A child in a Southwark cellar bends her first sixpence for luck, and it goes up the stairs as rent, through the house-farmer, the lawyer and the kind gentleman of Russell Square, into the plate at a charity meeting, and home again within the week.
by Charles Dickens, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
In the Borough, a little to the east of the Mint, which has not been a sanctuary for debtors these hundred and forty years and has never yet been told so, there is a court called Pardon's Rents. Nobody knows who Pardon was. Nobody knows whether he was pardoned, or did the pardoning, or merely lent his name to the place and went away, as sensible men do; and since nothing has ever been forgiven in Pardon's Rents, from a week's arrears to a broken window, the name must be put down as a joke made by some builder long dead, who is lodging now, if the next world keeps any accounts at all, in a cellar very like the one I am about to show you.
There are nine houses in Pardon's Rents, and they lean together over the court like nine old men who have been asked a question and would each prefer that one of the others answered it. The question is, Whose are we? The gutter does not know. The pump, which has given nothing but a cough since the spring, does not know. The rats, who are the oldest inhabitants and pay no rent, do not care.
The cellar of Number Four was let to the Doyles at two shillings a week. For this sum they had a floor of brick that sweated in dry weather and swam in wet, a grating at the level of the pavement through which came all the light and most of the boots of Southwark, a fireplace that drew the wrong way, and a family of beetles who had been in possession longer than the Doyles and let them know it. Dennis Doyle had been a coal-whipper on the river until the coal-dust got down into his chest and set up house there, and now he lay on the bed in the corner and coughed in answer to the pump. Mrs. Doyle made matchboxes at twopence-farthing the gross, the paste-pot on her knee and the little trays drying all along the mantel like a regiment of very small coffins. And Kitty Doyle, who was eight, held horses in the Borough Market for whatever the carriers chose to give her, which was sometimes a halfpenny, and sometimes a curse, and once, on the Tuesday of the week I speak of, a whole silver sixpence, from a carrier who had had a good morning and a better breakfast.
Kitty had never owned a sixpence. She did with it what the children of that court did with any piece of luck that was too large to believe: she took it home, and set it in the crack of the cellar step, and bent it, very carefully, with her heel, so that it should be crooked and lucky and nobody else's. Then she scratched a K on it with a nail, because she had been told that was her letter, and put it in the tin on the shelf, and looked at it eleven times before she went to sleep.
On Saturday night the matchboxes had come to one-and-sixpence, and Dennis Doyle's cough had come to nothing at all, and the rent was two shillings.
Mrs. Doyle did not ask. She looked at the tin, and Kitty looked at the floor, and that was the whole of the conversation; and when the boots came down the steps at nine o'clock, and the knock came after them, the crooked sixpence was lying on the table beside the eighteen pennies, as bright as anything had ever been in that cellar.
Mr. Tolley Hookham was a small man in a large coat, with a book under his arm and a pencil behind his ear and a canvas bag on a strap across his chest, so that he looked, going up and down the stairs of Pardon's Rents, like a postman who delivered nothing and collected everything. He took the eighteen pennies and counted them twice. He took the sixpence, and turned it over, and saw the bend in it and the K.
"Bent," said Mr. Hookham.
"It's good silver," said Mrs. Doyle. "It's only bent for luck."
"Luck's no business of mine," said Mr. Hookham, and put it in the bag. "I'm only the collector." He wrote Doyle, cellar, 2s., pd. in the book, and licked the pencil, and went up to the ground floor front, where a widow kept a mangle; and to the first floor, where a tailor sat cross-legged among six apprentices and one candle; and to the second floor, where two sisters sewed shirts at a price which I will not print, because I wish this story to be believed; and to the garret, where an old man who had once been a clerk paid him in farthings, one by one, out of a stocking. And at every door Mr. Hookham said, if any word was said to him about the roof, or the pump, or the stair-rail that had come away in the tailor's hand, "I'm only the collector"; and the bag grew heavier on its strap; and the crooked sixpence rode at the bottom of it, up three pair of stairs and down again, and out into the court, and away.
Mr. Nathaniel Sallow received his collector every Saturday night at half-past eleven in a back parlour in Union Street, with a green cloth on the table, a pair of candles, and a face of the colour that faces take on when they have lived for a long while on the yellow side of other people's money.
