East London

by Walter Besant

It is, in fact, altogether an industrial population. If, again, we take Mr. Charles Booth’s figures in greater detail there are seventy-three thousand who depend upon casual employment; there are the railway servants, the police, the road service, the sailors, and the officials. There are, next, those employed in the main divisions of trade—dress, furniture, building, and machinery—and there are the significant items of “sundry artisans,” “home industries,” “small trades,” and “other wage-earners,” amounting in all to the support of about eighty-five thousand persons. It is among these “sundries” that we are to look for the astonishing variety of industries, the strange trades that our complex life has called into existence, and the minute subdivisions of every trade into branches—say, sprigs and twigs—in which one man may spend his whole life. We are now very far from the days when a shoemaker sat down with the leather and his awl and worked away until he had completed the whole shoe, perfect in all its parts, a shoe of which he was proud as every honest workman should be, with no scamping of work, no brown paper instead of leather for the heel. The modern system leaves no room for pride in work at all; every man is part of a machine; the shoe grows without the worker’s knowledge; when it emerges, not singly but by fifties and hundreds, there is no one who can point to it and say, “Lo! I made it. I—with my right hand. It is the outcome of my skill.” The curse of labor, surely, has never been fully realized until the solace of labor, the completion of good work, was taken away from the craftsman. Look at the list, an imperfect one, of the subdivisions now prevailing in two or three trades. Formerly, when a man set himself to make a garment of any kind he did the whole of it himself, and was responsible for it and received credit for it, and earned wages according to his skill. There is now a contractor; he turns out the same thing by the score in half the time formerly required for one; he divides the work, you see; he employs his “baster, presser, machinist, buttonholer, feller, fixer, general hand,” all working at the same time to produce the cheap clothing for which there is so great a demand. In bootmaking the subdivision is even more bewildering. There are here the manufacturers, factors, dealers, warehouse men, packers, translators, makers of lasts, boot-trees, laces, tips and pegs—all these before we come to the bootmaker proper, who appears in various departments as the clicker, the closer, the fitter, the machinist, the buttonholer, the table hand, the sole maker, the finisher, the eyeletter, the rough-stuff cutter, the laster, the cleaner, the trimmer, the room girl, and the general utility hand. Again, in the furniture and woodwork trade there are turners, sawyers, carvers, frame makers, cabinet-makers, chair makers, polishers, upholsterers, couch makers, office, bedroom, library, school, drawing-room, furniture makers; upholsterers, improvers, fancy-box makers, gilders, gluers, and women employed in whichever of these branches their work can be made profitable.

If we turn to women’s work as distinct from men’s, we find even in small things this subdivision. For instance, a necktie seems a simple matter; surely one woman might be intrusted with the making of a single tie. Yet the work is divided into four. There is the woman who makes the fronts, she who makes the bands, she who makes the knots, and she who makes the “fittings.” And in the match-making business, which employs many hundreds of women and girls, there are the splint makers, the dippers, the machinists, the wax-vesta makers, the coil fillers, the cutters down, the tape cutters, the box fillers, the packers, and so on.

It is not my intention in this book to enter into detail concerning the work and wages of East London. To do so, indeed, with any approach to truth would involve the copying of Mr. Charles Booth’s book, since no independent single investigator could hope to arrive at the mass of evidence and the means of estimating and classifying that evidence with anything like the accuracy and the extent of information embodied in those volumes. I desire, however, to insist very strongly upon the fact that the keynote of East London is its industrial character; that it is a city of the working-classes; and that one with another, all except a very small percentage, are earners of the weekly and the daily wage. I would also point out that not only are the crafts multiplied by the subdivisions of contractors, but that every new invention, every new fashion, every new custom, starts a new trade and demands a new set of working folks; that every new industrial enterprise also calls for its new workmen and its skilled hands—how many thousands during the last twenty years have been maintained by the bicycle? As for wages, they speedily right themselves as the employer discovers the cost of production, the possible margin of profit, and the level of supply and demand, tempered by the necessity of keeping the work-people contented and in health.

Another point to observe is the continual demand for skilled labor in new directions. A walk round the Isle of Dogs, whose shores are lined with factories producing things new and old, but especially new, enables one to understand the demand, but not to understand the supply. Early in this century the general application of gas for lighting purposes called for an army of gas engineers, stokers, and fitters and makers of the plant required. The development of steam has created another army of skilled labor; the new appliances of electricity have called into existence a third army of working-men whose new craft demands far more skill than any of the older trades. Consider, again, the chemical developments and discoveries; consider the machinery that is required for almost every kind of industry; the wonderful and lifelike engine of a cotton mill, which deals as delicately as a woman’s fingers with the most dainty and fragile fiber, yet exercises power which is felt in every department of the huge mill; consider the simple lathe driven by steam; consider the new materials used for the new industries; consider the machinery wanted to create other machinery; and consider, further, that these developments have all appeared during the nineteenth century, that East London is the place where most of them, in our country, were first put into practice. If, I say, we consider all these things we shall understand something of the present population of East London.

