Victorian Working Women

An historical and literary study of women in British industries and professions 1832-1850

Wanda F. Neff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136618116
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book was first published in 1929. The working woman was not, a Victorian institution. The word spinster disproves any upstart origin for the sisterhood of toil. Nor was she as a literary figure the discovery of Victorian witers in search of fresh material. Chaucer included unmemorable working women and Charlotte Bronte in 'Shirley' had Caroline Helstone a reflection that spinning 'kept her servants up very late'. It seems that the Victorians see the women worker as an object of oity, portrated in early nineteenth century as a victim of long hours, injustice and unfavourable conditions. This volume looks at the working woman in British industries and professions from 1832 to1850.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

THE working woman was not, like Punch and Free Trade, a Victorian institution. The word spinster disproves any upstart origin for the sisterhood of toil. Nor was she as a literary figure the discovery of Victorian writers in search of fresh material. Although Mrs. Anna Jameson in 1846 wrote: “After all that has been written, sung, and said of women, one has the perception that neither in prose nor in verse has she ever appeared as the labourer,”¹ she was not borne out by the facts. A goodly number of working women appear in literary annals from the days of Chaucer, and a few of them are vividly unforgettable figures. Nevertheless, Charlotte Brontë, in Shirley, when she gave to Caroline Helstone the reflection that Lucretia spinning at midnight in the midst of her maidens “kept her servants up very late”, was representing the new attitude. To the Victorians belongs the discovery of the woman worker as an object of pity, and in the literature of the early nineteenth century one first finds her portrayed as a victim of long hours, unfavourable conditions, and general injustice, for whom something ought to be done.

This belated consciousness of long-standing evils must be attributed to a variety of causes. Not only were working women regarded as a problem. All women were a problem. When W. R. Greg wrote an essay, Why are Women Redundant? he was not trying to be facetious. There were too many women in England, he gravely announced. What was to be done with them? Mrs. Jameson in 1851 proclaimed from the lecture-platform that there was an excess of half a million women in England.² The census figures allow 365,159. The Napoleonic Wars could be held directly responsible for only a small part of this disproportion* which the census had recorded since 1801. The rank and file of the Army in those days, moreover, furnished little substantial matrimonial material. The Empire with its need for a large number of men in the Civil Service was a far more disrupting factor. The settlement of new lands attracted adventurous young males to Canada, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, as well as the criminal and the destitute forced to leave England.† In quiet villages women continued an existence unchanged through the ages, and for many of them there were no husbands. Census figures in 18 51 show that 24–86 per cent, of the women in England and Wales at the age of 30 were unmarried; 17–89 per cent, at the age of 35; 11 -88 per cent, at the age of 50. When the census figures are subjected to the cold eye of a later age, it is not the proportion of 100 women of all ages to 96 men which is disturbing, but rather the proportion of mature men who remained bachelors. Out of every 100 men in 1851 in England and Wales, 25–89 were unmarried at the age of 30; 18 at the age of 35; 10–74 at the age of 50. Women were “redundant”, then, not because there were too many of them, but because the men did not marry.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a period when the only suitable profession for women was marriage, no eloquent pens berated such elegant celibates as Major Pendennis or Joseph Sedley. Even Mr. Pickwick was not blamed for not marrying Mrs. Bardell. There was no tax on bachelors. They had their excuses for avoiding the responsibilities of marriage. The Napoleonic Wars, if they had not cut down the flower of English manhood, had been responsible for much financial confusion. Business became a gamble. One man was a profiteer, another a bankrupt.³ After peace was declared, trade suffered the usual after-war deflation. England no longer enjoyed a monopoly of commerce with America. Her manufacturers had European competitors.⁴ Hundreds of firms failed. Factory hands had no work. Farmers went bankrupt with the drop in the price of corn. Rural labourers became paupers. The Corn Law passed in 1815 benefited the landowners at the expense of the rest of England. Between Waterloo and the passing of the Reform Bill unsettled conditions persisted. Young men on the brink of matrimony faltered. They could not afford to marry poor girls. They must marry wealth or remain bachelors, with the usual solaces of an age which still nodded over the wild-oats theory. Experienced business men like Mr. Sedley went under. The unmarried daughters of a ruined father were thrown upon the labour market without warning, untrained and helpless.

