§ 2.

That, then, is the first broad feature of Liverpool’s poverty—the frankness and completeness with which it is involved in the processes which grant her all her wealth. I have already spoken of its physical distribution: two dirty smears, one on either hand of the clean-swept central spaces. Of the two, the northern is the larger; and together they probably contain some six thousand adults and some thirteen thousand children. Of these (and this is the second and more interior peculiarity), the majority are either Irish or of Irish descent.[5] It follows, therefore, that here alone in Liverpool do you get a specific dialect. They speak a bastard brogue: a shambling, degenerate speech of slipshod vowels and muddied consonants—a cast-off clout of a tongue, more debased even than Whitechapel Cockney, because so much more sluggish, so much less positive and acute. It follows, too, that the ruling religion of these quarters is Roman Catholicism. There are about a dozen Catholic churches actually in the Slums, and to pass suddenly into one of them out of the stench and uproar of some dishevelled court is to taste again, in a very peculiar measure, the sweet, rich silence that has so often broken on one’s palate in the towns and villages of the Continent. Here, as on the Continent, too, the people slip in and out all day long, genuflecting, sitting in apathetic huddles, going back once more to their sorrowful outer world. And you constantly see the figures of priests moving to and fro among the lanes and alleys.

§ 3.

It would be an easy matter to add to this list of the region’s peculiarities: to speak of its food—chiefly bread and tea, with, upon occasion, the viler parts of pig; of its queer parasitic industries; of its dress, its habit of early marriage, its extravagant fecundity. But to do this would be simply to repeat, with a difference, that oldest and unhappiest of slum-induced habits, the habit of regarding the people who live there as, in some sort, a race apart. We speak largely of the Underworld, the People of the Abyss, the Submerged Tenth, and gradually we drift into a way of considering them as a strange breed of degenerates, mattoids, morlocks.... It is an offence that all the friendships I have formed amongst these people make me especially anxious to avoid. They are all, really, much more like the suburbans than the suburbans are themselves. Each one of these so bedraggled humans is really a rinsed and expurgated bundle of just those passions and emotions which form the unalterable nucleus of every character in the world. Life for them, you see, is so astonishingly shorn of the complexities and elaborations. All its circumstances—those levers at the Docks amongst others—have tended to fine everything down to the blunt, primary facts; and it is here, accordingly, and not amongst the lettuce-eaters who read Nietzsche in lonely country cottages, that you may discover the authentic simple life. They are always undisguisedly face to face, for instance, with that most ancient and inveterate of human problems, the problem of getting food. They start, so to say, from scratch. They tear the day’s vitality out of their own vitals. They know the pains of hunger on the one hand, the pains of satisfying hunger on the other; and they are constantly preoccupied with the fundamental human business of reconciling that great antithesis. It is the same throughout. Birth and Death, Hunger, Love and Hate, the Terrors of Damnation and the Hope of Heaven, become constant and vehement companions. The bones of life show through. Here, certainly, plus Ça change plus c’est la mÊme chose. And the people who live here are simply our simplified selves.

§ 4.

Take, for example, the case of Esther—of Esther (I’m sorry) Grimes. She lives in one of those blind-backed courts off Blenheim Street—quite one of the most malodorous corners in the whole of Liverpool’s Underworld. Her father (like so many of the fathers here: they seem to wear rather worse than the women) is dead, and Esther keeps herself and a vile-tempered, rheumaticky old gargoyle-crowned stick of a mother by tramping amazing distances through the northern suburbs—Anfield, Kirkdale, and so on—selling “stuff.” “Stuff” is Liverpool Irish for cheap fruits and vegetables, and she carries her ill-favoured tomatoes or oranges or whatever it may be in a great basket poised on a turban perched on the top of her head. Also, she bellows. By getting to the market by six in the morning and steadily walking and bellowing until five o’clock at night she can sometimes make quite as much as twelve shillings a week, which is more than she used to make in the tin-works. (It was Mr. Upton Sinclair, by the way, who really expelled her from there. “The Jungle” had some unsuspected sequels in this and that odd corner of the world.) She wears one of those local accretions of innumerable petticoats which so successfully attain all a crinoline’s ugliness without any of its precision, and her mass of red hair is scraped back into a tumbling knot above her neck, and drawn over the forehead of her pointed face in a broad fringe. She speaks the hideous jargon of the district, and when the suburban sees her in his own streets thus fringed, petticoated, bawling, and besmeared, he very naturally wonders what kind of preposterous nature must lurk beneath so preposterous an exterior.

