Shopping Saturday - some more Dickens

I have always been fascinated by the history of shops and shopping, and I have quite a collection of books on the subject. There are books on department stores, corner shops, well-known shopping street, famous high-street names and reprints of old catalogues. But many of our ancestors (well, many of mine, anyway) would have made their purchases in places that are not mentioned in any of these histories; they bought things second-hand. Think about it. If you were poor, and many people were, you couldn't afford to buy much, and even the cheapest new clothes might be beyond your reach.

You won't find company histories of dealers in second-hand clothes, or other goods, and there are no famous names that have come down through the ages. These traders did not always have shop premises either; instead they might have worked in street markets, or just streets. You might find them listed in directories as 'general dealers', 'wardrobe dealers' or 'marine stores'. In a post earlier this year about the monthly nurse I quoted Dickens' description of 'the very fetch and ghost of Mrs Gamp' hanging at the second-hand clothes dealers around Holborn. In Bleak House he paints an equally vivid picture of a marine store dealer's premises.

'She had stopped at a shop, over which was written, KROOK, RAG AND BOTTLE WAREHOUSE. Also, in long thin letters, KROOK, DEALER IN MARINE STORES. In one part of the window was a picture of a red paper mill, at which a cart was unloading a quantity of sacks of old rags. In another, was the inscription, BONES BOUGHT. In another, KITCHEN-STUFF BOUGHT. In another, OLD IRON BOUGHT. In another, WASTE PAPER BOUGHT. In another, LADIES' AND GENTLEMEN'S WARDROBES BOUGHT. Everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there. In all parts of the window, were quantities of dirty bottles: blacking bottles, medicine bottles, ginger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles: I am reminded by mentioning the latter, that the shop had, in several little particulars, the air of being in a legal neighbourhood, and of being, as it were, a dirty, hanger-on a;ud disowned relation of the law. There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby old volumes, outside the door, labelled "Law Books, all at 6d."...
...There were several second-hand bags, blue and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door, lay heaps of old crackled parchment scrolls, and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers. I could have fancied that all the rusty keys, of which there must have been hundreds huddled together as old iron, had once belonged to doors of rooms or strong chests in lawyers' offices. The litter of rags tumbled partly into and partly out of a one-legged wooden scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam, might have been counsellors' bands and gowns torn up.'

 

Happy birthday Charles John Huffam Dickens

I'm not actually late with this blog post, it's still 7 February in my current time zone. There are some excellent Dickens features and links in today's issue of the Guardian, my newspaper of choice, and the occasion has also been marked with an impressive Google Doodle.

I can't match any of that, but I can offer an observation on why reading Dickens might be useful to the genealogist. There are wonderful descriptive passages in some of his books that shed light on everyday life in early Victorian England, and one of my favourite passages is in my favourite Dickens novel, Bleak House.

Signatures, or the lack of them, in parish registers and on certificates are often used as a measure of literacy. It is a fairly good way of measuring literacy rates overall, but may not be an accurate indicator in each individual case. For example, the fact that a person signed their name does not always mean that they could read and write; it could be that their signature was the only thing they could write. Or the opposite could apply, where a literate person made a mark instead of signing, as illustrated by this passage:

There were many little occurrences which suggested to me, with great consolation, how natural it is to gentle hearts to be considerate and delicate towards any inferiority. One of these particularly touched me.  I happened to stroll into the little church when a marriage was just concluded, and the young couple had to sign the register. The bridegroom, to whom the pen was handed first, made a rude cross for his mark: the bride, who came next, did the same. Now I had known the bride when I was last there, not only as the prettiest girl in the place, but as having quite distinguished herself in the school; and I could not help looking at her with some surprise. she came aside and whispered to me, while tears of honest love and admiration stood in her bright eyes "He's a dear good fellow, miss; but he can't write yet - he's going to learn of me - and I wouldn't shame him for the world!" Why, what had I to fear, I thought, when there was this nobility in the soul of a labouring man's daughter!

It may be fiction, but it has a ring of truth, and I think it is very likely that there were indeed some young women who made their mark instead of signing the marriage register. One of them might have been your ancestor...

 

Workday Wednesday - the Monthly Nurse

You may have found an ancestor whose occupation was 'monthly nurse' or found one in your ancestor's household. In the British 1881 census there are more than 3000 of them.

The best-known of the breed is a fictional character, the infamous Mrs Gamp in Charles Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit (yes, that man again).

'...Mrs Gamp being, in her highest walk of art, a monthly nurse, or as her sign-board boldly had it 'Midwife'

The monthly nurse would have been engaged by a family around the time of a woman's 'lying-in' to look after the mother and the new baby. She would have no qualifications of any kind, other than a willingness to perform what could be very messy and often unpleasant tasks. She would also be called in to lay out the dead, and, sadly, the two types of visit often coincided in Victorian Britain. Childbirth was a hazardous business, and many women died of post-partum infections generally known as 'child-bed fever'. Infant mortality was high throughout the 19th century, as you can see from the number of death entries giving the age at death as '0' from 1866 onwards when this is shown in the indexes for England and Wales. In the birth indexes from 1837 you will often see births with no forename but just 'male' or 'female'. Occasionally these are children whose parents hadn't chosen a name yet, but the great majority were poor little mites who lived for only a few hours, or even a few minutes after birth.

