Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
a practice which is friendly to the knowledge of human nature, to good
feelings, and to that frankness of address which becomes a man who
would be thought a philosopher. For a philosopher should not see with
the eyes of the poor limitary creature calling himself a man of the
world, and filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth
and education, but should look upon himself as a catholic creature, and
as standing in equal relation to high and low, to educated and
uneducated, to the guilty and the innocent. Being myself at that time
of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally
fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are
technically called street-walkers. Many of these women had occasionally
taken my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off the steps of
houses where I was sitting. But one amongst them, the one on whose
account I have at all introduced this subject—yet no! let me not class
the, oh! noble-minded Ann—with that order of women. Let me find, if it
be possible, some gentler name to designate the condition of her to
whose bounty and compassion, ministering to my necessities when all the
world had forsaken me, I owe it that I am at this time alive. For many
weeks I had walked at nights with this poor friendless girl up and down
Oxford Street, or had rested with her on steps and under the shelter of
porticoes. She could not be so old as myself; she told me, indeed, that
she had not completed her sixteenth year. By such questions as my
interest about her prompted I had gradually drawn forth her simple
history. Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence (as I have since had
reason to think), and one in which, if London beneficence had better
adapted its arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might oftener
be interposed to protect and to avenge. But the stream of London
charity flows in a channel which, though deep and mighty, is yet
noiseless and underground; not obvious or readily accessible to poor
houseless wanderers; and it cannot be denied that the outside air and
framework of London society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive. In any
case, however, I saw that part of her injuries might easily have been
redressed, and I urged her often and earnestly to lay her complaint
before a magistrate. Friendless as she was, I assured her that she
would meet with immediate attention, and that English justice, which
was no respecter of persons, would speedily and amply avenge her on the
brutal ruffian who had plundered her little property. She promised me
often that she would, but she delayed taking the steps I pointed out
from time to time, for she was timid and dejected to a degree which
showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of her young heart; and perhaps
she thought justly that the most upright judge and the most righteous
tribunals could do nothing to repair her heaviest wrongs. Something,
however, would perhaps have been done, for it had been settled between
us at length, but unhappily on the very last time but one that I was
ever to see her, that in a day or two we should go together before a
magistrate, and that I should speak on her behalf. This little service
it was destined, however, that I should never realise. Meantime, that
which she rendered to me, and which was greater than I could ever have
repaid her, was this:—One night, when we were pacing slowly along
Oxford Street, and after a day when I had felt more than usually ill
and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into Soho Square.
Thither we went, and we sat down on the steps of a house, which to this
hour I never pass without a pang of grief and an inner act of homage to
the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory of the noble action which
she there performed. Suddenly, as we sate, I grew much worse. I had
been leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once I sank from her
arms and fell backwards on the steps. From the sensations I then had, I
felt an inner conviction of the liveliest kind, that without some
powerful and reviving stimulus I should either have died on the spot,
or should at least have sunk to a point of exhaustion from which all
reäscent under my friendless circumstances would soon have become
hopeless. Then it was, at this crisis of my fate, that my poor orphan
companion, who had herself met with little but injuries in this world,
stretched out a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, but
without a moment’s delay, she ran off into Oxford Street, and in less
time than could be imagined returned to me with a glass of port wine
and spices, that acted upon my empty stomach, which at that time would
have rejected all solid food, with an instantaneous power of
restoration; and for this glass the generous girl without a murmur paid
out of her humble purse at a time—be it remembered!—when she had
scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessaries of life, and when
she could have no reason to expect that I should ever be able to
reimburse her.
Oh, youthful benefactress! how often in succeeding years, standing in
solitary places, and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect
love—how often have I wished that, as in ancient times, the curse of a
father was believed to have a supernatural power, and to pursue its
object with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment; even so the
benediction of a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like
prerogative, might have power given to it from above to chase, to
haunt, to waylay, to overtake, to pursue thee into the central darkness
of a London brothel, or (if it were possible) into the darkness of the
grave, there to awaken thee with an authentic message of peace and
forgiveness, and of final reconciliation!
