On 28 January 1807, a stretch of Pall Mall in London was lit by gas. It was the first public gas street lighting anywhere, and it immediately created a job that had never existed before: someone had to go and light the lamps.
That person was the lamplighter. At dusk, he walked his route with a long pole, at the end of which was a small flame and a mechanism for turning the gas cock at the base of each lamp. He lit each one in turn, then at dawn he walked the same route and turned them off. On a dark evening, a lamplighter working a street was a moving line of small separate fires, appearing one at a time down the length of the road.
For most of the nineteenth century, this was a genuinely large occupation. London, Paris, and every other city that adopted gas lighting employed lamplighters in the thousands. The work had a rhythm built into it — the route was fixed, the timing was set by sunset and sunrise, and the lamplighter was on the street at the hours when almost no one else was. In cities before electric light, the lamplighter and the night watchman were the only official presence on the streets after dark, and people knew the sound of their footsteps.
The job carried a small, real dignity that shows up in the culture it left behind. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a poem called "The Lamplighter" in A Child's Garden of Verses in 1885, describing a child watching the lamplighter from a window: "My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky; / It's time to take the window to see Leerie going by; / For every night at teatime and before you take your seat, / With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street."
"Leerie" was the Scottish word for a lamplighter, from the verb to leer, meaning to look or peer — the man who looks into the lamps. It survives in English almost entirely because of that poem.
The word itself is a small time capsule. "Leerie" was never the official term — the records say lamplighter — but it was what people called him, the way a job acquires the name the neighbourhood uses rather than the name the employer writes down. When a job like that disappears, the slang usually goes with it, and the only reason we still have this one is that a famous writer happened to grow up watching the same street.
The end of the job was abrupt and unambiguous, which is unusual for a profession. It did not decline because people stopped wanting light. It ended because electricity changed where the work happened. An electric street lamp could be switched on from a central point — a control room, and later an automatic timer. There was no lamp to reach, no gas cock to turn, no flame to carry down a route. The function that had employed thousands of people was replaced by a switch and someone to operate it. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the lamplighters of most major cities were gone.
What makes the lamplighter unusual among lost jobs is that the equipment is still out there. London still has around fifteen hundred working gas street lamps, concentrated in Westminster, around the Royal Parks, and in a few other pockets. They are not decoration frozen in place; they are lit and extinguished every day, and a small number of lamplighters — now employed as maintenance staff — still do it by hand, with a pole, more than a century after the job was declared obsolete everywhere else. It is one of the very few places in the world where you can watch the nineteenth century happen on schedule.
The lamplighter is a useful example of something that happens to jobs when technology moves. It is easy to assume that work disappears because the underlying need disappears. Usually the need does not disappear; the need is what made the work valuable in the first place. What disappears is the physical point at which the human being was required. The lamplighter's function — deciding that it was dark enough and light was needed — did not go away. It was relocated into a clock and a switch, and the man walking the route with a pole stopped being a necessary part of the system.
Which is why the poem is still the right record. It does not describe the gas, the economics, or the technology. It describes a person going past a window at teatime, and a child who knew exactly what that meant.
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