Skip to item: of 244
Information about this record Back to top
Open in Universal viewer
Open in Mirador IIIF viewer

The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎29r] (62/244)

This item is part of

The record is made up of 1 volume (120 folios). It was created in Apr 1892. It was written in English. The original is part of the British Library: India Office The department of the British Government to which the Government of India reported between 1858 and 1947. The successor to the Court of Directors. Records and Private Papers Documents collected in a private capacity. .

Transcription

This transcription is created automatically. It may contain errors.

Apply page layout

1892 PROSPECTS OF MARRIAGE 547
other liable to receive proposals of a dishonouring union, •which may
free them from badly paid drudgery, the greatest effort should be
made to secure good wages. Combination is nowhere so much
needed, and perhaps is nowhere so unpopular. And yet the difficul
ties of foreign competition which make attempts to raise wages
among factory An East India Company trading post. girls so unsafe, and which make it most undesirable for
outsiders, ignorant of trade circumstances, to spread the ' doctrine
of divine discontent,' are entirely absent here; skilled hands are not
so plentiful that they could easily be replaced, and the girls, if
assisted by their friends, could well afford to bide their time quietly
at home until they had secured good terms.
There is no hard-and-fast line separating any group of workers
from another. If social distinctions divide population into horizontal
sections, industry cuts through these sections vertically. Class Gr or
the lower middle class enter the upper branches of the industries to
which I have referred. The girls here do not enter the factories or
become domestic servants to any extent worth considering. They
form the majority of the shop-assistants in the "West End and the
richer suburbs, and more than any other class supply the elementary
schools with teachers. It is as teachers, and also as Civil Service
clerks, that they join the upper middle class, including under that
term the professional, manufacturing, and trading classes. In treat
ing of this third group of working women I shall confine myself
entirely to the position of women in Class H, partly because my
experience as a high-school teacher has brought me into special
relations with girls and women of that class who have to earn their
living; and partly because their unconscious even more than their
conscious influence on the habits and ideals of the girls in the lower
middle class is very great.
In every class but Class H the girls can, if they choose, enter in
dustries conducted by employers with a view to profit. In the section
of the factory An East India Company trading post. class, where the girls are obliged to be self-supporting,
there is a point below which wages cannot fall for any considerable
period; there is a point above which it would not pay the employers
to employ them. The standard of living is unfortunately a very low
one, and the wages are low; but single women in this class can
support themselves so long as they are in work. In the second group
there is again a maximum height to which wages might be pushed
by combination; so long as it is profitable to employ them they will
be employed, however high the w T ages demanded may be. But the
minimum wage is not equivalent to the cost of living, but is rather
determined by the cost of living minus the cost of house-room and
part of the cost of food. In Class H women are not employed to
produce commodities which have a definite market value, and have
therefore no means of measuring their utility by market price. They
nearly all perform services for persons who pay them out of fixed

About this item

Content

The file contains a copy of the journal The Nineteenth Century. A pencil note on the cover of the journal, in the hand of Lady Pelly, indicates that Lewis Pelly was being read an article from this journal on Easter Sunday five days before he died.

The article he and his wife were reading has been marked on the cover 'Prospects of Marriage for Women, by Miss Clara E Collet' which appears on folios 24-31.

A second annotation, written by Sir William Henry Rhodes Green, gives the date of Lewis Pelly's death and is provided as context to Lady Pelly's comments.

Extent and format
1 volume (120 folios)
Physical characteristics

The journal contains one set of foliation and three sets of original pagination.

The principal foliation for this volume appears in the top right hand corner of the recto The front of a sheet of paper or leaf, often abbreviated to 'r'. of each folio, using a pencil number enclosed with a circle.

The three sets of original printed pagination that appear are as follows:

The advertisments at the front of the journal are paginated as i-xxxii; the articles themselves are paginated as 525-712; and the Sampson Low, Marston & Company publications list at the rear of the journal has been paginated as 1-8.

Written in
English in Latin script
View the complete information for this record

Use and share this item

Share this item
Cite this item in your research

The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎29r] (62/244), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, Mss Eur F126/28, in Qatar Digital Library <https://www.qdl.qa/archive/81055/vdc_100023318122.0x00003f> [accessed 28 March 2024]

Link to this item
Embed this item

Copy and paste the code below into your web page where you would like to embed the image.

<meta charset="utf-8"><a href="https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023318122.0x00003f"> <em>The Nineteenth Century</em> , No 182, Apr 1892 [&lrm;29r] (62/244)</a>
<a href="https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023318122.0x00003f">
	<img src="https://iiif.qdl.qa/iiif/images/81055/vdc_100000001524.0x0003a7/Mss_Eur_F126_28_0062.jp2/full/!280,240/0/default.jpg" alt="" />
</a>
IIIF details

This record has a IIIF manifest available as follows. If you have a compatible viewer you can drag the icon to load it.https://www.qdl.qa/en/iiif/81055/vdc_100000001524.0x0003a7/manifestOpen in Universal viewerOpen in Mirador viewerMore options for embedding images

Use and reuse
Download this image