[In the following essay, Kovačević and Kanner discuss the writings of Tonna, whose fictional works on factory conditions and child labor are based on factual accounts and witness testimony recorded in parliamentary blue books and other official reports.]

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, by her persistent reading of Government reports, laboured to penetrate the underground life of thousands of women hidden away in small and dirty shops. Her exhaustive treatment of so large a body of employment, unknown perhaps to all contemporary women but Harriet Martineau, demonstrates both industry and comprehension. … Other novelists were either ignorant of this industrial chaos or were unequal to the task of handling it in fiction.

This tribute to a now forgotten English author of the 1830s and 1840s was written by Wanda Fraiken Neff forty years ago in her Victorian Working Women: An Historical and Literary Study of Women in British Industries and Professions, 1832-1850.¹ And yet, with the exception of Mrs. Neff's close examination of her fiction in this study, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna has been the victim of an almost total conspiracy of silence ever since her death in 1846. Literary critics have been especially negligent, perhaps because they have not read Mrs. Neff or other social historians who, like Margaret Hewitt in her Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (1958), have at least shown awareness of her work. The most extensive literary commentary is that found in the five pages Louis Cazamian devotes to Mrs. Tonna in his Le roman social en Angleterre, published in 1903. Mona Wilson's Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries (1939) examines some aspects of her life and work, but does not discuss her novels in any detail. More recently, Aina Rubenius treats her social fiction briefly in connection with that of Elizabeth Gaskell in The Woman Question in Mrs. Gaskell's Life and Works (1950), and Kathleen Tillotson in her Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1953) refers to Mrs. Tonna's most important work, Helen Fleetwood, as anticipating Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and describes it as “a vivid and authentic tale of factory life” (127). Finally, a few lines in Margaret Maison's Search Your Soul, Eustace (1960) refer to Mrs. Tonna's religious fiction.

Yet Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, who wrote under the pen name “Charlotte Elizabeth,” broke ground in areas later explored by such well-known contemporaries as Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and other “condition-of-England” novelists of the Chartist period. She was the only author of her generation to write a novel wholly about the lives, at home and at work, of factory operatives and the first to introduce a working-class heroine into an English novel. Her novels, short stories, poems, and religious writings went into many editions; the three journals she edited had wide circulations; and the list of her eleven volumes of collected works and over seventy independent volumes takes up five-and-a-half columns of the British Museum catalog—which even then does not identify her as the author of her most important nonfictional work, The Perils of the Nation. Charlotte Elizabeth appears also to have had a transatlantic reputation, many of her works having been brought out in American editions; an advertisement for the New York edition of her collected Works, with an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, states that “Charlotte Elizabeth's works have become so universally known and are so highly and deservedly appreciated in this country, that it has become almost superfluous to mention them.”² And an English contemporary, Clara Lucas Balfour, in her Working Women of the Last Half Century (1856) gives Mrs. Tonna high praise as a “pioneer of progress” who not only achieved financial independence through her literary work and editorial management, but was personally involved in a great variety of philanthropic activities all her life.

Reasons for her latter-day neglect by both literary scholars and social historians are not far to seek as one checks the standard reference sources for information about this author of so many “universally known” works. The Cambridge History of English Literature gives one subordinate clause to her poetry. Her name appears in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature only as editor of The Christian Lady's Magazine, and in the New Cambridge Bibliography not at all; neither mentions her editorship of two other journals, The Protestant Annual and The Protestant Magazine. Ernest A. Baker does not mention her name in his comprehensive History of the English Novel nor, with very few exceptions, does any other historian of the novel or of English literature. The article in the Dictionary of National Biography, written by David James O'Donoghue, who also gives an account of her in his Poets of Ireland, is little more than an incomplete list of her works, with no comment on her literary work. Most of the references in Poole's Index are to obituaries which confine discussion of her work to her verse and religious tracts; a few others lead to contemporary comment on her articles (but very little on her fiction) in the magazines she edited, and to reviews of her autobiographical essay, Personal Recollections.

The neglect is not surprising on some scores. Besides the uninformative account in the Dictionary of National Biography, the only biographical details available are those given in her own sentimental Personal Recollections, the autobiography she published in 1841 when she was fifty because she hoped to avoid misrepresentation by biographers, and those in the equally sentimental and over-reverent supplementary chapters added by her husband L. H. J. Tonna in the edition he brought out after her death titled Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth, Continued to the Close of her Life (1847).³ The picture that emerges from these sources as well as that from reviews of these volumes and from the obituaries is not one to encourage serious critical interest in Charlotte Elizabeth's work. Her religious views were those of the ultra-Protestant Evangelical, so narrow and bigoted—especially in regard to Roman Catholicism—that even co-religionists were moved to protest against the intemperance and injustice of many statements which they felt did injury to the cause of Protestantism.⁴ And since Mrs. Tonna was a more prolific polemicist in the cause of millenarianism than in that of social reform, the deserved death of her contemporary reputation as the former seems to have carried recognition of her contributions as a writer of polemical social fiction to the same grave.

The novels of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna nevertheless play an important role in the development of social fiction from 1830 to 1850, a period when the “cheap repository tract” gave way in acceptance and popularity to the social-problem novel. The short narratives signed “Charlotte Elizabeth” which appeared in several religious periodicals of this period prove to be links bridging the school of the highly rational, unsentimental, and propagandistic fictional tracts and the later group of social novels treating similar subjects more emotively, more dramatically, and—in the larger and deeper sense—more realistically. Mrs. Tonna possessed the objectivity of the first group, best represented by Hannah More and Harriet Martineau, without their frequent ambivalence of attitude and seeming condonement of certain of the evils of the early phases of industrialization; on the other hand she had the personal compassion for human suffering characteristic of Elizabeth Gaskell and Dickens, without their incidence of sentimentality and melodrama (or of course their imaginative and artistic gifts).

