Ike Matthews’s “Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher After 25 Years’ Experience” was originally published in 1898, but it still holds up, more than a century later, as an extraordinary example of just how lousy a job can be. Williams was a Manchester rat-catcher who spent a great deal of time ruminating on his trade, and in this slim volume he’s jotted down all his many thoughts about catching and killing rats, from tricks with various oils as bait to whether tenants or landlords should have to pay for his services, to preventing one’s sack of angry rats from bursting on a train, and so on. The section on training ferrets and treating their diseases alone is worth the price of admission.
See also: Book pick: “Full Revelations of a Professional Rat Catcher” (1898)
Update: JP points out that Project Gutenberg has the full text of this online.