# The Soul of London/Chapter 3

WORK IN LONDON
CHAPTER III
WORK IN LONDON
The Thames is the oldest, as it is the most majestic of the roads into London, but its character as a road is obscured, justly enough. Along the others we travel to reach our work, our love, to meet our death. Along the Thames those who travel are working always, the passengers it bears leave it at the very gates of London.
Gravesend, with its high front of piers characteristic in their dark and rigid architecture of piles, is a place of romance to the sailor who comes to London from the deep waters. It is the signal that, after his ninety days of empty sea and empty sky, he has come very near to his harbours. Sailors speak of the place with the remembrance of old and good times, giving a soft look to the eyes, a soft tone to the voice; they are the look and tone of those who think about old emotions, of pleasure, of impatience, of the times when they said "Only a day more now." The river front of Gravesend means that.
On the other bank a square, large red hotel faces ​these pile structures across the broad gray sweep of water and air. It marks the gates of the lowest docks, and here, for the river, psychological London begins. It does not much matter whether the ship turns in there at Tilbury or whether it works up to the docks in Gallions Reach, or to the others in the heart of town itself. Work for them ends there.
It is taken up by the red-sailed barges. They tack in their engrossed manner across and across the wide reaches; they pass under the shadow of dull clouds, of rain squalls, under watery sunlight, the arms of aligned cranes, the smoke from factory chimneys. They linger, going about, in front of bluffs covered with gray buildings and black trees; in exposed stretches of water they are covered, right over the hatches, by the wash from the sea-tarnished sides of steamers so vast, so silent in their motions, so centred in themselves, that as, from the deck of a barge, one looks at their passing, it is hard to realise that they and not the low banks that they obscure and seem to swallow up, are gliding by.
These barges running up from Rotherhithe or from much farther out to sea, pass cement factories, sand works, anchored groups of skiffs where sand is hauled laboriously in buckets from the bottom of the river; they pass petroleum depôts where, side by side, gray retorts are like those of gas works; they pass candle factories and manure warehouses. They tack about gravely one after another beside a black smallpox hospital that, out in the river, is one half ship and the other a pier with a dingy and mournful resemblance to those ​of fashionable watering places. They move, these barges, in squadrons in a continual and mazy slant, red sail cutting diagonally across red sail, with here and there a large rent, and here and there a white patch. They give the "character" to this road into London, to this river of toil. Their only rivals are the sludge boats, a fleet of large steamers owned by the County Council. These are running in a continuous string; they go swiftly down stream, low in the water, and showing all black. They come back empty, so high in the bows that a great streak of red shows from the keel upwards; they swing round in front of one or other of the sewage works, ready to take in another cargo to drop into the sea beyond the Nore as soon as the tide serves. The barges, however, carry coke, carry sand, carry gravel, and a hundred other things. Occasionally one loaded very high with a stack passes them all, looking for all the world like a man buried beneath a haycock; occasionally these, too, are passed by very gaily painted, astonishingly swift, racing barges, that thread the close traffic like brilliant shuttles, and roar and rustle through the water.
So at last, keeping out of the way of the sludge boats, out of the way of powder barges, of great steamers of the famous Lines, of swift fish carriers that raise an enormous wash, and of the Belle steamers that they detest most of all, the small flotillas come to the top of Tipcock Reach. Hitherto the factories have been scarce, mostly unsavoury and solitary. But a beacon rises up beyond the wharf of a powder factory ​that faces a manure warehouse. This beacon is spindly, tall, of iron lattice work. And all beyond it the river runs as between high walls, shining with a more metallic glitter under smoke and the shadows of groves of masts, crane-arms, chains, cordage. A train of the large steamers lies heavy on the water, hooting signals to agents ashore, waiting at the dock gates for water enough to enter. This is Gallions Reach, and from here upwards London offers a solid black facing to its river. From here, too, the little companies of barges begin to break up. Some stop near the dock gates, some turn into the London canals. Some wait near Waterloo, some go far above the bridges. Here at any rate the river as a road into London ends. It is all the time a gray tide of work, a moving platform of workers.
Workers in London divide themselves, roughly, into those who sell the labour of their bodies and those who sell their attentions. You see men in the streets digging trenches, pulling stout wires out of square holes in pavements, pecking away among greasy vapours at layers of asphalte, scattering shovelfuls of crushed gravel under the hoofs of slipping horses and under the crunching tyres of wheels. If walls would fall out of offices you would see paler men and women adding up the records of money paid to these others. That, with infinite variations, is work in London.
You get the two things united here and there. The other day I was in Tilbury Docks. (It is difficult to get away from this river.) The vast, empty squares of water lay parapeted, arbitrary and dim in their eternal ​perspectives; the straight lines of the water, the straight lines of the parapets, of the bottoms of the goods sheds, of the tops, of the gray corrugated roofs, all dwindled together into the immense and empty distances. The rows of four-footed, gaunt, inactive cranes, painted a dull rust colour, and the few enormous steamers at the inner ends of the quays—all these things were wetted, fused and confused in their outlines, beneath a weeping sky in which a drapery of clouds had the look of a badly blotted water-colour painting, still wet and inefficient. Knots of stevedores in dim and neutral coloured clothes seemed to be doing nothing perfunctorily in the shadow of the great hulls.
A big, red faced, heavy-moustached man in blue clothes and with cheerfully brass-bound cap and shoulders, hurried out of a tin shed. It was labelled: "Office of the Steam Navigation Co." He slipped hastily between the black side of one of the huge sheds and a gray, rusty and sea-fretted liner. Her lower sides gaped in large holes screened with canvas, and from moment to moment obscured by grimy buckets of coal that rose from a lighter; her square, white upper deck cabins were being painted more white by painters in white jackets. He hurried very fast, with a masterful and engrossed step, a cheerful blue figure with pink cheeks, dodging mechanically the pools of greasy water and the fat black mud between the sleepers. He dived into another small office. He was the chief officer of the liner that was coaling and he had a pencil behind his ear.
