SKETCHES OF LIFE. BY A RADICAL.

It was an error to call this work[25] the autobiography of an individual. It is a picturing—faithful, minute, and eloquent—of the hardships, the sufferings, and the miseries endured by a large mass of our fellow men. It is an earnest and honest exposure of the hollowness that infests English society—an insight to the weakness of the substratum. It shows what education should have done, and what corruption really has done. Alton Locke is also a personification of the failings, as well as of the sufferings, that make up the sum of existence of a large class.

The author has effectually carried out his design—we will not say altogether with artistic consistency, or with book-making propriety. We know it is deemed a great offense against taste to make a novel the medium of exposing social dangers, or political inequalities and wrongs. We know that those who stick up for "the model," would have a fiction all fiction, or at least that the philosophy be very subordinate and the social aim be hidden so completely as not to be discernible excepting to the professional reader. But Alton Locke is an exception to all these objections. Spite of its defects, it is a perfect work—perfect, that it is invested with an air of the wildest romance, while it goes home to the heart and the judgment as a faithful picture—perfect, that it is eloquent and natural, and consistent with itself. It is one of those books which defy classification. We have not seen its like. And to those readers who accept our eulogy in earnest, Alton Locke will ever remain a token of rich enjoyment, and a memento that 1850 did produce at least one cherishable book.

The story of the biography will not impress so much or so favorably as the style. The hero is a widow's only child: his mother is a stern Calvinist. Her teachings, and the teaching of the vipers in religious form who come to administer consolation and to drink the old lady's tea, are hateful to an intense degree to Alton. He is of a poetic temperament, and a great admirer of nature. Opportunities of indulging his natural tastes are denied him. Born in a close London street, very rigidly watched and governed by his mother and the good men who come to visit her, his life is any thing but pleasant. But he subsequently becomes a tailor, reads largely, writes verses, turns Chartist, falls in love, and is imprisoned for spouting Chartism. The upshot of his rough life is, that he becomes a true Christian.

Several characters are hit off with great perfection. Such is the mother of Alton; and such is Sandye Mackaye, a friend to whom the boy occasionally ran for sympathy, and to borrow books.

But we will now draw upon the pages of the work itself, merely repeating that it is a remarkable composition, and one which men in high places would do well to ponder. It is a growth from the defects of our time, and should be taken as a presage that change must come. The working-men of this country will be indebted to Alton Locke for the manner in which he pleads their cause; all men should be gratified that the warning voice, which he will inevitably be deemed, is so moderate in tone and so philosophical in manner.

Alton's youth, we have said, was not happy. The following are his descriptions of his mother, and one of her associates:

ALTON'S MOTHER AND THE MISSIONARY.

"My mother moved by rule and method; by God's law, as she considered, and that only. She seldom smiled. Her word was absolute. She never commanded twice, without punishing. And yet there were abysses of unspoken tenderness in her, as well as clear, sound, womanly sense and insight. But she thought herself as much bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had been some ascetic of the middle ages—so do extremes meet! It was 'carnal,' she considered. She had as yet no right to have any 'spiritual affection' for us. We were still 'children of wrath and of the devil'—not yet 'convinced of sin,' 'converted, born again.' She had no more spiritual bond with us, she thought, than she had with a heathen or a papist. She dared not even pray for our conversion, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject. For though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear, logical sense would yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had it not been decided from all eternity? We were elect, or we were reprobate. Could her prayers alter that? If He had chosen us, He would call us in His own good time: and, if not, ——. Only, again and again, as I afterward discovered from a journal of hers, she used to beseech God with agonized tears to set her mind at rest by revealing to her His will toward us. For that comfort she could at least rationally pray. But she received no answer. Poor, beloved mother! If thou couldst not read the answer, written in every flower and every sunbeam, written in the very fact of our existence here at all, what answer would have sufficed thee? And yet, with all this, she kept the strictest watch over our morality. Fear, of course, was the only motive she employed; for how could our still carnal understandings be affected with love to God? And love to herself was too paltry and temporary to be urged by one who knew that her life was uncertain, and who was always trying to go down to deepest eternal ground and reason of every thing, and take her stand upon that. So our god, or gods rather, till we were twelve years old, were hell, the rod, the Ten Commandments, and public opinion. Yet under them, not they, but something deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it natural character, conformation of the spirit—conformation of the brain, if you like, if you are a scientific man and a phrenologist. I never yet could dissect and map out my own being, or my neighbor's, as you analysts do.

