The Night Side of London by James Ewing Ritchie

Strand, is a busy place by day-time (it does a great business in the newspaper line, and about four or five in the afternoon it is used by the acute newsboys of the metropolis as a kind of Change), but it is busier far by night, and the later the hour the more active and lively it grows. As you walk along the Strand any time in the afternoon and evening, have you not seen (to our shame be it said) a sight not visible in the chief thoroughfare of any other capital in Europe? The sight I allude to is that of girls, whose profession is but too evident from their appearance, stopping almost every man they meet, mildly, perhaps, in the early part of the evening -- but, under the influence of drink, with greater rudeness and freedom as the night wears on. These girls, as you observe, are dressed in finery hired for the purpose; and following them, as a hawk its prey, you will perceive at a respectful distance old hags, always Jewesses, whose business it is to see that these girls do not escape with their fine dresses, and that they are active in their efforts to entrap young men void of understanding. Well, these women all live in the neighbourhood of Catherine-street. What a filthy trade the Jews and Jewesses of London drive! You may go into Elysiums, and wine-rooms, and saloons, in this district, and you will find them belonging to Jews -- the waiters Jews -- the wine, the women, the cigars, all in the hands of Jews -- true to their ancient vocation of "spoiling the Egyptians. " Let me not be understood as joining in vulgar prejudices against the Jews.

Without reading "Coningsby," or "Lord George Bentinck, a Political Biography," I am ready to confess that there have been, and still are, great and gifted men born to the Jewish race; but I am speaking of the vile crew who earn an infamous livelihood by pandering to all that is degraded in man or woman -- whose vulture eyes follow you up and down Catherine-street, and who, if they could, would rob you of your last farthing, and tear off from your back its last rag, and who by fair means or foul rear up prostitutes, and trade in flesh and blood. But pardon the digression, and yet not exactly is the subject a digression, when we remember Catherine-street and its neighbouring courts would be a very different locality, had not the Jews selected it as a fitting place for operation. In the days Consule Planco, as Mr Thackeray would write, in the hot youth of the Regency, before George IV. had become prematurely used up, and a moral people had erected a statue to the memory of the most dissolute king in Christendom as a lesson for England's ingenuous youth and as an example for future royal princes, Catherine-street was gay indeed, if wine and profligacy in the lowest and worst reality of forms are ever gay. There was Mother H. 's, where bucks assembled, and reckless women danced and drank for a few short years ere they died wretchedly in parish poor-houses, or sought oblivion and repose in the dark waters of the neighbouring Thames. Up and down Catherine-street what wretchedness masked in smiles has walked -- what sin in satin -- what devilish craft and brutal lust, aye, and, what is worse than all, what unavailing repentance and regret!