the stage, and his assertion of worthy ambition and earnest
struggle against those
“twin gaolers of the human heart,
Low birth and iron fortune.”
Again, another’s taste will lead him to the contemplation of Rienzi
and the streets of Rome; another’s to the rebuilt and repeopled
streets of Pompeii; another’s to the touching history of the
fireside where the Caxton family learned how to discipline their
natures and tame their wild hopes down. But, however various their
feelings and reasons may be, I am sure that with one accord each
will help the other, and all will swell the greeting, with which I
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
shall now propose to you “The Health of our Chairman, Sir Edward
Bulwer Lytton.”
SPEECH: SANITARY REFORM. LONDON, MAY 10, 1851.
[The members and friends of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association
dined together on the above evening at Gore House, Kensington. The
Earl of Carlisle occupied the chair. Mr. Charles Dickens was
present, and in proposing “The Board of Health,” made the following
speech:-]
THERE are very few words for me to say upon the needfulness of
sanitary reform, or the consequent usefulness of the Board of
Health. That no man can estimate the amount of mischief grown in
dirt, – that no man can say the evil stops here or stops there,
either in its moral or physical effects, or can deny that it begins
in the cradle and is not at rest in the miserable grave, is as
certain as it is that the air from Gin Lane will be carried by an
easterly wind into Mayfair, or that the furious pestilence raging
in St. Giles’s no mortal list of lady patronesses can keep out of
Almack’s. Fifteen years ago some of the valuable reports of Mr.
Chadwick and Dr. Southwood Smith, strengthening and much enlarging
my knowledge, made me earnest in this cause in my own sphere; and I
can honestly declare that the use I have since that time made of my
eyes and nose have only strengthened the conviction that certain
sanitary reforms must precede all other social remedies, and that
neither education nor religion can do anything useful until the way
has been paved for their ministrations by cleanliness and decency.
I do not want authority for this opinion: you have heard the
speech of the right reverend prelate this evening – a speech which
no sanitary reformer can have heard without emotion. Of what avail
is it to send missionaries to the miserable man condemned to work
in a foetid court, with every sense bestowed upon him for his
health and happiness turned into a torment, with every month of his
life adding to the heap of evils under which he is condemned to
exist? What human sympathy within him is that instructor to
address? what natural old chord within him is he to touch? Is it
the remembrance of his children? – a memory of destitution, of
sickness, of fever, and of scrofula? Is it his hopes, his latent
hopes of immortality? He is so surrounded by and embedded in
material filth, that his soul cannot rise to the contemplation of
the great truths of religion. Or if the case is that of a
miserable child bred and nurtured in some noisome, loathsome place,
and tempted, in these better days, into the ragged school, what can
a few hours’ teaching effect against the ever-renewed lesson of a
whole existence? But give them a glimpse of heaven through a
little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be
clean; lighten that heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag
and in which they become the callous things they are; take the body
of the dead relative from the close room in which the living live
with it, and where death, being familiar, loses its awe; and then
they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were
so much with the poor, and who had compassion for all human
suffering.
The toast which I have to propose, The Board of Health, is entitled
to all the honour which can be conferred upon it. We have very
near us, in Kensington, a transparent illustration that no very