[-v-]
PREFACE
THE following papers were printed in THE BRITISH WEEKLY, commencing in
October, 1887, and continuing until the end of April, 1888. They excited
extraordinary attention and were made the subject of sermons and courses of
sermons in many churches and chapels in the United Kingdom, and reproduced in
all arts of the English-speaking world. The facts were collected with great care
by commissioners specially selected for the purpose. It was not possible to
publish more than a selection from the material available, and for obvious
reasons the most startling facts discovered cannot be made public. The Editor
was made to feel very acutely both the danger of saying too much and of saying
too little, and he cannot hope
to have perfectly succeeded in striking the mean. Some parts of this volume will
seem to some too outspoken ; and others, again, will think that greater
frankness should have characterised it throughout [-vi-] He can only say
that he and his contributors have done their best. They are already grateful for
the good these papers have done and may reasonably hope that n their collected
form they will be widely read by young men all over the country. It is believed
that no such complete
study of the subject has previously been published. The Editor may be permitted
to add two specimens of the numerous comments that have appeared.
The Canada Presbyterian says:- "THE BRITISH
WEEKLY has just concluded one series of exceptionally able articles on ‘
Tempted London.' Hitherto these have been confined exclusively to the
temptations that peculiarly beset young men in
the great metropolis, and what efforts the Churches and Christian organizations
generally are making to shield and rescue the tempted. This series is to be
followed by another relating to the trials and temptations of young women. Sad
as is the appalling
array of facts marshalled throughout the entire series, the work has been done
in a most satisfactory manner. The articles have been written in a proper and
common-sense spirit. Nothing has been taken for granted . Hearsay and imaginary
conditions have been carefully and rigorously avoided. There has been no
exaggeration. no sensational parade of the evils disclosed, nothing to shock the
most fastidious or in the least degree to palliate [-vii-] evil or make it
attractive. Whatever evil has been
depicted has appeared in its true colours as evil only, and that continually,
The worst has not been dragged into the light of day, but sufficient
illumination has been cast upon it to enable every reader to know that it exists
as a terrible reality.”
The City of London Association News says:-
"“For many weeks past articles on the above subject have been appearing
in the enterprising and ably edited BRITISH WEEKLY. The section specially
dealing with young men has now been completed. The work has been executed with
care and thoroughness, and for the first time a complete record exists
of the numerous temptations which surround the young men of this great city. For
many years to come these articles will doubtless be the text-book on the dangers
of London life, as far as they affect young men.”
27 PATERNOSTER ROW.
LONDON. E.C.
[-1-]
CHAPTER I.
COMING UP FROM THE COUNTRY TO LONDON
THE subject we have selected for investigation is one of universal interest.
There is hardly a household in the land that is not more or less concerned with
it. There is no parish, however remote or obscure, from the Hebrides to
Cornwall, from which young men do not find their way to London. There is,
perhaps, none who has not a relative or friend who has made his journey to the
great city and fought his battle there ; and it may be said that millions have
had their lives darkened by the defeat
and ruin of someone they have loved in that centre of temptation. So, too, even
at this moment many are spending anxious days and nights in thinking how their
dear ones who have gone out from the sheltered home are faring face to face with
wickedness in its most seductive forms.
The servants of Christ in all the churches are [-2-] deeply
concerned. There is no little congregation that has not sent up members of its
Bible-class to seek their fortune in the city ; and these are often most in
danger. According to the minister in
London who knows most of city young men, it is usually “the most amiable,
warm-hearted fellows that are most easily ensared." In this question, too,
the nation is greatly concerned, for upon the fate of the young men of London
depends, to a very large extent, the future of our country. The prizes of London
are very difficult to earn, and they are becoming more difficult every day. Of
the multitudes who set out full of buoyant hope and ambition, and even
high-toned resolves, many are disappointed. They look upon London as a
prospective earthly paradise, free from all restraint, and offering every
conceivable
satisfaction, The would-be Whittingtons must have Whittington virtues, or the
prospect may resolve itself into a hard and woeful experience. Into the actual
prospects of young men we shall enter into detail afterwards. Meanwhi1e, let it
suffice to say that they under-estimate the difficulties because they will not
examine the details, and they over-estimate their own capabilities because they
persist in an outlook- through the romantic colouring of their own imagination.
