| <The Saturday Review July 20, 1861>
| <Fashionable Factory Girls>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| <pb n="63">
| We do not know whether Lord Raynham has at present 
| anything on hand.  If not, perhaps he will accept from 
| us a friendly hint of a field on which his philanthropic 
| energies may find a worthy object.  Owing to the 
| benighted condition of the age, many of his and his 
| friends' recent enterprises have miscarried.  Parliament 
| absolutely declines to emancipate the fleas, or to 
| establish a <hi rend="italic"> habeas corpus </hi> for 
| the cab-horses, or to flog aggravating husbands, or to 
| restrain maid-servants from the pernicious liberty of 
| leaning out of window.  He will therefore hear with joy 
| of a case of oppression and suffering from which no 
| Parliament, however hard-hearted, can turn away.  As 
| the knight-errant of the lower animals in general, and 
| young women in particular, we invite him to an 
| enterprise which will require and reward all his 
| gallantry, in both senses of that ambiguous word.  We 
| only hope that when he has triumphed, and the 
| wreathed offerings of grateful womanhood rest upon 
| his brow, he will not forget the humble instrument to 
| whose suggestions he will owe his glory.
| We have to inform him, then, that in this metropolis 
| there is a vast district where all the horrors of <p> 
| "overtime" </p> are inflicted without remorse, and 
| almost without limit, upon a class of young and helpless 
| females.  A large number of young women, from the 
| ages of sixteen to thirty, living in the West-end of the 
| town, are engaged in the manufacture of a certain 
| article of general consumption.  They are employed, as 
| a rule, for fifteen hours a day on week days, and for six 
| or seven on Sundays.  But these fifteen hours are not 
| the ordinary hours of factory labour.  The working-day 
| begins at twelve o'clock at noon, and ends at three 
| o'clock the next morning; but it is not uncommon for 
| girls to work at it even till five, for the chance of better 
| pay.  The business is carried on in a hot and stifling 
| atmosphere, from which ventilation is carefully 
| excluded; but at certain intervals in the process the 
| workers have to move suddenly, bare-headed and 
| bare-shouldered, into the cold night air.  The dress in which, 
| according to the custom of the trade, the manufacture is 
| conducted, is so light and ill-adjusted as to increase to 
| the utmost possible extent the dangers of this change of 
| temperature.  Fatal illnesses are not uncommonly the 
| consequence of this enormous labour under such 
| unhealthy conditions.  The mental results are still worse.  
| The manufacture in question is found to have the 
| peculiar property of predisposing its victims to idiotcy; 
| and of course, after the greater part of the day and night 
| has been spent in exhausting toil, neither time nor 
| strength is left for anything in the nature of self-culture 
| or self-education to counteract its operation.  The 
| natural consequence is, that both the intellectual and 
| physical development of this class of young females is 
| very low, and constantly becoming lower.  For their 
| miserable toil the remuneration is wretchedly scanty.  
| In pursuance of a peculiar custom it is paid in very 
| unequal portions, and is moreover distributed by lot.  
| Some of the young women who are lucky in the lot they 
| draw, obtain an amount of recompence which may be 
| said to repay even such labour as we have described.  
| But the majority obtain little or nothing for their pains.  
| Fed by hope, which the overseers of the factory 
| culpably encourage, they continue their round of 
| wearing and dreary toil for fifteen or even twenty years, 
| and find themselves at the end even poorer than when 
| they began.  We need hardly particularize more closely 
| to Lord Raynham the case of which we speak.  The 
| manufacture in question is that of <p> "small-talk" 
| </p> ~~ an article which he probably does not consume 
| ~~ and the young females who are employed for fifteen 
| hours a day in producing it live chiefly in the 
| neighbourhood of Belgravia and May Fair.  It is indeed 
| an opportunity for the interposition of philanthropists.  
| There never was such a case for a short-time agitation.  
| Even if Lord Raynham's own favourite panacea could 
| be applied, and they could all be employed as 
| linen-drapers' assistants, the lot of these unfortunate 
| young women would be materially improved.
| These Belgravian young ladies are, indeed, very much 
| to be pitied.  The inexorable necessity of getting a 
| livelihood somehow imposes upon them this pernicious 
| toil; for without it husbands are, according to the 
| traditions of Belgravian wisdom, not to be obtained.  
