SOURCE: Kestner, Joseph. “Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's The Wrongs of Woman: Female Industrial Protest.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2, no. 2 (fall 1983): 193-214.

[In the following essay, Kestner discusses the cultural and factual basis of The Wrongs of Woman.]

In the opening paragraph of his essay Chartism (1839), Thomas Carlyle warned the British public about the “Condition-of-England Question,” calling for national inquiry about social abuses:

A feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it. … To us individually this matter appears, and has for many years appeared, to be the most ominous of all practical matters whatever; a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody. The time is verily come for acting in it; how much more for consultation about acting in it, for speech and articulate inquiry about it!¹

Part of the “inquiry” Carlyle demanded existed in the industrial fiction which appeared several months before the publication of Chartism. During 1839 two works investigating industrialization began serial publication, Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, Trollope's novel in shilling parts in February, Tonna's narrative in The Christian Lady's Magazine in September. In the tradition of female literature during the nineteenth century, however, the contribution of women writers to social protest has yet to be completely recognized. Writers like Geraldine Jewsbury, Julia Kavanagh, Elizabeth Stone, Eliza Meteyard, and Fanny Mayne, as well as the better known Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Gaskell, contributed, as did Trollope and Tonna, to a rigorous tradition of social protest during the period. Even before Helen Fleetwood and Michael Armstrong, a writer like Martineau, with such texts as The Rioters (1827), The Turn-out (1829) and A Manchester Strike (1832), had established women as analysts of industrialism. Many of these women have yet to find a secure place in the received canon of nineteenth-century female authorship that has embraced Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot. This omission distorts the situation of women during the period.²

In Literary Women Ellen Moers noted: “Of all the minor women of the epic age, this lady … Mrs. Tonna … is the one about whom I most wish to satisfy my curiosity.” Moers merely glances at Tonna's best known works, Helen Fleetwood and The Wrongs of Woman, content to call the latter “a species of industrial fiction.”³ This attitude is dismissive because it uncritically places such a work in a convenient category. It also assures that the writer remain “minor.” The Wrongs of Woman is an important literary social protest, the culmination of a sequence of industrial literature by the Evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (1790-1846). As early as 1832 Tonna had criticized unions in her novel Combination, which details the pernicious effects of labor combinations on two brothers. In 1837 she initiated a series on St. Giles slums in The Christian Lady's Magazine (of which she became editor in 1834), an exposé lasting into 1838. By the time Tonna began writing Helen Fleetwood in 1839, she not only had written Combination but also had examined the factory system in a series of essays in The Christian Lady's Magazine in 1838. When the serial publication of Helen Fleetwood concluded in March 1841, Tonna did not lose her interest in the factory controversy. Instead, she published several more criticisms of the system in 1842 in her magazine. Carlyle's exhortation in Chartism does not originate industrial fiction: it recognizes a tradition already pursued by women.

In 1843 Tonna's major contributions to industrial literature appeared with the anonymous publication at Easter of The Perils of the Nation and, later that spring, the first of four Parts of The Wrongs of Woman, “Milliners and Dress-makers.” Both these works, the former a treatise and the latter a novel, drew heavily from the work of Richard Dugard Grainger and Richard Henry Horne on the Second Report of the Commissioners on the Employment of Children (30 January 1843).⁴ “Milliners and Dress-makers” attracted sufficient favorable notice to encourage Tonna to write the remainder of The Wrongs of Woman: “The Forsaken Home” (“Part II”), “The Little Pin-headers” (“Part III”), and “The Lace-runners” (“Part IV”).

Recent critical treatment of Charlotte Tonna has concentrated on her role as one among several industrial novelists, including Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Elizabeth Stone.⁵ There remains, however, considerable reason for focusing on The Wrongs of Woman because of its pivotal time of publication and its concentration on women's labor. Unlike Helen Fleetwood, Michael Armstrong, Sybil, Mary Barton, or William Langshawe which deal with both male and female workers, The Wrongs of Woman concentrates on female laborers. Published during 1843 and 1844, it embraces a period only prophesied in Chartism. During 1842 England experienced the rejection of the second Chartist petition in May and the Plug Plot Riots in Manchester in August—events later used by Disraeli for the conclusion to Sybil. In 1842 several key documents concerning the Condition-of-England were published: in May there appeared in the First Report of the Commissioners on the Employment of Children in Mines, and in July Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. In the pages of the latter, the effects of some occupations were evident:⁶

TABULAR STATEMENT OF DEATHS FROM DISEASE OF MILLINERS AND DRESSMAKERS, IN THE METROPOLITAN UNIONS DURING THE YEAR 1839, AS SHOWN BY THE MORTUARY REGISTERS.

The conditions of dressmakers and milliners, exposed by the publication of the Second Report in January 1843, prompted the founding of societies like the Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dress-makers and Milliners, with Lord Ashley as its President.⁷ In March 1843, on the eve of the publication of Tonna's The Perils of the Nation, Fergus O'Connor was acquitted. By mid-year, when The Wrongs of Woman had been conceived, the magnitude of the Condition-of-England question was greater than it had been in 1839 when Tonna began Helen Fleetwood. According to the Census of 1841, of 106,801 persons engaged in dressmaking and millinery, only 563 were males.⁸ Tonna's interest in the sufferings of these women, discussed as early as 1835 in The Christian Lady's Magazine, culminated in The Wrongs of Woman. By December 1844, she learned she had cancer. The majority of her writing from that time forward concerned religious subjects. The Wrongs of Woman may be regarded as her final statement about women in industrial society.

ANTECEDENTS OF THE WRONGS OF WOMAN

The Wrongs of Woman cannot be assessed apart from Tonna's previous work about industrial conditions. The proof of this interrelationship is that in “Part II” of The Wrongs of Woman she cites The Perils of the Nation. To deal with these antecedents one must examine the growth of her interest in industrialism, evidence of which includes Combination, her writings for The Christian Lady's Magazine, Helen Fleetwood, and The Perils of the Nation. One may trace two developments in this sequence: a deepening range of reference and an increasing reliance on documentary evidence.

Combination was published in 1832, the same year as Harriet Martineau's A Manchester Strike.⁹ Subtitled A Tale, Founded on Facts, Combination presents several issues, including the religious beliefs of workers in factories and union agitation, that mark Tonna's industrial writing. The novel concerns two brothers, William and Thomas Riley, after they lose their father, a person of “a good moral character.”¹⁰ Unfortunately the Rileys meet the union agitator Smith, who encourages Thomas to kill Collyer, a strike-breaker and informer. After the murder, the brothers and their sister Judy drift to Manchester to stay with their aunt, Mrs. Harris. There they meet their cousin Michael Burke, who has been converted to Christ after a dissolute soldier's life.