But I know Esther very well indeed, and I protest that she is not in the least preposterous, that she is not, essentially, anything but particularly normal. I am convinced, indeed, as Grant Allen was of Hedda Gabler, that “I take her in to dinner twice a week.” She has all the essential, the root qualities: she is just, she is generous, she is sociable. She loves cleanliness and good colours. She has a fine appetite for pleasure, and the right, needful touch of diablerie. All that she lacks is an adequate mode of expression, the flexile, elaborate technique which would enable her to grant these things a gracious and orderly embodiment.... If you could invest her with certain possibilities of dress (the dress that Mr. Charles Ricketts designed the other day for Miss McCarthy would suit her admirably), could get her hair heaped up and back, and so round across her forehead in the curve that would rhyme with the feat curve of her chin, she would present, if not a figure of intolerable beauty, at least one of very singular vividness and charm.... Well, just in the same way with that essential bundle of root qualities which she possesses: grant them a similar appropriate equipment, and you would get an equally delightful result. But as it is, hammered out on the patched and tuneless instrument she has been provided with, all the fine human music of which she is so full sounds fearfully like so much deliberate discordancy. Her sociability, for instance: she is compelled to express that by sitting on a sour doorstep in the midst of a raucous group of messy neighbours. Her affection, again: she can only display that by lovingly cursing her mother, and by swinking all day on her behalf instead of getting married—as she so easily might do. She is just; but perhaps the only dignified example of her justness that I can produce is her remark (remember, she is one of the devoutest of Catholics) that probably the folks who insist upon leaving tracts for her really mean very well at bottom. She is fond of cleanliness; and the proof of that is to be found in the fact that she spends vastly more pains upon her toilet than many even second-rate actresses. It is not her fault that the results are incommensurate with her efforts. When one has to get all the water one uses from a little dribbling pump in the middle of a filthy court; when one has to carry it in a leaky meat-tin up a slimy stairway to a foetid room; when one has to wash (without soap) in the same meat-tin, and do one’s fringe without a looking-glass; when one has to do all this on a diet of bread and tea, and under a constant hail of reproaches from a rheumaticky old gargoyle, then it becomes distinctly easy to expend an enormous amount of energy without obtaining any very ravishing result. The result in Esther’s case is that you get an apparition so preposterous and streaky that well-meaning old ladies in the public streets are often moved to remonstrate with it on the subject of untidiness. I have heard them. I have also heard Esther’s replies.... She has, as I say, the needful touch of diablerie.

§ 5.

As with Esther, so with the majority of those about her. They are not plaster saints, and they are not morlocks: they are simply a community of amiably-intentioned life and laughter loving men and women and children, with the average amount of pluck and the average amount of cowardice, all exceedingly human and sinful and lovable and amorous and faithful and absurd and vain, and all compelled, by some strange swirl of outer circumstance, to spend their strength in a warfare waged on prehistoric lines. Here and there, of course, the skin self-protectingly toughens, malformities creep in, the Beast gets its appalling opportunities. Those levers at the Docks produce some sickening results.... But I do not want to heap up horrors. That, indeed, would be an easy thing to do. But it is even easier to misunderstand those exterior horrors which constantly do present themselves. That dirt, as we have seen, does not mean a love of dirt or a lack of energy; it simply stands for lack of proper tools.

Those clustered slatterns on the doorsteps do not really symbolize degeneracy; they merely emblematize that delicate and wholesome spirit which finds its projection elsewhere in the pleasant devices of our drawing-rooms. That ghastly uproar in a place of stench and wailing children simply means that the spleen which you and I, armed with a host of ingenious little instruments, twist and contrive into this and that elaborate code of moods and attitudes, is there being published abroad in the only fashion available. And it is not the fault of these people, nor in the least their essential desire, it is wholly the fault of the uncouth apparatus at their disposal, that their embodiment of that other wholesome and delicate human instinct—the instinct for Pleasure—should have taken the form of the crude lights and shocks of a corner tavern.

No, down here in the blackness and the slime, it is not, for the most part, any strange, incalculable brood that has its spawning-place; and I would like these two regions to remain in your imagination rather as a couple of far, unwholesome islands, primitive with jungle and morass, on which some thousands of twentieth century civilians, bankrupt of even the necessities, have been planked astonishingly down.

§ 6.

Now, it is obviously not in the nature of things that Liverpool should permit all the resultant discordancies and malformities—the constant waste of effort, the constant and preposterous clothing of civil bodies in a barbarous dress—without making some very notable efforts to provision and equip those islands. Much of this black disorder forms, as I have said, a large part of the price she pays for her efficiency—these people have been marooned here by the necessities of her own prosperous voyages—and although her passion for efficiency will never permit her to reduce the blackness by decreasing the efficiency, that very passion has always made her supremely anxious to beat down the price as far as possible. In no other city in the country, certainly, have the questions of feeding the poor, of housing them, nursing them, washing them, received more earnest and controlled attention; and upon the shores of these strange islands far-sounding official tides are constantly flinging this and that of necessity, of comfort, of direction. Into the details of all these efforts I have now no space to enter; nor, indeed, would such entry fall within the scope of this book. But you get their presence visualized, you get the vital sense of the activity of all these forces, when you turn some drab corner among the hovels and the rank disorder and come suddenly in sight of one of the clean, decisive blocks of Corporation dwellings: leash, personable structures, balconied and symmetrical, made up of course upon course of fit and habitable flats, and glittering at night with an unexpected blithesomeness and order. You get the same assurance, again, in the public wash-houses planted here and there—the first of their kind in the kingdom; and again in the occurrence of those neat-handed depots for distributing sterilized milk which dot a white pattern all about the blackness.

