Silverpen [Eliza Meteyard], ‘Lucy Dean: the Noble Needlewoman’, Eliza Cook’s Journal (1850), excerpts

In a street close upon Aldgate, the needlewoman, after speaking to one or two women, ill clad and wretched like herself, who came out from the open doorway of a mean house, entered through a narrow, dirty-looking passage, into a large room lighted by a gas-jet, and across which ran some few yards from the door, a very wide counter, worn and greasy, like a tailor’s board. ¹ It was piled up with made and unmade work, ² rolls of calico, hanks and reels of sewing cotton, waistcoating, yard measures, a great leaded pincushion, pairs of scissors, and strips of parchment. In front of this counter, four or five miserable women were grouped in the various positions of waiting for, receiving, and giving in work, whilst Mrs. Moss, a monstrously fat jewess, very gaudily attired, was not only concluding with these women the business of the day, but casting also now and then a watchful regarding eye to a huge fire-place at the rear of the room, over which a little shrimp of a drabbled servant was frying a great pan full of fish, whilst before it, to keep hot, stood a heaped-up dish of beef-steaks and onions, previously fried. In front of this fire stood a three-legged table, covered by a dirty cloth, wiped knives, Britannia-metal ³ forks and spoons of a sickly yellow hue, a jar of pickles, a loaf of bread, and a pewter-pot of stout; whilst, as the viands were not yet put on, nor Mrs. Moss yet ready, her only son-and-heir, Mr. Moses Moss, shopwalker ⁴ in a cheap tailoring establishment near at hand, had placed his feet, whilst swinging his body back with much ease and elegance in a low chair, he showed himself off conspicuously to his admiring mother, her hungry workers, or the little wretched cowering fryer of the fish.