Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet by Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

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"Corollary.--Brass minnow don't suit the water. Where is your wonderful
minnow? Send him me down, or else a _horn_ one, which I believes in
desperate; but send me something before Tuesday, and I will send you P.O.O.
Horn minnow looks like a gudgeon, which is the pure caseine. One pounder I
caught to-day on the 'March brown' womited his wittles, which was rude, but
instructive; and among worms was a gudgeon three inches long and more. Blow
minnows--gudgeon is the thing.

"Came off the water at 3. Found my man alive, and, thank God, quiet. Sat
with him, and thought him going once or twice. What a mystery that long,
insensible death-struggle is! Why should they be so long about it? Then had
to go Hartley Row for an Archdeacon's Sunday-school meeting--three hours
useless (I fear) speechifying and 'shop'; but the Archdeacon is a good
man, and works like a brick beyond his office. Got back at 10:30, and sit
writing to you. So goes one's day. All manner of incongruous things to
do--and the very incongruity keeps one beany and jolly. Your letter was
delightful. I read part of it to West, who says, you are the best fellow on
earth, to which I agree.

"So no more from your sleepy and tired--C. KINGSLEY."

This was almost the last letter I ever received from him in the Parson Lot
period of his life, with which alone this notice has to do. It shows, I
think, very clearly that it was not that he had deserted his flag (as has
been said) or changed his mind about the cause for which he had fought so
hard and so well. His heart was in it still as warmly as ever, as he says
himself. But the battle had rolled away to another part of the field.
Almost all that Parson Lot had ever striven for was already gained. The
working-classes had already got statutory protection for their trade
associations, and their unions, though still outside the law, had become
strong enough to fight their own battles. And so he laid aside his fighting
name and his fighting pen, and had leisure to look calmly on the great
struggle more as a spectator than an actor.

A few months later, in the summer of 1856, when he and I were talking
over and preparing for a week's fishing in the streams and lakes of his
favourite Snowdonia, he spoke long and earnestly in the same key. I well
remember how he wound it all up with, "the long and short of it is, I am
becoming an optimist. All men, worth anything, old men especially, have
strong fits of optimism--even Carlyle has--because they can't help hoping,
and sometimes feeling, that the world is going right, and will go right,
not your way, or my way, but its own way. Yes; we've all tried our
Holloway's Pills, Tom, to cure all the ills of all the world--and we've
all found out I hope by this time that the tough old world has more in
its inside than any Holloway's Pills will clear out." A few weeks later I
received the following invitation to Snowdon, and to Snowdon we went in the
autumn of 1856.

THE INVITATION.

Come away with me, Tom,
Term and talk is done;
My poor lads are reaping,
Busy every one.
Curates mind the parish,
Sweepers mind the Court,
We'll away to Snowdon
For our ten days' sport,
Fish the August evening
Till the eve is past,
Whoop like boys at pounders
Fairly played and grassed.
When they cease to dimple,
Lunge, and swerve, and leap,
Then up over Siabod
Choose our nest, and sleep.
Up a thousand feet, Tom,
Round the lion's head,
Find soft stones to leeward
And make up our bed.
Bat our bread and bacon,
Smoke the pipe of peace,
And, ere we be drowsy,
Give our boots a grease.
Homer's heroes did so,
Why not such as we?
What are sheets and servants?
Superfluity.
Pray for wives and children
Safe in slumber curled,
Then to chat till midnight
O'er this babbling world.
Of the workmen's college,
Of the price of grain,
Of the tree of knowledge,
Of the chance of rain;
If Sir A. goes Romeward,
If Miss B. sings true,
If the fleet comes homeward,
If the mare will do,--
Anything and everything--
Up there in the sky
Angels understand us,
And no "_saints_" are by.
Down, and bathe at day-dawn,
Tramp from lake to lake,
Washing brain and heart clean
Every step we take.
Leave to Robert Browning
Beggars, fleas, and vines;
Leave to mournful Ruskin
Popish Apennines,
Dirty Stones of Venice
And his Gas-lamps Seven;
We've the stones of Snowdon
And the lamps of heaven.
Where's the mighty credit
In admiring Alps?
Any goose sees "glory"
In their "snowy scalps."
Leave such signs and wonders
For the dullard brain,
As æsthetic brandy,
Opium, and cayenne;
Give me Bramshill common
(St. John's harriers by),
Or the vale of Windsor,
England's golden eye.
Show me life and progress,
Beauty, health, and man;
Houses fair, trim gardens,
Turn where'er I can.
Or, if bored with "High Art,"
And such popish stuff,
One's poor ears need airing,
Snowdon's high enough.
While we find God's signet
Fresh on English ground,
Why go gallivanting
With the nations round?
Though we try no ventures
Desperate or strange;
Feed on common-places
In a narrow range;
Never sought for Franklin
Round the frozen Capes;
Even, with Macdougall,
Bagged our brace of apes;
Never had our chance, Tom,
In that black Redan;
Can't avenge poor Brereton
Out in Sakarran;
Tho' we earn our bread, Tom,
By the dirty pen,
What we can we will be,
Honest Englishmen.
Do the work that's nearest,
Though it's dull at whiles;
Helping, when we meet them
Lame dogs over stiles;
See in every hedgerow
Marks of angels' feet,
Epics in each pebble
Underneath our feet;
Once a-year, like schoolboys,
Robin-Hooding go.
Leaving fops and fogies
A thousand feet below.

