December 21, 2005
Nineteenth century occupation of the day
another entry in an irregular series
LAMPLIGHTER. It will probably surprise some people to read that most historical occupations have modern analogues and descendents. There are surprisingly few occupations that don't have a readily identifiable modern counterpart. This is because occupations and work are as much, if not more, the product of social and economic arrangements as they are defined by technological requirements.
We have fewer farmers than we did in 1880 (relatively and absolutely), but farming is still farming. One set of occupations that has just about disappeared is coach, stage and cart driver, but they live on in other forms. While your friendly UPS delivery man no longer whips a horse to make his deliveries, but the job of driver or delivery man has changed relatively little within companies and within wider society.
Lamplighters though are really an occupation that has disappeared, and has no modern counterpart [that I can think of]. The modern occupation of street light repairer is a more skilled job, and the nature of the work is responding to problems. Lamplighters trod a regular circuit lighting lamps. They were probably expected to repair broken lamps they could fix, but that was an exception to their normal tasks. In a large sense, their job was a service occupation, not producing anything tangible, and indeed producing something quite ephemeral. Yet the social impact of street lighting was significant and substantial -- it helped create urban culture as we know it today by allowing people to walk the streets in greater safety for longer. The demand for street lighting was high, and its adoption quite quick. Electrification came rapidly to American [and European and Australasian] cities, and by 1920 there were few lamplighters left outside small towns.
(from Library of Congress, American Memory website)
Further reading: Here are numerous images of lamplighters at work. Here is an interesting local history article about lamp lighters. Maria Cummins book The Lamplighter was a best-seller in the 1850s. Charles Dickens' short story "The Lamplighter" is online.
Posted by robe0419 at December 21, 2005 9:32 AM