[In the following essay, Gagnier evaluates the extent to which nineteenth-century working-class writers of autobiography adopted bourgeois gender ideology in their works.]

A decade ago in ‘Working/Women/Writing’ Lillian S. Robinson asked that criticism, especially feminist criticism, not accept the doctrines of individualist aesthetics uncritically:

It is a fundamental precept of bourgeois aesthetics that good art … is art that celebrates what is unique and even eccentric in human experience or human personality. Individual achievement and subjective isolation are the norm, whether the achievement and the isolation be that of the artist or the character. It seems to me that this is a far from universal way for people to be or to be perceived, but one that is intimately connected to relationships and values perpetuated by capitalism. For this reason, I would seriously question any aesthetic that not only fails to call that individualism into question, but does so intentionally, in the name of feminism.¹

Robinson then reads the collection I Am a Woman Worker as an act of community indistinguishable from ‘self-actualization’.²

In a 1985 essay on imperialism in Jane Eyre that attempts to wrench feminists from the mesmerizing focus of Jane's subjectivity, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak follows Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's characterization of feminism in the West as female access to individualism: ‘the battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theater of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of “the creative imagination”.’³

At a time when ‘the creative imagination’ has ceased to bear the authority or command the attention it did in bourgeois Victorian culture; when it is found to be as historically embedded and culturally bound as romantic aesthetics and the autonomous individualism of liberal political theory; and when literary critics forecast ‘the end of autobiography’ and give up generic definitions of lifewriting, it is worth considering the relation of lifewriting to individualist aesthetics. The first half of this essay will show how individualist aesthetics have been used to disqualify women's and workers' lifewriting and propose an alternative rhetorical strategy for considering it—not as historians have, as data of varying degrees of reliability reflecting external conditions but as texts revealing subjective identities embedded in diverse social and material circumstances. The second will turn to the function of gender in working-class writing, with special attention to the ideological effects of the middle-class sex-gender system upon working-class subjects for whom that system was a material impossibility.

I

Since the nineteenth century, professional writers and literary critics have attempted generic definitions of autobiography, encouraging readers to take some lifewriting as proper autobiography and other as life, perhaps, but not Art. Such determinations were concurrent with developments in literary professionalism. Despite the marketing developments of 1840-80 that resulted in the institutionalizing of authorship—for example, specialist readers at publishing houses, literary agents, author's royalties, the Society of Authors, etc.—literary hegemony, or a powerful literary bloc that prevented or limited ‘other’ discursive blocs, did not operate by way of the institutional infrastructure, rules, and procedures of the ancient professions of law, medicine, and clergy. By, or through developments in, the nineteenth century, those ancient professions effectively exercised monopolies over their professional association, its cognitive base (knowledge and techniques), its institutional training and licensing, its ‘service’ ethos justifying autonomy from the market and collegial control, and the security and respectability differentiating its practitioners from other members of society.⁴

From the second half of the eighteenth century, when the democratic revolution combined with the effects of printing, writers had attempted to ‘commodify’ literary talent in the same way. In his Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (1795), Isaac Disraeli makes the literary character independent of local or historical environment, locating the writer's special commodity in his unique psychology.⁵ After Disraeli, the so-called Romantic poets, with their unconsciously commodified image of the poet, as in Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1802, aimed at privileged professional status without the institutional apparatus of the learned professions. In The Prelude, subtitled The Growth of a Poet's Mind, Wordsworth tentatively specified the meticulous—and idiosyncratic—training programme of the poetic sensibility, to be legitimated with great bravura by Shelley's poets in A Defence of Poetry (1821; pub. 1840)—‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. Mary Jean Corbett has argued that with the sublimation of the poet the ‘literary character’ sought self-determined valuation rather than subordination to the market; recognition of literature as a specialized and special service offered by the possessor of poetic knowledge for the edification of others, and a measure of social independence and economic security. Like Disraeli, the Romantics felt the need to distinguish ‘true artists’ from the more populous tribe of scribbling tradespeople.⁶

With the exception of Keats, who died young enough to truncate his agonistic relations with a ‘free market’ that granted the poetic ‘gift’ of the son of a stable-keeper no special privilege, the Romantic poets were of sufficient means to enjoy the homely privileges of the gentry amateur. In 1802, 80 per cent of the English population lived in villages and farms; by 1851 half the population was urban, and by 1901 80 per cent lived in towns. Within Victorian bourgeois ideology specialized knowledge and services came to inhabit the public sphere. The person who ‘worked’ at ‘home’, within the private sphere, was either paid very little, as in working-class women's ‘sweated’ homework, or nothing, as in middle-class women's household management. This contradiction for the literary men who worked at home contributed to their fear of ‘effeminization’ within a society that conflated ‘public’ with masculine for the middle class and differentiated this competitive market-place from the private ‘feminine’ space of the home.

Dickens's work of what is called autobiographical fiction, The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield (1850), did for the middle-class novelist what Wordsworth had done for the poet, and more: it introduced to an extended market—Dickens was the most popular writer of the nineteenth century—the professional author, and reclaimed and colonized the home as his domain. Dickens's competitive product, a ‘critical’ reflective sensibility (‘Nature and accident had made me an author’, writes David in Chapter 48, entitled ‘Domestic’), was commodified in David Copperfield as the autobiography of the self-made author: it showed the buying public who the man writing ‘really’ was. But in contributing to the ideological distinction between mental and manual labour (David vs. the Peggotty family) that oppressed working-class writers in ways that I shall specify below, Dickens also contributed to the division of labour along lines of gender. He showed that behind every David Copperfield writing at home, there was an Agnes Wickfield, a perfect household manager, for whom homemaking was as effortless as writing was for David.⁷ David's ‘progress’ to worldly success follows a sequence of relations with unsuitable women, until childlike and incompetent mother and first wife, vulgar nurse, excessively independent aunt, and flirtatious, class-aspiring Little Emily are supplanted by the ‘good angel’ Agnes, who even as a child is introduced as ‘a little housekeeper’ with ‘a little basket-trifle hanging at her side, with keys in it’.⁸ Agnes Wickfield Copperfield is the prototypical wife who cares for the material needs of the writer and who in later lives would type the manuscripts. Moreover, the writer David was to be distinguished from lesser ‘hack’ writers like Mr Micawber (whose wife is disorganized and whose imprudently large family is banished to Australia); Mr Dick (the ‘blocked’ hysteric who lives with the ‘divorced’ and sterile aunt); and Uriah Heep (the sweaty-palmed charity-school lad who had presumed to compete with David for Agnes).⁹

