Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ help hoping, and sometimes feeling, that the world is going right, and will go right, not your way, or my way, but its own way. Yes; we've all tried our Holloway's Pills, Tom, to cure all the ills of all the world—and we've all found out I hope by this time that the tough old world has more in its inside than any Holloway's Pills will clear out." A few weeks later I received the following invitation to Snowdon, and to Snowdon we went in the autumn of 1856.

      THE INVITATION.

      Come away with me, Tom,

       Term and talk is done;

       My poor lads are reaping,

       Busy every one.

       Curates mind the parish,

       Sweepers mind the Court,

       We'll away to Snowdon

       For our ten days' sport,

       Fish the August evening

       Till the eve is past,

       Whoop like boys at pounders

       Fairly played and grassed.

       When they cease to dimple,

       Lunge, and swerve, and leap,

       Then up over Siabod

       Choose our nest, and sleep.

       Up a thousand feet, Tom,

       Round the lion's head,

       Find soft stones to leeward

       And make up our bed.

       Bat our bread and bacon,

       Smoke the pipe of peace,

       And, ere we be drowsy,

       Give our boots a grease.

       Homer's heroes did so,

       Why not such as we?

       What are sheets and servants?

       Superfluity.

       Pray for wives and children

       Safe in slumber curled,

       Then to chat till midnight

       O'er this babbling world.

       Of the workmen's college,

       Of the price of grain,

       Of the tree of knowledge,

       Of the chance of rain;

       If Sir A. goes Romeward,

       If Miss B. sings true,

       If the fleet comes homeward,

       If the mare will do—

       Anything and everything—

       Up there in the sky

       Angels understand us,

       And no "saints" are by. Down, and bathe at day-dawn, Tramp from lake to lake, Washing brain and heart clean Every step we take. Leave to Robert Browning Beggars, fleas, and vines; Leave to mournful Ruskin Popish Apennines, Dirty Stones of Venice And his Gas-lamps Seven; We've the stones of Snowdon And the lamps of heaven. Where's the mighty credit In admiring Alps? Any goose sees "glory" In their "snowy scalps." Leave such signs and wonders For the dullard brain, As æsthetic brandy, Opium, and cayenne; Give me Bramshill common (St. John's harriers by), Or the vale of Windsor, England's golden eye. Show me life and progress, Beauty, health, and man; Houses fair, trim gardens, Turn where'er I can. Or, if bored with "High Art," And such popish stuff, One's poor ears need airing, Snowdon's high enough. While we find God's signet Fresh on English ground, Why go gallivanting With the nations round? Though we try no ventures Desperate or strange; Feed on common-places In a narrow range; Never sought for Franklin Round the frozen Capes; Even, with Macdougall, Bagged our brace of apes; Never had our chance, Tom, In that black Redan; Can't avenge poor Brereton Out in Sakarran; Tho' we earn our bread, Tom, By the dirty pen, What we can we will be, Honest Englishmen. Do the work that's nearest, Though it's dull at whiles; Helping, when we meet them Lame dogs over stiles; See in every hedgerow Marks of angels' feet, Epics in each pebble Underneath our feet; Once a-year, like schoolboys, Robin-Hooding go. Leaving fops and fogies A thousand feet below.

      T. H.

      CHEAP CLOTHES AND NASTY.

       Table of Contents

      King Ryence, says the legend of Prince Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with kings' beards. In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle assures us) there were at Meudon tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and revolutionary, follows both these noble examples—in a more respectable way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty; bodily pain is his devil—the worst evil of which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then chuckles self-complacently over the smallness of his tailors' bills. Hypocrite!—straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is flogging, or hanging, King Ryence's paletot, or the tanneries of Meudon, to the slavery, starvation, waste of life, year-long imprisonment in dungeons narrower and fouler than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among thousands of free English clothes-makers at this day?

      "The man is mad," says Mammon, smiling supercilious pity. Yes, Mammon; mad as Paul before Festus; and for much the same reason, too. Much learning has made us mad. From two articles in the "Morning Chronicle" of Friday, Dec. 14th, and Tuesday, Dec. 18th, on the Condition of the Working Tailors, we learnt too much to leave us altogether masters of ourselves. But there is method in our madness; we can give reasons for it—satisfactory to ourselves, perhaps also to Him who made us, and you, and all tailors likewise. Will you, freshly bedizened, you and your footmen, from Nebuchadnezzar and Co.'s "Emporium of Fashion," hear a little about how your finery is made? You are always calling out for facts, and have a firm belief in salvation by statistics. Listen to a few.

      The Metropolitan Commissioner of the "Morning Chronicle" called two meetings of the Working Tailors, one in Shadwell, and the other at the Hanover Square Rooms, in order to ascertain their condition from their own lips. Both meetings were crowded. At the Hanover Square Rooms there were more than one thousand men; they were altogether unanimous in their descriptions of the misery and slavery which they endured. It appears that there are two distinct tailor trades—the "honourable" trade, now almost confined to the West End, and rapidly dying out there, and the "dishonourable" trade of the show-shops and slop-shops—the plate-glass palaces, where gents—and, alas! those who would be indignant at that name—buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors' own slang; slang is true and expressive enough, though, now and then. The honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade has it all its own way. The honourable part of the trade is declining at the rate of one hundred and fifty journeymen per year; the dishonourable increasing at such a rate that, in twenty years it will have absorbed the whole tailoring trade, which employs upwards СКАЧАТЬ