Chambers's journal of popular literature, science, and art, fifth series, no. 119, vol. III, April 4, 1886

No. 119.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 1886.
‘A pair of gloves, if you please.’—‘Yes, sir. Kid gloves?’ The customer indicates the kind of gloves he requires; and down comes a long shallow box, divided into several compartments, in each of which there lies a neat bundle of gloves of various colours and shades, held together by a band of paper. ‘What size, sir?’ The size is mentioned; and one of the bundles is lifted out of its compartment and quickly and carefully opened at one end. Gloves of the exact size and shade required are selected, the price is paid, and there, for the most part, the transaction ends. How many of the thousands who every day go through this process have any idea of where and how the soft, delicate, tight-fitting gloves they wear are made?
Enormous numbers—said to exceed two-thirds of the entire consumption—are imported from France, Germany, and Sweden. But there is a large home manufacture, which is carried on to a considerable extent in and about Worcester, but principally in the west of England.
If the reader will glance at a railway map, and let his eye follow the main line of the London and South-Western Railway, he will find, about midway between Salisbury and Exeter, a station marked Yeovil Junction. Should he actually travel down the line and change at this junction, he would speedily find himself landed at the ancient market-town of Yeovil, the centre and capital of the glove-trade, or as it is locally described, ‘the gloving’—a town of about eight thousand inhabitants. A visitor from the North or the Midlands would probably be surprised, on entering the gloving metropolis, to find nothing of the noise or dirt which is usually associated with manufacturing industry. No tall chimneys belch out black clouds of smoke; no gaunt factories rear themselves aloft above the houses; no ponderous machinery makes its throb felt even by passers-by in the streets. No obtrusive signs of the trade which is being carried on meet the eye anywhere. The place is clean and bright and quiet; and surrounded by green hills and luxuriant valleys dotted over with magnificent timber. Yet it looks—what, indeed, inquiry proves it to be—a prosperous and thriving town, presenting a marked and agreeable contrast to most of the sleepy old towns whose glory has long since departed, in this beautiful west country that Kingsley loved so well. In this respect the capital is a fair sample of all the gloving centres—a general air of prosperity pervades them all.