A vast cultural production relegating women to household management while ‘authors’ wrote made it difficult for middle-class women to write. Men and professionals, especially professional men, worked in the abstract realm of mental labour and women and workers, especially women workers, worked in the immediate, concrete material. Agnes, as it were, types the manuscripts of David's œuvre: women, like workers, mediate for men between conceptual action and its concrete forms: ‘lady typewriters’ (as late-Victorians called them), Beatrice Webbs's ‘social investigators’, Florence Nightingale's nurses, and working-class cooks and cleaners.

In the canonical literary autobiographies, having a woman at home is necessary to the self-conception of authorial men. In John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873), the great radical retires to Avignon (to get sufficient distance and perspective upon English society) with his stepdaughter Helen Taylor as secretary. In John Ruskin's Praeterita (1885-9), the social critic retires to Brantwood with ‘Joanie’ Severn and calls his last chapter, before madness silenced him for ever, ‘Joanna's Care’. Charles Darwin's attentive wife and considerate family enabled the scientist to withdraw for the last forty years of his life from bothersome social engagements (that made him ill, he says) into secluded work and domesticity at Down (Autobiography, 1887).

In her edition of his Autobiography, Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow includes some notes Darwin scribbled in two columns as he deliberated whether or not to marry. On the plus side, the advantages of marriage, he listed

constant companion, (friend in old age), who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home, and someone to take care of house. … Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House.—Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, and books and music perhaps.

On the negative, ‘Not Marry’ side, he listed, ‘Perhaps my wife won't like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation with indolent idle fool’ and ‘I never should know French,—or see the Continent,—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon.’¹⁰

In Samuel Butler's fictive autobiography The Way of All Flesh (1873-8; pub. 1903), the only woman the narrator approves of is a rich aunt who offers the protagonist a room of his own in which to develop his aesthetic and muscular interests and then conveniently dies leaving him her fortune. Now if we return to Disraeli we find a chapter on ‘The domestic life of genius’ in which we are instructed that ‘the home of the literary character should be the abode of repose and of silence’ (p. 234), where ‘the soothing interruptions of the voices of those whom he loves [may] recall him from his abstractions into social existence’ (p. 236). And there are additional chapters upon ‘the matrimonial state of literature’ and ‘a picture of the literary wife’ who silently mediates between social and material distractions while the detached and isolated literary character produces abstract thought.

Even reading, although it unquestionably empowered men of all classes, was dangerous for women. In her brilliant autobiographical piece Cassandra (1852), Florence Nightingale writes contemptuously of the autonomy denied women in the practice of their being ‘read aloud to’, a practice she compares to forced feeding.¹¹ In many working women's autobiographies reading is perceived by employers to interfere with their work and consequently often jeopardizes women's jobs. Because of the sexual division of labour, reading and writing threatened rather than advanced women's work.

Feminist scholars have told the story of middle-class women's writing. Yet like the historical subjects themselves they have rarely questioned the distinctions between mental and manual labour that had first excluded women, and they have rarely attempted to demystify the individualist ‘creative imagination’ that women, as producers of concrete material life, had historically been denied.¹²

In one of the most revealing cultural confrontations in modern British history, Virginia Woolf's 1931 Introduction to the lifewriting of the Women's Co-Operative Guild illustrates the cross-purposes of individualist aesthetics and other uses of literacy.¹³ Having been asked to write a preface, Woolf begins with the problem of prefaces for autonomous aesthetics—‘Books should stand on their own feet’ (p. xv)—and solves the problem of introducing the Co-Operativists' writing by producing not quite a preface but rather a personal letter to the editor, another upperclass woman, Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Woolf wants the Co-Operativists to be individualists, to develop the self-expression and choices for things that are ends in themselves, like ‘Mozart and Einstein’, and not things that are means, like ‘baths and money’ (pp. xxv-xxvi). She wants for them, in short, rooms of their own, private places for private thoughts, detached, as Bourdieu would say, from the necessities of the natural and social world.¹⁴ Some working-class women, indeed many upper domestic servants—the most ideologically ‘embourgeoised’ workers—did want such pleasures; but the Guild women's lifewriting indicates that they wanted something different, communality; and distance from the necessities of the natural and social world (‘our minds flying free at the end of a short length of capital’ as Woolf puts it (p. xxv)) had not led middle-class women to change society in that direction.

Rather, the Co-Operativists are especially grateful to the Guild for transforming shy nervous women into ‘public speakers’ (pp. 32, 48-9, 65, 100-1, 141): a woman can write forever in a room of her own without ever learning not to go dry-mouthed and shaking in public. Woolf writes sympathetically about the production of the Co-Operativists' texts, ‘a work of labour and difficulty. The writing has been done in kitchens, at odds and ends of leisure, in the midst of distractions and obstacles’ (p. xxxix), but confined by her own aesthetics of individualism and detachment, she cannot imagine that ‘the self’ can be communal, engaged, and dialogical as well as individual, detached, and introspective. If such a world were possible, she cannot imagine herself within it: ‘This force of theirs’—the Co-Operativists are tellingly always ‘they’ to Woolf's editorial ‘we’—

this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them—all this is going to happen inevitably—but only when we are dead.

