I did quite a bit of research into both women’s employment conditions and Regency charitable organizations while writing this novel, and I’m sorry to report that the deplorable practices I described were indeed common to the era. It was the prevailing opinion that women should not work, and a common assumption was that while male “breadwinners” sought wages so they could support their families, women, by contrast, wanted wages in order to purchase bonnets and other fripperies. This poem written by Arthur Smith during a labor dispute involving the Carpet Weaving and Trade Union dates from the 1890s, but the prevailing attitude was the same:
Mary had a little loom and unto it did go.
And every Saturday afternoon you should have seen the show.
With veil, kid gloves and gaiters too, she goes out on the mash.
She fairly knocks the men out now because she gets the cash.
It was common practice to bar women from holding the better-paying jobs, and the male unions struck over and over again to prevent women from being hired into them. This was both to preserve those jobs for men and also because they knew that as soon as something became “women’s work,” their own wages would be slashed. In the rare instances when women were allowed to hold the same jobs as men, it was common practice to pay them a lower wage solely on the basis that they were women (similar to the example I cited in the book about painters who decorated Wedgwood china,) and the rationale that women deserved lower pay simply because they were women was openly discussed in a way that honestly startled me as a modern reader.
These days, I sometimes see an article suggesting that our modern-day wage gap is because women choose to go into lower-paid professions and wondering why more women don’t become welders instead of daycare workers. I would turn that around and ask why it is that welders are paid so much better than daycare workers and suggest that this might be a chicken-and-egg problem that dates back hundreds of years. Daycare workers are poorly paid today because they have always been poorly paid, and if you go back two hundred years, everyone openly acknowledged that the reason they were poorly paid was because they were women. I am far from the first person to muse upon this topic—in 1915, social scientist B.L. Hutchins wrote, “There is no reason, save custom and lack of organization, why a nursery-maid should be paid less than a coal miner. He is not one whit more capable of taking her place than she is of taking his.”
Still, there were examples of people pushing back against the prevailing attitudes, and I would like to share one of my favorites with you. At a Parliamentary Commission Hearing into the Working of the Factory and Workshops Act in 1876, a Miss Sloane from Birmingham went on the record stating, “If a woman is cleverer than a man and she can go out and earn as much as her husband, I do not see why she should be prevented from earning what she can to bring up her children in a better way… I can do it and do it, and would very much rather do it than stay at home and scrub.” This is one of those quotes that just leaps out of the historical record. It’s a great reminder that, just like today, there is no one thing that everyone believes, that people have always held a range of attitudes, and that at all points in history there were those who rejected the prevailing way of thinking.
By the late Regency to early Victorian period, the idea of model lodging houses, an early form of affordable public housing, was beginning to appear. Thomas Beames discusses them in his 1850 book The Rookeries of London, by which point they were popular enough that many parishes ran their own, as well as some individuals including the Earl of Ellesmere and Lord Kinnard. These were my inspiration for The Ladies’ Society’s lodging house, and Beames’s book was the source of many of my facts regarding the particular challenges faced by the poor in this era.
I would also like to give credit to George Smart, inventor of a “Chimney Cleansing Machine” very similar to the one I described as having been invented by Archibald Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy. Smart won a prize contest in 1803 seeking to find a machine that could take the place of climbing boys. Much like Mr. Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy, Smart thought up his invention one evening, stayed up all night building it, and tested it on every chimney in his house before his servants woke up (much to their delight, I’m sure!). The story was so good, I couldn’t resist including a version of it, and hope that Mr. Smart’s descendants will not mind my attributing their forebear’s invention to Archibald Nettlethorpe-Ogilvy. Unfortunately, Smart’s machine never caught on, as it remained cheaper to use climbing boys. It wasn’t until 1840 that a law was passed forbidding those under the age of 21 from climbing and cleaning flues, and not until 1875 that the law was given enough teeth that the use of climbing boys finally ended.
Finally, if anyone was surprised to see a Black gentleman barrister featured as a character in a book set in England in 1802, allow me to reassure you that this is well supported by the historical record. Please visit my website if you would like to learn about Nathaniel Wells, Julius Soubise, George Bridgetower, Robert Morse, William Ansah Sessarakoo, and other Black Britons who were members of the most refined circles during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Anyone who is interested can also find a list of some of the research references I consulted in writing this book.