The London Journal

A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present

ISSN: 0305-8034 (Print) 1749-6322 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yldn20

A Little Enterprise of her Own: Lodging-house

Keeping and the Accommodation Business in
Nineteenth-century London
Alison C. Kay
To cite this article: Alison C. Kay (2003) A Little Enterprise of her Own: Lodging-house Keeping
and the Accommodation Business in Nineteenth-century London, The London Journal, 28:2,
41-53, DOI: 10.1179/ldn.2003.28.2.41
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/ldn.2003.28.2.41

Published online: 18 Jul 2013.

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Download by: [82.12.11.240]

Date: 29 July 2016, At: 11:39

A Little Enterprise of her Own:

Lodging-house Keeping and the
Accommodation Business in
Nineteenth-century London
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ALISON C. KAY
Although many nineteenth-century commentators argued that a woman's proper
place was in the home, family finances were often insufficient to render such rhetoric a reality. Consequently, many women worked and in a metropolis like London,
where small business dominated the economic landscape, many became selfemployed or proprietors of small enterprises. Their ventures varied in size and
nature and were often carried on from a converted outhouse or a downstairs front
room in the home. What they all had in common was the negotiation of the public
and private space around them. This paper focuses on those women who did not just
carry on a business from home but actually turned their homes into a business.
Although, it has long been recognised that many women took up the business of
school keeping from within the safety of the four walls of their home, the provision
of accommodation and associated services has received far less attention from historians. Yet, it was acknowledged by contemporaries to be a suitable and respectable
method for women to generate an income due to its perceived proximity to the
domestic sphere. Some women let only a room, others a whole house. Some engaged
in other activities at the same time, others dedicated all their energies into making
their accommodation business profitable. This paper seeks to shed more light on
such women, beginning with the lodging-house keepers.
Genteel Lodging House Keepers
Large scale migration to nineteenth-century cities created a pressing need for suitable lodgings and it was argued that capable persons were needed to keep the
overflowing houses of accommodation in order.1 In mid-century, London women
out-numbered men to a significant degree. Between the ages of 20 and 40 there were
119 women to every 100 men of this age. Those between 40 and 60 years of age
exceeded men by 116 to 100 and those aged between 60 and 80 by 137 to 100.2 This
excess of women over men was said to be felt particularly strongly among the middleclass, an extremely broad social group, stretching far up and down the income scale.
At the same time, there was an increasing recognition that many middle-class
women needed employment, particularly those from the lower middle class,
including tradespeople, clerks, teachers and other poorly paid professionals.
'Women of education', it was suggested, could undertake the management and
Londonjourna128, (2),2003

42

ALISON C. KAY

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working of houses, providing clean accommodation, wholesome food, and the

'atmosphere of refinement' which the presence of ladies would ensure.3 'Why should
not women avail themselves of this combination of circumstances to develop a little
enterprise?' asked Elizabeth Kingsbury in 1884. In this way, lodging-house keeping,
she argued, would cure the enforced idleness of the daughters of the middle-class,
'decayed gentlewomen truly' consumed by the 'dry rot' of unused energy.4 It could
provide a suitable outlet for those female talents that 'find their proper sphere in
business'.5 She continued 'Though they are young in years they are old in helplessness and despondency, for many faculties of the greatest importance to the
individual, and to the race, only come into play in the struggle with difficulties which
self-maintenance involves.'6 It was a 'woman's business', she argued, to enable all
people to attain to the human rights of physical comfort and mental culture:
It is her duty to save the masses from the too great strain that is now put upon
them, by taking a fair share of the world's labour upon herself, it is her privilege
to resign the luxury of the body and to claim the luxury of the soul, her glory to
renounce the position of receiver and to claim the nobler place of the giver.7
Kingsbury was not alone, or the first, to petition for women's right and need to work.
Not all its inhabitants could afford to 'keep' a non-working wife or daughter and not
all daughters married. As Elizabeth Wolstenholme warned in 1869:
You who have daughters, wives and sisters, whom you guard tenderly from
present evils, take care that you are not preparing for them graver evils when
you are no longer able to provide for them ... If your affection be anything more
than that common form of selfishness which considers women as the mere playthings of men, you will look further into the future than you have yet done, and
will prepare differently for the days which may come to all, which will come to
many of your dear ones.8
However, such demands were often tempered by concerns about defining suitable
jobs for women, those that would not detract from their respectability. AsJ. D. Milne
wrote in 1857:
A woman in the middle ranks, when cast on her own exertions, has two courses
before her. Either she may endeavour to gain the means of subsistence in a way
in some measure fitting her previous station in life; or, unable to do this, she
may leave that status to join the ranks below.9
Well before Kingsbury, commentators promoted the provision of accommodation
as a suitable survival strategy for such women. At the turn of the century, Pricilla
Wakefield had argued that daughters of tradesmen could tum their hands to. 'the
management of public houses for the reception of travellers, labourers and the
single'.10 Regarded as not only domestic in nature but also involving an element of
moral guidance, lodging-house keeping enabled women to earn a living without
compromising their social position. II This notion that women had a unique moral
mission to perform was popular with anti-feminists as well as feminists. Its ideological
function was highly ambiguous. In the hands of anti-feminists, it usually served
merely to buttress sentimental dogmas of domestic womanhood. Among feminists it
led to a celebration of female moral superiority, which jostled uneasily with arguments against the concept of an innate femininity.12 The two ideas sometimes found

