Victorian lady who saw and recorded the misery of her era

"But it is as well to inquire how many of the thousands thereby found a means of livelihood are actually made happy by such prosperity."

Provided by herself, the answer to Lady Florence Bell's question must have caused a certain frisson between her and her husband, Sir Hugh, employer of some of the "thousands" who toiled in the ironworks and foundries of booming Victorian Middlesbrough.

"This immense population," declared Lady Bell, "is growing up among physical and moral influences that are bound to be unfavourable."

Of the ironworkers themselves, she noted: "The conditions are apt to tell upon the health of even the strongest, and many of the men are spent by the age of 50."

Of their wives she added: "It is sad to see many a young woman, who started as a bright, nice-looking girl, sinking at last into a hopeless acceptance of the conditions around her."

And of the offspring she observed: "In house after house one sees children suffering, miserable little creatures with only one or two garments on, many of them with their little legs bowed and bent." What a weight of guilt Lady Bell heaped on her distinguished husband, boss of the firm Bell Brothers, which later became the world-famous Dorman Long.

Born 150 years ago, Lady Bell recorded her impressions of the lives of the ironworkers and their families in a remarkable book. Based on visits to homes - and therefore somewhat mis-titled At The Works - it gives one of the most graphic contemporary accounts of the squalor and hardship behind the industry that made Britain the workshop of the world. Incidentally, it destroys many of the myths of "Victorian values," not least those of "The Family".

Take this, for example: "One thriving and affectionate couple adopted a child advertised in the local paper. The man died when the child was about ten, and the wife calmly announced her intention of advertising the child again ... after which she married the lodger." So baby auctions, thought to be a product of the internet, are not quite new.

Nor is the takeaway-food revolution. Written in 1907, Lady Bell's book shatters the image of the crisply-aproned Victorian housewife preparing the kind of dishes now celebrated as what mother used to make. She notes: "Many wives do not know how to cook. They get their food ready-cooked from an eating house or a fried fish shop."

Considering her background, Lady Bell's interest in, and sympathy for, the dwellers in what she called "the little brown streets" of Middlesbrough, overhung by "pillars of cloud by day, pillars of fire by night," is amazing. The daughter of Sir Joseph Oliffe and his wife Laura, she was brought up in fashionable Paris, where her father was physician to the British Embassy. At 19, in 1870, she returned with her family to England, where she married Sir Hugh Bell six years later.

The couple lived first at Red Barns, Redcar, (now a hotel), designed for Sir Hugh by the great Victorian architect Philip Webb. Later homes were Rounton Grange, near Northallerton, a glorious Webb house whose demolition in 1954 is regarded as one of the major post-war losses, and Mount Grace Manor, the converted guest house of the priory.

It is sad that Lady Bell's 150th anniversary seems to be slipping past unmarked. Coupled with her sympathetic observations are social attitudes well ahead of her time. For instance, she challenged the prevailing view that the father of an illegitimate child was expected to marry the mother. She implies support for birth control, then under attack because of a declining birthrate.

Almost 60 years before the advent of betting shops, she suggests that state-controlled gambling would be proved less harmful than the furtive forms then prevalent. Her understanding of the sheer drabness of life in the shabby ill-equipped street homes literally shines out in her recognition that the popularity of the Victorian pub had as much to do with warmth and comfort as drink. "The mere fact of a blaze of light in an ill-lit street is of incalculable effect," she wrote.

Most strikingly, Lady Bell recognised the crucial role of the mother as homemaker and organiser. "The husband's steadiness and capacity to earn are not more important than the wife's administration of the earnings," she remarked.

And yet what she termed the "daily, hourly struggle to make cruelly-slender means go far enough," was often not successful. She observed: "It is a heart-rending and constantly repeated experience to see in a workman's home where there is sickness, the house being stripped as one thing after another is taken to the pawnshop ... In one house a child lay dead and the parents, unable to pay for the funeral, finally pawned their clock."

Lady Bell even wrote a play, praised by George Bernard Shaw, in which an ironworker's widow, finding no support to raise her disabled child, smothers the infant to spare him a life of misery. The subject-matter was so sensitive that Lady Bell kept her authorship a secret for 35 years, until two years before her death in 1930.

Meanwhile, in Middlesbrough she had founded a workmen's club, created a winter gardens, which offered teetotal refreshment, band concerts, games such as darts and dominoes, and facilities for reading and writing, and opened a tea garden in the town's Albert Park.

In recent years new editions of At The Works have been published by Teesside university and the feminist publisher Virago. But it is ironic that, while Lady Bell does not figure in the reference book Who Was Who, half of the entry devoted to her husband, thrice mayor of Middlesbrough and a former Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding, is a list of her books.

"It may be of interest to those who have never come into contact with a manufacturing population to see what the Iron Trade is when translated into terms of human beings," she wrote in the preamble to At The Works. Few have done this better. "One child was seen eating scraps in the road," she observed. " 'She is such a one,' said her mother proudly, 'for picking up anything that is about.' "