An Open Verdict by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

CYRIL CULVERHOUSE had entered upon a career of unceasing toil. He had given himself scanty rest or respite at Little Yafford, though it was a place where most curates would have taken life easily; but at Bridford he learned, for the first time, what work means in an overcrowded, sorely neglected manufacturing town. The ignorances and abuses which he found rampant in those noisome back slums and overcrowded alleys, lying hidden behind the outward respectability of the high street, aroused his indignation against a system that allowed such things to be. He was no democrat; he had no sympathy with would-be levellers; but it seemed to him that there must be something out of joint in the time, when such depths of social degradation were left to their native gloom, while the gaslit thoroughfare and the shriek of the railway engine testified to the march of improvement.

Soon after the arrival of Cyril Culverhouse at Bridford, the respectable inhabitants were startled by a series of letters in their leading newspaper, letters characterized by that noble eloquence which comes straight from a heart moved to indignation by the wrongs and sufferings of others. No man could feel his own griefs so keenly as this anonymous writer felt the miseries of his fellow townsmen. With an unflinching hand he tore aside the curtain from those dens of infamy and ignorance which the citizens of Bridford were willing to ignore, or to speak of with a deprecating shrug, and an admission that Bridford was a very bad place. It had never occurred to anybody that it was his business to make the place better. No modern Peter the Hermit had arisen to call for a crusade against ignorance and vice. The Bridfordians were too hotly bent upon money-making to have time to spare for crusades of any kind. Those letters in the _Bridford Journal_ did some good, and roused some citizens who had been as deeply slumberous as to the condition of their fellow-men as if they had been the pampered lackeys of the Sleeping Beauty, wasting a century in one after-dinner snooze, with a vaguely pleasant sense of repletion, afternoon sun, the lullaby of summer woods, and the drowsy hum of insects.