Scary things come to life, in this world. Do you want it? Real or imagined?
Charles Dickens, was the first in my knowledge, the author of the “down and outs”. His stories inspired the world. It provoked a passion derived darkened alleys, crooked corners, beady eyes lurking, scoundrels of people huddled in masses slept on streets. Dirty, filthy streets on ground, underground stair cases from unknown burroughs, there in the deep darkness a people were without homes. A Christmas Carol became a seed to what lingered in the darkness. Scrooge a metaphor for the rich or those who really couldn’t care less how the world ran as long as money kept the world spinning; can’t tell you enough how many people believe in that ideology; caring less about those who are impoverished, it’s growing.
Gustav Dore whose depiction of the squalid life of those who struggled through life in London. We see the world of the poor, through his eyes, in the book Dore's London.
"Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty, while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the East End region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum. The streets were filled with a new and different race of people, short of stature, and of wretched beer-sodden appearance. We rode along through miles of bricks and squalor....Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman, and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling. At a market, tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown into the mud for rotten potatoes, beans and vegetables, while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot....Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man his family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two. When such rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space for, say, from eight pence to a shilling.
...I learned that there were no bath tubs in the thousands of houses I had seen....'A part of a room to let.' This notice was posted a short while ago in a window not five minutes walk from St. Jame's Hall....Beds are let on the three-relay system-that is; three tenants to a bed, each occupying it eight hours, so that it never grows cold."[p. 102]
Eric de Mare: The London Dore Saw
The steps of Scrooge are repeating. And what ghost will appear? Are you ready for them world?
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