SOURCE: Kaplan, Deborah. “The Woman Worker in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Fiction.” Mosaic: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 18, no. 2 (spring 1985): 51-63.

[In the following essay, Kaplan explores Tonna's role in the re-conceptualization of the working class.]

“To the Victorians belongs the discovery of the woman worker as an object of pity,” Wanda Neff suggests in her now classic study of Victorian Working Women.¹ Although women had always labored, the conditions of their work—indeed, the very idea of women working—began to evoke shock as well as pity in the 1830s and 1840s, in the decades in which the ideology of domesticity was first applied to working women.² This ideology asserted the innate femininity of woman, a femininity constituted by such “natural” traits as purity, piety, self-sacrifice, sensibility and, especially, maternal love. And it endowed woman with the “natural” roles of homemaker and moral guardian in the private sphere of family life.³ The ideology had been shaping the lives of upper- and middle-class women since the end of the eighteenth century. The application of its middle-class ideals to the working woman made her, in effect, recognizable. But she was recognized as pathetic or even perverse because her experience so deviated from those ideals. Indeed, it was in part this re-perception of working-class women within the framework of the ideology of domesticity which resulted first in parliamentary investigations and then in a spurt of protective legislation: the 1842 Mines Act, forbidding colliery employment for women, and the Factory Acts of 1844, 1847 and 1850, limiting women's hours of work in textile trades.

The industrial fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna has special significance for those interested in the social and literary history of working women because it registers the moment when this shift in the leisured classes' perception of working women occurred. Although neglected by most scholars,⁴ the Protestant evangelical Tonna was a very popular writer of prose narratives, poems, tracts and articles in the 1830s and 1840s. Her works were published in many editions and, by 1844, two years before her death, Tonna's reputation had reached transatlantic proportions: her complete works were published in the United States with an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe. An energetic promoter of the ideology of domesticity—of women as the moral and spiritual guardians of their families—Tonna was one of the first writers to apply this ideology to female industrial workers.⁵ Moreover, in her novel Helen Fleetwood (serialized 1839-40) and her collection of tales The Wrongs of Women (serialized 1843-44) she was one of the first writers to attempt to inform upper- and middle-class women about the lives of working-class women.

Convinced that affluent women knew nothing of the miserable conditions of women's industrial work, that they had little access to or interest in the “male” discourses of parliamentary speech and report, which were at that time creating “the woman worker as an object of pity,” Tonna “translated” those discourses into fiction, a discourse frequently identified by her contemporaries as being female.⁶ Moreover, she serialized her two works of industrial fiction in a “female” periodical, the Christian Ladies Magazine, which she also edited from 1843-46. In fictionalizing supposedly male documentary and polemical discourses, she not only demonstrated the new view of working-class women; she attempted to teach that perception to her women readers.

Her industrial fictions show these readers that women whom they assumed to be different, unfamiliar, “other” are, in fact, like themselves. Her justification for this re-perception of working-class women is based on a fundamental tenet of the ideology of domesticity. If femininity is innate, then all women are feminine and all women are, therefore, similar—“sisters in nature,” as Tonna puts it. She attempts to show her leisured readers that the “otherness” or difference of working women is only apparent and attributable to “mere” historical circumstances—specifically, the emergence of industrial capitalism. Tonna's fictions express a “myth” of the fall of working women out of the supposedly natural state of feminine domesticity and into industrial capitalism—with myth here to be understood in the sense coined by F. S. Schwarzbach in his discussion of the myth of corrupt town and innocent country in his Dickens and the City:

By using the word “myth” … I mean to suggest the manner in which we adumbrate explanatory models, fictitious only in varying degrees, which account for happenings in the actual world for which there are no readily available (or acceptable) explanations. … Such a myth is a variety of experiential fiction—a model which rearranges and transmutes past events and present circumstances into a consecutive narrative with order and meaning. In other words, it is a way of making sense of a world that does not itself, at least on the surface, make sense. It allows us to understand and even accept that which may yet be experienced as unpleasant and dangerous.⁷

By employing such an explanatory model, Tonna gives a new order and meaning to the strange and disturbing experience of working women. Tonna also urges her readers to re-perceive themselves at the same time that they re-perceive their “sisters,” arguing that her readers too have suffered the taint of industrial capitalism. Although they are not “fallen,” their femininity and virtue are nonetheless at risk because their participation in industrial capitalism—not as producers but as consumers—has contributed to the fall of working women.

