Victorian Working Women - by Katherine Langrish

For my own nefarious purposes I make occasional visits to the Guildhall Library, London, poring through the long history and development of places like Wapping and Poplar. And I want to share with you today a delighted discovery I made regarding the facsimiles of old Ordnance Survey maps of London which the Guildhall Library – and as far as I can find out, ONLY the Guildhall Library – sells for a modest price in its delightful bookshop.

Here, for example, £2.50 will buy you the 1894 map of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs, on the massive scale of about 15 inches to the mile, with every dwelling house detailed, plus trees, railways, jetties, wharfs, the positions of stoneworks, shipbuilding yards, manure works, the South Metropolitan Gas Works, soap works, and the General Steam Navigation Company.  Here's a portion of it:

But that’s not all. Turn the map over, and you’ll find not only an essay on the history of the area covered by the map, but – oh frabjous day! – lengthy facsimile extracts from relevant Post Office directories, listing the very names and occupations of all the people on the various streets. And these are utterly fascinating. Look!

West Ferry Road, Millwall (Bridge road to East Ferry road, Manchester Road, and Wharf Rd.)

…here is Ingelheim Place…

PILLAR LETTER BOX
335 Isaac Clarke, grocer
337 & 339 Mrs Elizabeth Phoebe Lewthwaite, pawnbroker
361 Frederick Burt, fried fish shop
363 Mrs Mary Ann Miller, chandler’s shop
365 Mrs Ann Badsey, greengrocer
Chubb, Round & co. fibre works (Elizabeth Place)
367 Glengall Arms, Henry Short
369 Mrs Eleanor Leech, coffee rooms
371 Charles Bolton, greengrocer
373 Miss Annie Geach, chandler’s shop
375 Samuel Brown, chandler’s shop

… here is Cahir Street…

377 Mrs C. Cadman, chandler’s shop
391 William Turner, bootmaker
393 Arthur Phillips, coffee rooms
395 Great Eastern, James Bates

…here is British Street…

397 Mrs Mary Bailey, butcher
403 Charles Newman, coffee rooms
409 Edward Allington, dining rooms

…here is Lead Street…

John George Hames, omnibus proprietor (5 Silver Terrace)
METROPOLITAN FIRE BRIGADE STATION


Now what strikes me about this (apart from the magical bird’s eye view of the street, rather as if the roofs had been lifted off the houses so we could see inside), is that out of those 18 commercial addresses, no less than seven belong to women running their own businesses – which is getting on for 40%. And what a range of occupations they are in engaged in, too! A pawnbroker, three chandlers’ shops, a greengrocer, a coffee room proprietor, and a butcher! On other streets we find women furriers, bootmakers, confectioners, laundresses and drapers; women running refreshment rooms, fruit shops, tobacconists, newsagents, restaurants and libraries.

Let me repeat: actually in charge of their own establishments.

And lest you think this unusual, or perhaps limited to riverside areas, let’s look at 19 addresses on the west side of Drury Lane, where the 1892 directory gives us Mrs Julia Kelf, tobacconist, Mrs Ellen Marshall, confectioner, Mrs Maria Marion Snellgrove, landlady of the Marquis of Granby, Mrs Josephine Winnig, clear starcher, and Mrs Jane Beech, cheesemonger – while in the 1859 Post Office directory for the area around Tower Hill, there is at Number 15, Little Tower Hill, a Mrs Cathryn Dutfield, ‘licensed carman’, and her husband Henry Dutfield, merely ‘carman’ – which looks very much as though it was Cathryn, not Henry, who held the licence from the Worshipful Company of Carmen for her husband’s work as carter and carrier within the City of London. I will finish, from the same directory, with Mrs Phoebe Dwelley of 10, Well Street, Wellclose Square, who is listed as ‘wheelwright’.

An amused stare from a papermill worker, Dartford, 1863

If nothing else, this tells me that our popular picture of Victorian womanhood is very much skewed, on the one hand to the upper middle classes and on the other hand to the very poor. Perhaps there was little or nothing for a gentleman’s daughter to do, other than marry or teach – and certainly there were many starving seamstresses, flower sellers and full or part-time prostitutes: but it looks as though plenty of their lower middle class/upper working class sisters managed to be both busy, competent and comfortable in a wide variety of trades, thank you very much indeed…

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