(p. xxix)

Social historians (not to speak of socialist feminists) have made this point somewhat differently to middle-class feminists. The issue concerns normative dualism, the belief that the especially valuable thing about human beings is their mental capacity and that this capacity is a property of individuals rather than groups (‘Mozart and Einstein’), and liberal rationality, the belief that rational behaviour is commensurate with the maximization of individual utility.¹⁵ Showing the astonishing ‘strategies’ of married working-class women living along the poverty line in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—working part- or full-time outside the home, using children's wages, controlling household budgets, using the products of their families' allotments, and borrowing both goods and cash—Elizabeth Roberts writes that she is often asked what women themselves ‘got’ out of their lives:

It has been remarked that they gave to their families much more than they received in return. These questions and comments would not have been asked nor made by the women themselves. Their own individual concerns were of little importance to them. They appeared to have found their chief satisfaction in running their homes economically and seeing their children grow up. Their major preoccupations were (throughout the period) feeding, clothing and housing their families.¹⁶

In an article in the same collection, Diana Gittins writes of the three interrelated and often overlapping occupational spheres for working-class women from the mid-nineteenth century through the second world war—paid work, unpaid domestic work in extended families, and marriage—as ‘strategies for survival, but survival for the household generally rather than for the individual women’.¹⁷ My reading of working women's lifewriting confirms that such strategies for the family household were, again, indistinguishable from self-actualization.

But non-individualism comes in many forms and working-class lifewriting suggests that that of women at home with their families in nineteenth-century Britain was the least conducive to the constitution of writing subjects. Contrary to the claims on behalf of a room of one's own, workers' lifewriting suggests that writing women were those whose work took them out of the home. Although some working people wrote to understand themselves, producing the kinds of texts I discuss in detail below, most wrote for communicative rather than introspective or aesthetic ends: to record lost experiences for future generations, to raise money, to warn others, to teach others, to relieve or amuse themselves. One functionalist, William Tayler, footman to a wealthy London widow in 1837, wrote his autobiographical journal ‘to improve my handwriting’.¹⁸

Such functionalist uses of literacy contrast markedly with the aesthetic of detached individualism represented by literature (as it is represented in literature departments) in general and the autobiographical canon in particular. The criteria we may deduce from the canon include a meditative and self-reflective sensibility; a faith in writing as a tool of self-exploration; an attempt to make sense of life as a narrative progressing in time, with a pronounced narrative structured upon parent/child relations and familial development; and a belief in personal creativity, autonomy, and freedom for the future. This is autobiography as the term is usually employed by literary critics, and it is also bourgeois subjectivity, the dominant ideology of the nineteenth and at least the first half of the twentieth century. It adds to assumptions of normative dualism and liberal rationality the assumption of abstract individualism, or the belief that essential human characteristics are properties of individuals independent of their material conditions and social environment.

Modern literary critics have made deviation from this model of autobiography into a moral as well as an aesthetic failure. In 1960 Roy Pascal claimed that ‘bad’ autobiography indicated ‘a certain falling short in respect to the whole personality … an inadequacy in the persons writing, a lack of moral responsibility towards their task’.¹⁹ Pascal's stance belongs with that of James Olney in Metaphors of Self; both are apologists for the primacy of individualism as represented by a literary tradition. Even more recent and properly deconstructive theorists of autobiography, like Paul Jay, Avrom Fleishman, and Michael Sprinker, privilege what they intend to deconstruct by employing such notions as ‘the end of autobiography’.²⁰

Therefore, it is probably less useful to approach such ‘extra-literary’ texts as working people produce with frames as value-laden as ‘autobiography’ than as strategic articulations in a language-power game.²¹ By ‘strategic’ I do not necessarily mean narrowly intended as a political strategy, although many working-class writers, such as the Guild Co-Operativists, intended to place their writing in the service of a political project. I mean, rather, that discursive production must be understood in terms of the multifarious purposes and projects of specific individuals or groups in specific material circumstances. I have often found it useful, for example, to adapt Roberto Mangabeira Unger's spectrum of personality (from longing to be with others to fear of others) to discourse, locating a text between the poles of discursive participation and antagonism with others.²² All autobiographical ‘moves’ in my sense are such inevitable strategies and all are ‘interested’. By articulation I mean a speech act in a discursive field of other such acts: the autobiographical move is a cultural product in circulation with other such cultural products. Some workers, for example some music-hall performers, wrote specifically for their writing's exchange-value. Because articulations occur in a theoretically open discursive field—torture, war, and repressive state apparatuses can of course close it, but these are less relevant to the working class in Britain than elsewhere—they can be perceived as participatory or antagonistic to other articulations. Writers like Annie Kenney in Memoirs of a Militant (1924) and William Lovett in Pursuit of Bread, Knowlege, and Freedom (1876) are participatory with their respective movements, Suffrage and Chartism, while antagonistic to the hegemonic articulations of sexism and classism—hegemonic again meaning dominant with respect to other discourses, denying other discourses their full development and articulation. By ‘language-power game’ I mean the inevitable social arena in which individuals present ‘themselves’ and are received. (Needless to say, ‘game’ here implies structured interactions rather than triviality.) For some, a simpler way of putting this would be to say that I read lifewriting rhetorically, taking language as realist, not in the sense of metaphysical realism, direct isomorphism with reality (Thomas Nagel's ‘the view from nowhere’), but realist in the sense of projecting objectively real articulations of power in particular communities. Like reading itself, writing is a function of specific and distinct communities.²³

I want to emphasize that when I say ‘power game’ I intend ‘power’ more with its feminist than its Foucauldian associations: empowerment, ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’. Specifically I have in mind empowerment to represent oneself in a discursive cultural field. In the postmodern world we live in, ‘autobiography’ as bourgeois subjectivity may be dead except in academic or psychoanalytic circles; but as long as there is society, even cyborg society, there will be strategic articulations in its language-power games.²⁴ It is the responsibility of protectors of speech not to disqualify sub-hegemonic articulations, like women's, like workers', by evaluating them out of the game.

