IT was work easily learned and abundantly wanted. Poor creatures whose prospect was so dark that any pittance was a relief, could always, if they would accept the hard price, get the work. True, better times than those of forty-eight have dawned:* and in the future, hope is placed most confidently by all men.
But while we acknowledge that it is for the good of everybody that the iron seamstress should ply her double needles,* we may well look around to see what field of labour may be fairly laid open to helpless women. We are told that they would make tender doctors for one another; that in walks of science and knowledge, there is room they may well fill; that in the broad ways of the world there are many honourable employments for which they are appropriately fitted.* No doubt. Still, if we look to it a little, while the iron seamstress is practising her five hundred stitches per minute, we may take that one effective stitch in time which is said to save nine.*
abridged
A reference to the ‘year of revolutions’ that shook Continental Europe in 1848, and was felt even in the United Kingdom. In the issue for October 29, 1853, William Duthie and Henry Morley had written about the impact on France. “The French workman always is a loser by political disturbance. The crisis of eighteen hundred and forty-eight — a workman’s triumph — reduced the value of industry in Paris from sixty to twenty-eight millions of pounds. Fifty-four men in every hundred were at the same time thrown out of employ, or nearly two hundred thousand people in all.”
Charles Dickens, Jerrold’s editor at ‘Household Words,’ was keen on industrial innovation. In the issue for January 31, 1857, Henry Morley drew on an address by Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890), as reported in the Journal of the Society of Arts (Nov. 14, Dec. 26, 1856), to argue that mechanised mass production improved the lot of the labouring man by creating new jobs and raising wages. Neither Dickens nor Jerrold wanted to see the sewing machine put back in its box; they wanted to see women granted wider access to the opportunities that the ‘iron seamstress’ was creating.
See also Equally Free, in which Victorian expert on education Joshua Fitch (1824-1903) urged that women be allowed (but not forced) into all the professions at every level.
‘A stitch in time saves nine’ is a proverb encouraging swift intervention now to prevent a great deal of trouble later on. Economist Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) gave an example, reading like a fable but sadly only too real, in which failure to mend a broken latch on a gate resulted in severe hardship. See A Stitch in Time.