It
includes a number of small, mean, and squalid streets; there is not
anywhere in the great city a collection of streets smaller or meaner.
The people live in tenement-houses, very often one family for every
room--in one street, for instance, of fifty houses, there are one
hundred and thirty families. The men are nearly all
dock-labourers--the descendants of the scuffle-hunters, whose
traditions still survive, perhaps, in an unconquerable hatred of
government. The women and girls are shirt-makers, tailoresses,
jam-makers, biscuit-makers, match-makers, and rope-makers.
In this parish the only gentlefolk are the clergy and the ladies
working in the parish for the Church; there are no substantial
shopkeepers, no private residents, no lawyer, no doctor, no
professional people of any kind; there are thirty-six public-houses,
or one to every hundred adults, so that if each spends on an average
only two shillings a week, the weekly takings of each are ten pounds.
Till lately there were forty-six, but ten have been suppressed; there
are no places of public entertainment, there are no books, there are
hardly any papers except some of those Irish papers whose continued
sufferance gives the lie to their own everlasting charges of English
tyranny.
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