T. H.

CHEAP CLOTHES AND NASTY.

King Ryence, says the legend of Prince Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with
kings' beards. In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle assures us)
there were at Meudon tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and
revolutionary, follows both these noble examples--in a more respectable
way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty; bodily pain is his devil--the
worst evil of which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks
benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his
paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of
women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then
chuckles self-complacently over the smallness of his tailors' bills.
Hypocrite!--straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is flogging,
or hanging, King Ryence's paletot, or the tanneries of Meudon, to the
slavery, starvation, waste of life, year-long imprisonment in dungeons
narrower and fouler than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among
thousands of free English clothes-makers at this day?

"The man is mad," says Mammon, smiling supercilious pity. Yes, Mammon; mad
as Paul before Festus; and for much the same reason, too. Much learning has
made us mad. From two articles in the "Morning Chronicle" of Friday, Dec.
14th, and Tuesday, Dec. 18th, on the Condition of the Working Tailors,
we learnt too much to leave us altogether masters of ourselves. But there
is method in our madness; we can give reasons for it--satisfactory to
ourselves, perhaps also to Him who made us, and you, and all tailors
likewise. Will you, freshly bedizened, you and your footmen, from
Nebuchadnezzar and Co.'s "Emporium of Fashion," hear a little about how
your finery is made? You are always calling out for facts, and have a firm
belief in salvation by statistics. Listen to a few.

The Metropolitan Commissioner of the "Morning Chronicle" called two
meetings of the Working Tailors, one in Shad well, and the other at the
Hanover Square Rooms, in order to ascertain their condition from their
own lips. Both meetings were crowded. At the Hanover Square Rooms there
were more than one thousand men; they were altogether unanimous in their
descriptions of the misery and slavery which they endured. It appears
that there are two distinct tailor trades--the "honourable" trade, now
almost confined to the West End, and rapidly dying out there, and the
"dishonourable" trade of the show-shops and slop-shops--the plate-glass
palaces, where gents--and, alas! those who would be indignant at that
name--buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors'
own slang; slang is true and expressive enough, though, now and then. The
honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four
hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade has it all
its own way. The honourable part of the trade is declining at the rate of
one hundred and fifty journeymen per year; the dishonourable increasing at
such a rate that, in twenty years it will have absorbed the whole tailoring
trade, which employs upwards of twenty-one thousand journeymen. At the
honourable shops the work is done, as it was universally thirty years ago,
on the premises and at good wages. In the dishonourable trade, the work is
taken home by the men, to be done at the very lowest possible prices, which
decrease year by year, almost month by month. At the honourable shops, from
36s. to 24s. is paid for a piece of work for which the dishonourable shop
pays from 22s. to 9s. But not to the workmen; happy is he if he really
gets two-thirds, or half of that. For at the honourable shops, the master
deals directly with his workmen; while at the dishonourable ones, the
greater part of the work, if not the whole, is let out to contractors, or
middle-men--"_sweaters_," as their victims significantly call them--who, in
their turn, let it out again, sometimes to the workmen, sometimes to fresh
middlemen; so that out of the price paid for labour on each article, not
only the workmen, but the sweater, and perhaps the sweater's sweater, and a
third, and a fourth, and a fifth, have to draw their profit. And when the
labour price has been already beaten down to the lowest possible, how much
remains for the workmen after all these deductions, let the poor fellows
themselves say!