If women had not obtruded upon the sympathies of Victorian reformers, they might have been left alone for a longer period. Their enforced celibacy, unpleasant as it might be for the women who wanted to marry—there were always some who did not—would find the consolations of piety and charity. As Emma Woodhouse wisely remarked: “A single woman of good fortune is always respectable.”⁵ It was women in the aspect of wage-earners, labourers, who aroused suddenly indignant defenders. Two million women, according to Mrs. Jameson's uncertain figures, had to be self-supporting. The vision of delicate females trying to earn their daily bread moved journalists, lecturers, novelists. These women did hand-sewing, like Harriet Martineau after her father's failure, or they advertised in The Times their qualifications as governesses. In the lower classes there was the same spectacle of working women in increasing numbers. During these unsettled years had come the dramatic changes of the Industrial Revolution, with machinery demanding the labour of women and children. Mothers and daughters, forced by the widespread misery of the times, snatched at any work they could get. They left the cottages where they had worked hard but in obscurity and flocked to the mills, those gaunt structures looming above the once pleasant rural landscape. And for the first time the sleepy Tory gentlemen who believed in the Corn Laws experienced a twinge of discomfort.

Women as workers did not harmonize with the philosophy of the Victorians, their deification of the home. Women ought to marry. There ought to be husbands for them. Women were potential mothers. Then the moral earnestness of a generation feeling the belated results of Methodism and Evangelicism was torn by the spectacle of human sufferings. Christian gentlemen had the courage to try to reform longstanding evils. They had attacked slavery, the vicious prison system, the lack of education for the poor. They had discovered the sanctity of childhood. Classing women and children together as helpless creatures needing the protection of strong men, they were indignant at the knowledge that women had to support themselves, that they suffered degrading wrongs as working women.

This moral seriousness manifested itself not only in such philanthropists as Lord Ashley, but also in writers like Charles Dickens, who used the novel more and more for the correction of abuses, The tone of Victorian literature became serious. Even Thackeray could not entirely escape a pulpit manner. One would expect a further intensifying of this moral literary quality in the fact that women were finding increased opportunities for writing. The Edinburgh Review, the London Quarterly Review, and the Westminster Review with the convention of unsigned articles opened their columns to women. Lady Eastlake reviewed Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre for the Quarterly. Hundreds of women's magazines, with the editors and contributors largely women, sprang up in the early years of the nineteenth century.⁶ The society Annuals such as the Keepsake and Friendship's Offering, edited by women of social and literary prominence, were also a flourishing innovation. Not all women writers showed the high seriousness which was later to be commended in poets. They wrote to make money, and some of them earned large sums. They had the wisdom to study their public. The demand for fiction was greater than it had ever been before. If the manufacturers and business men who had come up from humbler rank with the new industrial regime had no time to read, their wives and daughters had the leisure and the inclination for the lighter varieties of literary food. With the increase of schools and more general ability to read among the lower classes, recruits were further added. Lady novelists helped to serve this new public. They wrote stories of high life for the young ladies outside the charmed circle of the aristocracy. The Countess of Blessington, to support an extravagant style of existence and an expensive husband, earned £2,000 a year for twenty years by writing novels and tales dealing with the fashionable world. Mrs. Marsh, Mrs. Crowe, and Julia Pardoe varied the same kind of fiction with the historical and supernatural romances which added colour to the monotony of a machine age. Catherine Gore, who preceded Thackeray in writing social satires, published two hundred volumes of novels, plays, and poems. Mrs. Frances Trollope, the mother of Anthony Trollope, to support her husband and children, wrote one hundred and two novels, dealing with a variety of subjects likely to attract the popular mind.

