wound or sore, but on each corresponding wave of repulsion. Walking
round Spitalfields, Jack London catalogued the ‘welter of rags and filth, of
all manner of loathsome skin diseases, open sores, bruises, grossness,
indecency, leering monstrosities and bestial faces’ that he finds in the
homeless asleep: ‘Looking at this agglomeration of misery, you don’t
think of our sins and shortcomings. You are conscious only of the revolt
of your senses, of nausea, and of a wild impulse to kill.’^23 Thankfully
restraining himself, London’s pity then took over. ‘But then... disgust
gives way to compassion. A longing springs up to wash those sores, to
bind up those bruised and swollen feet.’ The self-narrating of that
sentence reveals that London’s new attitude was not basically different
from his former; whether he wished to kill or cure, London saw the
homeless poor as violent stimuli upon his own sensibility, a kind of
experience he must tell rather than lives to understand.
Because the writer feels so very ill-at-ease in these surroundings, de-
scription often slides into an implicitly self-referential running commen-
tary, as when Everard Wyrall cast his trip to a doss-house into gothic
horror. The place itself was Dracula’s castle: ‘a grim weird mass of stone
loomed up out of the darkness... under such conditions one might be
forgiven for wanting to die’. An uncomfortable bed became the rack: ‘for
two hours I writhed in agony’. An unsympathetic warden enabled Wyrall
to see ‘a cruel light [that] flashed in his steely eyes...Iwondered what
exquisite piece of devilry he had for me’.^24 Why Wyrall should think that
the punishment was exclusively for him is not apparent; surely, part of the
degrading experience of officialdom is that nothing – not even pain – is
designed ‘for’ you at all, an institutional indifference R. C. K. Ensor’s
generally balanced article ‘Tramping as a Tramp’ had earlier stressed. Yet
even Ensor was susceptible to taking heartless jobsworths personally. ‘I
could never have believed the dogged cruelty of the people; for it was
patent that I was terribly tired and the rain would be heavy’ he wrote of
his attempts to get a bed.^25 The slight mismatch between the weary
mindlessness of ‘dogged’ and the purposeful scheming of ‘cruelty’ is
revealing, implying that Ensor felt they were trying to be cruel to him
against their instincts, a struggle that would hardly seem worth it and
which sits awkwardly with his picture of a system functioning without
reference to its inmates. Mary Higgs, a brave clergyman’s wife who made
several forays into the workhouse (and suffered a haemorrhage as a result
of the work she was made to do), framed her experiences as part of a
considered statistical and anthropological analysis. She took careful notes
of the mistreatment she suffered, the conditions of the inmates and the
The simplicity of W. H. Davies 135