Flush, A Biography by Virginia Woolf — Read

-"This morning Arabel and I, and he with us," Miss Barrett wrote, "went in a cab to Vere Street where we had a little business, and he followed us as usual into a shop and out of it again, and was at my heels when I stepped up into the carriage. Having turned, I said 'Flush,' and Arabel looked round for Flush--there was no Flush! He had been caught up in that moment, from UNDER the wheels, do you understand?" Mr. Browning understood perfectly well. Miss Barrett had forgotten the chain; therefore Flush was stolen. Such, in the year 1846, was the law of Wimpole Street and its neighbourhood.

Nothing, it is true, could exceed the apparent solidity and security of Wimpole Street itself. As far as an invalid could walk or a bath-chair could trundle nothing met the eye but an agreeable prospect of four-storeyed houses, plate-glass windows and mahogany doors. Even a carriage and pair, in the course of an afternoon's airing, need not, if the coachman were discreet, leave the limits of decorum and respectability. But if you were not an invalid, if you did not possess a carriage and pair, if you were--and many people were--active and able-bodied and fond of walking, then you might see sights and hear language and smell smells, not a stone's- throw from Wimpole Street, that threw doubts upon the solidity even of Wimpole Street itself. So Mr. Thomas Beames found when about this time he took it into his head to go walking about London. He was surprised; indeed he was shocked. Splendid buildings raised themselves in Westminster, yet just behind them were ruined sheds in which human beings lived herded together above herds of cows-- "two in each seven feet of space." He felt that he ought to tell people what he had seen. Yet how could one describe politely a bedroom in which two or three families lived above a cow-shed, when the cow-shed had no ventilation, when the cows were milked and killed and eaten under the bedroom? That was a task, as Mr. Beames found when he came to attempt it, that taxed all the resources of the English language. And yet he felt that he ought to describe what he had seen in the course of an afternoon's walk through some of the most aristocratic parishes in London. The risk of typhus was so great. The rich could not know what dangers they were running. He could not altogether hold his tongue when he found what he did find in Westminster and Paddington and Marylebone. For instance, here was an old mansion formerly belonging to some great nobleman. Relics of marble mantelpieces remained. The rooms were panelled and the banisters were carved, and yet the floors were rotten, the walls dripped with filth; hordes of half-naked men and women had taken up their lodging in the old banqueting-halls. Then he walked on. Here an enterprising builder had pulled down the old family mansion. He had run up a jerry-built tenement house in its place. The rain dripped through the roof and the wind blew through the walls. He saw a child dipping a can into a bright-green stream and asked if they drank that water. Yes, and washed in it too, for the landlord only allowed water to be turned on twice a week. Such sights were the more surprising, because one might come upon them in the most sedate and civilised quarters of London--"the most aristocratic parishes have their share." Behind Miss Barrett's bedroom, for instance, was one of the worst slums in London. Mixed up with that respectability was this filth. But there were certain quarters, of course, which had long been given over to the poor and were left undisturbed. In Whitechapel, or in a triangular space of ground at the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, poverty and vice and misery had bred and seethed and propagated their kind for centuries without interference. A dense mass of aged buildings in St. Giles's was "wellnigh a penal settlement, a pauper metropolis in itself." Aptly enough, where the poor conglomerated thus, the settlement was called a Rookery. For there human beings swarmed on top of each other as rooks swarm and blacken tree-tops. Only the buildings here were not trees; they were hardly any longer buildings. They were cells of brick intersected by lanes which ran with filth. All day the lanes buzzed with half-dressed human beings; at night there poured back again into the stream the thieves, beggars, and prostitutes who had been plying their trade in the West End. The police could do nothing. No single wayfarer could do anything except hurry through as fast as he could and perhaps drop a hint, as Mr. Beames did, with many quotations, evasions and euphemisms, that all was not quite as it should be. Cholera would come, and perhaps the hint that cholera would give would not be quite so evasive.