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"No, dear Mrs. Beaudessart, I feel that it is exhilarating, like having the east wind in one's face, to meet the world and make one's own fate, and rely on God, one's stout heart, and ten nimble fingers--but I thank you all the same." And she stood up to depart.
Joan Frobisher, left without resources after her father's sudden death, states her determination to work for her living, despite being 'a lady', in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1901 novel The Frobishers. Her determination will take her to the Staffordshire potteries, to grimy surroundings, and poverty-stricken neighbours, where she will be horrified by the evil effects of their work on the health of the young girls she befriends there. In the novel, Baring-Gould displays his intimate knowledge of the industrial area, of the manufacturing processes involved, of the dangers inherent in them, and of the characters and thought processes of the workers themselves.
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While The Frobishers is ostensibly the story of Joan and her sister Sybilla (who is horrified at Joan's determination to work for a living, and eventually makes for herself a marriage of convenience), it is also a protest at the working conditions endured by the girls at manufactories like Fennings. Girls like Polly Myatt seem resigned to their fate.
"There's lead in the dust, lead in the glost, and the lead gets into us through the eyes and ears and nostrils and the pores of the body; it gets into your hair; it gets into the lungs and into the blood, that turns to goulard water, and then you have the colic and are crippled with the palsy, and sometimes you die of it."
But Baring-Gould makes it clear that the fault does not lie solely at the door of greedy manufacturers. The popular majolica ware calls for one of the most dangerous processes, and customer demand causes the misery and ill-health of the working girls.
What disease is more horrible than that produced by the manufacture of lucifer matches? yet the mother of the girl whose jaw is corroded will squander a box of matches with total disregard. The public is the Juggernaut of to-day, under whose wheels thousands of lives are ground into the earth, or, if the lives are spared, all beauty and joy of life are crushed out of them.
Joan herself is able to make only a small difference to a few individuals, but Baring-Gould must have hoped that The Frobishers would prick numerous consciences and bring the problems into the public domain.
Page created 9 December 2002 and last
updated 9 December 2002
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