Item Info

Accession Number: 87-1615
Physical Description: [1] page
Material: paper
Transcription:

cording to her calculation at the moment, deducting what her trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket tenpence halfpenny, and she could make one in something less than two days.But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course itdidn't come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come through the second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money enough to pay the security deposit,--call it two pound,--she could get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not have to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second hand come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with great intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband's side at the washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as the meal was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups, and what not other sordid makeshifts; shabby as the woman was  in dress, and toning done towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of nutriment and washing,--there was positively a dignity in her, as the family anchor just holding the poor ship-wrecke boilermaker's bark. When I left the room, the boiler-maker's eyes were slowly turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that vanished boiler lay in her direction.  
                      These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work. 
                      Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor. The woman apologised for its being in 'an untidy mess.' The day was Saturday, and she was boiling the children's clothes in a saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a broken bottle or so, and there were some broken boxes for seats. The 

MssDate: 1868-00-00
Media Type: Letters
Source: Rare Book Department
Notes:

Leaf is numbered 6 at head and contians "A small star in the east" which first appeared in All the year round, December 19, 1868, and was published in the third edition of Dickens's The uncommercial traveller (London, 1875).

Provenance: Sessler, 1957, Matlack Fund.

Address/Building: Creation Place Note:[n.p.]

Creation Year: ca. 1868
Call Number: DMS Un1t
Creator Name: Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Author