Working-class Stories of the 1890s

P. J. Keating, Peter Keating

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138658653
• eBook ISBN: 9781317217688
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1971, this collection of short stories, set in the East End of London in the 1890s, offers a corrective to the view of nineties' literature as dominated by aestheticism, and shows how many late Victorian writers tried to break with Dickensian models and write of working class life with less moral intrusion and a greater sense of realism.

The editor has provides a succinct, historical and critical introduction, a bibliography of further reading, notes on the authors and stories, and a glossary of slang and phoneticized words. This book will be of particular interest to students of Victorian literature.

The Inevitable Thing

Edwin Pugh

DOI: 10.4324/9781315620688-ch-9

i

Moll lay sleeping in the sun, with her crumpled bonnet under her head, and her dishevelled hair trembling in the wind. Her face was red and swollen and dirty; her dress was torn and bespattered with mud. In the grime on her cheeks were furrows that tears had made; and on her forehead lay clots of black blood that had oozed from a broken bruise above her temple. One of her gloved hands clutched a shabby little reticule; the other was thrust into her bosom.

She lay on a clayey slope, with her feet jammed hard against some tarred palings. Behind her stretched a tract of waste land abutting on a railway. This was called ‘The Tips’. ‘The Tips’ was part of that ever-widening belt of neutral ground which engirdles all great cities, and is the line of demarcation between town and country. Hoops of iron, the staves of barrels, rusty pots and pails and kettles, broken crockery, fragmentary boots and hats, old clothes sodden and stained with mire, infected bedding, putrescent carcases of dogs and cats, bricks, worm-eaten beams of timber, nettles, a scanty crop of thin reedy grass and here and there a bloated dandelion, were the products of this strange territory. Years ago a row of houses had been projected there, and symmetrical holes cut in the ground. But nothing further had been done. The holes had lost their rigid angles and degenerated into mere puddles of stagnant rain-water, in which imaginative urchins floated untrustworthy rafts, and mimetic little girls washed their dolls’ clothes.

On the other side of the tarred palings, and separated from them by a narrow strip of roadway, was a row of houses called colloquially ‘Tips’ Tenements’. These houses had once been villas and rejoiced in distinctive names, as a close inspection of the miniature pediments over their porches proved. But latterly they had fallen on evil days, and were now let out in flats to whomsoever could afford a rental of five shillings a week. Unmentionable things happened in these houses, and untranslatable language was sometimes used. Fights were of frequent occurrence, the average allowance of black eyes being usually one and a fraction to each adult tenant.

On the morning when Moll lay sleeping in the sun, there emerged from the door of the last house in Tips’ Tenements a tiny yellow-haired girl. She was bareheaded, and she wore a frock that was too small even for her small body, so that her dirty little knees and a few inches of her mottled thighs were plainly visible. The Tips’ tenants had not yet risen from their beds, and the street was consequently silent and deserted. The hour was six o’clock. All the sky behind ‘The Tips’ was radiant with the glory of the morning, and something of that glory was reflected in the child’s face.

For some seconds she stood hesitating on the kerb, with her wide eyes roving over the cheerless expanse of ‘The Tips’; then, as she caught sight of a fluttering something behind the tarred palings, she crossed the dusty road, and, clutching a rail in each of her chubby hands, thrust her yellow head through a gap in the fence and looked down into Moll’s sleeping face.

Moll stirred uneasily under the scrutiny and opened her eyes. The child clapped her hands, and her lips parted in a smile. Moll stared at her with an expression of drowsy half-inquiry on her face. Presently, she sat up and began to arrange her tumbled hair.

‘Come ’ere,’ she said.

The child still smiled at her, but made no attempt to approach, though the gap in the fence was amply wide enough to admit her.

Moll laughed with noisy vehemence.

‘You can’t hear what I say to you, can you, Bet?’ she said, shaking her head at the child. The child nodded. Moll laughed again. ‘An’ you couldn’t answer me if you did ’ear, could you?’ she continued, ‘because yer quite deaf an’ dumb, ain’t yer, Bet?’

