, is there no exaggeration of himself in this? Go to church where I can go, and don't go to theatres where I can’t! Is there any tinge of the fox and the grapes in it? Is this the kind of penitence that will wear outside! Put the case that he had written, of his own mind, ‘My dear sister, I feel that I have disgraced you and all who should be dear to me, and if it please God that I live to be free, I will try hard to repair that, and to be a credit to you. My dear sister, when I committed this felony, I stole something – and these pining five months have not put it back – and I will work my fingers to the bone to make restitution, and oh! my dear sister, seek out my late companions, and tell Tom Jones, that poor boy, who was younger and littler than me, that I am grieved I ever led him so wrong, and I am suffering for it now!’ Would that be better? Would it be more like solid truth? But no. This is not the pattern penitence. There would seem to be a pattern penitence, of a particular form, shape, limits, and dimensions, like the cells. While Mr. Field is correcting his proof-sheets for the press, another letter is brought to him, and in that letter too, that man, also a felon, speaks of his ‘past folly,’ and lectures his mother about labouring under ‘strong delusions of the devil.’ Does this overweening readiness to lecture other people, suggest the suspicion of any parrot-like imitation of Mr. Field, who lectures him, and any presumptuous confounding of their relative positions? We venture altogether to protest against the citation, in support of this system, of assumed repentance which has stood no test or trial in the working world. We consider that it proves nothing, and is worth nothing, except as a discouraging sign of that spiritual egotism and presumption of which we have already spoken. It is not peculiar to the separate system at Reading; Miss Martineau, who was on the whole decidedly favourable to the separate prison at Philadelphia, observed it there. ‘The cases I became acquainted with,’ says she, ‘were not all hopeful. Some of the convicts were so stupid as not to be relied upon, more or less. Others canted so detestably, and were (always in connexion with their cant) so certain that they should never sin more, that I have every expectation that they will find themselves in prison again some day. One fellow, a sailor, notorious for having taken more lives than probably any man in the United States, was quite confident that he should be perfectly virtuous henceforth. He should never touch anything stronger than tea, or lift his hand against money or life. I told him I thought he could not be sure of all this till he was within sight of money and the smell of strong liquors; and that he was more confident than I should like to be. He shook his shock of red hair at me, and glared with his one ferocious eye, as he said he knew all about it. He had been the worst of men, and Christ had had mercy on his poor soul.’ (Observe again, as in the general case we have put, that he is not at all troubled about the souls of the people whom he had killed.) Let us submit to our readers another instance from Mr. Field, of the wholesome state of mind produced by the separate system. ‘The 25th of March, in the last year, was the day appointed for a general fast, on account of the threatened famine. The following note is in my journal of that day. “During the evening I visited many prisoners, and found with much satisfaction that a large proportion of them had observed the day in a manner becoming their own situation, and the purpose for which it had been set apart. I think it right to record the following remarkable proof of the effect of discipline. * * * * * They were all supplied with their usual rations. I went first this evening to the cells of the prisoners recently committed for trial (Ward A. 1.), and amongst these (upwards of twenty) I found that but three had abstained from any portion of their food. I then visited twenty-one convicted prisoners who had spent some considerable time in the gaol (Ward C. 1.), and amongst them I found that some had altogether abstained from food, and of the whole number two-thirds had partially abstained.”’ We will take it for granted that this was not because they had more than they could eat, though we know that with such a dietary even that sometimes happens, especially in the case of persons long conned. ‘The remark of one prisoner whom I questioned concerning his abstinence was, I believe, sincere, and was very pleasing. “Sir, I have not felt able to eat today, whilst I have thought of those poor starving people; but I hope that I have prayed a good deal that God will give them something to eat.”’ If this were not pattern penitence, and the thought of those poor starving people had honestly originated with that man, and were really on his mind, we want to know why he was not uneasy, every day, in the contemplation of his soup, meat, bread, potatoes, cocoa-nibs, milk, molasses, and gruel, and its contrast to the fare of ‘those poor starving people’ who, in some form or other, were taxed to pay for it? We do not deem it necessary to comment on the authorities quoted by Mr. Field to show what a fine thing the separate system is, for the health of the body; how it never affects the mind except for good; how it is the true preventive of pulmonary disease; and so on. The deduction we must draw from such things is, that Providence was quite mistaken in making us gregarious, and that we had better all shut ourselves up directly. Neither will we refer to that ‘talented criminal,’ Dr. Dodd, whose exceedingly indifferent verses applied to a system now extinct, in reference to our penitentiaries for convicted prisoners. Neither, after what we have quoted from Lord Grey, need we refer to the likewise quoted report of the American authorities, who are perfectly sure that no extent of confinement in the Philadelphia prison has ever affected the intellectual powers of any prisoner. Mr. Croker cogently observes, in the Good-Natured Man, that either his hat must be on his head, or it must be off. By a parity of reasoning, we conclude that both Lord Grey and the American authorities cannot possibly be right – unless indeed the notoriously settled habits of the American people, and the absence of any approach to restlessness in the national character, render them unusually good subjects for protracted seclusion, and an exception from the rest of mankind. In using the term “pattern penitence” we beg it to be understood that we do not apply it to Mr. Field, or to any other chaplain, but to the system; which appears to us to make these doubtful converts all alike. Although Mr. Field has not shown any remarkable courtesy in the instance we have set forth in a note, it is our wish to show all courtesy to him, and to his office, and to his sincerity in the discharge of its duties. In our desire to represent him with fairness and impartiality, we will not take leave of him without the following quotation from his book: ‘Scarcely sufficient time has yet expired since the present system was introduced, for me to report much concerning discharged criminals. Out of a class so degraded – the very dregs of the community – it can be no wonder that some, of whose improvement I cherished the hope, should have relapsed. Disappointed in a few cases I have been, yet by no means discouraged, since I can with pleasure refer to many whose conduct is affording proof of reformation. Gratifying indeed have been some accounts received from liberated offenders themselves, as well as from clergymen of parishes to which they have returned. I have also myself visited the homes of some of our former prisoners, and have been cheered by the testimony given, and the evident signs of improved character which I have there observed. Although I do not venture at present to describe the particular cases of prisoners, concerning whose reformation I feel much confidence, because, as I have stated, the time of trial has hitherto been short; yet I can with pleasure refer to some public documents which prove the happy effects of similar discipline in other establishments.’ It should also be stated that the Reverend Mr. Kingsmill, the chaplain of the Model Prison at Pentonville, in his calm and intelligent report made to the Commissioners on the first of February, 1849, expresses his belief ‘that the effects produced here upon the character of prisoners, have been encouraging in a high degree.’ But, we entreat our readers once again to look at that Model Prison dietary (which is essential to the system, though the system is so very healthy of itself); to remember the other enormous expenses of the establishment; to consider the circumstances of this old country, with the inevitable anomalies and contrasts it must present; and to decide, on temperate reflection, whether there are any sufficient reasons for adding this monstrous contrast to the rest. Let us impress upon our readers that the existing question is, not between this system and the old abuses of the old profligate Gaols (with which, thank Heaven, we have nothing to do), but between this system and the associated silent system, where the dietary is much lower, where the annual cost of provision, management, repairs, clothing, &c., does not exceed, on a liberal average, £25 for each prisoner; where many prisoners are, and every prisoner would be (if due accommodation were provided in some overcrowded prisons), locked up alone, for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and where, while preserved from contamination, he is still one of a society of men, and not an isolated being, filling his whole sphere of view with a diseased dilation of himself. We hear that the associated silent system is objectionable, because of the number of punishments it involves for breaches of the prison discipline; but how can we, in the same breath, be told that the resolutions of prisoners for the misty future are to be trusted, and that, on the least temptation, they are so little to be relied on, as to the solid present? How can I set the pattern penitence against the career that preceded it, when I am told that if I put that man with other men, and lay a solemn charge upon him not to address them by word or sign, there are such and such great chances that he will want the resolution to obey? Remember that this separate system, though commended in the English Parliament and spreading in England, has not spread in America, despite of all the steeple-chase riders in the United States. Remember that it has never reached the State most distinguished for its learning, for its moderation, for its remarkable men of European reputation, for the excellence of its public Institutions. Let it be tried here, on a limited scale, if you will, with fair representatives of all classes of prisoners: let Captain Macconnochie’s system be tried: let anything with a ray of hope in it be tried: but, only as a part of some general system for raising up the prostrate portion of the people of this country, and not as an exhibition of such astonishing consideration for crime, in comparison with want and work. Any prison built, at a great expenditure, for this system, is comparatively useless for any other; and the ratepayers will do well to think of this, before they take it for granted that it is a proved boon to the country which will be enduring. Under the separate system, the prisoners work at trades. Under the associated silent system, the Magistrates of Middlesex have almost abolished the treadmill. Is it no part of the legitimate consideration of this important point of work, to discover what kind of work the people always filtering through the gaols of large towns – the pickpocket, the sturdy vagrant, the habitual drunkard, and the begging-letter impostor – like least, and to give them that work to do in preference to any other? It is out of fashion with the steeple-chase riders we know; but we would have, for all such characters, a kind of work in gaols, badged and degraded as belonging to gaols only, and never done elsewhere. And we must avow that, in a country circumstanced as England is, with respect to labour and labourers, we have strong doubts of the propriety of bringing the results of prison labour into the over-stocked market. On this subject some public remonstrances have recently been made by tradesmen; and we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they are well-founded. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Pet Prisoners' Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-04-27 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-04-27-Pet_Prisoners Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no.5, 27 April 1850, pp. 97-103. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-97.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-97.html</a>. Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Pet Prisoners'. Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-27-Pet_Prisoners">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-27-Pet_Prisoners</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (27 April 1850) Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. The system of separate confinement, first experimented on in England at the model prison, Pentonville, London, and now spreading through the country, appears to us to require a little calm consideration and reflection on the part of the public. We purpose, in this paper, to suggest what we consider some grave objections to this system. We shall do this temperately, and without considering it necessary to regard every one from whom we differ, as a scoundrel, actuated by base motives, to whom the most unprincipled conduct may be recklessly attributed. Our faith in most questions where the good men are represented to be all pro, and the bad men to be all con, is very small. There is a hot class of riders of hobby-horses in the field, in this century, who think they do nothing unless they make a steeple-chase of their object, throw a vast quantity of mud about, and spurn every sort of decent restraint and reasonable consideration under their horses' heels. This question has not escaped such championship. It has its steeplechase riders, who hold the dangerous principle that the end justifies any means, and to whom no means, truth and fair- dealing usually excepted, come amiss. Considering the separate system of imprisonment, here, solely in reference to England, we discard, for the purpose of this discussion, the objection founded on its extreme severity, which would immediately arise if we were considering it with any reference to the State of Pennsylvania in America. For whereas in that State it may be inflicted for a dozen years, the idea is quite abandoned at home of extending it usually, beyond a dozen months, or in any case beyond eighteen months. Besides which, the school and the chapel afford periods of comparative relief here, which are not afforded in America. Though it has been represented by the steeplechase riders as a most enormous heresy to contemplate the possibility of any prisoner going mad or idiotic, under the prolonged effects of separate confinement; and although any one who should have the temerity to maintain such a doubt in Pennsylvania would have a chance of becoming a profane St. Stephen; Lord Grey, in his very last speech in the House of Lords on this subject, made in the present session of Parliament, in praise of this separate system, said of it: ‘Wherever it has been fairly tried, one of its great defects has been discovered to be this, that it cannot be continued for a sufficient length of time without danger to the individual, and that human nature cannot bear it beyond a limited period. The evidence of medical authorities proves beyond dispute that, if it is protracted beyond twelve months, the health of the convict, mental and physical, would require the most close and vigilant superintendence. Eighteen months is stated to be the maximum time for the continuance of its infliction, and, as a general rule, it is advised that it never be continued for more than twelve months.’ This being conceded, and it being clear that the prisoner's mind, and all the apprehensions weighing upon it, must be influenced from the first hour of his imprisonment by the greater or less extent of its duration in perspective before him, we are content to regard the system as dissociated in England from the American objection of too great severity. We shall consider it, first in the relation of the extraordinary contrast it presents, in a country circumstanced as England is, between the physical condition of the convict in prison, and that of the hard-working man outside, or the pauper outside. We shall then enquire, and endeavour to lay before our readers some means of judging, whether its proved or probable efficiency in producing a real, trustworthy, practically repentant state of mind, is such as to justify the presentation of that extraordinary contrast. If, in the end, we indicate the conclusion that the associated silent system is less objectionable, it is not because we consider it in the abstract a good secondary punishment, but because it is a severe one, capable of judicious administration, much less expensive, not presenting the objectionable contrast so strongly, and not calculated to pet and pamper the mind of the prisoner and swell his sense of his own importance. We are not acquainted with any system of secondary punishment that we think reformatory, except the mark system of Captain Macconnochie, formerly governor of Norfolk Island, which proceeds upon the principle of obliging the convict to some exercise of self-denial and resolution in every act of his prison life, and which would condemn him to a sentence of so much labour and good conduct instead of so much time. There are details in Captain Macconnochie's scheme on which we have our doubts (rigid silence we consider indispensable); but, in the main, we regard it as embodying sound and wise principles. We infer from the writings of Archbishop Whateley, that those principles have presented themselves to his profound and acute mind in a similar light. We will first contrast the dietary of The Model Prison at Pentonville, with the dietary of what we take to be the nearest workhouse, namely, that of Saint Pancras. In the prison, every man receives twenty-eight ounces of meat weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives eighteen. In the prison, every man receives one hundred and forty ounces of bread weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives ninety-six. In the prison, every man receives one hundred and twelve ounces of potatoes weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives thirty-six. In the prison, every man receives five pints and a quarter of liquid cocoa weekly, (made of flaked cocoa or cocoa-nibs), with fourteen ounces of milk and forty-two drams of molasses; also seven pints of gruel weekly, sweetened with forty-two drams of molasses. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult receives fourteen pints and a half of milk-porridge weekly, and no cocoa, and no gruel. In the prison, every man receives three pints and a half of soup weekly. In the workhouse, every able-bodied adult male receives four pints and a half, and a pint of Irish stew. This, with seven pints of table-beer weekly, and six ounces of cheese, is all the man in the workhouse has to set off against the immensely superior advantages of the prisoner in all the other respects we have stated. His lodging is very inferior to the prisoner’s, the costly nature of whose accommodation we shall presently show. Let us reflect upon this contrast in another aspect. We beg the reader to glance once more at The Model Prison dietary, and consider its frightful disproportion to the dietary of the free labourer in any of the rural parts of England. What shall we take his wages at? Will twelve shillings a week do? It cannot be called a low average, at all events. Twelve shillings a week make thirty-one pounds four a year. The cost, in 1848, for the victualling and management of every prisoner in the Model Prison was within a little of thirty-six pounds. Consequently, that free labourer, with young children to support, with cottage- rent to pay, and clothes to buy, and no advantage of purchasing his food in large amounts by contract, has, for the whole subsistence of himself and family, between four and five pounds a year less than the cost of feeding and overlooking one man in the Model Prison. Surely to his enlightened mind, and sometimes low morality, this must be an extraordinary good reason for keeping out of it! But we will not confine ourselves to the contrast between the labourer’s scanty fare and the prisoner’s ‘flaked cocoa or cocoa-nibs’ and daily dinner of soup, meat, and potatoes. We will rise a little higher in the scale. Let us see what advertisers in the Times newspaper can board the middle classes at, and get a profit out of, too. A LADY, residing in a cottage, with a large garden, in a pleasant and healthful locality, would be happy to receive one or two LADIES to BOARD with her. Two ladies occupying the same apartment may be accommodated for 12s. a week each. The cottage is within a quarter of an hour’s walk of a good market town, 10 minutes’ of a South-Western Railway Station, and an hour’s distance from town. These two ladies could not be so cheaply boarded in the Model Prison. BOARD and RESIDENCE, at £70 per annum, for a married couple, or in proportion for a single gentleman or lady, with a respectable family. Rooms large and airy, in an eligible dwelling, at Islington, about 20 minutes’ walk from the Bank. Dinner hour six o’clock. There are one or two vacancies to complete a small, cheerful, and agreeable circle. Still cheaper than the Model Prison! BOARD and RESIDENCE. - A lady, keeping a select school, in a town, about 30 miles from London, would be happy to meet with a LADY to BOARD and RESIDE with her. She would have her own bed-room and a sitting-room. Any lady wishing for accomplishments would find this desirable. Terms £30 per annum. References will be expected and given. Again, some six pounds a year less than the Model Prison! And if we were to pursue the contrast through the newspaper file for a month, or through the advertising pages of two or three numbers of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, we might probably fill the present number of this publication with similar examples, many of them including a decent education into the bargain. This Model Prison had cost at the close of 1847, under the heads of ‘building ‘and’ repairs’ alone, the insignificant sum of ninety-three thousand pounds – within seven thousand pounds of the amount of the last Government grant for the Education of the whole people, and enough to pay for the emigration to Australia of four thousand, six hundred and fifty poor persons at twenty pounds per head. Upon the work done by five hundred prisoners in the Model Prison, in the year 1848, (we collate these figures from the Reports, and from Mr. Hepworth Dixon’s useful work on the London Prisons,) there was no profit, but an actual loss of upwards of eight hundred pounds. The cost of instruction, and the time occupied in instruction, when the labour is necessarily unskilled and unproductive, may be pleaded in explanation of this astonishing fact. We are ready to allow all due weight to such considerations, but we put it to our readers whether the whole system is right or wrong; whether the money ought or ought not rather to be spent in instructing the unskilled and neglected outside the prison walls. It will be urged that it is expended in preparing the convict for the exile to which he is doomed. We submit to our readers, who are the jury in this case, that all this should be done outside the prison, first; that the first persons to be prepared for emigration are the miserable children who are consigned to the tender mercies of a DROUET, or who disgrace our streets; and that in this beginning at the wrong end, a spectacle of monstrous inconsistency is presented, shocking to the mind. Where is our Model House of Youthful Industry, where is our Model Ragged School, costing for building and repairs, from ninety to a hundred thousand pounds, and for its annual maintenance upwards of twenty thousand pounds a year? Would it be a Christian act to build that, first? To breed our skilful labour there? To take the hewers of wood and drawers of water in a strange country from the convict ranks, until those men by earnest working, zeal, and perseverance, proved themselves, and raised themselves? Here are two sets of people in a densely populated land, always in the balance before the general eye. Is Crime for ever to carry it against Poverty, and to have a manifest advantage? There are the scales before all men. Whirlwinds of dust scattered in mens’ eyes – and there is plenty flying about – cannot blind them to the real state of the balance. We now come to enquire into the condition of mind produced by the seclusion (limited in duration as Lord Grey limits it) which is purchased at this great cost in money, and this greater cost in stupendous injustice. That it is a consummation much to be desired, that a respectable man, lapsing into crime, should expiate his offence without incurring the liability of being afterwards recognised by hardened offenders who were his fellow-prisoners, we most readily admit. But, that this object, howsoever desirable and benevolent, is in itself sufficient to outweigh such objections as we have set forth, we cannot for a moment concede. Nor have we any sufficient guarantee that even this solitary point is gained. Under how many apparently inseparable difficulties, men immured in solitary cells, will by some means obtain a knowledge of other men immured in other solitary cells, most of us know from all the accounts and anecdotes we have read of secret prisons and secret prisoners from our school-time upwards. That there is a fascination in the desire to know something of the hidden presence beyond the blank wall of the cell; that the listening ear is often laid against that wall; that there is an overpowering temptation to respond to the muffled knock, or any other signal which sharpened ingenuity pondering day after day on one idea can devise: is in that constitution of human nature which impels mankind to communication with one another, and makes solitude a false condition against which nature strives. That such communication within the Model Prison, is not only probable, but indisputably proved to be possible by its actual discovery, we have no hesitation in stating as a fact. Some pains have been taken to hush the matter, but the truth is, that when the Prisoners at Pentonville ceased to be selected Prisoners, especially picked out and chosen for the purposes of that experiment, an extensive conspiracy was found out among them, involving, it is needless to say, extensive communication. Small pieces of paper with writing upon them, had been crushed into balls, and shot into the apertures of cell doors, by prisoners passing along the passages; false responses had been made during Divine Service in the chapel, in which responses they addressed one another; and armed men were secretly dispersed by the Governor in various parts of the building, to prevent the general rising, which was anticipated as the consequence of this plot. Undiscovered communication, under this system, we assume to be frequent. The state of mind into which a man is brought who is the lonely inhabitant of his own small world, and who is only visited by certain regular visitors, all addressing themselves to him individually and personally, as the object of their particular solicitude we believe in most cases to have very little promise in it, and very little of solid foundation. A strange absorbing selfishness – a spiritual egotism and vanity, real or assumed – is the first result. It is most remarkable to observe, in the cases of murderers who become this kind of object of interest, when they are at last consigned to the condemned cell, how the rule is (of course there are exceptions,) that the murdered person disappears from the stage of their thoughts, except as a part of their own important story; and how they occupy the whole scene. I did this, I feel that, I confide in the mercy of Heaven being extended to me; this is the autograph of me, the unfortunate and unhappy; in my childhood I was so and so; in my youth I did such a thing, to which I attribute my downfall not this thing of basely and barbarously defacing the image of my Creator, and sending an immortal soul into eternity without a moment's warning, but something else of a venial kind that many unpunished people do. I don’t want the forgiveness of this foully murdered person’s bereaved wife, husband, brother, sister, child, friend; I don’t ask for it, I don’t care for it. I make no enquiry of the clergyman concerning the salvation of that murdered person’s soul; mine is the matter; and I am almost happy that I came here, as to the gate of Paradise. ‘I never liked him,’ said the repentant Mr. Manning, false of heart to the last, calling a crowbar by a milder name, to lessen the cowardly horror of it, ‘and I beat in his skull with the ripping chisel.’ I am going to bliss, exclaims the same authority, in effect. Where my victim went to, is not my business at all. Now, GOD forbid that we, unworthily believing in the Redeemer, should shut out hope, or even humble trustfulness, from any criminal at that dread pass; but, it is not in us to call this state of mind repentance. The present question is with a state of mind analogous to this (as we conceive) but with a far stronger tendency to hypocrisy; the dread of death not being present, and there being every possible inducement, either to feign contrition, or to set up an unreliable semblance of it. If I, John Styles, the prisoner, don’t do my work, and outwardly conform to the rules of the prison, I am a mere fool. There is nothing here to tempt me to do anything else, and everything to tempt me to do that. The capital dietary (and every meal is a great event in this lonely life) depends upon it; the alternative is a pound of bread a day. I should be weary of myself without occupation. I should be much more dull if I didn’t hold these dialogues with the gentlemen who are so anxious about me. I shouldn’t be half the object of interest I am, if I didn’t make the professions I do. Therefore, I John Styles go in for what is popular here, and I may mean it, or I may not. There will always, under any decent system, be certain prisoners, betrayed into crime by a variety of circumstances, who will do well in exile, and o end against the laws no more. Upon this class, we think the Associated Silent System would have quite as good an influence as this expensive and anomalous one; and we cannot accept them as evidence of the efficiency of separate confinement. Assuming John Styles to mean what he professes, for the time being, we desire to track the workings of his mind, and to try to test the value of his professions. Where shall we find an account of John Styles, proceeding from no objector to this system, but from a staunch supporter of it? We will take it from a work called ‘Prison Discipline, and the advantages of the separate system of imprisonment,’ written by the Reverend Mr. Field, chaplain of the new County Gaol at Reading; pointing out to Mr. Field, in passing, that the question is not justly, as he would sometimes make it, a question between this system and the profligate abuses and customs of the old unreformed gaols, but between it and the improved gaols of this time, which are not constructed on his favourite principles.* * As Mr. Field condescends to quote some vapouring about the account given by Mr. Charles Dickens in his ‘American Notes,’ of the Solitary Prison at Philadelphia, he may perhaps really wish for some few words of information on the subject. For this purpose, Mr. Charles Dickens has referred to the entry in his Diary, made at the close of that day. He left his hotel for the Prison at twelve o’clock, being waited on, by appointment, by the gentlemen who showed it to him; and he returned between seven and eight at night; dining in the prison in the course of that time; which, according to his calculation, in despite of the Philadelphia Newspaper, rather exceeds two hours. He found the Prison admirably conducted, extremely clean, and the system administered in a most intelligent, kind, orderly, tender, and careful manner. He did not consider (nor should he, if he were to visit Pentonville to-morrow) that the book in which visitors were expected to record their observation of the place, was intended for the insertion of criticisms on the system, but for honest testimony to the manner of its administration; and to that, he bore, as an impartial visitor, the highest testimony in his power. In returning thanks for his health being drunk, at the dinner within the walls, he said that what he had seen that day was running in his mind; that he could not help reflecting on it; and that it was an awful punishment. If the American officer who rode back with him afterwards should ever see these words, he will perhaps recall his conversation with Mr. Dickens on the road, as to Mr. Dickens having said so, very plainly and strongly. In reference to the ridiculous assertion that Mr. Dickens in his book termed a woman ‘quite beautiful’ who was a Negress, he positively believes that he was shown no Negress in the Prison, but one who was nursing a woman much diseased, and to whom no reference whatever is made in his published account. In describing three young women, ‘all convicted at the same time of a conspiracy,’ he may, possibly, among many cases, have substituted in his memory for one of them whom he did not see, some other prisoner, confined for some other crime, whom he did see; but he has not the least doubt of having been guilty of the (American) enormity of detecting beauty in a pensive quadroon or mulatto girl, or of having seen exactly what he describes; and he remembers the girl more particularly described in this connexion, perfectly. Can Mr. Field really suppose that Mr. Dickens had any interest or purpose in misrepresenting the system, or that if he could be guilty of such unworthy conduct, or desire to do it anything but justice, he would have volunteered the narrative of a man's having, of his own choice, undergone it for two years? We will not notice the objection of Mr. Field (who strengthens the truth of Burns to nature, by the testimony of Mr. Pitt!) to the discussion of such a topic as the present in a work of ‘mere amusement;’ though, we had thought we remembered in that book a word or two about slavery, which, although a very amusing, can scarcely be considered an unmitigatedly comic theme. We are quite content to believe, without seeking to make a convert of the Reverend Mr. Field, that no work need be one of ‘mere amusement;’ and that some works to which he would apply that designation have done a little good in advancing principles to which, we hope, and will believe, for the credit of his Christian office, he is not indifferent. Now, here is John Styles, twenty years of age, in prison for a felony. He has been there five months, and he writes to his sister, ‘Don't fret my dear sister, about my being here. I cannot help fretting when I think about my usage to my father and mother: when I think about it, it makes me quite ill. I hope God will forgive me; I pray for it night and day from my heart. Instead of fretting about imprisonment, I ought to thank God for it, for before I came here, I was living quite a careless life; neither was God in all my thoughts; all I thought about was ways that led me towards destruction. Give my respects to my wretched companions, and I hope they will alter their wicked course, for they don't know for a day nor an hour but what they may be cut o . I have seen my folly, and I hope they may see their folly; but I shouldn't if I had not been in trouble. It is good for me that I have been in trouble. Go to church, my sister, every Sunday, and don't give your mind to going to playhouses and theatres, for that is no good to you. There are a great many temptations.’ Observe! John Styles, who has committed the felony has been ‘living quite a careless life.’ That is his worst opinion of it, whereas his companions who did not commit the felony are ‘wretched companions.’ John saw his ‘folly,’ and sees their ‘wicked course’ It is playhouses and theatres which many unfelonious people go to, that prey upon John’s mind not felony. John is shut up in that pulpit to lecture his companions and his sister, about the wickedness of the unfelonious world. Always supposing him to be sincere, is there no exaggeration of himself in this? Go to church where I can go, and don't go to theatres where I can’t! Is there any tinge of the fox and the grapes in it? Is this the kind of penitence that will wear outside! Put the case that he had written, of his own mind, ‘My dear sister, I feel that I have disgraced you and all who should be dear to me, and if it please God that I live to be free, I will try hard to repair that, and to be a credit to you. My dear sister, when I committed this felony, I stole something – and these pining five months have not put it back – and I will work my fingers to the bone to make restitution, and oh! my dear sister, seek out my late companions, and tell Tom Jones, that poor boy, who was younger and littler than me, that I am grieved I ever led him so wrong, and I am suffering for it now!’ Would that be better? Would it be more like solid truth? But no. This is not the pattern penitence. There would seem to be a pattern penitence, of a particular form, shape, limits, and dimensions, like the cells. While Mr. Field is correcting his proof-sheets for the press, another letter is brought to him, and in that letter too, that man, also a felon, speaks of his ‘past folly,’ and lectures his mother about labouring under ‘strong delusions of the devil.’ Does this overweening readiness to lecture other people, suggest the suspicion of any parrot-like imitation of Mr. Field, who lectures him, and any presumptuous confounding of their relative positions? We venture altogether to protest against the citation, in support of this system, of assumed repentance which has stood no test or trial in the working world. We consider that it proves nothing, and is worth nothing, except as a discouraging sign of that spiritual egotism and presumption of which we have already spoken. It is not peculiar to the separate system at Reading; Miss Martineau, who was on the whole decidedly favourable to the separate prison at Philadelphia, observed it there. ‘The cases I became acquainted with,’ says she, ‘were not all hopeful. Some of the convicts were so stupid as not to be relied upon, more or less. Others canted so detestably, and were (always in connexion with their cant) so certain that they should never sin more, that I have every expectation that they will find themselves in prison again some day. One fellow, a sailor, notorious for having taken more lives than probably any man in the United States, was quite confident that he should be perfectly virtuous henceforth. He should never touch anything stronger than tea, or lift his hand against money or life. I told him I thought he could not be sure of all this till he was within sight of money and the smell of strong liquors; and that he was more confident than I should like to be. He shook his shock of red hair at me, and glared with his one ferocious eye, as he said he knew all about it. He had been the worst of men, and Christ had had mercy on his poor soul.’ (Observe again, as in the general case we have put, that he is not at all troubled about the souls of the people whom he had killed.) Let us submit to our readers another instance from Mr. Field, of the wholesome state of mind produced by the separate system. ‘The 25th of March, in the last year, was the day appointed for a general fast, on account of the threatened famine. The following note is in my journal of that day. “During the evening I visited many prisoners, and found with much satisfaction that a large proportion of them had observed the day in a manner becoming their own situation, and the purpose for which it had been set apart. I think it right to record the following remarkable proof of the effect of discipline. * * * * * They were all supplied with their usual rations. I went first this evening to the cells of the prisoners recently committed for trial (Ward A. 1.), and amongst these (upwards of twenty) I found that but three had abstained from any portion of their food. I then visited twenty-one convicted prisoners who had spent some considerable time in the gaol (Ward C. 1.), and amongst them I found that some had altogether abstained from food, and of the whole number two-thirds had partially abstained.”’ We will take it for granted that this was not because they had more than they could eat, though we know that with such a dietary even that sometimes happens, especially in the case of persons long conned. ‘The remark of one prisoner whom I questioned concerning his abstinence was, I believe, sincere, and was very pleasing. “Sir, I have not felt able to eat today, whilst I have thought of those poor starving people; but I hope that I have prayed a good deal that God will give them something to eat.”’ If this were not pattern penitence, and the thought of those poor starving people had honestly originated with that man, and were really on his mind, we want to know why he was not uneasy, every day, in the contemplation of his soup, meat, bread, potatoes, cocoa-nibs, milk, molasses, and gruel, and its contrast to the fare of ‘those poor starving people’ who, in some form or other, were taxed to pay for it? We do not deem it necessary to comment on the authorities quoted by Mr. Field to show what a fine thing the separate system is, for the health of the body; how it never affects the mind except for good; how it is the true preventive of pulmonary disease; and so on. The deduction we must draw from such things is, that Providence was quite mistaken in making us gregarious, and that we had better all shut ourselves up directly. Neither will we refer to that ‘talented criminal,’ Dr. Dodd, whose exceedingly indifferent verses applied to a system now extinct, in reference to our penitentiaries for convicted prisoners. Neither, after what we have quoted from Lord Grey, need we refer to the likewise quoted report of the American authorities, who are perfectly sure that no extent of confinement in the Philadelphia prison has ever affected the intellectual powers of any prisoner. Mr. Croker cogently observes, in the Good-Natured Man, that either his hat must be on his head, or it must be off. By a parity of reasoning, we conclude that both Lord Grey and the American authorities cannot possibly be right – unless indeed the notoriously settled habits of the American people, and the absence of any approach to restlessness in the national character, render them unusually good subjects for protracted seclusion, and an exception from the rest of mankind. In using the term “pattern penitence” we beg it to be understood that we do not apply it to Mr. Field, or to any other chaplain, but to the system; which appears to us to make these doubtful converts all alike. Although Mr. Field has not shown any remarkable courtesy in the instance we have set forth in a note, it is our wish to show all courtesy to him, and to his office, and to his sincerity in the discharge of its duties. In our desire to represent him with fairness and impartiality, we will not take leave of him without the following quotation from his book: ‘Scarcely sufficient time has yet expired since the present system was introduced, for me to report much concerning discharged criminals. Out of a class so degraded – the very dregs of the community – it can be no wonder that some, of whose improvement I cherished the hope, should have relapsed. Disappointed in a few cases I have been, yet by no means discouraged, since I can with pleasure refer to many whose conduct is affording proof of reformation. Gratifying indeed have been some accounts received from liberated offenders themselves, as well as from clergymen of parishes to which they have returned. I have also myself visited the homes of some of our former prisoners, and have been cheered by the testimony given, and the evident signs of improved character which I have there observed. Although I do not venture at present to describe the particular cases of prisoners, concerning whose reformation I feel much confidence, because, as I have stated, the time of trial has hitherto been short; yet I can with pleasure refer to some public documents which prove the happy effects of similar discipline in other establishments.’ It should also be stated that the Reverend Mr. Kingsmill, the chaplain of the Model Prison at Pentonville, in his calm and intelligent report made to the Commissioners on the first of February, 1849, expresses his belief ‘that the effects produced here upon the character of prisoners, have been encouraging in a high degree.’ But, we entreat our readers once again to look at that Model Prison dietary (which is essential to the system, though the system is so very healthy of itself); to remember the other enormous expenses of the establishment; to consider the circumstances of this old country, with the inevitable anomalies and contrasts it must present; and to decide, on temperate reflection, whether there are any sufficient reasons for adding this monstrous contrast to the rest. Let us impress upon our readers that the existing question is, not between this system and the old abuses of the old profligate Gaols (with which, thank Heaven, we have nothing to do), but between this system and the associated silent system, where the dietary is much lower, where the annual cost of provision, management, repairs, clothing, &c., does not exceed, on a liberal average, £25 for each prisoner; where many prisoners are, and every prisoner would be (if due accommodation were provided in some overcrowded prisons), locked up alone, for twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and where, while preserved from contamination, he is still one of a society of men, and not an isolated being, filling his whole sphere of view with a diseased dilation of himself. We hear that the associated silent system is objectionable, because of the number of punishments it involves for breaches of the prison discipline; but how can we, in the same breath, be told that the resolutions of prisoners for the misty future are to be trusted, and that, on the least temptation, they are so little to be relied on, as to the solid present? How can I set the pattern penitence against the career that preceded it, when I am told that if I put that man with other men, and lay a solemn charge upon him not to address them by word or sign, there are such and such great chances that he will want the resolution to obey? Remember that this separate system, though commended in the English Parliament and spreading in England, has not spread in America, despite of all the steeple-chase riders in the United States. Remember that it has never reached the State most distinguished for its learning, for its moderation, for its remarkable men of European reputation, for the excellence of its public Institutions. Let it be tried here, on a limited scale, if you will, with fair representatives of all classes of prisoners: let Captain Macconnochie’s system be tried: let anything with a ray of hope in it be tried: but, only as a part of some general system for raising up the prostrate portion of the people of this country, and not as an exhibition of such astonishing consideration for crime, in comparison with want and work. Any prison built, at a great expenditure, for this system, is comparatively useless for any other; and the ratepayers will do well to think of this, before they take it for granted that it is a proved boon to the country which will be enduring. Under the separate system, the prisoners work at trades. Under the associated silent system, the Magistrates of Middlesex have almost abolished the treadmill. Is it no part of the legitimate consideration of this important point of work, to discover what kind of work the people always filtering through the gaols of large towns – the pickpocket, the sturdy vagrant, the habitual drunkard, and the begging-letter impostor – like least, and to give them that work to do in preference to any other? It is out of fashion with the steeple-chase riders we know; but we would have, for all such characters, a kind of work in gaols, badged and degraded as belonging to gaols only, and never done elsewhere. And we must avow that, in a country circumstanced as England is, with respect to labour and labourers, we have strong doubts of the propriety of bringing the results of prison labour into the over-stocked market. On this subject some public remonstrances have recently been made by tradesmen; and we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that they are well-founded. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/Supposing_[No.1]/1850-04-20-Supposing_No1.pdf a6856b8b8cda7e4998eec23b2b618232 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500420 Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. Supposing, we were to change the Property and Income Tax a little, and make it somewhat heavier on realised property, and somewhat lighter on mere income, fixed and uncertain, I wonder whether we should be committing any violent injustice! Supposing, we were to be more Christian and less mystical, agreeing more about the spirit and fighting less about the letter, I wonder whether we should present a very irreligious and indecent spectacle to the mass of mankind! Supposing, the Honorable Member for White troubled his head a little less about the Honorable Member for Black, and vice versa, and that both applied themselves a little more in earnest to the real business of the honorable people and the honorable country, I wonder whether it would be unparliamentary! Supposing, that, when there was a surplus in the Public Treasury, we laid aside our own particular whims, and all agreed that there were four elements necessary to the existence of our fellow creatures, to wit, earth, air, fire, and water, and that these were the first grand necessaries to be uncooped and untaxed, I wonder whether it would be unreasonable! Supposing, we had at this day a Baron Jenner, or a Viscount Watt, or an Earl Stephenson, or a Marquess of Brunel, or a dormant Shakespeare peerage, or a Hogarth baronetcy, I wonder whether it would be cruelly disgraceful to our old nobility! Supposing, we were all of us to come off our pedestals and mix a little more with those below us, with no fear but that genius, rank, and wealth, would always sufficiently assert their own superiority, I wonder whether we should lower ourselves beyond retrieval! Supposing, we were to have less botheration and more real education, I wonder whether we should have less or more compulsory colonisation, and Cape of Good Hope very natural indignation! Supposing, we were materially to simplify the laws, and to abrogate the absurd fiction that everybody is supposed to be acquainted with them, when we know very well that such acquaintance is the study of a life in which some fifty men may have been proficient perhaps in five times fifty years, I wonder whether laws would be respected less? Supposing, we maintained too many of such fictions altogether, and found their stabling come exceedingly expensive! Supposing, we looked about us, and seeing a cattle-market originally established in an open place, standing in the midst of a great city because of the unforeseen growth of that great city all about it, and, hearing it asserted that the market was still adapted to the requirements and conveniences of the great city, made up our minds to say that this was stark-mad nonsense and we wouldn’t bear it, I wonder whether we should be revolutionary! Supposing, we were to harbour a small suspicion that there was too much doing in the diplomatic line of business, and that the world would get on better with that shop shut up three days a-week, I wonder whether it would be a huge impiety! Supposing, Governments were to consider public questions less with reference to their own time, and more with reference to all time, I wonder how we should get on then! Supposing, the wisdom of our ancestors should turn out to be a mere phrase, and that if there were any sense in it, it should follow that we ought to be believers in the worship of the Druids at this hour, I wonder whether any people would have talked mere moonshine all their lives! Supposing, we were clearly to perceive that we cannot keep some men out of their share in the administration of affairs, and were to say to them, ‘Come, brothers, let us take counsel together, and see how we can best manage this; and don’t expect too much from what you get; and let us all in our degree put our shoulders to the wheel, and strive; and let us all improve ourselves and all abandon something of our extreme opinions for the general harmony,’ I wonder whether we should want so many special constables on any future tenth of April, or should talk so much about it any more! I wonder whether people who are quite easy about anything, usually do talk quite so much about it! Mr. Lane, the traveller, tells us of a superstition the Egyptians have, that the mischievous Genii are driven away by iron, of which they have an instinctive dread. Supposing, this should foreshadow the disappearance of the evil spirits and ignorances besetting this earth, before the iron steam-engines and roads, I wonder whether we could expedite their flight at all by iron energy! Supposing, we were just to try two or three of these experiments! Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly magazine Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Supposing!' (No.1) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission. Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-04-20-Supposing_No1 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <div id="dublin-core-source" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> Household Words, vol. 1, no.4, 20 April 1850, p. 96. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-96.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-96.html</a>. </div> </div> <div id="dublin-core-contributor" class="element"> <div class="field two columns alpha"></div> </div> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-04-20 Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Supposing' (No.1). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-20-Supposing_No1">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-20-Supposing_No1</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (20 April 1850) Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. Supposing, we were to change the Property and Income Tax a little, and make it somewhat heavier on realised property, and somewhat lighter on mere income, fixed and uncertain, I wonder whether we should be committing any violent injustice! Supposing, we were to be more Christian and less mystical, agreeing more about the spirit and fighting less about the letter, I wonder whether we should present a very irreligious and indecent spectacle to the mass of mankind! Supposing, the Honorable Member for White troubled his head a little less about the Honorable Member for Black, and vice versa, and that both applied themselves a little more in earnest to the real business of the honorable people and the honorable country, I wonder whether it would be unparliamentary! Supposing, that, when there was a surplus in the Public Treasury, we laid aside our own particular whims, and all agreed that there were four elements necessary to the existence of our fellow creatures, to wit, earth, air, fire, and water, and that these were the first grand necessaries to be uncooped and untaxed, I wonder whether it would be unreasonable! Supposing, we had at this day a Baron Jenner, or a Viscount Watt, or an Earl Stephenson, or a Marquess of Brunel, or a dormant Shakespeare peerage, or a Hogarth baronetcy, I wonder whether it would be cruelly disgraceful to our old nobility! Supposing, we were all of us to come off our pedestals and mix a little more with those below us, with no fear but that genius, rank, and wealth, would always sufficiently assert their own superiority, I wonder whether we should lower ourselves beyond retrieval! Supposing, we were to have less botheration and more real education, I wonder whether we should have less or more compulsory colonisation, and Cape of Good Hope very natural indignation! Supposing, we were materially to simplify the laws, and to abrogate the absurd fiction that everybody is supposed to be acquainted with them, when we know very well that such acquaintance is the study of a life in which some fifty men may have been proficient perhaps in five times fifty years, I wonder whether laws would be respected less? Supposing, we maintained too many of such fictions altogether, and found their stabling come exceedingly expensive! Supposing, we looked about us, and seeing a cattle-market originally established in an open place, standing in the midst of a great city because of the unforeseen growth of that great city all about it, and, hearing it asserted that the market was still adapted to the requirements and conveniences of the great city, made up our minds to say that this was stark-mad nonsense and we wouldn’t bear it, I wonder whether we should be revolutionary! Supposing, we were to harbour a small suspicion that there was too much doing in the diplomatic line of business, and that the world would get on better with that shop shut up three days a-week, I wonder whether it would be a huge impiety! Supposing, Governments were to consider public questions less with reference to their own time, and more with reference to all time, I wonder how we should get on then! Supposing, the wisdom of our ancestors should turn out to be a mere phrase, and that if there were any sense in it, it should follow that we ought to be believers in the worship of the Druids at this hour, I wonder whether any people would have talked mere moonshine all their lives! Supposing, we were clearly to perceive that we cannot keep some men out of their share in the administration of affairs, and were to say to them, ‘Come, brothers, let us take counsel together, and see how we can best manage this; and don’t expect too much from what you get; and let us all in our degree put our shoulders to the wheel, and strive; and let us all improve ourselves and all abandon something of our extreme opinions for the general harmony,’ I wonder whether we should want so many special constables on any future tenth of April, or should talk so much about it any more! I wonder whether people who are quite easy about anything, usually do talk quite so much about it! Mr. Lane, the traveller, tells us of a superstition the Egyptians have, that the mischievous Genii are driven away by iron, of which they have an instinctive dread. Supposing, this should foreshadow the disappearance of the evil spirits and ignorances besetting this earth, before the iron steam-engines and roads, I wonder whether we could expedite their flight at all by iron energy! Supposing, we were just to try two or three of these experiments! https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/Some_Account_of_an_Extraordinary_Traveller/1850-04-20-Some_Account_of_an_Extraordinary_Traveller.pdf 394e07031be3cc0cfa3b1eebecbcb954 Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500420 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly magazine Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. No longer ago than this Easter time last past, we became acquainted with the subject of the present notice. Our knowledge of him is not by any means an intimate one, and is only of a public nature. We have never interchanged any conversation with him, except on one occasion when he asked us to have the goodness to take o our hat, to which we replied ‘Certainly.’ BOOLEY was born (we believe) in Rood Lane, in the City of London. He is now a gentleman advanced in life, and has for some years resided in the neighbourhood of Islington. His father was a wholesale grocer (perhaps), and he was (possibly) in the same way of business; or he may, at an early age, have become a clerk in the Bank of England, or in a private bank, or in the India House. It will be observed that we make no pretence of having any information in reference to the private history of this remarkable man, and that our account of it must be received as rather speculative than authentic. In person MR. BOOLEY is below the middle size, and corpulent. His countenance is florid, he is perfectly bald, and soon hot; and there is a composure in his gait and manner, calculated to impress a stranger with the idea of his being, on the whole, an unwieldy man. It is only in his eye that the adventurous character of MR. BOOLEY is seen to shine. It is a moist, bright eye, of a cheerful expression, and indicative of keen and eager curiosity. It was not until late in life that MR. BOOLEY conceived the idea of entering on the extraordinary amount of travel he has since accomplished. He had attained the age of sixty-five, before he left England for the first time. In all the immense journies he has since performed, he has never laid aside the English dress, nor departed in the slightest degree from English customs. Neither does he speak a word of any language but his own. BOOLEY’S powers of endurance are wonderful. All climates are alike to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alternations of heat and cold appear to have the least effect upon his hardy frame. His capacity of travelling, day and night, for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help of books. An intelligent Englishman may have occasionally pointed out to him objects and scenes of interest; but otherwise he has travelled alone, and unattended. Though remarkable for personal cleanliness, he has carried no luggage; and his diet has been of the simplest kind. He has often found a biscuit, or a bun, sufficient for his support over a vast tract of country. Frequently, he has travelled hundreds of miles, fasting, without the least abatement of his natural spirits. It says much for the Total Abstinence cause, that MR. BOOLEY has never had recourse to the artificial stimulus of alcohol, to sustain him under his fatigues. His first departure from the sedentary and monotonous life he had hitherto led, strikingly exemplifies, we think, the energetic character, long suppressed by that unchanging routine. Without any communication with any member of his family MR. BOOLEY has never been married, but has many relations without announcing his intention to his solicitor, or banker, or any person entrusted with the management of his a airs, he closed the door of his house behind him at one o’clock in the afternoon of a certain day, and immediately proceeded to New Orleans, in the United States of America. His intention was to ascend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Taking his passage in a steamboat without loss of time, he was soon upon the bosom of the Father of Waters, as the Indians call the mighty stream which, night and day, is always carrying huge instalments of the vast continent of the New World, down into the sea. BOOLEY found it singularly interesting to observe the various stages of civilisation obtaining on the banks of these mighty rivers. Leaving the luxury and brightness of New Orleans – a somewhat feverish luxury and brightness, he observed, as if the swampy soil were too much enriched in the hot sun with the bodies of dead slaves – and passing various towns in every stage of progress, it was very curious to observe the changes of civilisation and of vegetation too. Here, where the doomed Negro race were working in the plantations, while the republican overseer looked on, whip in hand, tropical trees were growing, beautiful flowers in bloom; the alligator, with his horribly sly face, and his jaws like two great saws, was basking on the mud; and the strange moss of the country was hanging in wreaths and garlands on the trees, like votive offerings. A little farther towards the west, and the trees and flowers were changed, the moss was gone, younger infant towns were rising, forests were slowly disappearing, and the trees, obliged to aid in the destruction of their kind, fed the heavily-breathing monster that came clanking up those solitudes, laden with the pioneers of the advancing human army. The river itself, that moving highway, showed him every kind of floating contrivance, from the lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the raft of logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward to the poor Indian's frail canoe. A winding thread through the enormous range of country, unrolling itself before the wanderer like the magic skein in the story, he saw it tracked by wanderers of every kind, roaming from the more settled world, to those first nests of men. The floating theatre, dwellinghouse, hotel, museum, shop; the floating mechanism for screwing the trunks of mighty trees out of the mud, like antediluvian teeth; the rapidly- owing river, and the blazing woods; he left them all behind – town, city, and log-cabin, too; and floated up into the prairies and savannahs, among the deserted lodges of tribes of savages, and among their dead, lying alone on little wooden stages with their stark faces upward towards the sky. Among the blazing grass, and herds of buffaloes and wild horses, and among the wigwams of the fast-declining Indians, he began to consider how, in the eternal current of progress setting across this globe in one unchangeable direction, like the unseen agency that points the needle to the pole, the Chiefs who only dance the dances of their fathers, and will never have a new figure for a new tune, and the Medicine-men who know no Medicine but what was Medicine a hundred years ago, must be surely and inevitably swept from the earth, whether they be Choctawas, Mandans, Britons, Austrians, or Chinese. He was struck, too, by the reflection that savage nature was not by any means such a fine and noble spectacle as some delight to represent it. He found it a poor, greasy, paint-plastered, miserable thing enough; but a very little way above the beasts in most respects; in many customs a long way below them. It occurred to him that the ‘Big Bird,’ or the ‘Blue Fish,’ or any of the other Braves, was but a troublesome braggart after all; making a mighty whooping and holloaing about nothing particular, doing very little for science, not much more than the monkeys for art, scarcely anything worth mentioning for letters, and not often making the world greatly better than he found it. Civilisation, MR. BOOLEY concluded, was, on the whole, with all its blemishes, a more imposing sight, and a far better thing to stand by. MR. BOOLEY’S observations of the celestial bodies, on this voyage, were principally conned to the discovery of the alarming fact, that light had altogether departed from the moon; which presented the appearance of a white dinner-plate. The clouds, too, conducted themselves in an extraordinary manner, and assumed the most eccentric forms, while the sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On his return to his native country, however, he had the satisfaction of finding all these things as usual. It might have been expected that at his advanced age, retired from the active duties of life, blest with a competency, and happy in the affections of his numerous relations, MR. BOOLEY would now have settled himself down, to muse, for the remainder of his days, over the new stock of experience thus acquired. But travel had whetted, not satisfied, his appetite; and remembering that he had not seen the Ohio river, except at the point of its junction with the Mississippi, he returned to the United States, after a short interval of repose, and appearing suddenly at Cincinnati, the queen City of the West, traversed the clear waters of the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition he had the pleasure of encountering a party of intelligent workmen from Birmingham who were making the same tour. Also his nephew Septimus, aged only thirteen. This intrepid boy had started from Peckham, in the old country, with two and sixpence sterling in his pocket; and had, when he encountered his uncle at a point of the Ohio River, called Snaggy Bar, still one shilling of that sum remaining! Again at home, MR. BOOLEY was so pressed by his appetite for knowledge as to remain at home only one day. At the expiration of that short period, he actually started for New Zealand. It is almost incredible that a man in MR. BOOLEY’S station of life, however adventurous his nature, and however few his artificial wants, should cast himself on a voyage of thirteen thousand miles from Great Britain with no other outfit than his watch and purse, and no arms but his walking-stick. We are, however, assured on the best authority, that thus he made the passage out, and thus appeared, in the act of wiping his smoking head with his pocket-handkerchief, at the entrance to Port Nicholson in Cook’s Straits: with the very spot within his range of vision, where his illustrious predecessor, Captain Cook, so unhappily slain at Owyhee, once anchored. After contemplating the swarms of cattle maintained on the hills in this neighbourhood, and always to be found by the stockmen when they are wanted, though nobody takes any care of them – which MR. BOOLEY considered the more remarkable, as their natural objection to be killed might be supposed to be augmented by the beauty of the climate – MR. BOOLEY proceeded to the town of Wellington. Having minutely examined it in every point, and made himself perfect master of the whole natural history and process of manufacture of the ax-plant, with its splendid yellow blossoms, he repaired to a Native Pa, which, unlike the Native Pa to which he was accustomed, he found to be a town, and not a parent. Here he observed a Chief with a long spear, making every demonstration of spitting a visitor, but really giving him the Maori or welcome – a word MR. BOOLEY is inclined to derive from the known hospitality of our English Mayors – and here also he observed some Europeans rubbing noses, by way of shaking hands, with the aboriginal inhabitants. After participating in an affray between the natives and the English soldiery, in which the former were defeated with great loss, he plunged into the Bush, and there camped out for some months, until he had made a survey of the whole country. While leading this wild life, encamped by night near a stream for the convenience of water, in a Ware, or hut, built open in the front, with a roof sloping backward to the ground, and made of poles, covered and enclosed with bark or fern, it was MR. BOOLEY’S singular fortune to encounter Miss Creeble, of The Misses Creebles’ Boarding and Day Establishment for Young Ladies, Kennington Oval, who, accompanied by three of her young ladies in search of information, had achieved this marvellous journey, and was then also in the Bush. Miss Creeble having very unsettled opinions on the subject of gunpowder, was afraid that it entered into the composition of the re before the tent, and that something would presently blow up or go off. MR. BOOLEY, as a more experienced traveller, assuring her that there was no danger; and calming the fears of the young ladies, an acquaintance commenced between them. They accomplished the rest of their travels in New Zealand together, and the best understanding prevailed among the little party. They took notice of the trees, as the Kaikatea, the Kauri, the Ruta, the Pukatea, the Hinau, and the Tanakaka – names which Miss Creeble had a bland relish in pronouncing. They admired the beautiful, arborescent, palm-like fern, abounding everywhere, and frequently exceeding thirty feet in height. They wondered at the curious owl, who is supposed to demand ‘More Pork!’ wherever he flies, and whom Miss Creeble termed ‘an admonition of Nature’s against greediness!’ And they contemplated some very rampant natives, of cannibal propensities. After many pleasing and instructive vicissitudes, they returned to England in company, where the ladies were safely put into a hackney cabriolet by MR. BOOLEY, in Leicester Square, London. And now, indeed, it might have been imagined that that roving spirit, tired of rambling about the world, would have settled down at home in peace and honor. Not so. After repairing to the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, and accompanying Her Majesty on her visit to Ireland (which he characterised as ‘a magnificent Exhibition’), MR. BOOLEY, with his usual absence of preparation, departed for Australia. Here again, he lived out in the Bush, passing his time chiefly among the working-gangs of convicts who were carrying timber. He was much impressed by the ferocious mastiffs chained to barrels, who assist the sentries in keeping guard over those misdoers. But he observed that the atmosphere in this part of the world, unlike the descriptions he had read of it, was extremely thick, and that objects were misty, and difficult to be discerned. From a certain unsteadiness and trembling, too, which he frequently remarked on the face of Nature, he was led to conclude that this part of the globe was subject to convulsive heavings and earthquakes. This caused him to return, with some precipitation. Again at home, and probably reflecting that the countries he had hitherto visited were new in the history of man, this extraordinary traveller resolved to proceed up the Nile to the second cataract. At the next performance of the great ceremony of ‘opening the Nile,’ at Cairo, Mr. BOOLEY was present. Along that wonderful river, associated with such stupendous fables, and with a history more prodigious than any fancy of man, in its vast and gorgeous facts; among temples, palaces, pyramids, colossal statues, crocodiles, tombs, obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin; he proceeded, like an opium-eater in a mighty dream. Thebes rose before him. An avenue of two hundred sphinxes, with not a head among them, - one of six or eight, or ten such avenues, all leading to a common centre, - conducted to the Temple of Carnak: its walls, eighty feet high and twenty-five feet thick, a mile and threequarters in circumference; the interior of its tremendous hall, occupying an area of forty-seven thousand square feet, large enough to hold four great Christian churches, and yet not more than one-seventh part of the entire ruin. Obelisks he saw, thousands of years of age, as sharp as if the chisel had cut their edges yesterday; colossal statues fifty-two feet high, with ‘little’ fingers five feet and a half long; a very world of ruins, that were marvellous old ruins in the days of Herodotus; tombs cut high up in the rock, where European travellers live solitary, as in stony crows’ nests, burning mummied Thebans, gentle and simple, - of the dried blood-royal maybe, - for their daily fuel, and making articles of furniture of their dusty coffins. Upon the walls of temples, in colors fresh and bright as those of yesterday, he read the conquests of great Egyptian monarchs; upon the tombs of humbler people in the same blooming symbols, he saw their ancient way of working at their trades, of riding, driving, feasting, playing games; of marrying and burying, and performing on instruments, and singing songs, and healing by the power of animal magnetism, and performing all the occupations of life. He visited the quarries of Silsileh, whence nearly all the red stone used by the ancient Egyptian architects and sculptors came; and there beheld enormous single-stoned colossal figures nearly finished – redly snowed up, as it were, and trying hard to break out – waiting for the finishing touches, never to be given by the mummied hands of thousands of years ago. In front of the temple of Abou Simbel, he saw gigantic figures sixty feet in height and twenty-one across the shoulders, dwarfing live men on camels down to pigmies. Elsewhere he beheld complacent monsters tumbled down like ill-used Dolls of a Titanic make, and staring with stupid benignity at the arid earth whereon their huge faces rested. His last look of that amazing land was at the Great Sphinx, buried in the sand – sand in its eyes, sand in its ears, sand drifted on its broken nose, sand lodging, feet deep, in the ledges of its head – struggling out of a wide sea of sand, as if to look hopelessly forth for the ancient glories once surrounding it. In this expedition, MR. BOOLEY acquired some curious information in reference to the language of hieroglyphics. He encountered the Simoom in the Desert, and lay down, with the rest of his caravan, until it had passed over. He also beheld on the horizon some of those stalking pillars of sand, apparently reaching from earth to heaven, which, with the red sun shining through them, so terrified the Arabs attendant on Bruce, that they fell prostrate, crying that the Day of Judgment was come. More Copts, Turks, Arabs, Fellahs, Bedouins, Mosques, Mamelukes, and Moosulmen he saw, than we have space to tell. His days were all Arabian Nights, and he saw wonders without end. This might have satiated any ordinary man, for a time at least. But MR. BOOLEY, being no ordinary man, within twenty-four hours of his arrival at home was making The Overland Journey to India. He has emphatically described this, as ‘a beautiful piece of scenery,’ and ‘a perfect picture.’ The appearance of Malta and Gibraltar he can never sufficiently commend. In crossing the Desert from Grand Cairo to Suez, he was particularly struck by the undulations of the Sandscape (he preferred that word to Landscape, as more expressive of the region), and by the incident of beholding a caravan upon its line of march; a spectacle which in the remembrance always affords him the utmost pleasure. Of the stations on the Desert, and the cinnamon gardens of Ceylon, he likewise entertains a lively recollection. Calcutta he praises also; though he has been heard to observe that the British military at that seat of Government were not as well proportioned as he could desire the soldiers of his country to be; and that the breed of horses there in use was susceptible of some improvement. Once more in his native land, with the vigor of his constitution unimpaired by the many toils and fatigues he had encountered, what had MR. BOOLEY now to do, but, full of years and honor, to recline upon the grateful appreciation of his Queen and country, always eager to distinguish peaceful merit? What had he now to do, but to receive the decoration ever ready to be bestowed, in England, on men deservedly distinguished, and to take his place among the best? He had this to do. He had yet to achieve the most astonishing enterprise for which he was reserved. In all the countries he had yet visited, he had seen no frost and snow. He resolved to make a voyage to the ice-bound Arctic Regions. In pursuance of this surprising determination, MR. BOOLEY accompanied the Expedition under Sir James Ross, consisting of Her Majesty's ships, the Enterprise and Investigator, which sailed from the river Thames on the 12th of May, 1848, and which, on the 11th of September, entered Port Leopold Harbor. In this inhospitable region, surrounded by eternal ice, cheered by no glimpse of the sun, shrouded in gloom and darkness, MR. BOOLEY passed the entire winter. The ships were covered in, and fortified all round with walls of ice and snow; the masts were frozen up; hoar frost settled on the yards, tops, shrouds, stays, and rigging; around, in every direction, lay an interminable waste, on which only the bright stars, the yellow moon, and the vivid Aurora Borealis looked, by night or day. And yet the desolate sublimity of this astounding spectacle was broken in a pleasant and surprising manner. In the remote solitude to which he had penetrated, MR. BOOLEY (who saw no Esquimaux during his stay, though he looked for them in every direction) had the happiness of encountering two Scotch gardeners; several English compositors, accompanied by their wives; three brass founders from the neighbourhood of Long Acre, London; two coach painters, a gold-beater and his only daughter, by trade a stay-maker; and several other working-people from sundry parts of Great Britain who had conceived the extraordinary idea of ‘holiday-making’ in the frozen wilderness. Hither too, had Miss Creeble and her three young ladies penetrated: the latter attired in braided pea-coats of a comparatively light material; and Miss Creeble defended from the inclemency of a Polar Winter by no other outer garment than a wadded Polka-jacket. He found this courageous lady in the act of explaining, to the youthful sharers of her toils, the various phases of nature by which they were surrounded. Her explanations were principally wrong, but her intentions always admirable. Cheered by the society of these fellow-adventurers, MR. BOOLEY slowly glided on into the summer season. And now, at midnight, all was bright and shining. Mountains of ice, wedged and broken into the strangest forms – jagged points, spires, pinnacles, pyramids, turrets, columns in endless succession and in infinite variety, flashing and sparkling with ten thousand hues, as though the treasures of the earth were frozen up in all that water appeared on every side. Masses of ice, floating and driving hither and thither, menaced the hardy voyagers with destruction; and threatened to crush their strong ships, like nutshells. But, below those ships was clear sea-water, now; the fortifying walls were gone; the yards, tops, shrouds and rigging, free from that hoary rust of long inaction, showed like themselves again; and the sails, bursting from the masts, like foliage which the welcome sun at length developed, spread themselves to the wind, and wafted the travellers away. In the short interval that has elapsed since his safe return to the land of his birth, MR. BOOLEY has decided on no new expedition; but he feels that he will yet be called upon to undertake one, perhaps of greater magnitude than any he has achieved, and frequently remarks, in his own easy way, that he wonders where the deuce he will be taken to next! Possessed of good health and good spirits, with powers unimpaired by all he has gone through, and with an increase of appetite still growing with what it feeds on, what may not be expected yet from this extraordinary man! It was only at the close of Easter week that, sitting in an arm chair, at a private Club called the Social Oysters, assembling at High-bury Barn, where he is much respected, this indefatigable traveller expressed himself in the following terms: ‘It is very gratifying to me,’ said he, ‘to have seen so much at my time of life, and to have acquired a knowledge of the countries I have visited, which I could not have derived from books alone. When I was a boy, such travelling would have been impossible, as the gigantic-moving-panorama or diorama mode of conveyance, which I have principally adopted (all my modes of conveyance have been pictorial), had then not been attempted. It is a delightful characteristic of these times, that new and cheap means are continually being devised, for conveying the results of actual experience, to those who are unable to obtain such experiences for themselves; and to bring them within the reach of the people – emphatically of the people; for it is they at large who are addressed in these endeavours, and not exclusive audiences. Hence,’ said MR. BOOLEY, ‘even if I see a run on an idea, like the panorama one, it awakens no ill-humour within me, but gives me pleasant thoughts. Some of the best results of actual travel are suggested by such means to those whose lot it is to stay at home. New worlds open out to them, beyond their little worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information, sympathy, and interest. The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among us all. I shall, therefore,’ said MR. BOOLEY, ‘now propose to the Social Oysters the healths of Mr. Banvard, Mr. Brees, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Allen, Mr. Prout, Messrs. Bonomi, Fahey, and Warren, Mr. Thomas Grieve, and Mr. Burford. Long life to them all, and more power to their pencils!’ The Social Oysters having drunk this toast with acclamation, MR. BOOLEY proceeded to entertain them with anecdotes of his travels. This he is in the habit of doing after they have feasted together, according to the manner of Sinbad the Sailor – except that he does not bestow upon the Social Oysters the munificent reward of one hundred sequins per night, for listening. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller' Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (20 April 1850) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol. 1, no.4, 20 April 1850, pp. 73-77. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-73.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-73.html</a>. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online, used by permission. Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-04-20-Some_Account_of_an_Extraordinary_Traveller Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850-04-20 Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller.' Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-20-Some_Account_of_an_Extraordinary_Traveller">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-20-Some_Account_of_an_Extraordinary_Traveller</a>. Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. No longer ago than this Easter time last past, we became acquainted with the subject of the present notice. Our knowledge of him is not by any means an intimate one, and is only of a public nature. We have never interchanged any conversation with him, except on one occasion when he asked us to have the goodness to take o our hat, to which we replied ‘Certainly.’ BOOLEY was born (we believe) in Rood Lane, in the City of London. He is now a gentleman advanced in life, and has for some years resided in the neighbourhood of Islington. His father was a wholesale grocer (perhaps), and he was (possibly) in the same way of business; or he may, at an early age, have become a clerk in the Bank of England, or in a private bank, or in the India House. It will be observed that we make no pretence of having any information in reference to the private history of this remarkable man, and that our account of it must be received as rather speculative than authentic. In person MR. BOOLEY is below the middle size, and corpulent. His countenance is florid, he is perfectly bald, and soon hot; and there is a composure in his gait and manner, calculated to impress a stranger with the idea of his being, on the whole, an unwieldy man. It is only in his eye that the adventurous character of MR. BOOLEY is seen to shine. It is a moist, bright eye, of a cheerful expression, and indicative of keen and eager curiosity. It was not until late in life that MR. BOOLEY conceived the idea of entering on the extraordinary amount of travel he has since accomplished. He had attained the age of sixty-five, before he left England for the first time. In all the immense journies he has since performed, he has never laid aside the English dress, nor departed in the slightest degree from English customs. Neither does he speak a word of any language but his own. BOOLEY’S powers of endurance are wonderful. All climates are alike to him. Nothing exhausts him; no alternations of heat and cold appear to have the least effect upon his hardy frame. His capacity of travelling, day and night, for thousands of miles, has never been approached by any traveller of whom we have any knowledge through the help of books. An intelligent Englishman may have occasionally pointed out to him objects and scenes of interest; but otherwise he has travelled alone, and unattended. Though remarkable for personal cleanliness, he has carried no luggage; and his diet has been of the simplest kind. He has often found a biscuit, or a bun, sufficient for his support over a vast tract of country. Frequently, he has travelled hundreds of miles, fasting, without the least abatement of his natural spirits. It says much for the Total Abstinence cause, that MR. BOOLEY has never had recourse to the artificial stimulus of alcohol, to sustain him under his fatigues.  His first departure from the sedentary and monotonous life he had hitherto led, strikingly exemplifies, we think, the energetic character, long suppressed by that unchanging routine. Without any communication with any member of his family MR. BOOLEY has never been married, but has many relations without announcing his intention to his solicitor, or banker, or any person entrusted with the management of his a airs, he closed the door of his house behind him at one o’clock in the afternoon of a certain day, and immediately proceeded to New Orleans, in the United States of America. His intention was to ascend the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Taking his passage in a steamboat without loss of time, he was soon upon the bosom of the Father of Waters, as the Indians call the mighty stream which, night and day, is always carrying huge instalments of the vast continent of the New World, down into the sea.  BOOLEY found it singularly interesting to observe the various stages of civilisation obtaining on the banks of these mighty rivers. Leaving the luxury and brightness of New Orleans – a somewhat feverish luxury and brightness, he observed, as if the swampy soil were too much enriched in the hot sun with the bodies of dead slaves – and passing various towns in every stage of progress, it was very curious to observe the changes of civilisation and of vegetation too. Here, where the doomed Negro race were working in the plantations, while the republican overseer looked on, whip in hand, tropical trees were growing, beautiful flowers in bloom; the alligator, with his horribly sly face, and his jaws like two great saws, was basking on the mud; and the strange moss of the country was hanging in wreaths and garlands on the trees, like votive offerings. A little farther towards the west, and the trees and flowers were changed, the moss was gone, younger infant towns were rising, forests were slowly disappearing, and the trees, obliged to aid in the destruction of their kind, fed the heavily-breathing monster that came clanking up those solitudes, laden with the pioneers of the advancing human army. The river itself, that moving highway, showed him every kind of floating contrivance, from the lumbering flat-bottomed boat, and the raft of logs, upward to the steamboat, and downward to the poor Indian's frail canoe. A winding thread through the enormous range of country, unrolling itself before the wanderer like the magic skein in the story, he saw it tracked by wanderers of every kind, roaming from the more settled world, to those first nests of men. The floating theatre, dwellinghouse, hotel, museum, shop; the floating mechanism for screwing the trunks of mighty trees out of the mud, like antediluvian teeth; the rapidly- owing river, and the blazing woods; he left them all behind – town, city, and log-cabin, too; and floated up into the prairies and savannahs, among the deserted lodges of tribes of savages, and among their dead, lying alone on little wooden stages with their stark faces upward towards the sky. Among the blazing grass, and herds of buffaloes and wild horses, and among the wigwams of the fast-declining Indians, he began to consider how, in the eternal current of progress setting across this globe in one unchangeable direction, like the unseen agency that points the needle to the pole, the Chiefs who only dance the dances of their fathers, and will never have a new figure for a new tune, and the Medicine-men who know no Medicine but what was Medicine a hundred years ago, must be surely and inevitably swept from the earth, whether they be Choctawas, Mandans, Britons, Austrians, or Chinese. He was struck, too, by the reflection that savage nature was not by any means such a fine and noble spectacle as some delight to represent it. He found it a poor, greasy, paint-plastered, miserable thing