Well, it could be done by a craftsman printer, but on a very limited basis -- and it wouldn't be true kerning as the term is understood with today's rubber-type tech.
Say you had a biblical verse that began with a drop cap "T", with the descender covering, say, five lines. Well, you could set up the job so that the body type was laid in under the T and you could space out each line to justify left and right with "em" and "en" thins to alter the width of the spaces.
My dad was a jobbing printer and I grew up setting wedding invitations etc. and printing them on a foot-operated platten. It was an astonishly demanding craft and, despite the utility of computer typesetting, we're poorer for the loss of those arcane skills, if only in for the satisfaction of doing a first-rate job by eye, hand, and wit.
What was even harder was writing newspaper headlines in hot metal, especially if you worked for a paper that liked a tight fit on the decks. Screams at edition time if the hed you wrote bounced. Today, you just condense and kern it.
#76 has some good info on kearning that was done in newspaper headlines.