Abstract
After noting the under-representation of working-class women in previous studies of Victorian autobiography and laying out broad definitions of “class” and “autobiography,” I review categories of nineteenth-century working-class memoirs suggested by previous scholars such as David Vincent, Jane Randall, Nan Hackett, and Regenia Gagnier. I then discuss some of the uncertain and limited circumstances under which working-class Victorian women were able to achieve publication, the shaping effects of transcription or other forms of editorial mediation, and the disturbing presence of reported instances of violence in these accounts. Other sections consider the range of styles, occupations, and life circumstances represented in these memoirs, and suggest ways in which they differ from the autobiographical writings of their working-class male and middle-class female contemporaries.
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Notes
- 1.
Linda Peterson, Traditions of Women’s Autobiography, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001; Mary Jane Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Michael Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
- 2.
Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Working Class Autobiography. London: Methuen, 1982. See also Nan Hackett, XIX Century British Working-Class Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: AMS Press, 1985, 22, and Regenia Gagnier, “Working-Class Autobiography, Subjectivity and Value,” Chap. 4 of Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Burnett, Vincent and Mayall, eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. New York: New York University Press, 1984–89, 3 vols., vol. 1, rightly observe that “No other form of source material will bring historians as close to the meaning the past had for those who made it and were made by it,” xxi.
- 3.
Burnett, Vincent, and Mayall, eds., The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, vol. 1, xviii. I am not certain what this “main group” is, since the bibliography includes more than 2000 items, but their point stands. Their claim that “there was a rough equality of opportunity in such schooling as was available to the working class during the nineteenth century” (xviii) is undercut by the statistics Vincent himself provides in The Rise of Mass Literacy, as discussed in Chap. 2, “Women and the Education Acts,” and by the evidence of the histories and autobiographies of the period of the differential nature of the “education” (weighted toward sewing, religion, manners, etc.) provided to girls until the passage of the 1870 Education Acts .
- 4.
Rendall, “‘A Short Account of My Unprofitable Life,’” Women’s Lives/ Women’s Times, ed. Trev Broughton and Linda Anderson, Albany: SUNY Press, 1997, 33. See also S. Barbara Kanner, Women in English Social History 1800–1914: A Guide to Research. Vol. 3, Autobiographical Writers, New York: Garland, 1987; and D. H. Edwards, One Hundred Modern Scottish Poets, Brechin: Edwards, 1880ff, 16 vols.
- 5.
“I Too Am Here”: Selections from the Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle, with an introduction and notes by Alan and Mary MacQueen Simpson, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
- 6.
James A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning in Victorian England, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954; Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.
- 7.
Their definition begins: “Our aim was to include those who for some period of their lives could be described as working class, whether defined in terms of their relationship with the means of production, their educational experiences and cultural ties, by self-ascription, or by any combination of these factors” (xxxi).
- 8.
For example, the subject of Mary Ashford’s Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter clearly fell into this category. Her autobiography might more accurately have been entitled A Servant’s Life.
- 9.
Rendall, “‘A Short Account of My Unprofitable Life,’” 34. “The most common occupation was service, at different levels, followed by keeping a shop and hawking goods across the country, needlework and dressmaking, spinning, weaving, and teaching.” All of these occupations are represented in the memoirists discussed in this book, if one counts Watt’s travels through the countryside to market her fish as “hawking goods.”
- 10.
Roy Pascal , Design and Truth in Autobiography, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, “[A]utobiography must always include, as a decisive element, … the meaning an event acquires when viewed in the perspective of a whole life” (17). As Gagnier notes, “Cartesian subjectivity was not assumed by most working-class writers and as a consequence autobiography often meant something different from emplotted self-sufficiency” (Subjectivities, 148).
- 11.
Peterson, Preface, x.
- 12.
Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, 9.
- 13.
Gagnier, Subjectivities, 169.
- 14.
E.g., Shari Benstock, The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, London: Routlege, 1988; Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present, Bsoston: Twayne, 1986; Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998; Julia Swindells, ed., The Uses of Autobiography, New York: Taylor and Francis, 1995.
- 15.
Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, London: Verso, 2002; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall, University of California Press, 1984. See also the discussion in Gagnier, Subjectivities, 144–148, 161.
- 16.
Schreiner, The Story of An African Farm, London: Chapman and Hall, 1883.
- 17.
People’s and Howitt’s Journal, vol. 1/6, 1849, 176–77.
