It's a bit of a myth that in Victorian times men went out to work, ran businesses and brought in the wages while women stayed at home with the children. And as I was looking through an old directory of my local town, Reading, from 1883, I found the names and addresses of women who ran businesses and supported the local community in many different ways.
The Berkshire town of Reading in 1883 was well-known for its markets and its place on the Thames. It had its own poor law union, inland revenue collection and county court. Just thirty-six miles from London, carriages took passengers to towns such as Bath, Newbury, Twyford and Basingstoke. The iconic Town Hall had only been recently finished in 1875, its red-brick exterior and carved decorations still new.
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| Broad Street, Reading in 1890, Wikimedia Commons |
Victorian residents shuffled to one of the many public offices within the Town Hall, such as the Orchestra Hall, Council Chamber, Library and Museum. Women had their own library, called the 'Ladies' Library', which was separated from the main library with a screen. There were a number of different schools in the town, some of which concentrated on etiquette, education, music, labour and training servants. Some schools were held within the Town Hall itself, including a science classroom and a workshop. Residents would also have known the Assize Courts, on the site of today's courtrooms at the Forbury. The Market Place was busy too, market days being Saturdays for the sale of corn and stock cattle, and Mondays for the sale of fat cattle.
The town had four banks - Stephens, Blandy and Co, J & C Simonds and Co, a branch of the Capital and Counties Bank and a Savings Bank that had been founded in 1817. Reading Gaol was opening its doors to prisoners, including Oscar Wilde, whose likeness is now cast in metal gates between the canal and the abbey precincts. A police station was situated in the Forbury. Families and couples headed to the Royal Albert Hall in Friar Street, built near the new railway station that served the town under the Great Western Railway. The hall was described as a 'very spacious and elegantly decorated chamber' that was 114 feet long, 38 feet wide and held as many as 1,200 people at one time. It hosted public meetings, concerts, balls and other entertainments.
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| Victorian Ladies Sewing, Flickr, Public Domain |
Another building that had been established only a few years before was the Royal Berkshire Hospital. Opening on 27 May 1839, two wings were added in 1882 with a new operating room, library, museum, chapel, laundry and servant's dormitories. Business was also booming at Reading's biscuit factory, Huntley and Palmer's, on King's Road nearby. In 1883 it employed over 3,000 locals. On London Street was a complementary business, Messrs Huntley, Boorne and Stevens, tin manufacturers who made the tins for the biscuits made at the factory. Sutton and Sons was another major employer, producing seeds and shipping them off to parts of the United Kingdom and Europe. Reading gained its main industry through biscuits, iron foundries and engine works. Seed-growing, malting and brewing as well as the sale of corn, flour and cattle were noted as other key contributors to the town's economy in 1883.
At the centre of the Victorian town was a thriving community of workers, who ran businesses and supplied essential goods and services to other residents and visitors. Among them were over 150 women who opened the doors to establishments and were listed the directory as business owners, publicly taking responsibility for their trades.
Surprisingly, there were some trades carried out by women that we might think were considered a 'man's work' in Victorian Britain. Mrs Frances Mayo was a butcher who operated on the Oxford Road, the long commercial street that trailed its way to Tilehurst. Mrs Mary Ann Jordan too, was a butcher based on St John's Road. Miss Louisa Scarrott ran a fishmonger's on St Mary's Butts, while Mrs Sarah Withers was a corn merchant who ran her business from a larger premises comprising of two adjacent buildings on London Street. Mrs Sarah Foxley, who worked from Silver Street, was listed as a chimney sweeper.
Women were equally involved in the education in the town. Miss Fanny Alder was a professor of music, based at a premises on Oxford Road, which she shared with Miss Emily Jane Alder, likely a relative, perhaps a sister. Nearby was a ladies' school run by Miss Annie Cane on Oxford Road, with Miss Sarah Wells running another ladies' school just a few doors down. Other schools were dotted around the town run by women - in Addington Road, Jesse Terrace and London Road. Miss Vincent ran a Nursing Home for Invalid Ladies on Brownlow Road.
Queen's Road was where you'd venture out if you needed a hat - a number of women ran milliners along this road in 1883, including Mary Marshall and Emma Settle. Along the same road were dress makers, including Rose Partridge and Esther Newman. Other women worked as corset makers and stay makers, while Emily Cripps was a straw bonnet maker on Oxford Road. Reading was certainly somewhere you could find everything needed for a well-dressed Victorian lady - or child; Jane and Frances Dowling had a shop described as a 'juvenile outfitters' on Oxford Road.
Other women ran shops as tobacconists, beer retailers, grocers, bakers and fruiterers. It was good to see some women-run taverns and pubs too. Mrs Sarah Pontin ran The George Hotel in 1883, while Jane Scearse is listed as the owner of The Greyhound at Mount Pleasant. Mrs Mary Elizabeth George was the owner of a large hotel on Friar Street, while Ellen Kinzett ran The Red Lion on Southampton Street.
There was also a strong presence of businesswomen at Smelly Alley, or as you probably known it, Union Street. The small pedestrian cutway that leads from Broad Street to Friar Street has been called Smelly Alley by locals for its fishmonger, butcher and fruit and vegetable shops that existed there until not long ago. In 1883 Hester Boxall ran a basket warehouse there, while Mary Hinman was a tobacconist. Mrs Sarah Porro had a confectioner's shop, and Mary Ann Warren was a wardrobe dealer. The alley's links with fishmongers goes right back to this year, with Mrs Mary Cook operating a fishmonger's shop at 9 Union Street, next to Sarah Porro's confectioner's.
We also see some women sharing business premises with a family member or partner. Annie B. Butler is described as a professor of painting and drawing and worked at 9 St Mary's Butts. She shared the premises with portrait painter and photographer Edward Butler. She is not described as married, something the register took great pains to record, and so perhaps Edward was a father, brother or cousin. Similarly, Mrs Mary Metcalf, a milliner also at St Mary's Butts, shared her premises with Arthur Brown Metcalf, a tobacconist.
The Kelly's Directory of 1883 shows that women worked in a variety of sectors and provided products and services to the town's community towards the end of the Victorian era. They lived through issues such as the dawn of women's suffrage, celebrations for the Queen's Jubilee and the day to day challenges of dealing with customers, importing and making stock and running errands of their own. The details given are not only valuable in that they are from a reliable source - the directory provided a list of businesses the Victorian resident could contact for service and their address - but because they provide traces of a community of women linked by trade and geography. Multiple female-led businesses appear on different streets, most notably on Oxford Road, Queen's Road, London Street and Caversham Road. They would have turned to one another for support, information and shared customers. Some may even had considered each other competitors. Women were certainly not idle or restricted to the home in Victorian Britain, and this directory provides an intriguing and nostalgic snapshot of life for a woman in nineteenth-century Reading.
Liked this? You might also like my other posts about Reading, or The Stone Heads of Reading Abbey's Gateway or even Did Queen Victoria Hate Reading? The Story of Victoria's Statue in Friar Street.
Here is a full list of the women and their businesses from the 1883 Kelly's Directory, which may be useful for those tracing their family histories.
Source:
Kelly's Directory of Berkshire, Bucks and Oxon, 'Reading'. Kelly's Directories Ltd, 1883, Kelly and Co, London, Getty Research Institute
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