The Strand Magazine, from which I have taken the article, was a fairly late-comer to the world of Victorian publication, with its first issue being printed in January 1891. As a bit of a collector of Victorian papers and magazines, I must admit that The Strand is an excellent little eye on the world of the late Victorian period, as it combines fiction with factual articles. Many publications from the period can be, I find, a little difficult to read if they are purely news-based. Interesting, of course, but if you don’t have a full grasp on a story, it can be a little dull reading a small portion of it, so, in many ways, since The Strand contains whole articles on various social aspects of the Victorian period, it gives a far broader view on the topics it covers – if not quite as detailed.
Before I move onto the article, I’d like to say how much I like the front cover of The Strand, which is a lovely sketch of – predictably – The Strand, in London, looking toward Mary Le Strand. This was designed by the artist George Charles Haitè. The title of the magazine is suspended from telegraph wires, zig-zagging above the thoroughfare.
Enough of the publication, and onto the article:
Child Workers in London
This article does not profess to be an exhaustive account of all the employments in which
Nothing can be harder and
drearier than the lot of little servants, employed in many cases in
lodging-houses. They are on their feet all day long, at everyone’s beck and
call, and never expected to be tired or sit down properly for a meal; the food
is of the poorest quality; they have heavy weights to drag up and down stairs
in the shape of coal-scuttles, and the inevitable strapping baby; their
sleeping apartment is as often as not a disgraceful hole, and such requisites
to health as are generally considered necessary in the shape of exercise, fresh
air, and baths are unknown quantities.
There is a strong prejudice
against the “factory girl” in many quarters, and “service” is indiscriminately
extolled as far more suitable for a respectable girl of the lower classes. It
would be, if there were any chance of the docker’s child or the coster’s child
obtaining a decent situation; but, as a matter of fact, the life of the
much-pitied match-worker is infinitely easier than that of these little
drudges. At eight o’clock the factory girl is at any rate free to get out into
the open air for a couple of hours, or to sit down and rest. The little
“general” is never free. One child told me – she was the daughter of a docker
who was the happy owner of eleven children, and was herself an under-fed,
anaemic-looking creature – that she got up at six every morning to
“make the gen’l’m’s
breakfast – it was a lodging house; after that there’s the steps, ‘ouse work,
peeling potatoes, and sich like, till dinner. I never sits down till we ‘ave a
cup o’ tea after the lodgers ‘ave ‘ad their suppers. But the missis – oh, she
is a nice, kind laidy, and she works with me, she do.”
“I suppose,” I said “you are
able to get out on Sunday’s?”
“Once a month I goes ‘ome,
but I nusses the baby on Sunday, as we ain’t so busy. ‘E’s such a beauty; I’ll
ask missis if I can bring ‘im down; ‘e can’t walk by ‘isself.”
And off darted the little
maid to the top of the house as if she were not on her thin legs from morn to
night, returning presently with a huge and well-fed baby, about three times as
fat as herself. I am bound to say this girl seemed contented, and, as
lodging-house landladies go, her mistress seemed a fairly good one; but what a
life of exhaustive and unremitting labour, even under these conditions, for a
child of thirteen; and what a life of horrors if her mistress had been a brutal
or cruel woman! The usual payment is 2s. 6d. a week, but I found in a number of
cases the girls only receive 1s., or even 9d., their mistresses deducting the
rest of their salary for the payment of the clothes which they have been
compelled to buy for them on arrival, the little servant being too often in
possession of a hat with feathers, a fur boa, and a brass locket, which, with
the garments she stands up in, form her entire outfit. A pathetic little story
was told me about a bright-faced girl I happened to come across.
“I got to know of her,” said
my informant, a lady who does much quiet good, and whose name is unknown to
newspaper readers, “last year. A friend of mine whose Sunday-school she
attended in Deptford asked me to look her up. I happened quite by chance to
call in at the coffee tavern where she was to act as a servant, a few moments after
she had arrived, and I was told I might go up to the ‘bedroom.’ Well, I wont go
into particulars about that ‘bedroom.’ It was nearly dark, and I found the poor
little soul sitting on the only available piece of furniture in the room – her
own little tin hat-box. I shall not easily forget that dazed, bewildered look
with which she met me. It was all so strange; everyone had been too busy to
attend to her, and, though she had come from a wretched home, where the playful
father had been in the habit of making her a ratget for his boot shying, still
there had been familiar faces round her. She seemed to realize in the sort of
way young people do not, as a rule, the intense loneliness of her lot; and,
when I put my arm round her she clung to me with such sobs that I could hardly
help crying too. “
Fortunately, sensitive
child-servants are tolerably rare, and I am bound to say I failed to find any
answering to this description. They were generally what one might describe as
decidedly “independent!” one girl – she was barely fifteen – told me she had
been in six places.
