ot a single one among
the cultivated and comfortably off people, with whom I came to mix
later on, had any conception at all regarding the nature and character
of the sort of life I saw all round me during my first two years in
London. I consider that London's cab horses were substantially better
off than the section of London's poor among whom I lived in places
like South Tottenham, the purlieus of that long unlovely highway--the
Seven Sisters Road.

Had I been of a more gregarious and social bent, the experience must
have broken my heart, or unhinged my mind, I think. But, from the very
first day, I began systematically to avoid intercourse with those
about me; and in time this became more and more important to me. So
much so indeed that, as I remember it, quite a large proportion of my
many changes of lodgings were due to some threatened intimacy, some
difficulty over avoiding a fellow lodger. Other moves were due to
plagues of insects, appalling odours, persistent fighting and
screaming in the next room, wife-beating; in one case a murder; in
another the fact that a sodden wretch smashed my door in, under the
impression that I had hidden his wife, by whose exertions he had
lived, and soaked, for years. I must have removed more than a score of
times in those two years, and more than once it was to seek a cheaper
lodging--cheaper than the previous hell!

No, it would never do for me to attempt a detailed record of this
period. Even consideration of it in outline causes the language of
melodrama to spring to the pen. Melodrama! What drama ever conceived
in the mind of man could plumb the reeking depths of the life of the
vicious among London's poor? Things may be a little better nowadays.
Beyond all question, the way of the aspirant in Grub Street appears
vastly smoother than in my time. It is all cut and dried now, they
say--schools of journalism, literary agents, organisations of one sort
and another. But with regard to the life of the very poor, of the
submerged, I have seen signs in the twentieth century which to my
experienced eye suggested that no fundamental change had taken place
since I lived among these cruelly debased people.

One would never dare to say it in print, of course, but I know very
well that, while I lived among them, I was perfectly convinced that,
for very many--not for all, of course, but for very many--there could
be no fundamental improvement this side of the grave. For them the
only rea