A Real Casual on Casual Wards - Postscript (1866).

I have now given you as good a description as I am able of the various workhouses I have been in. I know many others by report, that I might be able to give you very correct information of, I dare say; but as I wish only to give you something I can vouch for, I have not done so. If you wish it, however, I will tell you what I know about them. And further, if you think in any one of these workhouses I have noted down, that you would wish for a little more information respecting some points, I shall be most happy to furnish it. It is scarcely likely that I can have given everything, broken away from it as I have been every hour or so; and it is, I know, very disjointed and jerky, but I hope yon will be able to make all out correctly.

The "casual," after having come out of the workhouse in a morning, begs about town until two o'clock; the more respectable wander down into Great Smith Street, Westminster, where a free reading-room and library is kept, and read and lounge away the time until about five o'clock, when they go towards another lodging for the night to come. Most of them usually are to be found in Ham Yard, Great Windmill Street, Leicester Square, where a soup kitchen is open at three o'clock. This soup-kitchen is perfectly free, and the soup is made out of the scraps of meat, &c., got from the club-houses, hotels, and gentlemen's residences in the west-end. All the old casuals know where to get tickets for this soup-kitchen — at Elkington's, Regent Street, the club-houses, a baker in St. James Street, and many others. Running after these tickets is perhaps an hour's occupation to them. Some of them, perhaps, will have as many as six of these tickets, and, having kept one themselves, will sell the others at a penny each to those who have not been fortunate enough to beg one, but who have begged money instead. The soup got at this kitchen is very good; and as it is hot, and nearly a quart of it together, with plenty of bread, it is highly prised by casuals.

Another noted place is the Mendicity Society, in Red Lion Square, Holborn. If you can get a ticket for this place, and "gull" the officers sufficiently, you get a basin of pea-soup and a quantity of bread-and-cheese, proportionate to the number of lies you tell. If you say you aro going out of town, and have also a wife and children, perhaps a quartern loaf and a pound of cheese, may be your share — but it you tell the truth, and say you aro going to stay in town to try and get employment, small, indeed, will be your quantity — a pound of bread, perhaps, without the cheese. A person is only allowed to go once to this place; if anyone is found there a second time within a certain time, he gets a month's imprisonment, but such is the small notice taken of you, and so implicitly is your statements received, that a man may go with impunity twice a week. I have done it myself.

I scarcely know what to say about a remedy for all this. There aro various refuges in London' that put out every year in the "Times," flaming statements as to how many situations for the destitute have been found, and how many have been relieved, and so forth. That is just the whole root of it — find them work, and they will help themselves. The refuges don's do this, and how on earth the secretaries can have the assurance to say they do, has often astonished me. I have been in the Field Lane Refuge, in Carter's (South London), in Newport Market Refuge, and in Lord Dudley Stuart's, Market Street, Edgware Road. Whose are all, except the refuge in Playhouse Yard, which does not attempt to find situations for them. I know a good deal about each of these places, I have spent a week at a time in them, and could toll how these statements of theirs is concocted very well.

In the first place, to get a man work, it is necessary that he should be respectably dressed. I, myself, could have got employment many a time, but I got so shabby that I could not even bare to apply for it — and a proud man with a little "self" about him, can't apply to his friends if he has any, or perhaps, as is likely, he may have none. I had a good testimonial from my former employer, with whom I was employed two years. When I left him (because he had no more to do) I was ill for a time, and sold my clothes to procure necessaries, and got from bad to worse. The great object that these refuges were opened for — to get clothes, &c., for the really worthy and destitute, that they may bo enabled to help themselves, is not done, and many other things besides, they don't do. Those refuges, however, have a greater connection with workhouses than some people imagine, and the most of them are simply carrying out the provisions of the Houseless Poor Act, and completely ignoring the purposes they were originally intended for. If I had time I could easily show this.