work, beginning at eight or nine o'clock a.m. A few have the regular factory hours. There are, however, many exceptional cases, and very long hours are occasionally exacted. The most prolonged labour, as we have said, occurs in the cases of persons working for themselves; thus shirt-makers often work from five a.m. to eight p.m., and in the boot-trade some hand-workers keep at it from seven a.m. to ten p.m. But long hours more particularly prevail when workpeople employed in a factory are allowed to take work home to be done after their factory labour is over. In the case of small masters and mistresses, long hours are rather the rule than the exception; and although the number of children and young persons employed by each is small, collectively the young workers are an extremely numerous class. In one case a child only seven years of age was found working at bracemaking for an old woman in a court out of Golden Lane, London, from eight a.m. to eight p.m. for 6d. a-week. In that neighbourhood many children work from half-past eight to seven p.m., and others, from seven to thirteen years of age, work still longer; some thirteen hours, and, on alternate days, fourteen hours a-day. Long hours like these are not peculiar to London, they prevail also in country districts. At Yeovil, it is quite common for the children at eight or nine years old, who work three or four together at glove-making for a mistress, to labour from six a.m. to eight p.m. And, bad as this is, it is exceeded by the cruel exactions of parents in the case of their own offspring; and painful illustrations are adduced by the Commissioners of the sad truth that too often parents, when their pecuniary interests are concerned, cannot be trusted with the welfare of their children.

The allowance of time for meals is more liberal in factories than in small workshops; but, at home and in small places, the food is hastily taken, often scarcely stopping the work. At Yeovil, the medical officer for the union reported that the hasty swallowing of meals, and the habit even among the females of taking beer or other stimulants in the place of substantial food, 'to save time,' were productive of bad results.

Employed at so early an age, and in such protracted labour, it is certain that many cruel practices must be used to keep the children at work. A person at Yeovil told the Assistant Commissioner that her daughter began to work af six years old; her mistress employed her from 6-30 a.m. to 8-30 p.m., and 'it was as much as her life was worth to look up.' The Commissioners think that this is in no degree an exceptional

case.

As with the dressmakers, so with the seamstresses, great

reason

Seamstresses: Education.

119

reason exists to deplore the unwholesome character of many of the places where they work. Several well-built factories and warehouses are noticed, whose proprietors have been anxious to introduce good sanitary arrangements and secure the health of their workpeople-as Messrs. Tillie and Henderson, of Londonderry, where in an extremely well-managed establishment, proper accommodation of lavatories, waterclosets, hot-water-pipes for warming, and strict cleanliness and healthfulness of the buildings, have been provided, besides a regular medical attendant at a salary of £100 per annum; and the health of all the workers is very good; also, Mr. Edwin Bostock, bootmaker, of Stafford; and Messrs. Lloyd, and Messrs. Gibson and Woolley, of the same town. But still the Commissioners regret to report that in many of the larger, and in all the smaller places of work, the rooms are overcrowded, and either altogether unventilated, or only ventilated by chance. They say:

It cannot be too often repeated that ventilation secured is equivalent to space gained; that it is, therefore, in the highest degree economical, especially in large cities and towns, where rents are so high; and that, apart from the question of health, it is known that in every form of prolonged, and especially sedentary occupation, and therefore especially in all kinds of needlework, a pure atmosphere, by sustaining the bodily vigour, enables the worker to produce more in a given time, and so to benefit equally the employer and the employed. There is no doubt, also, that the depressing influence of a foul atmosphere induces a desire for stimulants difficult to resist.'

In point of education the whole class is in an extremely low condition, as well in London and in the large towns, as in the more rural districts. In a school in Golden Square, where are 200 girls aged from nine to fifteen, mostly employed in the shops and factories in the neighbourhood during the day, the state of ignorance is reported by the mistress to be something astonishing. Although there were not more than a dozen of the whole number who had not attended a day-school, not more than a third of the 200 were able to read, write, and cypher; and the remaining two-thirds were unable to say the alphabet. Of about fifty girls employed by one person in making chenille nets, not one-half could read. In a boot factory in Norwich, of twenty girls from sixteen to twenty years old, seven could not read; and at a clothing and shirt factory in Manchester, two girls who were questioned, each thirteen years old, proved to be able neither to write nor to read, and others were reported to be in an equally neglected state. Amongst the glovers in country districts matters are still worse. The children, working constantly from eight years of age, and without any half-time provision, are utterly uneducated and often unable to read.' Growing up thus empty of learning, and

able

able at an early age to support themselves independently of parents and guardians, they easily fall a prey to vice. The want of respectable lodgings has been a source of much evil, and many praiseworthy efforts have been made in London and elsewhere to rectify the mischief by the establishment of 'homes,' where the young women are lodged and boarded.

The Commissioners think that no real difficulty would accrue in a limitation of the hours of work, and in the adoption of the half-time system as prescribed by the Factory Act; and they recommend that, allowing the option of from six to six or from seven to seven all the year round, the provisions of the Factory Act as to time should be applied to all establishments for the manufacture of wearing apparel, be they small or large. In the case of children working for their parents at home, they suggest a general enactment to be carried into effect by the local authority, forbiding children under eight years of age to be employed at certain processes, and regulating the time of work of others above that age.

