It being plain that as a poor young man with a family I could rent no houses at all in this most undesirable region, I next looked for rooms, unfurnished rooms, in which I could store my wife and babies and chattels.  There were not many, but I found them, usually in the singular, for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man’s family in which to cook and eat and sleep.  When I asked for two rooms, the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner, I imagine, that a certain personage looked at Oliver Twist when he asked for more.

Not only was one room deemed sufficient for a poor man and his family, but I learned that many families, occupying single rooms, had so much space to spare as to be able to take in a lodger or two.  When such rooms can be rented for from three to six shillings per week, it is a fair conclusion that a lodger with references should obtain floor space for, say, from eightpence to a shilling.  He may even be able to board with the sublettees for a few shillings more.  This, however, I failed to inquire into—­a reprehensible error on my part, considering that I was working on the basis of a hypothetical family.

Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen.  Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking.  But, it seems, the compensation comes in with the saving of soap, so all’s well, and God’s still in heaven.

However, I rented no rooms, but returned to my own Johnny Upright’s street.  What with my wife, and babies, and lodgers, and the various cubby-holes into which I had fitted them, my mind’s eye had become narrow-angled, and I could not quite take in all of my own room at once.  The immensity of it was awe-inspiring.  Could this be the room I had rented for six shillings a week?  Impossible!  But my landlady, knocking at the door to learn if I were comfortable, dispelled my doubts.

“Oh yes, sir,” she said, in reply to a question.  “This street is the very last.  All the other streets were like this eight or ten years ago, and all the people were very respectable.  But the others have driven our kind out.  Those in this street are the only ones left.  It’s shocking, sir!”

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.

“You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others do.  We need more room.  The others, the foreigners and lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get one.  So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford.  It is shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be.”