Laboring to write: Representation of the working-class woman in Victorian Britain (Hannah Cullwick)

The lives of the laboring classes were of interest to middle-class Victorian writers in Britain in the wake of social unrest early in the nineteenth century and the outbreak of revolution on the Continent at mid-century. The working-class woman in particular was represented in various kinds of texts in nineteeth-century Britain, such as the government-sponsored parliamentary reports, social novels, and in books and private journals of individuals. In these texts the mostly middle-class authors passed judgment on the condition of labor for women, speaking both for and about working women in their situation of work. A theme common to many of these books and reports was the pathos of the situation of women's work in public workspaces such as mines and factories. This theme served the reform agendas of these middle-class authors that were prevalent at this time in history. The theme contrasts, however, the attitude towards work for women as expressed by some working women themselves in their own self-representational autobiographical texts. The diaries of one such woman Hannah Cullwick, a domestic servant who wrote diaries about her working life from 1854 to 1873, reveal pride in her labor, a concept that directly contradicts the pathos of women's work as expressed in texts written about working women.; This study addresses those contrasts in representations of working-class women by middle-class writers and the self-representational texts of Hannah Cullwick. This study has a two-fold purpose reflected in its formal construction. Part I features a contextualization of the different genres of representation of the Victorian working-class woman. Part II continues the contextualization by examining the self-representational texts of housemaid Hannah Cullwick to show how she spoke about her labor in different ways than did the middle-class writers of Part I. Further, this study works as recovery of the diaries of housemaid Hannah Cullwick, significant texts that reveal a substantial view of the life of a working-class woman at a time in history when women were an active part of Britain's booming economy.; The texts revealed in Part I spoke for the working-class woman by representing excerpts from the woman worker's testimonial given to the investigators gathering information on labor for their books, reports, and journals. In this way the working woman's voice was usurped in middle-class projects of reform. Hannah Cullwick, on the other hand, though called to voice by a middle-class gentleman who asked her to write her diaries for him, spoke for herself in her diaries even as she was writing to a specific audience, the gentleman who requested her texts. Her diaries show that, contrary to the reports and articles on working women as debilitated by their labor, her labor empowered her, not only in strength and economic freedom, but also in the articulation of self in self-representational texts. Cullwick's labor supplied the agency to create her identity in her diaries and a space to create herself as a woman of value because of her ability to labor. Labor, writing, and self-value were inexticably linked in the Cullwick diaries.