enough; but a very little way above the beasts in most respects; in many customs a long way below them. It occurred to him that the ‘Big Bird,’ or the ‘Blue Fish,’ or any of the other Braves, was but a troublesome braggart after all; making a mighty whooping and holloaing about nothing particular, doing very little for science, not much more than the monkeys for art, scarcely anything worth mentioning for letters, and not often making the world greatly better than he found it. Civilisation, MR. BOOLEY concluded, was, on the whole, with all its blemishes, a more imposing sight, and a far better thing to stand by. MR. BOOLEY’S observations of the celestial bodies, on this voyage, were principally conned to the discovery of the alarming fact, that light had altogether departed from the moon; which presented the appearance of a white dinner-plate. The clouds, too, conducted themselves in an extraordinary manner, and assumed the most eccentric forms, while the sun rose and set in a very reckless way. On his return to his native country, however, he had the satisfaction of finding all these things as usual. It might have been expected that at his advanced age, retired from the active duties of life, blest with a competency, and happy in the affections of his numerous relations, MR. BOOLEY would now have settled himself down, to muse, for the remainder of his days, over the new stock of experience thus acquired. But travel had whetted, not satisfied, his appetite; and remembering that he had not seen the Ohio river, except at the point of its junction with the Mississippi, he returned to the United States, after a short interval of repose, and appearing suddenly at Cincinnati, the queen City of the West, traversed the clear waters of the Ohio to its Falls. In this expedition he had the pleasure of encountering a party of intelligent workmen from Birmingham who were making the same tour. Also his nephew Septimus, aged only thirteen. This intrepid boy had started from Peckham, in the old country, with two and sixpence sterling in his pocket; and had, when he encountered his uncle at a point of the Ohio River, called Snaggy Bar, still one shilling of that sum remaining! Again at home, MR. BOOLEY was so pressed by his appetite for knowledge as to remain at home only one day. At the expiration of that short period, he actually started for New Zealand. It is almost incredible that a man in MR. BOOLEY’S station of life, however adventurous his nature, and however few his artificial wants, should cast himself on a voyage of thirteen thousand miles from Great Britain with no other outfit than his watch and purse, and no arms but his walking-stick. We are, however, assured on the best authority, that thus he made the passage out, and thus appeared, in the act of wiping his smoking head with his pocket-handkerchief, at the entrance to Port Nicholson in Cook’s Straits: with the very spot within his range of vision, where his illustrious predecessor, Captain Cook, so unhappily slain at Owyhee, once anchored. After contemplating the swarms of cattle maintained on the hills in this neighbourhood, and always to be found by the stockmen when they are wanted, though nobody takes any care of them – which MR. BOOLEY considered the more remarkable, as their natural objection to be killed might be supposed to be augmented by the beauty of the climate – MR. BOOLEY proceeded to the town of Wellington. Having minutely examined it in every point, and made himself perfect master of the whole natural history and process of manufacture of the ax-plant, with its splendid yellow blossoms, he repaired to a Native Pa, which, unlike the Native Pa to which he was accustomed, he found to be a town, and not a parent. Here he observed a Chief with a long spear, making every demonstration of spitting a visitor, but really giving him the Maori or welcome – a word MR. BOOLEY is inclined to derive from the known hospitality of our English Mayors – and here also he observed some Europeans rubbing noses, by way of shaking hands, with the aboriginal inhabitants. After participating in an affray between the natives and the English soldiery, in which the former were defeated with great loss, he plunged into the Bush, and there camped out for some months, until he had made a survey of the whole country. While leading this wild life, encamped by night near a stream for the convenience of water, in a Ware, or hut, built open in the front, with a roof sloping backward to the ground, and made of poles, covered and enclosed with bark or fern, it was MR. BOOLEY’S singular fortune to encounter Miss Creeble, of The Misses Creebles’ Boarding and Day Establishment for Young Ladies, Kennington Oval, who, accompanied by three of her young ladies in search of information, had achieved this marvellous journey, and was then also in the Bush. Miss Creeble having very unsettled opinions on the subject of gunpowder, was afraid that it entered into the composition of the re before the tent, and that something would presently blow up or go off. MR. BOOLEY, as a more experienced traveller, assuring her that there was no danger; and calming the fears of the young ladies, an acquaintance commenced between them. They accomplished the rest of their travels in New Zealand together, and the best understanding prevailed among the little party. They took notice of the trees, as the Kaikatea, the Kauri, the Ruta, the Pukatea, the Hinau, and the Tanakaka – names which Miss Creeble had a bland relish in pronouncing. They admired the beautiful, arborescent, palm-like fern, abounding everywhere, and frequently exceeding thirty feet in height. They wondered at the curious owl, who is supposed to demand ‘More Pork!’ wherever he flies, and whom Miss Creeble termed ‘an admonition of Nature’s against greediness!’ And they contemplated some very rampant natives, of cannibal propensities. After many pleasing and instructive vicissitudes, they returned to England in company, where the ladies were safely put into a hackney cabriolet by MR. BOOLEY, in Leicester Square, London. And now, indeed, it might have been imagined that that roving spirit, tired of rambling about the world, would have settled down at home in peace and honor. Not so. After repairing to the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, and accompanying Her Majesty on her visit to Ireland (which he characterised as ‘a magnificent Exhibition’), MR. BOOLEY, with his usual absence of preparation, departed for Australia. Here again, he lived out in the Bush, passing his time chiefly among the working-gangs of convicts who were carrying timber. He was much impressed by the ferocious mastiffs chained to barrels, who assist the sentries in keeping guard over those misdoers. But he observed that the atmosphere in this part of the world, unlike the descriptions he had read of it, was extremely thick, and that objects were misty, and difficult to be discerned. From a certain unsteadiness and trembling, too, which he frequently remarked on the face of Nature, he was led to conclude that this part of the globe was subject to convulsive heavings and earthquakes. This caused him to return, with some precipitation. Again at home, and probably reflecting that the countries he had hitherto visited were new in the history of man, this extraordinary traveller resolved to proceed up the Nile to the second cataract. At the next performance of the great ceremony of ‘opening the Nile,’ at Cairo, Mr. BOOLEY was present. Along that wonderful river, associated with such stupendous fables, and with a history more prodigious than any fancy of man, in its vast and gorgeous facts; among temples, palaces, pyramids, colossal statues, crocodiles, tombs, obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin; he proceeded, like an opium-eater in a mighty dream. Thebes rose before him. An avenue of two hundred sphinxes, with not a head among them, - one of six or eight, or ten such avenues, all leading to a common centre, - conducted to the Temple of Carnak: its walls, eighty feet high and twenty-five feet thick, a mile and threequarters in circumference; the interior of its tremendous hall, occupying an area of forty-seven thousand square feet, large enough to hold four great Christian churches, and yet not more than one-seventh part of the entire ruin. Obelisks he saw, thousands of years of age, as sharp as if the chisel had cut their edges yesterday; colossal statues fifty-two feet high, with ‘little’ fingers five feet and a half long; a very world of ruins, that were marvellous old ruins in the days of Herodotus; tombs cut high up in the rock, where European travellers live solitary, as in stony crows’ nests, burning mummied Thebans, gentle and simple, - of the dried blood-royal maybe, - for their daily fuel, and making articles of furniture of their dusty coffins. Upon the walls of temples, in colors fresh and bright as those of yesterday, he read the conquests of great Egyptian monarchs; upon the tombs of humbler people in the same blooming symbols, he saw their ancient way of working at their trades, of riding, driving, feasting, playing games; of marrying and burying, and performing on instruments, and singing songs, and healing by the power of animal magnetism, and performing all the occupations of life. He visited the quarries of Silsileh, whence nearly all the red stone used by the ancient Egyptian architects and sculptors came; and there beheld enormous single-stoned colossal figures nearly finished – redly snowed up, as it were, and trying hard to break out – waiting for the finishing touches, never to be given by the mummied hands of thousands of years ago. In front of the temple of Abou Simbel, he saw gigantic figures sixty feet in height and twenty-one across the shoulders, dwarfing live men on camels down to pigmies. Elsewhere he beheld complacent monsters tumbled down like ill-used Dolls of a Titanic make, and staring with stupid benignity at the arid earth whereon their huge faces rested. His last look of that amazing land was at the Great Sphinx, buried in the sand – sand in its eyes, sand in its ears, sand drifted on its broken nose, sand lodging, feet deep, in the ledges of its head – struggling out of a wide sea of sand, as if to look hopelessly forth for the ancient glories once surrounding it. In this expedition, MR. BOOLEY acquired some curious information in reference to the language of hieroglyphics. He encountered the Simoom in the Desert, and lay down, with the rest of his caravan, until it had passed over. He also beheld on the horizon some of those stalking pillars of sand, apparently reaching from earth to heaven, which, with the red sun shining through them, so terrified the Arabs attendant on Bruce, that they fell prostrate, crying that the Day of Judgment was come. More Copts, Turks, Arabs, Fellahs, Bedouins, Mosques, Mamelukes, and Moosulmen he saw, than we have space to tell. His days were all Arabian Nights, and he saw wonders without end. This might have satiated any ordinary man, for a time at least. But MR. BOOLEY, being no ordinary man, within twenty-four hours of his arrival at home was making The Overland Journey to India. He has emphatically described this, as ‘a beautiful piece of scenery,’ and ‘a perfect picture.’ The appearance of Malta and Gibraltar he can never sufficiently commend. In crossing the Desert from Grand Cairo to Suez, he was particularly struck by the undulations of the Sandscape (he preferred that word to Landscape, as more expressive of the region), and by the incident of beholding a caravan upon its line of march; a spectacle which in the remembrance always affords him the utmost pleasure. Of the stations on the Desert, and the cinnamon gardens of Ceylon, he likewise entertains a lively recollection. Calcutta he praises also; though he has been heard to observe that the British military at that seat of Government were not as well proportioned as he could desire the soldiers of his country to be; and that the breed of horses there in use was susceptible of some improvement. Once more in his native land, with the vigor of his constitution unimpaired by the many toils and fatigues he had encountered, what had MR. BOOLEY now to do, but, full of years and honor, to recline upon the grateful appreciation of his Queen and country, always eager to distinguish peaceful merit? What had he now to do, but to receive the decoration ever ready to be bestowed, in England, on men deservedly distinguished, and to take his place among the best? He had this to do. He had yet to achieve the most astonishing enterprise for which he was reserved. In all the countries he had yet visited, he had seen no frost and snow. He resolved to make a voyage to the ice-bound Arctic Regions. In pursuance of this surprising determination, MR. BOOLEY accompanied the Expedition under Sir James Ross, consisting of Her Majesty's ships, the Enterprise and Investigator, which sailed from the river Thames on the 12th of May, 1848, and which, on the 11th of September, entered Port Leopold Harbor. In this inhospitable region, surrounded by eternal ice, cheered by no glimpse of the sun, shrouded in gloom and darkness, MR. BOOLEY passed the entire winter. The ships were covered in, and fortified all round with walls of ice and snow; the masts were frozen up; hoar frost settled on the yards, tops, shrouds, stays, and rigging; around, in every direction, lay an interminable waste, on which only the bright stars, the yellow moon, and the vivid Aurora Borealis looked, by night or day. And yet the desolate sublimity of this astounding spectacle was broken in a pleasant and surprising manner. In the remote solitude to which he had penetrated, MR. BOOLEY (who saw no Esquimaux during his stay, though he looked for them in every direction) had the happiness of encountering two Scotch gardeners; several English compositors, accompanied by their wives; three brass founders from the neighbourhood of Long Acre, London; two coach painters, a gold-beater and his only daughter, by trade a stay-maker; and several other working-people from sundry parts of Great Britain who had conceived the extraordinary idea of ‘holiday-making’ in the frozen wilderness. Hither too, had Miss Creeble and her three young ladies penetrated: the latter attired in braided pea-coats of a comparatively light material; and Miss Creeble defended from the inclemency of a Polar Winter by no other outer garment than a wadded Polka-jacket. He found this courageous lady in the act of explaining, to the youthful sharers of her toils, the various phases of nature by which they were surrounded. Her explanations were principally wrong, but her intentions always admirable. Cheered by the society of these fellow-adventurers, MR. BOOLEY slowly glided on into the summer season. And now, at midnight, all was bright and shining. Mountains of ice, wedged and broken into the strangest forms – jagged points, spires, pinnacles, pyramids, turrets, columns in endless succession and in infinite variety, flashing and sparkling with ten thousand hues, as though the treasures of the earth were frozen up in all that water appeared on every side. Masses of ice, floating and driving hither and thither, menaced the hardy voyagers with destruction; and threatened to crush their strong ships, like nutshells. But, below those ships was clear sea-water, now; the fortifying walls were gone; the yards, tops, shrouds and rigging, free from that hoary rust of long inaction, showed like themselves again; and the sails, bursting from the masts, like foliage which the welcome sun at length developed, spread themselves to the wind, and wafted the travellers away. In the short interval that has elapsed since his safe return to the land of his birth, MR. BOOLEY has decided on no new expedition; but he feels that he will yet be called upon to undertake one, perhaps of greater magnitude than any he has achieved, and frequently remarks, in his own easy way, that he wonders where the deuce he will be taken to next! Possessed of good health and good spirits, with powers unimpaired by all he has gone through, and with an increase of appetite still growing with what it feeds on, what may not be expected yet from this extraordinary man! It was only at the close of Easter week that, sitting in an arm chair, at a private Club called the Social Oysters, assembling at High-bury Barn, where he is much respected, this indefatigable traveller expressed himself in the following terms: ‘It is very gratifying to me,’ said he, ‘to have seen so much at my time of life, and to have acquired a knowledge of the countries I have visited, which I could not have derived from books alone. When I was a boy, such travelling would have been impossible, as the gigantic-moving-panorama or diorama mode of conveyance, which I have principally adopted (all my modes of conveyance have been pictorial), had then not been attempted. It is a delightful characteristic of these times, that new and cheap means are continually being devised, for conveying the results of actual experience, to those who are unable to obtain such experiences for themselves; and to bring them within the reach of the people – emphatically of the people; for it is they at large who are addressed in these endeavours, and not exclusive audiences. Hence,’ said MR. BOOLEY, ‘even if I see a run on an idea, like the panorama one, it awakens no ill-humour within me, but gives me pleasant thoughts. Some of the best results of actual travel are suggested by such means to those whose lot it is to stay at home. New worlds open out to them, beyond their little worlds, and widen their range of reflection, information, sympathy, and interest. The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among us all. I shall, therefore,’ said MR. BOOLEY, ‘now propose to the Social Oysters the healths of Mr. Banvard, Mr. Brees, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Allen, Mr. Prout, Messrs. Bonomi, Fahey, and Warren, Mr. Thomas Grieve, and Mr. Burford. Long life to them all, and more power to their pencils!’ The Social Oysters having drunk this toast with acclamation, MR. BOOLEY proceeded to entertain them with anecdotes of his travels. This he is in the habit of doing after they have feasted together, according to the manner of Sinbad the Sailor – except that he does not bestow upon the Social Oysters the munificent reward of one hundred sequins per night, for listening. https://www.dickenssearch.com/files/original/12/The_Amusements_of_the_People_[No._2]/1850-04-13-The_Amusements_of_the_People_No2.pdf 4fe3c05a8a49eec728310e9b2fdbcc0a Journalism Ngram Date Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101. 