As the first report of these Commissioners on the employment of children, of which an abstract was given in 'Meliora,' in Vol. VI., was followed by legislation, bringing about 50,000 persons under its protection, we may surely hope that during the next Session of Parliament something may be done in a similar manner to ameliorate the condition of the very much larger class still outside the pale. Any sincere effort to bring this about will assuredly receive the most hearty commendation of 'Meliora.'

IT

ART. III. THE MODERN THALIA.

I'd rather be a kitten and cry mew,

Than one of these same metre balladmongers.'

Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth.

T will probably be generally acknowledged that the present is hardly the time for entering upon a discussion as to the lawfulness or necessity of amusement.

The complaints against the amusements of the age rest, indeed, not at all upon the fact of their being amusements, but upon the characteristics of frivolity and viciousness with which almost all are alike impressed. Putting wholly out of the question the attractions of the public-house, which depend chiefly, if not solely, upon the quantity of intoxicating drink consumed; and those of the skittle-alley, to which precisely the

same

same complaint is applicable; and turning to those places which offer simply amusement to the visitor, it is painful to see how strongly the entertainments they offer are characterized by utter and hopeless frivolity. If we turn, for a moment, to the theatres, we observe the degradation that has fallen upon the stage in all degrees, from the wealthiest theatre of the West End of London to the miserable playhouse of Whitechapel or the Waterloo Road. From all of them passion and thought are equally banished, sense has given way to 'sensation,' and, in place of appeals to the intellectual faculties, the eye and ear alone are addressed. The same class of dramatic writing meets us wherever our steps are directed. East and west alike, a light comedy of manners, a 'screaming farce,' or a 'sensation melodrama,' appealing only to the lowest and most vulgar emotions of our nature, has the best chance of gaining the suffrages of an 'enlightened British public.' Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists have been ruthlessly put aside to make room for clumsy adaptations (or rather translations) from the French. If a play of Shakespeare happen by any chance to be performed, it is brought out either to exhibit the resources of the theatre in matter of upholstery, stage decoration, and effect, or else because it is supposed to be the only method for the display of a 'star' actor surrounded by a bundle of sticks.' It is soon withdrawn, and the old dreary round of farce, melodrama, and pantomime succeeds. Let any one who may be disposed to think this a hasty and undeserved censure, simply take the trouble of calling to mind those plays which have met with the largest measure of success during the last five or six years. Did not crowds flock nightly to one of our largest theatres for more than two years to see a 'sensation header'? did not the lisping and stammering of a half-idiotic lord draw nightly throngs for more than a year to another house? did not a clever optical illusion form for many months the chief attraction at a third? and have not the two most successful pieces recently in course of representation been in one case a melodrama, the repulsive incidents of which are only made palatable by wonderfully elaborate scenery and startling mechanical effects, and in the other a revivification of a clumsy and stupid play expressly to exhibit the shameless gestures and vulgar attitudinizing of a half-naked woman? If melodramas such as these, crowded with such vulgar emotions as these, and impressed with such frivolity and degradation of thought, be tolerated at the theatres of the West End, what can be expected in those of the East? While the Ticket of Leave Man' draws crowds to the Olympic night after night we need not be surprised to

find The Convict's Fate; or, Life at the Hulks' in Shoreditch or Whitechapel. When four long acts of slow poisoning, spiced with adultery, form the intellectual food presented to the frequenters of a West End house, it needs not astonish us to find an East End manager advertising Charley the Cracksman; or, Love and Revenge;' and if Miss Menken startle her audience at Astley's by performing in a chemise, it is not a matter for wonder that another woman should be found willing to caper before the select audience of the Pavilion lightly attired in a towel and sandals.

We have hitherto purposely avoided all mention of the most frivolous of all kinds of dramatic literature-that of burlesques and extravaganzas. The writers of these productions may, if they please, imagine themselves to be the legitimate successors of Aristophanes, but it will require much ingenuity to persuade an educated Englishman that there is much resemblance between the author of The Clouds' and the writer of the last vulgar and common-place burlesque of 'Romeo and Juliet,' or Othello.' Without doubt this species of composition has its uses, and when applied to the legitimate purposes of ridiculing pretension and satirizing incompetence, whether political, social, or theatrical, it is a useful species of the dramatic art. The Rehearsal,' the Critic,' the 'Beggar's Opera,' and 'Bombastes Furioso' are excellent specimens of what burlesque ought to be. Folly is sharply satirized, and that in the most complete and effective way, by exhibiting it in its completeness, but with only such an amount of distortion as is produced by exaggerating the weak points of the subject of the burlesque. But what can be said of those works, the only object of which seems to be to raise a laugh, even though at the expense of the loftiest poetry and the most dignified ethical teaching? It is perfectly legitimate to turn a sensation melodrama into ridicule, but the writer surely oversteps the bounds of his art when he takes up such a subject as 'Othello,' and represents him as a stage 'nigger' with a high collar and a banjo, or seizes upon 'Faust' and turns Gretchen into a harlot, and the scene of the Walpurgis-nacht into Cremorne Gardens. We need only go a little farther, and, as Douglas Jerrold said, we shall have a comic prayer-book, and the sermon on the mount set to the tune of the "King of the Cannibal Islands." But, apart from all considerations of subject, the manner of the modern burlesque is eminently open to criticism. Only those who have listened to some half dozen of these productions can have any idea of the extent to which the absurd system of quibbling and playing on words is carried. Whole speeches are constructed expressly to lead