Tonna's indictment of unions in Combination is naive and strident. When a fever strikes the workers' district, she regards it as a visitation from God: “Such was a part of the miseries that followed from the wicked principle of combining to raise wages” (p. 178). Despite the narrator's commentary, the anti-union position is presented in a perceptive summary by Mr. Bolton, who advises the Rileys against combining. At the novel's conclusion all the Rileys die: William dies uncertain of belief, Thomas blaspheming, and Judy confirmed in her convictions. Despite her subtitle, Tonna supplies no documentation, basing her idea of union activity on rumor and Christian prejudice. Although Combination is only a marginal work of art, several of its elements are relevant to Tonna's later methods. First, the religious fervor behind her reforming instincts is evident, as it will be in Helen Fleetwood and The Wrongs of Woman. Tonna imposes a biblical allegory on industrial conditions, calling Thomas a “Prodigal Son” (p. 104). This allegorical tendency she modifies or abandons in later industrial writing, substituting for it genuine factuality. The female characters, Judy Riley and Mrs. Harris, have only admonitory roles, to contrast with the violence and unbelief of the male characters. In later works Tonna will show women as well as men destroyed, degraded, and demoralized by the factory system. Her proauthoritarian attitudes in Combination will be completely altered within a year or two, probably as a result of the publication of the Sadler Committee investigations.

Between Combination and Helen Fleetwood in 1839, Tonna assumed the editorship of The Christian Lady's Magazine in 1834. In the Introduction to the first issue, January 1834, Tonna stated her purpose:

Is then our little periodical to be numbered among works exclusively theological? We mean not so: we have sketched a wider range for our kind contributors to occupy. … Against love-tales we enter our solemn protest. … It is our ambition, not merely to supply our friends with a periodical that may amuse them for a fleeting hour, but to furnish their shelves with an occasional volume of useful reference on topics of permanent importance.¹¹

The writings about industrialism in The Christian Lady's Magazine fall into two periods, those prior to the serialization of Helen Fleetwood (1839 to 1841), and those of 1842, following the novel and contemporary with the publication of Chadwick's Report. In February 1834, the second issue, Tonna published an essay, “Politics,” a conversation between an uncle and his niece. The occasion of the essay was probably the publication of the minutes presented before the committee chaired by Michael Sadler; this was the Report from the Select Committee on the Bill to Regulate the Labour of Children in Mills and Factories of August 1832. Tonna's characters call Sadler “a human M.P.” (1.155). The uncle criticizes the final bill passed, which did not include a ten hours' provision for those under eighteen, as originally proposed.¹² Topics like ventilation, work hours, powers of overseers, and fencing of machinery are commented upon. Two practices in this essay characterize Tonna's approach: the inclusion of documentation and the exhortation to the female audience to become reformist. The uncle quotes from newspapers actual cases of child abuse or death by machinery. Tonna asks her readers to become involved with legislative reform:

Female influence is very powerful; it was exerted with persevering energy and most happy effect, throughout the thirty years' struggle on behalf of the oppressed negroes. The work to which you are now called, is comparatively easy: the scenes described are within a short journey of any person who desires to investigate the matter. … The sources of information are so numerous, so near at hand, that it is enough to point it out to your readers.

(1.159-60)

While cautioning her reader not to become a “female demogogue,” Tonna in her second issue has made her point: women can inform themselves about factory conditions by travel or reading and then influence their male associates to make legislative changes. This is the same intention expressed ten years later in The Wrongs of Woman. Unlike Carlyle, she is addressing a specifically female reformist audience.

This early essay is not Tonna's only writing about industrialism prior to Helen Fleetwood. The Christian Lady's Magazine continued to remind its readers of conditions. In December 1835 it published a letter from a woman concerning “Remuneration for Needle-work.” The correspondent pointed out that those women not strong enough for household work are most often employed in workplaces, suffering more than their stronger sisters. She asks women to remedy this condition:

There is something, too, in the very occupation—so quiet, so harmless, so domestic, so exclusively womanish—it seems to have a peculiar interest to a woman's feeling. …

Does it not become every Christian lady to consider the deep responsibility that is upon us, the accumulated misery of which we may be the occasion, by the insufficient payment of those whom we employ?

(4.536-37)

The correspondent alludes to the inevitable descent into prostitution caused by low wages, a theme Tonna was to use for the conclusion to “Part IV” of The Wrongs of Woman. By February 1842 Tonna has become exasperated: “Look at the factories; session after session passes by, and no effectual step is taken by Parliament, no pledge to be obtained from men in power, that they will promote the sacred cause of those poor destitute ones” (17.286). The following month she chastises her readers, stating her motive for writing Helen Fleetwood and The Wrongs of Woman; she believes that the females of England can promote change: “If a lady on reading your pages finds her heart moved to go to some male relation or friend who will listen kindly to her plea,” conditions might be remediated (17.285). Tonna believes that “ENGLISH FEMALE SYMPATHY” (17.287) may work in unison with “the noble, persevering, uncompromising Ashley” to effect reform: “Give us justice for the factories, and a TEN HOUR BILL!” (17.288). The emphatic use of documentation in The Christian Lady's Magazine series after 1836 is a result of the publication of Blue Books begun in that year.¹³

Of The Wrongs of Woman and Helen Fleetwood, the latter is the better known. The fact that Tonna wrote The Wrongs of Woman indicates she did not regard Helen Fleetwood as conclusive. Prior to the initial installment of Helen Fleetwood in September of 1839, England had been through several incidents that sharpened Tonna's insight, including riots in Wales in May and the rejection, by a vote of 235 to 46, of the first Chartist petition in July. Pursuant to her intentions stated in the Introduction to the first issue of The Christian Lady's Magazine in January 1834, Tonna, in the December 1839 installment, informs her readers that Helen Fleetwood is not a fiction:

Let no one suppose we are going to write fiction, or to conjure up phantoms of a heated imagination, to aid the cause which we avowedly embrace. … Vivid indeed, and fertile in devices must the fancy be that could invent a horror beyond the bare, everyday reality of the thing! Nay, we will set forth nothing but what has been stated on oath, corroborated on oath, and on oath confirmed beyond the possibility of an evasive question.¹⁴

Tonna does not avoid such subjects as prostitution in Helen Fleetwood, which is to be a combination of fiction and documentation.