It was the group of novelists working after 1830 who began to give body and soul to instructional fiction, and who dared (in spite of the prevailing disapproval on moral grounds of novel reading and writing) to adapt some of the techniques of the popular lending-library romances to their own narratives, with the purpose of making the latter more readable and more moving, and therefore better conveyers of serious social messages. Those who experimented discovered that their stories surpassed the earlier didactic tracts in effectiveness as polemical vehicles as well as in popularity. As Mrs. Tonna, taking her cue from Hannah More, was forced to admit: “The abstract idea of a suffering family does not strongly affect the mind, but let its particles be known to us, let their names call some familiar images to our view, and contain 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.”⁵

In this new form of narrative written solely for the purpose of inspiring sympathy for the suffering working-classes, a critical examination of the “condition of England” was interwoven with accounts of fictitious characters undergoing fictitious experiences. In spite of her distaste for “fabrication” (she even attributed the popularity of her own novels to an “unhealthy tone of the public mind”⁶), Mrs. Tonna did not hesitate to invent heroes, villains, and crises in order to direct her readers' attention to the iniquities then being exposed in Parliamentary blue-book reports, reports not likely to be read by the middle-class wives and mothers through whom she hoped to influence their voting husbands, fathers, and sons. Charlotte Elizabeth deplored her country-women's ignorance of social and political realities, believing that all women should be whole-souled in working to redress the wrongs that engulfed a world so few of them cared to discover. Her impatience with dilettantish do-gooders is reminiscent of Dickens's impatience with England's Mrs. Jellabys; in her story “The Forsaken Home” she addresses her sentimental country-women:

We may prepare and dispatch missionaries to every corner of the world; we may shower Bibles like hail over earth's wide surface; we may exhibit in our own conduct and conversation a very model of all that Christian women ought to be; but this one thing God requires of us, and will not acquit us if we refuse to do it, whatever worthy deeds we may choose to do, that we enter our strong, urgent, unanimous protest against the frightful degradation of our sisters, and demand from those who have the power to accord it the boon of their emancipation.

(3:445)

The women polemicists of the early years of the Industrial Revolution were socio-economic theorists whose concern about conditions of the time impelled them to dramatize their theories in the manner of the fictional romancers. But the sugar-coating of their sermonizing was generally as thin as Oliver Twist's gruel. Mrs. Tonna, an admirer and admitted disciple of Hannah More, shifted from her predecessor's emphasis on theoretical platitudes and argued for amelioration of conditions she described in concrete and realistic detail. The discovery of a novel like Charlotte Elizabeth's Helen Fleetwood after a reading of Hannah More's ultra-didactic exempla and Harriet Martineau's Tales and Illustrations of Political Economy strikes a markedly new emotional chord in the reader. While Helen Fleetwood is unashamedly propagandistic and self-consciously reliant upon the dry bones of parliamentary and other reports, it is a genuinely moving assault upon the reader's conscience in its graphic account of what it is like to be a woman or child forced by compulsions of poverty to work in a factory. On their behalf the author uses fiction as a pulpit from which she pleads that private philanthropy be increased, that religious guidance and education be expanded, and that legislation not only be enacted but its provisions implemented (which did not happen until the Factory Act of 1850). Mrs. Tonna thus anticipated such novelists as Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, and Dickens, none of whose social novels except Oliver Twist appeared before Helen Fleetwood; and, with the exception of Frances Trollope, author of the much inferior and far-fetched extravaganza, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1839-40)—only partially a “factory novel”—Charlotte Elizabeth was the only novelist to describe actual conditions in the factories of the time, more especially the miseries of the child and female operatives.

There can be no denial, of course, that much of the dust which lies on Mrs. Tonna's “Complete Works” is there because its removal is unmerited. The literary value of her writing is too mediocre to call for defense. However, the purpose here is to show that she deserves to be better known to the literary historian through her special contributions as a social polemicist. As Wanda Neff admits, “Helen Fleetwood is the most effective single literary agency in getting technical information before the general public. Only a writer who had a greater regard for truth than for art, who sacrificed the interest of her tale for what it taught, could be so wilfully dull and, at the same time, so important” (87). Though a number of her works deserve attention in this connection, this paper will concentrate on Mrs. Tonna's principal novel, Helen Fleetwood, with some comment on the volume of her best shorter narratives, The Wrongs of Women. Since so little is known about the author—and that little unreliable—a preliminary consideration of her life and personality may shed light of some use in the evaluation of these two works.

