The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 1602: Chapter 23: Unexpected Gain (Part 3)

Previously, when Disraeli went to Gottingen for a trip, he had harshly criticized the ”New Poor Law” to Arthur, but looking at it now, the actual situation might be even worse than Disraeli had imagined.

When Arthur was still a policeman at Scotland Yard, the poor and homeless in the East District could receive about 3 pennies in relief each week, but after the New Poor Law was passed, this amount quickly dropped to 1 penny, and this money was only for those poor with a certain income.

If you want to rely entirely on parish assistance, I’m sorry, you must now go to the Poorhouse.

However, life in the Poorhouse might not be much better. The newly established Central Poor Law Commission’s main requirement for the Poorhouse heads was to control the budget and reduce financial expenditure, and the easiest way to achieve this was certainly to cut down staff numbers, lower personnel quality, and reduce the supply of living materials.

Of course, it might be unfair to blame the plight of London’s poor entirely on the Poor Law Commission.

At least in Arthur’s view, the increase in the number of poor and the continual spread of slums was mainly driven by the rapidly growing population of London.

When Arthur first arrived in London in 1826, he had already noticed while in the village in York that many people in the village were continuously flocking to the city.

It wasn’t because the old folks from York didn’t like staying in their hometown, but rather because many agricultural jobs were being rapidly replaced by industrialization and factory operations, and the wages of rural farm laborers were decreasing almost every year.

However, when Arthur came to London, the situation was completely reversed. Every year you would see new faces in London, and although many lived with hardships, only a few left.

After all, you couldn’t hope to find squeezed lemon peels in ditches in the countryside, much less sell such things to manufacturers for making cheap lemon candy by extracting residual juice.

In London, bone collectors would compete with dogs on the streets for discarded bones and then sell them to bone-burning furnaces, fetching 2 shillings per bushel.

You could also find metal, like nails, in piles of cobblestones, to sell to dealers at the Maritime Store.

Ragpickers had to walk 10 kilometers a day to collect metal, rags, and bottles, and earn an average of 2 to 3 pennies per day.

Some might say, if life in the city is so tough, why not go to the countryside?

In fact, these people indeed led a migratory life, much like the Members of Parliament in Westminster and shopkeepers on Regent Street, just with slightly different timings.

Generally, they would spend summer and autumn in the countryside and suburbs, working as bricklayers, diggers, or farm laborers.

But when winter arrived, with wealthy individuals mostly returning home for holidays and the weather unsuitable for continued construction work, they would return to London to find jobs.

Typically, the highest-paid construction sites were most sought after, and if they couldn’t find work there, they moved to factories, such as brick factories or jobs related to heating, like chimney sweeping or coal carrying, which were known to require more workers during the cold season.

Some skilled lucky ones among them, such as jugglers, had a completely different migration schedule. Jugglers usually left London in March or April for Easter touring performances nationwide, returning to London before October to welcome the approaching garden party season in London.

As for why Arthur was so familiar with the routines of transient workers?

That was naturally because their lodging places in London were always areas under close police surveillance, including Little Adam’s old home in Saint Giles, Tothill Field near Parliament, the vicinity of the Mint, and the south bank of the Thames River where Greenwich was located, all were areas they gathered in.

It’s no exaggeration to say that during the worst times each year, from Rotherhithe to southeast London, the population under the more than 500 bridge arches could almost account for a whole town.

Regarding what Old Fagin said about the obscure girl’s unfortunate fate, Arthur didn’t entirely disbelieve it, as such things were not particularly rare in London, and most of the poor were only a mishap or illness away from a ruinous fate.

If the situation was true, Arthur wouldn’t mind lending a small helping hand. Dozens of pounds, although no small amount of money, was trivial to him; even if he took the Saint Anna Medal awarded by Tsar Nicholas I to auction it off, it would fetch more than that.

But what intrigued Arthur more was why he hadn’t heard a word at Scotland Yard about the theft of items gifted by the King.

Was it because the owner hadn’t reported the case to Scotland Yard, or was Ledley, that little eel, acting up again, knowing about information related to the Royal Family but failing to report it?

If it’s the former, Arthur truly wanted to see which family was so careless, negligence in security measures aside, but how could they not even know when something was lost from their own house?

If it’s the latter, it wouldn’t be too difficult to verify.

After all, Ledley wasn’t Arthur’s only friend at Scotland Yard, especially not when it came to Chief Charles Field, an elite he had personally groomed in the Criminal Investigation Department; no case could escape the eyes of this newly famed detective of Scotland Yard.