18500413 Publication The title of the newspaper/serial (if applicable) Household Words Publication Type E.g. newspaper/serial Weekly newspaper Ngram Text Hidden from users and search. Copy and paste from the Scripto transcription. Then check and uncheck HTML to strip out all formatting. Finally, search and remove any   (which is the HTML for spaces). This will prevent the Ngram picking up on irrelevant HTML. MR. WHELKS being much in the habit of recreating himself at a class of theatres called ‘Saloons,’ we repaired to one of these, not long ago, on a Monday evening; Monday being a great holiday-night with MR. WHELKS and his friends. The Saloon in question is the largest in London (that which is known as The Eagle, in the City Road, should be excepted from the generic term, as not presenting by any means the same class of entertainment), and is situate not far from Shoreditch Church. It announces ‘The People’s Theatre,’ as its second name. The prices of admission are, to the boxes, a shilling; to the pit, sixpence; to the lower gallery, fourpence; to the upper gallery and back seats, threepence. There is no halfprice. The opening piece on this occasion was described in the bills as ‘the greatest hit of the season, the grand new legendary and traditionary drama, combining supernatural agencies with historical facts, and identifying extraordinary superhuman causes with material, terrific, and powerful effects.’ All the queen's horses and all the queen’s men could not have drawn MR. WHELKS into the place like this description. Strengthened by lithographic representations of the principal super-human causes, combined with the most popular of the material, terrific, and powerful effects, it became irresistible. Consequently, we had already failed, once, in finding six square inches of room within the walls, to stand upon; and when we now paid our money for a little stage box, like a dry shower-bath, we did so in the midst of a stream of people who persisted in paying their’s for other parts of the house in despite of the representations of the Money-taker that it was ‘very full, everywhere.’ The outer avenues and passages of the People’s Theatre bore abundant testimony to the fact of its being frequented by very dirty people. Within, the atmosphere was far from odoriferous. The place was crammed to excess, in all parts. Among the audience were a large number of boys and youths, and a great many very young girls grown into bold women before they had well ceased to be children. These last were the worst features of the whole crowd, and were more prominent there than in any other sort of public assembly that we know of, except at a public execution. There was no drink supplied, beyond the contents of the porter-can (magnified in its dimensions, perhaps), which may be usually seen traversing the galleries of the largest Theatres as well as the least, and which was here seen everywhere. Huge ham sandwiches, piled on trays like deals in a timberyard, were handed about for sale to the hungry; and there was no stint of oranges cakes, brandyballs, or other similar refreshments. The Theatre was capacious, with a very large capable stage, well lighted, well appointed, and managed in a business-like, orderly manner in all respects; the performances had begun so early as a quarter past six, and had been then in progress for three-quarters of an hour. It was apparent here, as in the theatre we had previously visited, that one of the reasons of its great attraction was its being directly addressed to the common people, in the provision made for their seeing and hearing. Instead of being put away in a dark gap in the roof of an immense building, as in our once National Theatres, they were here in possession of eligible points of view, and thoroughly able to take in the whole performance. Instead of being at a great disadvantage in comparison with the mass of the audience, they were here the audience, for whose accommodation the place was made. We believe this to be one great cause of the success of these speculations. In whatever way the common people are addressed, whether in churches, chapels, schools, lecture-rooms, or theatres, to be successfully addressed they must be directly appealed to. No matter how good the feast, they will not come to it on mere sufferance. If, on looking round us, we find that the only things plainly and personally addressed to them, from quack medicines upwards, be bad or very defective things, - so much the worse for them and for all of us, and so much the more unjust and absurd the system which has haughtily abandoned a strong ground to such occupation. We will add that we believe these people have a right to be amused. A great deal that we consider to be unreasonable, is written and talked about not licensing these places of entertainment. We have already intimated that we believe a love of dramatic representations to be an inherent principle in human nature. In most conditions of human life of which we have any knowledge, from the Greeks to the Bosjesmen, some form of dramatic representation has always obtained.* We have a vast respect for county magistrates, and for the lord chamberlain; but we render greater deference to such extensive and immutable experience, and think it will outlive the whole existing court and commission. We would assuredly not bear harder on the fourpenny theatre, than on the four shilling theatre, or the four guinea theatre; but we would decidedly interpose to turn to some wholesome account the means of instruction which it has at command, and we would make that office of Dramatic Licenser, which, like many other offices, has become a mere piece of Court favour and dandy conventionality, a real, responsible, educational trust. We would have it exercise a sound supervision over the lower drama, instead of stopping the career of a real work of art, as it did in the case of Mr. Chorley’s play at the Surrey Theatre, but a few weeks since, for a sickly point of form. * In the remote interior of Africa, and among the North American Indians, this truth is exemplified in an equally striking manner. Who that saw the four grim, stunted, abject Bush-people at the Egyptian Hall – with two natural actors among them out of that number, one a male and the other a female – can forget how something human and imaginative gradually broke out in the little ugly man, when he was roused from crouching over the charcoal fire, into giving a dramatic representation of the tracking of a beast, the shooting of it with poisoned arrows, and the creature’s death? To return to Mr. Whelks. The audience, being able to see and hear, were very attentive. They were so closely packed, that they took a little time in settling down after any pause; but otherwise the general disposition was to lose nothing, and to check (in no choice language) any disturber of the business of the scene. On our arrival, MR. WHELKS had already followed Lady Hatton the Heroine (whom we faintly recognised as a mutilated theme of the late THOMAS INGOLDSBY) to the ‘Gloomy Dell and Suicide’s Tree,’ where Lady H. had encountered the ‘apparition of the dark man of doom,’ and heard the ‘fearful story of the Suicide.’ She had also ‘signed the compact in her own Blood;’ beheld ‘the Tombs rent asunder;’ seen ‘skeletons start from their graves, and gibber Mine, mine, for ever!’ and undergone all these little experiences, (each set forth in a separate line in the bill) in the compass of one act. It was not yet over, indeed, for we found a remote king of England of the name of ‘Enerry,’ refreshing himself with the spectacle of a dance in a Garden, which was interrupted by the ‘thrilling appearance of the Demon.’ This ‘superhuman cause’ (with black eyebrows slanting up into his temples, and red-foil cheekbones,) brought the Drop-Curtain down as we took possession of our Shower-Bath. It seemed, on the curtain’s going up again, that Lady Hatton had sold herself to the Powers of Darkness, on very high terms, and was now overtaken by remorse, and by jealousy too; the latter passion being excited by the beautiful Lady Rodolpha, ward to the king. It was to urge Lady Hatton on to the murder of this young female (as well as we could make out, but both we and MR. WHELKS found the incidents complicated) that the Demon appeared ‘once again in all his terrors.’ Lady Hatton had been leading a life of piety, but the Demon was not to have his bargain declared off, in right of any such artifices, and now offered a dagger for the destruction of Rodolpha. Lady Hatton hesitating to accept this trifle from Tartarus, the Demon, for certain subtle reasons of his own, proceeded to entertain her with a view of the ‘gloomy court-yard of a convent,’ and the apparitions of the ‘Skeleton Monk,’ and the ‘King of Terrors.’ Against these super-human causes, another superhuman cause, to wit, the ghost of Lady H.’s mother came into play, and greatly confounded the Powers of Darkness, by waving the ‘sacred emblem’ over the head of the else devoted Rodolpha, and causing her to sink into the earth. Upon this the Demon, losing his temper, fiercely invited Lady Hatton to ‘Be-old the tortures of the damned!’ and straightway conveyed her to a ‘grand and awful view of Pandemonium, and Lake of Transparent Boiling Fire,’ whereof, and also of ‘Prometheus chained, and the Vulture gnawing at his liver,’ MR. WHELKS was exceedingly derisive. The Demon still failing, even there, and still finding the ghost of the old lady greatly in his way, exclaimed that these vexations had such a remarkable effect upon his spirit as to ‘sear his eyeballs,’ and that he must go ‘deeper down,’ which he accordingly did. Hereupon it appeared that it was all a dream on Lady Hatton’s part, and that she was newly married and uncommonly happy. This put an end to the incongruous heap of nonsense, and set MR. WHELKS applauding mightily; for, except with the lake of transparent rolling fire (which was not half infernal enough for him), MR. WHELKS was infinitely contented with the whole of the proceedings. Ten thousand people, every week, all the year round, are estimated to attend this place of amusement. If it were closed to-morrow – if there were fifty such, and they were all closed to-morrow – the only result would be to cause that to be privately and evasively done, which is now publicly done; to render the harm of it much greater, and to exhibit the suppressive power of the law in an oppressive and partial light. The people who now resort here, will be amused somewhere. It is of no use to blink that fact, or to make pretences to the contrary. We had far better apply ourselves to improving the character of their amusement. It would not be exacting much, or exacting anything very difficult, to require that the pieces represented in these Theatres should have, at least, a good, plain, healthy purpose in them. To the end that our experiences might not be supposed to be partial or unfortunate, we went, the very next night, to the Theatre where we saw MAY MORNING, and found MR. WHELKS engaged in the study of an ‘Original old English Domestic and Romantic Drama,’ called 'EVA THE BETRAYED, OR THE LADYE OFLAMBYTHE.’ We proceed to develope the incidents which gradually unfolded themselves to MR. WHELKS’S understanding. One Geoffrey Thornley the younger, on a certain fine morning, married his father’s ward, Eva the Betrayed, the Ladye of Lambythe. She had become the betrayed, - in right or in wrong – of designing Geoffrey’s machinations; for that corrupt individual, knowing her to be under promise of marriage to Walter More, a young mariner (of whom he was accustomed to make slighting mention, as ‘a minion’), represented the said More to be no more, and obtained the consent of the too trusting Eva to their immediate union. Now, it came to pass, by a singular coincidence, that on the identical morning of the marriage, More came home, and was taking a walk about the scenes of his boyhood – a little faded since that time when he rescued ‘Wilbert the Hunchback’ from some very rough treatment. This misguided person, in return, immediately fell to abusing his preserver in round terms, giving him to understand that he (the preserved) hated ‘manerkind, wither two eckerceptions,’ one of them being the deceiving Geoffrey, whose retainer he was, and for whom he felt an unconquerable attachment; the other, a relative, whom, in a similar redundancy of emphasis, adapted to the requirements of MR. WHELKS, he called his ‘assister.’ This misanthrope also made the cold-blooded declaration, ‘There was a timer when I loved my fellow keretures till they deserpised me. Now, I live only to witness man’s disergherace and woman’s misery!’ In furtherance of this amiable purpose of existence, he directed More to where the bridal procession was coming home from church, and Eva recognised More, and More reproached Eva, and there was a great to-do, and a violent struggling, before certain social villagers who were celebrating the event with morris-dances. Eva was borne off in a tearing condition, and the bill very truly observed that the end of that part of the business was ‘despair and madness.’ Geoffrey, Geoffrey, why were you already married to another! Why could you not be true to your lawful wife Katherine, instead of deserting her, and leaving her to come tumbling into public-houses (on account of weakness) in search of you! You might have known what it would end in, Geoffrey Thornley! You might have known that she would come up to your house on your wedding day with her marriage certificate in her pocket, determined to expose you. You might have known beforehand, as you now very composedly observe, that you would have ‘but one course to pursue.’ That course clearly is to wind your right hand in Katherine’s long hair, wrestle with her, stab her, throw down the body behind the door (Cheers from MR. WHELKS), and tell the devoted Hunchback to get rid of it. On the devoted Hunchback’s finding that it is the body of his ‘assister,’ and taking her marriage-certificate from her pocket and denouncing you, of course you have still but one course to pursue, and that is to charge the crime upon him, and have him carried off with all speed into the ‘deep and massive dungeons beneath Thornley Hall.’ More having, as he was rather given to boast, ‘a goodly vessel on the lordly Thames,’ had better have gone away with it, weather permitting, than gone after Eva. Naturally, he got carried down to the dungeons too, for lurking about, and got put into the next dungeon to the Hunchback, then expiring from poison. And there they were, hard and fast, like two wild beasts in dens, trying to get glimpses of each other through the bars, to the unutterable interest of MR. WHELKS. But when the Hunchback made himself known, and when More did the same; and when the Hunchback said he had got the certificate which rendered Eva’s marriage illegal; and when More raved to have it given to him, and when the Hunchback (as having some grains of misanthropy in him to the last) persisted in going into his dying agonies in a remote corner of his cage, and took unheard-of trouble not to die anywhere near the bars that were within More’s reach; MR. WHELKS applauded to the echo. At last the Hunchback was persuaded to stick the certificate on the point of a dagger, and hand it in; and that done, died extremely hard, knocking himself violently about, to the very last gasp, and certainly making the most of all the life that was in him. Still, More had yet to get out of his den before he could turn this certificate to any account. His first step was to make such a violent uproar as to bring into his presence a certain ‘Norman Free Lance’ who kept watch and ward over him. His second, to inform this warrior, in the style of the Polite Letter-Writer, that ‘circumstances had occurred’ rendering it necessary that he should be immediately let out. The warrior declining to submit himself to the force of these circumstances, Mr. More proposed to him, as a gentleman and a man of honour, to allow him to step out into the gallery, and there adjust an old feud subsisting between them, by single combat. The unwary Free Lance, consenting to this reasonable proposal, was shot from behind by the comic man, whom he bitterly designated as ‘a snipe’ for that action, and then died excedingly game. All this occurred in one day – the bridal day of the Ladye of Lambythe; and now MR. WHELKS concentrated all his energies into a focus, bent forward, looked straight in front of him, and held his breath. For, the night of the eventful day being come, MR. WHELKS was admitted to the ‘bridal chamber of the Ladye of Lambythe,’ where he beheld a toilet table, and a particularly large and desolate four-post bedstead. Here the Ladye, having dismissed her bridesmaids, was interrupted in deploring her unhappy fate, by the entrance of her husband; and matters, under these circumstances, were proceeding to very desperate extremities, when the Ladye (by this time aware of the existence of the certificate) found a dagger on the dressing-table, and said, ‘Attempt to enfold me in thy pernicious embrace, and this poignard!’ &c. He did attempt it, however, for all that, and he and the Ladye were dragging one another about like wrestlers, when Mr. More broke open the door, and entering with the whole domestic establishment and a Middlesex magistrate, took him into custody and claimed his bride. It is but fair to MR. WHELKS to remark on one curious fact in this entertainment. When the situations were very strong indeed, they were very like what some favourite situations in the Italian Opera would be to a profoundly deaf spectator. The despair and madness at the end of the first act, the business of the long hair, and the struggle in the bridal chamber, were as like the conventional passion of the Italian singers, as the orchestra was unlike the opera band, or its ‘hurries’ unlike the music of the great composers. So do extremes meet; and so is there some hopeful congeniality between what will excite MR. WHELKS, and what will rouse a Duchess. