The first Listrabanians lived in stirring times. To them England would still have been the ‘workshop of the world,’ and its capital, envied centre of the Empire, was booming and rapidly spreading outwards to house a labour force streaming in. Of the 539 original Listrabanians, almost a half were born outside the boundaries of today’s London.
We can learn a great deal about Listraban’s founding fathers and mothers from the 1891 census. Among arrivals from distant parts the biggest single contingent were Scots, who numbered 27. Next came 17 from Lancashire, 14 from Essex, 12 from Yorkshire, then 11 each from Kent and Suffolk. Smaller numbers were drawn from 27 other English counties, together with Wales and Ireland, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and South Africa.
Households were often much larger than today’s, and sometimes swollen by the addition of lodgers. Sometimes, as now, two households would share a house. Households of eight, nine and ten were common. 26 households boasted a servant, invariably female, the youngest of them, one Harriet Silvermore, being only 12, with three others just a year older. At the other end of the scale Elizabeth Trew from Dorset was still ‘in service’ at 61. Housework was more laborious then, of course. The fireplaces we value today as decorative ‘original features’ would have made for grimy work that started in the cold, dark morning before the household was up. The cellars that we clutter with junk would have been filthy with coal dust. Today, in 2020, some of us will still remember these things from our own childhood.
It’s hard to imagine our small streets swarming with 116 children under ten. With that sort of child population it’s not surprising to find 13 of Listraban’s women and 6 of the men employed as teachers. Another 4 women worked as governesses, providing private teaching in the home. Some of the teachers specified that they taught in Board schools, which represented the Victorian beginnings of a locally administered state education system.
By far the commonest occupations for men were those of commercial clerk (30) and commercial traveller (10). For the women, in second place after teaching came dressmaking (11). Two men were employed on the newfangled railway. Two were engravers on stone, and may have contributed to tombstones in Abney Park, which had opened as a cemetery fifty years earlier. There were five butchers – four of them in one Scottish family – and a family from Brightlingsea in the fish trade. There were men working as civil, electrical and mechanical engineers and engine and instrument makers. But although the Victorian era was very much an industrial one, the financial sector was growing in importance, and in Listraban we see a cluster of occupations around finance and law. Not actual bankers, to be sure: they would be living in the grander villas lining the Cambridge road. But there were 3 bankers’ clerks and 2 ‘stock bankers’ clerks,’ presumably in what we nowadays call investment banking or stockbroking. There were 4 accountants, 5 solicitors’ clerks and a curiously designated ‘Paris Law Clerk’ – should that perhaps be Parish?
The other side of the financial industry is seen in the 20 women and 1 man who list their occupation as ‘Living on her/his own means.’ In England greater ‘respectability’ had long attached to those who were able to live off the ownership of land or other capital, rising above the demeaning necessity of work. There are those who argue that this attitude contributed to the economic decline that started in the late Victorian period. Some would say that it still has a malign effect today.
Mid- and late-19th century England saw a frenzy of Christian missionary activity, partly as a response to the perceived dangers inherent in the swelling and rootless urban working class and the conditions in which it lived. Two of Listraban’s women listed religious occupations, one in ‘ecclesiasical work’ and the other specifying the Salvation Army. Stoke Newington had strong nonconformist traditions.
Lurking among the listed occupations are a few that hint at cultural changes. The Victorian boom was partly fuelled by consumer spending, and the market had its influence on culture. The new middle class and the affluent end of the working class aspired to some of the things that ornamented the lives of the wealthier. The Isabella Mockridge who taught piano at a kindergarten reminds us that music was first and foremost in the home, and that a piano in the living room was both a source of entertainment and a status symbol. The spread of instruments spawned a sheet music industry supplying everything from comic songs to piano transcripts of operatic and orchestral masterpieces. ‘Culture’ was reaching into new corners of society.
A similar process was influencing tastes in art. There was a booming market for pictures to hang on walls, and thanks to the process of engraving, many of the world’s famous paintings (and some less so) were available from the printing industry in black and white versions at a price the working family could afford. Edgar A Holloway, the 21-year-old Bradford-born litho artist who lodged at 69 Listria Park would have been part of a broad cultural transformation, alongside Samuel Harrison and his son John, whose craft was engraving on steel and copper.
Some things don’t change. The presence of an umbrella manufacturer at 10 Martaban testifies that the Victorians too had English weather. And of course there will always be room for a Dandy Roll Maker.
Below is a complete transcript of the census data. Click on the up and down arrows to navigate.
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