Again referring to Mr. Charles Booth’s book, there you may learn for yourself what is paid to men, women, and children for every kind of work; there you may learn the hours employed and all the conditions—sanitary, insanitary, dangerous, poisonous—of all the industries. It must be enough here to note that there are, as might be expected, great variations in the wages of the work-people. High skill, whatever may be the effect, in certain quarters, of sweating, still commands high wages; those trades which make the smallest demand for skill and training are, as might be expected, poorly paid. For instance, there is no work which calls for more skill than that of the electrical or mechanical engineer, or the engineer of steam or of gas. Therefore we observe without astonishment that such a man may receive £3 or £4 a week, while the wage of the ordinary craftsman ranges, according to the skill required, from 18s. to 35s. a week. In the work of women it is well to remember that the lower kinds of work are worth from 7s. to 12s. in ordinary seasons, and that there are some kinds of work in which a woman may make from 15s. to 25s. a week. In thinking of East London remember that the whole of the people (with certain exceptions) have to live on wages such as these, while the clerks, who belong to a higher social level and have higher standards of comfort, are not in reality much better off with their salaries ranging from £80 a year to £150.

An East End Factory.

It might be expected that in speaking of trade and industry we should also speak of the sweating, which is so largely carried on in this city of industry. There is, however, nothing on which so much half-informed invective has been written—and wasted—as on the subject of sweating. For my own part, I have nothing to say except what has been already said by Mr. Charles Booth, who has investigated the subject and for the first time has explained exactly what sweating means. The sweater is either the small master or the middleman; the employer practically resigns the responsibility of his workmen and makes a contract with a middleman, who relieves him of trouble and makes his profit out of the workmen’s pay. Or the employer finds a middleman who distributes the work and collects it, does part of it himself, and sweats others, being himself sweated. Or sometimes it is a “chamber master” who employs “greeners”—new hands—for long hours on wages which admit of bare subsistence—sweating, in fact, is the outcome in all its shapes of remorseless competition. Many experiments have been tried to conduct business on terms which will not allow the sweater’s interference. These experiments have always ended in failure, often because the work-people themselves cannot believe in the success of any system except that with which they are familiar. Some twelve or fifteen years ago my friend Mrs. H—— started a workshop at St. George’s-in-the-East on coöperative principles. She made shirts and other things of the kind. At first she seemed to be getting on very well; she employed about a dozen workwomen, including a forewoman in whom she placed implicit confidence. Her successful start, she said, was due entirely to the enthusiasm, the zeal, the devotion, of that forewoman. Then a dreadful blow fell, for the devoted forewoman deserted, taking with her the best of the workwomen, and started a sweating shop herself—in which, I dare say, she has done well. My friend got over the blow, and presently extended her work and enlarged her premises. The enlargement ruined her enterprise; she had to close. Her experience was to the effect that it is only by the sweated farthing that in these days of cut-throat competition shops which sell things made by hand or by the sewing-machine can pay their expenses, that the sweater is himself sweated, and that the workwoman, starving under the sweating system, mistrusts any other and is an element of danger in the very workroom which is founded for her emancipation.

She also discovered that the workgirl requires constant supervision and sharp—very sharp—admonition; she found that the system of fines adopted by many workshops saves a great deal of trouble both in supervision and in admonition; that a gentle manner is too often taken for weakness and for ignorance. And she impressed upon me the really great truth that the working girl is never employed out of sentimental kindness, but as a machine, by the right and judicious use of which an employer may make a livelihood or even perhaps a competence. In other words, when we talk about miserable wages we must remember all the circumstances and all the conditions, and, she insisted, we must set aside mere sentiment as a useless, or even a mischievous, factor. For my own part, I do not altogether agree with my friend. I believe in the power and uses of sentiment. Let us by all means ascertain all the facts of the case, but let us continue our sentiment—our sympathy—with the victim of hard conditions and cruel competition.

A remarkable characteristic of East London is the way in which the industrial population is constantly recruited from the country. I shall speak of the aliens later on. I mean, in this place, the influx from the country districts and from small country towns of lads or young men and young women who are always pouring into East London, attracted by one knows not what reports of prosperity, of high wages, and greater comforts. If they only knew—most of them—what awaits them in the labyrinthine city!