Mr. Sallow did not own Pardon's Rents. He was very particular on the point. He farmed it. That is to say, he took the nine houses on a lease from somebody who did not wish to be troubled with them, at a sum fixed and moderate; and let them again by the room, and by the cellar, and by the corner of the room where a room was too much for a family, at sums neither fixed nor moderate; and put the difference in his pocket, as a farmer puts his harvest in his barn. There is nothing unlawful in it. I wish there were.
The bag was emptied on the green cloth. Copper went one way and silver another, and Mr. Sallow's hands moved among the coins as a good cook's hands move among the pastry, lightly, lovingly, and without looking. They stopped at the crooked sixpence.
"What's this?"
"Doyle's," said Hookham. "Cellar, Number Four. Bent it for luck, she says."
Mr. Sallow put it between his teeth, which were the colour of his face, and bit it, and it was silver, and it went on the silver side of the cloth.
"The roof of Number Six," said Hookham, "is coming in over the tailor."
"Then the tailor had better go out from under it," said Mr. Sallow. "I only farm the place. Repairs is the owner's business. Put it in writing, if you like, and I'll put it in the drawer."
He had a drawer for that purpose. It was nearly full.
Michaelmas fell that year upon a Monday; and on Michaelmas Day, as on every quarter day, Mr. Sallow put on a black coat and crossed the river, with the quarter's rent for Pardon's Rents in a stout bag, to the chambers of Mr. Blandish in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Mr. Blandish was a gentleman of the law, of a smooth, round, soothing presence, like a well-kept lawn or a warm bath or a very good cushion, and his office was the only room in this story with a fire that drew the right way. He did not farm Pardon's Rents; that was Mr. Sallow. He did not own them; that was his client. Mr. Blandish acted. He received the rent, and deducted his costs, and paid the balance to his client's bankers, and sent his client a statement in a hand like engraved copper; and if any question arose touching roofs, or pumps, or cellars in the Borough, Mr. Blandish would say, with the gentlest possible inclination of his round head, "I only act for the owner," and the question would lie down, and go to sleep, and trouble nobody.
"The collector mentions a roof," said Mr. Sallow, who liked to have it on record that he had mentioned it.
"I will mention it to my client," said Mr. Blandish, which he did not, having learnt in thirty years that a client who is told about roofs is a client who is made uneasy, and that a client made uneasy is apt to go elsewhere.
The gold went to the bankers. But Mr. Blandish's client had one small fancy, which Mr. Blandish's clerk had long since learnt to humour: he liked to have the loose silver of each quarter sent round to him in a little wash-leather purse, for charitable occasions. And so the clerk, a thin young man with a cold, made up the purse at his desk by the window; and among the half-crowns and the florins, and the shillings worn smooth by a thousand pockets, went a sixpence that had been bent upon a cellar step, and scratched with a K.
Mr. Augustus Benefield was one of the kindest men in London. Ask anybody. Ask the Society for the Relief of Distressed Needlewomen, or the Asylum for Fatherless Children, or the Ladies' Committee for Clothing the Destitute Infant, or any of the eleven institutions whose printed lists, every year, bore the name of AUGUSTUS BENEFIELD, ESQ., RUSSELL SQUARE, with a guinea or two guineas or five guineas after it; ask the crossing-sweeper at the corner of Bedford Place, who had a penny from him every morning of his life; ask his daughter.
He lived in a tall house full of warm red curtains and clean windows and clocks that all agreed with one another. He had inherited, along with the curtains and the clocks, a number of properties in various parts of London, concerning which he knew exactly one thing, which was that Blandish looked after them. He had never seen Pardon's Rents. He had been through the Borough, certainly, in a cab, on his way to the Dover train; and he had looked out of the window at it with the same mild interest with which he might have looked at a picture of Naples, and with rather less notion that anybody lived there.
"I only receive," he would have said, if anybody had asked him, and been quite astonished at the question. But nobody did.
On the Thursday evening following Michaelmas, Mr. Benefield went down to Exeter Hall, in the Strand, for the fourteenth annual meeting of the Society for Promoting Light and Air among the Industrious Poor, and took the wash-leather purse with him, and a seat upon the platform.