But other women writers were not satisfied to amuse a half-educated reading public. Many an authoress had a serious purpose in wielding her pen. She had in large measure the earnestness of her age, and she wanted her books to be powerful weapons for worthy causes. Lady Morgan took upon herself the defence of the oppressed Irish, and wrote novels dealing largely with their wretched past.- Maria Edgeworth gave a picture of the Irish estates owned by absentee landlords. Harriet Martineau preached the evils of the Poor Laws and the inevitable improvement of England if society were governed by the principles of political economy. Novels with a purpose so strongly reflected the reforming spirit of the age that they were in heavy demand. Mrs. Trollope, with a careful finger on the pulse of her public, responded by writing Michael Armstrong to circulate the abuse of factory children. Charlotte Brontë apologized for Villette because it took up no “philanthropic scheme”.⁷ By 1850 fiction was in a harness of moral obligation.

In all this bulk of philanthropic writing by women, one would expect a concern with questions relating to their own sex. The most cursory examination reveals a wealth of such material. Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë are the great champions of the women of their generation. George Eliot is their most intelligent critic. But with these came women less in fame, but equal to them in their eagerness to make the lives of women more endurable. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790–1846), so popular in her own day that a complete edition of her works was published in the United States with an Introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe ranking her above Dickens as a reformer, was a strict Evangelical with the conviction that the reading, and even more the writing, of novels was a sin. But after she was deserted by her adventurous and unstable soldier husband, she had no way of supporting herself except by writing. She saved herself from the evils of fiction by composing a species of tales, not novels, because they were based upon the truth. She took the unwieldy Blue Books of Parliament reporting the suffering of factory women and children, selected the most harrowing facts, and made them the experiences of imaginary characters. As editor of the Christian Lady's Magazine she printed articles showing the necessity of women's informing themselves in politics and economics, and used even simpler methods than Harriet Martineau to explain the changes made by industrialism. She was as conscious of the new age in her magazine as Dickens in Household Words. Mrs. Anna Jameson (1794–1860), remembered now as the author of Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women and several pleasant volumes on Italian Art, urged by painful memork; of “governessing”, waged a tireless campaign for working women. Mrs. S. G Hall (1800–1881), who wrote sketches of Irish life strongly influenced by Mary Mitford's general manner, also composed stories illustrating a long list of the sufferings of governesses, and later used the pages of the Saint James Magazine, of which she was editor, to expose the wrongs of women toilers.

The most interesting result from reading many of the dull books which grew out of a consciousness of sex oppression is the discovery of the interest of women authors in working women. One turns from them to men to find similar material. Disraeli, Dickens, Thackeray are equally conscious of the changed conditions of existence for women. Female characters ' who are wage-earners are introduced, especially in the novels of Dickens. From fiction one proceeds to verse, and then to the outer borders of literature, the magazines, the pamphlets, and finally to the parliamentary Blue Books. From all these miscellaneous data the working woman emerges.

The primary object of this study is to build up a complete picture of the working woman in England between 1832 and 1850. These dates, loosely set, mark her emergence as a definite social problem presented to a large reading public. In 1832 the Sadler report began the exposure of the wrongs of factory women. This was quickly and steadily followed by Government investigation of other female toilers. By 1850 the factory legislation of 1847 was showing results, the Children's Commission of 1842–43 had achieved an extensive notoriety for a wide diversity of women's employments, and the agitation for the relief of the governess had a definite programme. The term working women will include only those classes of labour which received special investigation and definite reform during the years under observation. Such hopeless slaves as the hand-loom weavers and the immortally toiling agricultural labourers and domestic servants have, of necessity, been omitted. In examining the literature of that period* for material concerning the kinds of work woman performed, the conditions of her labour, her pay, her way of life, the term literature has been stretched to its widest limits, with no separation of strictly literary and non-literary matter. This method has considerable advantage. From such a mass only can the investigator estimate how much the writing of the day was concerned with those women who supported life by their daily labour. Furthermore, with the journalism and parliamentary reports side by side with bellse-lettres one is enabled to test the accuracy of fiction and poetry dealing with social questions, to determine what of fact and what of fancy the artist has combined for his purpose, and how much he, as compared with the philanthropist, the magazine writer, the Government official, has devoted himself to the question of working women.

