What's a clicker? Anybody?

My favourite thing yet from the Guardian archives: job vacancies from 1865. Such as:

"A Youth, as Billiard Marker, and to make himself useful: good character required."

"A steady person, to attend a small engine."

And of course, "Common Puddlers, Shinglers, Forge rollers, Hammermen for Tyrebars, Rollers of Tyres and Bar-iron, Furnacemen and others."

Update: a "clicker", it transpires, could be one of three things: "salesman's assistant who would drum up custom; print worker who would set up the press for the compositor; one who makes eyelet holes in boots using a machine which clicked". (They really should have been more specific.)

I found this out on a delightful site that also tells me that while I am a nettir, and have sometimes dreamed of being a colporteur, my career choices in days of yore* might have included ankle beater, avenator, piscator, quister, or even vaginarius (how rude!).

Bankers, it seems, did not work in offices. Waiters didn't (legally) collect tips. Chiffoniers and dressers were not, to their presumed relief, items of furniture. Flashers, hookers and hackers were perfectly respectable occupations.

A savant might not have been particularly smart, and a spinster could well have been married. A vulcan probably didn't have any special mental powers.

And a Puddler, in case you were wondering, is a wrought iron worker.

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* Leaving aside, for the nonce, all questions of what might have been considered proper occupation for a woman.