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63
The Retrograde Parish.—In the Times for January
26th, the report of a speech made by Sir Charles Dilke having
been published, in which the Parish of Clerkenwell is denounced
as one of the retrograde metropolitan parishes, from the existence
of overcrowding of the poor in unsanitary and dilapidated
dwellings. I felt bound to express to the Vestry, my opinion
that this statement is not founded upon fact, if intended
to apply to the sanitary condition of the parish, which has
always been better and with a lower death-rate than that of
other parishes in the same group, which moreover is not the
group with the greatest mortality. At the same time I pointed
out that for some years past many of the well-to-do residents of
the Parish have been gradually leaving their houses, which
become occupied by a poorer class of people, many of the houses
which were formerly held by one family, being now let to several.
When these poorer and rough people, especially the labourers,
enter a house, at once begins a course of dirt and destruction.
The locks and handles of the doors become toys for the children
and are soon demolished. The drain traps are sold at the bone
and bottle shops, those left are never kept on, the closets are
stopped up and the pans are broken. The chimneys are never
swept, so that the rooms become black and disfigured. The
paper is torn off the walls, the floors and passages are never
washed, and there are no door mats, so that the whole place
becomes a mass of dirt and destruction. The water-butt lids
and the dust-bin lids are used for firewood, the ball cocks are
broken off, so that there is great water waste, which floods the
yards and washes away the cement from the paving. The very
handrails of the stair-cases are broken away, and even the walls
are picked out with nails or something of the kind, so as to leave
large holes. The windows are constantly broken and stopped
up with brown paper; in fact, there exists in every parish, a
juvenile window breaking club, the members of which demolish
every pane of glass they can, especially in empty houses. As
the better houses are becoming filled with these families, the
prospect is truly not favorable; moreover, a population of