"My heart was in my mouth as I opened the door to them, and sunk back again to the very lowest depths of my inner man when my eyes fell on the face and figure of the missionary—a squat, red-faced, pig-eyed, low-browed man, with great soft lips that opened back to his very ears; sensuality, conceit, and cunning marked on every feature—an innate vulgarity, from which the artisan and the child recoil with an instinct as true, perhaps truer, than that of the courtier, showing itself in every tone and motion—I shrunk into a corner, so crest-fallen that I could not even exert myself to hand round the bread-and-butter, for which I got duly scolded afterward. Oh! that man!—how he bawled and contradicted, and laid down the law, and spoke to my mother in a fondling, patronizing way, which made me, I knew not why, boil over with jealousy and indignation. How he filled his teacup half full of the white sugar to buy which my mother had curtailed her yesterday's dinner—how he drained the few remaining drops of the three-penny worth of cream, with which Susan was stealing off to keep it as an unexpected treat for my mother at breakfast next morning—how he talked of the natives, not as St. Paul might of his converts, but as a planter might of his slaves; overlaying all his unintentional confessions of his own greed and prosperity, with cant, flimsy enough for even a boy to see through, while his eyes were not blinded with the superstition that a man must be pious who sufficiently interlards his speech with a jumble of old English picked out of our translation of the New Testament. Such was the man I saw. I don't deny that all are not like him. I believe there are noble men of all denominations doing their best, according to their light, all over the world; but such was the one I saw—and the men who are sent home to plead the missionary cause, whatever the men may be like who stay behind and work, are, from my small experience, too often such. It appears to me to be the rule that many of those who go abroad as missionaries, go simply because they are men of such inferior powers and attainments that if they staid in England they would starve."

ALTON'S STUDY.

"I slept in a little lean-to garret at the back of the house, some ten feet long by six wide. I could just stand upright against the inner wall, while the roof on the other side ran down to the floor. There was no fire-place in it or any means of ventilation. No wonder I coughed all night accordingly, and woke about two every morning with choking throat and aching head. My mother often said that the room was 'too small for a Christian to sleep in, but where could she get a better?' Such was my only study. I could not use it as such, however, at night without discovery; for my mother carefully looked in every evening, to see that my candle was out. But when my kind cough woke me, I rose, and creeping like a mouse about the room—for my mother and sister slept in the next chamber, and every sound was audible through the narrow partition—I drew my darling books out from under a board in the floor one end of which I had gradually loosened at odd minutes, and with them a rushlight, earned by running on messages, or by taking bits of work home, and finishing them for my fellows. No wonder that with this scanty rest, and this complicated exertion of hands, eyes, and brain, followed by the long dreary day's work of the shop, my health began to fail; my eyes grew weaker and weaker; my cough became more acute; my appetite failed me daily. My mother noticed the change, and questioned me about it, affectionately enough. But I durst not, alas! tell the truth. It was not one offense, but the arrears of months of disobedience which I should have had to confess; and so arose infinite false excuses, and petty prevarications, which embittered and clogged still more my already overtasked spirit. Before starting forth to walk two miles to the shop at six o'clock in the morning, I sat some three or four hours shivering on my bed, putting myself into cramped and painful postures, not daring even to cough, lest my mother should fancy me unwell, and come in to see me, poor dear soul!—my eyes aching over the page, my feet wrapped up in the bed-clothes to keep them from the miserable pain of the cold; longing, watching, dawn after dawn, for the kind summer mornings, when I should need no candlelight. Look at the picture awhile, ye comfortable folks, who take down from your shelves what books you like best at the moment, and then lie back, amid prints and statuettes, to grow wise in an easy chair, with a blazing fire and a camphine lamp. The lower classes uneducated! Perhaps you would be so too, if learning cost you the privation which it costs some of them."

But Alton read largely, notwithstanding his privations. What of his time was not spent on the tailor's board, was devoted to the writings of the great spirits of the age. On a holiday he visited the National Gallery, and learned to love and bless the painters. He studied narrowly Milton and Tennyson, and many other writers, and among them "that great prose poem, the single epic of modern days, Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution." Alton's daydreams were more numerous than we should imagine are those of the majority of men who are steeped in poverty as he was; and he has described them well. When he did learn to walk into the fields, he truly enjoyed the liberty thus attained.

