3-053-437 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sketches in Vienna: pedlars and laundress, 1873. 'The dress, manners, and employments of different classes of the people in the lively capital of the Austrian empire afford much entertainment to an observant foreign visitor...There is great diversity of figures, costumes, and dialects among the various nationalities...and the poorer inhabitants of this large city are in the habit of practising a multitude of trades or shifts to get their precarious living. An industrious woman...who has worked hard to finish her job of washing, ironing, or mangling linen, and who goes through the street laden with a basket of clean clothes, may be accosted by a mob of travelling pedlars from the Danubian provinces, clad in half-Asiatic attire, and speaking a language scarcely known in Western Europe. They will tempt her feminine taste for personal finery with a display of cheap brooches and earrings, or they may endeavour to extract from her maternal fondness the price of a toy for one of her children, if she does not care to buy a new mock-meerschaum, or other fancy tobacco-pipe, for the evening solace of her worthy husband. This dilemma of the female Viennese workwoman is portrayed in one of our Artist's street sketches'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.