The child uttered a harsh, crooning murmur, and squeezed through the gap. She sat down beside Moll and drew from her pocket a very dirty, sticky piece of pink sweetstuff. This she offered to Moll with an air of charming invitation. Moll put it aside.

‘Sweet little dear!’ she said, and stooped forward and kissed the child. ‘Though I ain’t no right to kiss ’er,’ she murmured. ‘Me so ’orrible an’ vile, an’ ’er such a little angel.’

She sighed, and began to brush the mud from her dress with her gloved hands.

‘Lawd!’ she exclaimed, as a sudden spasm of nausea overcame her. ‘ ’Ow bad I do feel, to be sure! ’Ere, Bet!’ The child sidled up closer to her. ‘You ain’t afraid o’ me, are you, Bet? You don’t throw things at me when I’m drunk, or pull my dress, do you? You’re a little angel, Bet, that’s what you are, though you can’t never ’ear me say so. ... I wish you belonged to me, Bet. I think there’d be a better chance fer me to git religion an’ keep straight then.’ She blinked her swollen eye-lids and began to snuffle. ‘I did git religion once,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t no good to me. I broke out again. An’ every time I break out I break out wuss’n ever I did before.’

She began to sob and dab at her eyes with a ragged handkerchief.

The child, seeing her distress, again offered the piece of pink sweetstuff to Moll. Moll pretended to nibble it.

‘There, my dear!’ she said. ‘I won’t cry any more.’

She wiped her eyes with an air of finality, and rose.

‘Run back to yer mar, now, Bet,’ she said. The child looked into her face. ‘Yer mar wouldn’t like you to come wi’ me, you know,’ Moll added. But Bet, divining the purport of her words, shook her shoulders petulantly, and nestled closer to her strange friend. She put her short arms about the woman’s neck and kissed her. Moll reciprocated passionately, then sank down once more on the ground and began to rock herself to and fro in a paroxysm of weeping.

ii

For some minutes Moll continued to weep. At last Bet touched her on the shoulder, and when Moll looked up, pointed with a dingy digit over the tarred palings. Advancing toward them was a redfaced, slatternly woman. Her aspect was threatening. She wore a coarse brown apron, and her sleeves were rolled up above her skinless elbows. At sight of her, Bet trembled visibly.

‘ ’Ere’s yer mar come to look for you,’ said Moll.

Bet began to cry. Her mother crossed the road and reached the palings.

‘What are you doin’ wi’ my child, Moll Matters?’ she bawled. ‘Ain’t you got enough sins o’ yer own to answer for without con- taminatin’ other people’s children?’

‘Who’s contaminatin’ anybody?’ demanded Moll fiercely. ‘I don’t want yer brat.’

‘Then don’t inkerridge ’er to go wi’ you. This ain’t the fust time, you know. I s’pose you want to make ’er like yerself?’

‘Gawd forbid!’ said Moll.

‘So I should think. ’Ere, Bet.’

The child, in obedience to her mother’s gesture, left and advanced towards the palings. Her mother seized her by the arm and dragged her through the fence.

‘What’re you doin’ out at this time o’ the mornin’?’ she cried, angrily shaking the child. ‘Can’t you stop in bed till yer told to git up? ’Ere’s me bin a-lookin’ for you all over the place. Git along wi’ you,’ and she pushed her towards the opposite side of the roadway. Bet gave one forlorn backward glance, and trotted towards her home. On the doorstep she was seized by her elder sister, a lank girl of fourteen, and bundled out of sight.

‘Well, Moll Matters, so you’ve bin up to yer games again, ’ave you?’ said Bet’s mother with fine scorn.

Moll made no reply.

‘Missis Marting’s swore she won’t ’ave you for ’er lodger any more. She’s chucked all yer furniture out, and says she’ll do as much for you if you try to go back. An’ quite right, too, I say. Yer a disgrace to the street, that’s what y’are.’

‘Chucked my furniture out?’ cried Moll, aghast.

