Dickens's England by R. E. Pritchard Read Free Book Online Page A

the lot of the worker among such grim surroundings as these. But there is many a man employed in the works to whom these surroundings are even congenial, to whom the world coloured in black and flame-colour is a world he knows and understands, and that he misses when he is away from it.
    Lady Florence Bell, At the Works. A Study of a Manufacturing Town (1907)
    THE MILL-OWNER’S HOUSE
    Those who are admitted to a nearer view of the house (and, for the convenience of the public, every Wednesday is set apart for its being shown), will find still more to admire, than such as see it only from a distance. It has its park and its pinery; conservatories, which cause the mercury in the thermometer, when paraded through them, to run up to the cocoa-ripening heat of the tropics, and ice-houses that would bring it down again to the temperature of Bering’s Straits. It has three drawing-rooms, two dining-rooms, a great library all full of new books; as many bedrooms, dressing-rooms and boudoirs as a great man’s house ought to have, and a study besides – Sir Matthew Dowling’s own private study. This delightful little apartment is small, not more than twelve feet square; but nothing can be more agreeable and convenient. It opens by one door from the great hall of entrance, and by another communicates through a long stone passage with the offices of the mansion; enabling the knight to receive, without interruption, not only his overlookers (Sir Matthew being the proprietor of many cotton-mills) but his coachman, gardener, bailiff and whomever else he might wish to transact business with.
    Of the fitting up of this princely mansion, it is only necessary to say, that it is done in a spirit of emulative imitation, which renders it fully equal, in this respect, to the most finished private dwellings in Europe. The furniture is uniformly rich throughout: the picture-frames in the best style of art; Saxony carpets in the drawing-rooms, Turkey ditto in the dining-rooms, Brussels in the bedrooms, and indeed not a single inch of Kidderminster anywhere, except in the garrets. . . .
    There was hardly an individual within ten miles who was not aware that Lady Dowling kept two carriages, six horses, one coachman, one postillion, five gardeners, two grooms, three footmen, one butler and a page – not to mention two nurses, four nursery-maids, and more ladies’-maids, housemaids, cookmaids, kitchen-maids, laundry-maids, still-room maids, dairy-maids and the like, than any other lady in the county. Neither could any be ignorant that, except in the article of jewels, her wardrobe might vie with that of any duchess in the land, and all might see, moreover, that she was comely still, both in form and feature. She conversed with great ability on all subjects connected with fashionable life; and though some few carping critics thought that she was too apt to diversify the monotony of the English language by indulging in some remarkable variations from its ordinary laws, nobody, or scarcely anybody, attempted to deny that she was on the whole a very charming woman.
    Frances Trollope, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840)
    AN UNEMPLOYED WEAVER’S HOME
    Wilson said Davenport was a good fellow, though too much of the Methodee; that his children were too young to work, but not too young to be cold and hungry; that they had sunk lower and lower, and pawned thing after thing, and that now they lived in a cellar in Berry Street . . . [The street] was unpaved; and down the middle a gutter forced its way, every now and then forming pools in the holes with which the street abounded. Never was the old Edinburgh cry of ‘Gardez l’eau’ more necessary than in this street. As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which overflowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were the stepping-stones, on which the passer-by who