One working tailor (at the Hanover Square Rooms Meeting) "mentioned a
number of shops, both at the east and west ends, whose work was all
taken by sweaters; and several of these shops were under royal and noble
patronage. There was one notorious sweater who kept his carriage. He was a
Jew, and, of course, he gave a preference to his own sect. Thus, another
Jew received it from him second hand and at a lower rate; then it went to a
third-till it came to the unfortunate Christian at perhaps the eighth rate,
and he performed the work at barely living prices; this same Jew required a
deposit of 5_l_. in money before he would give out a single garment to be
made. He need not describe the misery which this system entailed upon the
workmen. It was well known, but it was almost impossible, except for those
who had been at the two, to form an idea of the difference between the
present meeting and one at the East-end, where all who attended worked for
slop-shops and sweaters. The present was a highly respectable assembly; the
other presented no other appearance but those of misery and degradation."

Another says--"We have all worked in the honourable trade, so we know the
regular prices from our own personal experience. Taking the bad work with
the good work we might earn 11s. a week upon an average. Sometimes we do
earn as much as 15s.; but, to do this, we are obliged to take part of our
work home to our wives and daughters. We are not always fully employed. We
are nearly half our time idle. Hence, our earnings are, upon an average
throughout the year, not more than 5s. 6d. a week." "Very often I have made
only 3s. 4d. in the week," said one. "That's common enough with us all, I
can assure you," said another. "Last week my wages was 7s. 6d.," declared
one. "I earned 6s. 4d.," exclaimed the second. "My wages came to 9s. 2d.
The week before I got 6s. 3d." "I made 7s. 9d.," and "I 7s. or 8s., I can't
exactly remember which." "This is what we term the best part of our winter
season. The reason why we are so long idle is because more hands than
are wanted are kept on the premises, so that in case of a press of work
coming in, our employers can have it done immediately. Under the day work
system no master tailor had more men on the premises than he could keep
continually going; but since the change to the piecework system, masters
made a practice of engaging double the quantity of hands that they
have any need for, so that an order may be executed 'at the shortest
possible notice,' if requisite. A man must not leave the premises when,
unemployed,--if he does, he loses his chance of work coming in. I have been
there four days together, and had not a stitch of work to do." "Yes; that
is common enough." "Ay, and then you're told, if you complain, you can go,
if you don't like it. I am sure twelve hands would do all they have done at
home, and yet they keep forty of us. It's generally remarked that, however
strong and healthy a man may be when he goes to work at that shop, in a
month's time he'll be a complete shadow, and have almost all his clothes in
pawn. By Sunday morning, he has no money at all left, and he has to subsist
till the following Saturday upon about a pint of weak tea, and four slices
of bread and butter per day!!!"

"Another of the reasons for the sweaters keeping more hands than they want
is, the men generally have their meals with them. The more men they have
with them the more breakfasts and teas they supply, and the more profit
they make. The men usually have to pay 4d., and very often, 5d. for their
breakfast, and the same for their tea. The tea or breakfast is mostly a
pint of tea or coffee, and three to four slices of bread and butter. _I
worked for one sweater who almost starved the men; the smallest eater there
would not have had enough if he had got three times as much. They had only
three thin slices of bread and butter, not sufficient for a child, and the
tea was both weak and bad. The whole meal could not have stood him in 2d.
a head, and what made it worse was, that the men who worked there couldn't
afford to have dinners, so that they were starved to the bone._ The
sweater's men generally lodge where they work. A sweater usually keeps
about six men. These occupy two small garrets; one room is called the
kitchen, and the other the workshop; and here the whole of the six men, and
the sweater, his wife, and family, live and sleep. One sweater _I worked
with had four children and six men, and they, together with his wife,
sister-in-law, and himself, all lived in two rooms, the largest of which
was about eight feet by ten. We worked in the smallest room and slept there
as well--all six of us. There were two turnup beds in it, and we slept
three in a bed. There was no chimney, and, indeed, no ventilation whatever.
I was near losing my life there--the foul air of so many people working
all day in the place, and sleeping there at night, was quite suffocating.
Almost all the men were consumptive, and I myself attended the dispensary
for disease of the lungs. The room in which we all slept was not more than
six feet square. We were all sick and weak, and both to work._ Each of the
six of us paid 2s. 6d. a week for our lodging, or 15s. altogether, and I
am sure such a room as we slept and worked in might be had for 1s. a week;
you can get a room with a fire-place for 1s. 6d. a week. The usual sum that
the men working for sweaters pay for their tea, breakfasts, and lodging
is 6s. 6d. to 7s. a week, and they seldom earn more money in the week.
Occasionally at the week's end they are in debt to the sweater. This is
seldom for more than 6d., for the sweater will not give them victuals if
he has no work for them to do. Many who live and work at the sweater's are
married men, and are obliged to keep their wives and children in lodgings
by themselves. Some send them to the workhouse, others to their friends
in the country. Besides the profit of the board and lodging, the sweater
takes 6d. out of the price paid for every garment under 10s.; some take
1s., and I do know of one who takes as much as 2s. This man works for a
large show-shop at the West End. The usual profit of the sweater, over and
above the board and lodging, is 2s. out of every pound. Those who work
for sweaters soon lose their clothes, and are unable to seek for other
work, because they have not a coat to their back to go and seek it in.
_Last week, I worked with another man at a coat for one of her Majesty's
ministers, and my partner never broke his fast while he was making his half
of it._ The minister dealt at a cheap West End show-shop. All the workman
had the whole day-and-a-half he was making the coat was a little tea. But
sweaters' work is not so bad as government work after all. At that, we
cannot make more than 4s. or 5s. a week altogether--that is, counting the
time we are running after it, of course. _Government contract work is the
worst of all, and the starved-out and sweated-out tailor's last resource._
But still, government does not do the regular trade so much harm as the
cheap show and slop shops. These houses have ruined thousands. They have
cut down the prices, so that men cannot live at the work; and the masters
who did and would pay better wages, are reducing the workmen's pay every
day. They say they must either compete with the large show shops or go into
the 'Gazette.'"