To demonstrate her role in spreading the new view of working-class women, I will focus on Tonna's second work of industrial fiction, The Wrongs of Women, which consists of four tales—“Milliners and Dress-makers,” “The Forsaken Home,” “The Little Pin-Headers,” and “The Lace-Runners.” I have chosen this work because it most fully articulates the myth of the fall. I want to chart that myth, highlighting the plot structure organizing the stories as well as the techniques employed to convey the causal links between leisured women's behavior and working women's degradation. But Tonna not only participated in the perceptual transformation of working-class womanhood; she made a unique contribution to the British industrial novel of the 1840s and 1850s. Thus, in the last section of this essay, I will show the importance of Tonna's work in the context of that genre's representations of working women.

Each of Tonna's tales in The Wrongs of Women treats different female characters in different non-textile industries. “Milliners and Dress-Makers” describes the experience of Ann and Frances King, apprentices in millinery and dressmaking sweatshops. “The Forsaken Home” gives an account of Alice Smith, worker in a screw factory. “The Little Pin-Headers” tells of Betsy Smith, daughter of Alice, who goes to work in a pin factory after her mother's death. And “The Lace-Runners” concerns Kate Clarke, laboring in the cottage industry of lace-running. Although each tale depicts its own characters at distinct kinds of work, all the female characters' experience are similar and, for that matter, similar to the female characters' experiences in Tonna's novel Helen Fleetwood which describes work in textile mills. They are shaped by the same mythic world-view.

Before the fall into industrial capitalism, all the tales suggest, both leisured and working women contentedly realized their female natures. The ontological priority of innate femininity and feminine similarity is underscored by its temporal priority. The tales allude to a pre-industrial world in which women inhabited different ranks, but inequality was no barrier to communality. Indeed, if women shared by nature in the same gender identity, they were also designated, by nature, so the tales suggest, for different social positions. “Female respectability,” the narrator assures her readers, “does not depend on wealth or station … the humblest of English maidens may establish as strong a claim to it as the proudest peeress in the land.”⁸

The hierarchical relations to which the narrator refers belong to a highly romanticized version of pre-industrial village life. Like many of the works of British literature analyzed by Raymond Williams in The Country and The City, The Wrongs of Women draws on a convention of retrospect, imagining a better past with which the present is unflatteringly compared.⁹The Wrongs of Women evokes pre-industrial social relations as the framework within which all women realized their femininity because, thought to be divinely ordained, these relations were also considered, as a system, devoid of injustice and mutually exclusive desires. The narrator turns back to a kind of “golden age” where the supposed harmony and morality of feudal relationships take the place of the antagonism and exploitation which are intrinsic to an industrial capitalist system.

Although The Wrongs of Women situates the shared gender identity of leisured and working women—rooted in innate femininity—in the past (a past, of course, which never actually existed),¹⁰ this shared identity is not viewed as archaic. The hierarchical but “sisterly” relations constitute what Williams has called “residual culture.” According to Williams, “certain experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation.”¹¹ The vision of a universal innate femininity realized in a harmonious and orderly hierarchical framework expresses for Tonna not an archaic but an alternative set of values to those conveyed by the exploitative social relations of industrial capitalism.

