The East End of London was not a new experience to me.  Laura and I had started a creche at Wapping the year I came out; and in following up the cases of deserving beggars I had come across a variety of slums.  I have derived as much interest and more benefit from visiting the poor than the rich and I get on better with them.  What was new to me in Whitechapel was the head of the factory.

Mr. Cliffords was what the servants describe as “a man who keeps himself to himself,” gruff, harsh, straight and clever.  He hated all his girls and no one would have supposed, had they seen us together, that he liked me; but, after I had observed him blocking the light in the doorway of the room when I was speaking, I knew that I should get on with him.

The first day I went into the barn of a place where the boxes were made, I was greeted by a smell of glue and perspiration and a roar of wheels on the cobblestones in the yard.  Forty or fifty women, varying in age from sixteen to sixty, were measuring, cutting and glueing cardboard and paper together; not one of them looked up from her work as I came in.

I climbed upon a hoarding, and kneeling down, pinned a photograph of Laura on a space of the wall.  This attracted the attention of an elderly woman who turned to her companions and said: 

“Come and have a look at this, girls! why, it’s to the life!”

Seeing some of the girls leave their work and remembering my promise to Cliffords, I jumped up and told them that in ten minutes’ time they would be having their dinners and then I would like to speak to them, but that until then they must not stop their work.  I was much relieved to see them obey me.  Some of them kept sandwiches in dirty paper bags which they placed on the floor with their hats, but when the ten minutes were over I was disappointed to see nearly all of them disappear.  I asked where they had gone to and was told that they either joined the men packers or went to the public-house round the corner.

The girls who brought sandwiches and stayed behind liked my visits and gradually became my friends.  One of them—­Phoebe Whitman by name—­was beautiful and had more charm than the others for me; I asked her one day if she would take me with her to the public-house where she always lunched, as I had brought my food with me in a bag and did not suppose the public-house people would mind my eating it there with a glass of beer.  This request of mine distressed the girls who were my friends.  They thought it a terrible idea that I should go among drunkards, but I told them I had brought a book with me which they could look at and read out loud to each other while I was away—­at which they nodded gravely —­and I went off with my beautiful cockney.