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A LITILE ENTERPRlSE OF HER OWN

43

expression in the same piece of writing, as is the case with Kingsbury's piece. Such
attempts displayed an unresolved tension between the desire to minimise sexual
difference and the need to re-assert it in women's favour.
However, the provision of boarding and lodging represented a conundrum it
itself. Although it replicated the feminine model of the woman carrying out
domestic tasks in her home, gentility was increasingly associated with privacy. Hence,
letting rooms could be perceived as resulting in a loss of status. In the words of
Davidoff, privacy was necessary for genteel status because it kept the family free from
the taint of the marketplace. In addition, the provision of boarding and lodging was
a gendered activity. The term 'landlord' meant to own property and collect rent,
whereas to be a 'landlady' was interpreted as providing rooms and services for cash.
According to Davidoff, the contradictions inherent in the characteristics of lodging
meant that the relationship of landladies and lodgers was problematic, especially in
the provision of personal services. Basic services seem to have included attendance,
light and firing. The former included services such as cleaning, carrying water and
coal, emptying slops such as waste water and chamber pots, making fires, and
running errands. There was 'a certain ambiguity' involved in extracting payment for
such services that would often have been provided by mothers, wives and other
female relatives.I3
As an extension of domestic management, lodging-house keeping, could be
learned within the family home.I4Yet even in lodging-house keeping, monies earned
needed to exceed expenses paid and some amount of capital would have been
required to set-up in business on a sufficient scale to ensure adequate revenue.
However, Kingsbury allayed her readers' concerns by pointing out the futility of
money spent 'about toilets, entertainments and the various expenses incurred in the
attempt to "establish" girls' .15 Rather, she argued investment in a lodging house
would provide greater security. Furthermore, she reasoned: 'if ordinary intelligence
were brought to bear in the management, a fair percentage might be confidently
looked for' .16
In order to obtain some measure of the number of women engaged in lodginghouse keeping in the nineteenth-century we can turn to London's most comprehensive trade directory, the Post Office Directory.I7 So that comparisons could be made with
other sources, the years 1851 and 1871 were selected. Although such directories do
not provide a complete picture, particularly of married businesswomen whose trades
were often recorded under the name of their husbands, they can provide a valuable
insight to female entrepreneurship.
The 1851 Post Office Directory contained 762 lodging houses and female proprietors were identifiable for 401 of these. Constituting 52.6 per cent of all the lodginghouse keepers listed in this year, the proportion of women in this trade came
second only to the proportion engaged in millinery - 80.2 per cent of those listed
(n=801 women). In 1871, some 1,401 lodging houses were listed, 40.4 per cent of
which had a female proprietor (n=566). As Walton argued in his study of Blackpool
landladies:
For the widow and the deserted wife, in particular, but often also for the spinster, becoming a landlady was the outcome of a very limited range of choices,
and women on their own were very much more likely to be pushed into the business lest worse befall, than to seek upward mobility through it. IS