Thus if hierarchical, sisterly relations existed in the past, they will, the tales suggest, be realized in the future. The Wrongs of Women posits not just life before the fall into industrial capitalism and out of femininity, but a restoration of life before the fall. By encountering stories of working-class women, by coming to see that leisured and working women are “sisters in nature” who have been differentiated only by the brutalities of industrial capitalism, readers will be roused to help bring about that return. In “The Little Pin-Headers” the “ladies of England” are urged to help the working woman to become “the wife, the manager, the mother in her own humble rank” (p. 462). We must, Tonna insists to her readers in “The Forsaken Home,” “enter our strong, urgent, unanimous protest against the frightful degradation of our sisters” (p. 455). In becoming the benefactors of working-class women and in championing femininity, upper-and middle-class women will also protect their own jeopardized femininity.

How did working women lose their femininity? The answer is to be found in the single plot which structures all of the tales: the step-by-step making of female industrial workers and the step-by-step defeminization that attends that change.¹² Each story pays particular attention to the threshold point—the moment when the central female characters enter industrial capitalism. Their life-stories recapitulate the processes of urbanization and industrialization: each character's feminine nature is initially shown to be uncontaminated because she resides in the pre-industrial countryside.

Thus the initial source of the female characters' de-naturing is located in new socio-economic institutions. The emergence and intensification of profit-making enterprises—industrialization and agrarian capitalism—jeopardize the jobs of their fathers or husbands. The tenant farming Mr. King and the farm-laboring Mr. Smith are being pressured off their lands by big landowners, seeking to consolidate their holdings for more profitable farming. Similarly, the job of Kate Clarke's father, who works as an ostler, is rendered obsolete by the coming of the railway. As a result, the women of the family and in one case the family as well must leave the countryside to seek work in towns.

Only “The Little Pin-Headers” opens on a character, Betsy Smith, who is already at work in a factory. Her threshold point, which she has not yet arrived at either, belongs to the stages of her personal growth rather than to the stages of socio-economic development, but it too emphasizes the historicity of working-class females' gender “difference.” Her gender identity is still intact because she is very young—too young to have been affected yet by her factory work, though old enough to reveal the natural maternal impulses with which all females are supposedly endowed from birth.

In her emphasis on the threshold point, Tonna can also show that working women carry their former or prior feminine values over into their new lives. They do not embrace industrial work. On the contrary they seek work in industrial towns which is suited to and compatible with their nature and duties. In “The Forsaken Home” Alice Smith moves with her family to the factory town of W—where she expects to do what she has always done—keep house for her family while her husband switches from farm to factory work. Kate Clarke in “The Lace-Runners” hopes to become a domestic servant and looks forward to cooking, cleaning, running errands and, most of all, taking care of a family's youngest children.¹³ They are also shown to take on work for specifically feminine reasons. In “Milliners and Dressmakers,” Ann and Frances King, apprenticed in trades in London which essentially commercialize the household task of sewing, hope to put the money they will eventually earn in the service of family life. They dream of repaying their parents for the financial support they have hitherto extended, of helping to support younger brothers and sisters, and of saving dowries for marriage.

These characters discover, however, that it is impossible to find work which is in accordance with their feminine values. Some are simply denied such work. Alice Smith and her husband discover that the factory owners want to hire women only because women will take lower wages than men. Alice is thus forced to work in a screw factory though she “inwardly shrinks from every thing about her: the machinery, the nature of the work, and the aspect of those employed” (p. 423). The family Kate Clarke enters is engaged in the home industry of lace-running. Needing another lace-runner rather that a domestic servant—for they barely have any domestic family life at all—they give Kate, along with all their children, lace embroidery work to do. And some of the characters find that work which was traditionally suitable for a feminine nature has been transformed by the industrial revolution and is no longer so. Milliners and dressmakers' apprentices are worked like machines. Ignoring everything about them but their capacity to create profits, their employers work Ann and Frances King twenty out of twenty-four hours at a time and sometimes around the clock during busy seasons. The work of lace-runners is also inhumanly prolonged. Competition for work is so great and wages so low that families must transform as many of their members as they can into laborers and work them incessantly if they are to earn even a very minimal income.