​He was uniting as it were the labours of the men shovelling in the buckets of coal, of the men uttering melancholy wails as they swung-in a white boat, of the men hooking up long planks for the painters to sit on, and of the painters themselves on the upper decks. With that pencil he controlled all their labours, as if he were twisting them into an invisible rope which passed through that tin office and up, far away into town where other pencils and other pens recorded these things on large pages, digested them into summaries and finally read them out to Boards of Directors.
Those invisible ropes—they are strong enough in all conscience—seem to be the only tie between these two classes of workers, between these two great camps set one against another. It is astonishing how different London looks from one or from the other end. Speaking broadly, the man who expresses himself with a pen on paper sees his London from the west. At the worst he hopes to end with that view. His London of breathing space, his West End, extends from say Chiswick to say Portland Place. His dense London is the City as far as Fenchurch Street, his East End ends with what he calls "Whitechapel".
The other sees his London of elbow room extend from say Purfleet to say Blackwall. He is conscious of having, as it were at his back, the very green and very black stretches of the Essex marshes dotted with large solitary factories and small solitary farms. His dense London, his City, lies along the line from Blackwall to ​Fenchurch Street. Beyond that, the City proper, the city of the Bank and the Mansion House, is already a place rather of dilettante trifling. Its streets are tidied up, its buildings ornamented and spacious. The end of the West End is for him the Piccadilly Fountain, and this latter quarter of large, almost clean, stone buildings, broad swept streets and a comparative glare of light, is already a foreign land, slightly painful because it is so strange. That, further west, there may be another enormous London never really enters his everyday thoughts. He reads about it sometimes, he hears it spoken of; sometimes perhaps in a holiday frame of mind he goes through it. But it never "matters" to him, it is never like his familiar, rigid rows of streets all of blackened bricks, windows that are square openings in boxes and plasters of blue and white and begrimed enamelled iron advertisements. These are familiar, these are real life, these are homely, as if warm and alive. The other he does not much want to think about, it would worry him. In just the same way the penworker does not want to think about several dark towns of a million or so east of "Whitechapel". It is an unpleasant thought. Given ill-luck, a craving for drink, disease or one or other of the fatal falls of humanity, he too might have to sink into those gloomy and shadowy depths. The other man is vaguely troubled at the idea of the West. There he would have to be tidy, constrained, worried about specks on his clothes, careful of his tongue, less than a man.
These two types, in their mass very human and very ​comprehensible, are in general very foreign and in general very hostile the one to the other. Yet upon their combined workings the life of London depends. And because there they may work one into another like the teeth of cogwheels revolving antithetically, London attracts them. For the obvious secret of London, its magnetism, is the work that it offers to be done or to be "organised". You go there whether you got your training at the tail of a plough in Kent or in Lithuania, with the most salient fact in your experience the knowledge of a pollard willow in which there is always a dog-fox asleep; or whether beside the Isis, on the links of St. Andrews, or in the University of Bonn you learnt the sorrows of Achilles, the binomial theorem, or the chemical formulae of all the coal tar by-products. You go there, whether your ideal is to get a wage of fifteen shillings a week more with lighter work and shorter hours, or whether you dream that before "retiring" you will get yourself turned into a limited company with a capital of six cyphers at the tail of a numeral—you go there to get "something to do". That is the grosser view.
But the finer side is the romantic, the adventurous, the dreamer's spirit in mankind to whom work itself in imagination remains the primal curse. In certain cellars here and there in the City, in cellars that have been oil-clothed and tiled, garnished with rows of hat-pegs and with leather seats like planks along the walls, above white marble table-tops that loom like horizontal tombstones through the delicate films of cigarette smoke, ​contending in the dim atmosphere with the delicate fragrance of coffee—in a City Mecca, in fact—you will see men sit. Their faces of the palest, of the ruddiest, of the blondest, of the most black-avised, will be all united into one serious frown over black and white stones, like smaller tombstones standing or lying prone as if in a disastrously wrecked graveyard. A man will rise in a far corner, pull the lapels of his coat one towards another, shake his umbrella a little, and walk away with a swift step and a half self-conscious air. A young man will look up and lose for a moment his engrossed expression. He will stop his companion's domino in mid air with "Do you know who that is? Why, Plumly!"—"What, Plumly of the Dash United?" They will gaze with half awe at the disappearing trouser-ends and boot-heels on the stairs.
"Yes. Plumly was only an auctioneers' clerk in Honiton, where my father is. And now look what he's worth! That was what made me come to town." The eyes of both young men will have serious and reflective expressions before they resume their game. They will both be thinking, in one way or another, that what man has done man can do.
Or, on the seat before the ferryman's hut in a small harbour you may see a hook-nosed, bearded, begrimed, weather-soiled and wonderfully alert London bargeman. He will wave his tiny pipe at the faces of half a dozen young fishermen standing in a circle before him.
"Yes," he will say, "you're too young to remember ​Johnston. But his mother and Mrs. Spence, who keeps the 'Blue William' here, were first cousins. . . . Bill Johnston of the 'Britisher.'"
Bill Johnston of the "stumpy" called "Britisher" had in his childhood sailed from that port aboard a coaling schooner. Afterwards he had "been South," he had been in the Cape Mounted Police, then he had returned to London. He had saved a little money and bought a share in his "stumpy," which is a barge without a top-sail: he had carried freight unceasingly from Rotherhithe into the Pool or into the canals; his employers had advanced him money to buy the barge outright; he had carried freights until he had paid them back, "And now," his eulogiser comments, "he sails that there river, Bill Johnston, with his missis for mate and his kid for apprentice; he's in his own home with a cooking range in the cabin and a joint hanging in the hatchway for a larder. He's his own master; he comes when he will and he goes; he draws a steady three quid a week, and he's buying up other barges gradual."
The young fishermen standing round dive their hands deeper into their russet breeches pockets and gaze out over the rubble of old boats, cork floats, harbour mud and piles. The old man sucks at his pipe, spits, waves a grimy hand wanting a thumb, and says, "Just such a lad as you be Bill Johnston were," and a boy moves his hands in his pockets sighing "Ah!"
