How a pen is made, by Edwin Nairn
An original magazine feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This feature, published in a popular weekly magazine in 1851, describes a visit to a factory in Birmingham where steel pen nibs were made.
Few of the readers who dip a steel pen into the ink each morning have any notion of the journey it has made to reach their desks. I confess I had none myself until last week, when Messrs Corder and Lyle were good enough to open their works in Birmingham to my inspection. The building is plain enough without: four storeys of smoky brick in a narrow street. Within, it is a hive of such ceaseless industry that I came out at noon quite dizzy with admiration.
The pen begins its life as a ribbon of sheet steel, which is fed into a press and stamped into flat blanks at the rate of two hundred a minute. These blanks then pass from room to room and from hand to hand: they are pierced, softened in the furnace, marked with the maker’s name, raised into their curve, hardened, scoured in revolving tin barrels, and at last slit down the centre so finely that the eye can scarcely find the cut. Each stage is the work of a separate machine, and each machine is the servant of a separate girl.
There are some four hundred of these girls, the greater part of them between thirteen and twenty years of age, and they are paid by the gross. They sit in long rows at their presses, working the lever with one hand and feeding the blanks with the other, so swiftly that I could not follow their fingers. The din is tremendous. Several told me they no longer heard it. One young woman held up her left hand to show me where the tip of the middle finger was missing. ‘It was the slitting press, sir,’ she said, without the least complaint, ‘my first month.’ The overseer assured me that such accidents are now very rare, and that the girls grow used to the work. I did not doubt it; and yet I own that I looked at the presses differently afterwards.
Their wages, I was told, are from five to nine shillings a week, which is more than they might earn in service, and their dinner hour is spent in a clean room set aside for the purpose. They were cheerful enough to laugh at a stranger in a tall hat.
The works send out more than a million pens a week. A pen that cost a shilling in my boyhood may now be bought for less than a farthing, and the poorest schoolboy in the land may write as freely as a bishop. When we consider how much of our commerce, our learning and our affection travels upon these little points of steel, we may surely call this one of the quiet triumphs of the age.
“The writer is more impressed by the machines than concerned about the people who work them.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.