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Updated: July 8, 2025
Needless to say the children bolted with a mingled sense of mischief and alarm. About this time I joined a society for the relief of distress, of which Bromley Davenport was the nominal leader. The 'managing director, so to speak, was Dr. Gilbert, father of Mr. W. S. Gilbert. To him I went for instructions. I told him I wanted to see the worst. He accordingly sent me to Bethnal Green.
The Palace is in the very heart and centre of East London, with its two millions, mostly working men; trams, trains, and omnibuses make it accessible from every part of this vast city from Bromley, Bow and Stratford, from Poplar, Stepney and Ratcliff, from Bethnal Green and Spitalfields.
They had set their minds against suggestions that they should live in Walworth or Whitechapel or Bethnal Green in order that they might get to know something of the lives of the very poor. "That's simply slush," Gilbert had said. "We shouldn't live like them. We'd have four good meals every day and baths every morning, and we'd only feel virtuous and 'smarmy' and do-good-to-the-poor-y.
Bethnal Green lay very silent, parched, and weary, not even enlivened by its usual gabbling flocks of geese, all of whom, poor things! except the patriarchal gander, and one or two of his ladies, had gone to the festival but to return no more! One of those who had been in the midst of the pageant, and had returned unscathed, was Blind Hal of Bethnal Green.
This good man, however, was very obviously driving a wedge into the hearts of many of his poor neighbours who in those days found no opportunity for relief in innocent pleasures from the sordid round of life in the drab purlieus of Bethnal Green.
And this teaching he applied alike to hideousness in character, sight, and sound to "watchful jealousy" and rancour and uncleanness; to the "dismal Mapperly Hills," and the "uncomeliness of Margate," the "squalid streets of Bethnal Green," and "Coles' Truss Manufactory standing where it ought not, on the finest site in Europe"; to such poetry as
In Pimlico or Bethnal Green a man might have a fortune given him, and it would not stir him to so much gratitude as an orange if he were living on the South Downs, and the peculiar sourness of modern democracy is due perhaps to deficiency of oxygen and sunlight. Miriam had no objection to return.
Oh, those trudges through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings, rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes, out of the tremulous hands of men. Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what the way of rescue for the world?"
Why can't he act like a man, and take it as he should, not come whining about here like a blind beggar of Bethnal Green? But if he can't see, others can. Perhaps Mr John Grange mayn't stop here very long. Who knows?"
I was rector near Huddersfield during the three years in which the mills were at their worst, but I have never seen such complete helplessness of the poor as since then in Bethnal Green.
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