Home › All Sorts and Conditions of Men › All Sorts and Conditions of Men: Angela

All Sorts and Conditions of Men: Angela

Yet Angela Messenger never had been inside one of her own houses. Never had visited her brewery. She knew all the theories about people, but she didn't know people themselves. She resolved: "I efface myself. I vanish. I disappear. Your Angela will be a dressmaker, and she will live by herself and become--what her great-grandmother was--one of the people."

This was in June, 1881.

For a long time to come, fashionable London would see Angela Messenger no more.

But in Whitechapel district, a charming young woman claiming the name of Kennedy appeared from nowhere in particular, to open dressmaking-rooms. At Mrs. Bormalack's boarding-house she met the man.

The man had all of personal refinement, education, and aristocratic poise that was to be expected in the favorite member of the family of Lord Jocelyn Le Breton. Reaching the age of twenty-three, he had been told the secret of his birth: his only claim upon that home of wealth and social distinction was one of gratitude. For, in truth, he had been the child of a sergeant in the English army; and instead of Le Breton, his name was Goslett--Harry Goslett, the first name being pronounced 'Arry in the neighborhood where he had been born.

Free to make his choice, he resolved to go back to his own people. Mrs. Bormalack's boarding-house was old and mean. Everything was old and shabby; everything wanted polishing, washing, brightening up. The boarders numbered an elderly couple from a New Hampshire town, hugging the delusion that they were rightful owners of a peerage, and awaiting the day when their rights would be recognized; a sleight-of-hand performer out of employment, who bored his fellows by practising his magic upon them; a learned scholar from Australia, who claimed the discovery of the original tablets of stone upon which the Ten Commandments had been written, but who was deprived of the glory due such an achievement by the jealousy of rival scholars; a clerk in the great brewery, who for thirty years had labored under suspicion of stealing certain valuables from a safe of the Concern--holding on to an ill-paid position through the decades, without hope of promotion or fear of discharge, until guilt might be proven or the missing valuables discovered. In such surroundings, Angela and Harry naturally gravitated toward each other. Without question, they took each other at face value: she, a dressmaker with a little money to set herself up in business; he, a cabinet-maker with wages of a shilling an hour for mending broken furniture and doing similar jobs at the brewery.