A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  A young man in a counting house would serve a five-year apprenticeship, usually under the tutelage of an individual, more senior clerk, before being allowed to see himself as qualified. Clerks were as varied a group as the wide worlds of commerce and administration could produce. Those in banks were considered to be the at the top of the profession, but international commerce was not far behind, for there was always glamour attached to the whiff of exotic places that this brought with it. The men themselves varied between those – the majority – of modest income and ambition and those of comfortable means, who sometimes worked for a few years without pay. These latter were often the sons of merchants, and chose to learn the ropes of their profession before setting up in business on their own. After he had completed his training, a clerk might – if he were in a small firm that had no hierarchy or ‘career ladder’ – do literally the same work every day until old age or failing eyesight made him unable to continue. In a large organization it might be possible for a valued employee to receive a pension, but this was not something to which most could look forward. In a great many cases, they would hope for a parting gift from their employer, consisting of whatever he was willing to bestow.

  Clerks dressed in black, and would have been immediately recognizable in the street from their stooped shoulders, ink-stained hands and general pallor. Their hours of work might be extremely civilized – some government departments began at ten and finished at four, and half-past four or five were typical finishing times – with a break of an hour for lunch. However, clerks had to remain in their offices until the necessary work was finished, and if that took longer than the allotted span of their day, they would simply have to continue. Depending on the nature of their business, there would be busy times of the week or the month or the year, during which they might be expected to work into the night. On Saturdays, when under normal circumstances they could hope to finish at lunchtime and have the afternoon off, they might just as easily have to stay late to complete the week’s paperwork. A survey of banks comments that in Manchester in the thirties and forties, before the introduction of Saturday half-days had taken hold, it was ‘quite common in the principal banks and warehouses to see every window illuminated up till nine, ten and even eleven p.m., and the longest and sweetest of midsummer evenings often sank in the west before ever a door was locked and a lad set free.’8 They were not paid overtime, and – like everyone else until the 1930s – had no paid holidays. Though they sat down all day, their work was physically taxing, for until the latter decades of the reign there were no devices to save labour or to lessen the wearisome nature of their tasks.

  Dickens, in Sketches by Boz, describes an inhabitant of this world, with its:

  dingy little back-office into which he walks every morning, placing his hat on the same peg, and placing his legs beneath the same desk: first, taking off that black coat which lasts the year through, and putting on one which did duty last year, and which he keeps in his desk to save the other. There he sits till five o’clock, working on, all day, as regularly as the dial over the mantel-piece, whose loud ticking is as monotonous as his whole existence: only raising his head when someone enters the counting-house, or when, in the midst of some difficult calculation, he looks up at the ceiling as if there were inspiration in the dusty sky-light with a green knot in the centre of every pane of glass. About five, or half-past, he slowly dismounts from his accustomed stool, and again changing his coat, proceeds to his usual dining-place.9

  Both clerks themselves and the wider public were well aware they appeared to the world as mindless drudges. B. G. Orchard, in his 1871 report on Liverpool clerks, quoted one man who asked:

  What do we see of real life? What do we know of the world? What do we know of anything? We don’t do men’s work. We aren’t real men. Think of crossing ‘t’s and dotting ‘i’s all day long. No wonder bricklayers and omnibus drivers have contempt for us.10

  As a byword for anonymous nonentity, it was no accident that a clerk – Mister Pooter – was chosen as the hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s satirical novel The Diary of a Nobody. As those familiar with this will know, however, the nature of his work does not prevent Pooter from enjoying a relatively varied life – he has his garden, his friends, his hobbies and his visits to the seaside to provide diversion, and he has the luxury of being able to indulge in a sense of self-importance. The life of a Victorian clerk could be more agreeable than a glance at his working conditions might imply.

  In the first half of the reign, the only significant piece of office equipment was the pen, though where might also be a need for rulers (in those days cylindrical rather than flat) and the pumice stone that was used for rubbing out mistakes. At the time of Victoria’s accession the steel nib had begun to replace the goose quill, but this made very slow inroads. Quills continued in common use for decades afterwards, and were still to be found in many offices at the end of the century. In the absence of photocopiers, all duplicates had to be laboriously written by hand, as did fair copies of letters. The filing cabinet and paper clip, those modern symbols of bureaucracy, did not yet exist. Invoices were stored by being impaled on a spike, in order of arrival, the most recent at the top. Bundles of papers were held together with pins, an inefficient and sometimes painful practice. Many documents were tied together and hung from nails or pegs, and the walls were festooned with calendars, papers and coats and hats. Without telephones, communication was by messenger. If a document was ready to be sent, the ring of a small handbell would summon one. Almost all were small boys or elderly men, who stood about the premises all day awaiting this type of summons, and they knew the geography of a commercial district well enough to speedily deliver letters and packages either within their own building or in the surrounding streets.