You will see scenes just the same besides the Bay of ​Naples and, mutatis mutandis, in Ukrainia and the Levant. For London calls out across the lands to the spirit of Romance, to the spirit of youth and the spirit of adventure—to the Finer Spirits.
There are such glorious plums. And the thought of them eventually fills alike those City Meccas and the square, blackened brick, balconied dock-dwellings; it fills the bare rooms in Whitechapel, where dark and hook-nosed men sit amid the stench of humanity, their mouths filled with small brass nails, silent amid the rattling clatter of hammers on boot soles. It fills, too, the behind-counters of large drapers, the very sewers with large neutral-coloured scavengers, and the great Offices in Whitehall. In the whitewashed and grimy courts of Saffron Hill splendid-limbed, half-nude children tumble, dark eyed, like the cherubs of Cinquecento pictures, round the feet of dark men puffing cigarette smoke, and fair Venetian girls lean back, smiling and chattering, in bright head-cloths, bright neck-cloths, bright bodices and bright petticoats against brilliant barrows. Hook-nosed, saturnine and imperturbable old men mix, with the air of sorcerers, flour, vanilla, cochineal, and condensed milk in pewter freezing pots like infernal machines. The Finer Spirit . . . because, to-day as always and for ever, the streets of London are paved with gold.
I remember reading somewhere a long time ago an ingenious article pronouncing boldly that this splendid figure of speech, this myth shining down the ages, was literally true. I remember the bare existence of the ​article, but I cannot remember its arguments. It was, perhaps, because the ground in front of the Mansion House is worth its area in sovereigns set on edge. Or it may have been that, according to the writer, the mud trodden underfoot was, for some profound chemical reason, worth its weight in gold. In either case a favoured few do undoubtedly possess the secret of alchemy, in that everything they touch—mud, too, no doubt—turns to gold. And the number of that favoured few is very great, because in London there are so many things to touch. Hence the immensity of London's silent appeal. She calls to all the world.
"In the old days," there were, say, The Holy Land, the "Wars" where thousands of mercenaries cut by turns the throats of Ferrarese, of Bolognese, of French, of Burgundians, of Kaiserliks and of each other. There were afterwards the Indies, Peru, Mexico, the Spanish Main; then more Wars of Seven, of Thirty years' duration—then the opening up of the silent East, then goldfields. These things called to the adventurous of succeeding generations for ten centuries. But these appeals were limited. They called only to those who felt able to handle a sword, fire a thatch, cut the rings off a woman's hand, set a sail, shoot in a wood, march a thousand miles or come out of a death of thirst. They were for the valorous alone who could work with their hands.
The appeal of London is far wider. She has seemed for the last century or so to stand on high, offering, like the figure on the Duke of York's column, laurel ​wreaths to all the world. She seems to hold them for bank clerks and for bargees, for charlatans and the Founders of Faiths, to poets and to privates in the Foot Guards, to actors as to all sorts of robbers with violence. But the appeal is on the whole a modern one: it was not until the wider world of woods and seas was nearly all exploited that the Occidental peoples "discovered" London. To enter minutely into this movement would be impracticable. It would take one very deep into that odd psychology of statistics that is called Political Economy.
But it had its rise, this modern appeal of London, at about the time of the triumphing principle of Free Trade; it had its beginning at about the time when ​the world evolved the equally triumphant principles of Limited Liability, Specialism in Labour and the freedom of knowledge.
It was probably foreshadowed in the opening years of last century by the triumphant figure of Napoleon I. He more than anyone stands for that other triumphant principle: What man has done man can do. He raised the standard of the adventurer not only towards respectability but towards apotheosis.
Before his day the great London adventurers were, actively, the Drakes and the Raleighs; passively, Casanovas and Cagliostros. Roderick Random's idea of "making a career" after the Wars had failed him, was to pretend in London to be a man of fashion, to victimise an heiress, or in some miraculous way to pick up a "patron" with influence. There was not in those days any other career in the Town. Macshanes, O'Creegans, an occasional Colonel Evans, perhaps a French barber spying in the service of the Pretender, a few poets like Thomson of the "Seasons" and a few bastards like Tom Jones—all these people were obsessed by these two ideas. They sat in their best clothes toying with their ​snuff-boxes or ostentatiously winding up jewelled watches in boxes at the Opera; they panted to attract the attention of an heiress or they wrote dedications and fee'd the footmen of peers.
It would be fanciful to make Buonaparte too responsible for the Modern Type; but he, upon the whole, was the discoverer of the principle: apply yourself to gain the affection of the immense crowd. After his day the mere heiress and the patron as ends of a career vanish. They remain merely as stepping stones.
But the immense crowd is still the indubitable end. If hardly any of us aspire to its suffrage in its entirety, we have, in London at least, discovered the possibilities of capturing its custom in its smallest trifles. To make a corner in collar studs would be rather American: the method in London is to invent, or to buy up the invention of, a collar stud that will appeal straight to the heart of the million, a collar stud that will be not only in all the street vendors' trays, but in all the barbers', all the hosiers', all the drapers' windows. It ought to be very cheap, very picturesquely "put on the market," and just perishable enough to make a constant supply desirable. The man who did put it on the market would immediately become the Napoleon of the Collar Stud.
There are already so many of these: there is at least one, I am not sure that there are not several, of the Press; Napoleons of the Lower Finance find their Waterloos every few years. There is a Napoleon of Pharmacy, one of the Tea Trade, one of Grocery, one ​of Underclothing. This is not a mere figure of speech on my part: the words are used month by month by each of these Trade Journals. There is very obviously one of politics, but that "career", as things are in London of to-day, has become comparatively decorative—a hobby for Napoleons in retirement. What one would sigh for is no longer the making of a people's laws or of a people's songs, but of a people's socks. With that behind one, one may die Chancellor of the Exchequer and a peer of the realm.
