What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  Crossing sweeper—There was a crossing sweeper like Bleak House’s little Jo at every major street intersection in London. Dodging in and out of passing waggons and carriages, they brushed away the mud and dust that collected on the streets—they did their best business in wet weather—so that the genteel could cross the street without getting their feet dirty. It was not very remunerative, seven shillings a week being a decent average wage, but with luck a sweeper who stayed at the same spot might get to know the “regulars,” who might send him on small errands.

  Dustman—Most city houses had dustbins into which the dust—the refuse from the ashes and cinders of coal fires and similar household matter—was regularly dumped. The dustman would periodically come around to collect the dust, whence it would be hauled away to be used ultimately for bricks and manure after being carefully sifted for inadvertently discarded valuables and other salable items. The most famous fictional member of this occupation is, of course, Mr. Boffin, the “Golden Dustman” in Our Mutual Friend.

  Mudlarks—Because the Thames is a tidal river, at low tide it was possible to walk out into the mud and scrounge for coal, rope, bones, and copper nails as the mudlarks did, praying that they would not cut their bare feet on the glass or nails; many of them were six-to-twelve-year-old children. One observer wrote of a boy who stood in the waste stream of hot water from a steam factory to keep his feet unfrozen in winter while trying to earn the threepence a day he could make doing this if he were lucky. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens mocks a school run for prostitutes, “unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks” on the “grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil was childish and innocent.”

  Orange girl—Selling oranges or bootlaces and staylaces was among the most viable street occupations if you were very poor because the start-up costs were so low. By comparison, most costermongers needed a barrow or a stall; if you sold hot fish or puddings you needed a warmer, too, for coffee. For oranges you just needed the 15d. to 18d. necessary to buy fifty oranges. The next step down economically were match girls, who often went door to door with their infants on their arm, all but begging.

  Packman—A traveling peddler who carried his wares of cotton or linen goods for ladies about in his pack. The occupation ultimately adopted by Bob Jakin in The Mill on the Floss.

  Pieman—A seller of pies whose ingredients could run the gamut from apple, currant and gooseberry to beef, mutton, or eel. There were recurrent suspicions as to the kind of meat that found its way into pies. Quite apart from the story of Sweeney Todd, there were many who would have believed Sam Weller’s account of a conversation with a pieman who kept a lot of cats. “ ‘You must be wery fond o’ cats,’ says I. ‘Other people is,’ says he, a winkin’ at me; ‘they an’t in season till the winter though,’ says he. ‘Not in season!’ says I. ‘No,’ says he, ‘fruits is in, cats is out.’ ” A real-life pieman complained indignantly to an observer in the mid-1800s that when he went into some areas, people began “crying ‘Mee-yow,’ or ‘Bow-wow-wow’ at me.” On the other hand, sometimes the customer at least got the food for free. In Dombey and Son Dickens recounts how Rob the Grinder accepts a half-crown, “ran sniggering off to get change, and tossed it away with a pieman.” This was a common practice that involved flipping a coin with the pieman when you were going to buy from him. If the pieman guessed right, he got your penny and you went hungry; if he guessed wrong, you got the pie free.

  Ratcatcher—A good occupation for a lower-class boy who liked some excitement, animals, and had no education, like Bob Jakin in The Mill on the Floss, who tells Tom Tulliver of his desire to be a ratcatcher. Rats were all over, due to inadequate sewage, granaries, and the ubiquitous stables filled with oats for horses. The ratcatcher operated with arsenic, with which he poisoned the rats, or else used a ferret (“Lors! you mun ha’ ferrets,” says Bob) to chase them out of their holes whereupon his terrier would kill them. The going rate for deratting a London house at mid-century ranged from two shillings to a pound.