The stories' masterplot moves from the threshold point to a period of adaptation. At work, the women are informally subjected to a kind of re-education—the goal of which is to produce unfeminine behavior. Women, the stories reveal, become good workers only if they learn to stifle many of the instincts which would make them devoted wives and mothers. Some attempt, at first, to use their feminine natures to shape their work. Betsy's maternal impulses lead her to try to help her younger brother with his pin-heading and to divert beatings meant for him onto herself. Kate Clarke, anxious over the sufferings of two-year old Sally, the youngest laborer in the Collins family's home industry, offers to do her work for her. When Betsy tries to intervene on behalf of her brother, however, his punishments increase. Kate is taught that maternal impulses cut into profits, though in a less harsh manner. If she does Sally's work, Mrs. Collins tries to explain to her, “Who's to do your work then?” (p. 482).

Indeed, feminine emotional responses, in general, must be suppressed. Ann King learns that she must not cry as she works—tears stain fabrics. Mrs. Collins can discourage Kate's nurturing desires because she has learned to hold back all expressions of feeling in herself. “I could hardly have treated myself to a cry before my own children,” she confides at one point to Kate, “for fear they'd think they might work on my feelings, some day, to shorten their tasks. That's why I never let them see me moved” (p. 485).

Female laborers also need to learn unfeminine behavior because tears or sympathy are now luxuries which the working woman cannot afford. For under industrial capitalism, “innate” femininity, like the worker herself, becomes a commodity. Pre-industrial rural life contained “free,” “abundant” arenas of nature untainted by exchange values. Kate Clarke, like the other lace-runners, unable to afford more than watered down milk and thin slices of bread, remembers the nourishment which nature could provide. “I knew what hard living was before I came here,” she tells Mrs. Collins. “Many's the day I've had to content me on two penn'orth of brown bread; but in the autumn I'd flavor it with blackberries, nuts, and ripe sloes … plucking them out of the hedges” (p. 496). If the natural rural world made berries, nuts and sloes available to all, the female nature possessed a parallel freedom and plentitude in the country mother's milk. And, by contrast, no activity better illustrates the commodification of femininity in industrial towns than some of the characters' frustrated efforts to breast feed their children. Once Alice Smith, for example, goes to work in the factory, her breast milk, because she would have to interrupt her paid labor to nurse, becomes a commodity which is too expensive to give her newborn infant very often. She is forced to substitute Godfrey's Cordial for her own milk. A mixture of treacle, water and opium, Godfrey's is a cheaper baby food not only because it does not compete with the mother's laboring but because the narcotic reduces the child's appetite and demands for attention.

The masterplot advances two possible outcomes of the period of adaptation, death or prostitution. Both reveal, albeit in opposite ways, that the worker's femininity is virtually incompatible with her survival. Though efficient workers can not also be good wives or mothers, ironically, only feminine impulses enable women to tolerate the oppression of industrial work. Ann King sickens and dies rather than breaking off an apprenticeship which could eventually render her useful to her struggling family. Those who have become somewhat defeminized rebel against their oppression. They make what are always disastrous attempts either to find better jobs or to counteract the effects of their labor with intensified quests for enjoyment. They do live longer, but they completely lose their femininity. Kate Clarke, for example, unable to endure the long hours and the monotonous repetition of lace-running, unable to find work as a servant, and unable, finally, to afford food and shelter, turns to prostitution.

In addition to plotting the stories in such a way as to show her upper-and middle-class readers how the difference between them and their working class sisters has been created, Tonna shows her readers how they have contributed to the creation of that difference. And, in doing so, she reveals they have hovered on the verge of difference, of defeminization themselves. The “ladies of England” have played an active role in the degradation of female workers because they participate in the economic system which exploits working women. Most upper-and middle-class women who appear in the stories are not capitalists—owners of millinery and dressmaking establishments are exceptions. But as consumers, they have helped industrial capitalism to thrive. Particularly indicted by Tonna are their patterns of consumption, which are directly exploitative.