The position the average young man will have to fill is not at all romantic. He
may be successful; he may rise to high position and influence,
as many have risen and are rising; but it will not be without a rigorous
perseverance, a stern self-denial, and through a vast amount of labour,
extended, perhaps, over many years. On the other hand, he may fall at once ; he
may rise and fall again ; or he [-3-] may sink from prosperity to misery by
degrees, and join the ranks of the vast lawless crowd of Darker London. Whether
successful or not, he will have to face enormous difficulties, endure many
privations, and be brought face to face with temptation on every side. But in
spite of all these considerations, the mighty magnet exerts its mysterious
fascination, and the number of young men and women who come to London every year
is steadily on the
increase.
Not only is the subject deserving of consideration, by reason
of its absorbing interest and importance, but also because so little is known in
this connection. To the general public absolutely nothing is known of the life
of young men and young women who make up Tempted London. The young people
themselves are very isolated; they are also very reticent. As a rule, they do
not know much of one another. Indeed, in many, if not in all, houses it is
etiquette that one employé should not know the salary of another. Between the
religious and the irreligious, the virtuous and the “fast,” there
is a great gulf fixed, and the one class can tell very little of the real life
of the other. Ministers and
associations have only a very limited hold of these young men, and also a very
limited knowledge.
Those who come up decided Christians generally connect themselves at once with
churches, and in many cases with Young Men’s Christian Associations; but the
vast majority do neither. To achieve any permanent good there must be in large
business establishments a corporate spiritual life. As in a family, religion has
little chance of flourishing unless [-4-] one of the family be religious,
although next door
there may be a most energetic church or chapel, so
when there is no high moral life inside a warehouse it is useless to expect much
good from outside
agencies. The secretary of one of the largest Christian Associations has said
that "unless a young
man coming to London joins us at once, he is not likely to do so until he has
passed through the bitterness of having to eat the fruit of his own wrong-doing; and until he has
for himself discovered
the hollowness and unsatisfactory nature of that way of living, he will be
impervious to better teaching.”
It is difficult, if not impossible to obtain full information from ministers or
other Christian workers, for the simple reason that they do not possess it; nor
is it easy to get information from the young men themselves. Largely isolated
from society and thrown in on themselves, they shrink from confiding to
strangers; they have no father-confessors. It does not appear that any one has
yet thought of establishing a censorship in any large house. There does not seem
to be a single instance where any one is found to supervise the moral life of
the establishment to act as guide, philosopher, and friend to the
youth of the house. There is no one to whom a lad wrestling with the first
throes of temptation can go for counsel or help, no one to whom a young man in
trouble, doubt, or difficulty can make a clean
breast of it, and obtain guidance and comfort. Boys and young men alike, so long
as they keep out of scrapes, can do as they please, go where they please, and
will be asked no questions. The competition in business and the knowledge that
if a man loses [-5-] his position there are hundreds ready to grasp at it at
once, are sufficient to ensure outward decorum and observance of rule in most
houses, and there is
really little or no trouble in maintaining the necessary discipline. The large
houses in which young
men reside practically serve them as clubs. A young man has his reading-room,
smoking-room,
and other conveniences at his own place of business. He has his cricket, rowing,
or football club there
too, and therefore does not go outside for relaxation or companionship. Thus he
necessarily keeps much to himself. To add to these difficulties, the subject
has never before been taken in hand in a serious manner. Attempts have indeed
been made, but abandoned. There are no statistics of any kind
upon which reliance can be placed.
In the present work, therefore, the information has been
collected by commissioner conversant with city life, who have thoroughly
investigated the subject ; and it is hoped that the mass of facts in the
following pages will be found as useful as they
are certainly accurate.