Charlotte Elizabeth was the daughter of Michael Browne, a clergyman of Norwich, where she was born in 1790. She died of cancer in 1846. At the age of ten she became completely deaf for life and almost lost her sight; her delicate health influenced her great love of books, especially the plays of Shakespeare which she admitted in her Recollections encouraged her to live in an imaginary romantic world and, upon the death of her father and the financial difficulties facing her mother, to resolve to become a writer. Later she came to look upon her early addiction to the reading of Shakespeare and romantic novels as a sinful waste of time, and expressed gratitude that it pleased God to save her from the snare of seeking personal fame and fortune as an author of light fiction. God rescued her from the snare by sending her a husband, a Captain Phelan, whom she accompanied first to Nova Scotia for two years and then to his post in Ireland. In Ireland the reading of some religious tracts for the poor gave her the idea of using her talents in a cause of which she would not be ashamed. The Dublin Tract Society was soon paying her liberally for her immediately successful stories and tracts, and she became a polemicist of some importance among her fellow-Evangelicals. After her husband deserted her, she went to England and began to support herself by writing. Four years after Captain Phelan's death in 1837, Charlotte Elizabeth married Lewis Hypolytus (sometimes spelled Hippolytus) Tonna, Secretary of the Royal United Institution. Lewis was also a religious writer of some standing, identified in the Dictionary of National Biography as the author of many “small books and pamphlets written from the ultra-Protestant point of view.” Besides publishing numerous prose narratives, poems, tracts, and articles, Mrs. Tonna was editor of The Christian Lady's Magazine from 1843 to 1846, The Protestant Magazine from 1841 to 1845, and The Protestant Annual from 1841 to her death. Her personal contributions, in general anonymous, to the periodicals she edited was considerable; all the leading articles signed “The Watchman” in The Protestant Magazine are hers, as are the stories and serial novels published under the signature “Charlotte Elizabeth,” the pen name she initially adopted to protect herself from the financial claims of her first husband.

The bare record of the principal events in Charlotte Elizabeth's life fails to convey the liveliness and intensity of her nature. Her personal appeal is evident from the fact that her second husband was twenty-nine when he married her, a deaf woman over fifty. Her tremendous vitality in spite of a lifelong frailty is revealed in her Recollections which, while devoted mainly to a description of her conversion to Evangelicalism and the discussion of religious issues, also contains accounts of her diverse activities in such causes as those of the Irish poor, of the English factory children, of deaf mutes in both countries, of Zionism, and of the poor and friendless everywhere.

However much Mrs. Tonna took the ultra-Evangelical pose,⁷ she was not primarily concerned with the pacification of the “dangerous class,” but with the alleviation of their sufferings; and she seems not to have been at all guilty of the class-protecting humbug which later writers like Dickens associated with the Evangelical movement. She proposed that the connection between hunger and degradation was the same as that between hunger and revolt, and in her opinion a great sin of industrial society was the indiscriminate disregard for body, spirit, and human personality alike.

Charlotte Elizabeth's most important work, Helen Fleetwood, first serialized in The Christian Lady's Magazine in 1839-40, was published in 1841 by R. B. Seeley in one volume at seven shillings. This tale of Manchester operatives was not a one-shot piece of social writing composed accidentally, but part of a well-organized and executed Evangelical campaign to direct public attention to evils of child and female labor. An earlier series of articles by Mrs. Tonna in the same journal, dealing with the work of her benevolent friend Lord Ashley on behalf of the children in mines and factories, were contributions to the same campaign as were a seven-stanza poem, “The English Factory,” and the four tales later brought together under the title, The Wrongs of Women.

Helen Fleetwood is a moving documentary narrative supporting the view that industrialism had wreaked moral debilitation upon every level of British society. The plot centers on a single family, the Greens—consisting of a grandmother, her four grandchildren, and an adopted granddaughter Helen Fleetwood—and charts their downhill progress from their forced migration to a manufacturing town to the tragic consequences of that move for them all. Following the death of the mother of the family the Greens are dispossessed of their land in a country village because of a legally sanctioned but morally unfair change of ownership. The New Poor Law has infected the parish guardians with panic at the thought of supporting their poor, and they circulate fraudulent pamphlets glamorizing life in the fast-growing industrial centers in order to encourage parish paupers to migrate. Mrs. Tonna presents the central problem as a spiritual breakdown in both individuals and the nation at large, and sees the only solution in the reestablishment of the spirit of Christian brotherhood—an idea developed later into a movement by Frederick Denison Maurice and his Christian Socialists.

The cotton mill presented in Helen Fleetwood is a synthesis of all the factories condemned as “inhuman” by witnesses in official investigations or as “sub-standard” by factory inspectors. A superb propagandist, Mrs. Tonna no doubt chose to ignore evidence tending to contradict or soften her attack. Certainly she ignored the protestations of such men as John Bright and the Strutts of Derbyshire, who were constantly working to improve conditions in the mills, and of economists who countered attacks of the social reformers with evidence pointing to the increase in national output of goods—an increase they claimed had already brought and was about to increase material advantages for the workers. But the author of Helen Fleetwood, nevertheless, offered credible evidence that the defenders of laissez-faire in politics, trade, and private enterprise were in this period of crisis equally culpable in refusing to include in their statistics the cost in human welfare of pushing John Bull full steam ahead. These were the men Dickens described as “those who see figures and averages, and nothing else … the addled heads who would take the average of cold in the Crimea during twelve months as a reason for clothing a soldier in nankeens on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur.”⁸

