WORKHOUSE CHARACTERS.*
This is a " good book "—in every sense of the phrase. It is well written, it is realistic, it is humorous, and it is edifying. All this does not affect the fact that it is grim. No one will read it Without a feeling of sadness and alarm. Is life really so bitterly hard for some, for many, people ? Can it be helped ? We mean is the community in fault, and can it reform itself and ease the suffering of its poorest members ? If not, what will happen ? " What will ye do in the end thereof ? " The worst is that, so far as the scene of action of these " character sketches " is concerned, all the expensive " improvements " of the last few years seem to have been of small avail. Public charity, however adequate its amount, however able its administration, is utterly unpalatable to its recipients. Old people are described as unhappy under the Poor Law system. The younger people, caught mostly through their own fault in its toils, despair. Children brought up in barrack schools, perfect though these may be in " plant " and organization, seem to enter life with a sense of deprivation and resentment which ill equips them for its struggle.
Almost all the pictures which Mrs. Nevinson draws for us make h sad impression, and in one or two cases we cannot bear to look long at them. The old woman who can neither hear nor see, who complains that the nurse is cruel to her, is a tragic figure indeed. The " fierce, aching blackness " before her eyes, the ceaseless rumblings " like trains in a tunnel " which distress her ears, deaf to all but imaginary sounds, horrify us. No one is of any comfort to her but a Methodist parson who tells of the New Jerusalem, and, diverging in human kindness from strict orthodoxy, assures her that she will there once more see the sight she longs for. It is nothing romantic or wonderful, only the tea-table of her childhood with the Western sun shining in across a row of red geraniums in the window. She talks a great deal, poor soul, indulging in long Methodist musings. The other inhabitants smile at her hopes of Heaven not unkindly. The tone of the workhouse, Mrs. Nevinson tells us, though perfectly tolerant, inclines to scepticism. We wonder whether this is quite true. It is very sad if it is so among men and women terribly in need of spiritual consolation. Any- how, the clergy seem to be liked well enough by the " House." Among the uneducated age confers something almost equivalent to rank. The attitude of the aged workhouse inhabitant towards the world at large would appear to be condescending, more especially towards the clergy. " I like little Walker, what there is of him," says one friendly critic of a favourite parson. Mr. Walker is the incumbent of a neighbouring church, and the friend who " likes " him listens each day to hear the bell rung for evensong—" a kind of prayers that he says chiefly to 'itself."
There are people of course whose spirits not even blindness aggravated by the workhouse can damp. We hear of one eccentric and rather intemperate old woman whose great desire was always to go out for walks alone. " No, I sha'n't get run over by no motor- car," she assures the Guardian who would dissuade her. " The Lord may have taken the sight of my eyes, but He has left me an
• Workhouse Character*, and other Sketches of the Life of eke Poor. By Margaret Wynne Nevinson, L.L.A. London : Allen and Eosin. UM. ed. net.1
uncommon sharp pair of ears and a nose like a ferret, and by this special mercy I can hear the things stinking and rampaging long afore they're near me." Why is it that it should seem so ludicrous to speak of hearing a stink ? It is not more absurd in reality than the constant use of phrases which apply to one art in the criticism of another. To speak of the colours of a piece of music is very like speaking of the sound of a smell.
Not a very high ideal of marriage is to be found in work- houses apparently. Half the sad stories told to Mrs. Nevinson concern the drunkenness, cruelty, or imnioreNty of a huaband or father. It is a strange thing how much less prone men seem to be to complain and vilify their relations. A good many women who come into the workhouse for confinement glory in unmarried motherhood. " I don't say as I envies you married ladies your rings or your slavery," says " a tall, handsome Woman," who explains that she was put off marriage very early in life by the fact that her father beat her mother to death. " I lives clean and respectable," she continues—" no drinking, no bad language ; my children never see nor hear what I saw and heard, and they are mine—mine—mine." Some wives kindly excuse, but very few indeed of those who get into the workhouse praise, their hus- bands. One woman tells indulgently of a husband who, being constantly out of work and hungry, " took to sleeping with a carving-knife under his pillow, and hitting me about cruel. I knew it was only trouble, and didn't think wrong of the man," she adds in kindly parenthesis. For her part, she agrees with the old-fashioned notion that every man should support his wife. " Granny says they most always did in her day, and rich people does still, I suppose, but it ain't the fashion down our street, and it falls heavy on the woman what with earning short money and being most always confined." There is a really very amusing story here told of an elderly widow who, having been married to a Frenchman for a few years in her youth, finds herself accounted an alien. She is very angry at being supposed to be anything but English, and it seems to her absurd that so slight an event as marriage should affect her nationality. Husbands, she says, are " come-by-chance " sort of people. " You go for a walk in the moonlight, and you kisses each other, and then, afore you're clear in your mind, you're standing at the altar, and the ' better for worse ' curse a-thundering over you."
Occasionally the reader is tempted to wonder whether Mrs. Nevinson does not put into her paupers' mouths language more bookish than they could have used, but she vouches for the faithful- ness of her portraits, and no doubt many paupers have come down in the world, sometimes a very long way. Mrs. Nevinson tells us of a Greek scholar—a woman—who dies of delirium tremens in the workhouse infirmary while still young. Our authoress is quite as sorry for her heroines when their misfortunes are their own fault as when they are wholly undeserved. The ordinary reader is not capable as a rule of this extreme of sympathy, and will find comfort now and then as he reads in the reflection that at least a good many of Mrs. Nevinaon's " characters " have brought their terrible misfortunes on themselves. All these workhouse stories belong to the past, the near past no doubt, but to the time before the war. Many workhouses have been evacuated, and their scattered inhabitants have found shelter in other institutions. Wounded soldiers have taken the places of the rate-supported poor.
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