The plan that has been adopted is to follow the career of a
hypothetical young man who comes to London for the first time ; to describe his
surroundings, his lodgings, his business life; to explain his ways, his
prospects; in a word, to depict as far as possible his life in London. Then
follows in strict sequence a consideration of his temptations, ranging under
these formal heads — Drink, Betting and Gambling, and Impurity. Of course
there are other
temptations than these, the minor temptations to [-6-] which all are alike
exposed ; but our subject deals
rather with the peculiar temptations of young men in the position indicated.
Commencing with the evil of drink, which lies at the foundation of almost
every crime, we shall pass on to the fruitful theme of betting and gambling. The
enormous proportions to which this evil has grown are now beginning to be
realized by the public ; but as yet it may be said that the churches and the
instructors of youth are
entirely ignorant of its real nature and the way in which it gradually creeps
on, of the extent to which it fills the life of those who engage in it, and of
the results to which it leads. Perhaps there are not a hundred pulpits in the
land from which has been denounced the canker which threatens to eat out the
very heart of the nation, and which affects all classes, from the highest to the
lowest. As these
papers will be strictly free from everything prurient and indecent, it is
obvious that the evil of impurity must be touched upon in a guarded manner. At
the same time, there are many facts which ought to be known to all, young as
well as old, and which it will be necessary to state. We shall refer
particularly to the whole subject of "pleasure" — the real nature of
theatres, music-halls, dancing-saloons, and the rest. In various ways the
Christian Church
has been lately roused to the importance at this subject ; but it is not too
much to say that no full
and reliable materials for judgment and warning exist.
There is no train from the provinces that enters London but
shoots a number of young men into the metropolis. Day by day, week by week, and
month [-7-] by month the stream flows on, filling ever and refilling the great
tide of the unemployed. Quite recently
a London lawyer advertised for a clerk at a salary of £70 a year. He got some
thirteen hundred answers, of which over a thousand came from the country. The
number of young men employed in and about the city was estimated by the late
Samuel
Morley as amounting to some two hundred and fifty thousand. Good judges now
estimate it as about three hundred thousand. According to the best information in the city of London,
there are, annually, twelve thousand young men who fall. Often the fall is but a
momentary aberration, but it is sufficient to exclude from employment, and
often-times from recovery.
The change from a small country town to London is enormous;
it is like going out of the calm twilight
into a blinding blaze of gas. A young man, though, now approaching his twentieth
year, has lived hitherto an uneventful life. Perhaps up to the day
when he departs for the metropolis he has not been a fortnight away from home.
Home influence, the greatest of all educating powers, has kept him in
check, and made a healthy-minded lad of him. His severest dissipation has been a
visit to some neighbouring town to play a cricket-match, and he
has grown up under the eyes of a minister, between whom and himself there is
mutual regard. His weaknesses are merely weaknesses, as yet nothing more, though
capable of shooting up into vices. "All wickedness," Milton says,
"is weakness;" and it is as true that all weakness is potential
wickedness. The young man has not reached the stage of [-8-] despising his
parents, and there is a lump in his throat as he bids them “Good-bye.” But
youth is
sanguine. He spends the first half-hour of his journey making brave promises to
himself, and for the remainder of the time he looks out at the window.
He has never been in London before, and among all this
seething mass of humanity he does not know
where to look for a familiar face. There are old school friends of his here, but
we know that life begins over again when we leave school. He may meet half a
dozen persons whom he knows within an hour of his arrival, or he may not meet
one for a dozen years. He is full of vague anticipation at first, but the
prosaic business of engaging lodgings, and the prosaic life in those lodgings,
soon sobers
him down.
In the city of London the price of ground is so enormous that
it is impossible to have business premises sufficiently large for clerks to
reside in them, and, as a matter of fact, the large majority of young men live
in lodgings. Our new arrival must
therefore look out some lodgings. With all his worldy possessions on the top of
his four-wheeler, he rumbles through miles of thoroughfare until he reaches the
apartments. They are in a street where every other window exposes a card with
“Apartments,” showing through layers of dirt. Even when the house is full
this card is not taken down, for lodgers come and go in London as they do not
elsewhere, and there is generally some destitute man or woman on the third floor
without money to pay the rent. The young man tries several houses, and [-9-]
finds each one duller and less home-like than the former. He can only afford to
take one room, which must serve as bed and sitting-room combined. A house
repeats its tenant. Know the one, and you can conjure up the other.