  Sweep—“I wants a ‘prentis,” says Mr. Gamfield, the chimney sweeper, at the beginning of Oliver Twist, explaining to the workhouse board that lighting fires under the “chimney-boys” while they’re cleaning the chimney is “humane” because it “makes ’em struggle to hextricate theirselves.” Before Parliament outlawed the use of climbing boys in 1832 children as young as four or five were sent crawling up the 12-by-14-inch chimneys (some were only 7 inches square) of nice middle-class homes to clean out some of the five bushels of soot that coal fires deposited there on the average each year. Since the chimney surfaces were generally smooth inside, only the pressure of their elbows and knees got—or kept—the small boys up, and older boys often stood below them holding lighted straws to their feet or sticking them with pins to “encourage” them. Or they were simply beaten. Country children were warned that “the sweeps will get you” to keep them from wandering; in fact, small children in rural areas were sometimes kidnapped for the trade.

  Waterman—The name was applied to two different kinds of London workers. First, to the men who rowed people across the Thames or out to vessels on the river they were trying to reach. To be a waterman required a seven years’ apprenticeship. “Waterman” was also the name given to the men who watered the horses at cab stands.

  APPRENTICES

  In the nineteenth century, the road to success and fortune often lay along the road of apprenticeship. Surgeons, lawyers, milliners, teachers, shoemakers—all underwent a process of training with a master of some kind in order to get experience necessary both practically and legally to practice a craft.

  The legal requirement was theoretically in force for a good part of the century. Under the Statute of Apprenticeship passed in 1563 it was made unlawful “to exercise any craft, mystery or occupation” then practiced in England without having served an apprenticeship of seven years or more, and the law was not fully repealed until 1875.

  In essence, apprenticeship was a preindustrial means to ensure that people in skilled occupations learned their business thoroughly and that the established members of the field weren’t overwhelmed by competition from cheap upstarts who hadn’t worked their way up through the system.

  Not everyone was apprenticed, of course. According to the law an apprenticeship was required only for a “craft” or “mystery” in existence in 1562. An occupation like coach making, therefore, did not require apprenticing, because there were no real coaches until the 1680s. Other occupations the courts declared too simple to require any training, i.e., they were presumably not really crafts or mysteries. By the early 1800s, surgeons, shoemakers, silk weavers, milliners, soap makers, and cooks were on the list of those required to be apprenticed to learn their trade; butchers, collar makers, costermongers, rope makers, and merchants were not.

  To become apprenticed the youth or his parents or guardians found a master willing to take him on and then signed a contract, called an indenture, binding, or “articling,” him to the master. (Apprentice solicitors, for example, were known as articled clerks.) In law the agreement was actually between the apprentice and the master. In Great Expectations, “The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the magisterial presence . . . . Here, in a corner, my indentures were duly signed and attested, and I was ‘bound.’ ” In his undertaking to accept Pip as an apprentice, Joe Gargery, as usual, is very generous. When he and Pip give the indentures to Miss Havisham to read, she notes that he has waived payment of the customary “premium,” which the parents of the child being apprenticed paid to the master as compensation for training him.

  The master was allowed to beat the child in his keep, but was not supposed to grossly mistreat him. Short of that, generally only a few major catastrophes like the master’s death or bankruptcy could cancel the contract until the seven statutory years were up, unless he and the master agreed to cancel their contract first, which, again, Joe generously agrees to do so Pip can go
away to London to become a gentleman. (“You would not object to cancel his indentures, at his request and for his good?” says Mr. Jaggers, to which, of course, Joe replies, “Lord forbid. . . .”)