It was a beautiful meeting. There was a Bishop, and a Lord, and a Member of Parliament, and a great deal of gas. There were two thousand people in the body of the hall, and every one of them was in favour of light, and every one of them was in favour of air. A physician read a paper upon the effect of cellar-dwelling on the lungs of children, with figures, which was received with profound sensation; and a clergyman described a court in Bermondsey where a family of seven slept in a space nine feet by eleven, and there were cries of Shame!; and then Mr. Augustus Benefield rose, with his kind pink face shining in the gaslight, to move the third resolution.
The resolution was, That this Meeting views with the deepest indignation the conduct of those owners of house property who, for the sake of gain, suffer the dwellings of the poor to fall into a condition unfit for human habitation. And Mr. Benefield moved it with his whole heart. He said that he did not know who these men were. (Hear, hear.) He said that he would not wish to know them. (Loud cheers.) He said that he would not sit at table with such a man, if he were pointed out to him in that hall. (Prolonged applause, in which the Bishop joined.) And when the plates came round, Mr. Benefield opened his wash-leather purse and poured the whole of it in, silver and all, with a generous shake at the end to be sure of the last coin; and the last coin was a crooked sixpence with a K on it, and it rang upon the others like a very small bell.
On the Friday the treasurer of the Society made up the purses of the District Visitors from the proceeds of the plate: so much in tickets for coals, so much in tickets for bread, so much in silver for cases of pressing want, at the Visitor's discretion.
And on the Saturday afternoon, a young lady in a grey cloak and a very earnest bonnet came picking her way across Pardon's Rents with a basket on her arm, and asked a small boy which was Number Four, and gave him a tract for telling her.
Miss Honoria Benefield was nineteen. She had asked the Society for the worst district they had, and they had looked at her father's name upon their list and given her the Borough, and she had bought a map, and marked it, and been proud of it. She had never been down a cellar step in her life. She went down this one with her skirts gathered in both hands and her heart beating, and stood at the bottom in the green dark, with the grating over her head letting in the light and the boots of Southwark, and Dennis Doyle coughing in the corner, and Mrs. Doyle rising from the paste-pot to curtsey, and the little trays along the mantel, and the smell, which I shall not describe, because to the end of her life she never could.
She did what she had been taught. She read a short passage, and left a tract upon the table, and a ticket for a hundredweight of coals, and wrote Doyle, cellar, No. 4 in a little book, as another person had written it in another book a week before. Then, because the child in the doorway was so thin, and the man in the corner so grey, and because she was nineteen, she took a coin out of her purse, the first her fingers found, and put it in Kitty's hand, and closed the small fingers over it.
Kitty opened them again, and looked, and her face did a thing that Miss Benefield did not understand.
"It's mine," said Kitty.
"Yes, dear. It is yours now."
"No, miss. It's mine. It's got my letter on." She held it up to the grating, and there in the thin light were the bend and the K. "It's been out, and it's come home."
Miss Benefield laughed, a little uncertainly, and said that was a very pretty fancy, and that it must be a lucky sixpence indeed. Then she looked up at the ceiling, which was dark with wet, and down at the floor, which was darker, and asked, as they had told her to ask, whose house this was.
"Mr. Sallow's, miss," said Mrs. Doyle. "Leastways, Mr. Hookham comes for it."
"And is Mr. Sallow the owner?"
Mrs. Doyle did not know. Mr. Doyle, between two coughs, did not know. Nobody in Pardon's Rents had ever known. Miss Benefield wrote Owner? in her little book, and underlined it twice, and said that she should certainly write to the Society about it, and that the Society would find him out, and that her papa, who was on the Committee, should hear of it that very evening, for she was sure there was not a kinder man in London; and she went up the steps into what remained of the afternoon, and the grating darkened behind her skirts.
It was dark in the court by nine o'clock. The pump coughed. The nine old houses leaned together over their question. The matchboxes had come to one-and-sixpence again that week.
Kitty sat on the bottom step with the crooked sixpence in her fist, and held it against her mouth, and felt the bend of it with her lip, and heard, above her, on the pavement, a pair of boots she knew, turning in at the head of the cellar steps.
Her mother held out her hand.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Kalendās Octōbrēs (29 September 2026), ā Carolō Dickensiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Charles Dickens, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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