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44

ALISON C. KAY

In London, the listings suggest that 59.6 per cent of lodging-house proprietors
may have been male. This is undoubtedly an overestimate as many proprietors were
listed without a title or first name and so it is impossible to distinguish their gender.
Walton's analysis of the 1871 census returns for Blackpool revealed only three
unmarried men as lodging-house keepers. Certainly in the seaside resort, lodginghouse! keeping was a woman's business, whether married or single.19 Entries also
were often listed in the London Post Office by surname only, particularly for partnerships, and therefore underestimate the proportion of married couples responsible
for the listed 'houses of accommodation' in the metropolis. Some clearly were
husbapd and wife partnerships: for example, the surviving trade card of Mr and Mrs
Joslan1d promoted their commercial and private establishment, Providence House,
situated near the Royal Exchange.2o However, without record linkage, it is impossible
to distover how many of these establishments were run in partnership with or solely
by a wife. Furthermore, although 80 per cent of the female lodging-house keepers
were described as 'Mrs' in the 1851 and 1871 listings respectively (n=452 and 324),
without record linkage it is impossible to estimate the proportions of women who
were still married or widowed. It is also difficult to know how many of the marital
status prefixes reflected the true situation for women. Inviting paying strangers into
your home represented a challenge to a woman's respectability, particularly if she
was unmarried. The term 'Mrs' communicated a certain level of propriety and so
conferred some protection to the reputation of the lodging-house keeper and of
course of her establishment.
In order to gain a further insight to female lodging-house keepers we can turn to
fire insurance records. By the Victorian period it was not unusual for property
owners to insure their home, private and business assets. In London the habit of
taking out insurance was more widespread than elsewhere and aggregate insured
values had reached over 400 million by the 1860s.21 The policy registers of the Sun
Fire Office, one of London's largest insurers, have survived and contain valuable
information about properties and their contents. Details of owners, tenants, partners, executors, occupations and places of residence were frequently recorded.
Contents, including livestock, books and clothing, were usually specified and many
policies contain details of the buildings themselves, including the numbers of storeys
and rooms, and construction materials. Of course it is difficult to estimate how many
women chose not to insure their domestic assets whether used in private or business capacity, such as lodging-house keeping. Perhaps some were less risk adverse or
had alternative means of insurance such as that provided by family members.
However, it seems likely that women who took up lodging-house keeping would have
been likely to purchase insurance in order to protect the very means of supporting
themselves.
Analysis of the Sun Fire's London registers (which contain only new policies and
renewals with substantial changes) reveals that women were active consumers of fire
insurance. In the registers for 1851 and 1861 women took out around 10 per cent of
all the policies. Some 20 per cent of their 2,289 policies were taken out to cover business assets (See Table 1). These policies reflected a wide range of occupations but
half covered assets for just ten trades, including that of victualler and coffee-house
keeper. (See Table 2) .22 For example, Esther Goatley, widow-proprietor of the coffee
rooms at 37 Bermondsey Street, accommodated five lodgers, in addition to two sons,
a son-in-law and a daughter.23 Victuallers and coffee-house keepers like Esther

45

A LITfLE ENTERPRISE OF HER OWN

Table 1. Provision of policies held by women with the Sun Fire Office (private and business assets)

Year

Total number
of policies

Per cent of policies

held by women

Per cent of women s

policies covering
business assets (stock,
utensils & fixtures)

Per cent of women s

policies covering
private assets

1851
1861

10,303
12,584

10.3
9.8

19.1
20.4

80.9
79.6

Source: Sun Fire Office Registers, series 11,936, Guildhall Library

Table 2. The most frequently occurring

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Ranking

trades in policies covering business assets ('the common trades')