Charlotte Elizabeth cared nothing for statistics. She cared for people who were suffering, whether few or numerous, whether in July or December. It is true that she “created” a prototype of a cotton factory as a showcase for the system she deplored, but that there was a factual basis for that prototype is undeniable. The unromanticized story of factory life as she tells it dictates that tragedy must dominate the conclusion, and in Helen Fleetwood the entire action of the novel moves painfully but believably toward that end. By the last chapter the city of Manchester has devoured the simple rural family in little more than a single year. The author's straightforward and generally skillful presentation of her situations allows the tension to mount toward its tragic climax without any of the false pathos found in the stories of many of her better-known contemporaries. The function of her characters is limited to the part they play in the routine events of the life of the working-poor. Since for Mrs. Tonna what is happening to her characters—what “economic exploiters” are doing to them—is more important than what kind of people they are, they are not for the most part portrayed as complex human beings but as actors in a pageant showing how the poor of Disraeli's “other nation”⁹ live—a life the nation of the rich knows nothing of. At the same time Helen Fleetwood and the other characters in the novel are more than abstract socio-economic “cases” such as those found in Michael Armstrong. Michael scarcely reminds one of a real worker, and the other characters in the novel are mere shadows. In contrast, the workers—children and adults—in Mrs. Tonna's novel have their idiosyncrasies which distinguish them as individuals, neither stereotypes nor eccentrics. One of her most successful portraits is that of Tom South, who foreshadows John Barton in his complex drives and ambivalences.¹⁰ South, a revolutionary conspirator who reads seditious literature, is a skilled worker who is well paid and yet dissatisfied with the condition of his class and especially angry over the exploitation of children. The family of another worker, Wright, is likewise very successfully depicted in the description of their domestic conditions and the coarse and unfeeling relationship between parents and children.

Mrs. Tonna was among the few of her period who tried to look beyond the immediate social ills to the breaking-up of old standards and values and to gauge long-range effects of industrialization on both morals and life styles. Through her stories she showed how the factory regimen could undermine family life and alienate individuals. In Helen Fleetwood she reveals that children were not in all cases sent to the factories because of the extreme poverty of the parents. The working-class relatives of the Green family, who receive them with little enthusiasm upon their arrival in Manchester, live in comparative ease as a result of their industrial employment; they rent several rooms which are furnished with some pretension to luxury, with bright pictures in gaudy frames on the walls. Yet the mother is indifferent to the young breadwinners and the children have no respect for her. One of the workers in the novel comments bitterly on the lack of affection or loyalty in the families of many mill workers: “And to my mind it is a cannibal sort of life to be eating as one may say, the flesh off our children's bones, and sucking the young blood out of their veins.”¹¹ And yet the children of this worker are employed in the factories. The incident is revealing, perhaps beyond the author's intent, of the subtle but compelling power of social conformity at every class level. It is made clear that being against what is recognized as a social evil does not necessarily give an individual the moral strength to resist it.

There is no idealization of poverty in Mrs. Tonna's social fiction, thrown out as a sop to her readers' consciences. She does not represent the poor the way Dickens often does, as an embodiment of her personal ideal of humanity. Consistent in her desire to demonstrate that bad living conditions inevitably deform man, she allows her characters to degenerate before her readers' eyes. In this she is more realistic than the author of Oliver Twist, who makes his hero immune to the most monstrous of evil influences. Moreover her characters are true to their class and to human nature, more so than such working-class characters as the idealist Alton Locke, or Gerald in Sybil, who is really a displaced aristocrat, or Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times, who act completely out of character. Charlotte Elizabeth's singleness of vision and purpose and her rejection of embellishment of any kind as a betrayal of the “truth” she believed she was portraying lead, however, to what is perhaps the most obvious artistic flaw in her work, its total lack of humor, with none of Dickens's subtle and often poignant understanding of man's resort to laughter as a deep-seated human need.

The real significance of Mrs. Tonna's work lies in the nature of its thematic content and in the fact that it serves as an excellent model of out-and-out polemical fiction. For her own purposes, which were obviously not those of giving her readers aesthetic pleasure, a novel like Helen Fleetwood by its very single-mindedness in the exposure of social injustice and its rejection of such devices as metaphor, symbolism, or imaginative leaping and lingering may well entitle its author to a reputation as a better social novelist in the narrow sense than many of her more literary contemporaries. The role of such a writer in the progress of social fiction from The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain to Bleak House is an important one. Where the social historian may tend to trust the unsophisticated localized truth of a Helen Fleetwood over the artistic truth of a Bleak House, the literary historian will trust the deeper and more universal truth he finds only in the great works of art. Yet if the latter, by turning himself into a master collating machine, examines the novels of a Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna against the artistically superior social novels, he can learn something of the mystery of the how, why, and wherefore of narrative genius.

Charlotte Elizabeth's outstanding literary innovation was her employment of official reports and inquiries as the factual basis for her stories. She was the first of the social-problem fiction writers to translate the recorded testimony of witnesses in parliamentary blue books into dialogue for her novels. In Helen Fleetwood we can trace the substance of the conversations of such of her characters as Tom South, Richard Green, and Hudson to official documents like the Sadler Committee Report, the pamphlets of such reformists as Peter Gaskell, Richard Oastler, James Kay (later Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), and R. D. Grainger, the speeches of Lord Ashley, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, and even contemporary police reports. By giving such documents a fictional framework, Mrs. Tonna brought to the average middle-class household a rudimentary knowledge of the social and economic issues under debate in the early nineteenth century. She proved that existing laws pertaining to factory regulation were not being effectively administered, and she demonstrated that such laws were failing to solve the social problems connected with the unharnessed growth of industrial enterprise.

