A buried-alive population
Wright was appalled by the poverty he witnessed in Britain’s great cities
Of all the sentiments that Wright betrayed in his letters, perhaps none are more powerful than the horror he expressed on witnessing Britain’s poor. Watching people take supper and beer outside the London alehouses, he beheld “a sort of piggish intoxication… in some” and “a marvellous degree of stupidity in all. Their faces seemed coarsely cut gravestones of mind.”
Walking along Oxford Street late one night, Wright was implored by a shabby little girl, who told of her mother lying hungry at home with typhus fever. Following her to Tottenham Court Road, he watched her “nimbly tripping on her devious way… through narrow, sepulchral archways, swarming with a sort of buried-alive population”, until she “at last went up a filthy alley, about three feet wide, and entered at the third door”. Shrewdly noticing potatoes in the room, Wright lectured the supposedly bedridden woman for training her child to lie, but presently went off with the girl to buy them bread.
Meanwhile, having heard the British poor described as ‘the great unwashed’, Wright was astonished, just after 5am one Sunday morning, to find perhaps 3,000 men and boys bathing in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. “Such a scene!… The people are constantly coming and going, and by 8 o’clock I have no doubt 10,000 had come and gone away refreshed.” After 8am the bathers might be ordered out of the water by the police, lest their nakedness or poverty offend the gentry and nobility, strolling or riding in carriages along the bank.