4 - Work

Summary

In his diary, A. J. Munby records a series of encounters with a young woman called Sarah Tanner. He knew her first as a ‘maid of all work to a tradesman in Oxford’, and then met her a year or so later in Regent Street, ‘arrayed in gorgeous apparel’:

How is this? said I. Why, she had got tired of service, wanted to see life and be independent; & so she had become a prostitute, of her own accord & without being seduced. She saw no harm in it; enjoyed it very much, thought it might raise her & perhaps be profitable. She had taken it up as a profession, & that with much energy: she had read books, and was taking lessons in writing and other accomplishments, in order to fit herself to be a companion of gentlemen.

Several years later he came across her again, now soberly dressed, the respectable proprietor of a coffee house she had bought with her savings from a three-year career on the streets. In the field of work, reading and writing rarely had so straightforward and so successful an application. Even amongst her own kind, Sarah Tanner's attainments were unusual. Only 3 per cent of London prostitutes could read and write fluently, and 54 per cent were wholly illiterate.

Neither the association of specific occupations with the skills of literacy nor the long-term interaction between the technologies of production and communication can be reduced to simple generalisations.