“Are you so fond of change?”
I asked.
“’Tain’t that so much,”
returned the young lady; “but I cant put up with ‘cheek,’ and some o’ my
missises do go on awful. ‘I says: ‘Ave yer jaw, and ‘ave done with it.’”
This certainly was rather an
awful specimen; but she could not have been very bad, as her present mistress –
who, I presume, has not up to the present “checked” her – assured me that the
girl handed over her 2s. 6d. a week regularly to her mother. This seems to be
the usual practice with the girls. Their mothers buy their clothes, and give
them a shilling on Bank Holidays and a few pence every week to spend on
themselves. A large proportion of these little drudges marry dockers and
labourers generally, and, as their training has not been exactly of the kind to
render them neat, thrifty housewives, it is perhaps not surprising that their cuisine and domestic arrangements
altogether leave much to be desired.
There is perhaps no form of
entertainment more popular amongst a large class of playgoers than that
afforded by the clever acrobat, of whose private life the public has only the
vaguest knowledge. The general impression, derived from sensational stories in
newspapers and romances, is that the profession of the gymnast is a
disreputable one, involving a constant danger of life and limb; and that young
acrobats can only be made proficient in the art by the exercise of severity and
cruelty on the part of trainers.
The actual facts are that
the owners, or, as they are called, “fathers,” of “troupes” are, in a number of
cases, respectable house-holders, who, when not travelling over Europe and
America, occupy little villas in the neighbourhood of Brixton and Clapham; that
the danger is immensely exaggerated, particularly in the case of boys, who are
always caught when they fall; and that the training and discipline need not be
any severer than that employed by a schoolmaster to enforce authority.
“Of course,” said a trainer of long experience
to me, “I sometimes get an idle boy, just as a schoolmaster gets an idle pupil,
and I have my own methods of making him work. But I would lay a heavy wager
that even a lazy lad sheds less tears in his training with me than a dull
schoolboy at a public school. I have never met with a single boy who didn’t
delight in his dexterity and muscle; and you will find acrobats as a whole
enjoy a higher average of health than any other class.”
There are no “Schools of
Gymnastics” for training acrobats in London, the regular method being that the
head of each troupe – which usually consists of five or six persons, including
one or more members of the family, the acrobatic instinct being strongly
hereditary – trains and exhibits his own little company. The earlier a boy begins,
of course, the better; and, as a general rule, the training commences at seven
or eight years old. Many of the children are taken from the very lowest dregs
of humanity, and are bound over by their parents to the owner of a troupe for a
certain number of years. The “father” undertakes to teach, feed and clothe the
boy, whilst the parents agree not to claim him for a stipulated number of
years. A boy is rarely of any good for the first couple of years, and it takes
from five to six years to turn out a finished gymnast.
“Is it true,” I asked of the
head of the celebrated “Yokohama Troupe,” “that the bones of the boy are broken
whilst young?”
Mr. Edwin Bale, who is
himself a fine specimen of the healthy trapezist, smiled pityingly at my
question, and asked me to come and watch his troupe practice. All gymnasts
practice regularly for two hours or more every day. The “Yokohama Troupe”
includes three boys, all well-fed looking and healthy, one of them being Edwin,
the fifteen-year-old son of Mr. Bale, a strikingly handsome and
finely-developed boy, who has been in the profession since he was two.
The first exercise that
young boys learn is “shoulder and legs,” which is practiced assiduously till
performed with ease and rapidity. After this comes “splits.” This exercise
looks as if it ought to be not only uncomfortable but painful; but a strong
proof that it is neither was afforded me involuntarily by one of the little boys.
