She buried her husband, gathered her children round her, and with her bits of furniture went into one room, and proceeded to make her match-boxes. She had four children, and the youngest, a girl, was but two years old. I know that room, for I have been in it scores of times; it measures ten feet by eight. I know everything in that room, from its miserable bed to its paltry cupboard. I know the rent of that room: it is three shillings weekly--£7 16s. a year. She has now been in it nine years, and has paid over £70 in rent for that mean room. Here with her children four she set to work to redeem the promise made to her dying husband. Here in Christian London she made match-boxes at 2¼d. a gross, finding her own paste and thread. Here in the ‘land of the free’ she made match-boxes for fourteen hours a day, seven days to the week. Here she earned 1s. 3¾d. a day for her ‘stint’ of seven gross. Here she earned 9s. 2¼d. for her week’s work of ninety-eight hours, plus fetching and returning her work, and minus the cost of her thread and paste. And so she essayed to live, and so she did live, for she had had four years of it when I first met with her. Too hopeless even for despair, she became a machine, and her heart became dead within her. No parish allowance for her, organized charity had nothing for her, and no Sister of Mercy or parish clergyman had visited in her little room, for she ‘kept herself to herself.’
But I have forgotten an important item. The widow had a widowed mother, old and feeble, but who supported herself, and out of her penury allowed her daughter a shilling a week. For three years and nine months after the death of her son-in-law the tottering old woman carried the shilling weekly to her daughter, and then she died and the shilling died with her. The loss of her mother and the shilling awoke some feelings in the dead heart of the match-box maker. For three months she struggled on, with her lessened means and the increasing wants of the children; and the anniversary of her husband’s death came round. That afternoon, as she sat at her match-boxes, looking through her window, she saw a dead body drawn out of the Lea. At midnight there was a cry raised, ‘A woman in the Lea!’ So next day I met her in the police court.