Helen Fleetwood concerns a single family, the Greens, headed by the grandmother, and her grandchildren, Richard, Mary, James, and Willy, and the orphan Helen Fleetwood, adopted by Mrs. Green. The family is dispossessed after a lease on their farm is not renewed by the new landlord. Deluded by recruiters from the cities (already condemned in the essay “English Slavery”), the Greens migrate to Manchester, where Mrs. Green's daughter Sally Wright lives with her four children, Sarah, John, Phoebe, and Charles. Throughout the narrative Tonna reminds her readers of the New Poor Law, Althorp's Factory Act (1833), “white slavery,” Lord Ashley, Blue Book evidence, and Chartism. She quotes Leonard Horner's testimony of 11 March 1840 in the July 1840 installment: contemporaneity is emphasized to arouse readers of The Christian Lady's Magazine.

Of particular relevance to The Wrongs of Woman is Tonna's emphasis on the suffering of females in Manchester. Sally Wright is an impoverished mother living at subsistence level. Of her two female children, Sarah dies after losing one arm in an accident; Phoebe becomes a prostitute. Mary Green is “apprenticed out to an humble business” (p. 643), Mrs. Green goes to the workhouse, and Helen dies from abuse at the factory. It is the male characters, Richard Green and his brother Willy, who survive—Richard never having left the country, and Willy having returned through the aid of a clergyman. The brunt of the suffering is borne by the women, whereas the men have the ability to endure the city or the chance to escape to the country. Tonna implies that men are less targets of abuse than women. Specifically to engage the sympathy of the readers of The Christian Lady's Magazine, Tonna concentrates on female characters, not avoiding such sensitive issues as Sally's loss of religion or Phoebe's prostitution. Running at the same time as the serialization of Helen Fleetwood was a series, “Female Biography of Scripture,” which featured the biblical Sarah. Since one of the characters in the novel is also named Sarah, Tonna assigns a religious value to her novel and promulgates the idea that women are the spiritual force of a society. Her indictment of the factory system in Helen Fleetwood, consequently, embraces both physical and spiritual destitution.¹⁵ With the completion of Helen Fleetwood in March 1841, Tonna directed her energies to serializing Judah's Lion from April 1841 to February 1843. During this time, she published several more editorials (“The Protestant”) on factory conditions in the February and March issues of The Christian Lady's Magazine in 1842. In July, she asked her readers to purchase Lord Ashley's speeches (18.42).

Toward the end of 1842 Tonna was asked by the Committee of the Christian Influence Society to write a study of the condition of Britain, since, according to her husband, she was “deeply impressed with a sense of the alarming state of the country, from the habitual grinding oppression to which the labouring classes were exposed.” As a result, “she was at once amply supplied with facts and information, both from Parliamentary Reports and private correspondence of many who were devoting themselves to this momentous inquiry.” The resulting work, The Perils of the Nation, appeared at Easter (16 April) 1843. The work was published anonymously, “as it was not to be supposed that legislators and those for whose perusal it was intended, would pay much attention to a work on such a subject from a woman's pen.” Louis Tonna recalled after his wife's death:

The book speedily reached a second and a third edition; and that it had a marked and decided influence, not only on the tone of public feeling, but directly on the Legislature, admits of no doubt. It was quoted on platforms and discussed in private circles; three important societies may be attributed to its influence. … What were its effects in aiding the passing of the Mines and Collieries' Bill, and the Ten Hours Bill, and in bringing forward the Health of Towns Bill, will only be known when the secrets of all hearts are revealed.¹⁶

The Perils of the Nation was, as Monica Fryckstedt contends, “undoubtedly Charlotte Elizabeth's most influential single work.”¹⁷ If one considers the “Ten Hours' Bill” (Fielden's Factory Act, 1847) and the Public Health Act (1848) as results of The Perils of the Nation, this is true. The work is also valuable for illustrating Tonna's methodology immediately prior to the composition of The Wrongs of Woman.

More than any other work by Tonna, The Perils of the Nation relied on documentation: it begins with a quotation from Lord Ashley's speech of 28 February 1843, and maintains its documentary emphasis in order to convince readers that it is not fiction. Tonna's purpose and method is stated with clarity in the ninth chapter, “Want of Sanitary Regulations”:

We shall follow into their dwellings the same classes that we have already glanced at in their occupations. …

We must supply data to those who desire to investigate the evil, that they may devise a remedy. … It is obvious that relief does not, cannot lie within the reach of the sufferers. … The legislature must interfere.¹⁸

Tonna's practice in Helen Fleetwood and The Wrongs of Woman parallels this intention to “follow into dwellings.” In her third chapter Tonna notices the prevalence of females in manufacturing: “His, do we say! her toil, its toil; for women and children form the larger portion of those who are so employed” (pp. 19-20). She observes the hazards to their moral state: “Her morals may have escaped the practical pollution of the mass, her mind cannot have continued undefiled in the daily hearing and seeing of such abominations” (p. 24). Tonna's documentary references in The Perils of the Nation are myriad, including speeches by Lord Ashley (p. 202), Martineau's A Manchester Strike (p. xii), the Morning Chronicle (p. 103), and William Gilly's The Peasantry of the Border (1841) (p. 142).

Indicative of Tonna's procedure is Chapter Five, “The Workshop Labourers.” She draws heavily from Horne and Grainger's evidence in the Second Report. (Disraeli used some of this same material for Sybil.¹⁹) Tonna quotes extensively for three pages from the Introduction to the Second Report, omitting only employers' names. So rapid was the composition of The Perils of the Nation that Tonna quoted this Introduction verbatim, without citing the complete transcripts. In The Wrongs of Woman she returns to the complete transcript, utilizing its material about children's lack of religion. But in The Perils of the Nation Tonna prefers to use summaries from the Introduction, since their modification of the complete accounts increases the shock value of the testimony. An instance of this preference is the following:²⁰

Introduction (Parliamentary Papers 13) and Tonna (p. 53): His master behaves very bad. His mistress behaves worst, like a devil; she beats him; knocks his head against the wall.”

Complete transcript (Parliamentary Papers 15): His master behaves very bad sometimes—another time he'll be just the other way. His mistress behaves worst to him. The master is not amiss; it is his wife—second wife; she behaves like a devil to him; she beats him sometimes—knocks his head against the wall.