THE FIRST SIP OF FREEDOM.

"It was a glorious morning at the end of May; and when I escaped from the pall of smoke which hung over the city, I found the sky a sheet of cloudless blue. How I watched for the ending of the rows of houses, which lined the road for miles—the great roots of London, running far out into the country, up which poured past me an endless stream of food, and merchandise, and human beings—the sap of the huge metropolitan life-tree! How each turn of the road opened a fresh line of terraces or villas, till hope deferred made the heart sick, and the country seemed—like the place where the rainbow touches the ground, or the El Dorado of Raleigh's Guiana settlers—always a little farther off! How, between gaps in the houses right and left, I caught tantalizing glimpses of green fields, shut from me by dull lines of high-spiked palings! How I peeped through gates and over fences at trim lawns and gardens, and longed to stay, and admire, and speculate on the names of the strange plants and gaudy flowers; and then hurried on, always expecting to find something still finer ahead—something really worth stopping to look at—till the houses thickened again into a street, and I found myself, to my disappointment, in the midst of a town! And then more villas and palings; and then a village: when would they stop, those endless houses? At last they did stop. Gradually the people whom I passed began to look more and more rural, and more toil-worn and ill-fed. The houses ended, cattle yards and farm buildings appeared; and right and left, far away, spread the low rolling sheet of green meadows and corn-fields. Oh, the joy! The lawns with their high elms and firs, the green hedgerows, the delicate hue and scent of the fresh clover-fields, the steep clay banks where I stopped to pick nosegays of wild flowers, and became again a child—and then recollected my mother, and a walk with her on the river bank toward the Red House. I hurried on again, but could not be unhappy, while my eyes ranged free, for the first time in my life, over the checkered squares of cultivation, over glittering brooks, and hills quivering in the green haze, while above hung the skylarks, pouring out their souls in melody. And then, as the sun grew hot, and the larks dropped one by one into the growing corn, the new delight of the blessed silence! I listened to the stillness; for noise had been my native element; I had become in London quite unconscious of the ceaseless roar of the human sea, casting up mire and dirt. And now, for the first time in my life, the crashing, confusing hubbub had flowed away, and left my brain calm and free. How I felt at that moment a capability of clear, bright meditation, which was as new to me, as I believe it would have been to most Londoners in my position. I can not help fancying that our unnatural atmosphere of excitement, physical as well as moral, is to blame for very much of the working-men's restlessness and fierceness. As it was, I felt that every step forward, every breath of fresh air, gave me new life. I had gone fifteen miles before I recollected that, for the first time for many months, I had not coughed since I rose."

The following is the utterance in a more eloquent mode, of some startling facts revealed by the London Correspondent of The Morning Chronicle:

THE TERRORS OF THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM.

"Well: one day our employer died. He had been one of the old sort of fashionable West-end tailors in the fast decreasing honorable trade; keeping a modest shop, hardly to be distinguished from a dwelling-house, except by his name on the window blinds. He paid good prices for work, though not as good, of course, as he had given twenty years before, and prided himself upon having all his work done at home. His work-rooms, as I have said, were no elysiums; but still, as good, alas! as those of three tailors out of four. He was proud, luxurious, foppish; but he was honest and kindly enough, and did many a generous thing by men who had been long in his employ. At all events, his journeymen could live on what he paid them.

"But his son, succeeding to the business, determined, like Rehoboam of old, to go ahead with the times. Fired with the great spirit of the nineteenth century—at least with that one which is vulgarly considered its especial glory—he resolved to make haste to be rich. His father had made money very slowly of late; while dozens, who had begun business long after him, had now retired to luxurious ease and suburban villas. Why should he remain in the minority? Why should he not get rich as fast as he could? Why should he stick to the old, slow-going, honorable trade? Out of some 450 West-end tailors, there were not one hundred left who were old-fashioned and stupid enough to go on keeping down their own profits by having all their work done at home and at first-hand. Ridiculous scruples! The government knew none such. Were not the army clothes, the post-office clothes, the policemen's clothes, furnished by contractors and sweaters, who hired the work at low prices, and let it out again to journeymen at still lower ones? Why should he pay his men two shillings where the government paid them one? Were there not cheap houses even at the West-end, which had saved several thousands a year merely by reducing their workmen's wages? And if the workmen chose to take lower wages, he was not bound actually to make them a present of more than they asked for. They would go to the cheapest market for any thing they wanted, and so must he. Besides, wages had really been quite exorbitant. Half his men threw each of them as much money away in gin and beer yearly, as would pay two workmen at a cheap house. Why was he to be robbing his family of comforts to pay for their extravagance? And charging his customers, too, unnecessarily high prices—it was really robbing the public!