| But, having forced this system on the young ladies, 
| society turns round and abuses them for its results.  The 
| elder sons, to charm whose wearied and used-up 
| existence this gigantic production of small-talk is 
| carried on, actually have the effrontery to complain that 
| the young ladies of the present day are stupid.  We are 
| not disputing the melancholy truth.  There is no room 
| left for disputing what is lamented, but admitted, on all 
| sides.  The demand that has sprung up for pretty 
| horsebreakers is a sufficient proof that the legitimate 
| article has become quite unmarketable.  It is too true 
| that the young-lady brain, whatever there was of it, is 
| slowly wearing away.  But it does not lie in the mouth 
| of her hard taskmaster to reproach his victim with the 
| injuries his own exigence has caused.  Let the exacting 
| <hi rend="italic"> parti </hi> who complains, 
| deliberately count over the trials through which that 
| brain has to pass, and then say whether any native 
| strength of texture or excellence of preparation could 
| avert the melancholy result.  If he really wishes to 
| probe the evil to the bottom, let him ask the next silly 
| young lady with whom he dances to favour him with a 
| diary of her occupations during the space of a single 
| day.  In the present state of the marriage market, such a 
| modest request could not be refused to any thoroughly 
| eligible young gentleman.  When he obtains the 
| precious document, he will find that the existence of the 
| fair chatterbox at whose empty-headedness he has been 
| marvelling consists entirely of a ceaseless round of talk, 
| talk, talk.  The occupation is never varied, but only the 
| ostensible amusement under which the occupation is 
| disguised.  It may be the exhibition, in Rotten Row, of a 
| hat copied after the last new horsebreaker's pattern.  It 
| may be the destruction of poor Aunt Sally's pipe on 
| some hot suburban lawn.  It may be the calmer delights 
| of the <p> "kettle-drum," </p> when the young married 
| women talk over their husbands, and exchange hints 
| upon conjugal strategy ~~ or the stiff diner, or the 
| asphyxiating drum, or the revolution on one's own axis 
| which is called dancing.  These are only different 
| modes of weaving the meshes of small-talk by which 
| the angling maiden hopes to land her golden prey.  
| During all these various occupations she must be 
| chattering, ever chattering, about something.  What that 
| something is, all men who have suffered under it know 
| too well ~~ the heat, the weather, the last party and the 
| next, her neighbour's misconduct, and her friends' 
| ugliness, and the general hideousness of every dress 
| except her own.  For fifteen hours out of every week-day
| her poor little brain, ill prepared by an education of 
| mere accomplishments, must be spinning out of its own 
| weak substance eternal talk upon these edifying topics.  
| And these exertions are not confined, as formerly, to 
| the season.  No sooner is the season over than the 
| country-house begins.  Scotland for the autumn, and 
| England for the winter, furnish a season pretty nearly as 
| severe as that of London.  The so-called gaiety is quite 
| as constant, and the hours almost as bad.  And, as recent 
| experiments appear to many others to have established 
| the superiority of country-house dissipation for 
| matrimonial purposes, the manufacture of small-talk 
| goes on more furiously than ever.  Only, the 
| opportunities for <hi rend="italic"> tete-a-tetes </hi> 
| being very much greater, it is apt to become a good 
| many shades more tender.  But, whether mingled with 
| the tenderness of the shrubbery or the pertness of the 
| ball-room, on it must go without respite or relaxation, 
| till a bridegroom capable of settlements has been won, 
| or the chilling threshold of old maidship has been 
| reached.  Is it a matter of surprise that under such 
| treatment a young lady's intellect becomes a vanishing 
| quantity?  It is rather wonderful that any portion of it 
| survives ~~ even that small portion of it which 
| subsequently reappears under the faded charms and 
| developed outline of the fashionable mother.  No other 
| human being could go through such trials and retain 
| even the rudiments of a mind at the end.  The toughest 
| intellects could not stand it.  We should like to make the 
| experiment on Mr. Gladstone or Lord Westbury, if 
| either of those great men would sacrifice themselves in 
| the interests of science.  We entertain no doubt that if 
| one of these grave personages were condemned to five 
| years of hard fashionable labour, to spend all his 
| waking hours in fashionable conversation, discussing 
| balls and concerts, matchmaking and scandal, he would 
| come out at the end with an intellect as nearly washed 
| out as that of the most inveterate ball-goer in Belgravia.
| It is a consolation to think that in course of time the evil 
| must cure itself.  The system will cease as soon as it 
| becomes clear, even to the obtusest mother, that it has 
| ceased to pay.  Already the tide of feeling on the male 
| side is beginning to turn against it.  Men do not relish 
| the alternative, which is apt to befall the husband of the 
| regular ball-goer, of either turning chaperon himself, or 
| leaving that office to be more tenderly performed by the 
| volunteer zeal of other young men.  Mothers should 
| take warning in time, and not invest in a falling stock.  
| The market is turning.  London girls are showing signs 
| of heaviness, and country-bred girls are becoming 
| firmer every day.  A reaction will come soon, if they 
| are not wise in time, and eligible elder sons will be seen 
| scampering over the country, ransacking rural 
| parsonages and retired manor-houses for wives.  Evil 
| days are in store for the mammas, if they do not 
| compromise matters with the growing utilitarianism of 
| the men.  There is no knowing where a revulsion will 
| stop.  Times may come when nimbleness in playing 
| polkas or dancing them will be looked on as an 
| unpractical accomplishment, and when cleverness in 
| imitating horsebreaker fashions will cease to attract 
| admiration.  Men may even come to be so prosaic as to 
| wish that future housewives should know something 
| about managing a household.  Perhaps they may go so 
| far as to desire that some traces of mental cultivation, 
| however minute, should be discoverable in the 
| conversation on which they are to depend for 
| amusement during great part of their lives.  Possibly 
| they may even be so fastidious as to prefer to take their 
| wives from houses in which scandal does not form the 
| main topic of daily conversation.  This is an evil 
| prospect to put before the eyes of an honest Belgravian 
| matron.  She had better anticipate these dangers, and, 
| by plenty of loud professions and a few unimportant 
| practical concessions, make terms, while it is yet time, 
| with the changing spirit of the age.