This obviously is desirable enough; we sigh very reasonably for business men in our cabinets. It is picturesque too, and inspiring, it brings about kaleidoscopic changes, and the wildest of contrasts. It makes life more worth living, because it makes life more interesting, and more amusing. The trouble, the defect of this particular Quality, is that the work suffers. The workers and their immediate dependants suffer perhaps still more.
The two clerks in that City Mecca—I happened to be watching them—saw that particular millionaire cross through the cigarette smoke and disappear. He, too, was a Napoleon of a particular financial order, and those two young men, when they rose from their dominos, pulled together their coats, shook their umbrellas a very little, and set their hats on at a particular angle. They were imitating almost gesture for gesture their hero.
I have no means of knowing how much further in the real mysteries of his craft they imitated him. I do not ​know whether they possessed his tremendous energy, his industry, his nerve, his knowledge of the market—whether they possessed even a shade of his temperament. It is obvious, however, that the great majority do not, that the chance against any average young man is a "thousand to one". I used to know rather intimately a talented and in that sense romantic young man, whom I will call X. X. had several irons in the fire: that meant that he had several Napoleons he could imitate. He had a very reasonable competence: he invested it in a certain wholesale business, of which he knew little more than that fortunes were rapidly made in it. He occupied certain offices which looked down on Aldgate Pump.
The rooms appealed to his romanticism: he found it extremely picturesque to see women, actually with pails, in London, in the twentieth century, really fetching water. It was interesting, too, to look at the Trade Papers, and his office had lockers all round it. They were meant to contain samples of the raw material he traded in. I happened once to open one; it revealed rather astonishingly the tinfoil necks of champagne bottles.
X. sanguinely and amiably explained. Strauss, an awfully sharp man, the Napoleon of the . . . Trade, had his lockered office just round the corner: he always offered his clients—perhaps "suitors" would be the right word—that particular brand of wine. He kept it in just such a receptacle.
That part of the business X. attended to with amia​bility and success: he had also an idea that the Banks were advancing his partner money on some sort of "cover system"; the crop somewhere in the East was going to fail: his partner—X. financed this partner—had taken care to be early in the market: as soon as the season commenced they would be making a profit of £90 a week, and with a few more such lucky specs, X. would be able to clear out with £50,000.
He attended at his office thus amiably, he wrote an occasional letter on his typewriter, which was rather fun, he looked out of window at the Pump, he countersigned cheques, and genially acknowledged that the . . . Trade was full of rogues, from ten until four.
Then he hurried westwards to his large white and ormolu house, and sat down to a rosewood Chippendale bureau. He had there another Napoleon before his eyes.
This was a celebrated novelist, who made £7,000 a year, by dictating topical novels into a phonograph. X. accordingly dictated topical novels—when the war broke out, a romance of South Africa; during the Chinese Massacres, a Chinese novel.
He displayed an astonishing industry over this speculation, and, having devoted his two or three hours a day to it, he "dressed", and with his wife, either dined out, or "dined" other amiable and fashionable persons. That, too, was part of the game, because to get on in either the Book or the other Trade, you have to "know people". Sometimes after returning from the opera X. would sit down and write a topical critique and sketch​—he had a talent for sketching—the dresses and the mise en scène. This was because he knew a Journalist—a Napoleon of the Paragraph—who said he made £4,000 a year at similar odd moments.
But I never heard X. attach any importance to knowing how to "write", or to learning the ins and outs of the . . . Trade. He had his irons, however, in these fires. His partner might scoop the market with Bosnians when the Honduras crop failed, or X. himself might make a hit with a novel. Either would mean a swift and easy affluence.
There is nothing inherently impossible in X.'s ideals, just as there is nothing criminal or mean. He represents, rather diffusely, the Modern Spirit. For, speaking largely, we in London to-day see life as a great gamble, London as a vast Monte Carlo, or, if you will, an immense Hamburg lottery. We put in a quite small stake, we may win a six figure lot. That is why London attracts us so supremely. If we do not at once win, we put in another small stake, and we continue until either we win, or our capital, our energy, our health, our youth, or our taste for gambling, come to an end. This tendency is, in fact, a trade custom, like any other: ​it is a vast frame of mind, that one may not like, but that one has not any valid ethical reason for condemning.
But the pity for X., as for so many other amiable and gallant young men, is that even in this modern market, the essentially old-fashioned must be to be found at the bottom of the sack. What work we do must still in one way or another be good in the sense of being attractive. You must still lay a good coin of some realm or other on the green cloth.
I know, for instance, another young man not so dilettante—neither indeed so charming nor so amiable as X—but almost more romantic. I will call him P. He had inherited a business of a specially old-established, a specially trustworthy, a specially eminent kind—one of those houses as reliable and as "placed", as is Childs' in the banking, or Twinings' in the tea trade. When P. came into it, it was already beginning to feel the touch of competition from Stores. It had relied upon old-fashioned "good" customers; it had never advertised.
P. not only advertised generally and lavishly, but he put on the market cheap and attractively packed "specialities". He tried in fact to corner London's collar studs. What his business lost immediately in caste, he tried to make up at home. He devoted his leisure time to a species of scientific investigation connected with his trade, which along with Napoleons of Specialities, has room for disinterested and abstruse ​investigators with great names and no money—famous "benefactors of their kind". P., in fact, was making a large and romantic bid: he sacrificed the particular aroma of respectability of his business to a kind of large altruism: he sacrificed his great name in his trade organs, to the chance of gaining in the wider papers a considerable and undying fame. And this is very characteristic of the conditions of modern work in London. Our poets have to gain a daily bread in the public offices, our scientists in electric light works. We may all know an admirable critic of belles lettres: he gives eight hours of his day to checking the issue and return of dog licences at Somerset House, and there are many religious enthusiasts of the type of Swedenborg who spend even longer hours in measuring and selling cheap ribbons. They are doing it in order on Sundays to preach in the parks.