  For the very poor, things were grimmer. If you were a pauper like Oliver Twist, the overseers of the poor could apprentice you—without your consent—once you turned nine until such time as you turned twenty-one. This is what happens to Oliver when he makes his famous request for “more”—“Oliver was ordered into instant confinement and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the hands of the parish. In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade, business, or calling.” By not having to meet the requirement that the child consent, parishes could more easily sneak him into the hands of a thug like the brutal chimney sweep Gamfield. As Dickens suggests, if the master lived in a parish other than the pauper’s, there was a financial incentive for the pauper’s parish authorities to place him with the master, for after the child spent forty days in another parish, he was no longer the financial responsibility of the parish that had bound him out. (Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress was the book’s original title.) Fortunately, there was also a requirement that indentures be approved by two magistrates. Until 1834, during which time the magistrates chose the overseers of the poor, this was probably often no safeguard at all. However, it saves Oliver when he falls to his knees begging the magistrates not to be sent away with the sweep. “We refuse to sanction these indentures,” one of them then says to the representative of the local Poor Law authorities. “Take the boy back to the workhouse, and treat him kindly. He seems to want it.”

  In real life, however, things were not always so pleasant. Until 1816, parish workhouses in London shipped batches of apprentices to mill owners in Lancashire, the requisite signatures of approval by two magistrates sometimes being affixed to blank indentures that bound the children from the age of eight until they were twenty-one to employers and working conditions of which nothing was known. In general, it seems likely that a parish apprentice’s lot was not an enviable one.

  At the end of his seven years the apprentice became a journeyman (from the French jour, for “day”) that is, a man entitled to work on his own. He was now free to hire himself out to whoever wanted him. Hardy tells us in The Mayor of Casterbridge that after his bankruptcy Henchard is forced to hire himself out for “journeyman work,” but what the craftsman really wanted was to accumulate enough money and experience to set up a shop on his own and be his own boss. By so doing he himself became a master who could then take on apprentices, and thus the whole cycle of apprenticeship began all over again.

  Ultimately, the system could not survive the century. Adam Smith attacked it early on for locking people up in dying occupations—made obsolete by the new industrial revolution—while new kinds of work were opening up that suffered from a shortage of people that could have used some of those who were imprisoned by their indentures.

  THE WORKHOUSE

  we seem to be in the fictional world of Dickens except that the words in this instance come from the actual correspondence of a workhouse inspector in Kent in 1839. “A short time back,” he wrote, “it was circulated in this county that the children in the workhouses were killed to make pies with, while the old when dead were employed to manure the guardians’ fields, in order to save the expense of coffins.”

  A workhouse interior.

  The workhouse, or, as it was sometimes called, the “house,” the “poorhouse,” or the “union” (entering the workhouse was sometimes called “going on the parish”)—why did people hate and fear it so?

  Noah Claypole in Oliver Twist attends a charity school, and he is ridiculed by one and all for being a “charity-boy.” Whom does he pick on? Oliver Twist—because Oliver is “Work ’us,” or, as Dickens says, “Noah was a charity-boy but not a workhouse orphan.” Through the pages of Our Mutual Friend wanders Betty Higden, pleading again and again to be allowed to die safe from the clutches of the parish authorities, and it is to the workhouse that poor, desperate, dying Fanny Robin is driven in Far from the Madding Crowd, her subsequent funeral a bungled, miserable, rain-sodden affair without even the customary death knell being rung on the parish church bells because the workhouse won’t pay for it. “Please, sir, I want some more,” says Oliver in the workhouse—a quote rendered so pathetic by its setting as to have achieved immortality.

  The workhouse system came into existence in 1834. Until then, relief of the poor, though required by statute, had been exclusively a local parish obligation. Each year poor rates were established to defray the cost of maintaining the indigent in the local workhouse, and the local overseer of the poor then did what was necessary to see that the funds were properly utilized and the poor adequately provided for.

  The system was fine as far as it went, but it was meant to deal with isolated instances of local poverty and not with systematic economic impoverishment on a large scale, which is what took place in England in the late 1700s as the poor farmer or laborer was forced off his land by enclosures or denied the use of hitherto public land for fuel gathering or pasture.

