A letter addressed to Her Majesty's Justices of the Peace, for the county of Middlesex on the subject of the increase of inquests / by William Baker.

  • Baker, William (coroner)
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter addressed to Her Majesty's Justices of the Peace, for the county of Middlesex on the subject of the increase of inquests / by William Baker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    — “ he thought how regularly things went on from day to day in the same unvarying round,—how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on,—how crafty avarice grew rich and manly honest hearts were poor and sad,—how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many they who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down at night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them, or the energies of one single man directed to their aid,—how, in seeking not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and in- adequate subsistence, these women and children in that one town divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades,—how ignorance was punished and never taught,—how gaol-door gaped and gallows loomed for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradle’s heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace,—how many died in soul and had no chance of life,—how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch, who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they, had they done ill, —how much injustice, misery, and wrong there was, and yet how the world rolled on from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it.”—Nickleby.