II

There is no ‘typical’ Victorian working-class life or lifewriting; rather the forms of lifewriting were as multifarious as the British labouring classes themselves. I have provided an anatomy of such writing elsewhere, based largely upon several hundred of the 804 texts indexed in John Burnett, David Vincent, and John Mayall's important bibliography, The Autobiography of the Working Class (1984), but several salient points are worth reiterating here before focusing on gender.²⁵ First, the loose ‘generic’ groupings that may be made according to the rhetorical approach outlined above indicate some uniformity in how texts are written, read, and historically assessed in terms of the participatory modes of value and consensus and the antagonistic modes of resistance, domination, and appropriation. Thus, in nineteenth-century Britain, when working people began to include their occupations in titles of their work, as in Memories of a Working Woman, Confessions of a Strolling Player, Narrative of a Factory Cripple, In Service, and Autobiography of a Private Soldier, ‘memories’ often came from southern agrarian workers who hoped to preserve local history for members of the community, or domestic workers whose trade declined radically after the First World War, ‘narratives’ from organized northern industrial workers who sought to empower other workers and compete historically with the bourgeoisie, and ‘confessions’ from transients like stage performers who hoped to gain cash by giving readers immediately consumable sensation.²⁶ In other words, socio-economic status, rhetorical purpose, status of labour, and geography were often heavily significant in the forms the lifewriting took.

The second point that must be reiterated is that whether the writer was a factory operative (38 per cent of the working population in 1861), agricultural labourer (18 per cent), miner (14 per cent), or domestic servant (19 per cent—half of the population of women workers), for working-class autobiographers, subjectivity—being a significant agent worthy of the regard of others, a human subject as well as an individuated ‘ego’, distinct from others—was not a given.²⁷ In conditions of long working hours, crowded housing, and inadequate light, it was difficult enough for workers to contemplate themselves, but they had also to justify themselves as writers worthy of the attention of others. Thus I have written of what I call the ‘social atom’ phenomenon. Most working-class lifewriting begins not with family lineage or a birthdate (conventional middle-class beginnings), but rather with a statement of its author's ordinariness, encoded in titles like One of the Multitude (1911) by the pseudonymous George Acorn, a linguistically-conscious furniture builder who aspired to grow into an oak. The authors were conscious that to many potential readers they were but ‘social atoms’ making up the undifferentiated ‘masses’. As radical journalist William Adams put it in 1903, ‘I call myself a Social Atom—a small speck on the surface of society. The term indicates my insignificance. … I am just an ordinary person.’²⁸ Depending upon the author's purpose in writing, such rhetorical modesty could signify any point within an affective range extending from defensive self-effacement through defiant irony, as in the ‘Old Potter’ Charles Shaw's splendid, ‘We were a part of Malthus's “superfluous population”.’²⁹ I have examined the sources of this rhetorical modesty in the writers' struggle, as Homo laborans rather than Homo cogitans, to distinguish themselves from ‘the masses’ in order to present themselves as subjects worthy of the attention of others; to indicate their simultaneous resistance to embourgeoisement and their competition with representations of themselves in middle-class fiction and its implicit, broadly Cartesian, assumptions about the self.

The relevance of gender appears with the structural differences between workers' lifewriting and the classic realist autobiography, in which gender plays a major structuring role. The classic realist autobiography includes such elements as remembered details of childhood, parent/child relations, the subject's formal education, and a progressive developmental narrative of self culminating in material well-being and ‘fame’ within greater or lesser circles (whether the Old Boy's place among Old School fellows or John Stuart Mill's place in the democratic revolution). Most workers' autobiographies deviate from this narrative pattern for fairly obvious reasons: in A Cornish Waif's Story discussed below, Emma Smith was born in the workhouse, raised by a child molester, and educated in a penitentiary.

First, most of the writers were working outside the home by the time they were 8 years old, so the period of ‘childhood’ is problematic, the remembered details often truncated to the more common ‘first memory’. This first memory is often traumatic; its significant positioning within the first paragraphs of the text operates and resonates differently from the evolutionary narrative of childhood familiar to readers of middle-class autobiography. Second, as will be demonstrated in detail below, parent-child relations among the working class often differed from those in the upper classes. Third, since the subject's formal education competed with the family economy, in most cases it was not limited to a particular period. In many working-class examples, education often continues throughout the book and up to the time of writing. And fourth, most working-class autobiographies do not end with success but rather in medias res. In this context it is worth noting that with the exception of political and religious-conversion lifewriting, most working-class texts do not have the crises and recoveries that are common to ‘literary’ autobiography, just as they do not have climaxes. The bourgeois climax-and-resolution/action-and-interaction model presupposes an active and reactive world not always accessible to working-class writers, who often felt themselves passive victims of economic determinism. Working since the age of 9, Mrs Wrigley writes a life consisting of a series of jobs, mentioning in the one sentence devoted to her marriage its maternal character and her childlike relations with her employers: ‘I was sorry to give up such a good home, and they was sorry for me to leave but my young man wanted to get married for he had no mother.’³⁰

What is ‘missing’ then in much working-class lifewriting is the structuring effect, apparent in any middle-class ‘plot’, of gender dimorphism. In Britain, middle-class boys experienced and wrote of an ordered progress from pre-school at home to childhood and youth at school and university, through the Raj, diplomatic corps, or civil service, or through domestic life with equally genderized wives and daughters.³¹ Middle-class women wrote of early life with fathers and later life with husbands. These two patterns—as central to the great nineteenth-century realist novels as to Victorian autobiography—represent middle-class gender construction of masculinity and femininity, power and domesticity. Whereas boys learned ‘independence’ through extrusion from mothers and nannies, and paternalism through elaborate forms of self-government in public schools, middle-class girls under constant supervision by parents and headmistresses learned to be dependent upon and obedient to husbands. (Many, needless to say, also rebelled against this pattern. See especially Cecily Hamilton's trenchant and witty Marriage as a Trade (1909), recommended reading for every Victorian and feminist course.) On the other hand, from the time they were old enough to mind younger siblings, to their minding the children of the upper classes, to their non-companionate (economically oriented) marriages (‘because my young man had no mother’), working-class women learned to be self-reliant and nurturing, and their husbands learned to be ‘matronized’. ‘What I needed was a man who was master in his own house,’ writes Emma Smith, ‘upon whom I could lean. Instead of this, I always had to take a leading role.’³²

