Other families which Booth offered as examples included those of Mr R., a blind man with a weekly pension of 5s 6d; Thomas B., a wharf labourer; and a widow with two grown-up children. Mr R. had a wife, who earned a little money in the season, picking fruit and hops, and three grown-up daughters, the eldest, ‘a rough girl who ruined her health at the lead works’, being an occasional sack-maker and bottle-washer. The other two daughters worked in a seed factory and gave their mother between 1 is and 13s a week between them. The total housekeeping money of this family was 17s 6d a week; and they lived, ‘to the greatest possible extent, from hand to mouth’, buying almost everything on credit from one shop and every week putting in and taking out of pawn the same set of garments for which the broker charged 4a. The two working girls spent 2d a day on their dinners at work; the meals they had at home costing 3d a head for dinner on Sundays and 1½d for other meals. Tea formed a large part of their purchases at the corner shop to which they resorted as often as a middle-class housewife would go to her canister, making as many as three trips a day and buying ‘pinches’ at ¾d each.
The widow managed rather better than the Rs. She herself earned 7s a week; her daughter, aged twenty-three, received up to 15s in a good week as an envelope-folder; while her twenty-one-year-old son, who had no regular work, contrived to bring home 5s or so. Their living, with the cost of meals working out at 1¾Ad each, was very bare, their only luxury an occasional bottle of ginger-beer.
The dock labourer earned 21s a week, his wife a little extra, sometimes 3s 6d, by needlework; and although he had five children under ten at home and a girl out at service who still received both money and clothes from her parents, he was able to live quite comfortably, thanks to ‘steadiness on his part and good management on the part of the wife’. He had all his meals at home with the family for whom, in an average week, he was able to supply eight pounds of meat at 5a a pound, five pounds of fish at 3d, thirty pounds of potatoes, thirty-four pounds of bread, three pounds of flour, one and a quarter pounds of butter and seven pounds of sugar.
Booth went on to describe in detail the appearance and inhabitants of various London streets. One of these, Shelton Street, St Giles, may be taken as characteristic:
Shelton Street was just wide enough for a vehicle to pass either way, with room between curb-stone and houses for one foot-passenger to walk; but vehicles would pass seldom, and foot-passengers would prefer the roadway to the risk of tearing their clothes against projecting nails. The houses, about forty in number, contained cellars, parlours, and first, second and third floors, mostly two rooms on a floor, and few of the 200 families who lived here occupied more than one room – which in rare instances would be curtained off. If there was no curtain, anyone lying on the bed would perhaps be covered up and hidden, head and all, when a visitor was admitted, or perhaps no shyness would be felt. Drunkenness and dirt and bad language prevailed, and violence was common, reaching at times even to murder. Fifteen rooms out of twenty were filthy to the last degree, and the furniture in none of these would be worth twenty shillings, in some cases not five shillings. Not a room would be free from vermin, and in many life at night was unbearable. Several occupants have said that in hot weather they don’t go to bed, but sit in their clothes in the least infested part of the room. What good is it, they said, to go to bed when you can’t get a wink of sleep for bugs and fleas? The passage from the street to the back door would be scarcely ever swept, to say nothing of being scrubbed. Most of the doors stood open all night as well as all day, and the passage and stairs gave shelter to many who were altogether homeless. The little yard at the back was only sufficient for dustbin and closet and water-tap, serving for six or seven families. The water would be drawn from cisterns which were receptacles for refuse, and perhaps occasionally a dead cat. The houses looked ready to fall, many of them being out of the perpendicular. Gambling was the amusement of the street. Sentries would be posted, and if the police made a rush the offenders would slip into the open houses and hide until danger was past. Sunday afternoon and evening was the hey-day time for this street. Every doorstep would be crowded by those who sat or stood with pipe and jug of beer, while lads lounged about, and the gutters would find amusement for not a few children with bare feet, their faces and hands be-smeared while the mud oozed through between their toes.
