by Koven, Seth
Banks also felt compelled to clarify for Bagon and her readers her views on the education of girls and domesticity. Girls, Banks contended, should be instructed only in those arts and sciences for which they were individually well suited. The mere fact of being female was no reason in itself to teach a girl to clean and decorate a home. On the other hand, Banks concluded that service could provide a safe and respectable alternative to factory labor for some girls. Banks anticipated the time when “a girl reaching a certain age shall be treated with the same consideration as her brother.” “Then a man taking a wife,” she concluded, “will regard her in the light of a partner with a distinct right to have the same aims and ambitions as himself, and not as a mere housekeeper and multiplier of the human race.”74
It is hard to believe that the author of these boldly egalitarian words was the same “girl” who would soon express her disdain for “new womanhood” during her subsequent campaign disguised as a laundress. A correspondent from Dublin, E.L.S., angrily chided Banks for being an “emancipated woman” whose views of maternity “are not less gross than are those of costermonger or a corner boy.” Banks was contributing to the society-wide “inversion of wise nature’s laws,” E.L.S. claimed, by “showing an open preference for any and every employment where [women] will mix most with men.”75 While some readers condemned Banks as a gender radical, others felt she had not gone far enough in criticizing the larger social and cultural structures that compelled one class of women—servants—to live under the tyranny of another—their mistresses. Arthur Chitty of Finsbury Park claimed that Banks had badly misunderstood the justifiable class animosity prevailing between servants and mistresses. Chitty reminded readers that servant girls were subjected to the whim of a “thousand and one jumped-up nobodies who keep servants to wait on them hand and foot.” Certainly readers of the Weekly Sun, which included both mistresses and their female servants, would have had ample opportunity to be exposed to radical perspectives such as Chitty’s. At the time the paper ran Banks’s story, it also published in serial form the autobiography of the free thinking Fabian socialist Annie Besant, who had used her own inflammatory reporting for the Link to organize and unionize London’s matchgirls in 1888, and William Tirebuck’s A Wage of Sin, The Story of a Miners’ Lock Out, a loosely fictionalized account of events transpiring during the recent “coal war.”76
Readers’ critical responses to Banks’s articles and the Weekly Sun’s readiness to print large numbers of them in its aptly named correspondence column, “The Voice of the People,” illustrate that the mass press of the 1890s could and did provide a genuinely demotic—and perhaps even democratic—forum for debating social questions. An elaborate system of personal employment references called “characters,” without which a servant would rarely be hired, ensured that most maids deferred to their mistresses in their daily lives. But within the pages of the letters to the editor of the Weekly Sun, they debated various aspects of Banks’s articles with mistresses on terms of genuine equality. Some critics of the New Journalism, such as J. A. Hobson, bemoaned its exaltation of commodity capitalism and its mindless jingoism as proof of its essentially conservative impact on society. British elites across the political spectrum condemned the mediocrity and vulgarity of the New Journalism as but one of the many dangers of democracy. These criticisms certainly carried significant weight. However, Banks’s journalism is a striking example of how the popular press of the 1890s and early twentieth century importantly promoted intense debates about shifting gender and sexual norms and expanded the class and gender composition of those engaged in public discussion on political and social issues.77
Banks had embarked on her “Cap and Apron” series with no intention of stirring up political debate. At this point in her career, she had evinced neither knowledge nor interest in politics per se. But in offering an insider’s perspective on the grievances mistresses and female servants harbored against one another, she had hit upon a subject that her readers insisted was fundamentally about class and gender and bourgeois life and its discontents. It was one thing to go disguised into the slums of London and reveal abominations in Lambeth or Whitechapel to an appalled public. What Banks had done was in its own way more threatening if less daring. She had hinted—and her correspondents had amplified—that the animosities and injustices in British society as a whole were reproduced within the bourgeois home, the very space that Victorians desperately wished to believe was a queenly haven from the struggles of the masculine world. Far from domesticating politics by bringing the values of the home into the public realm, Banks’s campaign proved for some readers that the home was itself a class-polarized site of strife between women.