London, in fact, if it make men eminently materialist in their working hours (and that is the great cry of all idealists against the great place), makes them by reaction astonishingly idealist in their interior souls. I know a railway signalman. He spends dreadfully long hours, high up in a sort of cage of wood and glass, above the innumerable lines of shimmering rails just outside the dim cave of a London's terminus. He works himself dog-tired, pulling levers that are constantly bright with the friction of his hands; he listens to the drilling sounds of little bells, straining his eyes to catch the red and white placards on the breasts of distant engines. At night in a cottage "down the line" he ​spends more hours, making out of pith and coloured paper little models, like stalactite work, of the English Cathedrals. His small holidays go in making trips to Bath, to Exeter, to Durham, and his small savings are spent on architectural drawings and photographs of details. His ambition is to make a model of every cathedral in this country, and, if life holds out, of those at Rouen, Amiens, and Notre Dame de Paris.
This is an ideal: his eyes grow hazy and romantically soft at the thought of finally having in his working shed all these small white objects. But he does not in the least care about architecture. I once met by accident a man of forty, a cashier of a London bus company. He rather disliked the country, but his ambition was to cover, on his bicycle, every road of the United Kingdom. He inked over on his ordnance map each road that he travelled on, and he saw, in imagination, as a glorious finale like a dream, one of the sixpenny papers publishing a half-tone block representing this map with all its coach roads inked and distinct like the filaments of a skeleton leaf.
Collectors and connoisseurs there have been, no doubt, in all the ages since Nero carried off his five hundred bronzes from Delphi. But the recreations of this signalman and this 'bus-cashier are simply mental anodynes: if they were not necessary for self-preservation they would be imbecile. The conditions of modern labour make them almost more than necessary. A man who retires from any routine work at all strenuous, signs nowadays his own death warrant if he have no hobby.
​And all work in modern London is almost of necessity routine work: the tendency to specialise in small articles, in small parts of a whole, insures that. It becomes daily more difficult to find a watch operative who can make a timepiece, from escapement to case. One man as a rule renders true little cogwheels that have been made by machine, another polishes tiny pinion screws, another puts all these pieces together, another adjusts them. In just the same way one woman machines together trousers that have been roughly cut out by machine, another buttonholes them, another finishes them. And in just the same way in offices, a partner mentions the drift of a letter to a clerk, he dictates it to a shorthand-typewriter, she writes and addresses it, a boy posts it. And the clerk, the typewriter and the boy go on doing the same thing from the beginning of the working day to the end without interest and without thought.
In the minds of these workers, work itself becomes an endless monotony; there is no call at all made upon the special craftsman's intellect that is in all the human race. It is a ceaseless strain upon the nerves and upon the muscles. It crushes out the individuality, and thus leisure time ceases to be a season of rest, of simple lying still and doing nothing. One needs, on the contrary, to assert one's individuality, and to still the cry of one's nerves. This leads to these hobbies which, psychologically considered, are a form of new work making some appeal to our special temperaments. In men this means, as a rule, some sport in which they have a chance of asserting an individual superiority, and women ​workers find their vent in personal adornments or housework.
But women workers, at any rate of the very poor, have not even this solace. I call to mind one in particular, and this was her life. She was married—or perhaps she was not married—to a waterside labourer who, when he could work, made fair money. As a rule, he suffered from chronic rheumatism, and was next door to a cripple. She had four children under nine. She was a dark, untidy-haired woman with a face much pitted by small pox, and she had a horribly foul tongue. The room looked out upon a boxlike square of livid brick yards, a table was under a window, a sugar box held coals. Another, nailed above the mantel, held bits of bread, a screw of tea in white paper, a screw of sugar in blue, and a gobbet of margarine in a saucer. When her man was in work or bad enough to be in hospital, when, at any rate, he was out of the house, there would be no coal in the one box because he was not crouching over the fire, and a bit of bacon in the other because there was no fuel to pay for. What he made went for the rent. There was nothing else in the room except a mattress and, on a damp and discoloured wall, a coloured mezzotint of Perdita, the mistress of George IV. I do not know how she had come to be pasted up there.
Till the school bell rang the children worked at her side. I don't think they were ever either dressed for school or given breakfasts by her. She made matchboxes at 23/4d. the 144, and it was wonderful to watch her working—engrossed, expressionless, without a word, ​her fingers moved deftly and unerringly, the light very dim, the air full of the faint sickly smell of paste and of the slight crackling of thin wood, and the slight slop-slopping of the pastebrush. Sometimes she would sigh, not sorrowfully, but to draw a deeper breath. It was the only sound that was at all arbitrary, the only variation in the monotony of her life, the only thing that distinguished her from a wonderfully perfect machine. Now and then a piece of the thin wood cracked along the line of a knot, but she showed no sign of exasperation.
Her husband, as a rule, sat in front of the fire; his right hand had lost two fingers, his others were too swollen to be able to catch hold of a paste-brush, he sucked silently at the end of an empty pipe. To me, however,—I used to stand in the doorway and watch—what was appalling was not the poverty. It was not the wretchedness, because, on the whole, neither the man or the woman were anything other than contented. But it was the dire speed at which she worked. It was like watching all the time some feat of desperate and breathless skill. It made one hold one's own breath.
In face of it any idea of "problems", of solutions, of raising the submerged, or of the glorious destinies of humanity, vanished. The mode of life became, as it were, august and settled. You could not pity her because she was so obviously and wonderfully equipped for her particular struggle: you could not wish to "raise" her, for what could she do in any other light, in any other air? Here at least she was strong, heroic, settled and beyond any condemnation.
​As for ideals. . . . Looking at the matter from a broad field which includes Theocritus, Nietzsche, the Eastern question, or a general election, she had not even ideas. She was an engrossed and admirable machine. But if you gave her 23/4d., the price of a gross of boxes—if you gave her time literally, she would utter long bursts of language that was a mixture of meaningless obscenities and of an old fashioned and formal English. She did not see why the Irish were allowed in Southwark, and she would shoot forth a monologue of grievances against her husband's mates, shouldering the poor old chap out of a job, and stealing his 'bacca, and him next door to a cripple; she had stuck the carving knife through the arm of a drunken man because he had tried to come into her room one night when her man was in hospital. She laughed hoarsely at the idea, and made feints with her hands.