Among the inhabitants of Shelton Street were Mr Mulvaney who collected the rents from other occupiers; a widow with three children who made a ‘fair living as a costermonger, very clean, careful, and kindly disposed’; a rough Covent Garden porter who spent most of what he earned on drink before he came home, then swore and knocked his wife about; a woman of French origin who claimed to be an officer’s widow and got her living by begging and picking up odds and ends in the street; Mrs Shane, an Irishwoman, seller of water-cresses, ‘rather tidier than some, though given to drink at times’; a family of Irish costermongers who would only open their door wide enough ‘to afford a glimpse of wall covered with pictures and shut it again’; a woman whose husband had emigrated to America and whose children were locked up in her room while she went out into the streets selling oranges; an alcoholic, paralysed by drink, whose family were ‘filthy and lived like pigs – both sights and smells were sickening’; Mrs Varney, a respectable woman who obtained a living by selling fowls; a prostitute who lived with her mother, ‘a notorious drunkard’; a murderer who asserted that he ‘did not believe in anything but beer’; a charwoman, ‘clean and steady,’ with a husband crippled by rheumatism and worn out with pain; another market porter who ‘drank the largest part of his earnings, came rolling and roaring upstairs into his room’ and lived ‘like a demon’ with a wife who also spent most of what she could lay her hands on in the public house; a very pious Roman Catholic woman whose two daughters worked in the City; a scavenger employed by the Board of Works, ‘a martyr to asthma’, whose room was ‘most offensive and swarming with vermin’; ‘a very decent man who had formerly been a pugilist, a hard hitter and hard drinker, as his battered face testified, now an abstainer and very respectable’; a mysterious young woman ‘of quiet manners and doubtful character’; a shiftless, though sober, furniture repairer whose mother was a nurse; Mrs Berry, ‘a widow, paralysed so as to be almost speechless, who pushed a barrow and sold mussels in the street’; Mrs O’Brien who ‘sold lights in the streets, exciting pity with her suffering children’ while her husband was in hospital; a drunken and violent chimneysweep who lived with a woman whom, occasionally assisted by his sons and by another woman, he abused and insulted and slowly battered to death; a polite young man who made toys in the form of wooden mice; a music-hall bouncer; a vendor of shellfish; Mr Warner, a cobbler who bought old shoes, patched them up with paper, paste and polish and disposed of them in Dudley Street where they sold for is a pair ‘warranted’ and fell apart on the first wet day; and Mr and Mrs Park who had five children.
This man, now about forty-eight years old, had served in India as a soldier, and was discharged in ill-health suffering from pains in the head and loss of memory due to fracture of the skull and sunstroke … He does house painting when he can get it, which is rare. The mother works hard for her children and attends … every mission-hall. This brings her soup three or four times a week and sometimes a loaf of bread … At Christmas she may contrive to get two or three Christmas dinners from different places. The room here was full of rubbish – all in it would not fetch 10s; the dirty walls covered with little pictures never taken down. Vermin abounded and the stench was awful. These people have had seven children but about eight years ago two of them, aged nine and eleven, going to school in the morning, have never been heard of since.6
For those who had no rooms of their own there were numerous lodging-houses, and ‘lower still in reputation, “furnished houses”, and houses where stairways and corners are occupied nightly by those without any other shelter’. The registered lodging-houses were reasonably well run and orderly. They had common kitchens with open fires on the g
round floor and dormitories above. The quarters for single women were large rooms packed so close with broken-down truckle beds that there was only just enough room to walk between them; married couples, or those who claimed to be such, were assigned to rooms boxed off by wooden partitions. The many unlicensed lodging-houses, however, were like ‘visions of hell’ in which every conceivable crime had been committed and in which prostitutes, many of them children, abounded. Tens of thousands slept in such places down by the docks, around Drury Lane, St Giles’s, Ratcliffe Highway and Whitechapel. The charge was generally no more than 2d a night for a bundle of rags on a bunk and the use of the fire in the kitchen by which would be crowded a ragged assortment of labourers, pickpockets, Billingsgate porters, beggars and sailors, vagrants and drunkards, and men fallen from better positions, ‘usually through drink, clerks in holy orders, educated men, school teachers, merchants, reduced to the lowest condition’. Wearing a weird array of clothes, shiny with age and grease – some barefooted, others in boots with the toes cut off so that they could get their feet into them – they sat at tables round the walls, drying the ends of cigars they had picked up in the streets, or crowded round the fire toasting herrings or bits of meat stolen from a butcher’s stall. For a penny reduction in the fee it was possible to sleep on the floor of the kitchen and many did so, women as well as men, girls and boys, most of them having taken the precaution of getting drunk if they could afford it for there was no sleep otherwise to be had.
Booth described two such places in Parker Street. One, which accommodated fifty to sixty men, was entered ‘down some steps from a back yard into a rough kind of cavern, and then through a door into the kitchen which was more like a dungeon than anything else’. In the other, also underground, about seventy women squatted round the coke fire. Their hair was matted, their faces and hands filthy, their ragged clothing ‘stiff with accumulations of beer and dirt, their underclothing, if they have any at all, swarming with vermin. Many of them are often drunk … Bad as this house is here described, it was worse in the days of Mrs Collins, a gigantic woman profusely bedecked with rings, who grew enormously fat and died weighing nearly thirty stone. She made her living by combining the role of lodging-house keeper with that of procuress.’7
