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In other schoolrooms and nurseries, in slum living-rooms perhaps or workhouse wards or palaces, round the other side of the earth, in Canada or Russia or China, other little creatures are trying their small limbs, clutching at things about them with infantile hands, who someday will come into your life with a power and magic monstrous and irrational and irresistible.
Bumble is a magnificent figure of the follies and cruelties of ignorance in office I would have every candidate for the post of workhouse master pass a severe examination upon "Oliver Twist" but it is not only caricature and satire I demand.
The doctor's third case happened at midnight, being called on duty to the workhouse at that hour. It was about a mile from the town something less perhaps. Halfway on his journey he found a man trying to raise a poor woman out of the dyke. He went to his assistance, and found the woman paralyzed with cold, and speechless.
Her home was in Little Silver, which is our village; and only poverty and the need for work had took her out of it. There she tended her widowed father, and he had such a passion for the girl, her being his only one, that 'twas only the shadow of the Union Workhouse ever steeled him to part from her.
If they could not, or were not willing to pay the increased rent, increased because of their own labor, they could leave; others would rent the places at the increased figure. "As for you, ye shiftless, miserable tillers of the soil, ye can go where you like; emigrate if you can; get you to the workhouse or the grave if you cannot."
Mr and Mrs Morton also did their best to comfort her; indeed, had it not been for them she would have been compelled to resort to the workhouse for support. They sympathised with the old woman, not because they were aware of the service her husband had rendered those dear to them, but because, as they supposed, a like calamity had overtaken her and themselves at the same time.
Corney, the matron of the workhouse to which our readers have been already introduced as the birthplace of Oliver Twist, sat herself down before a cheerful fire in her own little room, and glanced, with no small degree of complacency, at a small round table: on which stood a tray of corresponding size, furnished with all necessary materials for the most grateful meal that matrons enjoy.
Their morals too are exemplary; and they often perform this labour to support aged parents, or to keep their own children from the workhouse! In keen suffering, they endure all that the imagination of a poet could desire; they live hard, they sleep on straw in hovels and barns, and they often burst an artery, or drop down dead from the effect of heat and over-exertion!
It is useless to offer them the workhouse; they will refuse it, and make, the offer a ground of appeal to the benevolent. As regards the children, the medical officer declares that his medicines are useless, and even dangerous. They are taken in the morning, the child is exposed in the evening, and in a few months it dies a natural death?
Jan he says, 'Grind, says he, 'you should have some meat to eat, and some good beef-tea, and a drop o' wine wouldn't do you no harm, says he. And it makes me smile, sir, to think where the like o' poor folks is to get such things. Lucky to be able to get a bit o' bread and a drain o' tea without sugar, them as is off their work, just to rub on and keep theirselves out o' the workhouse.
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