[In the following excerpt, Johnson describes the elements of the Victorian social-problem novel in Helen Fleetwood, focusing especially on the work's frank depiction and criticism of England's industrial system.]

“The poor harassed girl.”

Helen Fleetwood

In Helen Fleetwood, the narrator describes the effects of factory work on the sixteen-year-old title character:

Helen Fleetwood was … not a girl of robust make, or rude strength; but no tendency to a sickly habit had ever appeared in her constitution. The rapid effect of mill-labour upon it had led her to suspect some lurking unsoundness; but a little more experience and observation would have proved to her how short a resistance the stoutest frame could offer to the debilitating effects of the atmosphere and other evils to which she was exposed throughout the live-long day. Neither could it be questioned that the mental sufferings which could not but await any modest, right-minded female in such society, had a very large share in undermining her bodily health. This is one of the worst features of mill-labour. … There is no protection for the ear of female modesty, against all that can outrage it. … This had been the great ordeal to Helen. … She felt herself in a manner degraded, from being the unwilling but helpless witness to so much infamous language, accompanied as it will always be by conduct no less abandoned. … She longed to escape it; she pined for deliverance: and this grief of heart preyed on her life to an extent that soon defied all human skill.

(627-28)

Thus Tonna's narrator describes the experience of sexual harassment long before the term was invented.

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's fiction is unique in Victorian literature for its emphasis on working-class women and its detailed examinations of the nature of their work. Helen Fleetwood provides an unusually detailed picture of the workplace as well as its effect on Helen and other factory girls.¹ This emphasis presents the contradiction between the Victorian belief that society protected women and the reality of a brutal factory system that exploited them so graphically that the reader is faced with the choice of a reformation so total that it amounts to abolishing the factory system itself.² And at the center of its depiction of factory work is the issue of sexual harassment. Tonna's description is remarkable on several levels: for its specificity in naming the unnameable, for its identification with its working-class heroine, and for its criticism of the system itself as the responsible party. The narrator even uses the specific word “harassed” several times to describe the experience Helen undergoes (549, 554, 629). Helen describes herself, for example, as being “unceasingly harassed” in the factory (554). While part of the harassment stems from Helen's orphaned state and intense religiosity, much of it is sexual in nature. Although girls her own age “seemingly hardened past all fear or shame” join in, “[h]er greatest annoyance however by far, was from the boys, who were often set on to insult her in ways more trying than the rest” (538). Eventually, harassment envelops her, even affecting her love for her fiancé: “[E]ven as she looked on Richard's honest countenance, beaming with integrity, with manly sincerity, and godly simplicity, the thought arose to repel the yearnings of innocent affection towards the dear playmate of her infancy” (629). Tonna's approach does not entirely avoid the class and gender stereotypes of the period. The novel sometimes blames the victims of the system for the system's effects, seeing some of the factory workers as inherently corrupt. Its patriarchal Evangelicalism turns continually to men for a resolution to the problem, even though men are shown as either complicit with the system's evils or ineffectual in their responses to it. But Tonna's protofeminism is the novel's energizing force, although it is a feminism that finally fails to win the day. Two women—Helen Fleetwood and her guardian, the Widow Green—face the system, describe and try to combat its evils, and suffer the consequences.

Helen Fleetwood tells the story of a country family tricked by the parish poor-law commissioners into relocating to a factory town. While the oldest boy, seventeen-year-old Richard, is left behind as a useful laborer for the local squire, his grandmother, the Widow Green, takes her three younger grandchildren—two boys, James and Willy, and one girl, Mary—and an adopted orphan, Helen Fleetwood, to find work in the factories. When the family arrives in the factory town of M., it immediately becomes clear that the fate of the girls will be the significant measure of the factory system. At first, the Widow Green lodges with her married daughter, Mrs. Wright. The Wright family provides a diagram of what factory work produces. One son works in the factory and has been made cynical by it. The effects on the two daughters, however, are extreme. One of them, Sarah, represents the physical outcome: missing an arm through a machinery accident, her spine bent from her years of labor, she is dying of consumption. The other daughter, Phoebe, is morally deformed. It is she who instigates the harassment of Helen, apparently out of an instinctive hatred of Helen's goodness. Eventually, Phoebe becomes a prostitute. The emphasis on the girls continues when only Helen and Mary begin factory work, because the two boys are too young. Still another factory girl is drawn into the family when Mary takes up the cause of her little Irish scavenger, Katy.

