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…

Visit Katherine's website
or her blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles 

Once upon a time in a tower, Part One – Michelle Lovric

Once upon a time, my architect husband wanted to take over a deconsecrated bell tower in Venice and turn the top floor into a studio. Venice’s skyline is punctuated by dozens of empty bell-towers, now slowly crumbling into the lagoon. Inhabiting a building is the best way to keep it alive, and we were prepared to invest in the restoration of a tower even though we knew that we would never actually own one. But Byzantine negotiations with the church finally deprived our idea of the will to live. So Project Venice Bell-Tower was consigned to the imagination. I expiated my frustration in the usual writerly way – I wrote a novel about it. Talina in the Tower is the story of a girl, a cat, three dogs and an elderly writer who inhabit an imaginary bell-tower on the northernmost edge of Venice. I enjoyed myself immensely, fantasizing about the layout of each single room on each successive floor, furnishing it with every comfort and accoutrement I’d once desired for my own tower.

At the end of Talina in the Tower, I wrote an historical note about towers and their uses in Venice, enviously noting that some people had succeeded where we had failed: These days, parts of some bell towers are being used as dwellings. San Marcuola’s tower is partly residential now, as is the tower of Santa Margherita (which lost its spire in 1810) and those of San Boldu and San Stae. San Vidal’s lower floors are used as offices. The top floors of the abandoned towers would, of course, make wonderful studios for architects . . . or writers.

Truth is relentlessly stranger than fiction, of course. Before Talina in the Tower is even published, I’ve discovered that another mind at work on the same idea of making a creative studio in at the top of a disused bell-tower. But Alex Scott-Whitby had done more than imagine it. He is actually doing it.

I first met Alex Scott-Whitby in Venice eighteen months ago, when he was part of a team of young architects invigilating at the British Pavilion at the architecture Biennale. (Rather flatteringly, it happened that Alex and his colleagues whiled away some of their long hours at the reception desk reading my novel The Book of Human Skin.)

Over a dinner on the Zattere, we talked about Alex’s project called (IN)Spires – an idea to create a series of creative studios for a new generation of St Jeromes nesting within the belfries of the City of London's churches. By that time, Alex had already taken possession of a tower himself – that of St Mary Woolnoth in Lombard St – and was using it as a studio, from which he was already dreaming of even greater things.

To demonstrate the spirituality as well as the materiality of his aspiration, Alex recreated Dürer’s depiction of Saint Jerome in his study. (I am not sure how he persuaded the lion to walk up the hundred steps to the tower. Perhaps there was a steak at the top, or a gazelle.)


Alex’s plan is facilitate a layer of creativity floating like cream above London’s economic engine room – a new intellectual community in these airy eyries with their strange and wonderful perspective on the city. The 51 churches in the City of London serve just 11,000 residents. Alex believes that 38 of them have St Jerome potential. There is an urgent need, too, to protect the towers from globalization and commercialization: Alex explains that ‘mobile phone company circle like vultures around a carcass,’ waiting to fill them with broadcasting antennae.


Over the next 30 years, Alex envisages, suitable applicants will be appointed both curates and curators of these towers. His own experiment has shown the worth of this human investment: ‘By acting as a curator of this place and becoming a keyholder to the church, I am also protecting it through occupation and as a tenant I provide a small income and so help to preserve and enliven this historic monument.’

And Alex looks beyond London too – foreseeing a global network of artists, designers and writers nesting in abandoned monuments.

In late October, I was delighted (though not surprised) to see that Alex’s (IN)Spires had won first prize in the RIBA Forgotten Spaces competition, which asked architects, artists, local groups and designers to nominate an abandoned place in Greater London and conceive an imaginative and inspiring proposal for its regeneration.

