ABSTRACT
In his right hand he held a stick, and he directed Arthur to guide him by the empty sleeve on the other side. In this manner they issued out of Whitecross Street and proceeded westwards. (Workers in the Dawn, vol. l, pp.70f.)
The drunken Bill Blatherwick of Gissing's Workers in the Dawn (1880) feigns blindness and lameness in order to collect alms from the West End bourgeoisie. One of a shifty criminal underclass, he brings his innate coarseness and sadism to bear in his treatment of the shivering and cowering Arthur, whose blonde angelic looks earn them more pennies from passers-by. Through this scenario, Gissing would seem to affirm the need for institutional checks on almsgiving, and he might be interpreted as approving of the eleven-year-old Society for Organizing Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendacity, or Charity Organisation Society (C.O.S). Established following the bureaucratic disaster of the Mansion House Relief Fund of 1866-9, the C.O.S. acted as a clearinghouse to distinguish between deserving and undeserving recipients of charity.