Sweet competition! Heavenly maid!--Now-a-days hymned alike by
penny-a-liners and philosophers as the ground of all society--the only
real preserver of the earth! Why not of Heaven, too? Perhaps there is
competition among the angels, and Gabriel and Raphael have won their rank
by doing the maximum of worship on the minimum of grace? We shall know some
day. In the meanwhile, "these are thy works, thou parent of all good!"
Man eating man, eaten by man, in every variety of degree and method! Why
does not some enthusiastic political economist write an epic on "The
Consecration of Cannibalism"?

But if any one finds it pleasant to his soul to believe the poor
journeymen's statements exaggerated, let him listen to one of the sweaters
themselves:--

"I wish," says he, "that others did for the men as decently as I do. I
know there are many who are living entirely upon them. Some employ as many
as fourteen men. I myself worked in the house of a man who did this. The
chief part of us lived, and worked, and slept together in two rooms, on the
second floor. They charged 2s. 6d. per head for the lodging alone. Twelve
of the workmen, I am sure, lodged in the house, and these paid altogether
30s. a week rent to the sweater. I should think the sweater paid 8s. a week
for the rooms--so that he gained at least 22s. clear out of the lodging
of these men, and stood at no rent himself. For the living of the men he
charged--5d. for breakfasts, and the same for teas, and 8d. for dinner--or
at the rate of 10s. 6d. each per head. Taking one with the other, and
considering the manner in which they lived, I am certain that the cost for
keeping each of them could not have been more than 5s. This would leave 5s.
6d. clear profit on the board of each of the twelve men, or, altogether,
£3, 6s. per week; and this, added to the £1, 2s. profit on the rent, would
give £4, 8s. for the sweater's gross profit on the board and lodging of
the workmen in his place. But, besides this, he got 1s. out of each coat
made on his premises, and there were twenty-one coats made there, upon an
average, every week; so that, altogether, the sweater's clear gains out of
the men were £5, 9s. every week. Each man made about a coat and a half in
the course of the seven days (_for they all worked on a Sunday--they were
generally told to 'borrow a day off the Lord_.') For this coat and a half
each hand got £1, 2s. 6d., and out of it he had to pay 13s. for board and
lodging; so that there was 9s. 6d. clear left. These are the profits of the
sweater, and the earnings of the men engaged under him, when working for
the first rate houses. But many of the cheap houses pay as low as 8s. for
the making of each dress and frock coat, and some of them as low as 6s.
Hence the earnings of the men at such work would be from 9s. to 12s. per
week, and the cost of their board and lodging without dinners, for these
they seldom have, would be from 7s. 6d. to 8s. per week. Indeed, the men
working under sweaters at such prices generally consider themselves well
off if they have a shilling or two in their pockets for Sunday. The profits
of the sweater, however, would be from £4 to £5 out of twelve men, working
on his premises. The usual number of men working under each sweater is
about six individuals; and the average rate of profit, about £2, 10s.,
without the sweater doing any work himself. It is very often the case that
a man working under a sweater is obliged to pawn his own coat to get any
pocket-money that he may require. Over and over again the sweater makes out
that he is in his debt from 1s. to 2s. at the end of the week, and when
the man's coat is in pledge, he is compelled to remain imprisoned in the
sweater's lodgings for months together. In some sweating places, there is
an old coat kept called a "reliever," and this is borrowed by such men as
have none of their own to go out in. There are very few of the sweaters'
men who have a coat to their backs or a shoe to their feet to come out into
the streets on Sunday. Down about Fulwood's Rents, Holborn, I am sure I
would not give 6d. for the clothes that are on a dozen of them; and it is
surprising to me, working and living together in such numbers and in such
small close rooms, in narrow close back courts as they do, that they are
not all swept off by some pestilence. I myself have seen half-a-dozen men
at work in a room that was a little better than a bedstead long. It was as
much as one could do to move between the wall and the bedstead when it was
down. There were two bedsteads in this room, and they nearly filled the
place when they were down. The ceiling was so low, that I couldn't stand
upright in the room. There was no ventilation in the place. There was no
fireplace, and only a small window. When the window was open, you could
nearly touch the houses at the back, and if the room had not been at the
top of the house, the men could not have seen at all in the place. The
staircase was so narrow, steep, and dark, that it was difficult to grope
your way to the top of the house--it was like going up a steeple. This is
the usual kind of place in which the sweater's men are lodged. The reason
why there are so many Irishmen working for the sweaters is, because they
are seduced over to this country by the prospect of high wages and plenty
of work. They are brought over by the Cork boats at 10s. a-head, and when
they once get here, the prices they receive are so small, that they are
unable to go back. In less than a week after they get here, their clothes
are all pledged, and they are obliged to continue working under the
sweaters.