Women Journalists Investigate Women’s Labor in London
One reader of Banks’s “Cap and Apron” series insisted that Banks had failed to grasp the broadest and most consequential meaning of her own findings. She signed her letter “Another Woman Journalist” and explained that she “lived for several years on a common staircase in a densely populated quarter of East London.” She blasted the “present capitalist system of unlimited industrial competition,” which pressed “far more hardly on women than on men.” She, for one, was confident that domestic service was a “badge of slavery” and that working girls throughout London were beginning to develop a vocabulary that would allow them to articulate their grievances.78
Who penned this sharp-edged retort? Only a handful of women in London could have written it and all of them were part of a loosely connected group of gender and political radicals in the 1880s who made the reading room of the British Museum into their second home: Eleanor Marx (Aveling), Amy Levy, Olive Schreiner, Clementina Black, and Margaret Harkness among them. By 1893, Levy had committed suicide and it seems improbable that either Marx or Schreiner would have described herself as a journalist. The most likely author is either the female trade unionist, Clementina Black, or the sometime socialist and Salvationist Margaret Harkness. Black and Harkness, like Banks herself, were unmarried, educated women who depended upon their journalism and novel-writing to help support themselves. But in marked contrast to Banks, these women were less preoccupied with their own earnings than in fighting for social and economic justice for their working-class sisters. We can more fully appreciate Banks’s contributions to late Victorian debates over women’s work in the metropolis by comparing them, first with Black’s and then with Harkness’s own slum journalism and social investigations.79
Black was born into the professional middle class, but family misfortunes denied her many of its material and psychological comforts. The ill health of her solicitor father and the death of her mother left Black saddled with a large family and compelled her to contribute to her own maintenance as a teacher and, later, as a writer. Living in London with two of her sisters in the early 1880s, Black combined fiction writing with immersion in the history, sociology, and economics of women’s labor.80 Such knowledge served her well in her frequent conversations with Karl Marx’s ailing wife and daughter in London and provided the empirical foundations for her writings and political activism as a leader of the Women’s Protective and Provident League (eventually renamed the Women’s Trade Union League).81 In March 1893, just six months before Banks embarked on her “Cap and Apron” series, Black adopted the “point of view of the servant” and wrote “The Dislike to Domestic Service,” an essay in the Nineteenth Century, a highly respected periodical that Banks certainly read once she moved to London and to which she later contributed.82 Black emphasized the moral and sexual dangers of removing laboring girls and young women from their families and isolating them from their peers. “There are too many households,” she warned, “in which an unprotected girl is liable to temptation and insults from which she would be safe in most factories and workshops.” Most of the girls she met at homes and refuges for fallen women had once been servants, she grimly reported.83 Black returned to the evils of domestic service at the International Congress of Women a few years later
, where she characterized it as a vestige of feudalism, as tyrannical as it was inefficient.84 While Black never called herself a socialist, she located her account of domestic service—and each of the other female industries about which she wrote—within an overarching framework of relations between labor and capital.
The studies of female labor that Black published in socially progressive, specialized venues such as the Economic Journal were, not surprisingly, much more sociologically precise and politically engaged than the articles Banks wrote for mass consumption in the popular press.85 But the demands of editors and the expectations of readers cannot explain why Banks and Black took such different approaches in their respective contributions about women and work to the same middle-brow periodical, the English Illustrated Magazine. Banks and Black wrote their articles in informal prose interlaced with first-person authorial asides (“I trust” or “I had been told”) that were closely identified with the confidential and friendly “voice” adopted by so many women journalists. Banks, like Black, incorporated the methods and some of the language of sociology into her journalism. However, Banks’s article in the English Illustrated Magazine on her experiences disguised as a crossing sweeper provides very little information about the trade beyond sweeps’ belief in their right to protect their territory from competitors. Instead, we learn a great deal about Banks’s feelings: “People walked on my crossing, but nobody offered me payment…. I began to despise them, and in my heart, I called them paupers, to patronise my crossing and not be willing to pay for the privilege.”86 Banks limited her intervention into the sweeping trade by criticizing the ineffectiveness of the system of licensing sweeps (at a cost to the sweep of 5 shillings per year) and by reminding Londoners that sweeps deserved payment for their labors.
Black’s English Illustrated Magazine essay “Match-Box Making at Home” combined personal observations about her encounters with working women with rigorous analysis of statistical information. Her piece offers a detailed picture of each stage of the labor process and a careful accounting of the time and cost involved in making matchboxes. What begins as a description of a “pretty enough spectacle” of women cheerfully and nimbly assembling matchboxes turns subtly but unmistakably into condemnation of a system that pays the most efficient worker only 1 shilling 3½ pence for fifteen hours of labor a day. Black’s rhetoric is measured, her tone friendly and polite; however, she used her article to summarize the tempestuous history of labor relations in the industry and drive home to readers the radical demand that sweated homeworkers join ranks with their unionized sisters working in factories.87
While Banks’s treatment of crossing sweeps was lighthearted and lightweight, she sometimes ventured into more substantive and politically charged terrain. Well aware that twenty to thirty thousand men and women had gathered in Hyde Park to demand state regulation of the laundry industry just the year before her arrival in London,88 Banks disguised herself as a laundress to provide an insider’s exposé of the industry. Playing the part of both lady customer and woman worker, she literally followed her own clothes from her home to their destination at a large East London steam laundry. The articles she wrote about her experiences as a laundress come closer than anything else she ever wrote to the sociological rigor characteristic of Black’s writings on female labor. Banks noted distinctions in the levels of skill and wages among different workers. Ironers occupied the upper rung of the hierarchy, earning up to 3 shillings, 6 pence per day, while the girls who put towels and linens into the ironing machine received the lowest wages of 3 to 6 shillings per week. She reported that girls and women at the laundry were fully and intelligently engaged in the debate over the Factory Act.89 Banks also encouraged readers to question their own preconceptions about relations between labor and capital by praising and criticizing in equal measure
both workers and managers. She had gone to the laundry expecting to meet girls and women who were “the most wicked of their sex” (159), but instead she found diligent, respectable, and friendly workers only too willing to lend a hand in teaching her their trade. Banks’s admiration for the owner’s relentless hard work and amiable relations with her workers did not mute Banks’s criticisms of conditions prevailing at the laundry: the failure to fence off dangerous equipment such as the hydroextractor and the absence of any system to ventilate foul smelling steam. The laundry may have endangered the health of the women workers but, Banks concluded, it posed absolutely no threat to its customers.