Actually, the story of the tragic experiences of the Green family in Helen Fleetwood is a detailed and informative rendition of contemporary reports of the living and working conditions of the industrial poor in the 1830s; and almost all the events in the novel from the recruitment of new hands for industry to the placement of old Mrs. Green in the workhouse are based on testimonial evidence drawn from the blue books if not from personal observation.¹² Mrs. Tonna's object was to shake the complaisance of her women readers and through them to shake that of members of Parliament; she has one of her characters say of Lord Ashley's efforts: “We used to think that what thwarts him is a hot opposition in the House of Commons. No such thing; it is like pleading with the dead. … We cannot rouse a manly feeling in the legislature on behalf of the oppressed children of poverty” (148). She therefore often repeated such arguments of Lord Ashley's partisans as:

The waste of human life in factories, like that in the plantations of the west, occasions so pressing a demand for a supply of new labourers, that it gives rise to a traffic not very dissimilar from the slave trade. A brisk market is always open; and those who consider it a meritorious work to decrease the burden of their respective parish at any cost, are equally ready to recruit it with their paupers, as the natives of Madagascar of old were to sell their prisoners.

(56)¹³

Mrs. Tonna was especially indignant at the indifference of those who accepted such waste as a natural and inevitable by-product of the factory system. She mentions a case of a visitor to a factory remarking to the proprietor about one of the children: “‘What a pretty girl that is. … What a fine creature she will be at twenty.’ The young gentleman looked at the beautiful creature pointed out, then glanced his eye over the whole throng of her youthful companions, and turning to the visitor with a significant leer, quietly answered in an undertone: ‘There are not many in this room who will live to be twenty’” (160). The incident may have been based on a letter from Southey to Ashley written in 1833, in which he recounts a proprietor's explanation to a visitor that the children “were consumptive, that a great proportion never reached the age of twenty.”¹⁴

Several passages in Helen Fleetwood suggest that Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have been moved to write her “Cry of the Children” after reading a novel with such descriptions of a life of up to twenty hours a day in a cotton mill as the following:

Everything is done by machinery; you see, they are great things, ever so high and big, all going about and about, some on wheels running up and down the room, and some with great rollers turning about as fast as the steam can drive them; so you must step back, and run forward, and duck, and turn, and move as they do, or off goes a finger or an arm, or else you get a knock on the head, to remember all your lives. As to sitting down there's no such thing.

(71)

Move, move, everything moves. The wheels and the frames are always going, and the little reels twirl round as fast as ever they can; and the pulleys, and chains, and great iron works over-head, are all moving; and the cotton moves so fast that it is hard to piece it quick enough; and there is a great dust, and such a noise of whirr, whirr, whirr, that at first I did not know whether I was not standing on my head.

(77)

Certainly no other fictional account of the period gives such a haunting picture of the terror child operatives must have experienced in such surroundings; in another of her stories, “The Forsaken Home,” Charlotte Elizabeth describes the life of children in the mines, which may also have been read by Mrs. Browning.

In another incident in Helen Fleetwood a character loses an arm because of the unfenced machinery. For years, Parliament continued to debate the question of the legality or the propriety of compelling employers to fence their machinery. Sixteen years after Tonna, Dickens came forward in this ongoing controversy in an article in Household Words attacking Harriet Martineau's defense of the factory owners in her pamphlet, The Factory Controversy, A Warning against Meddling Legislators.¹⁵ The controversy reminds us of the strong opposition to labor legislation at the time Mrs. Tonna was pleading for it. Helen Fleetwood is most topical when it brings to the fore the main issue of the discussion—the lack of adequate bureaucratic machinery to enforce the laws even when and if they should be passed. In this instance she would seem to be paraphrasing the Report of Leonard Horner, factory inspector, in his evidence before the Commission of 1840, but since the novel was written a year or more earlier than Horner's published report, the novelist presumably made use of Horner's “Open Letter to Nassau Senior” of May 1837, the arguments of which he repeated before the Commission. A working-class character in Helen Fleetwood tells of some of the ways the Factory Acts were violated: “The inspector comes once a year, and is bound to advertize his coming in the newspapers; so they take care to have all right just then”; and even when violators were caught, “The law made the lowest penalty … against a mill owner” (70).

The members of the Green family of Helen Fleetwood were not the only fictional victims of conditions in those factories of the period which were operated with indifference to workers' welfare. In Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854), which Wanda Neff calls “easily the greatest novel of industrial life in English” (87), Betty Higgins, dying of tuberculosis in Manchester, accuses her master of refusing to invest twenty pounds in a ventilator which would have made the work much less harmful. Another Manchester author, Geraldine Jewsbury, in her novel Marian Withers (1851), describes in graphic detail the unhealthiness of certain occupations in a cotton factory. Frances Trollope in Michael Armstrong (1839) introduces a scene where blows are administered to the sleepy and exhausted children which is similar to that in Helen Fleetwood where the Green boy, overcome with fatigue and sleepiness during night work, is wakened by a cut from the overlooker. As a worker explains to old Mrs. Green after her granddaughter has been beaten, “In the case of ill-usage, you see the master usually contrives to shift the blame from himself to the managers or overlookers, or spinners: he don't order the children to be beat; he don't see them beaten; and so he gets off, and the poor things have no real protection any where” (70). But none of the fictional accounts are more moving than the actual words of witnesses whose testimony was reported in the parliamentary commissions in the blue books of 1831-32, on which most of the novelists based their scenes. One of these authentic fragments illustrates the point made about overseers:

When you were employed as an overlooker, and had to superintend those children, was not the employer aware that you had to stimulate them up to labour by severity?