‘Yus. It’s in the road now—what’s left of it, that is. Some o’ the things got broke an’ some’s bin stole. But you’ll find a few odds an’ ends that’ll prove I ain’t tellin’ you no lies.’

Moll rose with a lame attempt at dignity.

‘I don’t want to ’ave nothin’ to say to you, Missis Grewles,’ she said. ‘An’ I don’t believe a word you’ve uttered.’

‘Go an’ see for yourself, then.’

‘I will,’ said Moll.

She turned away and began to climb the slope. Mrs Grewles laughed and yelled after her a torrent of abuse, of which Moll took no heed. She stumbled over the uneven ground until she came to a spot where the fence had broken down, and stepped over the débris into the street. One agonized glance down the deserted roadway was sufficient to assure her that Mrs Grewles had spoken truly. Piled up in the gutter and scattered over the pavement were the sorry remnants of her household goods. The tables and chairs and bedding—all that was worth keeping—had been purloined. Some rusty broken saucepans, a legless stool, and other useless trifles, were all that remained. She stood contemplating the desolation of her home with a twitching face, then becoming conscious of the fact that every window in the street was opaque with eager, interested faces, she lifted her chin disdainfully and walked away.

She did not return until late in the evening, and during her absence the female half of the Tips’ tenants discussed her at some length on the doorstep of the house in which she had lodged.

‘Mrs Marting,’ Moll’s ex-landlady, a heavy-bodied, light-headed young matron, was overwhelmed with shrill sympathy.

‘It’s not a bit more’n she deserved!’ said Bet’s mother.

‘I’d ha’ done it long ago,’ declared another lady with hair that could hardly be termed false, because it was such a palpable wig.

‘It do seem a bit ’ard, though, don’t you think so?’ ventured a stout old woman, who had only lately become a Tips’ tenant.

‘Ah, my dear! you don’t know ’er!’ Bet’s mother said.

‘Is she so orful bad, then?’

‘Bad? Bad ain’t the word. She’s wuss’n bad. An’ the good ’usband she ’ad, too! ’E left ’er so much a year when ’e died— eighty poun’s, wasn’t it, Mrs Kwitt?’

‘Mor’n that, I believe.’

‘Yuss; more’n eighty poun’s a year. Jest think of it. Enough to live comfor’ble on in a ’ouse o’ yer own. I on’y wish some one’d leave me eighty poun’s—’

‘More’n eighty poun’s.’

‘Well, we’ll say eighty poun’s a year. I’d show you all ’ow to ’old yer ’eads up. But what does Moll do? Spend it all, or nearly all, on rum. Rum, too. Gin I could understand, or beer with a good body in it. But rum—ugh!’

‘An’ she don’t eat ’ardly anythink,’ interpolated Moll’s exlandlady; ‘or ever buy ’erself a noo dress, even.’

‘’Orrid!’

‘We’ve all tried to git ’er to turn over a noo leaf. But it ain’t no manner of good—not a bit. I’m sure dear Mister ’Oward—round at the Mishing ’All—’as talked to ’er that feelin’ you wouldn’t believe. On’y a day or two ago ’e was on at ’er to sign the pledge, and give ’er ’eart to Gawd. She said she would try, an’ she did sign the pledge. But las’ night she broke out again. I ’appened to be on the doorstep about seving, an’ I see ’er a-coming round the corner between two o’ the men from Mead’s factory. She was ’alf bosky then, an’ kep’ singin’ an’ laughin’ like a mad thing. She went into the Lion wi’ the two men, an’ there she stuck till chuckin’-out time. When I went acrost to git my supper-beer she was sittin’ in one of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A further acknowledgement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• A Street
• The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot
• Lizerunt
• The St George of Rochester
• Sissero's Return
• Lou and Liz
• The First and Last Meeting of the M.S.H.D.S.
• A Small Talk Exchange
• The Inevitable Thing
• At the Dock Gate
• Young Alf
• Concerning Hooligans
• Billy the Snide
• Slang and Phoneticized Words
• Bibliographical Note