Abstract

Historians of nineteenth-century businesswomen in the United States, Britain, the British Empire, and Europe have discovered a wide range of female entrepreneurial activities, from the proprietorship of major local businesses such as stores and hotels, to operating tiny home-based shops or taking in boarders. A study of nineteenth century fiction reveals an even wider range of micro-businesses operated by women. (I define business as any economic activity that generates a profit in contrast to employment for wages or salaries, and identify micro-businesses as those in which a sole proprietor with four or fewer helpers -- often family members -- acts as both owner of and worker in their own venture.) Minor characters in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) include four female micro-entrepreneurs: a tavern-keeper, the owner of a pawn shop, a dolls’ dressmaker, and a child-minder who is also a laundress, later turned itinerant peddler. Each woman represents a different level of prosperity, power and autonomy; together they suggest the variety of micro-entrepreneurial options available to women in Victorian London. Supplementing this analysis with evidence from Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and the London Poor (1840s-1861) enables us to explore the panoply of tiny, quirky entrepreneurial ventures available to women (and men) in the modernizing, industrializing cities and towns of the mid-nineteenth century.