"Such, I suppose, were some of the arguments which led to an official announcement, one Saturday night, that our young employer intended to enlarge his establishment, for the purpose of commencing business in the 'show trade;' and that, emulous of Messrs. Aaron, Levi, and the rest of that class, magnificent alterations were to take place in the premises, to make room for which our work-rooms were to be demolished, and that for that reason—for of course it was only for that reason—all work would in future be given out, to be made up at the men's own homes....

"'We were all bound to expect this. Every working tailor must come to this at last, on the present system; and we are only lucky in having been spared so long. You all know where this will end—in the same misery as fifteen thousand out of twenty thousand of our class are enduring now. We shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to face, as the rest have, ever decreasing prices of labor, ever increasing profits made out of that labor by the contractors who will employ us—arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings—the competition of women, and children, and starving Irish—our hours of work will increase one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; and in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but ever more penury, slavery, misery, as we are pressed on by those who are sucked by fifties—almost by hundreds—yearly, out of the honorable trade in which we were brought up, into the infernal system of contract work, which is devouring our trade and many others, body and soul. Our wives will be forced to sit up night and day to help us; our children must labor from the cradle without chance of going to school, hardly of breathing the fresh air of heaven; our boys, as they grow up, must turn beggars or paupers; our daughters, as thousands do, must eke out their miserable earnings by prostitution. And after all, a whole family will not gain what one of us had been doing, as yet, single-handed.'...

"'Government—government? You a tailor, and not know that government are the very authors of this system? Not to know that they first set the example, by getting the army and navy clothes made by contractors, and taking the lowest tenders? Not to know that the police clothes, the postmen's clothes, the convicts' clothes, are all contracted for on the same infernal plan, by sweaters, and sweaters' sweaters, and sweaters' sweaters' sweaters, till government work is just the very last, lowest resource to which a poor, starved-out wretch betakes himself to keep body and soul together? Why, the government prices, in almost every department, are half, and less than half, the very lowest living price. I tell you, the careless iniquity of government about these things will come out some day. It will be known, the whole abomination; and future generations will class it with the tyrannies of the Roman emperors and the Norman barons. Why, it's a fact, that the colonels of the regiments—noblemen, most of them—make their own vile profit out of us tailors—out of the pauperism of the men, the slavery of the children, the prostitution of the women. They get so much a uniform allowed them by government to clothe the men with; and then—then, they let out the jobs to the contractors at less than half what government give them, and pocket the difference. And then you talk of appealing to government!'"

Only Dickens or Thackeray could have rivaled the following sketch of a discussion on

THE REAL OFFICE OF POETRY.

"'What do you mean, Mr. Mackaye!' asked I, with a doleful and disappointed visage.

"'Mean—why, if God had meant ye to write about Pacifics, He'd ha put ye there—and because He means ye to write aboot London town, He's put ye there—and gien ye an unco sharp taste o' the ways o't; and I'll gie ye anither. Come along wi' me.'

"And he seized me by the arm, and hardly giving me time to put on my hat, marched me out into the streets, and away through Clare Market to St. Giles's.

"It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and greengrocers' shops the gas-lights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slip-shod, dirty women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat, and frost-bitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality. Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy pavement, sending up odors as foul as the language of the sellers and buyers. Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction. Foul vapors rose from cow-sheds and slaughter-houses, and the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the back yard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above hanging like cliffs over the streets—those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin—the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy choking night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go, scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the library which God has given thee—one often fears in vain—and see what science says this London might be!

"'Ay,' he muttered to himself, as he strode along, 'sing awa; get yoursel' wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like the rest of the poets, and gang to hell for it.'

"'To hell, Mr. Mackaye?'