1851

1861

Percent

Percent

Milliner and Dressmaker

29.1

Milliner and Dressmaker

Chandler

14.6

Coffee-House

Haberdasher

11.7

Victualler

Victualler

5
6
7

and Hosier

Keeper

27.3
11.6
10.7

9.7

Linen Draper

9.9

Grocer and Greengrocer

8.7

Laundry Keeper

9.9

Coffee-House

5.8

Grocer and Greengrocer

8.3

Clothier

4.9

Chandler

7.4

Linen Draper

4.9

Stationer

5.0

Stationer

4.9

Tobacconist

10
Total

Tobacconist

4.9
103

Haberdasher

Keeper

5.0
and Hosier

5.0
121

Source: Sun Fire Office Registers, series 11,936, Guildhall Library

usually provided accommodation of some description and both these trades were
popular options for metropolitan women (See Table 2). Another example is illustrated in Figure 1 which shows the trade card of Rose Clinch, who offered 'genteel
accommodation for gentlemen and families' from her tavern on the Strand.
The insurance registers, however, contain no examples of female policy holders
engaged specifically in lodging-house keeping, largely because their business assets
were essentially the same as their private assets - a dwelling house, furniture, mirrors,
and books - the quality of which depended on the type of establishment. To find
examples of female lodging house keepers who had taken the trouble to insure their
property, therefore, we have to examine policies covering private assets. These
provided 25 cases of women who described themselves as lodging or boarding house
keepers in 1851 or 1861.
Of the 25 lodging-house keepers in the 1851 and 1861 Sun Fire registers, only six
were included in the London Post Office Directory listings.24 These included Mrs Wilby
of 44 Watling Street; Mrs Peters Brotherson of 17 and 18 Francis Inn, Holborn; Miss
Johnstone of 16 Norfolk Street, Strand; and Mrs Sheppard of 7 Arundell Street,
Strand. All these women held substantial insurance policies valued between 800 and
1,500.25 The other lodging-house keepers who were insured but were not recorded
in the Post Office Directory held policies valued between 150 and 600.

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46

ALISON C. KAY

Figure 1. Trade card of Rose Clinch.

Source: Heal Collection, London Guildhall Library, 1.104. Updated. By kind permission of
the G~ildhall Library, Corporation of London.

This suggests two things. First, trade directories tended to include larger establishments on the better streets in the better parts of town. In the 1851 London Post Office
Directory some 60 female lodging-house keepers, about 15 per cent of the total, operated in or around the Strand. None of the lodging houses listed as operated by
women were located in south London and only 22 gave addresses in the east or
north. In 1851 and 1861, central and western districts, including Marylebone,
accounted for 44 per cent and 47 per cent of proprietors respectively.26 In contrast,
the lodging-house keepers located in the Sun Fire registers were distributed more
widely, although the numbers were far smaller. In 1851 central and western districts
accounted for 16 of the 24 lodging houses recorded, northern districts five and the
rest of London only three.27 This suggests that while a significant proportion of
women operated from the more respectable parts of London, others could be found
elsewhere, catering not for tourists and fine gentlemen and ladies but for a distinctly
local clientele with a more limited budget.
The second issue raised by the directory and insurance evidence is the suggestion
that many establishments run by women were small and probably relied on word-ofmouth rather than an entry in a directory as a way of advertising their existence. The
directories themselves, therefore, cannot alone be relied on to provide a complete
picture of women in this business. Indeed, the 1851 census occupational tables for
London recorded 2,741 women engaged in lodging-house keeping, compared to 403
in the Post Office Directory. Although the census figure also included 'apprentices,
assistants, and other persons employed subordinately' (and hence is not an accurate
enumeration of actual London lodging-house keepers), the actual number is still

47

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A LITILE ENTERPRISE OF HER OWN

likely to be higher than in the directory, particularly as a further 711 women were
recorded in the census as being engaged in the separate category of 'others boarding and lodging' .28
Where the insurance registers come into their own, however, is the evidence they
contain on the value of property and assets.29 According to Cockerell and Green, it is
unlikely that the figures contained in the policy registers represent overvaluations.
The tension between the insurer's desire for maximum available premiums but not
over-evaluated payouts, and the policyholder's wish to avoid loss by under-evaluation
but reluctance to pay excess premiums, ensured that valuations were ordinarily
realistic.30 The lowest value policy held by a lodging-house keeper was 100 and the
highest 1,500. However, as illustrated in Table 3, averaged over the two years, the
proportion of the women insuring assets below 300, between 300 and 499, and
between 500 and 999 was roughly similar. A much smaller percentage insured
assets above 1,000 in value and in all such cases the policies were taken out in 1851,
the year of the Great Exhibition. It seems plausible that in this year, a number of
women opened up their otherwise private homes to paying guests for a brief period
when there was a particularly high demand for accommodation. This highlights the
flexible and accessible nature of this business and that not all women involved in
providing lodging were victims of circumstance. Indeed, some were obviously opportunists taking advantage of the massive number of visitors to London in that year. For
example, the 1851 trade card of Miss Killick, reveals that not only did she create a
hierarchy of bedrooms with corresponding staggered pricing but that she charged
extra for more than one person in the room. In addition, male guests were charged
Is. more than female guests for attendance and linen.31
Table 3. Insurance valuations of female lodging-house

1851
1861
1851 and 1861

keepers (per cent)

