XXXII

1

The poor people who supply me
with rats are what you may
call barn-door labouring poor for
they are the most ignorant people I
ever come near really you would
not believe people could live in
such ignorance talk about Latin &
Greek sir why English is Latin
to them in fact I have
a difficulty to understand them myself

2

when the harvest is got in
they go hunting the hedges &
ditches for rats
once the farmers had to pay
2d. a-head for all rats
caught on their grounds
& they nailed them
up against the wall but now
the rat-ketchers can get 3d. each
by bringing the vermin up to town the farmers
don't pay them anything
to hunt them in their stacks & barns
they no longer get their 2d. in the country
though they get their 3d. in town

3

there is a wonderful deal of difference
in the specie of rats
the bite of sewer
or waterditch rats is
very bad their
coats is poisonous the water
& ditch rat lives on filth
but your barn-rat is a plump fellow
& he lives on the best of everything he's
well off
there's as much difference
between the barn & sewer-rats
as between a brewer's horse & a costermonger's

4

Rats want a deal of watching
& a deal of sorting now you
can't put a sewer & a
barn-rat together it's like
putting a Roosshian & a Turk
under the same roof I can tell
a barn-rat from a ship-rat
or a sewer-rat in a minute
there's six or seven different kinds of rats
& if we don't sort 'em they
tear one another to pieces

5

A rat's bite is very singular
it's a three-cornered one like a leech's
only deeper of course
& it will bleed for
ever such a time my boys
have sometimes had their fingers
go dreadfully bad from rat-bites
all black & putrid like
aye as black as the horse-hair covering to my sofa
people have said to me you
ought to send the lad to the hospital
& have his finger took off but
I've always left it to the lads
& they've said oh
don't mind it father
it'll get all right by & by &
so it has

6

The best thing I
ever found for a rat-bite
was the thick bottoms of
porter casks
put on as a poultice the
only thing you can do is to poultice
these porter bottoms is so powerful
& draws so
they'll take thorns out of horses' hoofs & feet
after steeplechasing

 

Copyright © John Seed, 2005.

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John Seed was born in the North-East of England, but now lives in London, and teaches History at Roehampton University. Shearsman Books published two volumes of his work in April 2005: New and Collected Poems & Pictures from Mayhew, from the latter of which the poem here is drawn. Every single word of the Mayhew poems is drawn from Henry Mayhew's mid-19th century reports of the condition of the London poor. John Seed has taken the transcriptions of several of the voices recorded by Mayhew and re-arranged them as a narrative poem-sequence.