In Chapter Five Tonna reproduces the same sequence of quotations as exists in the Introduction to the Report. G. M. Young notes that The Perils of the Nation was “hurriedly compiled … in the alarm following the Chartist Riots of 1842.” To Young, The Perils of the Nation “undoubtedly represents a great body of educated opinion of, broadly speaking, a Tory-Evangelical cast, and furnishes a link between the Sadler-Ashley thought of the thirties and Unto This Last of 1860.”²¹

In addition to this use of documentation in The Perils of the Nation, Tonna exhibits another characteristic that will reappear in The Wrongs of Woman—her emphasis on the necessity of “female influence” to achieve legislative reform. She devotes the penultimate chapter of The Perils of the Nation to the question, arguing:

It is much to be wished that the mighty engine of female influence were more efficiently directed. The ladies of England are famed for tenderness of feeling, for decision of mind, for firmness of purpose, and promptitude of action. Their position in society is more commanding than that of any other females throughout the world: they comprehend our political or commercial objects, share our anxieties, and assist us by their intelligent counsel, to an extent which renders their power, for good or for evil, almost irresistible. … In all our great national crises, has the feminine mind appeared clad with masculine energy, and evinced a fortitude, an endurance most admirable.

(pp. 345-46)

Tonna does not remain content with general statement. To conclude the chapter she concentrates on the plight of dressmakers and milliners, which will be the subject of “Part I” of The Wrongs of Woman:

And this call for interposition is especially urgent in a department principally under female patronage and control; one, where almost every lady in the land has power to interfere, at least negatively, by withdrawing her custom, and stating the reason of her so doing, where the offence is committed. Dress-making and millinery are, with few exceptions, carried on in establishments, and by means of young females, either apprenticed to learn the business, or employed on hire. It is utterly impossible to describe what this class of operatives undergo: physically, morally, and spiritually, their condition is heart-rending.

(pp. 359-60)

Tonna records the grim details of the work conditions, hours, and moral corruption. The review of The Perils of the Nation in The Christian Lady's Magazine states that “the ladies of the land” are not omitted from among those required to rectify these abuses (19.467).

THE WRONGS OF WOMAN

The Wrongs of Woman was published in four Parts between 1843 and 1844, the fictional result of Tonna's long researches for The Perils of the Nation. In the September 1843 issue of The Christian Lady's Magazine, Tonna published a letter from a clergyman under the heading “Dress-making,” praising “Part I” of The Wrongs of Woman:

Your happy power of illustration, while it thrills with emotion in the perusal, has awakened some to a far more acute perception of the evils which were too well known to be in existence, but which it seldom happened to individuals to probe in the depths and miseries of their consequences. … You have spoken well and boldly upon the oppressive character of the slavery which prevails among thousands of wretched women, who minister to the fashions and frivolities of the gay world,—and who spend their early days, and exhaust their precious lives in a bondage which is thankless, profitless, and often the instrument of ruin both to body and soul.

(20.243-44)

Echoing Tonna's own statements, the minister continues: “Oh that the ladies of England, the mothers, the daughters of England, would stand forth as with one voice, and say that such a system shall not be!” (20.248). He praises “the humane and Christian labour you have undertaken of laying bare the system which so extensively prevails of oppressing the weaker sex” (20.252). Since the letter is dated 7 August, “Part I” of The Wrongs of Woman must have appeared in May or June, soon after Tonna completed The Perils of the Nation.

The publication of the Second Report confirmed the validity of Tonna's essays in The Christian Lady's Magazine and convinced her to pursue The Wrongs of Woman. Although Tonna used evidence from it for Helen Fleetwood, she did not directly quote it as she does in the four Parts of The Wrongs of Woman. She had learned from The Perils of the Nation that direct testimony is necessary to persuade readers, realizing that Helen Fleetwood lacked conviction because it lacked evidence. As Ivanka Kovačević comments, Tonna uses such documents because they were “not likely to be read by the middle-class wives and mothers through whom she hoped to influence their voting husbands, fathers, and sons.”²² Therefore, at the end of each Part of The Wrongs of Woman there appears a chapter of documentation: “Consequences” (“Part I”), “Corroborating Evidence” (“Part II”), “Authentications” (“Part III”), and “The Finale” (“Part IV”). Such quotation is the most conspicuous difference between Helen Fleetwood and The Wrongs of Woman, a result of the intermediate composition of The Perils of the Nation. Wanda Neff's statement about Helen Fleetwood is instructive: “Mrs. Tonna, by giving Government investigations a fictional framework, brought to the lay reader a rudimentary knowledge of the factory. Helen Fleetwood is the most effective single literary agency in getting technical information before the general public” (p. 87). Tonna goes beyond this objective in The Wrongs of Woman, concentrating on female labor and supplying verbatim testimony, amplifying rather than repeating the procedure of Helen Fleetwood.

Although The Wrongs of Woman was composed of four separately-written Parts, Tonna unifies her stories in several ways. By concentrating on dressmaking, screw-making, pin-heading, and lace-running, Tonna emphasizes the non-textile industries. Restriction to these four occupations gives the work both a fictional and a documentary unity. Neff notes that the new emphasis occurs because in the reports of 1843 “for the first time the non-textiles shared with the textile industries some of the public attention” (p. 88). For all Parts except “II,” Tonna includes a chapter detailing a “typical day” at each of the employments. This focus was necessary in 1843-1844 because, as Neff contends: “Non-textile workers are even more scantily represented in literature than those in the textile trades. … They offered more difficult technical problems to the author, their lives were equally barren of romantic interest, and were more completely hidden from public scrutiny” (p. 114). While Michael Armstrong and Helen Fleetwood had exposed textile conditions, Tonna sought a new area for The Wrongs of Woman. Tonna also links her four stories by having the protagonists come from the same village “not far from a town of considerable traffic.”²³ Ann and Frances King, who became the milliner and dressmaker of “Part I,” are daughters of a “small farmer” (p. 400). Tom Clarke, a widower who works in a stable yard, has lost his custom since a railroad bypassed the inn; he is specifically called “a grade lower in station” than King (p. 400). His daughter, Kate Clarke, enters the lace-running business in “Part IV.” Parts “II” and “III” concern the family of John Smith, “still worse off” than either King or Clarke (p. 400). His wife Alice becomes a screw worker in “Part II,” his children Betsy and Joe enter pin-heading in “Part III.”

Complementing these unifying devices, Tonna introduces sufficient variety to compel her reader to distinguish among these women. For example, while The Wrongs of Woman focuses on non-textile industries, the occupations Tonna studies exhibit class variations. Dressmakers and milliners, frequently from the country, were usually of the shabby genteel rather than the working class. Those engaged in pin-making, on the other hand, were frequently “drawn from the lowest classes.”²⁴ Tonna's readers were thus introduced not only to women as a group, but to class subdivisions according to the distinctions noted in the Parliamentary reports. The Parts of The Wrongs of Woman indicate some principles of alternation. Parts “I” and “III” have two protagonists, Ann and Frances King and Betsy and Joe Smith; Parts “II” and “IV” have a single central character, Alice Smith or Kate Clarke. “Part II” is unusual in having for a title the consequence of industrialism, “The Forsaken Home,” rather than an occupation. This title is ironic since it applies to each family both before and after its move to the industrial center: the home is forsaken twice.

