Life in a hospital : being an East End chapter / by Walter Besant.

  • Besant, Walter, 1836-1901.
Date:
[1883?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Life in a hospital : being an East End chapter / by Walter Besant. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    *5 4 An East End Chapter. streets which have been built over these fields follow the lines of the more important lanes. This is part of the great truth that the sheep and the cows are the first to lay down roads, and that they do it on the sound engineering principle of the least trouble, while the caravans, muleteers, pack-saddle horses, and wayfarers, following in their track, gradually make out a beaten track, which in time becomes a high road or a street. When we get to that bend of the river which, with the straight line of Ratcliff Highway on the north, includes St. Katharine’s, Wapping, and Sliadwell, there are plenty of streets with a fine, breezy, free and easy, roystering, drinking, singing, dancing, roaring, fighting, love-making, stabbing, robbmg, murdering, press-gang- ing kind of life going on in them—the short and merry life ; the live to-day and die to-morrow life ; the devil may care life ; with the Execution Dock just below Wapping New Stairs, and quantities of ships lying off either bank where, when the pay is gone—which takes wonderful little time—a man may find a craft bound for any port he pleases in the whole world, and nothing to choose between the ships or their destination; the same weevily biscuit and hard junk; the same new rum; the same rope’s end; the same grewsome creature with nine tails ; the same scurvy ; the same storms ; very likely the same shipwreck and watery grave. Why, only to look at the names of the streets is to remember the stories in the old “ Annual Registers,” where one may look for all the life of England faithfully pour- tray ed. But even Wapping and Sliadwell are not by any means covered with houses ; there are broad spaces of orchards and market gardens, between the river bank and Ratcliff Highway, so that one may think how, * -3l