You can now see Alex’s and other architects’ ideas in an exhibition staged in some of Somerset House's own forgotten spaces – the lightwells and coalholes that lurk beneath the Edmond J Safra Fountain Court and in the evocative space known as the Deadhouse. The visitor makes his way in and out of these dim, mysterious niches and passageways, finding installations, images and multimedia that illustrate proposals for, amongst many other things, an urban climbing tunnel under Clapham High Street, a physic garden in Nag’s Head Yard, a Fish Ladder and salmon hatchery in the River Wandle, a Bee Farm and agro-forest in Neasden and a project to re-invent Crystal Palace as a Northern version of the scintillating market square of Djema el Fna in Marrakesh.

The Forgotten Spaces exhibition is open daily January 29th, 2012, 10am – 6pm. Admission is free. I suggest it would be an excellent place for novelists to go to refresh their sense of place, and for fantasy novelists to refresh their sense of the imaginable.

Part two of this blog is to follow – because I am lucky enough to have received an invitation to dinner in Alex’s bell-tower and I’m sure I’ll have plenty to tell you about that.


You can see more images of Alex’s airy desk here
Alex’s website
RIBA website
Somerset House website
Michelle Lovric’s website

Talina in the Tower is published February 2nd, 2012, by Orion Children’s Books

MEDIUMS - then and now Mary Hooper

“When the dead talk, the living must listen” – or so the strap line says of my new historical novel, VELVET, published 5th September. VELVET is a story about a medium – or, more precisely, about a girl who goes to work for a medium - and of course I had to do research for this which involved going to see “real” mediums on stage in small local theatres.

As the curtain opened on the first of these, the medium came forward to ask if anyone in the audience was a confirmed sceptic. I put up my hand (I was the only one) and she fixed me with a glowering eye and said, “Yes. I see.” After that, far from trying to change me to a believer, she didn’t look my way for the rest of the evening.

I was really hoping for more: the way one would quite like to see a nice ghost. I had very much hoped to be selected by the medium and receive an inspiring and uplifting message. Perhaps the spirits would know that I was planning to write a book about them and turn up to give a good performance?

Unfortunately, they did not. What happened in all three events I attended was, after passing on several messages that seemed to mean something to certain members of the audience (had they been planted there, I wondered?) the medium resorted to asking basic questions: had anyone in the audience someone in spirit called – say - Fred, or John, or Anne. Of course, most people did know someone deceased who had these not-very-unusual names, and it wasn’t difficult to fabricate stories around them. The medium would say, “I’m getting some disconnected messages here, tell me if some of them mean anything to you”, then throw in a few suggestions: Uncle Fred had had a great sense of humour/enjoyed gardening/liked to travel abroad/watched a lot of TV, and the audience member would seize on any that were relevant to him or her.

The medium would then go on to employ the type of “cold reading” used by Derren Brown, analysing the audience member’s body language, speech patterns, level of education, clothing, hairstyle, etc. and making high probability guesses – messages which were purported to have come from Uncle Fred.

Never did anyone receive a message which stunned and amazed them, a communication which could only have come from “beyond the grave”.

At the second event I attended, the medium resorted to asking the audience (rather desperately, for lots of spirits had come through but no one knew who they were) if there was someone in there tonight with a black handbag. About three quarters of the audience raised their hands, and then looked round at each other and laughed nervously. And this was the event at which the medium and her assistant were waiting in the foyer of the theatre to greet, talk with and “put the audience at their ease”. Hmmm...

Oh, and dates. Sometimes these were thrown in with random messages, the medium saying they were birth/anniversary/marriage or death dates. If no one claimed them as a date they recognised, the medium said they would “make sense later” when we got home and realised this was the date on which Auntie Rose/Grandma died. Or was born. Or....yes, you get the picture. I think that, given half a dozen different dates, most people would be able to make one of them mean something.

My book is set in 1900, and perhaps one of the most interesting things I discovered when researching it was that every single “big name” Victorian/Edwardian medium was accused of fraud, and only one of these was not convicted of any wrongdoing. I am not saying that speaking to spirits is impossible – just that I never found any clear evidence of it, now or way back then. I will let you know if I do.