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the most general in large towns, the ready-made trade, it may at first be supposed that all the evils of the bespoke system may be avoided. According to Barny O'Rierdon, in Ireland they are entirely avoided, as a man comes into market with a barrow full of brogues, and every one helps himself; there is no measuring in the case, and if a brogue is too long, he claps a wisp of straw in the toe.

There is a large class of persons in London, &c., who sell boots and shoes, but do not manufacture them. The greater part of those persons know no more how a boot or shoe is made, than the boots and shoes can be said to possess such knowledge. These articles are principally made in the country, or the eastern part of the metropolis, and sent up for sale. Perhaps a hundred dozen pairs are made on one pair of lasts; the makers, of course, have no idea who will be the purchasers, or of the form of the feet of the parties who may wear them ; nor do they care, their object being merely the sale and the money.

Persons may occasionally purchase a pair of these articles which will suit them tolerably well, as there is no rule without an exception; but for one such instance, there are, perhaps, fifty to the contrary. While some may prove good, others will be, perhaps, worthless; and though some persons

may be satisfied, most people will have abundant cause to regret having risked a purchase.

In the "cheap women's trade," there is also much deception practised; so that cheap is only another word for what at last proves to be, perhaps, the dearest part of the female's expenditure for wearing apparel.

The cause of the evil here indicated must be ascribed to one of those many misconceptions of people's own affairs, which are so often made manifest in the conduct of individuals and classes. Masters and workmen, quarrelling with each other, do not see, in the blinded and blinding system of their reprisals, what must finally be the result. The employer, in some cases, must be ignorant of the effect of his curtailments; and the journeyman as ignorant as to the method he takes to protect himself against such injustice. It is thus that the woman's shoemaker, more than any other class in the trade, has found himself lowered within the last twenty-five or thirty years, in the scale of society; and his abilities also, as a workman, deteriorated; the master at the same time losing his own proper position, through the inferiority of those articles he sells, and the public in general, as well as the character of the nation itself, in a sense,

injured. The master curtails, or the journeyman

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exacts too much, differences ensue, fresh men are employed, and the old ones, finding they must do something for a living, move about and struggle on as they can, and ultimately, in their despair, turn a sort of master for themselves. Here, however, as these parties have no shop to expose their goods in, they must sell to those who have; and thus finding shop purchasers, the trade now takes a new complexion. The issue may be readily told. The journeyman now becomes the competitor in a closer sense than ever, with his fellow-journeyman; and as the cheapening system widens, the work still gets worse and worse done, and money bulk, not money worth, becomes the only standard in the business. London is at present the chief seat for the manufacture of these sale women's shoes and boots, though various establishments of the same nature are growing up, day by day, throughout the country. What the penny and twopenny paid shirts are to the hapless needlewoman, the fourpenny and sixpenny-paid slippers are to the poor sadly-miscalled ladies' shoemaker. The evil, too, as connected with the London journeyman, and those in other places, is still taking a worse phase day after day. Leather, it is well known, as with all other commodities, can be more profitably purchased in large than in small quantities; and hence

the master returns, in part, to his old character. He now again gets ready his own materials, and gives these to be manufactured by whom he pleases, as was formerly the case; the only difference being, that his cuttings-out are now in manifold pairs, for a chance sale, and not, as before, to a separate measure. There is now, too, no other option for the workman; he must do this work, and at the very lowest wages, or starve. He may, it is true, considerably slight the articles; indeed, he must do so, to live at all: and this is now his last and only dependence. And thus an art is found to retrograde, and the fair face of our social progress to become spotted with these deeply-to-be-lamented blemishes, the source of as much national demerit and weakness, as they are of far-spread individual misery.

The Northampton, Daventry, and Wellingborough wholesale manufacture of the man's shoe and boot, may be traced to the same cause, and is as productive of the like bad result.

The system has

grown in these places to a portentous bulk, and that too in the short space of about a quarter of a century. We see at present the goods of these places in the shop-windows of almost every town in the kingdom, ticketed up at so much the pair; the prices charged being in many cases much less than

what some masters pay to the better-qualified jour neyman for the mere making of similar-looking articles. The wealthier and more tasteful class of consumers still continue, however, to prefer bespeaking (or to have their measure taken for) their shoes and boots, than to run the risk of any of these chance bargains; and thus, so far, the trade maintains a certain degree of respectability, which is alike beneficial to both the employer and the employed.

The English boot and shoe about thirty years since, was generally speaking, the first article of its kind in the world, and so there was nothing to apprehend while the master's price was good and the workman's wages were good also; an evident decline, however, took place in the character of our workmanship. The Spectator of the 15th Dec., 1838, thus notices the absence of style in our boots and shoes: "A clumsy boot was till lately a distinguishing mark of a true Englishman abroad; now travellers get their feet neatly fitted in France, while all at home, who regard personal appearance, prefer French boots, and the predilection of the fair sex for shoes of Paris manufacture is notorious.”

This competition has had the effect of improving the homemade article: but still it is easier to bawl for prohibiting duties than to beat the foreign work

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