Mrs Gamp, however, appears in Dickens' novel when she is called in to perform the necessary offices following the death of the elderly Mr Anthony Chuzzlewit. He paints a vivid picture:

'She was a fat old woman, this Mrs Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist eye...She wore a very rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and a shawl and bonnet to correspond. In these dilapidated articles of dress she had, on principle, arrayed herself, time out of mind, on such occasions as the present; for this at once expressed a decent amount of veneration for the deceased, and invited the next of kin to present her with a new set of weeds; an appeal so frequently successful that the very fetch and ghost of Mrs Gamp, bonnet and all, might be seen hanging up, any hour in the day, in at least a dozen of the second-hand clothes shops about Holborn. the face of Mrs Gamp - the nose in particular - was very red and swoln, and it was diffcult to enjoy her society without being conscious of a smell of spirits.'

It would be unfair to suggest that all monthly nurses were like Mrs Gamp, but Dickens was not the only writer who satirized them. The illustration above comes from a two-volume publication 'Heads of the People: or Portraits of the English', a compilation of writings by a number of authors in the 1830s. The chapter on 'The Monthly Nurse' was written by Leigh Hunt, who, like Dickens, was also a journalist. His description of the monthly nurse was:

...a middle-aged, motherly sort of a gossiping, hushing, flattering, dictatorial, ignorant, knowing, not very delicate, comfortable, uneasy, slip-slop kind of a blinking individual, between asleep and awake, whose business it is - under Providence and the doctor - to see that a child be not ushered with too little officiousness into the world, nor brought up with too much good sense during the first month of its existence.

The writings of both men reflect a time when there was no kind of training for nurses, and no notion that nursing might be a profession. This was to come later in the century. Leigh Hunt was not uniformly unkind about the monthly nurse. Later on in the piece he expresses sympathy for the women whom circumstances had forced into this kind of work, and goes on to describe those higher up the social scale:

'The Monthly Nurse, as you ascend in society, is not seldom a highly respectable woman, who is nearly all that she should be - mild, firm and well-meaning.'

So if you have a monthly nurse in your ancestry, she may not have been a Mrs Gamp after all!


 

2012 - It's going to be a Dickens of a year

At the hairdresser's - Nicholas Nickleby

You can take your pick of anniversaries to celebrate in any given year, but I think my favourite for this year will be the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. I went to school in Chatham, which is very much Dickens country, and quite honestly you can get a bit over-Dickensed there; to this day I have an aversion to David Copperfield, one of his most popular books, having been dragged unwillingly through it at a tender age. It actually took twenty years after that for me to read Dickens without being forced to, but we get along just fine now, Charlie and me. I decided to give 'Great Expectations' a try, and I loved it.

You might wonder what works of fiction have to do with family history, and the answer is - quite a lot, as it happens. One of the reasons I think I found Dickens rather heavy going first time round was having to read the whole book in one go. That's not how Dickens' eager Victorian audience read them; the stories came out in instalments, often ending on a cliffhanger so that the next would be all the more eagerly anticipated. Since each section would be about the same length, sometimes they would go off at an apparent tangent so that the story would reach exactly the right stage on its last page. These little diversions might have little relevance to the plot, but are a goldmine of information on everyday life in Victorian England. For example, the picture above illustrates a visit to the hairdresser in Martin Chuzzlewit.

It was not exactly a hair-dresser's; that is to say, people of a coarse and vulgar turn of mind might have called it a barber's, for they not only cut and curled ladies elegantly and children carefully, but shaved gentlemen easily. Still it was a highly genteel establishment, - quite first-rate in fact, - and there were displayed in the window, beside other elegances, waxen busts of a light lady and a dark gentleman which were the admiration of the whole neigbourhood. Indeed, some ladies had gone so far as to assert that the dark gentleman was actually a portrait of the spirited young proprietor, and the great similarity between their head-dresses - both wore very glossy hair with a narrow walk straight down the middle, and a profusion of flat circular curls on both sides - encouraged the idea.'

You don't get that sort of detail in a dictionary of occupations. This is just one of many examples of passages in Dickens' novels that shed light on occupations in early Victorian England. I picked it because I happen to have an illustrated edition of Martin Chuzzlewit, but there are plenty more. And there are insights into other aspects of Victorian life and society. The stories may be pure fiction (and we can leave the question of Dickens' attitude to women and his female characters for another time) but they are set in a very real world. And if you have English ancestors it's a world you should be interested in.

Dickens didn't just write fiction, although that's what we remember him for. He wrote a number of non-fiction, mainly travel, books, and he was also a journalist, contributing to and editing a number of journals throughout his career. They make interesting reading, and there some extracts I will write about during the year. In the meantime, for some genuine practical genealogy here is a copy of the entry in the parish register of St Luke Chelsea recording the marriage of Charles John Huffam Dickens to Catherine Thomson Hogarth in 1836, and for a pre-1836 marriage it's more informative than most.

Happy new year.