This difference in the practical sex-gender system leads to the major structural difference of working-class lifewriting, but there are trans-class similarities according to gender as well. Working women refer far more frequently to their husbands or lovers and children (their personal relationships) and working men to their jobs or occupations (their social status). Traditionally prevented from speaking in public, even women like the Guild Co-Operativists, who write with the explicit purpose of political reform, speak from within a material economic realm. Yet politicized men, even before they gained full male suffrage in 1885, were accustomed to public speaking (for example, in pubs) and argued within the discourse of national politics.³³ Comparatively isolated within their homes or others' as domestics, the Co-Operativists learned to internalize rhetorical values acceptable to the middle class, such as the catechism, criticizing personal injustices and inequalities within marriage and the family. On the other hand, from early experience in public and on the job with others, the men write movingly of specific material deprivations but predominantly of the ‘rights’ of workers and the class struggle, explicitly attacking class structure.

This different understanding of injustice—one local and immediate, the other systemic—leads to different formulations of political goals. The Co-Operativists see politics as a forum for domestic demands, like baths for miners or peace for one's remaining son. The radical men want what the middle class has. These may not in effect be different goals: what the middle class has is baths and sons comparatively safe from war; but because the women reason from personal example and moral lesson and the men launch discourses articulated within the democratic revolutions of the US and France, even the politically-motivated lifewriting is often informed differently by women and men.

Such differences, however, arise in the relative isolation of women's labour, as the highest-paying and most independent employment was consigned to men as principal breadwinners and women were driven from the factories from the 1840s. They may be dealt with by social historians concerned with the interrelations of gender, ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres. For the literary or cultural critic, gender in working-class lifewriting is most interesting when it shows itself as ideological hegemony—in Antonio Gramsci's sense of popular consent to the political order. Here the game is embourgeoisement.

In such texts one reads the cost of bourgeois—especially familial or gendered—ideology to women and men who were not permitted bourgeois lives. They were often written by people with lives of unmitigated hardship, for whom writing was a form, more or less successful, of therapy. They are not trying to sell their work so much as to analyse and alleviate their pain, yet their narratives are derived from models, often literary models, more suitable to the conditions of middle-class authors. Unlike other working-class writers, they have also extensively adopted middle-class ideology: they have accepted the value of introspection and writing as tools of self-understanding; they seek to write their lives as middle-class narratives, especially with respect to the development of parent/child relations and material progress; and they believe that writing and self-understanding will help them succeed. Yet although they attempt self-analysis, their experience cannot be analysed in the terms of their acculturation. This gap between ideology and experience leads not only to the disintegration of the narrative the writer hopes to construct, but, as the analyses below will show, to the disintegration of personality itself.

Discussion of these texts is inescapably reductive, for their characteristic is the authors' layered revisions of their experience, which contribute to an unusual density of signification. Literary readers will find them the most ‘literary’ of working-class writers.³⁴ Here I shall focus upon the writers' attempts to structure their lives according to middle-class gender ideology.

The struggle between ideology and experience is inscribed both micrologically and macrologically in James Burn's Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (1855). At 9 years old, Burn tracks down his biological father in Ireland, where the boy is forced to wear rags, endure lice, and work in isolation. In a fit of humiliation and self-hatred, and a parody of primogeniture, he runs away, calling the dirt he associates with his father his ‘patrimony’. ‘I had neither staff, nor scrip, nor money in my pocket. I commenced the world with the old turf-bag. In order that I might sever the only remaining link that bound me to my family, I tore two syllables from my name [i.e. from McBurney, his father's name].’³⁵ This minute detail of the boy's insufficiency to meet a cultural code—his castration of his father's name as sign of his lack of father and patrimony in a patriarchal and propertied culture—prefigures the larger narrative distortion reflecting the insufficiency of his experience to meet his society's master narrative of male progress.

When Burn summarizes the lesson of his life for his son at the end of his book (pp. 199-200), the summary corresponds to his preceding narrative only up to a point: he writes of his thoughtless wandering until he was 12 years old, of parental neglect (‘I had been blessed with three fathers and two mothers, and I was then as comfortably situated as if I never had either one or the other’ (p. 106)), and of his lack of social connection for long periods. This summary corresponds to the episodic structure of his preceding story and to the fragmented nature of his childhood as itinerant beggar on the Scots Border. Yet then Burn refers to the ‘grand turning point’ of his life, when he learned a trade as hatter's apprentice. In fact, only a nominal change occurred wth his apprenticeship: since there was no work, he was permitted to call himself a hatter rather than a beggar while on a tramp for 1,400 miles (p. 135). He makes much of a change of status from unemployable to employable, although no material change occurs—he remains unemployed. Similarly, he continues to insist upon the great happiness of his domestic life, despite the necessity of living apart from his family for long periods of tramping and the deaths of his wife and twelve of his sixteen children. The summary concludes with the assertion of his relative success in remaining respectable as a debt collector to the poor, a respectability that was reinforced by the bowdlerized version of 1882, in which he finally obliterated all references to sexual experiences and bodily functions.

