for a quarter of a century has gone since they were last in fashion, and men’s collars and women’s skirts have run their full orbit since.  Excellent books have appeared, written with intimate knowledge of working life—­books such as Charles Booth’s London or Mr. Richard Free’s Seven Years Hard, to mention only two; but either the public mind was preoccupied with other amusements, or it had not recovered from the lassitude of the last philanthropic debauch.  Nothing has roused that fury of charitable curiosity which accompanies a true social revival, and leaves its victims gasping for the next excitement.  The time was, perhaps, ripe, but no startling success awaited Mr. Alexander Paterson’s book, Across the Bridges.  Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion.  For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end.  Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations of fashion reached.

Mr. Paterson’s experience lay on the south side of the river, and the district possesses peculiarities of its own.  On the whole, I think, the riverside streets there are rather more unhealthy than those in the East End.  Many houses stand below water-level, and in digging foundations I have sometimes seen the black sludge of old marshes squirting up through the holes, and even bringing with it embedded reeds that perhaps were growing when Shakespeare acted there.  The population is more distinctly English than on the north side.  Where the poverty is extreme it is more helpless.  Work as a whole is rather steadier, but not so good.  The smell is different and very characteristic, partly owing to the hop-markets.  Life seems to me rather sadder and more depressing there, with less of gaiety and independence; but that may be because I am more intimate with the East End, and intimacy with working people nearly always improves their aspect.  It is, indeed, fortunate for our sensational novelists that they remain so ignorant of their theme, for otherwise murders, monsters, and mysteries would disappear from their pages, and goodness knows how they would make a living then!

It is not crime and savagery that characterise the unknown lands where the working classes of London chiefly live.  Matthew Arnold said our lower classes were brutalised, and he was right, but not if by brutality he meant cruelty, violence, or active sin.  What characterises them and their streets is poverty.  Poverty and her twins, unhappiness and waste.  Under unhappiness, we may include the outward conditions of discomfort—­the crowded rooms, the foul air, the pervading dirt, the perpetual stench of the poor.  In winter the five or six children in a bed grow practised in turning over all at the same time while still asleep, so as not to disturb each other.  In a hot summer the bugs drive the families out of the rooms to sleep on the doorstep.  Cleanliness is an expensive luxury almost as far beyond poverty’s