ABSTRACT
These young workers seem a million miles away from Tahmin, growing up in Spitalfields a hundred years later, when she claims: ‘my parents would never say, “Go and get a job”. In fact, my dad’s so old-fashioned that if you’re going to work, it has to be a job that has some prestige, otherwise it’s demeaning to work as a secretary, it’s demeaning to work in a shop…’. So are Tahmin and her peers simply worlds apart from the East End matchgirls a century ago? The answer, strangely, is both yes and no. There can, of course, be no comparison between the choices open to both groups. For a nineteenth-century East End girl, there was little choice but to take whatever work she could find and, for most, the East End was a prison. In the twenty-first century, Tahmin has been to university and is thinking of studying for a doctorate in the USA. As Tahmin says in Chapter 5, the world should be her oyster. Yet we cannot
just dismiss any thought of comparison across generations. We need only to probe a little beneath the surface to recognise similar faces of anger and humiliation. The anger of the matchgirls is reflected in Tahmin’s description of her own ‘success by default’, whereby she feels she could just as easily have ended her career stacking shelves in a supermarket. And the anger, humiliation, freedom, choice or imprisonment of both groups are centred upon literacy in its widest sense.