  Some parishes in desperation tried to pay farm laborers who were still working but not earning enough to keep body and soul together a supplement to bring them up to a minimal living standard so they wouldn’t have to go into the workhouse and seek relief there. This so-called “outdoor relief” was based on the notion that it was more desirable to keep people out of the workhouse, but it ran into bitter opposition. The incentive to work was being destroyed, cried opponents, and the supplements being paid in this way were said to be an unfair subsidy to local farmers, so the old system was reformed out of existence in 1834 and replaced with the New Poor Law, an act that set up a national board of three Poor Law commissioners in London who supervised the new boards of guardians elected by the local ratepayers that now replaced the overseers of the poor. The guardians were to run the local workhouses on the union system, that is, the programs for the poor in a group of parishes were to be run together—if possible, all out of one large central workhouse. (There were some 650 such unions in the country.)

  The major problem for the reformers was now to make sure that people got adequate food and clothing without at the same time making the workhouse so attractive that the not-so-idle and idle poor would all flock there at the ratepayers’ expense.

  There were, in fact, already restrictions on who could get help in a local area. “Settlement” laws dating back to Elizabethan times required that you demonstrate a connection of some kind with the local parish in order to be eligible for workhouse relief. Though the regulations were somewhat complex, for the most part being born in the parish was a sufficient qualification—which is no doubt one reason, quite apart from sentiment, why desperate homeless people like Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding Crowd always returned home, i.e., to their place of birth, when in trouble. Being apprenticed in the parish for forty days also did the trick; the parish in which Oliver Twist asks for “more” deliberately binds him out to a master in another parish to get him off their rolls in just this way. One year’s domestic service in a parish also qualified you for assistance until 1834, a regulation which led some parishes to encourage or require employers of servants to hire them for periods no longer than eleven months and three weeks. At a convivial gathering at the malthouse in Far from the Madding Crowd, the old maltster recalls how “Old Twills wouldn’t hire me for more than eleven months at a time, to keep me from being chargeable to the parish if so be I was disabled.” Paying rates or marrying a man from the parish also got you a settlement there.

  But how to keep even these eligible poor from flooding the workhouses? The solution adopted was to make the workplaces as grim and grinding as possible so that a recipient of workhouse charity would avoid going on relief if at all possible. The food was often ins
ubstantial, amounting to less than what prisoners were fed, noted a prison steward in 1843 who had previously been master of a workhouse. No razors, no tobacco, no alcohol. You got issued a standard workhouse uniform and yielded up your regular clothes, and you had to abandon your personal possessions. Children were routinely separated from their parents, and husbands and wives were generally separated from one another within the workhouse walls, too. As Dickens mordantly put it in Oliver Twist, the board of guardians “kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors’ Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor!” There was no going out to Sunday service; a chaplain was imported to say the service instead within the workhouse walls, and the work you were given to help the workhouse live up to its name was picking oakum or breaking stones—the same work you would have been given in contemporary prisons.

  Indeed, many of the new workhouses were deliberately built to look as grim and forbidding as possible. “Their prison-like appearance,” wrote an assistant commissioner with relish, “inspires a salutary dread.”

  DISEASE

  among the things that have faded—if not vanished—with the passing of the nineteenth century are a host of physical complaints and illnesses. Gout, apoplexy, dropsy, ague, quinsy—these are all terms we associate with the age but may be hard put to define exactly now.

  Ague—Another name for malaria, or the stage of malaria characterized by chills and shivering, hence, any such chill or fever. We think of it as primarily a tropical disease and, of course, people caught it in the West Indies, but it existed on its own in England at least up through the middle of the nineteenth century, spread by the same Anopheles mosquito that carried the disease elsewhere. When Pip brings Magwitch the food he has stolen from the Gargerys in Great Expectations, he finds the convict shivering along the river and says, “I think you have got the ague. . . . It’s bad about here. . . . You’ve been lying out on the meshes, and they’re dreadful aguish.” Their conversation, of course, takes place in the marshes and those in the area of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were known for their malaria. Local chemists did a brisk business in quinine in the 1800s until drainage helped to eradicate the disease.