To readers familiar with her intentions in The Christian Lady's Magazine, Tonna's purpose in writing The Wrongs of Woman is not surprising. She dissociates herself from agitating, something against which she cautioned her readers in February 1834 (1.160). Despite the fact that Tonna's title evokes Mary Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), Tonna repudiates any such intention. In the March 1839 issue of The Christian Lady's Magazine she had attacked Wollstonecraft for advocating equality with men, which she regarded as “sinfully disbelieving the plain statements of God's word” (11.193). In The Wrongs of Woman she states:

When we name the infliction of a wrong, we imply the existence of a right. Therefore, if we undertake to discuss the wrongs of women, we may be expected to set out by plainly defining what are the rights of women. This is soon done. We repudiate all pretentions to equality with man. … We have no intention of advancing any such claims.

(p. 397)

Her purpose instead is to bring to the attention of Englishwomen the abuse suffered by their sisters. Tonna wishes “to avoid the admixture of fictitious narrative, yet to realize … the various situations in which female labourers are placed” (p. 399). She uses fiction, therefore, only to the degree necessary for variety. Her intention is educational; as in her magazine, she repudiates any romantic element. The premise behind her method is stated in “Part II,” Chapter Five:

The abstract idea of a suffering family does not strongly affect the mind; but let the parties be known to us, let their names call up some familiar images to our view, and certain facts connected with their past lives be vividly brought to our recollection when they are spoken of, we are enabled much more feelingly to enter into their trial. For this purpose, a case of constant recurrence has been fixed on, and the same individuals have been kept in view throughout, in order to engage the reader's sympathies, while concentrating her attention more effectually than the pages of a formal report, necessarily prolix and full of repetitions, could do.

(p. 441)

Fiction for Tonna is a structural device to heighten the reader's sympathetic understanding of the subject. She offers a corrective to the undiluted reports by restricting her focus and by concentrating on distinct narrative lines to compensate for the unavoidable heterogeneity of the 1843 Second Report.

Tonna wrote the first Part of The Wrongs of Woman about dressmakers and milliners because their plight was so brutally exposed in the Second Report. She may have been particularly concerned with this trade because its conditions were very bad in her birthplace, Norwich.²⁵ As she had noted in The Christian Lady's Magazine, women outnumbered men by far in the trade, a fact to which Grainger testified in the Introduction of the Report:

No men would sustain the labour which is imposed on these young and delicate women. … No slavery is worse than that of the dress-maker's life in London. … No men work so long. It would be impossible for any animal to work so continuously with so little rest.

(14.F30)

The final note of blame Tonna includes in her sixth chapter with other evidence.

Because Tonna follows the Report strictly, the details of Ann's and Frances's lives are precisely recorded in “Milliners and Dress-makers,” lending conviction to the tale by specificity. For example, Ann is not simply a milliner but an “improver,” defined in the Report (14.F29) as one who has already learned some elements of the trade in the country. Tonna writes that Ann is to be “perfected in the business of which she had learned the rudiments through the kindness of the squire's lady's own woman, who took a fancy to her, and sometimes privately availed herself of her help in that line” (p. 402). Ann's introduction to the shop, recorded in the “typical day” chapter, follows Grainger in the Report. She is allowed fifteen minutes for dinner, ten for tea (pp. 402-03): Grainger records that fifteen or twenty minutes were allowed for dinner, fifteen “or less” for tea (14.F30). Tonna thus selects the lowest possible time limit. Ann is kept ignorant of another fact: “She does not yet know that this is the third day and night of incessant application during twenty, and unbroken confinement throughout the twenty four-hours [sic]” (p. 404). This datum Tonna takes from Parliamentary Papers 14.F30, where one witness reported working continuously “without going to bed, from four o'clock on Thursday morning till half-past ten on Sunday morning.” This item so impressed Tonna that Ann quotes it to a physician in the next chapter (p. 407). Tonna likewise takes from the Report (13.118) the fact that no meals were served on Sundays, leaving the destitute girls alone in the streets (p. 411). King takes Ann from the establishment after being notified by a physician. Tonna's account of Ann's symptoms comes from the Report which includes evidence of several surgeons (14.f232-f236)—especially the statement of John Dalrymple (14.f235) who recounts having “saved” a consumptive woman. In her fifth chapter, Tonna returns to Frances King at the dressmaker's, an account reinforced by the Report, especially in that Frances is taught nothing and is beginning to consort with “gentlemen” (p. 413). That prostitution was long established in millinery and dressmaking is apparent from Francis Newbery's The Cries of London (1775), which contains “A Poetical Description of the British Metropolis” with this line: “Lords with milliners debating.”²⁶

As in each of the four sections of The Wrongs of Woman, Tonna's final chapter is devoted to evidence from the Second Report. Beginning this testimony (p. 415), she cites Parliamentary Papers 13.144 that 15,000 women work in 1,500 establishments in London alone. Tonna believes that employers, “if encouraged and upheld by the ladies of England, would pledge themselves to a line of conduct which at present they can only pursue under heavy disadvantages” (p. 415). Along with various other citations from the Report, Tonna emphasizes the statement of E. L. Devonald of 3 May 1841: “In no trade or manufactory whatever is the labour to be compared to that of the young dressmakers: no men work so long. It would be impossible for any animal to work so continuously with so little rest” (14.f236). Since she completely agrees, Tonna italicizes the final sentence, then notes that “the unnatural exactions of pride, and pomp, and frivolity have made her [woman] a beast of burthen to her own sex” (p. 415). For her final series of references Tonna mines Grainger's Introduction on hours, meals, work-rooms, and health (p. 416; Parliamentary Papers 14.F29-F32). Tonna adds one final element of authenticity by treating these subjects approximately in the order in which investigators were required to compile data.²⁷ Recounting Ann's death and Frances's slide into prostitution, Tonna concludes “Milliners and Dress-makers.”

The first Part of The Wrongs of Woman presented its readers with a fictionalized account of the Parliamentary reports, with the advantage of a restricted focus and a plot line. As the letter quoted from The Christian Lady's Magazine indicates, it alarmed its readers. Its structural pattern—departure from home, typical day, decline, evidence—established the form of the remaining three Parts.