He did it repeatedly for his own benefit when off duty! After this the boy
learns “flip flap,” “full spread,” and a number of intricate gymnastics with
which the public is familiar. In all these performances boys are very much in
request, partly because they are more popular with the public, and partly
because in a variety of these gymnastic exhibitions men are disqualified from
taking any part in them owing to their weight. In the figure technically known
as “full spread” (shown in illustration)
it is essential that the topmost boy shall be slightly made and light in
weight; but even under these conditions the strain on the principal “supporter”
is enormous. As regards danger, so far as I have been able to learn from a good
deal of testimony on the point, there is very little of any kind. The only
really dangerous gymnastic turn is the “somersault,” which may have serious
results, unless done with dexterity and delicacy. There is no doubt that
exercise of this kind is beneficial to the boys’ health. Several boys in
excellent condition, with well-developed muscles and chests assured me they were
often in the “’orspital” before they became acrobats.
Their improved physique is
possibly in a great measure due to the capital feeding they get, it being
obviously to the advantage of the “father” to have a robust, rosy-faced company.
Master Harris, of the “Yokohama Troupe,” informed me that he generally has meat
twice a day, a bath every evening (gymnasts are compelled by the nature of
their work to keep their skins in good condition by frequent bathing), that
Mrs. Bale was as kind to him as his own mother, and that he thought performing
“jolly.” He further informed me that he got three shillings a week for pocket
money, which was put inton the bank for him.
Another boy in the same
troupe told me he had over £9 in the bank. Of course, all companies are not so
well looked after as the boys in Mr. Bale’s troupe; but I have failed to
discover a single case where the boys seemed ill-used. Where the troupe
travelled about Europe , the lads were
exceptionally intelligent, and several of them could talk fair French of
German. A really well-equipped acrobat is nearly always sure of work, and can
often obtain as much as £30 a week, the usual payment being from £20 to £25 a
week. As a rule, the boys remain with the master who has given them their
training, and who finds it worthwhile, when they are grown up, to pay them a
good salary. A troupe gets as much as £70 or £80 a day when hired out for fetes
or public entertainments. There is one point which will possibly interest the
temperance folk, and which I must not forget. The boys have constantly before
them moderation in the persons of their elders.
“Directly an acrobat takes
to drinking,” said Mr. Bale, impressively, “he is done for. I rarely take a
glass of wine. I can’t afford to have my nerves shaky.” Altogether there are
worse methods of earning a livelihood than those of the acrobat; and a propos of this point, an instructive
little story was told me which sentimental, fussy people would do well to note.
There was a certain little lad belonging to a troupe the owner of which had
rescued him from the gutter principally out of charity. The boy was slight and
delicate-looking, but good feeding and exercise improved him wonderfully, and
he was becoming quite a decent specimen of humanity when some silly people
cried out about the cruelty of the late hours, and so on, and insisted that he
should be at school all day. The lad, who was well fed, washed, and clothed,
was handed back to the care of his parents. He now certainly attends school
during the day, but he is running about the gutter every evening, barefooted,
selling matches till midnight!
On the subject of ballet
children there is also a great deal of wasted sentiment. All sorts and
descriptions of children are employed in theatres, from the respectable
tradesman’s child to the coster’s child in Drury Lane; but the larger
proportion are certainly of the very poorest class, and it must be remembered
that these children would not be tucked up safely in their little beds, if they
were not earning a few badly-wanted shillings; they would be running about he
London streets.
Mr. D’Auban – who has turned
out a number of our best dancers, such as Sylvia Grey, Letty Lind, and others, -
was kind enough to call a rehearsal of his children, who are now performing at
the Lyric, Prince of Wales, Drury Lane, and other theatres, so that I was
enabled to see a very representative gathering of these useful little
breadwinners. Whatever else may be urged against the employment of children in
theatres, there is not the least doubt that dancing is a pure pleasure to them.
Out of all the little girls I questioned, not a single one would admit that she
ever felt “tired.” A good many of the children belong to theatrical families,
and have been on the stage since they were babies; they were distinguished by a
calmness and self-possession which the other little ones lacked; but in the
matter of dancing there was very little difference, and it was difficult to
believe that a large proportion of the children now playing in “La Cigale,”
knew nothing about dancing six months ago. Mr. D’Auban has no apprentices, no
agreements, and no charges, and he says he can make any child of fair
intelligence a good dancer in six months.
The classes begin in May,
and, as soon as it is known that Mr. D’Auban wants children, he is besieged by
parents with little maids of all sizes. The School Board only allows them to
attend two days a week; but Mr. D’Auban says: “Everything I teach them once is
practiced at home and brought back perfect to me.