His object was in every case, to get a certain quantity of work done; it must be done by some means or other; but when it is necessary for the overlooker to use severity, he had to bear the stigma of it, and not the master. … I have been obliged to urge them [children] on to work when I knew they could not bear it, but I was obliged to make them strain every nerve to do the work, and I can say I have been disgusted with myself and my situation. I felt myself degraded and reduced to the level of a slave-driver in such a case.¹⁶

The author of Helen Fleetwood looked beyond the physical cruelty of such blows and long hours to what she viewed as the even greater injustice—the dehumanizing effect of work performed by machinery and only watched over by man. Here she evinces an understanding of one of the crucial threats of an industrialism which tends to alienate man from himself:

Seen at their work they are a community of automata. Nothing seems to animate them. The cold listlessness of their looks sends a chill to the heart of the spectator, who, if he feel rightly, must feel it a degradation to his species to be chained, as it were, to a parcel of senseless machinery, confused by its din, and forced to obey its movements with scarcely an interval for thought or repose.

(159)

Next to Helen Fleetwood Mrs. Tonna's most important contribution to the development of the art of preaching social reform through fiction was the series of shorter narratives, what could be called novelettes, first published in her Christian Lady's Magazine and then brought together in the volume The Wrongs of Women in four parts, 1843-44.¹⁷ These stories dealing with the non-textile trades were: “Milliners and Dress-Makers,” “The Forsaken Home,” “The Little Pin-Headers,” and “The Lace-Runners.” As indicated by the titles, each centers on conditions in a particular line of work in which women were engaged (“The Forsaken Home” dealing with both screw manufacture and the mines). Even from the point of view of social history they are fascinating because of their detailed descriptions of the methods of manufacture as well as the conditions in the factories or sweat shops. But they are also powerful attacks upon conditions of the system which tended to exploit women as employees because they were cheaper, more docile, and more dependable than men.

In “Milliners and Dressmakers” the author describes conditions in the sweatshops where the women employed were generally of the shabby gentility rather than of the working-class. The appeal here is not so much for legislative action as for greater human consideration on the part of the fashionable ladies who patronized the unscrupulous sweatshop operators. Mrs. Tonna, like Kingsley after her in his famous “Cheap Clothes and Nasty” and Alton Locke, shows how clients put pressure on the seamstress manager to get the work out quickly, and she denounces as un-Christian the vanity of considerations of fashion or frivolous personal convenience which led supposedly “gentlewomen” to wait until the latest styles were announced to order their new clothes for a wedding or other special occasion, and then expect seamstresses to work all day and all night to fill their orders; or to insist upon such a modish preference as black dresses adorned with elaborate black trimming, with no thought of how they were ruining the eyesight of their overworked dressmakers.

The second of the stories, “The Forsaken Home,” describes the tragedy of a family in which the mother has to support her husband and children because the local screw manufactory prefers conscientious married women to men as machine operatives. The struggle of the central character to maintain a home and support her husband and children on nine shillings a week leads to the degeneration of all; domestic arrangements are neglected, the husband who is denied his proper place as breadwinner changes from a decent industrious farm laborer to an idler and drunkard. Another character is a young woman who works in the mines up to a few days before her confinement and then is forced to turn her baby over to a “nanny.” In a scene paralleling that in Disraeli's Sybil, the “nanny” drugs the infants in her charge with a sinister potion called “Godfrey's Cordial,” a tranquilizing blend of boiled treacle, water, and opium. The factory mother remarks to a friend, “Every chemist and druggist makes his own Godfrey. It is left to the apprentice to concoct, or to the chemist's wife. It stands in a great jug on the counter for sale. They are all urged to keep this medicine, or they will lose their custom” (3:427). The factory women grow callous to their home responsibilities, as they join newly organized “Friendly Societies” and hold meetings in the local pubs, “drinking, singing, and smoking for two or three hours … brought in contact with … men … assembled through curiosity or worse intentions” (3:443).

The third and fourth novelettes are the best of the group and rival Helen Fleetwood in power. “The Little Pin-Headers” aims again at the mothers and wives of the middle- and upper-classes who take for granted the supply of such a seemingly insignificant but necessary article as a pin and have no idea of where it comes from or how it is made. The principal characters are the children sent off to work in a pin factory by the stepmother brought into the family after their mother dies of overwork, and the main thrust of the story is the extremely graphic description of the interior of a pin manufactory and the attack on such social evils as the owner's abrogation of responsibility to his underlings—in this case to the cruel female overseer. Other conditions attacked are the management's pretense of keeping a dame school, the punishment of children for being ill or faint from the fetid air, the rampant irreligion, the lack of cleanliness, and the evils of drink by parents, overseers, and even the children. In sum, a system invented by man for the manufacture of this “marvelous piece of delicate work,” when it has to be performed by children who have become wretched little “automata,” is—in the author's opinion—“a crime against God.”

