Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
Difficulties occur often. Impossibilities will bar the way now and then;
but there are so few real impossibilities. When a difficulty arises,
the three hundred industrious arts and crafts are freely ransacked for
a prisoner; ay!--ransacked as few rich men would be bothered to sift the
seven or eight liberal professions in order to fit a beloved son.
Here, as in the world, the average of talent is low. The majority can
only learn easy things, and vulgar things, and some can do higher
things and a few can do beautiful things, and one or two have developed
first-rate gifts and powers.
There are 25 shoemakers (male); 12 tailors, of whom 6 female; 24
weavers, of whom 10 female; 4 watchmakers, all female; 6 printers and
composers, 5 female; 4 engrainers of wood, 2 female. (In this art we
have the first artist in Britain, our old acquaintance, Thomas Robinson.
He has passed all his competitors by a simple process. Beautiful
specimens of all the woods have been placed and kept before him, and for
a month he has been forced to imitate nature with his eye never off
her. His competitors in the world imitate nature from memory, from
convention, or from tradition. By such processes truth and beauty are
lost at each step down the ladder of routine. Mr. Eden gave clever Tom
at first starting the right end of the stick, instead of letting him
take the wrong.) Nine joiners and carpenters, 3 female; 3 who color
prints downright well, 1 female; 2 painters, 1 female; 3 pupils
shorthand writing, 1 female.
[Fancy these attending the Old Bailey and taking it all down solemn as
judges.]
Workers in gutta-percha, modelers in clay, washers and getters-up of
linen, hoe-makers, spade-makers, rake-makers, woodcarvers, stonecutters,
bakers, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. Come to the hard-labor yard.
Do you see those fifteen stables? there lurk in vain the rusty cranks;
condemned first as liars they fell soon after into disrepute as weapons
of half-science to degrade minds and bodies. They lurk there grim as
the used-up giants in “Pilgrim's Progress,” and like them can't catch a
soul.
Hark to the music of the shuttle and the useful loom. We weave linen,
cotton, woolen, linsey-woolsey, and, not to be behind the rogues
outside, cottonsey-woolsey and cottonsey-silksey; damask we weave, and a
little silk and poplin, and Mary Baker velvet itself for a treat now and
then. We of the loom relieve the county of all expense in keeping us,
and enrich a fund for taking care of discharged industrious prisoners
until such time as they can soften prejudices and obtain lucrative
employment. The old plan was to kick a prisoner out and say:
“There, dog! go without a rap among those who will look on you as a dog
and make you starve or steal. We have taught you no labor but crank, and
as there are no cranks in the outside world, the world not being such
an idiot as we are, you must fill your belly by means of the only other
thing you have ever been taught--theft.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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