Many of these graceful
little dancers are the real bread winners of the family. Little Minnie Burley,
whose charming dance in “The Rose and the Ring” will be remembered, though only
eleven years old, has for more than a year practically supported herself and
her mother by her earnings. The mother suffers from an incurable spinal
complaint, and, beyond a little help which she gets from another daughter who
is in service, has nothing to live upon but the little one’s earnings. During
the double performance of the “Rose and the Ring,” Minnie earned £1 5s. a week;
now she is earning as a Maypole dancer in “Maid Marian” 12s. a week: but her
engagement will soon end, and the poor little maiden, who has the sense and
foresight of a woman of thirty, is getting rather anxious.
She is a serious-faced,
dark-eyed child, very sensible, very self-possessed, and passionately fond of
dancing. Her mother is devoted to her, and keeps her exquisitely neat. I asked
her whether she did not feel a little nervous about the child coming home alone
every night from the Strand .
“No,” said Mrs. Burley, “you
see, she comes by ‘bus, and she knows how
to take care of herself – she knows she is not to let anyone talk to her.”
Minnie is a type of dozens
of other hard working, modest little girls who are supporting themselves, and
very often their families, by dancing. As a rule, the mothers fetch the
children, or make arrangements for several to come home together. Many of them,
whose husbands have been out of work, or who are widows, or deserted, have assured
me they could not possibly have got through the winter without the children’s
earnings, whilst the children themselves are immensely proud of “helping”
mother. The pride they take in their parts is also very amusing. One small girl
ran after me the whole length of a street. She reached me breathless, saying,
“Don’t forget I’m principal
butterfly.” Another small mite gave me a most crushing reply. She made some
allusion to her mother, and I said innocently, “I suppose your mother is a
dresser?” She looked daggers at me, and said indignantly, “My mother’s a lady
wots in the ballet.”
The wages of the children
range from 6s. to 16s. a week, and, as their engagements often last for four
months at a time, it will be seen that their money is a valuable, and in may
instances an essential, addition to the mother’s purse.
Child models, being required
almost exclusively in the daytime, are, thanks to the vigilance of the School
Board authorities, becoming more and more scarce. The larger number of them
comes from “model families,” the mother having sat herself, and having from an
early age accustomed their children to “sitting.” The children of these
families have no difficulty in obtaining regular work; they get a reputation in
the painting world, and one artist recommends them to another. In the
neighbourhood of Fitzroy Square ,
Holland St. John’s
Mary M–––, whose face is
familiar to admirers of Miss Kate Greenaway’s pictures, is, except for a couple
of months in the summer, never out of work. She is a beautiful child of
fourteen, the daughter of a cab-driver, who is not always in regular
employment; and, as Mary has a tribe of little brothers, her earnings are of
the utmost usefulness. For several months she has been sitting to three
artists, and making the very respectable sum of £1. 10s. a week.
In her spare moments Mary
takes music lessons, and her great ambition is to become an illustrator in
black and white. All her earnings are cheerfully handed over to her mother, who
is careful of her little daughter’s welfare as can be.
“I don’t sit as a nude
model,” Mary said, “but only for my head, and mother doesn’t let me go into any studio.”
As a matter of fact,
children are not used as nude models to any great extent; they do not sit still
enough, and their limbs are too thin and unformed to be of much use. Besides
the regular professional models, who get 5s. a day, and are pretty sure of
engagements, except in the summer, there is a fairly large class of street children
who call at the different artists’ studios, and are taken on occasionally.
“I get any number,” said a
well-known artist. “They come down to me, and are kind enough to suggest ideas. One small girl said to me
the other day. ‘could you do me in a blue dress, sir; mother says it would go
well with my golden ‘air.’”
Many artists prefer these
children to the regular model, who get a stereotyped expression and artificial
poses from long habit. Mr. T.B. Kennington, whose pictures of poor London London
 |
| "Widowed and Fatherless" T.B. Kennington, 1888 |
“Do you make the children
‘put on’ this sad expression?” I asked Mr. Kennington.
“No, indeed; my great
difficulty is to make them smile, except momentarily. Haven’t you ever noticed
how melancholy children look in repose?”
This may be true about
children who are constantly half-starved and ill-treated, but surely it is not
true of children in general, or even of the majority of children of the lower
classes, who contrive to wear an air of marvelous brightness, in spite of cold,
hunger, and even blows. “Sitting” does not seem to be an occupation that
commends itself to children, who naturally dislike keeping perfectly still in
one position. Nearly all the little models prefer ladies, who keep them quiet
by telling them stories, and bestowing sweets and cakes on them; whereas male
painters have less persuasive methods of making them do what they want. These
latter, however, make many attempts to reform the manners and morals of their
small models, many of whom, they say, evince an appalling amount of depravity.
