Playthings and parodies - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 Excerpt: ...comes back from his work at night, though it should be earlier, and sees the lighted clock of St. Mary's winking drowsily at him through the fog, Whitechapel looks something quite different. As I turn up Petticoat Lane, I remember that if I had come on a Sunday morning, I should have found it far more crowded, and the Jewish population would have been busy there with gambling and speculation. The poverty of the East is brilliant with variety in its outward aspect. It is only from within that one feels sure that to many life must seem but a dull monotone, made lurid at rare intervals with some cheap sensuality. The names painted over the shop-doors, the faces of the people in the streets, and the language they speak, proclaim their Jewish origin. It has been computed that there are not less than 60,000 Jews in London. The other nations would have none of them, and England, crowded as she was and is, found room for them; or they found it for themselves. As one passes through the squalid streets, and watches the crowds of the poorer, though not of the utterly destitute class, one wonders if the Jews--of this quarter, at least--do not still sigh at times for the flesh-pots of Egypt. There are grades in their poverty. It would be unsafe, perhaps, to estimate from the appearance of a shop the income of its Jewish proprietor; but the shop has a more substantial air than the barrow; the salesman at the barrow seems in a position of permanent comfort when compared with the hawker who has to carry his own tray; and the hawker should surely pity those hollow-eyed, narrow-chested, unshaven men, with the wisp of flannel round their throats, and their coats buttoned as tightly as the presence of buttons will permit, who slink softly and sadly along under the shadow of th...