Tonna does not, however, consistently attack consumption per se. Though consuming, especially excessive and vain consuming, taxes the producer, The Wrongs of Women also suggests that it sustains and enhances femininity. For commodities not only preserve a woman's natural beauty and modesty, they adorn and increase them. Still, the femininity cultivated through consumption is inevitably called into question. When Tonna demonstrates that one group of women consumes at the expense of another group, she is also revealing that one group of women's feminization depends on the other's defeminization.

Often Tonna relies on commodities to trace out this cause and effect relationship. Indeed, three out of four of the tales center upon commodities—lace, pins, dresses—made by women for women. In “Milliners and Dressmakers,” for example, fashionable clothing, in general, connects the deterioration of Ann King's femininity not simply to the greed of her employer at the millinery establishment, but to the vain buying habits of lady customers which result in their feminization. Because they wish to appear in the most up-to-date fashions, affluent women wait until the last moment to order their clothes. They thus give dressmakers very little time to prepare the clothes, and so the latter are forced to hurry and overwork their apprentices. “As fashion has everywhere its apes, so has it everywhere its victims,” Tonna laments (p. 415). Work on fashionable millinery destroys the physical embodiment of Ann King's gender identity, her “bloom”: “The slim, bowed figure, and the tress of thin, loose, flossy hair, bear little vestige of the plump contour and bright rich curls that marked the young girl who, twelve months since, first made her appearance in the work-room of Madame A” (p. 405). She dies before she is able to embark on the twin female destinies of marriage and motherhood. But the same millinery enhances the beauty of the upper-class woman as she confidently enters the marriage market. Thus to Tonna, “Though God made her [the working woman] to be an help-meet for man, the unnatural exactions of pride, and pomp, and frivolity have made her a beast of burthen to her own sex” (p. 415).

The link between the collapse of the working woman's femininity and the achievement of the affluent woman's is also rendered with particular commodity emblems—like the veil which is featured in “The Lace-Runners.” Mrs. Collins, Kate Clarke's employer, takes on extra work—a lace veil which requires embroidering—in order to pay for her infant's coffin. The veil marks the frustration of Mrs. Collins' maternal instincts. Her labor on it may earn her enough money for a coffin, but would not earn her enough to keep her maternal instincts outside the sphere of exchange values. Like Alice Smith, she has caused his death because she could not afford to stop her lace-work in order to nurse and tend to the child herself. But the very same veil, according to Tonna, will aid in the fulfillment of the affluent woman's female nature. “Some blooming bride will probably shade her face with that costly veil, amid the sumptuous preparations for a wedding,” Tonna suggests ironically. And the wedding which fulfills the bride's femininity will also solidify her consumer privileges and class position. She can look forward to “luxuries, the means of providing which may possibly be traced to some successful speculation on the productiveness of pauper industry” (p. 486).

Tonna was not the only writer in the 1840s to create imaginative representations of the working woman. To understand fully the value of her work, we need to situate her images of the producing woman's fall from femininity and her consuming “sister's” contribution to that fall in their literary context. Tonna's work belongs to a decade of experimentation with and flux in literary depictions of the working woman. The working-class woman was becoming an “object of pity.” Could she also become a novel heroine?

Tonna's fictions say “no,” if by heroine we mean a central female characters in quest of an integral self, a destiny realized usually in plots of courtship and marriage.¹⁴ Seeking primarily to explain how working women have lost their femininity, Tonna's masterplot interrupts the lives of adolescent working-class characters like Frances and Ann King, cutting them off from entry into the heroine's plot. They die or become prostitutes before they are even old enough for romance and marriage. While Tonna created working-class protagonists but showed that the career of the heroine was impossible to them, Disraeli created a working-class heroine but showed that she was not really working-class. The heroine of Sybil (1845), we discover, is a descendant of the aristocracy. It is Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) which first shows a female character who is both working class and a heroine. The daughter of a textile worker, Mary Barton must choose between two lovers and makes a nearly irrevocable mistake in selecting, at first, the wrong suitor.

