Richard Rowe was an English journalist, author, and tutor who also spent part of his career in Australia. He wrote fiction, journalism, and books for young readers.
Richard Rowe
Picked Up In the Streets; or struggles for life amongst the London poor
W.H. Allen & Co., 1880.
On a spring Sunday morning, the heat of which would have been almost tropical, had it not been for a tempering east wind, I chanced to find myself in Regent's Park...White and purple lilac were in almost full bloom. Chestnut-trees, too, were spired with precocious pagodas, and the blossom-buds of the famous hawthorn-trees were bursting. Dusky, heavy-fleeced sheep stood grazing, lay dozing, or moved along lazily upon the wide sunny lawns, and the shadier green of sloping banks of the brown canal, in which dogs, big and little, were splashing, swimming, or whining to be pulled out by the ears, or the nape of the neck - glossily-matted masses of moist misery
The author had emigrated to Australia as a young man, and had worked as a journalist as well as writing a number of children's books. On his return to London he made a study of the conditions of life among the poor.
Most of the people in the park were on foot, or seated on the benches, or lolling on the grass, gazing, meditating, smoking, reading books and newspapers, love-making, or quietly enjoying doing nothing. There was a curious medley of people present - soldiers in gay uniforms; paupers in their snuff-coloured Sunday suits; servant-girls out for a holiday; nursemaids and patresfamilias wheeling perambulators; sisters of orders; elder sisters of families; hard-worked mothers, in charge of frolicking little ones; old bachelors moping like herons; young foreigners walking four abreast, and talking and laughing loudly; hearty groups of working-men, who met other groups, and saluted one another with such affectionate greetings as "Well, old Mouldy, and how's yourself?"