Mr. F.W. Lawson, who painted
some veritable little slum waifs, in his series of pictures called “Children of
the Great Cities,” told a good little story of one of his attempts in this
direction. His model was a small, bright-faced, black-eyed street boy.
“Well, Fred, what have you
been doing today?” asks Mr. Lawson.
“Playing on Battersea Bridge
Mr. Lawson, on learning that
mad old Jimmy added blindness to his other infirmities, spoke strongly about
the cruelty and cowardice of such an entertainment; and ended up by telling a
story of a heroic deed by a blind man.
“When I looked up,” said Mr.
Lawson, “I saw the boys eyes were full of tears, and I thought to improve the
occasion by asking, ‘And now, Freddy, what will you do if you meet mad old
Jimmy again?’ The little scamp looked up with a wink and said, chuckling,
‘Chuck stones at ‘im, sir.’”
Professional models,
especially those who have sat to eminent artists, have an exaggerated idea of
their comeliness, and they will draw your attention to their good points with
much frankness.
“I’ve got beautiful ‘air.”
Said one little girl, modestly pointing to her curly, chestnut locks; whilst a
small boy, usually called the “Saint,” from having figured in several religious
pictures, requested me to observe his “fine froat,” as if he had been a prize
beast.
In London Drury Lane
The little factory girl is
decently enough attired so far as her frock is concerned, but she, or her
mother, cares nothing about her boots, which are invariably cheap and untidy, whilst
any superfluous coin is devoted to the adornment of her hat, an article of
great importance amongst factory-girls – young as well as old. But a still more
characteristic feature, which, so far as I know, is peculiar to factory-girls,
is their curious method of walking, which is carefully cultivated and imitated
by the young ones. It is a sort of side “swing” of the skirts, and has one of
the ugliest effects that can be produced, especially when executed by half a
dozen young ladies walking abreast on the pavement.
At Messrs. Allen’s chocolate
and sweet factories, in Mile End, some two hundred women and girls are
employed. Referring to the strike, I asked a highly respectable,
intelligent-looking girl, why she joined it:
“Well, I don’t hardly know,”
was the candid reply. “It was all done in a rush, and the other girls asked me
to come out.”
This girl was earning, by
the bye, 17s. a week.
The quite young girls are
principally employed in packing chocolate into boxes, covering it with silver
paper, which operation they perform with great dexterity, labeling, and other
easy work of this nature. The rooms are large and well ventilated, and each
department is under the care of a forewoman, who not only keeps a sharp
look-out on the work, but exercises what control she can have over behaviour
and conversation.
The discipline did not
strike me as particularly severe, considering that the girls left their work en masse, as soon as one of their number
had announced, referring to the artist, “She’s takin’ Em’ly’s likeness.”
The hours, from 8 to 7, are
certainly too long for girls in delicate health; but the work itself is light,
and a capital dining-room is provided on the premises, where the girls can cook
their dinners and make themselves tea. Nor are the prospects at all bad. Here
is Alice C –––, a girl of fourteen, the daughter of a flower carman,
not always in work. She is a packer, and gets 6s. a week, which she hands over
to her mother. She says she likes doing things with her hands, and would not
like to be in service, as then she wouldn’t have her Sundays to herself. If she
stays on at Messrs. Allen’s, her wages will be steadily raised to 18s. a week;
and, if she ultimately becomes a piece-worker, she may make as much as 24s. or
25s. a week.
Considering that a good many
educated women are teaching in High Schools for salaries of £65 per annum, this
is surely not bad.
Of course all factories are
not as well managed as these chocolate works, and where the hardship comes in
is where hands are turned off at certain periods of the year, or when the work
itself, like match-making, is injurious to health.
Still more unfortunate is
the lot of some of the little girl workers who assist their mothers at home in
tailoring, button-holing, and dolls-clothes making. The united work of mother
and child yields only a wretched pittance, and, carried on as it is in a room
where sleeping, eating, and living goes on, is, of all forms of labour, the
saddest and most unhealthy. Meals consist of bread and tea, and work is
prolonged till midnight by the light of one candle, with the consequence that
the children are prematurely aged and diseased. This is the most painful kind
of child-labour that I have come across, and would be unbearable, if it were
not ennobled by the touching affection that almost invariably exists between
the worn-out mother and her old-woman-wise little daughter.
