The Metropolitan Police. Aprons are Defences; against injury to cleanliness, to safety, to modesty, sometimes to roguery. From the thin slip of notched silk, which some highest-bred housewife . . . has gracefully fastened on; to the thick-tanned hide, girt round him with thongs, wherein the Builder builds, and at evening sticks his trowel. . . . How much has been defended, how much concealed in Aprons! Nay, rightly considered, what is your whole Military and Police Establishment, charged at uncalculated millions, but a huge scarlet-coloured, iron-fastened Apron, wherein Society works (uneasily enough); guarding itself from some soil and smithy-sparks, in this Devil's-smithy (Teufelsschmiede) of a world?
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book I, Chapter 6. The Maintenance of Law and Order before 1829 Authorities had few resources to cope with riot, crime and disorder. The industrial revolution put new pressures on society, leading to violence. "Bobbies" or "Peelers" were not immediately popular. Charles Booth Online Archive. The history of the workhouse by Peter Higginbotham. Harper's Bazaar- Suitable Clothing for Victorian Servants. THE uniformity of dress is a characteristic of the people of the United States. The man of leisure and the laborer, the mistress and the maid, wear clothes of the same material and cut. Political equality renders our countrymen and countrywomen averse to all distinctions of costume which may be supposed to indicate a difference of caste.
The uniformity which results is not favorable to the picturesque, and our everyday world in America has, in consequence, the shabby look of being got up by the Jews in Chatham Street and turned out in a universal suit of second-hand clothing. Our working-people, in vindicating their claims to social equality, by putting on their heads the stove-pipe hat and flimsy bonnet, and clothing their bodies in tight-fitting coats and flowing robes, not only interfere with the picturesque, which is of minor importance, but make, we think, an unwise sacrifice of comfort, convenience, and economy. How To Cite This Article: Catching Victorian and Edwardian criminals on paper. Victorian Social History: An Overview. Victorian Economics: An Overview. 'Living the Poor Life' poverty and the workhouse in the nineteenth century | Fluctu8 Podcast Directory. The Victorian Poor Law and Life in the Workhouse: An Overview.
Victorian Occupations: Life and Labor in the Victorian Period as Seen by Artists, Writers, and Modern Historians.