,
you can go and get your quartern or half-quartern over the bar--or you
can lounge into the concert-room and quietly sit soaking the whole
evening; for, as the performance does not close till midnight, the time
admits of a man getting "fou" between the commencement and the close of
the entertainment. Drury-lane is what may be called a low neighbourhood,
devoted principally to butchers' and bakers' shops, pawnbrokers'
establishments, and gin-palaces. Pass these latter any hour of the day
you will, and you will find them crowded by laundresses, and charwomen,
and haggard old crones from the sister isle, and young wives whose
husbands, it may be, are hard at work. There they stand in the streets,
with babies in their arms and dirty children in rags by their side,
gossiping with women as ill-conditioned as themselves; and as gossiping
makes them thirsty, and as drinking makes people drunk, it is not
difficult to imagine the state in which many of these women are. In the
middle of the day it is very obvious that many of them have had more than
enough. How they can afford it always puzzles me--I cannot, I know, and
I believe my weekly earnings equal theirs. The pawnbrokers may help
them--but their material guarantees cannot be perpetually forthcoming.
These gin-drinkers live cheap, I grant. They herd in the horrid slums of
Drury-lane--and people say sometimes, Can you wonder that such poor
wretches drink? but they forget that it is the drink that makes them such
poor wretches. The money these women spend in drink would pay for decent
apartments and clothes that would be clean and comfortable, not ragged
and filthy, and stinking with every abomination. It is not poverty that
creates drunkenness, but drunkenness that creates poverty, and the
poverty thus created--the dreariest kind of all poverty--abounds in
Drury-lane. Well, then, exclaims one of the new school, who believes
mankind are to be regenerated by fiddling, does not such a place as the
Mogul have a beneficial influence? I will answer this by describing the
kind of amusement afforded at the Mogul. You are pent up in a room where
the air is ten times worse than in any theatre--any crowded chapel--or
worse than in the late Reading Room of the British Museum or the House of
Commons. You see a little of the worst acting in London--broad farce,
chiefly by artists, if I may term them such, who are more remarkable for
their weakness than their strength. "Speak t