Why this variation in representations of the working-class woman? Why, at least initially, did the working-class heroine seem, in effect, a contradiction? The Victorian novel was a middle-class genre. The romantic plots of heroines had been marked out primarily by middle-class characters with whom middle-class readers could identify. The working class character could become a heroine only if her author and readers were willing to bestow on her middle-class ideals, and, specifically, only if they were willing to assume her innate femininity. Although Tonna assumed the innate femininity of the working-class woman, she did not believe that her readers shared that assumption and therefore could identify with the working woman. Her fictions are thus attempts at persuasion. The Wrongs of Women provides myths of the fall in order to convince upper- and middle-class readers of the natural femininity of the working woman and the “mere” historicity of the working woman's difference. But even had Tonna believed that her audience had already learned to re-perceive the working woman, she could not have created working-class heroines. As an orthodox evangelical Protestant, Tonna had a strong aversion to “false” and “seductive” romantic plots. She could justify her fiction-writing vocation only by producing polemical fiction.¹⁵

Ironically, some of the constraints under which Tonna operated account for her value as a writer of industrial fiction. Because she could not write novels and tales which assume the innate femininity of working women and because she chose to write polemical fiction, she provides a rendering of industrial work conditions and the relations of leisured and working women that was impossible in more conventional middle-class novels like Mary Barton. Industrial novels with working-class heroines are unable to examine in more than a cursory way the conditions of women's work. It is not just that the heroine's plot undercuts explorations of work by suggesting that work may be transcended through romance. Such industrial novels draw on a conventional middle-class vocabulary of heroine characterization and social relations. Although these novels ostensibly introduce the hitherto unknown working class and attempt to gain sympathy for that class from readers, their conventions, by rendering the working woman in a middle-class form, thus prevent knowledge of the “unknown.”¹⁶ Tonna's industrial fiction is important, then, because her frank depictions are virtually unique in British industrial novels and because, when juxtaposed to more mainstream novels like Mary Barton, they help us to recognize the conventions of those better-known works.

The Wrongs of Women's explicit descriptions of a woman's work conditions—her enforced separations from her infants, her encounters with sadistic or sexually coercive overseers, her illnesses, exhaustion, hunger pains and ragged clothes—emphasize the brutal, determining power of the material and historical circumstances which press in upon and destroy her gender identity. By contrast, the efforts of novels like Mary Barton to show the miseries of industrial work are severely constricted by the neat, even beautiful appearance of the heroine, her identification with the space of the home, and her frequent performances as homemaker and moral guide. She is and remains feminine. Mary Barton has a mouth “scarlet as winter-berries,” a clear, pale complexion, “where the eloquent blood flushed carnation at each motion,” thick, black eyelashes and golden, curly hair.¹⁷ Because she works for a milliner and dressmaker, she is both clothes-conscious and capable of making herself attractive dresses, like her “pretty new blue merino, made tight to her throat” worn with “her little linen collar and linen cuffs” (p. 26).”¹⁸ Mary is the “light” of her father's “hearth; the voice of his otherwise silent home” (p. 21) and her efforts to take care of that home and her father are more consistently dramatized over the course of the novel than her work as a seamstress. Indeed, she is rarely shown at Miss Simmonds' establishment. We see her do more piece-work sewing at home in order to earn money to buy food for her father or to help a friend finish work for which she will receive no pay.

Another female character, Rachael in Hard Times, is at thirty-five too old to be a heroine—that is, too old according to the conventions of the novel, to realize her identity within a plot of courtship and marriage. But we are reminded continually of her potential. She has “a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order of her shining black hair.”¹⁹ Her touch can “calm the wild waters” of Stephen Blackpool's soul, “as the uplifted hand of the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea” (p. 59). When Stephen's drunken wife suddenly returns, Rachael nurses her and straightens up Stephen's home. He returns from work to find that “everything was in its place and order as he had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the hearth was freshly swept” (p. 63). We never see Rachael at her work in Bounderby's textile mill.