Banks acknowledged the political stakes involved in women’s work in the laundry, but she did so to make her copy more attractive to editors. Banks, unlike Black, refused to play a partisan role in the debate over regulating laundries. In her articles, workplace hazards at the laundry matter a great deal less than her readiness to place herself in harm’s way in pursuit of a story. She repeatedly underscored that she was far too feminine and delicate to succeed at the arduous physical tasks required of her: after only three hours labor “I was so tired, I could hardly stand,” she confided to her readers. “I had several times burned my fingers and once nearly fallen against the stove.”90 The frisson produced by reading Banks’s incognito slumming adventures in the laundry derived entirely from the way she forced her readers to imagine their author—a petite, young, lady journalist—engaged in distinctly unladylike occupations.
Like Banks and Black, Harkness wrote extensively on the status of servants, matchbox makers, and factory girls in her slum novels of the 1880s and in her contributions to a sprawling series on young men’s and young women’s work published by the progressive Christian paper, the British Weekly in 1887 and 1888.91 The editors of the series insisted that “we shall have nothing for the lover of the prurient—no directory to hell—nothing but what may be read in any family.” However, it is not clear precisely what sort of family the editors had in mind because roving special commissioners escorted readers into “dingy, dirty, promiscuous gambling, dancing and betting” clubs and reprinted desperate letters written by neurasthenic men and hapless masturbators victimized by blackmailers.92 Harkness’s relationship to the British Weekly’s series is a complicated one, all the more because we know so little about it. We know with certainty that she contributed to the first series, “Tempted London: Young Men” and edited the second series, “Toilers in London: or, Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis.” She also served as one of the many “commissioners” hired to gather social facts and interview men and women about the wide range of social, sexual, and economic issues covered in the series. Vexed that Charles Booth had not selected her to serve as one of his lady assistants in compiling the first volumes of his social survey of East London, Harkness found in the British Weekly an alternative way to support herself though the work of observing and representing the city.93 She also found a vast storehouse of empirical data and human dramas, which she wove freely into her fictions.
Just as Banks took great liberties with facts in her writings, so, too, Harkness flagrantly dissolved the boundaries between journalistic facts and novelistic fictions. She incorporated not only many of the themes but lifted entire vignettes from the columns of the British Weekly series which she placed verbatim into her slum novels published under the nom de plume, John Law: Out of Work, City Girl, and Captain Lobe. Readers of the British Weekly sometimes encountered the same stories twice—first as a nonfictional piece of investigative journalism in Tempted London, and then, a few weeks later, as an installment of Harkness’s novel about the slum work of the Salvation Army, Captain Lobe, which was itself serialized in the British Weekly. Harkness, like Black, aided Annie Besant in the industrial dispute between matchgirls and their employer, Bryant and May, in the summer of 1888.94 In the weeks leading up to the resolution of the strike in mid-July 1888, the British Weekly ran an impressive set of unsigned articles, most likely written by Harkness, analyzing the structure and economics of the match trade and its impact on women workers. In the very same issue in which the British Weekly reported the t
riumph of the matchgirls, Harkness celebrated the solidarity of unskilled women workers by taking readers of her novel Captain Lobe on a sympathetic tour of a squalid room doubling as home and workshop of a family of sweated matchbox workers.95
The rebellious and disaffected daughter of a cash-strapped country rector, Harkness’s grip on economic security and social respectability was even more tenuous than Banks’s and Black’s.96 Forever trying on and taking off new religious and political beliefs (Salvationism, trade unionism, socialism) and subject to “morbid” and “hysterical” musings,97 she was an outspoken, unsettled, and unsettling figure in the philanthropic landscape of late Victorian London. Harkness confessed in 1875 that she did not “thoroughly understand” “love or passion between the sexes” which “must exist in such different degrees in different constitutions.” She loathed the “idea of marriage” for herself and preferred instead to eke out a precarious livelihood as an unmarried nurse, journalist, and novelist.98 While Harkness evinced little interest in sex in her private life, she argued that it was a volcanic albeit sinister force shaping the daily ebb and flow of the metropolis.99 The British Weekly articles, taken together, demonstrated how the constant influx of youths from the countryside into the anonymous city combined with the absence of social networks once provided by churches, kin, and friends led directly to sexual degradation and despair. Harkness’s novel Out of Work retold the same story in human terms by tracing the inexorable path to death by starvation of the Christlike carpenter Jos Coney, who journeys from the countryside to London. In both her journalism and novels, the minotaur-like metropolis consumed young men and women drawn to it by the glittering but illusory promise of high wages, steady work, and new sorts of personal freedom. Hunger, unregulated sexuality, and sin are the byproducts of capitalism unchecked by Christian principles in Harkness’s bleak vision of the city.
