The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House by Joseph O'Neill

Author:Joseph O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2014-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

‘Aint Eaten for Five Days’: Beggars and Tramps

His head was pressed against the wet pavement and his back arched up, his arms and legs splayed and his eyes turned up in his head, with only the whites visible. A crowd formed a circle about him, transfixed by the blood oozing from his nose and the froth flecking his mouth and chin. But it was the choking noise, the gurgling in his throat as his tongue lolled on his chin that held the crowd silent. Then his body fell limp. But the gurgling sound continued and the blood glistened on his face.

Two women stepped into the circle and lifted him to his feet. They parked him on a low wall and bent to his ear, whispering reassurance.

‘No wonder he’s collapsed,’ said one of the women. ‘Poor dear aint eaten for five days.’ The second woman took a sixpence from her purse and pressed it into the man’s palm. She turned to the crowd.

‘Will you see him starve?’ she reproached. ‘Will no one show a scrap of Christian charity to this poor creature?’ They wilted under her unblinking gaze and fumbled in their pockets.

That evening, back in their Drury Lane lodging house, in a court within a court, the epileptic and his female companions counted their money. It had been a profitable day.

Throwing a fit was just one of the myriad ruses used by professional beggars. It was always important to choose a time and location carefully. Outside a church, just as the congregation was leaving, was ideal. By the time he told his sad story – often supported by a written testimonial from a minister of religion – his concerned helpers were pressing on him the proceeds of an impromptu collection.

John Fisher Murray visited a lodging house in 1844 where he found the ersatz epileptic and many other professional beggars – or ‘gegors’ as they called themselves. Fisher had to concede that the fraudster’s use of soap, to produce the frothing at the mouth, and food dye pushed up his nostrils to produce the haemorrhaging, certainly added to the authenticity of his act. The ersatz epileptic was one of the numerous professional moochers whose aversion to work was such that they would expend any amount of ingenuity and effort to avoid it.

No one condemned these scroungers more vehemently than Henry Mayhew, as described in his seminal work on the underclass, London Labour and the London Poor:

We are surrounded by wandering hordes, distinguished from the civilized man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour and by want of providence in laying up a store for the future, by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehension, by his passion for intoxicating liquors, by his extraordinary powers of enduring privations, by his comparative insensibility to pain, by an immoderate love of gambling, by his love of libidinous dances, by the absence of chastity among his women and his disregard of female honour, by his vague sense of religion.

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