These topics seemed to come out of her as words come out of certain machines, unnatural and disturbing. She had not much desire to talk, her hands and eyes were continually going back to her paste-brush. But as for ideals! She wanted to keep off the rates; she wanted the Charity Organisation people, "them enquiry blokes", to keep away. She wanted her children to get their schooling done and easy things up a bit, helping her with the pasting. Above all she wanted the two lads to keep out of bad ways, and the two gals not to be bad gals with these here shiny top boots. She wanted them to stop indoors and paste match boxes. Sooner than see them on the streets she would ​use the carving knife to them; she had a sister a flower hand, making artificial flowers, who had "fallen".
Those were her ideals. If you translate them into terms of greater material prosperity you find them identical with anyone else's. One desires for the later years of one's life a little ease. She would have it when the law permitted her children to aid her. One desires privacy when one suffers, she would have it if the enquiry blokes would keep away. One desires that one's children should grow in virtue.
I should say that she was as contented and as cheerful as myself; she probably knew better than people more enlightened and with higher ambitions, the truth of the saying that was constantly on her lips, "We can't b . . . well all have everything." And, as I have said, to be in her presence was to find all "problems". Police court missionaries, societies, and sisters of the poor grow dim and childish along with the Modern Spirit itself. It was like interviewing the bedrock of human existence in a cavern deep in the earth. "Influences" on the surface, busy about raising her seemed to become mere whispers a long way above. She supported them all.
As you went upstairs to her room you were presented with an astonishing picture. (I was at the time looking for an investment, and this house had been offered to me as producing a highly desirable rental.) It had once been a model dwelling; the stairs were of stone, but the railings, the banisters, the panels of nearly all the doors, and sometimes the very doorposts, every ​cupboard and every shelf, had been chopped down for firewood. As I went up past all these open doors and ragged door holes, in absolutely every room there were women, sometimes several, sometimes several children, bending over tables or over old sugar cases, silently and with great swiftness making matchboxes, making umbrella tassels, running together cheap coats, making artificial flowers—the very poor.
The thought—or rather it was a sensation so irresistible as to be an obsession—that in all that district all the houses were as similar inside as their outsides were unvarying, the thought was more than overwhelming. To look at London from that grim warren was to have a foreground like an untidy and uninspired battle field in which the background of broad streets and fine gray buildings vanished to almost nothing. No cathedral spires and the turrets of no museums peeped over those serrated roofs.
That problem that is no problem—the matter of the very poor workers—becomes there the only question of London. It is not, unfortunately perhaps, one that we can write or think about with any amiable cocksureness. It is not, unfortunately, one that any one man, any ten, or any two hundred can even touch from the outside. All these districts are honeycombed with missions, brotherhoods, and organisations. But the solution must come from within, and, inside there, there is no movement and only work. It is, in fact, a problem to all human intents insoluble, precisely because this particular class of worker is composed of individuals who, ​through heredity, through "type", through temperament, for a hundred predestined and tragic reasons, are absolutely incapable of creating Movements.
Their whole nerve force, and nearly all their thoughts are given to their work. They are the dust filtered down from all the succeeding dominant types, they are the caput mortuum precisely because they are hopelessly old fashioned. They cannot combine, they have not any thoughts left for it; they could not strike because they have no means of communication; they are inarticulate.
They are forming, and they have been forming for years, an hereditary class. Education hardly touches their children. It means that for ten or eleven years the poor little things are made acquainted with facts, and are underfed, and that when they are fourteen they fall again to their parents. They learn no trade, they go apprentices to no craft. After a year or two of matchbox making the "facts" of their instruction are worn down out of their minds.
And that very virtue of their mothers, that fierce determination to keep the little things "respectable", means tying them more and more to their rooms. That particular striving, a fierce craze forkeeping the children straight, is an almost universal "note", a dominant passion among the mothers of the very poor.
These, then, are the obverse and the reverse of the medal of work in London that appears to be so much of a gamble, that is really so fierce and so logical a struggle. For if we take X. as paying too little atten​tion to his actual work, we must think of this woman as paying too much.
Work in London to-day, if it have become in all its branches less of craft, depends more and more, if its worker is to make any individual success, on "temperament". Temperament in that particular sense we must take to mean the quality of inspiring confidence in one's employer or in one's customer. It is something akin to the artist's temperament, it is something akin to the charlatan's power to hypnotise mobs. The worker, if he is to rise out of the ruck, must impose his private personality upon a greater, or upon a lesser, public.
This tendency is most observable in the periodical press, that most enormous and most modern of industries. Here upon the whole the aesthetically intrinsic quality of the work offered by a young man does not matter much. The employer sits as it were in an office chair between the great public and the men who besiege him. It is not, obviously, his business to secure men whose work will remain, he wants staff that will "go". He will select for his permanent favours men who inspire him with confidence, men who have not any nonsense about them. Nonsense in this case is impracticable ideas of one kind or another.
X. will drive down to an editorial office in a nice dogcart and during an interview, interrupted by frequent calls at a telephone, will fidget towards a window overlooking the street in order to call pointed attention to the fact that his horse will not stand. In that case he may demonstrate that there is not any nonsense about ​him, that he is not dreamily poetic, but up to date and practical. He makes, perhaps, a chance for himself, but he might have done still better by studying his market, by acquiring a knowledge of the characteristics, the tone and the scope of the journal he has designs on. The editor, on the other hand, merely wants to get at whether X. will appeal to his own particular "crowd."
This tendency of dependence on the tastes of the great crowd is most handily demonstrable in the case of the Press; but it underlies every other industry. I happen to have followed the career of a man who is now still young and a very flourishing cabinet maker. He was the son of a widow in domestic service, Huguenot by descent, merry, dark and handsome whilst a young boy, but not otherwise strikingly intelligent.