  The Coming of Machinery

  The first manifestation of technology to break in upon the studious hush of offices was the telegraph, invented in 1855, which vastly increased the speed of communications and therefore the volume of business. The telephone arrived a generation later. Invented in the mid-seventies, it began to appear in offices in the following decade. In the nineties the rotary dial was added, creating in effect the instrument we still use today. Though undoubtedly a convenience, the telephone was expensive, and was neither widespread nor popular. Only in the next century did it become more or less universal. Many people – whether clerks or clients – were simply not comfortable using it, and this attitude could still be found as late as the 1920s, when the American President Herbert Hoover objected to speaking on the telephone because he considered it looked undignified.

  The typewriter was also to change the nature of office work, and it proved more significant than all the other innovations. It represented a revolution even more important than that which the computer brought in the twentieth century, for it marked the end of the pen and the beginning of noisy mechanization in commercial life. It speeded up the creation and processing of paperwork and, through the development of carbon paper, the copying of documents. The very earliest models appeared in the fifties but it was in the sixties and seventies that the machines began to gain ground. They were large, cumbersome and often difficult to work, but they had come to stay.

  Together with the typewriter came the increased use of shorthand. This highly valuable system for speedily recording information was, of course, not new – Samuel Pepys had written his diary in this form, and the young Dickens had used it when working as a legal reporter. It had been popularized at the beginning of the reign by a teacher named Isaac Pitman, whose book on the subject, Stenographic Sound Hand, was published in 1837 and enjoyed considerable success. He, and those who followed his lead, taught not only shorthand but other clerical skills such as book-keeping and typewriting. The result was the emergence of the commercial college, in which students of both sexes could be trained for careers in offices. The Dickensian clerk on his own could not possibly have adapted to the expanding needs of administration and commerce, which now needed a
rmies of staff to keep up.

  The size of companies, of warehouses, of machinery, increased, as did the numbers that firms employed and the pace of activity. We can see from surviving examples that office buildings from the later part of the century are, for the first time, on a scale approaching that of our own era. Many of them dwarf the counting houses and warehouses of the Georgians.

  This revolution took place over thirty or forty years. There was no overnight replacement of Dickensian clerks by ‘typewriters’ (as the operators of these machines were known). The two worked together in the same offices for many years. The ‘Bob Cratchits’ largely completed their careers and departed rather than, as would doubtless happen today, facing summary redundancy because they did not understand the new methods. There was still a place – albeit a diminishing one – for their skills until the end of the reign.

  Lady Clerks

  As if the introduction of so much technology were not change enough, the telephone and typewriter caused large numbers of women, for the first time, to enter the workplace. In 1851, the census showed only nineteen women commercial clerks. Forty years later there were 17, 859. Their numbers would continue to rise until, by the end of the Edwardian era, there would be over 150,000 of them. The change of attitude to some extent resulted from experience in America, where during the Civil War in the 1860s many thousands of women had worked in offices to replace men drafted into the army. In Britain, women in some businesses were initially segregated entirely from men, working in different rooms and even leaving the office at different times to avoid contact. Ironically in view of this, female employees often found no lavatories available to them at their place of work, and were obliged either to use the men’s facilities or, if that was impossible, might have to wait until they got home! Their advent in offices and counting houses was inevitably met with some cynicism. A cartoon from the seventies shows an exasperated employer coming into a room to find his female workforce gossiping idly or reading. In reality, employers found that women were actually better suited to working modern machinery than men, whether this was the telephone (the operation of which thus became from the time of their first use a predominantly female occupation) or the typewriter. As a member of the Post Office stated in 1871:

  They have in an eminent degree the quickness of eye and ear, and the delicacy of touch. They take more kindly than men and boys do to sedentary employment, and are more patient during long confinement to one place. The wages, which will draw male operators from but an inferior class of the community, will draw female operators from a superior class.11

  Twenty years later, the great social observer Charles Booth qualified this assessment:

  It is said that women are more accurate workers and better copyists than junior male clerks but, for the most part, are inferior to the male clerk over twenty-one years of age. This may be the result of their physical condition and want of experience.12

  Gradually the sharing of offices became more commonplace. One of the first organizations to try it, in the seventies, reported that the presence of women:

  Raises the tone of the male staff by confining them during many hours of the day to a decency of conversation and demeanour which is not always to be found where men alone are employed.13

  Women represented a saving of money since, regardless of the hours they worked or the duties they performed, they were paid at lower rates than their male colleagues who did the same jobs. As a result, their numbers increased and they rapidly came to form a significant part of the business world. They held no positions of responsibility, and not until almost exactly a century after their arrival would they be paid at the same rate as men. Nevertheless, they had secured for themselves an important bridgehead.