Parts “II” and “III” of The Wrongs of Woman, “The Forsaken Home” and “The Little Pin-headers,” concern the Smith family at two different periods, since Alice Smith, the central character of “Part II,” is dead when “Part III” begins. “Part II” has a theme very close to The Perils of the Nation, the preference for female over male labor, especially in its third chapter “Manufacturing Poor.” Presumably the Smiths go to Wolverhampton (W_____ in the text). Tonna does not wait until the final chapter of this Part to present her evidence. In a dialogue between John Smith and Richards, a militant worker recalling the agitator Smith in Combination, Tonna incorporates the Report into the dialogue:

“Your wife may get work easy enough at the screws, but you won't be taken in.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause women are all the thing there. Out of a hundred workers, you won't find over ten men, and 'tis the same rule they go by at all the shops, in business that isn't out and out beyond a woman's strength.”

“‘Tis a bad rule, and one I won't agree to. Why should women be chosen before men?”

“Oh, the masters find they work harder and take less; and that's all they care for.”

(p. 420)

Not believing this statement, Smith goes to a screw factory to discover it is so. Tonna obviously is alluding to statistics, previously cited in The Perils of the Nation, from the Parliamentary sources: “Mr. James James, screw manufacturer, states that he employs about 60 men and 300 females”; in the Hawkins factory, “there are 30 men and 102 women”; in the Ryland factory “the great majority of the workpeople are females, as many as 90 per cent” (13.16). Smith is forced to sign up his wife Alice for the factory when he can find no work himself. In the second chapter, “The Engagement,” Tonna records the process by which Alice is preferred to her husband, rather than, as in the other Parts, detailing a typical day.

The issues raised by women leaving home so arouse Tonna that she includes in her second and third chapters either direct quotation or indisputable reference to the Parliamentary data. At the conclusion of chapter two, for example, she denounces the use of Godfrey's Cordial, an infant pacifier containing opium, citing a long passage verbatim from Horne's report (15.Q30). Her work on The Perils of the Nation has moved her to construct the story of The Wrongs of Woman from the evidence rather than vice versa. This impression increases in the next chapter, when she alludes to the truck system, whereby workers were paid not in cash, but in scrip redeemable at the tommy shop or “company store.” She introduces her readers to a new vocabulary:

Our readers may wish to know what tommy may signify: it is the familiar name for a plan of payment adopted by some employers in almost all branches, and by too many forced on their workpeople. … On Saturday night, instead of money, the workman receives an order to the amount of his wages, and takes it to the tommy shop. … A tommy shop is a monopoly of the most perfect kind in all its ramifications.

(pp. 428-29)

Tonna deplores such a futile act as that of 1831 forbidding truck and tommy (cf. Perils, pp. 246-47). Alice Smith converses with Nell Carter, who relates the distress of women in mines who trap and hurry, including reference to the famous sketch of a woman hauling a tub with a chain between her legs (Parliamentary Papers 1842, 15.78). Throughout the dialogue Tonna expands her references beyond screws to other occupations. She also denounces the neo-Malthusianism of people like Harriet Martineau (criticized by name in Perils, pp. xii-xiii). Smith complains: “I don't repent marrying you, Ally, more than another; but you see, the root of all our troubles in this life is having a family; if it was not for that we might jog on well enough” (p. 432). Tonna cites her own The Perils of the Nation on women's employment (p. 435). To conclude, Tonna records the rapid decline of Alice and John Smith, their drinking, the disintegration of the marriage, and the break-up of their family. In the final “Corroborating Evidence” Tonna includes many quotations from the Report, including a long extract from the evidence of Joseph Corbett (15.f131-f132) on the ruin of his home due to his mother's absence, and an excerpt from Horne's evidence (pp. 441-42; 13.33).

Tonna's range in “The Forsaken Home” extends beyond that of “Milliners and Dress-makers” in several respects. She informs readers of issues beyond the specific trade under consideration, and she presents the process, not merely the fact, of the collapse of a marriage. The characterization of John and Alice Smith is stronger than that of Ann and Frances King in “Part I,” probably due to Tonna's own wretched first marriage.²⁸ In introducing her readers to terms like hurry, tommy, and truck, she enabled them to study the sources themselves. While her use of verbatim sources in intermediate chapters may initially be annoying, ultimately the reader senses a female narrative voice informed rather than intrusive.

“Part III,” “The Little Pin-headers,” concerns two of the Smith's children, Betsy and Joe. Tonna's work on The Perils of the Nation had exposed her to harsh evidence concerning children in pin-making: “In the whole of my inquiries I have met with no class more urgently requiring legislative protection than the unhappy pin-headers” (13.80). Tonna calls the children “wretched little automata” (p. 451). The construction of this Part follows the basic pattern of Parts “I” and “II.” In its second chapter, “A Sunday Stroll,” Tonna takes the reader through a filthy district, showing that no workers attend religious services, a detail that had concerned her in Combination. The next chapter includes the “typical day,” with the children suffering under Mrs. Kitty. Abandoned by their step-mother, the children are forced into a workhouse. Tonna asks:

Still we must ask, how do these ladies contrive to overlook the objects perishing so near them, and to confine their compassionate cares to others so very far removed? The misery, the wretchedness, the sufferings, the degradation of young English girls, far exceed those of the little heathen abroad.

(p. 463)

The one practice, peculiar to manufactories, that Tonna does not use is “that of masters lending parents money, to be repaid in their children's work” (Parliamentary Papers 13.24). If possible the children would be worse off if they were not abandoned by Smith and his second wife.

The final “Authentications” are especially detailed in “Part III,” since Tonna is particularly moved by the plight of these children. On the nature of the work, lack of provision, abuse, and health she draws on Grainger (14.F24, f124-f125), then turns to Horne (the same children used in The Perils of the Nation), recording their almost total ignorance of religion (15.q13, 31, 33-37, 40). “Part III” emphasizes the importance of religion, since Tonna considers the lack of religion as much an abuse as any other. By using extracted sections of testimony dealing with religion, she stresses her indictment. Implicit is the assumption that the final check against revolution—religion—is deteriorating.

For “Part IV” Tonna concentrates on “The Lace-runners” or embroiderers. The lace-runners were of much contemporary interest since in 1840 they had organized an unsuccessful strike in Nottingham. Ivy Pinchbeck notes that “the lace-runner, although the most skillful, was the hardest worked and the worst paid of all the operatives connected with the lace trade”; as a result, “almost all became prostitutes” (pp. 211-12). Grainger's evidence states that these women worked sometimes “15, 16, and even 17 hours a-day” (14.F10) and that married women were forced to resort to Godfrey's Cordial because of the long hours (14.F10). Runners “became totally unfitted for other manufacturing labour, and even common house-hold work and the discharge of domestic duties” (14.F11).

