Identifier: eastlondon00besa (find matches)
Title: East London
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Besant, Walter, Sir, 1836-1901
Subjects: Poor
Publisher: New York, The Century Co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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partby industries, but a few by professions. Thus, of the latterthere are 4485 persons—a very small proportion—supportedby the professions, meaning the clergy, the medical men, thelawyers, the architects, etc. Of clerks and subordinates in theprofessions there are 79,000 persons maintained, there are34,600 persons supported by shops of all kinds, there are9200 persons supported by taverns and coffee-houses; thisaccounts for less than 140,000. The whole of the remaining726,000 live on the wages earned by the breadwinner. It is, in fact, altogether an industrial population. If,again, we take Mr. Charles Booths figures in greater detailthere are seventy-three thousand who depend upon casualemployment; there are the railway servants, the police, theroad service, the sailors, and the officials. There are, next,those employed in the main divisions of trade—dress, furni-ture, building, and machinery—and there are the significantitems of sundry artisans, home industries, small trades,
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An East End Wharf. THE CITY OF MANY CRAFTS 27 and other wage-earners, amounting in all to the supportof about eighty-five thousand persons. It is among thesesundries that we are to look for the astonishing varietyof industries, the strange trades that our complex life hascalled into existence, and the minute subdivisions of everytrade into branches—say, sprigs and twigs—in which oneman may spend his whole life. We are now very far fromthe days when a shoemaker sat down with the leather and hisawl and worked away until he had completed the whole shoe,perfect in all its parts, a shoe of which he was proud asevery honest workman should be, with no scamping of work,no brown paper instead of leather for the heel. The modernsystem leaves no room for pride in work at all; every manis part of a machine; the shoe grows without the workersknowledge; when it emerges, not singly but by fifties andhundreds, there is no one who can point to it and say, Lo!I made it. I—with my right hand. It i

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