In these streets of London lodging-landladies are very like
each other. All their lives are engaged in
a conflict with Want. They may prevent his getting across the threshold, but he
is always knocking at the door. This makes them in many cases mean, avaricious,
grasping. In smaller towns the landlady takes a healthy interest in her lodgers.
In the poorer class of lodging-houses in London it is a fact that she frequently
never learns their names. Call on them. Ask for Mr. Brown, and note what
follows. A slovenly "slavey," from whose life all the beauty of
existence has long been driven, appears at the door with a sooty face, and a
bucket of slops in her hand. The name of Brown suggests no one
to her. In a shrill voice she demands of some invisible person in the back
regions whether there is a Brown in the house. “Try the second floor back,”
suggests another harsh voice. Yet Brown has been there for months.
Herein, too, is exemplified the “comforts” of lodgings.
At three houses where inquiries were made,
in the Islington district, the young men were expected to absent themselves on
Sundays, a reasonable time being allowed for dinner if he desired to share the
meal with the family. The same price (1s. 6d) was charged at each, though in two
of them he was to
take his mid-day meal alone. In many others a very strong objection was made to
his occupying the [-10-] room during the whole of the evenings of the week. One
landlady suggested that he “ought to go to a public-house if he wanted to pass
his time away, like other young people.” The landladies prefer their lodgers
to spend their evenings out of doors, where they require no attention, and do
what damage is done to other people’s furniture. Many little tiresome
annoyances are repeated for this object, and generally end in forcing young men
into public-houses although they had no previous inclination.
Here is a true sketch of one lodging-house. Flats are unknown
in the part of the world where it stands,
and it is a large house of four floors. On the ground floor is the dining-room,
with a bedroom opening
off it. A music-master has these rooms, and his cracked piano jingles all day.
On the first floor is the drawing-room, which is occupied by two ladies,
occupation at present unknown. The stair to the first floor is carpeted, and
comparatively well lit.
On the next stair—in the ascent of which it is well to grip the
banisters—there is a piece of ragged
carpet here and there, Beyond that all is plain wood, which, however, is hidden
from you unless you carry a candle. At the top of this stair the new
lodger has his room. It looks out on chimney-tops, which is not a disadvantage
in this street, where for
a view you have to choose between the dingy houses opposite and a lumpy plain of
roofs. The room is
of fair size, with a bed on one side, and a dilapidated couch on the other. The
occupant will have to use
the bed as a sofa, for the couch gives way if it leaves the wall. There is a
washstand, flanked by two
chairs; an aged easy-chair, which rocks uncomfort-[-11-]ably, owing to a castor
being gone; and two decaying tables. Nelson is dying at Trafalgar, on the wall,
in a flashy frame. The ceiling is very low, as
in neatly all London houses when you come higher than the second floor. There is
no gas. The higher class of young city men may be found in the
Camberwell and Brixton neighborhoods. In a street turning off the Clapham Road
there are four houses taken by a speculative apartment-letter. Ladies take
a house in these neighbourhoods, and so
contrive matters that they not only pay the rent of the whole house out of the
apartments let, but keep
themselves and their families in a moderate state of respectability besides. The
whole board, lodging,
and laundry work is undertaken at a fixed charge, with the distinction of a late
dinner in the better houses. The cost of the whole is from 18s, to 30s. a week,
with a few extras which have to be arranged for afterwards. But although these
lodgings are cleaner
and more comfortable, the position of a young man in them, with the necessity of
keeping up a corresponding appearance, is worse than in a by-street elsewhere.
He is also much more exposed to temptation. In that very neighbourhood there are
houses to which we shall call attention later, where, with the most devilish ingenuity,
provision is made for
the ruining of young men and young women under the most respectable external
appearances. The keepers of these places have clients in many business houses,
and others paid to tempt and introduce, at their convenience, young men engaged
in the city.
Happily, there are exceptions to this gloomy [-12-] picture.