This summary male middle-class narrative, beginning with the imaginary ‘grand turning point’ of his trade, occludes, first, Burn's political activity, for which he was well known, and, second, much of his past. With the threat of the General Strike in 1839, he had turned against the Chartists and begun to conceive of his prior activism as ‘madness’. In revising his life this ‘madness’ is excluded along with earlier madnesses, such as the madness of Scottish and Irish poetry. Due to its link with superstition and supernaturalism—and despite his opinion that English poetry is ‘dull and lifeless’ in comparison—Burn must reject it as irreconcilable with ‘useful knowledge’ (pp. 192-8). Similarly, the lively Dickensian style of the first two chapters shows his affection for society on the Borders, its lack of social differentiation and its extreme linguistic diversity. Yet this too disappears from his summary. He is left attempting to reconcile his proprietorship of taverns and spirit cellars with his hysterical temperance, and passing over the details of his job as debt collector to his former Chartist friends. Everything that must be repudiated in the service of class mobility—social tolerance, epistemological pluralism, the aspect of freedom of life on the Borders as a beggar boy—is expunged from the summary. Yet in dutifully obliterating or rewriting his past, there is no indication that Burn is comfortable with his present or future. As he puts it, ‘Amid the universal transformation of things in the moral and physical world, my own condition has been tossed so in the rough blanket of fate, that my identity, if at any time a reality, must have been one which few could venture to swear to’ (p. 56); or, ‘All our antecedents are made up of so many yesterdays, and the morrow never comes’ (p. 185).

Moreover, despite the seasonal difficulties of the hatting trade and high unemployment among artisans in Glasgow in the 1830s and 1840s, and despite an active and successful life as spokesperson for hatters in the Glagow United Committee of Trades Delegates, Burn blames himself for his failure in business. Assuming a liberal and masculine ethic of autonomy and progress, he concludes that he was personally deficient in the struggle to maintain either self or social position, and he therefore believes himself uneducable: ‘Although my teachers have been as various as my different positions, and much of their instruction forced upon me by the necessities of my condition, yet I have always been a dull dog’ (p. 196). Assuming individual responsibility for conditions beyond his control and de-identifying with other workers, he remains merely isolated, neither materially and socially middle-class nor identifying with his own. The disturbing power of the first half of the text, with the boy's mystical worship of his stepfather, the disintegration of the later sections the emphatic progress and rationality in tension with the obsessive memories of early days and the mystified transition from anger against a negligent father to guilt as an unworthy native son: all contribute to a nightmare of socio-psychic marginality. None the less, the book was received as a gratifying example of self-improvement and respectability among the lower classes.³⁶ Today we can see it as releasing all the phantoms of an ideology of familialism and progress upon a child who was deprived of a family and a chance. Unlike other working-class writers, Burn attempts to narrate his experience according to upper-class models. The price he pays is narrative and psychological disintegration.

Whereas Burn's story shows the effect of Enlightenment narratives, presumably from his days as a Chartist, and masculine ‘success’ stories combining with familial narrative, women's narratives of this type are correspondingly dominated by familialism and romance. In his Annals of Labour, the social historian John Burnett cites Louise Jermy's Memories of a Working Woman as an example of a successful transition from a low-paying millinery position into domestic service and ultimately marriage.³⁷ Yet Jermy sees her life as a series of episodes failing to conform to her expectations of family and romance. Born in 1877, she is motherless before her second birthday. Her childhood and health are ‘bartered’ by her father and stepmother when she is taken from school to do mangling at home in order to enable her parents to buy a house. Her adolescence is isolated, ‘not like other girls’, between illness and an apprenticeship at 14 to a dressmaker in ‘sweated’ conditions (long hours in confined and crowded space, few and short breaks, low pay). Her education is continually frustrated as her stepmother destroys her books, and while in service to a married couple at Birmingham University ‘anything like deep thinking produced the dreadful headaches’ (p. 93).

Jermy's romantic life is also a series of non-correspondences. A fragile betrothal conflicts with the long hours in service and the 9 p.m. curfew of domestic servants, until her fiancé bolts and leaves her in a severe depression that endures two years. Finally she marries a farm labourer in 1911, but, like many husbands described by working-class wives, he is ‘delicate’, ill every spring, and lives only ten years. Jermy returns to work to raise her two sons.

She suffers from amnesia, ceases in childhood to confide in others, and bears a conviction of her awkwardness and unattractiveness. She leaves the millinery shop not, as Burnett implies, for better wages but in order to leave home; and she wears black—the ‘decent black’ of domestic servants, as Mayhew put it, ‘no ringlets, followers, or scandals’—on and off the job.³⁸ While each episode fails to correspond to its middle-class analogue, Jermy none the less adopts middle-class standards and conventional narratives as her own. R. H. Mottram introduces The Memories of a Working Woman as the first autobiography written by a member of the Women's Institute. Yet Jermy never mentions the Institute: the dominant features of her life, at least prior to the Institute, were perverted familial relations (glorified dead mother, evil stepmother), aborted romance, and pronounced isolation.

In A Cornish Waif's Story: An Autobiography the pseudonymous Emma Smith's life is also a sequence of non-correspondences to middle-class norms. Born in 1894, Smith was the ‘illegitimate’ daughter of one of the twenty-three children of a Cornish tin-miner blinded in a mining accident and retired without pension. As a child she is told that her mother is her sister. As accompanist to a hurdy-gurdy man, she is sexually molested by a man she calls ‘Fagin’ and his friend Dusty the Sword Swallower. At 11, she runs away and is sent to a convent penitentiary, a home for ‘errant’ girls: ‘I was no more a prostitute than Dickens's Oliver Twist was a thief, if I may draw upon a character of fiction to illustrate what I mean. Yet here I was placed in the category, and indirectly it has affected my whole life’ (p. 108).

The convent penitentiary fails to prepare her for her re-entry into society, especially for marriage and a family, while it equally denies her a ‘speakable’ past. Upon release, ‘it was impressed upon me … that I was never to talk about the Home or let anyone know where I had come from … it was something to be very ashamed of’ (p. 133). Working as a servant in a vicarage provides dissonances that are borne out by her own marriage—‘Nothing was as I imagined it. The vicar was blessed with an unholy temper. His wife did not get on with her husband and took no pains to hide the fact’ (p. 134). Her marriage to a gardener is probably arranged by her employers—‘If you have two servants, a man and a woman, the thing to do is to marry them up. Then you have two servants for the price of one’ (p. 152)—and she very quickly distances herself as a unique, reflective, psychologically rich self (‘a complex piece of machinery’) from her husband (‘a simple country man’), who, as a transparent product of his class status, fails to fulfil her emotional, intellectual, and romantic aspirations (pp. 152-66).

