The network of dismal streets stretching over the surrounding
neighborhood contains a population for the most part of the poorer
order. In the thoroughfares where shops abound, the sordid struggle with
poverty shows itself unreservedly on the filthy pavement; gathers its
forces through the week; and, strengthening to a tumult on Saturday
night, sees the Sunday morning dawn in murky gaslight. Miserable women,
whose faces never smile, haunt the butchers' shops in such London
localities as these, with relics of the men's wages saved from the
public-house clutched fast in their hands, with eyes that devour the
meat they dare not buy, with eager fingers that touch it covetously,
as the fingers of their richer sisters touch a precious stone. In this
district, as in other districts remote from the wealthy quarters of the
metropolis, the hideous London vagabond--with the filth of the street
outmatched in his speech, with the mud of the street outdirtied in his
clothes--lounges, lowering and brutal, at the street corner and the
gin-shop door; the public disgrace of his country, the unheeded warning
of social troubles that are yet to come. Here, the loud self-assertion
of Modern Progress--which has reformed so much in manners, and altered
so little in men--meets the flat contradiction that scatters its
pretensions to the winds.
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