"The extent to which this system of 'street kidnapping' is carried on
is frightful. Young tailors, fresh from the country, are decoyed by the
sweaters' wives into their miserable dens, under extravagant promises of
employment, to find themselves deceived, imprisoned, and starved, often
unable to make their escape for months--perhaps years; and then only
fleeing from one dungeon to another as abominable."

In the meantime, the profits of the beasts of prey who live on these poor
fellows--both masters and sweaters--seem as prodigious as their cruelty.

Hear another working tailor on this point:--"In 1844, I belonged to the
honourable part of the trade. Our house of call supplied the present
show-shop with men to work on the premises. The prices then paid were at
the rate of 6d. per hour. For the same driving capes that they paid 18s.
then, they give only 12s. for now. For the dress and frock coats they gave
15s. then, and now they are 14s. The paletots and shooting coats were 12s.;
there was no coat made on the premises under that sum. At the end of the
season, they wanted to reduce the paletots to 9s. The men refused to make
them at that price, when other houses were paying as much as 15s. for them.
The consequence of this was, the house discharged all the men, and got a
Jew middle-man from the neighbourhood of Petticoat-lane, to agree to do
them all at 7s. 6d. a piece. The Jew employed all the poor people who were
at work for the slop warehouses in Houndsditch and its vicinity. This
Jew makes on an average 500 paletots a week. The Jew gets 2s. 6d. profit
out of each, and having no sewing trimmings allowed to him, he makes the
work-people find them. The saving in trimmings alone to the firm, since
the workmen left the premises, must have realized a small fortune to them.
Calculating men, women, and children, I have heard it said that the cheap
house at the West End employs 1,000 hands. The trimmings for the work done
by these would be about 6d. a week per head, so that the saving to the
house since the men worked on the premises has been no less than £1,300
a year, and all this taken out of the pockets of the poor. The Jew who
contracts for making the paletots is no tailor at all. A few years ago he
sold sponges in the street, and now he rides in his carriage. The Jew's
profits are 500 half-crowns, or £60 odd, per week--that is upwards of
£3,000 a-year. Women are mostly engaged at the paletot work. When I came to
work for the cheap show-shop I had £5, 10s. in the saving bank; now I have
not a half-penny in it. All I had saved went little by little to keep me
and my family. I have always made a point of putting some money by when I
could afford it, but since I have been at this work it has been as much as
I could do to _live_, much more to _save_. One of the firm for which I work
has been heard publicly to declare that he employed 1,000 hands constantly.
Now the earnings of these at the honourable part of the trade would be upon
an average, taking the skilful with the unskilful, 15s. a week each, or
£39,000 a year. But since they discharged the men from off their premises,
they have cut down the wages of the workmen one-half--taking one garment
with another--_though the selling prices remain the same to the public_, so
that they have saved by the reduction of the workmen's wages no less than
£19,500 per year. Every other quarter of a year something has been 'docked'
off our earnings, until it is almost impossible for men with families to
live decently by their labour; and now, for the first time, they pretend
to feel for them. They even talk of erecting a school for the children of
their workpeople; but where is the use of erecting schools, when they know
as well as we do, that at the wages they pay, the children must be working
for their fathers at home? They had much better erect workshops, and employ
the men on the premises at fair living wages, and then the men could
educate their own children, without being indebted to their charity."