Excerpt from Life in West London: A Study and a Contrast The district as a whole is characterized by conditions which, if they do not defy, at least baffle accurate description. Here, for example, are all the ordinary facts of social life in crowded centres - insanitary dwellings, irregular employ ment, sweated wages, and chronic physical weakness, inten sified by higher rents and a relatively higher cost of liv ing; and, what is worse still, aggravated by the close prox imity of those awful contrasts - the extremes of wealth and poverty, which are the special and peculiar miseries of the West End. In the east and south of London life has its deep and extended miseries, but this is not one of them. There the colour of life, if deadly dull, is more even; it knows nothing of those violent extremes of luxury and want which fix irrevocably and hopelessly before the worker's eyes the gulf which divides the classes. Here are gifts and' treasures innumerable - art, knowledge, beauty, wealth - but they are not for the poor. The poor of West London are made to feel that they are aliens from life on the very borders of their own homesteads. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.