Even among the very poor there were, of course, innumerable families who contrived to live in decency if not in comfort; and many of those with regular earnings lived in contentment in two or three rooms in Battersea or Clapham with clean coverings on the floors, curtains at the unbroken windows, picture postcards on the walls, Staffordshire figures, a few other ornaments, as well as a tin tray and a looking-glass on the shelf above the fireplace, a cloth on the table and sheets on the bed. Indeed, several contemporary observers, critical as they were of the unpleasant conditions in which they had to work, conceded that the homes of artisans were sometimes quite pleasant. A writer in The Cornhill Magazine in 1862 found that in ‘nearly all the cottages’ in one mining village, ‘and especially those tenanted by respectable families’ the furniture was ‘of a superior order’:
The bedstead is pretty sure to be a mahogany four-poster, with imposing pillars, clean white furniture, and a quilted coverlet. It is placed in the best room as an ornamental piece of furniture, and beside it will frequently stand a mahogany chest of drawers, well polished, and filled with linen and clothes. An old-fashioned eight-day clock, in a good case, usually flanks the four-poster. In the best ordered pit dwellings I have often seen also good chairs, china, bright brass candlesticks, and chimney ornaments; every one of these items being kept scrupulously clean, for cleanliness is the pride of the pitman’s wife. Herself probably the daughter of a pitman, she cherishes all the old associations of a similar home, and what constituted her mother’s pride stimulates hers: things must indeed be in a bad state when the four-poster, the eight-day clock, the little ornaments of the chimney-piece, and the chest of drawers are poor or neglected.8
The houses of the more respectable factory workers of Lancashire were also quite comfortable. A writer in the Fortnightly Review compared their dwellings very favourably with those of operatives in London who were obliged to inhabit ‘a portion of a tenement, often in the attic’ where ‘privacy is unknown’:
The dwellings of the [better-off Lancashire] operatives are mostly long rows of two-storied buildings, with a couple of rooms on each floor, the rental of which varies according to size and situation, from 2s 6d to 4s 6d a week, the landlord generally paying the rates. The furniture of the living room may consist of a dresser, an eight-day clock, kitchen sofa, and a couple of rocking-chairs on either side of the fire-place. The walls are usually adorned with two or three framed engravings or coloured lithographs. The better-paid workmen improve upon this a little. Their front apartment on the ground-floor is dubbed a parlour, and its furniture includes a small book-case if the man be studious, or if, as is not infrequent, he has a taste for music, a piano.9
Nor were the conditions in which all operatives had to work as unpleasant as some of the more partisan writers would have liked their readers to suppose. Fry’s chocolate and cocoa works at Bristol, for example, was described in a government report of 1866 as so well run that it was ‘a pleasure to visit the place’. There was a schoolroom and a chapel into which every morning at a quarter to nine, after work had been going on for some time, the employees proceeded looking ‘bright and fresh’, the men and boys in canvas jackets, the girls in neat aprons. They sat down in ‘an orderly way’ ‘the little girls in front, then the elder and women, then the boys and, at the back, the men, each taking down the Bibles from the shelves as they entered’.10
The firm of Thomas Adams and Company, lace warehousemen of Nottingham, was another example of one that paid close attention to the welfare of its employees. The building was light and airy, and a large room was set aside as a canteen where hot meals were provided for all who did not go home for dinner. As well as a chapel and a schoolroom equipped with books and maps, there were washrooms, a savings bank, a book club and a sick club; which secured medical attention for those who fell ill while in the firm’s employ. Similar favourable reports were given of a match factory in London, ‘a very nicely conducted place’, according to a report of 1863; there was ‘nothing unpleasant or objectionable here’.11
Such reports were offset, however, by the great number of condemnations of dark, ill-ventilated, rowdy and wretched factories from whose grim discipline many workers recoiled in horror. Among these were handloom weavers, obsolescent artisans of whom there were still 800,000 in the 1840s, more than in any other single occupational group, except that of farm labourers. Whole families of handloom weavers earned no more than 8s a week between them; yet, even so, framework knitters commonly had less, for though they might earn 10s a week, they had as much as a third of this deducted for candles, needles and the rents of the frames they used in their own cottages or in the small workshops of a master stockinger.12
Although so ill-rewarded for their labour that many of them had to exist on a diet composed largely of porridge and potatoes, these outworkers clung tenaciously to their occupation since the alternative was constant hunger or the loss of independence. The outworker could at least work at his own speed and in his own way, and have a drink when he wanted one, free from the strict regime and monotony of the factory.
There were, it had to be admitted, certain advantages in working in places such as that huge mill built on the banks of the Aire by the Bradford manufacturer, Sir Titus Salt. For close to his mill, Sir Titus, the son of a cloth merchant turned farmer, provided over 800 good, small houses for his men and their families as well as a school, a chapel, a park, an infirmary, baths and a dining-hall. But, in return for these benefits, all employees at Saltaire had to submit themselves to a firm discipline: they were not allowed to touch any alcohol, even beer; and notices to this effect were displayed about the works. The men employed by William Fairbarn, owner of a Lancashire engineering works, were also well provided for; but they, too,
were forbidden to drink alcohol, were instantly dismissed if they did so, and were sternly admonished if they appeared ill-dressed in the streets on a Sunday.
The unvarying dreariness of life in most mid-nineteenth-century factories was described by William Dodd in his Factory System Illustrated. He cited the example of a pathetic ‘specimen of a great proportion of the factory girls in Manchester’. Every morning she hurried from her room, having been woken by the watchman’s tap on the bedroom window, her meagre breakfast tied up in a handkerchief.
The bell rings as she leaves the threshold of her home. Five minutes more and she is in the factory … The clock strikes half past five; the engine starts and her day’s work commences. At half past seven the engine slacks its pace for a short time till the hands have cleaned the machinery and swallowed a little food. It then goes on again, and sometimes at full speed till twelve o’clock when it stops for dinner.13
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