HEADS OF THE PEOPLE: BEING Portraits of the English. THE DRESS-MAKER. BY DOUGLAS JERROLD. THE "original sin"-charged upon the frailty of the sex-is, in its consequences, visited tenfold upon the children of the blooming culprit. Sadly enough do those poor daughters of Eve, who live by needle and thread, pay for the peccadillo of their first mother! Bitterly do the sisterhood of Cranbourne Alley and Regent Street expiate the transgression of Eden! Is there a more helpless, a more forlorn and unprotected, creature than, in nine cases out of ten, the Dress-Maker's Girl-the Daily Sempstress; pushed prematurely from the parental hearth, or rather no hearth, to win her miserable crust by aching fingers? Crust-literally crust-is nearly all the reward of hours of drudgery; . of a monotonous task, at which the heart sinks, and the eyelids are fain to droop, until roused and strung anew to labour. Daily bread -a phrase that to most people conveys many things-is to our heroine a literal truth-a cold reality. She is a thousand times more to be pitied than yonder ballad-singer, with her feet imbedded in highway-mud, bawling the last effusion of the piano-forte poet; or, in shrill treble, screaming the semi-political satires of the bards of Seven Dials. She-the minstrel-has no respectability" to keep A 66 |