stand or fall by his accusations, and that an old shoe was thrown
after him on his departure from the building on this dread errand;
– not ineffectually, for, the interview resulting in a plumber, was
considered to have encircled the temples of Mr. Battens with the
wreath of victory,
In Titbull’s Alms-Houses, the local society is not regarded as good
society. A gentleman or lady receiving visitors from without, or
going out to tea, counts, as it were, accordingly; but visitings or
tea-drinkings interchanged among Titbullians do not score. Such
interchanges, however, are rare, in consequence of internal
dissensions occasioned by Mrs. Saggers’s pail: which household
article has split Titbull’s into almost as many parties as there
are dwellings in that precinct. The extremely complicated nature
of the conflicting articles of belief on the subject prevents my
stating them here with my usual perspicuity, but I think they have
all branched off from the root-and-trunk question, Has Mrs. Saggers
any right to stand her pail outside her dwelling? The question has
been much refined upon, but roughly stated may be stated in those
terms.
There are two old men in Titbull’s Alms-Houses who, I have been
given to understand, knew each other in the world beyond its pump
and iron railings, when they were both ‘in trade.’ They make the
best of their reverses, and are looked upon with great contempt.
Page 184
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
They are little, stooping, blear-eyed old men of cheerful
countenance, and they hobble up and down the court-yard wagging
their chins and talking together quite gaily. This has given
offence, and has, moreover, raised the question whether they are
justified in passing any other windows than their own. Mr.
Battens, however, permitting them to pass HIS windows, on the
disdainful ground that their imbecility almost amounts to
irresponsibility, they are allowed to take their walk in peace.
They live next door to one another, and take it by turns to read
the newspaper aloud (that is to say, the newest newspaper they can
get), and they play cribbage at night. On warm and sunny days they
have been known to go so far as to bring out two chairs and sit by
the iron railings, looking forth; but this low conduct, being much
remarked upon throughout Titbull’s, they were deterred by an
outraged public opinion from repeating it. There is a rumour – but
it may be malicious – that they hold the memory of Titbull in some
weak sort of veneration, and that they once set off together on a
pilgrimage to the parish churchyard to find his tomb. To this,
perhaps, might be traced a general suspicion that they are spies of
‘the gentlemen:’ to which they were supposed to have given colour
in my own presence on the occasion of the weak attempt at
justification of the pump by the gentlemen’s clerk; when they
emerged bare-headed from the doors of their dwellings, as if their
dwellings and themselves constituted an old-fashioned weather-glass
of double action with two figures of old ladies inside, and
deferentially bowed to him at intervals until he took his
departure. They are understood to be perfectly friendless and
relationless. Unquestionably the two poor fellows make the very
best of their lives in Titbull’s Alms-Houses, and unquestionably
they are (as before mentioned) the subjects of unmitigated contempt
there.
On Saturday nights, when there is a greater stir than usual
outside, and when itinerant vendors of miscellaneous wares even
take their stations and light up their smoky lamps before the iron
railings, Titbull’s becomes flurried. Mrs. Saggers has her
celebrated palpitations of the heart, for the most part, on
Saturday nights. But Titbull’s is unfit to strive with the uproar
of the streets in any of its phases. It is religiously believed at
Titbull’s that people push more than they used, and likewise that
the foremost object of the population of England and Wales is to
get you down and trample on you. Even of railroads they know, at
Titbull’s, little more than the shriek (which Mrs. Saggers says
goes through her, and ought to be taken up by Government); and the
penny postage may even yet be unknown there, for I have never seen