- 18.
Rendall, “‘A Short Account of My Unprofitable Life,’” 35.
- 19.
Johnston, Autobiography, Poems and Songs, Glasgow: W. Love, 2nd ed. 1869.
- 20.
Watt, Christian. The Christian Watt Papers, edited with an introduction by David Fraser. Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1983. As of 1983, these were in the possession of Christian Watt’s granddaughter. Though David Fraser does not mention her name, this was likely Christian Watt Marshall , daughter of Watt’s son James Sims. See Chap. 5, fn. 20.
- 21.
Mays, “Domestic Spaces, Readerly Acts,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 80.4 (2008), 343–368.
- 22.
“The organization of family life, of school, and of the institutions and movements that made up the plebeian public sphere simply made it easier for men and women to envision, justify, and support the individual readerly efforts of boys and men as facets of, and contributions to, mutual improvement and the collective pursuit of respectability and rights.” Mays, “Domestic Spaces,” 359.
- 23.
“The Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakley (1831–1900),” ed. R. Wilson, in A Miscellany. Norwich: Norfolk Historical Society, 1991, 148.
- 24.
Gagnier, Subjectivities, 151.
- 25.
An example of a “commemorative story” may be Elizabeth Cadwaladyr Davis’s The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis, a Balaclava Nurse, Daughter of Dafydd Cadwaladyr, ed. by Jane Williams (Ysgafell), but many of her adventures seem unlikely. I have also omitted Mary Seacole’s 1857 The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, because, as the widow of a prosperous man and a tradeswoman, she was only in limited senses “working class,” though at the time of writing her “adventures” she was suffering financial distress.
- 26.
Gagnier, Subjectivities, 167.
- 27.
Hackett, XIX Century British Working-Class Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography.
- 28.
Her “Phases of Girlhood” describes with regret the need for “Maggie” to help “poor weary mother” with the cares of a large family. Janet Hamilton, Poems, Sketches, and Essays. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1885.
- 29.
Elizabeth Duncan Campbell, Songs of My Pilgrimage. Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot; printed by John Leng and Co., Dundee Advertiser Office, 1875, xvii.
- 30.
Mays, “Domestic Spaces,” 352.
- 31.
Mays, “Domestic Spaces,” 346, 352–56.
- 32.
Nan Hackett, XIX Century British Working-Class Autobiographies, 22.
- 33.
Watt, The Christian Watt Papers, 68.
- 34.
Her poems include verses on “The Working Man,” “Lines on behalf of the Boat-builders and Boilermakers of Great Britain and Ireland,” and others on life in the factories where she worked. Her Autobiography, Poems and Songs is dedicated “To all men and women of every class, sect, and party, who by their skill, labour, science, art, literature, and poetry, promote the moral and social elevation of humanity.”
- 35.
Mays, “Domestic Spaces,” 353.
- 36.
Rendall, “‘A Short Account of My Unprofitable Life,’” 40.
- 37.
Mrs. Collier, A Bible-Woman’s Story: Being the Autobiography of Mrs. Collier of Birmingham, ed. Eliza Nightingale. London: T. Woolmer, 1885, 36.
- 38.
As mentioned in Chap. 8, Richard Dobbs was likely Richard Goffin , whom Martha Grimes (Elizabeth Dobbs in the Autobiography) married 16 May 1880 in St. Martin’s, Kentish Town.
- 39.
This 1900 Autobiography is the sole instance in which a memoirist mentions the possibility of police protection , perhaps indicating increased enforcement of laws protecting women from assault.
- 40.
Husbands were permitted to “chastise” their wives violently, leading to hundreds of cases of wife murder. In 1854 the Act for the Better Prevention of Aggravated Assaults Upon Women and Children (which permitted magistrates to judge such assault cases without sending them to a higher court) was passed, though often not enforced by judges sympathetic to the assailant. In 1878 the Matrimonial Causes Act permitted the granting of a separation order to women whose husbands had been convicted of aggravated assault. See Joan Perkin, Victorian Women, New York: New York University Press, 1995, 120–121, 130.
- 41.
“The Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakley,” in Miscellany, 130.
- 42.
“Temperance and the Moral Law,” in Hamilton, Poems, Essays, and Sketches: Comprising the Principal Pieces From Her Complete Works, Glasgow: Maclehose, 1880.
- 43.
