It appears
that there are two distinct tailor trades--the "honourable" trade, now
almost confined to the West End, and rapidly dying out there, and the
"dishonourable" trade of the show-shops and slop-shops--the plate-glass
palaces, where gents--and, alas! those who would be indignant at that
name--buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors'
own slang; slang is true and expressive enough, though, now and then. The
honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four
hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade has it all
its own way. The honourable part of the trade is declining at the rate of
one hundred and fifty journeymen per year; the dishonourable increasing at
such a rate that, in twenty years it will have absorbed the whole tailoring
trade, which employs upwards of twenty-one thousand journeymen. At the
honourable shops the work is done, as it was universally thirty years ago,
on the premises and at good wages. In the dishonourable trade, the work is
taken home by the men, to be done at the very lowest possible prices, which
decrease year by year, almost month by month.
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