Free A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain by Michael Paterson

and this usually meant about the age of five or six. There werealways coppers to be made by running errands, or by holding horses while their owners went about some piece of business. In financially desperate families, tailoring work might be undertaken at home by the parents, and children, from the moment they could first hold a needle, would be set to work helping make up garments. More specialized jobs – selling matches or watercress, blacking shoes or sweeping a crossing – required not only equipment but access to a ‘pitch’, and there might be stiff competition for this. Crossing-sweepers, once they had a particular place of work, guarded it jealously and might remain there for the rest of their lives. Victorian memoirs often refer to men or women who have stood at the same kerbside for decades (there was, for instance, a black man who swept the crossing at the bottom of Ludgate Hill), becoming part of the urban landscape.
    By the age of thirteen, boys and girls would be launched in the adult world of work. If they were fortunate they might be apprenticed at that age to some trade. Their parents, or any other well-disposed relative or adult, would pay for them to spend a period of five years or so in learning a profession, after which they would be qualified to practise it. Apothecaries, butchers, carpenters and a host of others were organized in this way, as they had been since the Middle Ages. To become an apprentice was the first step on the road towards respectability and financial security, and it did not always require private means to make this move, for parish authorities often paid for pauper boys to be apprenticed as tailors or shoemakers. For girls there was effectively only one apprenticeship – that of milliner. This involved little more than learning the basic skills of sewing, and then working at making dresses or bonnets for as long as one’s health and eyesight lasted. It was both dull and tiring work, and it was not constant – demand for clothes fluctuated according to thetime of year and changes of circumstance (a death in the Royal Family would mean the adoption of mourning black by Society). Whether in London or elsewhere, the demand for new dresses was dictated by the social season, which meant frantic periods of overwork to get costumes ready in time. The conscience of the Victorian middle and upper classes was often pricked by
Punch
and other periodicals that published drawings of exhausted milliners collapsed over their sewing as they worked through the night.
The Road to Ruin
    For women there were many possibilities for earning a living in small and insecure ways. They could sell things – flowers, foodstuffs or other commodities – in the streets. They could ‘take in washing’ or look after other people’s children (‘baby-farming’). Many thousands of them pursued an older profession, and this had the ‘advantage’ that it could be a part-time activity. Milliners and servant girls often supplemented their incomes in this way.
    However deplorable this may be from a moral point of view, it is worth remembering that such an activity gave them a certain independence. Female servants, especially if they were young and pretty, had often been ‘ruined’ by male counterparts or by employers, and thus fallen off the ladder to respectability. With nothing left to lose – and possibly having been dismissed from their position – they worked on the streets, but by doing so they were able to earn much more than they could in their former occupation, and they could also choose their hours and dress as they liked (respectable ladies sometimes met their former maids in the street, and were scandalized by their expensive and fashionable dress, for it would have been obvious at a glance how it had been obtained).If they were successful they would consort, on more or less equal terms, with men of their employers’ class. The most fortunate of them might well be set up as ‘kept