The lot of the child-vender
in the streets would be almost as hard, if it were not, at any rate, healthier.
Terrible as are the extremes of weather to which the little flower-girl or
newspaper boy is exposed, the life is in the open air, and a hundred times
preferable, even if it results in death from exposure, to existence in a
foul-smelling garret where consumption works its deadly way slowly. Children
find an endless variety of ways of earning a living in the streets. There are
the boot-black boys, who form a useful portion of the community; newspaper
boys, of whom the better sort are useful little capitalists, with an immense
fund of intelligence and commercial instinct; “job chaps,” who hang about
railway stations on the chance of earning a few pence in carrying bags;
flower-girls, match-girls, crossing sweepers, who can make a fair living, if
they are industrious; and lastly, although this enumeration by no means
exhausts the list – street prodigies, such as pavement painters and musicians.
All Londoners must be familiar with the figure of little Master Sorine, who
sits perched upon a high stool diligently painting away at a marine-scape in
highly coloured chalks.
This clever little artist of
eleven is the principal support of his parents, who do a little in the
waste-paper line when there is anything to be done. As a rule, Master Sorine is
finishing his marine picture or
landscape when I pass by, so that I have not had an opportunity of judging of
his real ability; but his mother, who keeps guard over him, assures me that he
can draw “anything he has seen” – an assertion which I shall one day test. The
little fellow is kept warm by a pan of hot charcoal under his seat, which would
seem to suggest rather an unequal distribution of heat. However, he seems to
think it is “all right.”
His artistic efforts are so
much appreciated by the multitude that on a “good day” he earns no less than
9s. or 10s., which mounts up to a respectable income, as he “draws in public”
three days a week. Master Sorine, however, is exceptionally fortunate, and
indeed, there is something particularly taking about his little stool, and his
little cap, and the business-like air with which he pursues his art studies.
Nothing can be said in praise of such “loafing” forms of earning a livelihood
as flower-selling, when the unhappy little vender has nothing but a few dead
flowers to cover her begging; or of “sweeping,” when the “crossing” of the
young gentleman of the broom is often dirtier than the surrounding country.
Now and again one comes
across industrious, prosperous sweepers, who evince a remarkable amount of
acuteness and intelligence. It may have been chance, but each of the crossing
sweepers I questioned were “unattached,” disdained anything in the way of
families, and declined to name their residence on the ground that they were “jes’
thinkin’ o’ movin’.” This is a very precarious method of earning a livelihood,
and is generally supplemented by running errands and hopping in summer.
In a wealthy neighbourhood,
frequented by several members of Parliament, who were regular customers, a very
diligent young sweeper told me he made on average in winter 2s. 6d. a week; but
he added contemptuously:
“Business ain’t what it used
to be. Neighbour’ood’s goin’ down, depend on it. I’m thinkin’ of turnin’ it
up.”
This young gentleman
supplemented his income by successful
racing speculations, obtaining his information about “tips” from his
good-natured clients. It seems sad to think how much good material is lost in
these smart street boys, whose ability and intelligence could surely be turned
to better account. The most satisfactory point – and one which no unprejudiced
person can fail to recognize – in connection with the subject of child-labour
is that healthy children do not feel it a hardship to work, and that,
therefore, considering, in addition, how materially their earnings add to their
own comfort, all legislation in the direction of restriction and prohibition
ought to be very carefully considered.
I must express my best
thanks to Mr. Redgrave, of the Home Office, for his help in obtaining entrance
to factories, and to Mr. Didcott, the well-known theatrical agent, for his kind
services in the matter of acrobats.
- Strand Magazine, 1891
The Strand Magazine ran for
almost sixty years, before ceasing to be in 1950, however, it was brought back
into publication in 1998, and has a website; strandmag.com
Anyone interested in
articles of this ilk, or lesser-known works of fiction by popular authors of
the past would be well-advised to look on eBay, or search antique book shops
for bound editions of this magazine, as they really do contain some interesting
work.
Returning to the subject of
Victorian children before I close, to offer a little contrast I may return to
The Strand for another article on Victorian children in the near future, but on
a somewhat brighter note.
Finally, in closing, a
picture of the modern-day Strand !