  They were described by one writer in the nineties, as they began to contribute to the scenery of London’s financial district:

  There are very few women in the City crowd. They are so rare that they walk about apologetically and attempt to efface themselves. They try to be businesslike, poor dears, in their linen dresses and blouses, gathered in tightly at neck, waist and wristbands; and their hats are inclined to be pinched and ‘perched’. The males scowl at but tolerate them, for they do not know that ‘all this rot about women coming into the city is bound to stop. They cant hold their own with us, my boy.’14

  He revealed something of their appearance – they must have brought a certain colour amid the sobriety of suits – as well as suggesting the difficulty they faced in answering even the most basic needs:

  They carry small brown-paper packages tied with white string in a day when ‘a lady that is a lady’ is not supposed to have a stomach, for in all this big city there is no place where a poor girl may eat and the teashop ‘ladies only’ department is unknown. When these unfortunate females go into one of the cheap eating-places they are treated as pariahs, and lordly waiters refuse to wait on them. They cannot find a room in which to ‘do themselves up’ and city employers object tacitly to providing them with the elementary decencies of life in the offices where they hang their diminished heads.15

  He continues:

  However, the typewriter is still frightfully modern and the lordly male does not care too much about working it. It is too like a sewing machine – ‘and I’m not a bally nursemaid-office-boy’, the comment of a time when women were inferior to men and the men knew it and the women knew it . . .

  But they are beginning to be used, all the same, because many of them regard their wages (15s to 30s a week) as ‘pin-money’ and usually live at home or as they can. But through it all, they are frightfully respectable and apologetic, especially as the night comes on and they have to go home to Finsbury Park or Clapham Junction or Balham or Woodford.16

  However quaint this sounds to a modern audience, it represented a revolution both in practices and attitudes and a break with custom. From the scribes of the ancient world until the mid-Victorian era, clerical work had been done by men, using the same basic tools. Thereafter, such work was not only done by machine but became so increasingly the province of women that they effectively edged out the male from these regions, and they have continued to dominate them ever since. It was the Victorians who created the world of work that we still inhabit.

  9

  LEISURE

  An Age of Travel

  Like our own time, the Victorian era was an age of leisure. Gradually improving working conditions, as well as a rising standard of living, gave people more time and money to spend, while advancing technology increased the opportunities available to them for exploiting these resources. They had more ways of enjoying themselves than any previous generation, just as we – with the technology at our disposal – are perceived to have. The Victorians maintained traditional pleasures such as the theatre (the quality of which had reached commanding heights by the end of the reign, and which was already producing its influential offshoot, the cinema), but developed others beyond the dreams of their predecessors. Most significantly, the advent of cheap travel and organized sports – both of which have undergone equivalent revolutions in our own time – decisively and permanently changed the habits, the outlook and the expectations of the British people.

  It was the fruits of the Industrial Revolution that enabled Victorians to travel, conveniently, to the British coasts, as a result of which seaside towns expanded and developed – or in some cases were created more or less from scratch – to feed, accommodate and entertain hordes of seasonal visitors. It was the same technology – the railway and the steamship – that enabled them swiftly to cross seas and oceans and to travel the European Continent and the Middle East, making far-flung regions accessible to the moderately well-off for the first time in history.

  It was because of this ease of access to other, and often distant places that the spread of organized games became possible. From this time on it became feasible for teams from other places to play each other. This allowed the creation of sustainable sporting ‘leagues’ and enabled rules to be standa
rdized. Not only could teams play each other, with the same rules, all over the country but, with the arrival of faster ocean travel, championship matches could be played abroad. The exchange of cricket teams with Australia from the 1860s, and the establishment of the ‘Ashes’ trophy opened a new era in sporting competition, leading the way to the Olympics – first held at Athens in 1894 – and to the great international events of the following century.

  Beside the Sea

  Sea bathing was a practice that became established in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as a treatment for ill health rather than a form of exercise or a relaxation. Its popularity was greatly enhanced by the Prince Regent – later George IV – who built a home in Brighton and made what had been an unremarkable fishing-port into an extension of fashionable London. It remained highly select, not least because it was expensive to reach and to live in, but by the end of the Georgian era a fall in the cost of coach travel had begun to nibble at the edges of the town’s exclusive character. The coming of the railway, however, was not only to change the resort of Brighton completely (by the end of the reign it was synonymous with cockney day-trippers) but to create a host of imitations. Railways made it possible for large numbers of people to reach the coastal towns with speed and comfort. This led to a seasonal demand for accommodation, for dining facilities and for entertainment. The result was an explosion in building as resorts were created. All over the British Isles, towns that had been largely unknown – or indeed non-existent – became household names: Blackpool and Filey in the north, Llandudno and Colwyn Bay in Wales, Minehead and Weston-super-Mare in the west, Yarmouth and Cromer in the east, Southend and Margate in the Thames estuary, Rothesay in Scotland, Bangor, Howth and Dun Laoghaire in Ireland. Some towns acquired, or maintained, a reputation for smartness and gentility: Scarborough was a cut above any other northern resort. Torquay enjoyed for a time a popularity with the international rich that rivalled the later glamour of the French Riviera. Ramsgate was given distinction by the fact that the Queen had, from girlhood, spent her holidays there. She gave it up only when her summer home was built at Osborne – which led to the reinvention of the Isle of Wight as a summer destination.