The men who make the light, by Walter Meakin
An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this essay, published in 1868, a writer describes a winter night he spent watching the stokers at a city gasworks.
When you turn up the gas in your parlour tonight, and the mantelpiece and the pictures and your wife’s face spring into light, I should like you to spare a thought for the men who made it. I spent a night among them last December, and I have not been able to turn up my own gas since without thinking of them.
The retort house of the Northgate works is a great black hall, as long as a cathedral and nearly as high, with a row of furnaces down one side. Each furnace holds seven retorts, long iron tubes into which the coal is shovelled to be baked until it gives up its gas. Every six hours the retorts must be emptied and charged afresh, and it is this, the drawing and charging, that is the stoker’s work.
I was there for the midnight draw. At a signal the men, eight to a furnace, threw open the iron doors, and the red coke came roaring out in a flood of fire, so bright that I could not look at it and so hot that I felt my eyebrows shrivel at twenty feet. Through this the stokers moved with long rakes, stripped to the waist and shining like bronze, pulling out the burning coke on to the floor and then, without a moment’s pause, flinging in fresh coal with shovels as broad as a tea tray. It was done in ten minutes. I have seen nothing in the theatre to equal it.
Then the doors were shut, and the men came out into the yard, steaming in the frost, and drank great draughts of oatmeal and water from a bucket. They laughed and chaffed one another and asked me, kindly enough, whether I should like a turn with the rake. I declined.
It was only later, in the mess room, that I saw them by ordinary lamplight. The foreman, who is forty, looks sixty. Half of them cough with a cough that does not stop. They work twelve hours at a stretch, seven days a week, for there is no Sunday in a gasworks. One man showed me the scars on his arms where the coke had caught him, and said, as a joke, that he had been half cooked so often he expected to be done by Christmas.
They do not complain, and I do not think they would thank me for pitying them. They are proud of their strength, and they have a right to be. But I came home through the lit streets at dawn and thought that every lamp in London was burning a little of their lives; and I wonder whether we, who sit so comfortably in the light, ought not to give them something more for it than a thought.
“The writer presents the stokers’ work as heroic rather than miserable.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 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.