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'The Amusements of the People' (No. 2) Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Lydia Craig Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Dickens Journals Online. Used by permission. Type The nature or genre of the resource Journalism article Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 1850-04-13-The_Amusements_of_the_People_No2 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Household Words, vol.1, no.3, 13 April 1850, pp. 57-60. Dickens Journals Online, <a href="https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-57.html">https://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-i/page-57.html</a>. Bibliographic Citation A bibliographic reference for the resource. Recommended practice is to include sufficient bibliographic detail to identify the resource as unambiguously as possible. Dickens, Charles. 'The Amusements of the People' (No.2). Dickens Search. Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. <a href="https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-13-The_Amusements_of_the_People_No2">https://dickenssearch.com/journalism/1850-04-13-The_Amusements_of_the_People_No2</a>. Description An account of the resource Published in Household Words (13 April 1850) Scripto Transcription A written representation of a document. MR. WHELKS being much in the habit of recreating himself at a class of theatres called ‘Saloons,’ we repaired to one of these, not long ago, on a Monday evening; Monday being a great holiday-night with MR. WHELKS and his friends. The Saloon in question is the largest in London (that which is known as The Eagle, in the City Road, should be excepted from the generic term, as not presenting by any means the same class of entertainment), and is situate not far from Shoreditch Church. It announces ‘The People’s Theatre,’ as its second name. The prices of admission are, to the boxes, a shilling; to the pit, sixpence; to the lower gallery, fourpence; to the upper gallery and back seats, threepence. There is no halfprice. The opening piece on this occasion was described in the bills as ‘the greatest hit of the season, the grand new legendary and traditionary drama, combining supernatural agencies with historical facts, and identifying extraordinary superhuman causes with material, terrific, and powerful effects.’ All the queen's horses and all the queen’s men could not have drawn MR.WHELKS into the place like this description. Strengthened by lithographic representations of the principal super-human causes, combined with the most popular of the material, terrific, and powerful effects, it became irresistible. Consequently, we had already failed, once, in finding six square inches of room within the walls, to stand upon; and when we now paid our money for a little stage box, like a dry shower-bath, we did so in the midst of a stream of people who persisted in paying their’s for other parts of the house in despite of the representations of the Money-taker that it was ‘very full, everywhere.’ The outer avenues and passages of the People’s Theatre bore abundant testimony to the fact of its being frequented by very dirty people. Within, the atmosphere was far from odoriferous. The place was crammed to excess, in all parts. Among the audience were a large number of boys and youths, and a great many very young girls grown into bold women before they had well ceased to be children. These last were the worst features of the whole crowd, and were more prominent there than in any other sort of public assembly that we know of, except at a public execution. There was no drink supplied, beyond the contents of the porter-can (magnified in its dimensions, perhaps), which may be usually seen traversing the galleries of the largest Theatres as well as the least, and which was here seen everywhere. Huge ham sandwiches, piled on trays like deals in a timberyard, were handed about for sale to the hungry; and there was no stint of oranges cakes, brandyballs, or other similar refreshments. The Theatre was capacious, with a very large capable stage, well lighted, well appointed, and managed in a business-like, orderly manner in all respects; the performances had begun so early as a quarter past six, and had been then in progress for three-quarters of an hour. It was apparent here, as in the theatre we had previously visited, that one of the reasons of its great attraction was its being directly addressed to the common people, in the provision made for their seeing and hearing. Instead of being put away in a dark gap in the roof of an immense building, as in our once National Theatres, they were here in possession of eligible points of view, and thoroughly able to take in the whole performance. Instead of being at a great disadvantage in comparison with the mass of the audience, they were here the audience, for whose accommodation the place was made. We believe this to be one great cause of the success of these speculations. In whatever way the common people are addressed, whether in churches, chapels, schools, lecture-rooms, or theatres, to be successfully addressed they must be directly appealed to. No matter how good the feast, they will not come to it on mere sufferance. If, on looking round us, we find that the only things plainly and personally addressed to them, from quack medicines upwards, be bad or very defective things, - so much the worse for them and for all of us, and so much the more unjust and absurd the system which has haughtily abandoned a strong ground to such occupation. We will add that we believe these people have a right to be amused. A great deal that we consider to be unreasonable, is written and talked about not licensing these places of entertainment. We have already intimated that we believe a love of dramatic representations to be an inherent principle in human nature. In most conditions of human life of which we have any knowledge, from the Greeks to the Bosjesmen, some form of dramatic representation has always obtained.* We have a vast respect for county magistrates, and for the lord chamberlain; but we render greater deference to such extensive and immutable experience, and think it will outlive the whole existing court and commission. We would assuredly not bear harder on the fourpenny theatre, than on the four shilling theatre, or the four guinea theatre; but we would decidedly interpose to turn to some wholesome account the means of instruction which it has at command, and we would make that office of Dramatic Licenser, which, like many other offices, has become a mere piece of Court favour and dandy conventionality, a real, responsible, educational trust. We would have it exercise a sound supervision over the lower drama, instead of stopping the career of a real work of art, as it did in the case of Mr. Chorley’s play at the Surrey Theatre, but a few weeks since, for a sickly point of form. * In the remote interior of Africa, and among the North American Indians, this truth is exemplified in an equally striking manner. Who that saw the four grim, stunted, abject Bush-people at the Egyptian Hall – with two natural actors among them out of that number, one a male and the other a female – can forget how something human and imaginative gradually broke out in the little ugly man, when he was roused from crouching over the charcoal fire, into giving a dramatic representation of the tracking of a beast, the shooting of it with poisoned arrows, and the creature’s death? To return to Mr. Whelks. The audience, being able to see and hear, were very attentive. They were so closely packed, that they took a little time in settling down after any pause; but otherwise the general disposition was to lose nothing, and to check (in no choice language) any disturber of the business of the scene. On our arrival, MR. WHELKS had already followed Lady Hatton the Heroine (whom we faintly recognised as a mutilated theme of the late THOMAS INGOLDSBY) to the ‘Gloomy Dell and Suicide’s Tree,’ where Lady H. had encountered the ‘apparition of the dark man of doom,’ and heard the ‘fearful story of the Suicide.’ She had also ‘signed the compact in her own Blood;’ beheld ‘the Tombs rent asunder;’ seen ‘skeletons start from their graves, and gibber Mine, mine, for ever!’ and undergone all these little experiences, (each set forth in a separate line in the bill) in the compass of one act. It was not yet over, indeed, for we found a remote king of England of the name of ‘Enerry,’ refreshing himself with the spectacle of a dance in a Garden, which was interrupted by the ‘thrilling appearance of the Demon.’ This ‘superhuman cause’ (with black eyebrows slanting up into his temples, and red-foil cheekbones,) brought the Drop-Curtain down as we took possession of our Shower-Bath. It seemed, on the curtain’s going up again, that Lady Hatton had sold herself to the Powers of Darkness, on very high terms, and was now overtaken by remorse, and by jealousy too; the latter passion being excited by the beautiful Lady Rodolpha, ward to the king. It was to urge Lady Hatton on to the murder of this young female (as well as we could make out, but both we and MR. WHELKS found the incidents complicated) that the Demon appeared ‘once again in all his terrors.’ Lady Hatton had been leading a life of piety, but the Demon was not to have his bargain declared off, in right of any such artifices, and now offered a dagger for the destruction of Rodolpha. Lady Hatton hesitating to accept this trifle from Tartarus, the Demon, for certain subtle reasons of his own, proceeded to entertain her with a view of the ‘gloomy court-yard of a convent,’ and the apparitions of the ‘Skeleton Monk,’ and the ‘King of Terrors.’ Against these super-human causes, another superhuman cause, to wit, the ghost of Lady H.’s mother came into play, and greatly confounded the Powers of Darkness, by waving the ‘sacred emblem’ over the head of the else devoted Rodolpha, and causing her to sink into the earth. Upon this the Demon, losing his temper, fiercely invited Lady Hatton to ‘Be-old the tortures of the damned!’ and straightway conveyed her to a ‘grand and awful view of Pandemonium, and Lake of Transparent Boiling Fire,’ whereof, and also of ‘Prometheus chained, and the Vulture gnawing at his liver,’ MR. WHELKS was exceedingly derisive. The Demon still failing, even there, and still finding the ghost of the old lady greatly in his way, exclaimed that these vexations had such a remarkable effect upon his spirit as to ‘sear his eyeballs,’ and that he must go ‘deeper down,’ which he accordingly did. Hereupon it appeared that it was all a dream on Lady Hatton’s part, and that she was newly married and uncommonly happy. This put an end to the incongruous heap of nonsense, and set MR. WHELKS applauding mightily; for, except with the lake of transparent rolling fire (which was not half infernal enough for him), MR. WHELKS was infinitely contented with the whole of the proceedings. Ten thousand people, every week, all the year round, are estimated to attend this place of amusement. If it were closed to-morrow – if there were fifty such, and they were all closed to-morrow – the only result would be to cause that to be privately and evasively done, which is now publicly done; to render the harm of it much greater, and to exhibit the suppressive power of the law in an oppressive and partial light. The people who now resort here, will be amused somewhere. It is of no use to blink that fact, or to make pretences to the contrary. We had far better apply ourselves to improving the character of their amusement. It would not be exacting much, or exacting anything very difficult, to require that the pieces represented in these Theatres should have, at least, a good, plain, healthy purpose in them. To the end that our experiences might not be supposed to be partial or unfortunate, we went, the very next night, to the Theatre where we saw MAY MORNING, and found MR. WHELKS engaged in the study of an ‘Original old English Domestic and Romantic Drama,’ called 'EVA THE BETRAYED, OR THE LADYE OFLAMBYTHE.’ We proceed to develope the incidents which gradually unfolded themselves to MR. WHELKS’S understanding. One Geoffrey Thornley the younger, on a certain fine morning, married his father’s ward, Eva the Betrayed, the Ladye of Lambythe. She had become the betrayed, - in right or in wrong – of designing Geoffrey’s machinations; for that corrupt individual, knowing her to be under promise of marriage to Walter More, a young mariner (of whom he was accustomed to make slighting mention, as ‘a minion’), represented the said More to be no more, and obtained the consent of the too trusting Eva to their immediate union. Now, it came to pass, by a singular coincidence, that on the identical morning of the marriage, More came home, and was taking a walk about the scenes of his boyhood – a little faded since that time when he rescued ‘Wilbert the Hunchback’ from some very rough treatment. This misguided person, in return, immediately fell to abusing his preserver in round terms, giving him to understand that he (the preserved) hated ‘manerkind, wither two eckerceptions,’ one of them being the deceiving Geoffrey, whose retainer he was, and for whom he felt an unconquerable attachment; the other, a relative, whom, in a similar redundancy of emphasis, adapted to the requirements of MR. WHELKS, he called his ‘assister.’ This misanthrope also made the cold-blooded declaration, ‘There was a timer when I loved my fellow keretures till they deserpised me. Now, I live only to witness man’s disergherace and woman’s misery!’ In furtherance of this amiable purpose of existence, he directed More to where the bridal procession was coming home from church, and Eva recognised More, and More reproached Eva, and there was a great to-do, and a violent struggling, before certain social villagers who were celebrating the event with morris-dances. Eva was borne off in a tearing condition, and the bill very truly observed that the end of that part of the business was ‘despair and madness.’ Geoffrey, Geoffrey, why were you already married to another! Why could you not be true to your lawful wife Katherine, instead of deserting her, and leaving her to come tumbling into public-houses (on account of weakness) in search of you! You might have known what it would end in, Geoffrey Thornley! You might have known that she would come up to your house on your wedding day with her marriage certificate in her pocket, determined to expose you. You might have known beforehand, as you now very composedly observe, that you would have ‘but one course to pursue.’ That course clearly is to wind your right hand in Katherine’s long hair, wrestle with her, stab her, throw down the body behind the door (Cheers from MR. WHELKS), and tell the devoted Hunchback to get rid of it. On the devoted Hunchback’s finding that it is the body of his ‘assister,’ and taking her marriage-certificate from her pocket and denouncing you, of course you have still but one course to pursue, and that is to charge the crime upon him, and have him carried off with all speed into the ‘deep and massive dungeons beneath Thornley Hall.’ More having, as he was rather given to boast, ‘a goodly vessel on the lordly Thames,’ had better have gone away with it, weather permitting, than gone after Eva. Naturally, he got carried down to the dungeons too, for lurking about, and got put into the next dungeon to the Hunchback, then expiring from poison. And there they were, hard and fast, like two wild beasts in dens, trying to get glimpses of each other through the bars, to the unutterable interest of MR. WHELKS. But when the Hunchback made himself known, and when More did the same; and when the Hunchback said he had got the certificate which rendered Eva’s marriage illegal; and when More raved to have it given to him, and when the Hunchback (as having some grains of misanthropy in him to the last) persisted in going into his dying agonies in a remote corner of his cage, and took unheard-of trouble not to die anywhere near the bars that were within More’s reach; MR. WHELKS applauded to the echo. At last the Hunchback was persuaded to stick the certificate on the point of a dagger, and hand it in; and that done, died extremely hard, knocking himself violently about, to the very last gasp, and certainly making the most of all the life that was in him. Still, More had yet to get out of his den before he could turn this certificate to any account. His first step was to make such a violent uproar as to bring into his presence a certain ‘Norman Free Lance’ who kept watch and ward over him. His second, to inform this warrior, in the style of the Polite Letter-Writer, that ‘circumstances had occurred’ rendering it necessary that he should be immediately let out. The warrior declining to submit himself to the force of these circumstances, Mr. More proposed to him, as a gentleman and a man of honour, to allow him to step out into the gallery, and there adjust an old feud subsisting between them, by single combat. The unwary Free Lance, consenting to this reasonable proposal, was shot from behind by the comic man, whom he bitterly designated as ‘a snipe’ for that action, and then died excedingly game. All this occurred in one day – the bridal day of the Ladye of Lambythe; and now MR. WHELKS concentrated all his energies into a focus, bent forward, looked straight in front of him, and held his breath. For, the night of the eventful day being come, MR. WHELKS was admitted to the ‘bridal chamber of the Ladye of Lambythe,’ where he beheld a toilet table, and a particularly large and desolate four-post bedstead. Here the Ladye, having dismissed her bridesmaids, was interrupted in deploring her unhappy fate, by the entrance of her husband; and matters, under these circumstances, were proceeding to very desperate extremities, when the Ladye (by this time aware of the existence of the certificate) found a dagger on the dressing-table, and said, ‘Attempt to enfold me in thy pernicious embrace, and this poignard!’ &c. He did attempt it, however, for all that, and he and the Ladye were dragging one another about like wrestlers, when Mr. More broke open the door, and entering with the whole domestic establishment and a Middlesex magistrate, took him into custody and claimed his bride. It is but fair to MR. WHELKS to remark on one curious fact in this entertainment. When the situations were very strong indeed, they were very like what some favourite situations in the Italian Opera would be to a profoundly deaf spectator. The despair and madness at the end of the first act, the business of the long hair, and the struggle in the bridal chamber, were as like the conventional passion of the Italian singers, as the orchestra was unlike the opera band, or its ‘hurries’ unlike the music of the great composers. So do extremes meet; and so is there some hopeful congeniality between what will excite MR. WHELKS, and what will rouse a Duchess.