The novel details the destruction of this family group as a whole; however, it is named for the orphan Helen because it is she who not only experiences factory work but also struggles against it. Critics have tended to find Helen an uninteresting character: Catherine Gallagher judges her to be “a submissive and largely nonanalytical consciousness,” while Susan Zlotnick claims that Tonna has merely “substitute[d] one stereotype for another, replacing the aggressive, independent, and fallen factory girl of the popular imagination with one borrowed from the factory reform discourse, which figures her as the unwitting victim of a brutal industrial regime.”³ But the narrator sees Helen differently, representing her both as a representative working girl and as particularly reserved and sensitive: “There was nothing in her character unusually elevated above the class to which she belonged,” although she has “a delicate mind” and her orphaned state has given her “a more contemplative, and perhaps a more imaginative turn of thought than most of her young companions, while a modest reluctance to make her own concerns more prominent than was suitable for so humble a person habituated her to … keeping her own counsel” (517).

The novel stresses Helen's habitual reserve, describing her as a girl “whose thoughts had never learned to clothe themselves in language worthy of the occasions that called them into existence” and as one who “had little to say” and whose “lips had hitherto been mute” (503). Helen's habitual silence underlines the significance of her ultimately speaking out: factory work leads her to “testify” in every sense of the word. She testifies to her experience there, to her religious faith, and even in a courtroom trial. Helen first speaks about her experiences when she describes the sexual harassment to the Widow Green. In analyzing her situation, Helen points an accusing finger not so much at her fellow workers as at the overseers and employers. When the widow says she will complain to the managers about the conditions Helen is working in, Helen tells her: “You are greatly mistaken if you think the men who overlook our work care for our morals—they themselves are often among the worst of the bad” (550). Of her employer, Mr. Z., Helen speaks even more strongly:

Mr. Z I know, has daughters growing up: would he send them among us for an hour every day? Not he. He knows too well that their health would be destroyed by staying even so long in the heat, the steam, the stench, and the dust of rooms where we are pent up from early morning to late night; and he knows that they would never again be let into respectable society if they were supposed to hear the vile, filthy talk that his poor labourers use, and the men he sets over them encourage; and which he never dreams of checking, either by his own presence, or by setting any moral, not to say religious person, to watch them.

Her religious conviction that Mr. Z. is ultimately responsible for the abuses around her leads her to “bless God that I [am] a poor despised factor-girl, and not an employer” (552).

Helen has a firm conviction that there is no earthly redress for what she suffers. The Widow Green, however, cannot believe that such things can happen in England and goes to the male authorities to ask for help. Her search is thorough and entirely fruitless. In the course of it, she meets with the mill owner's agent, the mill owner himself, the mill owner's elder brother who lives on the profits and has a reputation of being a respectable and caring family man, and finally the local clergyman. The agent's response to her concerns is to abuse her: “What the deuce, woman, do you think I sit here to be pestered with long saws from an old fool like you, because a couple of mawkish parish girls are not treated like countesses in the mill!” (556). The owner dismisses her with “Learn, Mrs. What's-your-name, to know your place; and remember too, that my private residence is not an office” (558). But the novel makes its strongest case for broad societal hypocrisy when it indicts the people who are not directly involved in running the factory. The mill owner's brother angrily reprimands the widow for describing Helen's situation in front of one of his daughters, “a young lady, whose ears ought not to have been assailed by discourse so unfit for a delicate mind” (560). The widow responds that “though of very humble rank, my poor Helen is modest and delicate as you yourself can desire a female to be; and she is obliged to hear and to see in their worst forms, all the evil things that I spoke of, and others that I could not even mention before the young lady.” This only provokes Mr. Z. further: “‘Really, woman, your assurance is matchless! Not content with insulting my daughter by your low conversation, you must now place some dirty factory girl on the same level with her, and thence argue that I am to go, in person of course, and rescue your distressed damsel from the mill!’ and he laughed in bitter scorn, as he spoke” (560). Obviously, all the responses stress the separation between upper-class women and the respect with which they are to be treated and dirty working-class factory girls. When the widow finally turns to the clergyman, she begins to despair because, although he alone listens to her with patience, all he can recommend is acquiescence to the system.

The family's conflict with the factory system reaches its climax when the Widow Green, Helen, and the granddaughter, Mary, complain to the factory inspector and take an overseer to trial. The trial, however, is not about sexual harassment, which, of course, has no legal existence. By this time events have escalated into acts of physical abuse, when, first, an overseer hits Helen with a rod. The trial itself brings a charge of “ill usage” against another overseer who is accused of “various acts of unnecessary severity to Mary Green … particularly with having, on a certain day kicked her on the shins, so as to hurt and bruise her considerably” (586). Sexual harassment lays a foundation for the events of the trial in several ways, however. First, the emphasis laid on it suggests the ways in which an atmosphere of harassment lays the groundwork for physical assault. Second, the trial demonstrates that such harassment is only one of the abuses that factory workers face. Finally, the Greens lose their case and the overseer is acquitted because the defense attorney calls the girls' characters into question. The trial is the culmination of the family's search for earthly justice, and, as Helen had predicted, it is not to be found.