She obsessively attempts to reconcile with her mother (from an external point of view, always a non-existent dyad), aborts an extramarital romance in Australia, and returns with her husband to Cornwall. Yet rather than a parish girl's progress to financial and domestic stability (she is a successful head laundress with three healthy daughters), Smith's is an ‘hysterical’ narrative indicating her non-adjustment to married life and maternity.

If personal identity is a function of a temporal unification of past, present, and future, Smith was as deprived as Foucault's ‘Herculine Barbin’ (who, raised as a girl in a convent, was legally declared to be male as an adult) of the past she had had to repress, and as unprepared for the future entailed by her gender and family: ‘I would dream that I was an inmate of a convent. … I was, or could have been, supremely happy if it were not for the knowledge that somewhere in the background I had a husband and children’ (p. 178). After several mental breakdowns, she twice attempts suicide (quietly, like a good servant, with aspirin and sleeping pills), but is finally convinced by her doctor that her responsibility is to live for her family. In her last paragraph Smith once again turns to fictive modes to mediate her experience, this time apparently unconsciously:

I should end my life story on a very happy note if I could honestly record that I have grown so well-balanced mentally that nothing now upsets or worries me. Such, however, is not the case. I am easily worried and upset over certain things, and for this reason as much as for others, I am anxious to find a little cottage somewhere in Cornwall with a bit of ground upon which we can grow vegetables and flowers. It would be a great thrill to me if my dream cottage had a view of both the sun rising and the sunset, for the sun rising fills me with hope, and the sunset fills me with peace.

(p. 188)

Novel-readers will recognize this image of the rose-covered cottage as the standard ending of Dickens's domestic fiction, including the image and final resting place of the adopted orphan Oliver Twist.

What is common to these texts is the conscious desire on the part of the writers to write their lives according to middle-class narratives and the unconscious distance between those narratives—especially of financial success, familialism, and romance—and the facts of their existence, especially economic determinism, non-familialism, aborted romance, and non-companionate marriage. What these narratives of disintegrated personality tell us about gender is that in circumstances of familial deprivation, familial ideology can only be assumed at great psychic cost.

Yet not all working-class lifewriters assumed familial ideology at such a cost. It was a cultural commonplace that many male radicals—for example Thomas Hardy, William Lovett, Thomas Cooper, Robert Blatchford, Robert Lowery, James Watson, and Thomas Dunning—had been raised by women alone (‘resourceful widows’ was the technical term), and they resisted bourgeois ideology as much as Emma Smith suffered from it. Unlike the writers above, the male radicals were engaged in communities with common purpose and in the process of rearticulating their common experience through the progressive narratives of the Enlightenment—as Lovett put it, through their common pursuits of bread, knowledge, and freedom, or material well-being, education, and political status. Emma Smith, Louise Jermy, and the Chartist renegade James Burn, on the other hand, were as isolated, individualistic, or unaffiliated as the middle-class subjects whose ideology they adopted—as isolated but not as autonomous: Smith maintained the forms of middle-class respectability and swallowed her pain like sleeping pills; Jermy was forced to return to work to support her fatherless sons; and as Burn said, whether or not there was work, his children were his ‘hostage to the State’ (p. 132).

Faced with such difficulties, the emotional health, or functional identities, of working-class writers were not dependent upon their politicization in any rigid sense so much as upon their participation in alternative articulations of their common experience. The indomitable Ellen Johnston, known to working people as Scotch Nell the ‘Factory Girl’, could have been a Jermy or a Smith. Abandoned by her father, a stonemason, ‘tormented’ by her stepfather, ‘deceived’ by two lovers, and ostracized as a fallen woman, the powerloom weaver/poet's brief Autobiography (1867) is melodramatically modelled on Walter Scott and ‘those strange romantic ordeals attributed to the imaginary heroines “of Ingelwood Forest”’ and her poems show the effects of literary hegemony, although often gender- and class-inverted, as in ‘Lines to a Young Gentleman of Surpassing Beauty’.³⁹

Yet Johnston articulated as well a common experience of great value to herself and fellow workers: for every epideictic poem to a romantic young gentleman there are many more in praise of working men (she writes, she says, to relieve them from the toils of factory life), and her Autobiography concludes not with melancholy and melodrama but with her taking her foreman to court, indicating that the Factory Girl has learned to imitate the middle class in more than literary hegemony. She publishes proud poems on her ‘illegitimate’ daughter, ‘bonny Mary Auchinvole’, composes many—including love poems—on behalf of less literate co-workers, includes in her volume addresses and songs written for her from other workers (to which she often composes personal responses), goes international with ‘Welcome, Garibaldi’ and ‘The Exile of Poland’, and writes with irresistible affection for the material life of the factory, as in ‘An Address to Napier's Dockyard’ and ‘Kennedy's Dear Mill’. ‘The Factory Girl's Farewell’ concludes:

Farewell to all the works around,
The flaxmill, foundry, copperage too;
The old forge, with its blazing mound,
And Tennant's stalk, farewell to you.
Your gen'rous masters were so kind,
Theirs was the gift that did excel;
Their name around my heart is twined:
So Gailbraith's bonnie mill, farewell!
Farewell, my honour'd masters two,
Your mill no more I may traverse;
I breathe you both a fond adieu;
Long may you live lords of commerce.
Farewell unto my native land,
Land of the thistle and blue-bell;
Oh! wish me joy with heart and hand;
So Gailbraith's bonnie mill, farewell!

