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.'

 

Hello sailor! Merchant Navy records now online at Findmypast

The Merchant Navy service records on Findmypast have now been extended to cover the period 1835-1941. This is great news, although not quite as good as it might first appear. This is not the fault of the good people at Findmypast, it is due to the fact that there was no central registry of seamen in the merchant service between 1858 and 1917. This is of course the period that many of us are interested in. There are other sources that you can use for this period, there just isn't a nice 'one-stop shop' kind of service record to be found for those years.

The records added to Findmypast today are those for 1835-1857, which will be of enormous use to many researchers (not including me, as far as I know, but I'm always prepared to be surprised). There is a lot of useful help on the site, in the Knowledge Base area, including a link to The National Archives guide on Merchant Seamen serving up to 1857

Have fun.

 

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!