The reader will perhaps say that the kind of miseries recounted in the previous chapter are more imaginary than real.  Many thousands of people subsist in London upon narrow means, and do not find the life intolerable.  They have their interests and pleasures, meagre enough when judged by a superior standard, but sufficient to maintain in them some of the vivacity of existence.  No doubt this is true.  I remember being struck some years ago by the remark of a person of distinction, equally acquainted with social life in its highest and its lowest forms.  Mr. H., as I will call this person, said that the dismal pictures drawn by social novelists of life among the very poor were true in fact, but wrong in perspective.  Novelists described what their own feelings would be if they were condemned to live the life of the disinherited city drudge, rather than the actual feelings of the drudge himself.  A man of education, accustomed to easy means, would suffer tortures unspeakable if he were made to live in a single room of a populous and squalid tenement, and had to subsist upon a wage at once niggardly and precarious.  He would be tormented with that memory of happier things, which we are told is a ‘sorrow’s crown of sorrow.’  But the man who has known no other condition of life is unconscious of its misery.  He has no standard of comparison.  An environment which would drive a man of refinement to thoughts of suicide, does not produce so much as dissatisfaction in him.  Hence there is far more happiness among the poor than we imagine.  They see nothing deplorable in a lot to which they have become accustomed; they are as our first parents before their eyes were opened to a knowledge of good or evil; or, to take a less mythical illustration, they are as the contented savage, to whom the refinements of European civilisation are objects of ridicule rather than envy.

I quote this opinion for what it is worth; but it has little relevance to my own case.  I am the only competent judge of my own feelings.  I know perfectly well that these feelings were not shared by men who shared the conditions of my own life.  There was a clerk in the same office with me who may be taken as an example of his class.  Poor Arrowsmith—­how well I recall him!—­was a little pallid man, always neatly if shabbily dressed, punctual as a clock, and of irreproachable diligence.  He was verging on forty, had a wife and family whom I never saw, and an aged mother whom he was proud to support.  He was of quite imperturbable cheerfulness, delighted in small jokes, and would chatter like a daw when occasion served him.  He had never read a book in his life; his mind subsisted wholly upon the halfpenny newspapers.  He had no pleasures, unless one can count as such certain Bank Holiday excursions to Hampstead Heath, which were performed under a heavy sense of duty to his family.  He had lived in London all his days, but knew much less of it than the country excursionist.  He had never