The master of his mother got him apprenticed to a working carpenter, and he developed what was practically a passion for fret-sawing. He rather lost his looks and his clothes were always dusted with the little particles of wood that fall away from the teeth of fret-saws. As soon as he was out of his time he set up for himself as a jobbing cabinet maker, in a small Walthamstow shop; he continued to pay serious attention to fretwork. Eventually he evolved what was practically a style: he made small hexagonal coffee tables, of the sort one sees now in the smoking divans of seaside hotels. These things had a kind of pierced screen, Oriental in inspiration, between each pair of legs and ​were painted a dead white. He made perhaps a dozen of these, with more than a dozen little stools, and some over-mantels and settees to match, all in white, with quasi-Moorish perforations.
About this time W. saw an announcement in his trade paper: a certain large linoleum seller was giving one of his windows to bamboo furniture. W. set off at once with a specimen coffee table under his arm; he managed to see the proprietor of this shop—it was in a well-frequented thoroughfare. The latter consented to "stock" the rest of W.'s white things, which were ludicrously inexpensive. He arranged in his window an alcove in which a white coffee table, some white stools, and a white settee stood, or supported cheap Oriental trays and vases full of peacock's feathers. There was not a day to wait for the things to "take on".
In a few days W. was turning out scores of white tables and overmantels. His ingenuity ended by no means at quasi-oriental nick-nacks, he had in him an astonishing faculty for knowing what the public—in this case mostly young marrying couples—could be induced to "want". He turned out cheap Chippendales, cheap Louis XIVs, cheap farm-house styles; he went with his customer, the former linoleum seller, to Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Whatever there appeared to them as a "line" in tables, chairs, beds or whatnots he could modify very slightly, cheapen very substantially, and turn out in large quantities, and W. is rapidly growing rich.
​This, of course, is a Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, but it is something more because it casts a strong light upon the characteristics of work in modern London. For of the worker nowadays there is demanded more than the old-fashioned attention to work. Unless you wish to live for posterity you cannot any more put out good work, work that is solid and lasting, leaving it alone to push its way in the world and to bring you customers paying a goodly price. You must obviously produce work that is good in the sense of being attractive for the moment; that is the one essential. But also, as I have said, you must have temperament—the temperament that brings luck, because it makes you take the right step instinctively and at the right moment. And you must have that sympathy with the humanity around you that will let you know just what modification of your product will for the time hold the sympathy of the crowd. This essential holds as good for the company promoter as for the cabinet maker. And you must have the qualities of inspiring confidence and of knowing instinctively whom you can trust.
This personal element tends to become, paradoxically perhaps, of more and more importance as the spirit of combinations spreads. And it is spreading into the most personal of the industries of to-day. There died in March of 1903 a sufficiently remarkable woman, a Mrs. Russell of Southwark. She was shrewd and eccentric, she had a passion for displaying her fingers in an armour of gold rings, and her breast in ​a mail of gold chains, and it was a certain fortune for a costermonger to get on her soft side. For she had achieved nothing less than a "combine" of coster barrows in Southwark.
The tendency in all things is either towards the trustification of all activities or towards State and Municipal trading. Into either the personal factor must enter very largely. We may suppose the grocery ​trade to be taken over by the State. There will be no scope at all for individual brilliancy; counter clerks will take orders with about the same capabilities, and what "rises" there may be will go either by routine or by the recommendations of foremen. These latter, as to-day they do, will recommend juniors who appeal to them for one reason or another. The same thing will happen if the grocery trade in the alternative becomes one vast Trust.
This tendency is as observable in a London bank as in a London cement factory. The bank manager watches and considers the personal characteristics of his clerks with an anxious solicitude. He notes the particulars of his clerk's dress and the details of his home life. A subordinate, who hopes for promotion must be careful never to be seen wheeling a perambulator for his wife; it would, if he happened to become manager of a suburban branch, damage the standing of the Bank in the eyes of the customers, excellent accountant though he may be. On the other hand he must be an excellent accountant, and he must impress his superior with his knowledge of human nature. He must be able to gauge, both with his intuition and by the skilful utilisation of local gossip, what customers it is safe to trust with those overdrafts that are the life of suburban trade.
It is very much the same in cement or kindred ​works. A hand must commence by being a good and an industrious workman, but he must also, if he is to rise, give the impression of being very much alive and very much interested in his work. I am thinking of a case in point in some rather small works of the sort. Here there is a managing foreman whom I will call Stanley. He is perhaps twenty-nine. These works were started to work a new process about twelve years ago, and Stanley, at the time a boy, helped in making the bed of the first engine. He was particularly alert, and entered into the spirit of the thing. This at the time was not very obvious, the engine being set down on the slope of a green hill into which it has since tunnelled and cut until an arena of sand, of rubble and of chalk, opens an immense face to the lower Thames. It shelters alike on its flat surface a huge cement factory, sand works, and a large brickfield. Immense chimney shafts like thin pencils pierce up into the lower clouds; the ground is sticky and white under foot, channelled with open conduits of hot water, a maze of small lines on which run tiny locomotives, a maze of the little black shelters that cover drying bricks.
In the midst of these gray and monstrous apparitions, in the faint and sickly odour of steam, under the drops that condense and fall from the eaves of engine sheds, clambering through small holes, dressed in dull clothes, clean shaven and with sparkling eyes, Stanley moves like a spirit of romance. If he chances upon a visitor he becomes almost a spirit in ecstasy. He slaps the bed of the engine that he helped to set there, he ​bids workmen run the wet sand through trap doors, he explains how these three industries, set there together in that hollow, work one into another so that nothing is lost. The hot water from the boilers of the cement works runs in those open conduits to separate in the sand works the sand from the loam; the separated loam makes the bricks in the brick works. He waves his hands and shouts in the immense roar of pebble-crushing machines to explain how what appears to be a lot of old ploughshares tied together with rope is really a nice device of his own for regulating the pressure on the crushing rollers. These things are the great, the romantic facts of his world. Because they are so, his managing director has advanced him very quickly from being a shovel boy, paddling in the warm and sandy water, to be superintendent of the whole works.