In the end it is consumption, not harassment, that kills Helen. By the novel's conclusion, the protesting, testifying women have been swept away: Sarah and Helen are dead (as James is, as well: he dies of consumption without ever being exposed to factory work); the Widow Green is consigned to the parish workhouse; Mary has been sent off to some humble country job which, it is hoped, will wash away the taint of the factory; and the orphaned Katy has been abandoned to her fate in the factory town. The final comments in the novel are given to men who ineffectually debate the nature of the system and the fate of Helen. A doctor who had befriended the Greens in the country comes to town and, after hearing their history, goes to the mill owner to complain about Helen's harassment. When he learns Helen's history, however, Mr. Z. merely repeats his distinction between working-class women and ladies, saying, “We are not to judge of the conversation kept up in a mill by the standard of drawing-room propriety; nor to suppose that what would wound the delicacy of a young lady causes any trouble to a bobbin-filler” (641). Of the original family group, only two boys, Richard and Willy, remain together, reunited in their old country parish: “It was on a bright day in Spring, after labouring together in their master's park, that Richard and Willy seated themselves to eat their frugal meal beneath an ash, just putting forth its tender leaves to the fostering ray” (643). Despite this Edenic setting, their thoughts are grim as they argue about whether it was the harassment or the physical harshness of factory work that was responsible for Helen's death. Willy takes the former view: “I am sure it was the wickedness of the place, more than the work, that killed Helen,” while Richard maintains, “But the work was enough to do it” (643).

Tonna's novel ends in failure with Helen dead and the factory system intact, but its depiction of a girl's resistance to workplace harassment is still a victory. Helen defies the attacks made on her and asserts the right to her own integrity. Despite her constitutional reserve, she does not suffer in silence but actively contests what is done to her. In fact, Helen becomes a spokeswoman for her class, first, because she dares to describe her experience to people outside the factory, second, because she finally assigns responsibility, not just to her fellow workers, but also to the system and its beneficiaries, and, third, because she defines this as a women's issue, rather than simply a class issue. Tonna succeeds in describing the hostile atmosphere created by sexual harassment and in allowing her working-class heroine to both articulate and resist it. And, what is most distinctive, Tonna stresses a cross-class identification of women with women, but it is an identification that is rooted in the working-class woman's experience, not one that requires her to masquerade as a middle-class woman. …

Notes

1. Deborah Kaplan argues that Tonna's “frank depictions” of working-class women in the workplace “are virtually unique in British industrial novels.” In addition to her concrete concerns there, Tonna is alive to the contradictions of domestic ideology. Kaplan comments that her novels expose the “myth of the fall of working women out of the supposedly natural state of female domesticity and into industrial capitalism.” See her article, “The Women Worker in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Fiction,” Mosaic (spring 1985): 60, 52.

2. MacKinnon argues: “Woman's consciousness erupts through fissures in the socially knowable” (Sexual Harassment of Working Women, xii). Perhaps it is for that reason that Tonna is able to describe workplace harassment with the degree of specificity she does. For there are few writers on industrial issues more fissured than Tonna is: as Gallagher has demonstrated, Tonna's novel is split between an intense Evangelicalism that insists on individual free will and an equally intense hatred of an all-powerful factory system (Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 41-44). In The Reader's Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Christine L. Krueger argues that Tonna constructs herself as a female prophetic writer in the midst of a heavily patriarchal Evangelical tradition (125-56). In a culminating paradox, while Tonna can be read as conservative, even reactionary, in The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), Patrick Brantlinger points out that her criticism of the factory system has a great deal in common with that of the most revolutionary factory critics (57).

3. Gallagher, Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 46; Zlotnick, Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, 151.

   In her discussion, Gallagher praises Helen Fleetwood as “the most important work of industrial fiction to emerge from … reforming Evangelicalism” (41), but she focuses on Richard Green, who, she argues, “represents the free will actively combating evil in the world.” She claims that “he is the character who makes Helen Fleetwood a novel” (47). By contrast, I argue that Helen's experience is, indeed, central, while Richard is a bystander, who represents the remnant of an honest but ineffectual paternalism. Richard hopes to marry Helen, but, kept on by his local squire, makes enough money only to support himself. It is Helen's factory wages that help to support, not only herself, but also the Widow Green and her three other grandchildren. Even when Richard visits the factory town M. and discovers that Helen is dying of the work, he cannot rescue her. The best solution he can offer is to help to get her a job in another factory. See, however, Harsh's Subversive Heroines for an interpretation of Helen as a powerful Christian martyr (88-91).