Norton, Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of the “Custody of Infants” (1838); Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 76; Frances Power Cobbe, “Wife Torture in England,” Contemporary Review, April 1878. The 1853 Aggravated Assaults Law permitted magistrates to sentence wife beaters to six months of imprisonment and a twenty pound fine, which could be increased to six months’ hard labor in lieu of payment, but observers noted that the law seemed to have little deterrent effect.
- 44.
Johnston’s only poem on an ostensibly religious subject, “Address to the High Church of Glasgow on the Rash Judgment of Man,” merely reproves the rashness of inscribing on a tombstone that the departed soul has left for heaven, when God may in fact consign the deceased one to hell.
- 45.
She describes herself as having gone to a Congregationalist Sunday School when a child, but also as having attended services at the “Old Kirk”; later she notes with anger that she will have to appear at Kirk Sessions if she fails to marry James Sim , the father of her child, recalling that her ancestors (as Episcopalians) had fought the introduction of Presbyterianism; David Fraser notes that “Christian’s own … proud radicalism grew not only from an innate sense of justice but from origins in which nationalist, Jacobite and Episcopalian (or, rather, anti-Presbyterian) sentiments were also blended” (The Christian Watt Papers, 8).
- 46.
Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature, London: Croom Helm, 1974; Michael Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- 47.
Meagan Timney, “Working-Class Women’s Writing in the Nineteenth-Century Radical Press: Chartist Threads,” Philological Quarterly 92.2 (Spring 2013), 177–97, discusses F. Saunderson and E. H., poets who published in the “Women’s Page” of the Northern Star; Margaret A. Loose, The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice, Ohio State University Press, 2014, devotes a chapter, “The Politics of Cognition in Chartist Women’s Poetry,” to a discussion of Mary Hutton, Elizabeth La Mont, and E. L. E., “A Semptress.”
- 48.
Working-class or Chartist male novelists included Thomas Wheeler, Thomas Doubleday, Ernest Jones, and John Bedford Leno. See Owen Ashton and Stephen Roberts, The Victorian Working Class Writer. New York, London: Mansell, 1999; Ian Haywood, ed., Chartist Fiction: Thomas Doubleday, ‘The Political Pilgrim’s Progress’; Thomas Martin Wheeler, ‘Sunshine and Shadow,’ Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 1999, and Chartist Fiction, vol. 2, Ernest Jones, ‘Woman’s Wrongs,’ Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2001.
- 49.
Mary Hutton, in Ian Haywood, ed., The Literature of Struggle, Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995. Also see Hutton’s Cottage Tales and Poems (1836). Hutton is discussed in Loose, 160–67.
- 50.
Hamilton, Poems and Prose Works, 11.
- 51.
For Thomas Cooper and John Bedford Leno, see Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, London: Mansell, 1999.
- 52.
For Carnie, see Roger Smalley, “The Life and Work of Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, with particular reference to the period 1907–1931.” Diss., University of Central Lancashire, 2006.
- 53.
I have been unable to find many women’s diaries or autobiographies from the mid and late nineteenth century in these collections, though many chronicle lives from the early twentieth century.
- 54.
London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.
- 55.
Janet Hamilton, Poems and Ballads. Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1868; Ellen Johnston, Autobiography, Poems and Songs of Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl.’ Glasgow: William Love, 1867; Annie Wakeman, The Autobiography of a Charwoman, as Chronicled by Annie Wakeman. London: John Macqueen, 1900.
- 56.
Helen Rogers , Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, 262, 271: “As in her political writings, Smith’s identification with the common people in her poetry was based more on a sense of the ordinary working people of her own locality, than with workers as a class.”
- 57.
See Lynn MacKay, Respectability and the London Poor, 1780–1870: The Value of Virtue. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013.
- 58.
Another instance is The Life of John Wills Walshe, F. S. A., by Philip Aegidius Walshe (Montgomery Carmichael), London: Burns and Oats, 1901 , an entirely fictional account of the alleged author’s alleged father’s life as a mystic in Italy.
- 59.
The researches of Sharon Knapp, a Vancouver landscape architect and genealogist, are detailed in Chap. 9.
- 60.
Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945; Margaret Penn, Manchester Fourteen Miles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947.
- 61.
“The Oven Bird,” The Poems of Robert Frost, New York: Random House, 1946, 125.
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Boos, F.S. (2017). Introduction: Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women. In: Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64215-4_1
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