Below 300

300-499

500-999

1,000+

20.0
33.3
28.0

20.0
40.0
32.0

30.0

26.7

30.0
0.0
12.0

28.0

Source: Sun Fire Office Registers, series 11,936, Guildhall Library

The Sun Fire policies can be linked with the census enumeratorg' returns to reveal
more about the personal circumstances of these lodging-house keepers.32 Nominal
linkage of this nature can furnish information about whether the proprietor was the
head of the household, her marital status and age, whether she had children, servants and live-in employees and the size of her household. This information can also
be compared with the characteristics of female insurers engaged in other trades, in
this case those 'common trades' discussed above that were listed most frequently on
the policies of women who insured business assets with the Sun Fire in 1851 and
1861. Many women who provided lodgings also combined this with other business
activities - of the 456 London women who held policies covering business assets with
the Sun Fire in 1851 and 1861, 180 were successfully located in the census and 18 per
cent of them had at least one lodger in their household. Occasionally if space
permitted they could squeeze in more.
Despite problems of tracing individuals in the census, it was possible to link 13
lodging-house keepers, about half the total, who were also recorded as having taken

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48

ALISON C. KAY

out an insurance policy with Sun Fire. In the absence of other detailed evidence, this
small sample provides a valuable insight to the homes of nineteenth-century female
lodging-house keepers and can help build a more detailed and varied picture of the
lives and circumstances of these women.
The linkage revealed that over three-quarters of lodging-house keepers and
women who insured business assets in the common trades were the head of their
household. The remaining lodging-house keepers consisted of two daughters of
elderly mothers and one woman who was married to the household head. Therefore
it would seem that all of the linked lodging-house keepers will have been heavily
involved in the decision as to whether to open up their homes to paying guests.
However, in contrast to women in the common trades, over half the lodging-house
keepers were spinsters compared to just over a quarter for the other occupations. By
contrast, it was relatively rare for a widow to be involved. Nearly two thirds of those
involved in the common trades were widows, compared to just under 40 per cent for
lodging-house keepers. The proportion of married women in either group was
~mall. This pain ts a differen t picture than that portrayed in the London Post Office
Directory listings, in which married or widowed women made up 80 per cent of
female proprietors. Perhaps, spinsters were more likely to run the smaller establishments at a further distance from the major thoroughfares and were therefore less
likely to make it into the directory listings. Kingsbury's 1884 suggestion that lodginghouse keeping could be a suitable activity for the unmarried woman was really a
reinforcement for what was already the case in London at mid-century.
However, although spinster-proprietors predominated amongst the lodging-house
keepers of the Sun Fire Office, in the 1850s and 1860s this was seemingly not an
occupation into which they stepped on coming of age. Indeed, only one spinster in
this study was below 40 years of age and she was not the head of the household. The
linked lodging-house keepers ranged from 30 to 53 years of age, a much narrower
range than that found for women engaged in the most common trades - 19 to 84
years old. This suggests that lodging-house keeping was an activity taken up once a
sufficient income had been generated from an alternative source, perhaps from an
inheritance or possibly from another trade. Alternatively, perhaps this was the best
option for middle-aged women who found themselves unsupported and without
specialist training. Similarly, it was often asserted that women thrown on their own
resources who then engaged in business seldom did so alone and often combined
with their sisters. Whilst this clearly did happen it does not seem to have been
common amongst female lodging-house keepers. The insurance records contain
only two cases of sisters operating a lodging-house together. However, there was also
one further case of female cousins in business together and two proprietors resided
with elderly mothers. Nonetheless, at about a third of the total sample, the proportion combining with a sister was higher than for the proprietors engaged in the most
common trades, in which about 11 per cent were found to be sharing a trade with a
sister or sister-in-law, usually a needle trade. In addition, women sometimes set up
with non-relatives, as hinted at by the trade card of Mrs Wood and Mrs Wormall's of
Finsbury although no such examples were found among the cases extracted from the
Sun Fire registers.33
It has been suggested that making a home into a business was a good means of
balancing income and childcare needs. In her study of Midwestern US women,
Murphy found that motherhood
may well have encouraged women to seek

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A LITTLE ENTERPRISE OF HER OWN

