"
But he went further, this blind man, and in his voice was the bitterness
of an afflicted man to whom society did not give enough to eat. He was
one of an enormous army of blind in London, and he said that in the blind
homes they did not receive half enough to eat. He gave the diet for a
day:-
Breakfast--0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Dinner --3 oz. meat.
1 slice of bread.
0.5 lb. potatoes.
Supper --0.75 pint of skilly and dry bread.
Oscar Wilde, God rest his soul, voices the cry of the prison child,
which, in varying degree, is the cry of the prison man and woman:-
"The second thing from which a child suffers in prison is hunger. The
food that is given to it consists of a piece of usually bad-baked prison
bread and a tin of water for breakfast at half-past seven. At twelve
o'clock it gets dinner, composed of a tin of coarse Indian meal stirabout
(skilly), and at half-past five it gets a piece of dry bread and a tin of
water for its supper. This diet in the case of a strong grown man is
always productive of illness of some kind, chiefly of course diarrhoea,
with its attendant weakness. In fact, in a big prison astringent
medicines are served out regularly by the warders as a matter of course.
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