"'Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie—a warse ane than ony fiend's' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that ye'll hear o' in the pulpits—the hell on earth o' being a flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures—and kenning it—and not being able to get oot o' it, for the chains o' vanity and self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there—'

"He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable alley:

"'Look! there's not a soul down that yard, but's either beggar, drunkard, thief, or warse. Write aboot that! Say how ye saw the mouth o' hell, and the twa pillars thereof at the entry—the pawnbroker's shop o' one side and the gin palace at the other—twa monstrous deevils, eating up men and women, and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o' the monsters, how they open and open, and swallow in anither victim and anither. Write aboot that.'

"'What jaws, Mr. Mackaye!'

"'Thae faulding-doors o' the gin shop, goose. Are na they a mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony red-hot statue o' Moloch, or wicker Gogmagog, wherein thae auld Britons burnt their prisoners? Look at thae barefooted, barebacked hizzies, with their arms roun' the men's necks, and their mouths full o' vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irishwoman pouring the gin down the babbie's throat! Look at that raff o' a boy gaun out o' the pawnshop, where he's been pledging the handkerchief he stole the morning, into the ginshop, to buy beer poisoned wi' grains o' paradise, and cocculus indicus, and saut, and a' damnable, maddening, thirst-breeding, lust-breeding drugs! Look at that girl that went in wi' a shawl on her back and cam out wi'out ane! Drunkards frae the breast!—harlots frae the cradle!—damned before they're born! John Calvin had an inkling o' the truth there, I'm a'most driven to think, wi' his reprobation deevil's doctrines!'

"'Well—but—Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about these poor creatures.'

"'Then ye ought. What do ye ken aboot the Pacific? Which is maist to your business?—thae bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o' the other side o' the warld, or these—these thousands o' barebacked hizzies that play the harlot o' your ain side—made out o' your ain flesh and blude? You a poet! True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at hame. If ye'll be a poet at a', ye maun be a cockney poet; and while the cockneys be what they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah of old, o' lamentation and mourning and woe, for the sins o' your people. Gin ye want to learn the spirit o' a people's poet, down wi' your Bible and read thae auld Hebrew prophets; gin ye wad learn the style, read your Burns frae morning till night; and gin ye'd learn the matter, just gang after your nose, and keep your eyes open, and ye'll no miss it.'"

One other extract, and we will have done with this original but captivating and convincing volume. Alton speaks prophetically of

THE DANGERS THAT ARE LOOMING.

"Ay, respectable gentlemen and ladies, I will confess all to you—you shall have, if you enjoy it, a fresh opportunity for indulging that supreme pleasure which the press daily affords you of insulting the classes whose powers most of you know as little as you do their sufferings. Yes; the Chartist poet is vain, conceited, ambitious, uneducated, shallow, inexperienced, envious, ferocious, scurrilous, seditious, traitorous.—Is your charitable vocabulary exhausted? Then ask yourselves, how often have you yourself, honestly resisted and conquered the temptation to any one of these sins, when it has come across you just once in a way, and not as they came to me, as they come to thousands of the working-men, daily and hourly, 'till their torments do, by length of time, become their elements?' What, are we covetous, too? Yes? And if those who have, like you, still covet more what wonder if those who have nothing, covet something? Profligate too? Well, though that imputation as a generality is utterly calumnious, though your amount of respectable animal enjoyment per annum is a hundred times as great as that of the most self-indulgent artisan, yet, if you had ever felt what it is to want, not only every luxury of the senses, but even bread to eat, you would think more mercifully of the man who makes up by rare excesses, and those only of the limited kinds possible to him, for long intervals of dull privation, and says in his madness, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!' We have our sins, and you have yours. Ours may be the more gross and barbaric, but yours are none the less damnable; perhaps all the more so, for being the sleek, subtle, respectable, religious sins they are. You are frantic enough if our part of the press calls you hard names, but you can not see that your part of the press repays it back to us with interest. We see those insults, and feel them bitterly enough; and do not forget them, alas! soon enough, while they pass unheeded by your delicate eyes as trivial truisms. Horrible, unprincipled, villainous, seditious, frantic, blasphemous, are epithets of course when applied to—to how large a portion of the English people, you will some day discover to your astonishment. When will that day come, and how? In thunder, and storm, and garments rolled in blood? Or like the dew on the mown grass, and the clear shining of the sunlight after April rain?"