49

self-employment or small business proprietorship opportunities.34 The desire for

additional income but the need for flexibility in hours and effort made self employment attractive to mothers or guardians of young children. In addition, as children
grew in size and increased in dexterity they could be incorporated into the enterprise, creating more household revenue and so~ytng s~il~-car~ ~r~p~em~. ~n ~hl~
study, the one married lodging-house keeper and two of the five widow-proprietors
had children under the age of 14 living in their household. However, the existence
of children in the lodging-keeper's households was relatively rare since the majority
of female proprietors were spinsters.
Although many lodging-house keepers were single, they were not necessarily alone
in their endeavours. Two widows and the married proprietor had children over the
age of 14 residing with them, three out of four of which were female. They will
almost certainly have assisted their mothers in the running of the lodging house.
Indeed, one of these daughters was recorded in the census as 'employed in house'.
However, because so many female lodging keepers were single, they tended to rely
on the help of others and probably for this reason it was more common for them to
have employed residential servants. All but one of the 10 lodging-house servants
noted in the record linkage was female and for many the work was exceptionally
arduous. Indeed, it was suggested at the time that the lowest form of domestic service
was the 'slavery' in a lodging house and this was often the fate of young girls from
workhouses or orphanages.35
Not surprisingly, the lodging-houses examined here varied considerably in size
and character. A little about the nature of the Sun Fire establishments can be gauged
by examining their visitors as recorded on census night. The number of guests varied
from as little as two people up to nine in one case. Some were devoted to providing
accommodation for the spinster fundholders. This was the case with Cesilia Ruedi's
establishment on Cambridge Terrace.36 Others, such as Anne VVhite on William
Street and Elizabeth Warmsley on Grafton Street, catered for a clientele that was
predominantly young and unmarried.3? More distinguished guests crossed the
threshold of 35 year-old Cassandra Wilby's lodging-house at 44 Watling Street in the
City, which, judging by the insurance policy which valued the premises at 1,150, was
a substantial affair.38 Her visitors included three married men, two of which were
merchants, and one unmarried woman, a 35 year-old annuitant called Margaret
Heel. By contrast, a 43 year-old married proprietor called Rebecca Darnell, who
insured her house at 4a Angel Alley in Whitechapel for 150, had a much younger
clientele, all of whom were aged below 30 and none of which were recorded by name
or occupation, hinting at a more transient set of customers.39
Low Lodging-House Keepers
The Angel Alley lodging-house raises the spectre of the 'low' lodging-house - the
type of establishment that most certainly did not make it into the London Post Office
Directory. Henry Mayhew estimated that there were at least 200 or so of these low
lodging-houses in London.4o Such places relied on more localised forms of advertising with which to signify their existence. According to Mayhew, a few of the better
off houses posted up small billheads, inviting the attention of prospective lodgers 'by
laudations of the cleanliness, good beds, abundant water and "gas all night", to be

50

ALISON C. KAY

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met with.'41 Others, relied on signage on the front of the house or 'Lodgings for
Travellers' painted on a shutter.
Though not genteel, such places could nevertheless be profitable. These establishments were referred to as 'low' by contemporaries because of the small charge for
lodging or by virtue of the character of their customers. They catered for a lower
class of visitor, migrants newly arrived to the capital, the disreputable, the transient
and, in many cases, prostitutes.42 A report published in 1850 stated that 'The question was never asked, when a man and woman go to a lodging house, whether they
are man and wife... I have known the bedding to be unchanged for three months ...
They are all infested with vermin, I never met with exception ...'43Such low lodgings
were usually over-crowded and often found in the worst districts, both of which, it
was argued, held particular moral danger for newcomers to the city. In 1847 Lord
Shaftesbury commented:
The astonishment and perplexities of a young person on his arrival here, full of
good intentions to live honestly, would be almost ludicrous, were they not the
prelude to such mournful results. He alights - and is instantly directed, for the
best accommodation, to Duck Lane, St Gile's, Saffron Hill, Spitalfields, or
Whitechapel. .He reaches the indicated region through tight avenues of glittering fish and rotten vegetables, with doorways or alleys gaping on either side which, if they be not choked with squalid garments or sickly children, lead the
eye through an almost interminable vista of filth and distress ...The pavement,
where there is any, rugged and broken, is bespattered with dirt of every hue,
ancient enough to rank with the fossils, but offensive as the most recent
deposits. The houses, small, low, and mournful, present no one part, in
windows, door-posts, or brickwork, that seems fitted to stand for another week rags and hurdles stuff up the panes, and defend the passages blackened with use
and by the damps arising from the undrained and ill-ventilated recesses. Yet
each one affects to smile with promise, and invites the country-bumpkin to the
comfort and repose of 'Lodgings for single men'. 44
Lord Shaftesbury's Act of 1851 placed the registration, inspection, cleansing and
limitation of overcrowding in these establishments in the hands of the Metropolitan
Police. In a further act of the same year, also sponsored by Shaftesbury, local authorities were empowered to buy, lease or build lodging-houses. Yet the adoption of this
power was extremely limited, leaving the private lodging-houses to dominate until
much later in the century.45
Starting a low lodging-house was not a costly matter and returns could be great.
Besides taxes, and rent if the lodging-house keeper did not own the property, the
principal expenditure was on coals and gas. In some of the better houses, blacking,
brushes, and razors were supplied, without charge. Newspapers were commonly
available and sometimes pen and ink, and soap, though this was the exception in low
lodgings. In some places a charge of a halfpenny was made for hot water but more
often it was included in the night's rent, or was not available.46 Mayhew estimated
that the average takings of lodging-house keepers was about 17s 6d a night. Henderson has brought to light the case of Mrs Cummins, the owner of lodging-houses in
St Giles. Her houses contained over 100 beds for which she charged as much as 18d
to 2s per hour. This was high and probably derived from the reputation her establishments possessed for protecting the customers of prostitutes from the risk of robbery.

