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Side by side, around the chair on which I lay propped up with pillows, coughing my span of life away, had knelt the high-born countess, the cultivated philosopher, the repentant rebel, the wild Irish girl, her slavish and exclusive creed exchanged for one more free and all-embracing; and that no extremest type of human condition might be wanting, the reclaimed Magdalene was there two pale worn girls from Eleanor's asylum, in whom I recognized the needlewomen to whom Mackaye had taken me, on a memorable night, seven years before.
Not all at once will your thirty thousand Needlewomen, your three million Paupers, your Connaught fallen into potential Cannibalism, and other fine consequences of the practice, come to light; though come to light they will; and "Ou' clo'!" itself may be in store for you, if you persist steadily enough.
The Times, the most aristocratic paper in England, publishes letters from needlewomen and dressmakers' apprentices, and reads grave lectures to duchesses and countesses on their duties to their poor sisters. One may fancy what a stir this would have made in the courtly circles of the reign of George II. Fashionable literature now arrays itself on the side of the working classes.
When her husband died, his cousin got the estate and title, and so she came, Katie tells me, and lived for one year down somewhere in the East-end among the needlewomen; and spent her whole fortune on the poor, and never kept a servant, so they say, but made her own bed and cooked her own dinner, and got her bread with her own needle, to see what it was really like.
Mother Sainte-Perpetue, the superior of the convent, undertook in the name of the institution to procure for the faithful, who wished to preserve the interior of their houses from the depravity of the age, companions for aged ladies, domestic servants, or needlewomen working by the day, all selected persons whose morality could be warranted.
The vacancies are chiefly composed of 13 advertisements, from registry-offices for servants of all capacities, married couples, gardeners, housekeepers, butlers, plain cooks, parlourmaids, housemaids, laundresses, waitresses, barmaids, cooks, laundresses, general servants, nurses, needlewomen, lady-helps . Similar persons are advertised for by private individuals; but besides these, I find: Wanted a bullock-driver, a carter, a coachman, a shoeing smith, three butchers, a bottler, two bakers, innumerable boys, barmen, a compositor, several dressmakers in all departments, half a dozen drapers' assistants, four grooms, sixty navvies in one advertisement, millers, haymakers, woodcutters, spademen, needlewomen, quarrymen, etc., two wheelwrights, a verger at £120 a year, pick and shovel men.
For her the journals began to describe the dresses already prepared, for her a staff of tailors, dressmakers, needlewomen and jewellers were working; she would have on her contract the same signature as a princess of the blood, who would be a princess herself and related to one of the most glorious aristocracies in the world.
"I think I am nearly sure, indeed that if they are really expert needlewomen, we can find plenty for them to do in our own family connection; five families of us, you know." "Five?" "Yes: Ion, Fairview, The Laurels, The Oaks, and Roselands." "Ah, yes; and it must take an immense amount of sewing to provide all the changes of raiment desired by the ladies and children," he remarked laughingly.
Of "distressed needlewomen" who cannot sew, nor be taught to do it; who, in private truth, are mutinous maid-servants come at last to the net upshot of their anarchies; of these, or of the like incurable phenomena, I hear nothing in Berlin; and can believe that, under this King, Indigence itself may still have something of a human aspect, not a brutal or diabolic as is commoner in some places.
"I am sure that you deserve it, and I abandon my interests to you. I want likewise to find some needlewomen willing to work in the lady's room, because she requires everything to be made very rapidly." "And dresses?" "Yes, dresses, caps, mantles-in fact, everything, for she is naked." "With money she will soon have all she wants. Is she young?" "She is four years younger than I. She is my wife."
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