Like her depictions of conditions of work, Tonna's representations of the exploitation of working women by leisured women also have no counterpart in other industrial novels. Certainly, middle-class characters may be silly or hysterical, but they are too feminine to play a part in exploitation. Indeed, both leisured and working women are shown, oddly, to be somewhat disconnected from industrial capitalism because both groups are associated with the private realm of domesticity. The supposedly public experience of industrial capitalism is illustrated in the interactions of male pairs like Barton and Carson or Blackpool and Bounderby. Leisured and working women either do not meet in these novels—Mary Barton never encounters Henry Carson's sisters—or, when they meet across class lines, they acknowledge the industrial capitalist relations of “master and men.”²⁰ In Hard Times, for example, Rachael and Louisa, meeting by accident in Stephen's apartment, discuss Stephen's difficulties finding factory work, difficulties which Bounderby and the workers' trade union have created.

Or they do not acknowledge industrial capitalist relations at all. This denial can be seen best in another of Gaskell's industrial novels, North and South. Although the working-class character Bessy is not a heroine, the novel deserves discussion here because it assumes her innate femininity, and it provides one of the most extended depictions of relations among women of different classes in the genre. When Margaret Hale visits Bessy Higgins, they often discuss clothes without noting that their different social identities give them, in fact, very different relations to clothes. Bessy, who has produced material in a textile mill, is now dying of tuberculosis, an occupational disease, while Margaret, despite her identification with the agricultural South, participates in the industrial revolution as a consumer of clothing. Dress links Bessy and Margaret in a socio-economic relationship—a relationship of exploitation. But though Bessy, in answer to Margaret's questioning, tells of the fluff which fills the air in the factory's carding-room and enters the lungs of the workers, and though Margaret, at Bessy's prompting, describes several of her dresses, neither woman perceives the cause and effect relationship between Bessy's illness and Margaret's elegance. Although the narration returns again and again to clothes, neither the narrator nor her character gives voice to the economic relations submerged beneath this female friendship. Instead, Margaret and Bessy are shown to have the same “natural,” gender-based interests not only in clothes but in flowers, religion and their families.

Although I have suggested that Tonna's work provides some illuminating contrasts to the well-known industrial novels of mid-nineteenth-century England, in one crucial way Tonna's The Wrongs of Women is similar to novels such as Hard Times, Mary Barton, or North and South. Tonna's graphic representations of women's work are, we should remember, offered in the service of her myth of the fall. They are part of her attempts to prove, in effect, that what was a middle-class view of sexual identity applied to working women as well. Thus, neither her graphic representations of women's work and of their exploitation by leisured women nor the obfuscation of these experiences in literary stereotypes of the heroine constitutes an acknowledgement of the working-class woman in her own terms. Neither form of representation—Tonna's “objects of pity” nor Dickens' and Gaskell's heroines—respected her “otherness.”

However, if Tonna's fiction is ultimately as limited, as class-bound in its moral and political vision as the works of Gaskell or Dickens, it is nonetheless a distinct and informative part of the history of the working woman's appearance in Victorian fiction. Despite its overall purpose, it more nearly conveys the actual experience of working women than any other fiction of its time. It provides us with a way to recognize the force of conventions in mainstream industrial novels. And it is vivid testimony to the spread of the ideology of domesticity throughout Victorian society.

Notes

1. Wanda Neff, Victorian Working Women (1929; rpt. New York, 1966).

2. See Ann Oakley, Women's Work: The Housewife Past and Present (New York, 1974), pp. 32-59.

3. Discussions of the ideology of domesticity are numerous. See, for example, Barbara Pope, “Angels in the Devil's Workshop: Leisured and Charitable Women in Nineteenth-Century England and France,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston, 1977), pp. 296-324 or Francoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel (New York, 1974), pp. 3-15. I want to stress that uses of the terms femininity and domesticity refer in this essay to a socially conservative nineteenth-century ideology and are to be distinguished from ideals of womanhood articulated by the feminist movement of the late twentieth century.