51

A LITfLE ENTERPRISE OF HER OWN

Nevertheless, Henderson argues the keepers of quite ordinary houses were able to
demand hugely inflated rents from the prostitutes who lodged with them.47

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Conclusion
This article has drawn attention to one of the ways in which women, including those
from the lower middle class and other social strata, managed to make an independent
living. There were, of course, other ways, as Davidoff and Hall have pointed out,
including rents, which provided a living to those who wished for a genteel competence not requiring active intervention.48 However, at the risk of endangering genteel
status, the provision of lodgings to one or more customers allowed metropolitan
women to obtain an income without leaving the sanctity of their home. Financially, it
could help a woman to retain her own residence, whilst socially it could extend her
network of acquaintances and business contacts. By doing so within the confines of
her own home, there was a chance that respectability could be maintained.
Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that this activity took a woman into the
public sphere. The existence of such establishments run by women represented not
only their negotiation of public and private space but also challenged the private
sphere of home as the respectable, gilded cage of womanhood. Although the provision of accommodation was often presented by contemporaries as an extension of
domestic activity, in reality it required many of the skills common to business generally. An establishment suitable to the proprietor's available capital and space had to
be set up, it had to be promoted in the right circles, staff needed to be located and
managed and additional familial help drafted in, appropriate and satisfactory services needed to be supplied to the lodgers and payment had to be collected. A head
for business was as vital as good housekeeping skills. Women who opened their
houses to paying guests did not always get paid and could find their livelihoods
pawned along with their furniture and bedding with the guest nowhere to be
found.49 These risks multiplied for the woman who set up an entire 'house ofaccommodation'. Furthermore, while many women set-up in the accommodation business,
what was more difficult was making the establishment pay. As Walton found of the
Blackpoollandladies, the transition from keeping a lodging-house to being kept by it
was difficult and uncertain of attainment.5o Nonetheless, the number of women who
engaged in lodging-house keeping in the mid-decades of the century attests that this
was a popular avenue for women in London well before Kingsbury waxed lyrical
about its social, moral and financial benefits. However, these women were not all
young and should not be regarded as victims of circumstance. They took advantage
of their varied means and training, the buoyant demand for lodging space and the
flexible nature of its supply, to turn their private sphere into a public one and their
homes into businesses.
NOTES
This paper is based on research undertaken from the author's
'Marry - Stitch - Die - or Do Worse': Female self-employment
torship in London c.1740-1880, University of Oxford, 2003.
the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged.
1. P. Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex

unpublished DPhil thesis:

and small business proprieThe financial assistance of
(1798), 170.

52

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2.

