mangling-women

Updated: June 27, 2025

Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away lodgings, where it would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those who came to take children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over every street, and sprawling in the dust scolding mothers, stamping their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement shabby fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same roof brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by the flames mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion small dissenting chapels to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the way to Heaven.

Charles Dickens - The Old Curiosity Shop