And always about these coasts, augmenting the gifts of the controlled official tides, there constantly wheels and dips an active fleet of friendly privateers. It is to them, indeed, that one’s natural inclination is always to look most hopefully: they are obviously human, they bring camaraderie and affection—needful things that the milk depots are not compelled to supply. You get all that side of the thing admirably symbolized by those open-air concerts (also, I fancy, the first of their sort in the kingdom) organized by one of the most successful of these free-lance expeditions, which fill the darkest of the courts, night after night, with actual, colourful music.... So that all these islanders, Esther and the rest, are not to be pictured as living in absolute isolation. Through the chaotic crowd of them there constantly move, very vitally and wonderfully, certain reassuring visitants—some shrewd, some benignant, some sentimental, but all enormously in earnest; and for my own part I never recall the dull bleared speech that prevails there without hearing, too, the dainty broken English, the daintier laughter, of a certain Swiss worker who chaffs them and mothers them and bullies them, and whom they love exceedingly, or without seeing the spare figure of that fine Founder of a noble secular order whom seven thousand children know by name, and who can pass anywhere among these morasses, at any hour of the day or night, and receive nothing but a welcome of elemental friendliness.

§ 7.

So that, in one way and another, the islanders begin to get their apparatus, the People of the Abyss, if you prefer to call them so, their share of light and laughter; and some day, perhaps, these two dull smears may even be wholly erased. And one speaks of such an event with the more of hopefulness because there are not lacking certain signals of a wide and deep change that is about to pass over, that has, indeed, already begun to pass over, the great organism of which they form so intimate a part. I do not speak now of a mere change in the social attitude towards these people; I speak rather of those profounder alterations of character, of purpose, of ideal, which must run their apparently unrelated course before any such specific attitude can be affected at all stably and significantly. All this blackness and disarray is, after all, too fundamental to vanish before any self-conscious and deliberate endeavours; it can only disappear by a kind of accident, the almost unintended by-product of other and alien processes; and it is, therefore, neither to the efforts of these fine workers, nor to the validity and zeal of that glittering official machinery, that one turns, on the last analysis, for the true portents of the change. It is rather to the talk going on in the cafÉs, to the books in the booksellers’ windows, to the remote suburban firesides where very different matters are being quietly discussed, to the efforts apparent in the ateliers. And in all these places, it seems to me, there are to be discerned the signs of the dawn of another epoch in the City’s history.

Liverpool passes out of her pubescence. The swift straight lines of her eager and yet so strangely dignified uprising begin to swerve out now into ample curves, begin to enclose another spaciousness, a larger and more considerate leisure. One finds it evidenced in the social atmosphere of the place, in an increasing suavity and ripeness to be discovered there. It appears again in the part played by the University—a part of ever-increasing confidence and intimacy on the one hand, of ever-increasing acceptability on the other. It is to be detected in the religious life of the place, in the aspirations which surround the great Cathedral which is now splendidly uprising in her midst. It is disclosed in the revealing mirror of the arts. In her latest and most perfect piece of architecture, the luminous building, so significantly isolated, that serenely dominates her central wharves, she seems, almost for the first time, to have confessed herself in beauty perfectly, and she has done that because the nature of the confession had already suffered change. A new poet, too, has wonderfully arisen in the midst of these hitherto almost songless workers; and in the painters’ quarters there is a momentous stir of schism and disputation. Already the old art of the place, called into existence by its spirit of independence, but limited by the typical demands of so strenuous an atmosphere, begins to give way a little before the advances of an art that concedes nothing to the citizen, that sits frankly apart among its own visions.... In a little bronze-hung studio, poised high above one of the central ways, a woman is dealing with pigment in a fashion more sensitive and personal than any that has been known in Liverpool before. Well, in the quality of her work I find some confession of the forces that are producing the profound unanimous change which may lead, among other things, to the dispersal of the darkness of the underworld.

So that in the end this dull stain may vanish. I have called it a dream—a black mood out of which the City dreadfully gathers inspiration for her battles. Like other dreams, it may one day draw to its close. But when it is over the dreamer, too, will have changed; that, at least, is inevitable. Just in what manner these subtle and various mutations will affect her character, her aspect, it is impossible even to suggest. It may be that this growing sensitiveness will soften in some measure the fingers we have seen probing, so tirelessly, so tirelessly, for the hard unmitigable fact. Or it may be that she will discover some wonderful union between these qualities, will maintain a double dominion, losing nothing of her ardour, gaining much of this new tranquillity. It is impossible to predict. This much alone is certain: that the next book which essays her portraiture will have to deal with a strangely different subject.