London Labour and the London Poor, Vol. 2

by Henry Mayhew

(b.) Those who derive their subsistence from other sources, and who, consequently, do not live by their labour.

(c.) Those who are in receipt of certain “aids to their wages,” or who have other means of living beside their work.

Of course these causes can alone have influence where the wages are minimized or reduced to the lowest ebb of subsistence, in which case they become so many means of driving down the price of labour still lower.

a. Those who, being what is designated hard-reared that is to say, accustomed to a scantier or coarser diet, and who, therefore, “can do” with a less quantity or less expensive quality of food than the average run of labourers, can of course live at a lower cost, and so afford to work at a lower rate. Among such (unskilled) labourers are the peasants from many of the counties, who seek to amend their condition by obtaining employment in the towns. I will instance the agricultural labourers of Dorsetshire.

“Bread and potatoes,” writes Mr. Thornton, in his work on Over-Population and its Remedy, p. 21, “do really form the staple of their food. As for meat, most of them would not know its taste, if, once or twice in the course of their lives,—on the squire’s having a son and heir born to him, or on the young gentleman’s coming of age,—they were not regaled with a dinner of what the newspapers call ‘old English fare.’ Some of them contrive to have a little bacon, in the proportion, it seems, of half a pound a week to a dozen persons, but they more commonly use fat to give the potatoes a relish; and, as one of them said to Mr. Austin (a commissioner), ‘they don’t always go without cheese.’”

With many poor Irishmen the rearing has been still harder. I had some conversation with an Irish rubbish-carter, who had been thrown out of work (and was entitled to no allowance from any trade society) in consequence of a strike by Mr. Myers’s men. On my asking him how he subsisted in Ireland, “Will, thin, sir,” he said, “and it’s God’s truth, I once lived for days on green things I picked up by the road side, and the turnips, and that sort of mate I stole from the fields. It was called staling, but it was the hunger, ’deed was it. That was in the county Limerick, sir, in the famine and ’viction times; and, glory be to God, I ’scaped when others didn’t.”

I may observe that the chief local paper, the Limerick and Clare Examiner, published twice a week, gave, twice a week, at the period of “the famine and evictions,” statements similar to that of my informant.

Now, would not a poor man, reared as the Limerick peasant I have spoken of, who was actually driven to eat the grass, which biblical history shows was once a signal punishment to a great offender—would not such a man work for the veriest dole, rather than again be subjected to the pangs of hunger? In my inquiries among the costermongers, one of them said of the Irish in his trade, and without any bitterness, “they’ll work for nothing, and live on less.” The meaning is obvious enough, although the assertion is, of course, a contradiction in itself.

“This department of labour,” says Mr. Baines, in his History of the Hand-Loom Weavers, is “greatly overstocked, and the price necessarily falls. The evil is aggravated by the multitudes of Irish who have flocked into Lancashire, some of whom, having been linen weavers, naturally resort to the loom, and others learn to weave as the easiest employment they can adopt. Accustomed to a wretched mode of living in their own country, they are contented with wages that would starve an English labourer. They have, in fact, so lowered the rate of wages as to drive many of the English out of the employment, and to drag down those who remain in it to their own level.”

b. Those who derive their subsistence from other sources can, of course, afford to work cheaper than those who have to live by their labour. To this class belongs the labour of wives and children, who, being supposed to be maintained by the toil of the husband, are never paid “living wages” for what they do; and hence the misery of the great mass of needlewomen, widows, unmarried and friendless females, and the like, who, having none to assist them, are forced to starve upon the pittance they receive for their work. The labour of those who are in prisons, workhouses, and asylums, and who consequently have their subsistence found them in such places, as well as the work of prostitutes, who obtain their living by other means than work, all come under the category of those who can afford to labour at a lower rate than such as are condemned to toil for an honest living. It is the same with apprentices and “improvers,” for whose labour the instruction received is generally considered to be either a sufficient or partial recompense, and who consequently look to other means for their support. Under the same head, too, may be cited the labour of amateurs, that is to say, of persons who either are not, or who are too proud to acknowledge themselves, regular members of the trade at which they work. Such is the case with very many of the daughters of tradesmen, and of many who are considered genteel people. These young women, residing with their parents, and often in comfortable homes, at no cost to themselves, will, and do, undersell the regular needlewomen; the one works merely for pocket-money (often to possess herself of some article of finery), while the other works for what is called “the bare life.”