Of course there was
a public-house at both ends of the court. There they fled, one and
all, for shelter, and warmth, and society, and forgetfulness. And
they came out in deeper debt, with inflamed senses and burning brains,
and an unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to
satiate. And in a few months the father was in prison, the wife
dying, the son a criminal, and the daughters on the street. _Multiply
this by half a million, and you will be beneath the truth_.
No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the
"awful East," with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green,
and Wapping to the East India Docks. The colour of life is grey and
drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bath
tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the
gods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness
becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange,
vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it
falls, is more like grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestones
are scummed with grease.
Here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey miles
of dingy brick.
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