These statements form the narrative of Kate Clarke. Tonna records each detail of the Report in the events of Kate's life. As in “Part III,” she instructs the reader in specific vocabulary, like drawing, running, mending, pearling (p. 478). She links “Part IV” to the earlier sections of The Wrongs of Woman by having Tom Clarke note “They sha'n't have it to say of me as they do of John Smith, that he made slaves of his children. I know better than to put mine in a factory prison” (p. 479). Thinking Kate is with the Collins family, he believes all will be well. In the second chapter Tonna presents a typical day at the Collins's, with graphic instances of the use of Godfrey, which links “Part IV” to “Part II.” Kate thinks of going into the hosiery trade, but this proves even worse than lace-running.²⁹ At the end, following Grainger's evidence, Tonna has Kate enter a brothel: “‘Let them answer it,’ she crosses the threshold. And here we part with her for ever” (p. 499).

In her evidence for “Part IV” (pp. 499-501), Tonna concentrates on two elements: workhours (citing 14.f42, F10) and Godfrey (14.f60-f61), concluding with a statement of unfair pricing and the inevitable prostitution (14.f40). She advises her readers, as she did in The Perils of the Nation, that prostitution cannot be concealed from female middle-class readers. Her final remonstrance is addressed to these readers:

Ladies of England! under such circumstances as we have laid before you, are the materials of your daily attire prepared by manufacture and embroidery. … At such a price you make your toilet. … If such FACTS do not speak, all language is utterly vain. … The wrong against woman, against woman in every rank and every class, perpetrated by the means which have been briefly sketched in these pages, is alike fearful and universal. Have we not a woman on the throne?

(pp. 501-02)

Tonna fears the “fiery tumult of universal insurrection.” The clothing idea that informs three of the four Parts of The Wrongs of Woman may allude to Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, published in book form in England in 1838. Tonna concludes: “The cruelties now heaped upon the poorest of our sex, are in the broadest, most inclusive sense, THE WRONGS OF WOMAN” (p. 502).

FURTHER STUDIES

Charlotte Tonna's The Wrongs of Woman maintains its importance. As a Condition-of-England novel, it anticipated several later works of the type. Gaskell's heroines in Mary Barton, Ruth, and Lizzie Leigh were involved in dressmaking or millinery. Jane Eyre thought of dressmaking when she left Rochester, and Charles Kingsley's grim tailoring scenes in Cheap Clothes and Nasty and Alton Locke are descendants of Tonna's novel via Henry Mayhew's essays in the Morning Chronicle (1849-50). No novelist sought to concentrate on women's labor with such intensity as Tonna did in The Wrongs of Woman. While in terms of characterization or dialogue Elizabeth Gaskell is her superior, one may admire Tonna for avoiding any romance in her milliners' lives; she does not offer even emigration as a solution. Asa Briggs has noted, “The social novel marked not so much an anti-romantic reaction as a shift in romantic interest from high society to urban society, and for many writers, to low society.”³⁰ However, while this might apply to other novelists, it is distinctly not true of Tonna. Although Elizabeth Stone, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Frances Trollope might have wished to rouse their female readers to social protest, only Tonna was so insistent upon this point. It is true that after Combination Tonna never presented the employer's side, as did Gaskell in North and South, Stone in William Langshawe, or Martineau in A Manchester Strike, but her concentration on females in diverse industries elevates The Wrongs of Woman to a prominent position in Condition-of-England fiction.³¹

It is doubtful whether Tonna regarded The Wrongs of Woman as having fulfilled its intention, for in The Christian Lady's Magazine in December 1844, she ran an article “Needlework.” In this essay, an aunt and niece discuss the charity through which wealthy women make millinery articles, selling them at the highest price to benefit the poor. Tonna criticizes the practice, since the high prices deprive ordinary workers of employment. In January and February of 1845 she published another essay, “A Scene in a Workhouse,” describing the sad death of a dressmaker, Anne. In June 1845 the magazine published a review of a text from the Religious Tract Society, The Young Women of the Factory; or, Friendly Hints on their Duties and Dangers, which praises Lord Ashley and again alerts the readers to the plight of females.

It took far longer than Tonna would have hoped to ameliorate the situation of her distressed workwomen. In 1856 Grainger discovered that the apprentices suffered more than ever before.³² The Parliamentary reports of 1861 record the continued use of Godfrey's Cordial, while those of 1864 are replete with details of the sufferings of dressmakers. Some acts passed after Tonna's death in 1846 gave impetus to reform. The 1847 Act to Limit the Hours of Labour of Young Persons and Females in Factories (The “Ten Hours' Bill”), the 1850 Act to Amend the Acts relating to Labour in Factories, Palmerston's Factory Act (1853), and the Lace Works Act (1861) did provide some improvement. Enforcement of the laws, however, was every bit as difficult as securing their passage.³³ Twenty years after “Milliners and Dress-makers” conditions remained miserable.

In All the Year Round, 5 September 1863, an essay was devoted to “The Point of the Needle.” Its author quotes from the same sources used by Tonna for “Part I” of The Wrongs of Woman concerning numbers employed, hours, conditions, and overwork.³⁴ The writer notes the unsuccessful attempt by the Association for the Aid and Benefit of Dress-makers and Milliners to achieve improvement. Very distressing is the fact that in certain female occupations, like shoe-binding and envelope-folding, machinery was beginning to supplant workers, with the result that even more had to resort to the needle (pp. 40-41). Especially disturbing to Tonna would have been the following: “The ladies of England never did, and do not yet, as a body, thoroughly perceive how much it rests with them to improve or maintain the unhappy condition of the milliners' workwomen” (p. 35). Tonna's fervor for reform in The Wrongs of Woman, while it did not remedy conditions as rapidly as she wished, produced an important text of social industrial protest. Her concentration on female labor reveals the special emphases women writers following her would pursue in this form. Believing that fiction must serve serious objectives, Tonna demanded a responsible, diligent female readership. The nineteenth-century canon must be expanded to include such achievements.

Notes

1. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelstone (New York: Penguin, 1971), p. 151.

2. This canon is reinforced in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Elaine Showalter, in A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), does locate major figures in a context of broader literary movements involving lesser known women writers.

3. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 36. Moers notes that Harriet Beecher Stowe introduced the American edition of Tonna's writings.

4. Maurice W. Thomas, The Early Factory Legislation (1948; rpt., Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 268; see also Thomas's Young People in Industry 1750-1945 (London: Nelson, 1945), passim. Marjorie Cruikshank, in Children and Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), discusses child labor, especially the appalling working conditions, pp. 48-53.

