Dr Vaidehi Nathan
Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell, Pp 384 (PB), £9.99
A Child of Jago, Arthur Morrison, Pp 217, £8.99
London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew, Pp 472, £8.99
Latest in the series Oxford World’s Classics from the Oxford University Press (OUP) are three books from the 19th century. Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell, and A Child of Jago by Arthur Morrison are novels, while London Labour and the London Poor, is a collection of essays by Henry Mayhew.
Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 1853 is the sorry tale of a beautiful woman who goes through severe travails. Ruth, working in a respectable sweatshop meets aristocratic Henry Bellingham at a ball, where she had gone to mend dresses. At the second meeting, he forces her to go with him to Wales. Henry falls ill and is taken away by his mother, leaving a little money for Ruth. She finds comfort in the home of disabled and kind Mr. Benson, who has a sister. Ruth is pregnant and delivers a baby boy. For the world she is a widow. The story takes several twists and turns and she is forced to confess to her son that he was an illegitimate child. He begins to despise her. Ruth, in the meanwhile, encounters Bellingham, who has appeared in the scene as Mr. Donne. He offers to marry her, but she declines. Ruth by now is very popular among the poor folks as she treats them as nurse and attends to them. Having heard that Bellingham is ill, she takes care of him and nurses him to health but dies of infection. At her funeral, the poor who had gathered pay rich tributes to her. The son realises the goodness of his mother.
There were several novels on ‘fallen woman’ during the 19th century, notable ones being Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Thomas hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). However, Elizabeth Gaskell is sympathetic to Ruth and portrays her as a victim.
A Child of the Jago created a furor when it was published because the author claimed that his novel was entirely based on real life. The background of the novel is the slum Jago, which is very much the ‘Old Nichol’ slum of the 1890s. The reason why people were angry was that the novel revealed the stinking underbelly of the city of London, which was at that time one of the most thriving commercial addresses in global map.
The story is that of a young boy of eight, till he grows up to be 17. His father a drunkard, his mother tired and many mouths to feed, Dicky Perrott, the protagonist joins the routine way of survival in the Jago. He begins as a petty thief. But he is rescued and put into decent employment by the clergyman in the area. But the lure of the street pulls Dicky back. The man, who was using Dicky in order to get him back, fixes his father, who is sent to jail. When he comes out he kills the trickster and in turn is hanged. Thoroughly disgusted, Dicky makes up his mind once and for all to live the life of the Jago. He says he would ‘spare nobody and stop at nothing… He was a Jago and the world’s enemy.
The novel was not received well. Morrison in his defence stated that his intention in writing A Child of the Jago had been to show the gradual corruption of a basically decent boy, Dicky Perrott, by the slum in which he was born and grew.
The two sides of London was a reality though the people then were not willing to accept it. Now, almost all the affluent cities boast of a dirty dark side, which is ‘accepted.’
Henry Mayhew was a Victorian journalist who walked the streets of London and wrote stories on the people whom he met there. The lives of petty traders and workers interested him. His collection of articles, mostly written for Morning Chronicle, was published in three volumes in 1851. Mayhew’s work described the struggle for survival of such people as those who gathered snails for food, ‘pure finders’ (who collected dog dung for tanneries) and ‘sewer-hunters’ (who searched the sewers for scrap metal and other valuables). Sheer poverty drives them to do this. There were teeming millions on the road, without a permanent shelter and source of income. Needless to say, the essays were heart wrenching and sad.
Read his stark description on the trade of the old wool. “There is yet another use for old woolen clothes. What is not good for shoddy is good for manure, and more especially for the manure prepared by the agriculturalists in Kent, Sussex, and Herefordshire, for the culture of a difficult plant – hops. It is good also for corn land (judiciously used), so that we again have the remains of the old garment in our beer or our bread.” Chilling!
He harshly comments about the society “It is hard for smug-faced respectability to acknowledge these dirt-caked, erring wretches as brothers, and yet, if from those to whom little is given little is expected, surely, after the atonement of their long suffering, they will make as good angels as the best of us.”
This is new selection of essays, which offers a cross-section of the original volumes. There was a time when poverty writing was fashionable. Not any longer. Our magazines and newspapers are full of gushing features on the rich and the luxurious. Henry Mayhew belonged to neither times. He wrote what he saw, heard and observed. He reported. He introduced to the world of gentlemen and ladies how the teeming population they pass by lives. You meet all kinds of people in his writings — migrants, beggars, labourers, dying men and struggling children. Revisiting the classics gives an insight into the social life of the times. The three books of the OUP give a vivid picture of the English society, nay London society in the 19th century, at a time when they were fast gaining footholds around the globe for trade and more. These are evergreen books that do not lose charm or relevance and hence are classics.
(Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6DP)
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