Pit brow lass

A carte-de-visite portrait of a Lancashire pit brow lass.

Pit brow lasses worked on the surface at British collieries, picking stones from the coal after it had been brought up from the mines. Prior to the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, women and girls had worked down in the mines alongside their menfolk.

Photographed by (or published and sold by) Dromgoole's Photographic and General Stationery Establishment of St Helens, Lancashire.

A pencilled inscription verso in a period hand reads: 'Havard wrote on this that it was my landlady.'