Florence S. Boos

Guide to the Year's Work

This past year brought many valuable contributions to the study of literary PreRaphaelitism, with detailed critical analyses often providing wider philosophic or cultural insights. I will begin this review by examining articles, book chapters, and a monograph that analyze the work of the Rossetti brothers, then turn to several articles and chapters on Christina Rossetti’s poetry and two books and several articles which explore the contributions of William Morris. Since Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song in NineteenthCentury Britain (Univ. of Virginia Press) includes chapters on all three major PreRaphaelite poets, Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Morris, these will be discussed separately under the relevant author headings.

‘Truth’, ‘Fiction’ and Collaboration in The Autobiography of a Charwoman

This chapter explores some of the qualities of Elizabeth Dobbs/Martha Grimes’s mediated narrative of a difficult life, as told to her employer Annie Wakeman. Elizabeth worked as a servant, singer, boarding-house keeper, shoemaker’s assistant and, after a series of family reverses, charwoman, and her oral Autobiography recorded the often idiosyncratic views of a determined member of the urban underclass. Since the account by “Dobbs” differs in some details from that of the census records, her Autobiography raises questions of the extent to which she may have reshaped her past to accord with class-based notions of acceptable behavior, why her employer may have done likewise, and the degree to which their motives for censorship or concealment may have diverged.

Ellen Johnston: Autobiographical Writings of “The Factory Girl”

This chapter examines a rare memoir by a Victorian woman factory worker, the preface to Johnston’s Autobiography, Poems and Songs. A resident of Glasgow and Dundee whose verses attracted the aid of Alexander Campbell, editor of the Glasgow Sentinel, Johnston used her memoir and autobiographical poems to narrate her years of childhood abuse, unwed motherhood, factory labor, and stubborn pride in authorship. “Factory girls” had lower standing in the Victorian class hierarchy than servants, and Johnston’s pointed use of the epithet and self-designation of the “Queen of the Penny Post” reflected pride not only in her verse, but also in her ability to reach a working-class audience against enormous odds.

The Servant Writes Back: Mary Ann Ashford’s Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter

This chapter discusses a rare self-published servant’s autobiography issued in 1844. Mary Ann Ashford’s Life offers an unsentimental view of her many years as a servant and nurse, constituting a virtual compendium of the ways in which servants could suffer from theft, deceit, isolation, food deprivation, arbitrary dismissal, and other forms of mistreatment. Ashford’s account also provides an interesting comparison with a contemporary fictional servant memoir composed by a humanitarian upper-class Quaker, (Miss) Hannah Mary Rathbone’s The Autobiography of Rose Allen, as well as a striking contrast with two contemporary novels with servant heroines, Catherine Crowe’s Susan Hopley, or the Adventures of a Maidservant and Dinah Mulock Craik’s Mistress and Maid, both of which celebrate the ideal of the selflessly devoted servant from an employer’s perspective.

Uneven Access: Working-Class Women and the Education Acts

This chapter compares the educational barriers faced by working-class women before and after the Education Act of 1870, as reflected in the poignant testimonies of Janet Bathgate, Mary Smith, Marianne Farningham, Hannah Mitchell, Peig Sayers, and several others. As these accounts testify, opportunities for bright and eager children to access formal education varied widely by region, parental occupation, and religious affiliation. The provision of government-sponsored primary education as initiated by the 1870 and later Education Acts, though delayed by minimal attendance requirements, lax enforcement, the politics of local school boards, and the rote nature of the instruction provided, nonetheless marked a seismic shift in widening opportunities for women of the British working classes in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

From Servant to Schoolmistress: Janet Bathgate and Mary Smith

In this chapter I introduce the memoirs of two women who attained the socially respected occupation of teacher for at least some part of their lives. Janet Bathgate, reared in rural poverty, taught herself what she needed in order to teach primary school and conduct religious classes; and Mary Smith, an intellectually inclined shoemaker’s daughter, founded a well-respected school in Carlisle. Bathgate drafted her (third-person) memoirs with marked dramatic skill, and Smith’s Autobiography was distinctive for its honesty, introspection, and stoic clarity of thought. Bathgate’s early efforts to become a lay religious teacher met with severe opposition, and Smith was forced to spend some years as the unpaid assistant to a minister and his family before opening her own establishment, but in later life both women attained gratification through authorship and, in the case of Smith, civic engagement.

Memoir and People’s History in Janet Hamilton’s Sketches of Village Life

In this chapter I examine the autobiographical reflections of a matriarch who, although largely remembered as a poet and essayist, also published reminiscences as part of a “people’s history” of the region in which she grew up. An avid reader who had no formal education whatsoever, Janet Hamilton possessed a remarkable memory which helped her memorialize, sometimes critically, the customs, ballads, legends, and personal ties of an “auld warld” in which she had managed to flourish. In a period when the life story of a working-class shoemaker’s wife and mother of ten might not have attracted interest, Hamilton’s essays, reprinted from the Airdre Advertiser, blended memories of a devout, rural, and preindustrial culture with the account of a bright girl’s observant and restless childhood.

The Annals of the Poor—Rural and Conversion Narratives: Elizabeth Campbell, Christian Watt, Elizabeth Oakley, Mrs. Collier, Jane Andrew, and Barbara Farquhar

In this chapter I consider the autobiographies of women of largely rural or provincial backgrounds, marginal incomes, or precarious health. The first section is devoted to the reminiscences of Elizabeth Oakley, a servant and farmer’s wife; Elizabeth Campbell, a servant, factory worker, and modestly published poet; and Christian Watt, a widowed fishwife who wrote her diary while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown left her unable to feed her large family. Though all of the autobiographers discussed in this chapter were religious, spiritual experiences or views provided the main impetus for the memoirs of those discussed in the second section: Jane Andrew, an invalided orphan; Barbara Farquhar, a “Labourer’s Daughter” and author of a treatise promoting Sundays as a day of rest; and A. Collier, a “Bible-Woman” who sought divine help in her struggles to cope with the sporadic hunger and physical violence she endured.

Under Physical Siege: The Early Victorian Autobiographies of Elizabeth Storie and Mary Prince

Few autobiographies of working-class women were published in the early and mid-Victorian period, and these were generally accounts of severe mistreatment which had attracted the compassion and assistance of middle-class patrons. In this chapter I consider two such early memoirs of abused women who, along with their sponsors, strove to present their lives as representative of a larger cause. Each woman had endured violence of the most visceral sort—Elizabeth Storie’s “doctor” almost poisoned her to death, and Mary Prince’s slaveholding “employers” beat, insulted, humiliated, and sexually assaulted her—and each suffered lifelong consequences from the abuse she described. Both Storie and Prince made direct polemical appeals to their intended audiences, and each needed personal assistance and financial subvention to further her cause.

Introduction: Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women

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.