hurts her dreadful; and that’s what it is, and niver no more, and
niver no less, sur.’
The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, took
a bandage from her head, and threw open a back door to let in the
daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable backyard I
ever saw.
‘That’s what cooms from her, sur, being lead-pisoned; and it cooms
from her night and day, the poor, sick craythur; and the pain of it
is dreadful; and God he knows that my husband has walked the
sthreets these four days, being a labourer, and is walking them
now, and is ready to work, and no work for him, and no fire and no
food but the bit in the pot, and no more than ten shillings in a
fortnight; God be good to us! and it is poor we are, and dark it is
and could it is indeed.’
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my selfdenial,
if I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in
the course of these visits. I did this to try the people. I may
state at once that my closest observation could not detect any
indication whatever of an expectation that I would give money:
they were grateful to be talked to about their miserable affairs,
and sympathy was plainly a comfort to them; but they neither asked
for money in any case, nor showed the least trace of surprise or
disappointment or resentment at my giving none.
The woman’s married daughter had by this time come down from her
room on the floor above, to join in the conversation. She herself
had been to the lead-mills very early that morning to be ‘took on,’
but had not succeeded. She had four children; and her husband,
also a water-side labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed in no
better case as to finding it than her father. She was English, and
by nature, of a buxom figure and cheerful. Both in her poor dress
and in her mother’s there was an effort to keep up some appearance
of neatness. She knew all about the sufferings of the unfortunate
invalid, and all about the lead-poisoning, and how the symptoms
came on, and how they grew, – having often seen them. The very
smell when you stood inside the door of the works was enough to
knock you down, she said: yet she was going back again to get
‘took on.’ What could she do? Better be ulcerated and paralysed
for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the children
starve.
A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back door
and all manner of offence, had been for some time the sleepingplace
of the sick young woman. But the nights being now wintry,
and the blankets and coverlets ‘gone to the leaving shop,’ she lay
all night where she lay all day, and was lying then. The woman of
the room, her husband, this most miserable patient, and two others,
lay on the one brown heap together for warmth.
‘God bless you, sir, and thank you!’ were the parting words from
these people, – gratefully spoken too, – with which I left this
place.
Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another
ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four
children, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their
dinner of bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty
cinderous fire in the grate by which they sat; and there was a tent
bedstead in the room with a bed upon it and a coverlet. The man
did not rise when I went in, nor during my stay, but civilly
inclined his head on my pulling off my hat, and, in answer to my
inquiry whether I might ask him a question or two, said,
‘Certainly.’ There being a window at each end of this room, back
and front, it might have been ventilated; but it was shut up tight,
to keep the cold out, and was very sickening.
The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her