Many objects can become a window into the past when thought of as an individual object rather than “just another old .......” A case in point is this small stoneware bottle. The bottle originated in England, and dates from the period 1817-1834 when a duty known as the Excise Tax was imposed on a number of consumer products including ink, soap and blacking. Blacking was made from the soot of lampblack, the carbon left over from the burning of lamps. It was an oily soot that tended to stick to whatever surface it was applied to, and was used for blacking the iron surfaces of stoves, and for polishing boots. Blacking came in two forms, liquid and paste. The liquid was sold in bottles such as mine. The paste was sold in round flat tins, similar to the containers still used for shoe polish.
Famously, Charles Dickens went to work in 1823 at the age of twelve in a blacking factory in London after his father was sent to prison for debt. He told his biographer, John Forster, what it was like to work in such a factory:
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages.
Could Dickens have dressed up my bottle as a child? Perhaps. Obviously nobody knows, but many children such as he worked in appalling conditions. Child labor was still very much the norm in early Victorian England, and it took the work of many people, including Dickens, to make the public aware of this injustice. The textile industry was probably the largest to employ child labor, with thousands of children employed in tying up loose ends and often losing hands or fingers in the process. Child labor laws were slow in their evolution. A Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer allowed to work. That seems like small comfort to our modern eyes.
Child labor is still present in much of the world. Unless a consumer is willing to do research on the origin of products that they buy they may not know that the clothing their are wearing might have been made in a sweatshop in Southeast Asia, for instance. The buyers of boot blacking in Victorian England probably didn’t give a second thought as to how their shoe polish was produced, so they bought it with a clear conscience.
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