We often associate employment in
Victorian Britain with notions of drudgery, hard toil, long hours and
factory work but this wasn’t always the case! The content of the
Henry Collection allows researchers a detailed insight into the
ordinary and often extraordinary working lives of many Victorian
‘Street-Sellers’.
As a result of Dr Henry’s fascination with
Chimney Sweeping, the Ernestine Henry Collection at Leeds Museums and
Galleries contains a wealth of original publications, pamphlets and
periodicals about everyday life and employment in Victorian London.
Some even contain original
photographs of Victorian people at work! These include ‘The
Crawlers’, ‘Covent Garden Flower Women’ and ‘Public
Disinfectors’. Journals such as Old and New London, Street Life in
London and a personal favourite of mine, London Labour and London
Poor are among many that this collection holds.
Henry
Mayhew, author of London Labour and London Poor wrote a twenty-six
issue long series of this pamphlet. Each issue gives detailed
eyewitness accounts of the occupation and life of street sellers of
certain goods and services. Some of these occupations we would
recognise today such as ‘The Baked Potato Man’ and ‘The London
Coffee Stall’ but others we may not; ‘The Street-Seller of
Nut-Meg Graters’, ‘Street-Seller of Grease Removing Composition’
and ‘Doctor Bokanky, The Street Herbalist.’ Mayhew even relays
the sounds of the Street-Sellers; ‘Eight a penny, stunning pears!’,
‘Chesnuts all ‘ot, a penny a score’, ‘An ‘aypenny a skin,
blacking.’ These incredibly detailed accounts enable researchers to
build a vivid image of everyday activities in a Victorian trading
street.
Another
unique aspect of this collection is the way in which sometimes dreary
aspects of Victorian life, such as employment and more specifically
the role of the Victorian chimney sweep, were counteracted with
humour. The sheer volume of satirical literature apparent in the
collection did surprise me.
Although some authors in Victorian
Britain wrote serious accounts of Chimney Sweeps’ experiences,
sweeps were often the central punch line of jokes, witty
stories and rhymes. The Humourist's Miscellany; containing Original
and Select Articles in Poetry on Mirth, Humour, Wit, Gaiety and
Entertainment and also Fun for the Million or The Laughing
Philosopher, consisting of Several Thousand of the best Jokes,
Witticisms, Puns, Epigrams, Humorous Stories, and Witty Compositions
in the English Language, intended as Fun for the Million are just two
publications which present jokes related to the occupation of Chimney
Sweeping. Judging by the amount of humorous literature in this
collection alone it is likely that the Victorians certainly knew how
to have a laugh!
A final but equally
captivating aspect of working with the Henry Collection is the unique
ways in which the objects tell the stories of their previous owners.
As a social and gender historian I am fascinated by ordinary peoples
experiences of the past. I have catalogued a large
number of books, scrapbooks and archive documents in this collection
which leave clues as to how such objects were exchanged and came to
be in peoples’ possession.
From the unique, personal,
handwritten messages often included on the title pages of various
works it is likely that at least some of these objects were given as
gifts. The Comic Keepsake was offered to Mary Bolton, possibly as a
birthday gift in 1835; 'Mary June Bolton, presented to her by her
Mamma, Sept 12th 1835' and likewise, from a handwritten annotation
written on the inner cover page, we know that The Christmas Annual
belonged to Joe Shard in 1903.
In a period when literature and
especially bound printed works were not as easily accessible as the
present day, is touching to observe the handwritten messages in the
front of books, pamphlets and scrapbooks in the Henry Collection.
By Chloe Simm, Social History Intern
