Abstract
So began Lady Isabella Somerset’s preface to Our Village Life, a colour-illustrated book of poetry for children published to raise money to support her home for workhouse girls. Writing for Somerset, a woman of wealth and privilege, did not offer the means to earn a living or achieve literary fame. Rather, she made a name for herself in print for the ‘sake of such as these’, a literary voice that increasingly came to define her own subjectivity as a writer, editor, and political activist.
‘The life of English village children stands always in our minds in painful contrast to the pent-up dreary life of the child born and bred in our crowded cities. With special pity do we think of those little ones who go forth from our workhouses and workhouse schools with so little that is bright to help them on the weary journey of life with all its uphill struggles. For the sake of such as these I seek your indulgence for my little work.’1
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Notes
Lady Henry Somerset, Our Village Life (Sampson Low and Co: London, 1884), Preface, n.p.
See F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980);
see also Michelle Tusan, ‘The Business of Relief Work: A Victorian Quaker in Constantinople and her Circle,’ Victorian Studies 51 no. 4 (Summer 2009), 633–661.
See Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 9–15;
Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 36–39;
and Aled Jones, Powers of the Press (Hants, UK: Scolar, 1996), 144.
New typesetting machines such as the monotype and linotype played a major role in this transformation of the industry during the last decades of the nineteenth century. See Richard E. Huss, The Development of Printers’ Mechanical Typesetting Methods, 1822–1925 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973), 3–24.
Marysa Demoor, ed., Marketing the Author (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 13.
Olwen Claire Niessen, Aristocracy, Temperance and Social Reform (Online: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 8.
Kali Israel, Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 13.
Ian Tyrrell, ‘Lady Isabella Caroline Somerset,’ Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 594–595.
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘The Story of Our Farm,’ North American Review 175, no. 5 (November 1902), 691–700: 692–694.
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘A Personal Word From Lady Henry Somerset,’ Lend a Hand 9, no. 4 (October 1892), 264–266: 266.
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘The Darker Side,’ North American Review 154, no. 1 Gan. 1892), 64–68: 67.
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘Practical Temperance Legislation,’ Contemporary Review 76 (October 1899), 512–527: 527.
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘Frances Elizabeth Willard,’ North American Review 166, no. 4 (April 1898), 429–436: 436.
Somerset appropriates this phrase from Lecky, claiming that the Middle Ages took ‘a far more logical view’ of women’s duty to the community through service and philanthropic work (Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘Renaissance of Women,’ North American Review 159 (July/Dec 1894), 490–497: 495–496).
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘The Tree of Knowledge,’ New Review 10 (June 1894), 675–690: 683.
Lady Isabella Somerset, ‘Nagging Women: A Reply to Dr. Edson,’ North American Review 160 (Jan/Jun 1895), 311–312: 312.
Rosemary VanArsdel, Florence Fenwick-Miller (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 183.
Michelle Tusan, Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 123–27.
Richard Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation (London; Thomas Nelson, 1963), 49–50.
A. Bradshaw, ‘Deserted Armenia,’ Our Sisters 2, no. 14 (1897), 52.
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© 2012 Michelle Tusan
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Tusan, M. (2012). Humanitarian Journalism: The Career of Lady Isabella Somerset. In: Gray, F.E. (eds) Women in Journalism at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001306_6
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