5. See the essays by Monica Correa Fryckstedt, “The Early Industrial Novel: Mary Barton and Its Predecessors,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63 (Autumn 1980), 11-30; and “Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna: A Forgotten Evangelical Writer,” Studia Neophilologica, 52 (1980), 79-102; Joseph Kestner, “The Manchester Magnate in Elizabeth Stone's William Langshawe,” Papers on Language and Literature, 19 (Winter 1983), 61-71; and “Men in Female Condition-of-England Novels,” in Men by Women, ed. Janet Todd (London: Holmes and Meier, 1982). Martineau, Tonna, and Gaskell are studied in Louis Cazamian's pioneering The Social Novel in England 1830-1850, translated by Martin Fido (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), first published in 1903. Several studies of Tonna's Evangelical origins include the following: Vineta Colby, Yesterday's Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 174-78; Elizabeth Kowaleski, “‘The Heroine of Some Strange Romance’: The Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 1 (Fall 1982), 141-53; and Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), pp. 170, 198-99. See also Patrick Brantlinger. The Spirit of Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 56-59; and Sheila M. Smith, The Other Nation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 41, 123.

6. Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), p. 176.

7. Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1930; rpt., London: Cass, 1969), p. 137; further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. Wanda Neff, Victorian Working Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), p. 86, notes that Tonna read Lord Ashley's speeches. Lord Ashley tried unsuccessfully to obtain a state pension for Tonna; see Fryckstedt, Studia Neophilologica, pp. 100-01. Further references to Neff are cited parenthetically in the text.

8. T. J. Edelstein, “They Sang ‘The Song of the Shirt’: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress,” Victorian Studies, 23 (Winter 1980), 186; pictorial studies of seamstresses were often romanticized, Edelstein demonstrates. A probing study of seamstresses detailing their oppression is Christina Walkley's The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London: Peter Owen, 1981).

9. Combination is not included in the British Museum Catalogue listing of Tonna's works. Patrick Brantlinger, in “The Case Against Trade Unions in Early Victorian Fiction,” Victorian Studies, 13 (September 1969), 37-52, discusses fiction and unions, but he does not discuss Combination in this essay.

10. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Combination (New York: Dodd, 1844), p. 7; subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.

11. The Christian Lady's Magazine, 1 (January 1834), 4-6; subsequent references to essays from this periodical will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. In her Personal Recollections (1841), Tonna recalled the period 1811-1812:

    A small annuity was all that my mother could depend on, and I was resolved to become a novel-writer, for which I was just qualified, both by nature and habits of thinking, and in which I should probably have succeeded very well, but it pleased God to save me from this snare.

    (New York: Scribner's, 1850, p. 78)

    Tonna, however, resorted to fiction often when it suited her purposes. In her petition to receive a state pension, Tonna said her works were “chiefly educational” (27 March 1846; British Library MS 40483, quoted with permission).

12. A transcript of the Factory Regulations Act (1833) is printed in G. M. Young and W. D. Hancock, eds., English Historical Documents 1833-1874 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), pp. 949-52.

13. On the value of personal evidence to Evangelicals see Jay, Religion of the Heart, pp. 103-05. The emphasis on individual testimony may have also come from Tonna's brother's anonymously published book An Historical View of the Revolutions of Portugal (London: Murray, 1827), which includes a lengthy appendix with a translation of the Constitutional Charter of Portugal.

14. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Helen Fleetwood, in The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth (New York: Dodd, 1849), 1.519; subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

15. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 127, comments that Helen Fleetwood is “a vivid and authentic tale of factory life,” but she mentions that “horror at its heathenism” is the main trait of the work, an element not more prominent than actual physical and mental abuse.

16. Louis Tonna's comments are appended to the Personal Recollections, pp. 374-75; The Perils of the Nation is not listed as Tonna's in the British Museum Catalogue.

17. Fryckstedt, Studia Neophilologica, p. 99.

18. [Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna], The Perils of the Nation (London: Seeley's, 1843), pp. 127, 135-36; subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

19. See Sheila M. Smith, “Willenhall and Wodgate: Disraeli's Use of Blue Book Evidence,” R. E. S. [Review of English Studies], 18 (1962), 368-84, passim. The use of Blue Book evidence by several authors is treated in Smith's “Blue Books and Victorian Novelists,” R. E. S., 21 (1970), 23-40. Martin Fido discusses Sybil in two essays: “Sources of Working Class Passages in Disraeli's Sybil,” Modern Language Review, 72 (April 1977), 268-84; and “The Treatment of Rural Distress in Disraeli's Sybil,” Yearbook of English Studies, 5 (1975), 158-63.

20. Parliamentary Papers (rpt., Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968), 1843, 13.81; complete statements, 15.q35, q32. Subsequent references to Parliamentary Papers and to the Report are cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

21. G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of An Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 54, n. 2.

22. Ivanka Kovačević and S. Barbara Kanner, “Blue Book into Novel: The Forgotten Industrial Fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 25 (September 1970), 156; see also Kovačević's Fact into Fiction (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1975), on Tonna, pp. 303-12. “Part III” of The Wrongs of Woman is reprinted here.

23. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, The Wrongs of Woman, in The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, 2.399; subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. The American title reads incorrectly The Wrongs of Women.

24. Pinchbeck, p. 276; see also Neff, p. 116.

25. Neff, p. 119.

26. Included in Donald J. Gray, “Picturesque London,” The Indiana University Bookman, 12 (December 1977), 56.

27. See Parliamentary Papers 13.6 which lists the order of compilation.

28. Tonna alludes frequently to her suffering when married to George Phelan, who beat her and eventually went insane. See L. S. Loomer, “Charlotte Elizabeth (Browne) Phelan (1790-1846),” Canadian Notes and Queries, 7 (November 1974), 10. In a letter 22 May 1844, Tonna describes herself enduring “many and most bitter trials and sufferings during a very unhappy marriage to one really deranged in mind” (quoted with permission of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania). The disintegrating family under industrial pressures is examined in detail by Margaret Hewitt, Wives & Mothers in Victorian Industry (London: Rocklift, 1958).

29. See Neff, p. 91.

30. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper, 1970), p. 99. The futility of emigration for those in genteel poverty is analyzed in A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (London: Croom Helm, 1979).

31. On industrialists see Ivan Melada, The Captain of Industry in English Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970), pp. 95-103.

32. Neff, p. 140.

33. On enforcement see Chapter Nine of Eric Roberts' Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960).

34. “The Point of the Needle,” All the Year Round, 5 September 1863 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), 36-37; subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text.