The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎27r] (58/244)

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1892 PROSPECTS OF MARRIA 543
17 8 per cent, of London, and sliould therefore be designated the
upper classes.
From the first of these groups are drawn the lower grades of
factory An East India Company trading post. girls in East London, who form the majority of match-girls,
rope-makers, jam- and sweetstuff-makers, and a considerable propor
tion of the box-, brush-, and cigar-makers, as well as of the less skilled
tailoresses. The children when they leave school do not all go to
work at once, but relieve their mothers or elder sisters of the charge
of the ubiquitous baby, enabling the former nurse to go to the factory An East India Company trading post. .
They stagger about with their charges, orplant them securely on the
coldest stone step they can find, and discuss with each other or with the
nursing mothers in their narrow street the births, deaths, marriages,
misfortunes, and peculiarities of their neighbours. Their families
live in one or, at most, two rooms, and their knowledge of life is such
as to render Bowdlerised versions of our authors quite unnecessary.
Sometimes the children take ' a little place' as servant girl, going
home at night, but e\ entually, and generally before they are fifteen,
they find their way to the factory An East India Company trading post. . By the time they are one-and-
twenty, at least a quarter of them have babies of their own to look
after; during the next five years the rest, with but few exceptions,
get married or enter into some less binding union. To show that I
do not exaggerate the proportion of girl marriages in this class, I give
a table of the number of girls married under 21 years of age in every
100 marriages that took place in the seven years from 1878 to 1884.
The percentage has been calculated for each year, and the mean of
the percentages is given.
Girls married under 21 years of age 100 marriages 1878-1884.
Holborn . ,
St. George's-in-East
Betlinal Green
St. Saviour's
St. Olave's
Shoreditch
AVliitecliapel
Stepney
Greenwieli
Poplar
Westminster
City .
Islington
St. Pancras
Camber well
19-4
22-9
34-7
22 9
19-5
209
25-2
21-8
19-6
18-9
15-1
17-5
14-6
14-7
17-2
Wandsworth.
Marylebone.
St. Giles'
Mile End Old Town
Lambeth .
Woolwich , ,
Fulham , .
Chelsea , ,
Strand „
Kensington.
Hackney
St. George's, Hanover
Lewisham ,
Hampstead , ,
17-5
13-9
16-6
26-5
17-3
37-1
19-3
14-5
140
129
139
10-6
12-1
9-4
in
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Bethnal Green is not responsible for all the girl marriages ascribed
to it. At the Ked Church, in the supposed interests of morality,
marriage is made cheap in every sense of the word, and several boys
and girls get married there who do not belong to the district. There
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