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

women’, and for a few years have their own household. As a result many of them found ‘ruination’ a positive, even desirable state, and moral campaigners lamented that many young women actually looked forward to it. Ironically – at least for the few short years before disease, imprisonment or the loss of beauty ended their careers – it made them freer and more self-respecting than they had been as part of the official world of work. The temptations of this way of life were described by Superintendent James Dunlap of the Metropolitan Police. In his evidence to the Select Committee on the Protection of Young Girls in 1881, he related how servants ‘get small wages; they come out on errands; they see these girls walking about the streets, their equal in social standing; they see them dressed in silks and satins; they say: “You can go and dress in silks and satins, while I am slaving”; they talk to the girls, and they are influenced.’
    Factory work claimed large numbers of young women, especially in the North and Midlands. This too was repetitive and exhausting, frequently involving long hours standing at machinery. It might also be highly dangerous, not only because unprotected machinery could be lethal, but because the constant breathing of fumes could kill by degrees those who worked in confined or unventilated spaces. Reports into working conditions refer incessantly to this:
    The duties of the powder-packer consist of filling casks with bleaching powder. To do that he has to enter the chamber, which for several days has been filled with chlorine gas. The heat is sometimes tremendous, especially as the poor wretch who has to endure it is swathed about the head in a way thatwould protect him from arctic cold. With the muzzle on, the effort of breathing appears to be most painful even in the open air. The chest heaves like that of a man struggling for breath in the violent stages of lung disease. The appearance of the face gives you an impression that he is being suffocated; the eyes seem distended as they stare through the goggles.
    Even with dry-cleaning, or ‘French cleaning’ as it was called, there was danger of:
    Giddiness, nausea, vomiting, and headaches, sometimes of tasting the spirit, and usually loss of appetite, intoxication with hysterical symptoms, sleepiness and, in the more severe cases, of loss of consciousness. 3
    The girls and young women who worked at Bryant and May’s match factory in London’s East End were the subject of public interest when they went on strike in 1888 under the leadership of the socialist Annie Besant. She reported that:
    One girl was fined 1 shilling for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, ‘never mind your fingers’. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless. 4
    While these conditions – created by unregulated industrialization – are shocking to us, we must remember that they were also shocking to contemporaries. The mere fact that they were recorded indicated that there was concern and that something was being done about them. To the Victorians’ credit there were constant enquiries, reports – and Factory Acts. Theimprovement of conditions was gradual, piecemeal and unfinished by the end of the reign, but it was nevertheless being pursued. It must also be remembered that nineteenth-century workers did not simply exist in pathetic misery. There were trade unions – the movement had been particularly active in the early part of the century – and a host of societies had been formed by these men and women, supported by modest regular subscriptions to pay the costs of sickness and other distress.
    We would also be mistaken in imagining young factory workers merely as sunk in exploitation and misery. A contemporary description shows them to have had, in spite of the awful hardship of