ALISON C. KAY

Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1852-1853,

LXXXVIII, Part 1; PP 1852-1853
XXVII,
Accounts and Papers, xxvii.
3. E. Kingsbury, Work/or Women (London, 1884),72-73.
4. ibid. 115.
5. ibid. 73.
6. ibid. 115.
7. ibid. 185-186.
8. E. Wolstenholme, 'The Education of Girls, its Present and its Future', inJ. E. Butler (ed.),
Women's Work and Women's Culture. A Series o/Essays (London, 1869),330.
9. J. D. Milne, Industrial and Social Position 0/ Women in the Middle and Lower Ranks (London,
1857),129.
10. Wakefield, Reflections, 170.
11. ibid. 72.
12. B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1983),
30-31.
13. L. Davidoff, 'The separation of home and work? Landladies and lodgers in nineteenth
and twentieth century England', in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work/or Women (1979), 70, 82, 90.
14. ibid. 83.
15. ibid. 85.
16. ibid. 74.
17. The London Post Office Directory was first published in 1800. It was acquired by Frederic
Kelly in 1836 and in 1841 it adopted the form which it retained up to its final issue in
1991. It contained the following sections: Commercial (an alphabetical list of traders),
Trades (a classified list of traders), Court (an alphabetical list of the wealthier private residents), and Streets (a list of those appearing in the previous sections, arranged by street
and house number).
18. J. K. Walton, The Blackpool Landlady. A Social History (Manchester, 1978), 85.
19. ibid. 86.
20. London Guildhall Trade Card Collection, Box 15, Hub-Jon. Dated 1853.
21. H. A. L. Cockerell and E. Green, The British Insurance Business (Sheffield, 1994), 40.
22. Keepers of hotels and public houses are under-represented due to the overlap between
private and business assets.
23. Esther Goatley: FRO, RD 26,27,29 RG 9/323 41 (back), Sun Fire 724/ 19531426.
24. The directory for 1861 is missing from the British Library's collections. The 1862 directory has been used instead.
25. Mrs Wilby, Sun Fire Office Policy Registers, Vol. 648 / Policy No. 1658377; Mrs Peters
Brotherson, Sun Fire 650 / 1664891; MissJohnstone, Sun Fire 651 / 1662138; Mrs Sheppard, Sun Fire 651 / 1651463.
26. Five streets accounting for 14 proprietors (3.5 per cent) could not be located. The
following was used to locate addresses: The A to Z o/Victorian London (London Topographical Society, 1987), index of place names. It is based on Bacon's Atlas of 1888. In the 1851
Post Office Directory a total of 175 female lodging house keepers was recorded and in
1861 the figure was 190.
27. One street could not be located.
28. PP 1852-1853, LXXXVIII, Part 1, Accounts and Papers. Census 0/ Great Britain, 1851 Occupations of the People, Division 1, London.
29. Assets include dwelling house and/or household goods and fixtures. Only two policies,
both from 1861, had more than one policyholder. In both cases, the additional persons
were female and shared the same surname as the main policyholder: Christiana Edwards
and Henrietta Edwards, Sun Fire 720 / 1955596; Caroline Ward and Maria Ward, Sun
Fire 722 / 1950662.
30. Cockerell and Green, The British Insurance Business, 50.

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A LITILE ENTERPRISE OF HER OWN

53

31. London Guildhall Trade Card Collecton, Box 16,Jor-Lav. Dated 1859.
32. Although the census only provides a snap shot of a household on one day of the year.
This remains the most detailed information available. Census linkage on the proprietors
active in the ten most common trades for 1851 / 1861 had a 57.6 per cent combined
success rate.
33. London Guildhall Trade Card Collection, Box 31, Woo-Yoo. Undated.
34. L. Eldersveld Murphy, 'Business Ladies: Midwestern women and enterprise, 1850-1880'
in M. A, Yeager (ed.), Women in Business Vol.II (Cheltenham, 1999), 71.
35. Davidoff, 'The separation of home and work', 89.
36. Cesilia Ruedi, Family Record Office (FRO), RD 1 RG 9/9 79 (front) and Sun Fire, 726 /
1971258.
37. Anne White, FRO, RD 9 RG 9/95 93 (front) and Sun Fire, 718 / 1958894; Elizabeth
Warmsley, FRO, RD 9 RG 9 / 103 12 (back) and 13 (front) and Sun Fire, 717 / 1955030.
38. Cassandra Wilby, FRO, RD 19 HO 107 / 1530 211 (back) and Sun Fire, 648 / 1658377.
39. Rebecca Darnell, FRO, RD 22 HO 107 / 1545 202 (back) and Sun Fire, 646/ 1658584.
40. H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor. Selections made by V. Neuburg (1985),
110.
41. ibid. 112.
42. J. R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge,
1980),24.
43. Cited in R. Porter, London: a social history (1994), 268.
44. Taken from the Quarterly Review, vol. 82,1847,142-52 and quoted in F. Sheppard, London
1808-1870 (1971) 4-5.
45. ibid. 289.
46. ibid. 112-113.
47. T. Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth Century London. Prostitution and Control in the
Metropolis 1730-1830 (Essex, 1999),34.
48. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class
1780-1850 (Ln, 1987),277-278.
49. Rees provides various examples of this kind of theft in the late eighteenth century. See
S. Rees, The Floating Brothel (St Ives, 2001), 12-13.
50. Walton, The Blackpool Landlady, 85, 114.