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Updated: June 24, 2025
The more ill-looking of the men the discreditable minority hung about on the steps of the beer-houses and gin-shops, smoking, and commenting pretty freely on every passer-by. Margaret disliked the prospect of the long walk through these streets, before she came to the fields which she had planned to reach. Instead, she would go and see Bessy Higgins.
He had a gentleman's horror of those resorts in gin-shops, or kept by the disciples of gin-shops, where he would surely be robbed, which did not appal him, but robbed in bad company. Thinking of all this, he went up to London late in the afternoon, and spent an uncomfortable evening in town. It was absolutely innocent as regarded the doings of the night itself, but was terrible to him.
Well, you see, the street's a kind of market all Saturday night, up till long after midnight costers' barrows with flare-lights, gin-shops full to the door, and all the fun of the fair all the fun of the fair.
There certainly was need of a Tabernacle in that quarter, for the poverty and wickedness were very dreadful. Boys not yet in their teens staggered by half-tipsy, or lounged at the doors of gin-shops. Bonnetless girls roamed about singing and squabbling. Forlorn babies played in the gutter, and men and women in every stage of raggedness and degradation marred the beauty of that fair Sunday morning.
"In the old coaching days," continued Mr Seaward, "this was a great centre, a starting-point for mail-coaches. For nigh thirty years the mission has been there. The `Black Horse' was a public-house in George Yard, once known to the magistrates as one of the worst gin-shops and resort of thieves and nurseries of crime in London.
You see more drunken people in a week in New York than in a year in Paris, and more people who, if not drunk, are unmistakable topers. On the whole, therefore, the picture of the French cafés is a pleasant one, and it is a pity the bar-rooms of America and the gin-shops of England were not more like them. They are a compromise, it is true, but that is better than the prohibitionist's vain fight.
He soon finds out gin-shops, where all is clean and bright, and where th' fire blazes cheerily, and gives a man a welcome as it were." Alice, who was standing near for the convenience of hearing, had caught much of this speech, and it was evident the subject had previously been discussed by the women, for she chimed in.
Although places of this description are to be met with in every second street, they are invariably numerous and splendid in precise proportion to the dirt and poverty of the surrounding neighbourhood. The gin-shops in and near Drury-Lane, Holborn, St. Giles’s, Covent-garden, and Clare-market, are the handsomest in London.
If you could only step inside the gin-shops as I do, you would see a drunken sinner of a father or a mother drinking down the pence you drop into the children's hands. Your thoughtless kindness is as cruel as their vice."
Even although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and "Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the Parks.
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