4. Before 1970 Tonna's work received scant attention, though there are treatments of her work worth noting in Neff, and in Louis Cazamian's The Social Novel in England 1830-1850, trans. Martin Fido (1903; rpt. London, 1973). Ivanka Kovačević and S. Barbara Kanner's “Blue Book Into Novel: The Forgotten Industrial Fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 24 (1970), 152-73, reintroduced Tonna's industrial fiction to literary critics. Although scholarly examinations of her work are still rare, the following works include discussions of her or her writings: Vineta Colby, Yesterday's Woman (Princeton, 1974); Ellen Moers, Literary Woman (Garden City, 1977); Ivanka Kovačević, Fact Into Fiction (Leicester, 1975); Joseph Kestner, “Men in Female Condition of England Fiction,” Women & Literature, 2 (1982), 77-100; Kestner, “Technological Change and Literary History: The Case of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” MLA Convention, New York, Dec. 1981.

5. See Oakley, pp. 46-47.

6. See Nancy Armstrong, “The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel,” Novel, 15, No. 2 (1982), 127-45.

7. F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (London, 1979), p. 11.

8. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, The Wrongs of Women in The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Vol. II (New York, 1846), p. 462. All subsequent page references are to this edition. After serialization in the Christian Ladies Magazine, The Wrongs of Women was published in 1843-44 by W. H. Dalton, London, and in the same years by M. W. Dodd, New York, Tonna's collected Works were first published in two and three volume editions simultaneously by M. W. Dodd in 1844-45. No British edition has been published.

9. Raymond Williams, The Country and The City (New York, 1973). For Williams' critique of what he calls “retrospective radicalism,” that is, the strategy of using the past to criticize the present, see chapter four, “Golden Ages.”

10. For a more realistic portrait of women in pre-industrial England, see, for example, Richard Vann, “Toward a New Lifestyle: Women in Preindustrial Capitalism,” in Becoming Visible, pp. 192-216.

11. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 122.

12. A few critics have noted that what I am calling Tonna's masterplot is a structure conveying deterioration without, however, recognizing that that deterioration is specifically defeminization. See, for example, Kovačević, Fact Into Fiction, pp. 303-04 and Neff, p. 94.

13. Female characters who prefer domestic work in The Wrongs of Women are expressing a middle-class point of view. According to Janet Murray, “Middle-class men and women tended to think of domestic service as the ideal working-class female occupation.” Murray goes on to unmask this preference. See Strong-Minded Women (New York, 1982), p. 327. See also Barbara Pope, “Angels in the Devil's Workshop: Leisured and Charitable Women in Nineteenth-Century England and France,” in Becoming Visible, p. 321.

14. For discussions of the heroine and the heroine's plot see Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (New York, 1982) and Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel 1722-1782 (New York, 1980).

15. Tonna's view of her vocation is elaborated in her autobiography, Personal Recollections, included in the Life of Charlotte Elizabeth (New York, 1848). For a discussion of that autobiography see Elizabeth Kowaleski's “’The Heroine of Some Strange Romance’: The Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 1, No. 1, (1982), 141-53.

16. Sheila Smith makes a similar point in The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s (Oxford, 1980), pp. 233-34.

17. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848; rpt. New York, 1958), p. 103.

18. Neff suggests that the dressmaker's apprentice was a favorite choice among novelists for the heroine role. Middle-class writers knew more of her occupation than of, for example, factory work, and she could be portrayed attractively—“Plying a needle did not disarrange her curls” (p. 147).

19. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; rpt. New York, 1966), p. 50.

20. “Masters and Men” is the title of the fifteenth chapter of Gaskell's North and South. “Men and Masters” is the title of Book Two, chapter five of Hard Times.