Brought up in . a basement in Jipping Street in a neighbouta
hood where no one policeman ever walked alone, where the nauseating smells of a tanyard and a pickle factory vied with the sickly-sweet odour of chloroform from a hospital, Miss Kathleen Woodward, the biographer of Queen Mary, has now written the story of her childhood under the title of Jipping Street (Longmans, 6s.). Suicides in the canal seem to have been the chief excitement in this dreary street : "Sometimes people came from far off to drown themselves in the canal, and a week seemed not to pass without yielding up the body of one suicide ; and the police or the coroner, or some mysterious officer awarded you twelve shillings and sixpence for each body recovered, and nothing at all for rescuing a live person ; which seemed ironical" Her descriptions of her mother, of Lil, who coloured her face and lips with the red back of a penny dictionary, of other outstanding personalities of her early life are unforgettable. Jipping Street belongs to the literature of revolt ; we hope Miss Woodward will write a continuation so that we may hear how, from being a fifteen shilling a week factory girl, she became a writer of such vivid (although sometimes ungrammatical) English.
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