But it is almost more important that the hands all like him. His director can go home and sleep, or leave the place for days on end, confident that Stanley has the knack of infusing into his men some of his own interest in the work itself, and that he will not by petty tyrannies bring on a strike. That particular human quality, the particular sort of artistic delight in his work which brings to birth an esprit de corps, is almost the most precious quality that a man can offer in these days of organisation. Without at least a share of it Stanley could never have risen from the ranks; with as much as he has there is no limit to his possibilities.
​At the same time, as a defect of this particular quality of work in London, the making of Stanley has meant throwing out of work of a whole small industry. It has caused to disappear almost the last of the old small flotillas of barges that used to dredge sand by hand from the bottom of the river. (Thames sand is indispensable in the London building trade; it is stipulated for in all the contracts for honest mortar.)
Travelling through all that eastern London of toil, no thought is more oppressive than that: a little way away or at a great distance people are unceasingly working to mature new processes that will ruin any one of the works that the eye rests on. Nothing can well be more tragic than such an announcement as this, which one may read any day in a trade paper: "Owing to the competition of the new D——— process of Messrs. W———, the D——— Co. of Plumstead have been forced to close that branch of their works. Two thousand workmen have been discharged this week. Messrs. T———, of Erith, have notified their ability to take over fifty mechanics at once and fifty-nine more later on. If other firms requiring men will communicate with the secretary of the D——— workers' Union they will assist in mitigating the local distress."
I must confess to finding that thought the most exciting and the most sinister that can come into one's head in those parts of the vast city. They are grim, they are overhung with perpetual miasma, they lie low in damp marshes. Square and stumpy chimneys rise everywhere in clusters like the columns of ruined ​temples overhung with smirchings of vapour. Great fields are covered with scraps of rusty iron and heaps of fluttering rags; dismal pools of water reflect on black waste grounds the dim skies. But all these things, if one is in the mood, one may find stimulating, because they tell of human toil, of human endeavour towards some end with some ideal at that end. But the other thing is sinister, since the other influences are working invisible, like malign and conscious fates, below the horizon.
To assist at the obsequies of one of these great works is more suggestive than to have seen the corpses in the snow of the retreat from Moscow. It is more horrible because the sufferers have fought in a fight much more blind and suffer inarticulately in the midst of their suffering children and in the face of their desolate homes. They suffer for no apparent principle, for no faith, for no fame, for no nation, for no glory; they suffer the shame of poverty without the compensating glory of defeat. They have not ever seen their Napoleon ride slowly along their cheering lines.
For London, if it attracts men from a distance with a glamour like that of a great and green gaming table, shows, when they are close to it, the indecipherable face of a desperate battle field, without ranks, without order, without pity and with very little of discoverable purpose. Yet those that it has attracted it holds for ever, because in its want of logic it is so very human.
* ↑ I have, however, just read the book of a well received Political Economist who asserts that it did not. The modern spirit is by him attributed to the "consistent, unrelenting, true-sighted policy of five centuries of English Governmental action to a protective system which, in fact, was only relaxed when the supremacy had been reached". It isn't, of course, my business to assert the one or the other dogma. The supremacy of London's particular attraction came at about the time of Free Trade. But Free Trade itself may have come because just then London had become supreme owing to five centuries of Protection. Or the reverse may have been the case. Both are possible enough, because in the arena of Triumphant Principle pendulums swing backwards and forwards: the undisputed right of to-day becoming the open question of to-morrow, and the unquestioned wrong of the immediate future. That is a platitude because it is one of the indisputable verities. In the country they say that large clocks when they tick solemnly and slowly, thud out the words: "Alive—Dead; Alive—Dead"—because in this world at every second a child is born, a man dies. But, in London, a listener to the larger clock which ticks off the spirits of successive ages, seems to hear above the roar of the traffic, the slow reverberation: "Never—Again; Never—Again", as principles rise and die, and rise and die again. For in London that fact forces itself upon the ear and upon the eye; it is a part of the very dust. It is, perhaps, the final lesson of the great, human place. Arts rise and die again, systems rise and die again, faiths are born only to die and to rise once more; the only thing constant and undying is the human crowd.
* ↑ I do not of course mean that steady work is no longer to be found in the town of London. The industrious apprentice still climbs as he did in the time of Hogarth. But the essential "note" of those who stand out among workers in modern London, appears on the surface to be that of gambling. That, in fact, is the most striking note of work in modern London, it is in that that it differs from work in all past Londons, and it is that which is the pre-eminent attractiveness of London itself. There is obviously mere work enough, sober and uninviting, to keep men in the country districts all over Europe.
* ↑ I do not wish to imply that the prospect pleases or displeases me. But the strong feeling against say Municipal Trading must disappear as soon as Trusts become universal. The Trusts may simply become the State as is the tendency in America. Or in the more likely alternative they may grow so oppressive that an outcry for State Trading will arise. In either case the individual trader will have disappeared, and with him the opposition to State Trading. The individual's sons and daughters will be simply the employees of the Trusts, and will view with indifference or with more probable favour their absorption by the State or the City in which they are interested. The third issue, the triumph of the cooperative system, will be so precisely the same in its effects on the individual worker that it may for my purposes be classed with either. The broad fact remains that the individual worker for the time being is doomed. He has been so for a long time, in London at least. This again is most strikingly observable in the periodical press. Upon the whole that of literature makes of all the pursuits the most call for individuality. Yet ever since Cave let Johnson dine behind his screen, ever since those two started the "Gentleman's Magazine" it has become more and more essential to men of letters to live in London. And to-day it is impossible for the many of them to exist, or for the very few to grow rich without the aid of journalism in one or other of its manifestations. This means their becoming the employees of small or of very large combines. All the learned professions have for centuries now been combined with their headquarters in London. They have been empowered with charters to become administrative, examining, or penal bodies, of solicitors, barristers, surgeons, doctors and even pharmacists,—to become close corporations.