I do not often weep: for not only do my thoughts on subjects connected
with the chief interests of man daily, nay hourly, descend a thousand
fathoms “too deep for tears;” not only does the sternness of my habits
of thought present an antagonism to the feelings which prompt
tears—wanting of necessity to those who, being protected usually by
their levity from any tendency to meditative sorrow, would by that same
levity be made incapable of resisting it on any casual access of such
feelings; but also, I believe that all minds which have contemplated
such objects as deeply as I have done, must, for their own protection
from utter despondency, have early encouraged and cherished some
tranquillising belief as to the future balances and the hieroglyphic
meanings of human sufferings. On these accounts I am cheerful to this
hour, and, as I have said, I do not often weep. Yet some feelings,
though not deeper or more passionate, are more tender than others; and
often, when I walk at this time in Oxford Street by dreamy lamplight,
and hear those airs played on a barrel-organ which years ago solaced me
and my dear companion (as I must always call her), I shed tears, and
muse with myself at the mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and
so critically separated us for ever. How it happened the reader will
understand from what remains of this introductory narration.
Soon after the period of the last incident I have recorded I met in
Albemarle Street a gentleman of his late Majesty’s household. This
gentleman had received hospitalities on different occasions from my
family, and he challenged me upon the strength of my family likeness. I
did not attempt any disguise; I answered his questions ingenuously,
and, on his pledging his word of honour that he would not betray me to
my guardians, I gave him an address to my friend the attorney’s. The
next day I received from him a £10 bank-note. The letter enclosing it
was delivered with other letters of business to the attorney, but
though his look and manner informed me that he suspected its contents,
he gave it up to me honourably and without demur.
This present, from the particular service to which it was applied,
leads me naturally to speak of the purpose which had allured me up to
London, and which I had been (to use a forensic word) soliciting from
the first day of my arrival in London to that of my final departure.
In so mighty a world as London it will surprise my readers that I
should not have found some means of starving off the last extremities
of penury; and it will strike them that two resources at least must
have been open to me—viz., either to seek assistance from the friends
of my family, or to turn my youthful talents and attainments into some
channel of pecuniary emolument. As to the first course, I may observe
generally, that what I dreaded beyond all other evils was the chance of
being reclaimed by my guardians; not doubting that whatever power the
law gave them would have been enforced against me to the utmost—that
is, to the extremity of forcibly restoring me to the school which I had
quitted, a restoration which, as it would in my eyes have been a
dishonour, even if submitted to voluntarily, could not fail, when
extorted from me in contempt and defiance of my own wishes and efforts,
to have been a humiliation worse to me than death, and which would
indeed have terminated in death. I was therefore shy enough of applying
for assistance even in those quarters where I was sure of receiving it,
at the risk of furnishing my guardians with any clue of recovering me.
But as to London in particular, though doubtless my father had in his
lifetime had many friends there, yet (as ten years had passed since his
death) I remembered few of them even by name; and never having seen
London before, except once for a few hours, I knew not the address of
even those few. To this mode of gaining help, therefore, in part the
difficulty, but much more the paramount fear which I have mentioned,
habitually indisposed me. In regard to the other mode, I now feel half
inclined to join my reader in wondering that I should have overlooked
it. As a corrector of Greek proofs (if in no other way) I might
doubtless have gained enough for my slender wants. Such an office as
this I could have discharged with an exemplary and punctual accuracy
that would soon have gained me the confidence of my employers. But it
must not be forgotten that, even for such an office as this, it was
necessary that I should first of all have an introduction to some
respectable publisher, and this I had no means of obtaining. To say the
truth, however, it had never once occurred to me to think of literary
labours as a source of profit. No mode sufficiently speedy of obtaining
money had ever occurred to me but that of borrowing it on the strength
of my future claims and expectations. This mode I sought by every
avenue to compass; and amongst other persons I applied to a Jew named
D—— {4}
To this Jew, and to other advertising money-lenders (some of whom were,
I believe, also Jews), I had introduced myself with an account of my
expectations; which account, on examining my father’s will at Doctors’
Commons, they had ascertained to be correct. The person there mentioned
as the second son of —— was found to have all the claims (or more than
all) that I had stated; but one question still remained, which the
faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested—was _I_ that person?
This doubt had never occurred to me as a possible one; I had rather
feared, whenever my Jewish friends scrutinised me keenly, that I might
be too well known to be that person, and that some scheme might be
passing in their minds for entrapping me and selling me to my
guardians. It was strange to me to find my own self _materialiter_
considered (so I expressed it, for I doated on logical accuracy of
distinctions), accused, or at least suspected, of counterfeiting my own
self _formaliter_ considered. However, to satisfy their scruples, I
took the only course in my power. Whilst I was in Wales I had received