A second purpose of this book concerns a definitely literary problem. One is conscious almost at once that certain classes of working women immediately attracted novelists and poets and were given detailed and fervent attention; others were neglected or dismissed with summary or general treatment. What is the explanation? Does the answer lie in the nature of fiction itself, the limitations of the writer's equipment, or the class of labour under consideration? One must decide whether any generalizations can be made as to what is available fictional fabric and what is not; whether the novel and poetry can be employed for certain kinds of subject-matter only. Were writers in the Victorian era limited in their choice of scenes and character by their own education, training, outlook, or by established literary traditions from which they could not escape? Does the solution of the problem lie, finally, in the workers themselves? Were some in greater need of the help of publicity from authors than others? An answer to these questions may help in explaining an obvious fact: that certain working women were largely neglected by literary agencies and that others formed a new class of heroine, compelling both sympathy and interest.

The total result of the investigation of the subject of working women from a great variety of sources is a discovery of the function of belles-lettres in handling social questions. This is a consideration with which any student of the nineteenth century, a period when Art came to grips with complex contemporary struggle, is especially confronted. If literature is a primary source, if it precedes the findings of Government officials and keen-scented journalists, why does it thus come first? If it is secondary material, its raison d'etre ought to be examined: does it bring facts before the public in more dramatic form than an obscure pamphlet; does it offer an interpretation of the facts by means of application to a concrete case; can one look to its leisurely reflections merely for proposed solutions to problems already presented by the Press, lecture-platform, and pulpit? In this specific problem of the working woman one goes even further in weighing the literary use of social material. Here an important inquiry is the outcome of female authorship. With more women writing, and writing on social questions, the student wants to know whether the cause of the working woman was helped. Or has the feminine contribution been essentially emotional, concerned with grievances, not their remedy, a preoccupation with the individual at the expense of the group, or acceptance of religious evasions and sentimental moralizings instead of a scientific examination of actuality and a courageous weighing of general considerations? One must compare Thackeray with George Eliot, Disraeli with Mrs. Tonna, Dickens with Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë. Men may have succeeded where women have failed, or possibly both have demonstrated the ineptitude of the Arts when they are too close to social tangles. In the study of Victorian working women, then, lies hidden a new appraisal of nineteenth-century literature.

* Trevelyan, G. M., British History in the Nineteenth Century, p. 129, states that the seven years of the Peninsular War cost less than 40,000 British dead out of a population (Clapham, J. H., An Economic History of Modern Britain, pp. 55, 54) of approximately 17,000,000 in the United Kingdom, a proportion very similar to the American dead in the world war.

† In the year 1832, 50,000 emigrants went to Canada alone.

* Not only are the fiction and verse published between 1832 and 1850 included in this study, but also that of the next generation dealing with conditions of this period. Consequently the novels of George Eliot and the novels of Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell published after 1850 are used.

CHAPTER II

THE TEXTILE WORKER

I. Introduction

“GROUPS of merry and somewhat loud-talking girls, whose ages might range from twelve to twenty, came by with a buoyant step. They were most of them factory girls, and wore the usual out-of-door dress of that particular class of maidens; namely, a shawl, which at midday or in fine weather was al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Contents
• CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER II. THE TEXTILE WORKER
• CHAPTER III. THE NON-TEXTILE WORKER
• CHAPTER IV. THE DRESSMAKER
• CHAPTER V. THE GOVERNESS
• CHAPTER VI. THE IDLE WOMAN
• CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index