Apartments are certainly to be had in
London where Christian benevolence induces to treatment marked by kindness and
real consideration. In particular, the Church
of England Young Men's Society, at the Leopold Rooms, 3, St. Bride Street,
provides a first-class residential club for young men. The annual subscription
is 10s. 6d., and the advantage of this and other institutions of a similar
character cannot be over-estimated. In addition to reading-rooms, concert-rooms,
and a gymnasium, there is a floor divided into a number of bedrooms —small,
indeed, but each a distinct room and sufficiently large. Each is furnished with
an iron bedstead, a chest of drawers, washstand and chair, while
the occupant is allowed to adorn his room according to his own tastes. There is
a bath-room close at
hand, where cold baths may be enjoyed gratis, though a charge is made for hot
baths. The weekly rent of each room is 7s., and this includes the washing of the
linen. For about a guinea a week a young man may board and lodge himself in the
Leopold Rooms as comfortably as any sensible and healthily organized youth need
desire. But the drawback is that the rooms are too few, and the
greater number of the applicants are of necessity denied admittance. But there
is here on a small scale what might be effected on a larger scale all
over London. We must not forget to add that lists of recommended apartments are
kept by the Young
Men’s Christian Associations, and that there is little doubt that care is
exercised in the selection of such
houses. The number, however, is small. Most young men, too, object to the kind
of restraint they [-13-] imagine is involved in such an arrangement, and the
system of boarding with families is to the English
mind objectionable. Young men prefer their own lodgings and a latch-key, even
though the material
comfort of this system be less than in the boarding-houses.
The onset of temptation is often immediate, as will hereafter
be seen. The moment the youth arrives in London chance nudges him with its
elbow, and many go down at the very first, yielding to sins which avenge
themselves with fatal precision. But
we have said enough to indicate two at least of the great dangers of London. The
first is the loneliness and monotony of life, which drives young men out of
doors to seek excitement; the next is the want of home restraints and the force
of environment. Where a man is unknown, and where all his life he can only be
known to a few, the restraints which, even in large provincial cities, have very
great strength altogether vanish away.
Even when temptation does not come immediately, there is a
thrilling sense in the mind of the youth that it is in the air if he but choose
to utilize
it. London, to one who does not look for vice, is outwardly one of the quietest
and most decent places
in the world, and many of the institutions which, even a few years ago, were the
notorious resorts of
the vicious seem to have vanished. All the same, they exist. No one has seized
this aspect of London with such force as Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson. Nothing
could be less romantic than a square in Bloomsbury or a by-street leading off
the Strand
yet this plain, dingy house, dark below and lighted [-14-] above, is the most
notorious gambling-hell in London —a place the full history of which it would
be impossible for any journal to print. That quiet house
in yonder sober square, which looks like the residence of peaceful
respectability, is inhabited by a knot of people whose orgies may match anything
to be witnessed in the worst dens of Paris. This other quiet-looking residence
is a great factory for the secret manufacture of impure literature. It takes
some trouble to get the pass-keys but once the inner region is entered its
secrets are not hard to find.
Two remarks may be added by way of reassurance. In the first
place, it is certain that hosts of young
men pass through this ordeal triumphantly, not only resisting the evil, but
hardly knowing of its existence. In the very midst of the furnace of temptation
there
are many as unhurt as the three children in the flames.
Next, everything depends upon the training, and principles
the young man brings up with him. It was remarked recently, by one with a very
large
experience of London life, that it is a great mistake to suppose that young men,
as a rule, come up innocent from hamlets and country towns to be led away by the
vices and temptations of London. They have been vicious before they come there,
and the opinion of this gentleman is that, as a rule, London-born young men are
at least as free from evil as those who come up from the country to London. If
parents could bring tip their sons total abstainers, and if the young men
vigorously adhered to the pledge, there would be, comparatively speaking, little
danger. But the true preservative is [-15-] conversion to God. Young men with
real religion in their hearts will not go wrong. In the course of these
investigations how often we have recalled the good old hymn —
“‘Twill save us from a thousand snares
To mind religion young!”