(p. 95)

Johnston participated fully in public life in factories in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Familial and romantic ideology exacted the highest psychic cost to those who lived in isolation. It seems inescapable that the emotional health and flourishing self-image of working-class subjects whose lives did not conform to the patterns of the dominant culture were proportionate to the degree of participatory—as opposed to purely antagonistic—discursive engagement with others beyond the family in the home. The narrative and psychological disintegration of working-class writers who attempted to adopt middle-class narratives of self, and the relatively successful identities of those supported by alternative participatory articulations, indicate the significance of discourse—in this case, of gendered, familial discourse—in human identity, as well as discourse's insufficiency entirely to override non-discursive material conditions.

Notes

1. Lillian S. Robinson, ‘Working/Women/Writing’, in Sex, Class, and Culture (New York and London: Methuen, 1986), p. 226.

2. Adria Taylor Hourwich and Gladys L. Palmer ‘Women in America’ Series (New York: Arno Press, 1974).

3. ‘Three women's texts and a critique of imperialism’, in Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.), ‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 265.

4. There are many works on the history of individual professions and the crucial periods of professional consolidation, such as the nineteenth century. The one I have found most useful is Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalization: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

5. My edition of Disraeli is The Literary Character of Men of Genius, ed. B. Disraeli (New York: Crowell, 1881).

6. ‘Producing the professional: Wordsworth, Carlyle, and the authorial self’ in ‘Professional women and the public sphere: subjectivity and work in Victorian women's autobiographies’, PhD dissertation in progress, English Department, Stanford University.

7. Mary Poovey argued this in ‘“The-Man-of-Letters Hero”: Literary Labor and the Representation of Women’, paper presented at the ‘Dickens, Women, and Victorian Culture’ Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, 6-9 August 1987.

8. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 279-80.

9. See also Alexander Welsh, From Copyright to Copperfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).

10. Nora Barlow (ed.), The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882 (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 232-4.

11. Florence Nightingale, Cassandra (New York: Kennikat Press, 1969).

12. See however Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1974), and Nan Hackett, XIX Century British Working-class Autobiographies: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: AMS, 1985).

13. Margaret Llewelyn Davies (ed.), Life As We Have Known It: By Co-Operative Working Women (1931; New York: Norton, 1975). Further page references will be included in the text.

14. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

15. For full discussion of the philosophical concepts normative dualism, liberal rationality, and abstract individualism, see Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983).

16. ‘Women's strategies, 1890-1940’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 243-4.

17. ‘Marital status, work and kinship, 1850-1930’, in Lewis, op. cit., p. 265.

18. William Tayler in John Burnett (ed.), Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British Working-Class People 1820-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 175.

19. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 148; James Olney, Metaphors of Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). I am grateful to Mary Jean Corbett for drawing these passages to my attention.

20. Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Michael Sprinker ‘Fictions of the self: the end of autobiography’, in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

21. The phrase is Miranda Joseph's. Our ideas have been influenced by the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Peregrine Books, 1980).

22. See Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1975) and Passion: An Essay on Personality (New York: The Free Press, 1986).

23. See Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1969).

24. For cyborg society see Donna Haraway, ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (March-April, 1985), pp. 65-107. Roughly, Haraway intends ‘cyborg’ to represent the collapse of the distinction between organic and mechanical.

25. See John Burnett, David Mayall, and David Vincent, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Volume 1, 1790-1900 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984); R. Gagnier, ‘Social atoms: working-class autobiography, subjectivity and gender’, Victorian Studies (Spring 1987), pp. 335-63. Also see Hackett, op. cit.

26. Louise Jermy, The Memories of a Working Woman (Norwich: Goose & Son, 1934); Peter Paterson (James Glass Bertram), Behind the Scenes: Being the Confessions of a Strolling Player (London: Henry Lea, 1859); William Dodd, Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple, Written by Himself (1841; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1968); Rose Gibbs, In Service: Rose Gibbs Remembers (Cambridge: Archives for Bassingbourn and Comberton Village Colleges, 1981); Anon., The Autobiography of a Private Soldier, Showing the Danger of Rashly Enlisting (Sunderland: Williams & Binns, 1838).

27. For statistics see P. Bairoch, The Working Population and Its Structure (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1968), p. 99. For detailed explanation see Burnett's introductory essays to the sections of Annals of Labour (n. 18 above): The Labouring Classes, Domestic Servants, and Skilled Workers.

28. William Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), p. xiii.

29. Charles Shaw, When I Was A Child (1893; repr. East Ardsley, Wakefield: SR Publishers, 1969), p. 97.

30. Life As We Have Known It, p. 60.

31. For a cultural critique of the narratives of English public school boys see Gagnier, ‘“From fag to monitor; or, fighting to the Front”: art and power in public school memoirs’, forthcoming in Browning Institute Studies, 15 (1988), special volume on Victorian Learning, ed. Robert Viscusi.

32. Emma Smith (pseud.), A Cornish Waif's Story: An Autobiography (London: Odhams, 1954), p. 154.

33. For the two modes see Life As We Have Known It and David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790-1885 (London: Europa, 1977). The fact that these primarily political and polemical documents represent a wide historical distance is less significant when it is realized that the gender difference alluded to is borne out by many ‘genres’ of working-class lifewriting throughout the period, e.g. conversion and gallows narratives as well as commemorative story-telling.

34. In Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), Julia Swindells also analyses some working women's lifewriting in ‘Part 2: Working women's autobiographies’ (pp. 115-207) in terms of what she calls ‘the literary’. I see such ‘literary’ effects controlling one kind of working-class writing, produced by men and women; whereas Swindells appears to find it characteristic of working women's writing exclusively and as a whole.

35. James Dawson Burn, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (1855), ed. David Vincent (London: Europa, 1978), p. 78.

36. See Vincent's Introduction, p. 28.

37. Burnett, op. cit., p. 52; Jermy, op. cit.

38. Mayhew, cited in John R. Gillis, For Better or Worse: British Marriage, 1600 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 244.

39. Ellen Johnston, The Autobiography, Poems, and Songs of ‘The Factory Girl’ (Glasgow: William Love, 1867), pp. 5, 62.