The last recorded speech of Professor Teufelsdrockh proposes the toast
'Die Sache der Armen in Gottes und Teufelsnamen' (The cause of the Poor
in Heaven's name and --'s.) The cause of the Poor is the burden of "Past
and Present," "Chartism," and "Latter-Day Pamphlets." To me...this
advocacy of the cause of the poor appealed very strongly...because...I
had had the opportunity of seeing for myself something of the way the
poor live. Not much, indeed, but still enough to give a terrible
foundation of real knowledge to my speculations.

[After telling how he came to know something of the East End, he
proceeds:--]

I saw strange things there--among the rest, people who came to me for
medical aid, and who were really suffering from nothing but slow
starvation. I have not forgotten--am not likely to forget so long as
memory holds--a visit to a sick girl in a wretched garret where two or
three other women, one a deformed woman, sister of my patient, were busy
shirt-making. After due examination, even my small medical knowledge
sufficed to show that my patient was merely in want of some better food
than the bread and bad tea on which these people were living. I said so
as gently as I could, and the sister turned upon me with a kind of
choking passion. Pulling out of her pocket a few pence and halfpence,
and holding them out, "That is all I get for six and thirty hours' work,
and you talk about giving her proper food."

Well, I left that to pursue my medical studies, and it so happened the
shortest way between the school which I attended and the library of the
College of Surgeons, where my spare hours were largely spent, lay
through certain courts and alleys, Vinegar Yard and others, which are