none but paupers present. The children sat in the galleries; the
women in the body of the chapel, and in one of the side aisles; the
men in the remaining aisle. The service was decorously performed,
though the sermon might have been much better adapted to the
comprehension and to the circumstances of the hearers. The usual
supplications were offered, with more than the usual significancy
in such a place, for the fatherless children and widows, for all
sick persons and young children, for all that were desolate and
oppressed, for the comforting and helping of the weak-hearted, for
the raising-up of them that had fallen; for all that were in
danger, necessity, and tribulation. The prayers of the
congregation were desired ‘for several persons in the various wards
dangerously ill;’ and others who were recovering returned their
thanks to Heaven.
Among this congregation, were some evil-looking young women, and
beetle-browed young men; but not many – perhaps that kind of
characters kept away. Generally, the faces (those of the children
excepted) were depressed and subdued, and wanted colour. Aged
people were there, in every variety. Mumbling, blear-eyed,
spectacled, stupid, deaf, lame; vacantly winking in the gleams of
sun that now and then crept in through the open doors, from the
paved yard; shading their listening ears, or blinking eyes, with
their withered hands; poring over their books, leering at nothing,
going to sleep, crouching and drooping in corners. There were
weird old women, all skeleton within, all bonnet and cloak without,
continually wiping their eyes with dirty dusters of pockethandkerchiefs;
and there were ugly old crones, both male and
female, with a ghastly kind of contentment upon them which was not
at all comforting to see. Upon the whole, it was the dragon,
Pauperism, in a very weak and impotent condition; toothless,
fangless, drawing his breath heavily enough, and hardly worth
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
chaining up.
When the service was over, I walked with the humane and
conscientious gentleman whose duty it was to take that walk, that
Sunday morning, through the little world of poverty enclosed within
the workhouse walls. It was inhabited by a population of some
fifteen hundred or two thousand paupers, ranging from the infant
newly born or not yet come into the pauper world, to the old man
dying on his bed.
In a room opening from a squalid yard, where a number of listless
women were lounging to and fro, trying to get warm in the
ineffectual sunshine of the tardy May morning – in the ‘Itch Ward,’
not to compromise the truth – a woman such as HOGARTH has often
drawn, was hurriedly getting on her gown before a dusty fire. She
was the nurse, or wardswoman, of that insalubrious department –
herself a pauper – flabby, raw-boned, untidy – unpromising and
coarse of aspect as need be. But, on being spoken to about the
patients whom she had in charge, she turned round, with her shabby
gown half on, half off, and fell a crying with all her might. Not
for show, not querulously, not in any mawkish sentiment, but in the
deep grief and affliction of her heart; turning away her
dishevelled head: sobbing most bitterly, wringing her hands, and
letting fall abundance of great tears, that choked her utterance.
What was the matter with the nurse of the itch-ward? Oh, ‘the
dropped child’ was dead! Oh, the child that was found in the
street, and she had brought up ever since, had died an hour ago,
and see where the little creature lay, beneath this cloth! The
dear, the pretty dear!
The dropped child seemed too small and poor a thing for Death to be
in earnest with, but Death had taken it; and already its diminutive
form was neatly washed, composed, and stretched as if in sleep upon
a box. I thought I heard a voice from Heaven saying, It shall be
well for thee, O nurse of the itch-ward, when some less gentle
pauper does those offices to thy cold form, that such as the
dropped child are the angels who behold my Father’s face!
In another room, were several ugly old women crouching, witch-like,