While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and 900,000 are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are registered as living in common lodging-houses—­known in the vernacular as “doss-houses.”  There are many kinds of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike, from the filthy little ones to the monster big ones paying five per cent. and blatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know but one thing about them, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness.  By this I do not mean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is that life in them is degrading and unwholesome.

“The poor man’s hotel,” they are often called, but the phrase is caricature.  Not to possess a room to one’s self, in which sometimes to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite different from that of hotel life.

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big private and municipal lodging-houses and working-men’s homes.  Far from it.  They have remedied many of the atrocities attendant upon the irresponsible small doss-houses, and they give the workman more for his money than he ever received before; but that does not make them as habitable or wholesome as the dwelling-place of a man should be who does his work in the world.

The little private doss-houses, as a rule, are unmitigated horrors.  I have slept in them, and I know; but let me pass them by and confine myself to the bigger and better ones.  Not far from Middlesex Street, Whitechapel, I entered such a house, a place inhabited almost entirely by working men.  The entrance was by way of a flight of steps descending from the sidewalk to what was properly the cellar of the building.  Here were two large and gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate.  I had intended to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my appetite, or, rather, wrested it from me; so I contented myself with watching other men cook and eat.

One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough wooden table, and began his meal.  A handful of salt on the not over-clean table constituted his butter.  Into it he dipped his bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big mug.  A piece of fish completed his bill of fare.  He ate silently, looking neither to right nor left nor across at me.  Here and there, at the various tables, other men were eating, just as silently.  In the whole room there was hardly a note of conversation.  A feeling of gloom pervaded the ill-lighted place.  Many of them sat and brooded over the crumbs of their repast, and made me wonder, as Childe Roland wondered, what evil they had done that they should be punished so.

From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life, and I ventured into the range where the men were cooking.  But the smell I had noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me into the street for fresh air.