The final story in the group is “The Lace-Runners,” another exemplum of the evils of child labor in the factories, which again carries the indictment to the wearers of such manufactured lace—those who create the demand by their vanity in trying to ape the ladies of the upper classes who wear handmade lace. The machines which handle lacework are described as extremely complicated, demanding men to work them, women to wind, and boys to thread. It is sympathy especially for the latter that prompts Mrs. Tonna's vehement denunciation of the middle-classes, charging that it is their demand for such unnecessary luxuries and their culpable ignorance of the conditions of their production that are widening the gulf between the rich and the poor and bringing England to the brink of revolution. She concludes her series of stories with the words:

It has been asked, Why is this little book called “The Wrongs of Women,” seeing it is only to one class of female sufferers that its sad details apply? We answer, that the wrong against woman, against woman in every rank and every class, perpetrated by the means which have been very briefly sketched in these pages, is alike fearful and universal. Have we not a woman on the throne? and is she not wronged, the Queen of England, while rebellion is cradled, fostered, matured in the ancient nurseries of pure old English loyalty throughout the land? … But now, through the atrocious system of which a very small and that too the least revolting part, has been set forth, our women are changed into men, and our men into devils; and the fair inheritance of England's Queen is becoming but a throne whose pillars rest on an awakening volcano.

(3:502)

Finally, because of its close relationship to the themes presented in her fiction, some note should be taken of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's most important non-fictional publication, The Perils of the Nation: An Appeal to the Legislature, the Clergy, and the Higher and Middle Classes (1843), her authorship of which has gone generally unrecognized. In 1842 a committee of the Christian Influence Society, seeking an effective author to prepare a political tract in advance of debates on the Factory Bill and other pending social legislation, induced Mrs. Tonna to accept the commission. After several months of research she presented the manuscript of The Perils of the Nation to her sponsors and publisher, who received it enthusiastically but decided it should appear “without a name … 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.”¹⁸ When the book went into second and third printings and was being widely discussed and attacked, it became impossible not to name an author, and so the publisher, Robert Benton Seeley, finally took credit for a work which most library catalogs, including those of the British Museum and the Library of Congress, still attribute to him.¹⁹ The tract is a terse and well-documented argument in favor or government intervention in the regulation of conditions in factories, mines, small workshops, and distressed agricultural areas, calling for new laws to govern sanitary conditions, urban housing, rampant pauperism, and educational opportunities for the poor.

Like her conservative friends, the Evangelical champions of labor-reform legislation, Mrs. Tonna was politically committed as an opponent of free-trade and Whig policies. In the Perils she denounces the doctrines of political economy held by the free-traders, holding up to ridicule the idea that workers under such a system were free agents. In a tone reminiscent of that of the author of Oliver Twist, she had observed in Helen Fleetwood that the workers “of course, were under no compulsion, save that of poverty; and had they rather chosen to starve, they had the liberty to do so” (150). But however strong her belief that the conspicuous accumulation and display of wealth lay at the root of the exploitation of the working classes, she in no sense supported political action on the part of the workers. If she opposed laissez-faire, like Carlyle and Dickens she was equally opposed to trade unionism as socialistic, warning her readers time and again in such passages as that in Helen Fleetwood where she tells how

… some half dozen of the young men in that mill had become Socialists. Beyond this it was impossible to go—Socialism is the ne plus ultra of six thousand years' laborious experience on the part of the great enemy of man—it is the moral Gorgon upon which whomsoever can be compelled to look must wither away: it is the doubly denounced woe upon the inhabiters of the earth—the last effort of Satanic venom wrought to the madness of rage by the consciousness of his shortened time.

(168)

But if the author of Helen Fleetwood was clearly of her time at the same moment that she was ahead of it, her early sensitivity to some of the deeper implications of the social changes engulfing her world underscores her importance as a social historian. Though holding views diametrically opposed to those of the socialist critics of capitalism, she arrived at many of the same conclusions.

All that is claimed for Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna in this brief review of her major work is that she deserves more recognition than she has received. Apart from the fact that her best work, Helen Fleetwood, is the first English novel devoted in its entirety to a description of life as lived by industrial workers, and therefore England's first proletarian novel, her compassionate vision at a time of crucial social tension in her country would seem to entitle her to more than a footnote in the history of the English novel. Her reputation as an ultra-religious zealot, which seems to have been responsible for the neglect of her social fiction, should not be allowed to perpetuate that neglect. History has accepted a similar blend of zeal for reform with zeal for religion (even when tinged with intolerance) in such famous humanitarians as Wilberforce, Lord Ashley, and Florence Nightingale. It would seem less than just to refuse some small recognition to a woman who, however narrow her religious views, was in some ways more fully aware of the nature of the social problems of her day, and more unambiguously and whole-heartedly committed to doing all that one person (one is tempted to say one female person) could do to remove them, than many of her more famous contemporaries. The mystery is not that her name was so well known in her day, but that it should be so little known today.

Notes

1. (New York, 1929), p. 114. This doctoral study is an excellent survey of the literary (mainly fictional) treatment of women who worked for a living in Victorian England, with one chapter on “the idle woman.” It is the best discussion by far of Mrs. Tonna's novels and stories. Other important scholarly works on conditions of the industrial workers in the early Victorian period include: Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1959); Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (London, 1958); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London, 1930).

2. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, 3 vols. (New York, 1844-45); a 2-volume edition appeared simultaneously, both published by M. W. Dodd in 1844, and there were seven later editions. This is the only collected edition of the Works; no English edition was published. In 1868 Dodd brought out a collection of Mrs. Tonna's short stories in 8 volumes. Harriet Beecher Stowe's introduction, almost her first appearance in print, seems to have escaped the notice of her bibliographers and biographers. Its discussion of the social and moral usefulness of such fiction as Mrs. Tonna's may be a clue to her own later decision to set aside, like “Charlotte Elizabeth,” her own scruples against novel-reading and strike a blow at slavery with her pen. Of particular interest is her comparison of Dickens and Mrs. Tonna, crediting the latter with more taste—if not more talent—than Dickens whose representations, in Mrs. Stowe's view, are so vivid as to be “corrupting.”

