Quite recently I was invited to take sixty of my poor industrious women to spend a day at Sevenoaks. Among the party was a widow aged sixty and her daughter of thirty-five. They were makers of women's costumes, and had worked till half-past four that very morning in order to have the day's outing. I had known them for years, and many times had I been in their poor home watching them as, side by side, they sat at their machines. Happy were they in recent years when their united earnings amounted to twenty-one shillings for a week's work of eighty hours. "Tell me," I said to the widow, "how long have you lived in your present house?" "Forty years," said the widow. "Emmy was born in it, and my husband was buried from it. I have been reckoning up, and find that I have paid more than twelve hundred pounds in rent, besides the rates." "Impossible," I said, "out of your earnings!" She said: "We let off part of the house, and that pays the rates and a little over, but we always have to find ten shillings a week for rent." Ten shillings out of twenty-one shillings, when twenty-one was forthcoming, which was by no means the case every week. "We cannot do with less than three rooms--one to work in, one to sleep in, and the little kitchen. I cannot get anything cheaper in the neighbourhood."
Here we come at once upon one of the greatest difficulties of the industrious poor. If they wish to live in any way decently, one-half their earnings disappears in rent.
"We have nowhere to go." The difficulties the poor have in finding suitable--or, indeed, any--rooms that may serve as a shelter for themselves and their children, and be dignified by the name of "home," are almost past belief. All sorts of subterfuges are resorted to, and it is no uncommon thing for a woman, when applying for one or more rooms, to state the number of her children to be less than half what it is in reality. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the people who obtain rooms by such means are not desirable tenants; but it is also true that even decent people have to resort to some kind of deception if they are to find shelter at all.
Day after day in London police-courts the difficulty is made manifest. Houses altogether unfit for human habitation have to be closed by order of the authorities; but, wretched and insanitary as those dwellings are, dangerous to the health and well-being of the community as they may be, they are full to overflowing of poor humanity seeking some cover. But they must "clear out." Their landlords say so, the sanitary authorities say so, and the magistrate confirms the landlord and the sanitary authorities. The one cry, the one plea of all the poor who are to be ejected is: "Where are we to go? We can't get another place." The kindly magistrate generally allows a few weeks' grace, and tells them to do their best meanwhile to procure other rooms. For some this is a possibility, but for others the period of grace will pass, and on an appointed day an officer of the court will be in Paradise Row or Angel Court, as the case may be, to see that the tenants are ejected without undue violence, and that their miserable belongings are deposited safely in the street.