3. Both editions were published in London by R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside; several later editions were brought out by various publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. L. H. J. Tonna published his contribution to the 1847 edition separately under the title: A Memoir of Charlotte Elizabeth: Embracing the Period from the Close of Her Personal Recollections to Her Death (New York, 1847). Ironically at least one later edition, published by the American Tract Society (New York, n. d.), announces on the title-page that it is “abridged, chiefly in parts pertaining to political and other controversies prevalent at the time in Great Britain.”

4. See esp. E. B. Hall's review in the Christian Examiner (Boston) 19 (July 1845): 28-52.

5. From “The Forsaken Home,” Wrongs of Women in Works, 3-vol. ed., 3:441; all later citations from Wrongs of Women are from this edition and will be given in the text.

6. “Concluding Remarks,” Personal Recollections (New York, 1858), p. 360; all later citations from the Recollections are from this edition which contains the contributions of both Mrs. Tonna and her husband.

7. A good example of her ultra-Evangelical view was voiced when she expressed admiration for Hannah More as the pioneer of propagandist fiction aimed at readers of “the most dangerous, and generally speaking the most unapproachable class—a class who congregates in ale-houses to hear the inflammatory harangues of seditious traitors.” See Personal Recollections, p. 108.

8. Letter to Charles Knight, 30 January 1854; see Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter, 3 vols. (Bloomsbury [London] 1938), 2:620.

9. Compare the lines in Helen Fleetwood: “Two classes, hitherto bound together by mutual interest and mutual respect, are daily becoming more opposed the one to the other” (Works [3-vol. ed.], 2:167) with those in Sybil: Or, the Two Nations: “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws” (chap. 5).

10. Though there is no evidence that Elizabeth Gaskell read Helen Fleetwood, it seems unlikely that anyone so well acquainted with Manchester and as sympathetic to the plight of its factory workers would not have known about this earlier “tale of Manchester life.”

11. Works, 3-vol. ed., 2:69; all later page references to Helen Fleetwood will be given in the text and will refer to this edition.

12. Many commentators have doubted that Mrs. Tonna knew at first hand the conditions she describes, but there is some evidence in her Recollections that she worked among the poor, at least in their homes and in the schools she set up for them. E. B. Hall remarks in one of the best contemporary accounts of her work and writings, “She has continued her indefatigable labors, with pen, and by personal instruction; at one time spending from four to six hours every day for four months in the purlieus of St. Giles, London, against the remonstrances and fears of all her friends” (Christian Examiner, 39 [July 1845]: 42). Wanda Neff observes that “Whether her faithful readings of Lord Ashley's speeches and Government documents were supplemented by actual visits to factories, her autobiography does not make clear. If not, her remarkable accuracy and the wisdom of her comments are the more remarkable” (Victorian Working Women, p. 87).

13. It is interesting to speculate on whether Mrs. Stowe noted the English author's numerous analogies like this one between “factory slaves” in England and the plantation slaves in America and the West Indies, and if so, whether she may have received a Jamesian “germ” of an idea that was to explode a decade later in the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

14. Quoted in Edwin Hodder, The Life and Work of the Earl of Shaftesbury, 3 vols. (London, 1887), I:146.

15. (Manchester, 1855). See the answer to Miss Martineau's attack, “Our Wicked Mis-Statements” (by Dickens and Henry Morley), Household Words, 13 (19 January 1856):13-19. For discussions of the controversy see K. J. Fielding and Anne Smith, “Hard Times and the Factory Controversy: Dickens vs. Harriet Martineau,” NCF [Nineteenth-Century Literature] 24 (1970): 404-27; and Ivanka Kovačević, “The Ambivalence of a Generation: Dickens Juxtaposed to Harriet Martineau” in Zbornik radova, povodom godisnjice osnivanja katedre za engleski jezik i knjizevnost, Filoloski fakultet Beogradskog universiteta, 1969, pp. 87-102.

16. Evidence of William Rastrick, overseer of a silk mill, Parliamentary Papers 15 (1831-32):537-40.

17. Published by W. H. Dalton, London; some of the stories (or “parts”) were later brought out separately. All of them are included in both the 3-vol. and the 2-vol. eds. of Works (see nn. 2 and 5).

18. “Concluding Remarks,” Personal Recollections, p. 374, n. 5. These comments by her husband, initially published in the edition of 1847, were apparently the first revelation of the true authorship of Perils; he makes no mention of the sequel (also ascribed to Seeley) which appeared the following year, in 1844: Remedies Suggested for Some of the Evils which Constitute “The Perils of the Nation,” and so it is not known if his wife was also the author of this similarly anonymous companion volume. One wonders whether the fact that Mrs. Tonna in the Perils discusses prostitution among other subjects contributed to the decision to publish the work anonymously.

19. The catalog of the University of Edinburgh is the only one that has come to our attention which properly ascribes Perils to Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. That other catalogs have not corrected the error is surprising in view of the fact that she was identified as the author as early as 1934 in G. M. Young's widely circulated and many-times reprinted essay, “Portrait of an Age”; the essay first appeared as the final chapter in Early Victorian England, 1830-1865 (London, 1934). In a long footnote Young summarizes the social views in Perils and calls attention to their similarity to those of Ruskin. See the Oxford University Press paperback edition (New York, 1960), pp. 54-55, n. 2.