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Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working Class

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The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940

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Abstract

Detailed and varied glimpses of domestic interiors are threaded throughout working-class autobiographies, offering vivid memories of physical aspects of the working-class home and revealing the more personal and intimate dimension of the family home as seen from ‘within’. Focusing on the ‘view from below’, specifically that of the young girl, this chapter offers a gendered discourse that positions girls specifically in relation to domestic space. It asks what happens if we put the gaze of the child at the centre of representations of the working-class home? What details did the girl’s eye light upon as she watched from within? And what is at stake when we take the girl’s subjective point of view as a serious object of enquiry?

I am very grateful to Katie Flanagan at Special Collections, Brunel University London, for her help in providing access to materials held in the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    These accounts have been widely collected and discussed. See, for example, P. Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (London: Fontana, 1976); R. Livesey, ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 9 (2004), pp. 43-67; E. Ross (ed.), Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); N. Wilson, Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 15-35; E. Cuming, Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 23-72; B. Leckie, Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

  2. 2.

    Key studies of working-class selfhood, family life, leisure, and work practices that draw on the extensive corpus of working-class autobiographies include: D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981); J. Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Penguin, 1984); R. Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); J-M. Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); E. Griffin, Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

  3. 3.

    Humphries, Childhood, pp. 6, 15.

  4. 4.

    Indeed, many published nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies by male writers include an artist’s impression of the family home as an illustrative plate.

  5. 5.

    J. Helgren and C.A. Vasconcellos, ‘Introduction’, in J. Helgren and C.A. Vasconcellos (eds), Girlhood: A Global History, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 4.

  6. 6.

    J. Swindells, Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 205.

  7. 7.

    Most published working-class autobiographies by writers born in the period 1876–1915 were male, and surveys of this body of writing have tended to focus on the experience of boys and men. However, the use of unpublished autobiographical writing by ‘amateur’ authors, such as the accounts collected by John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall, now deposited in the Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies, offer unique insight into the lived experiences of women and girls. For an overview of the Burnett Archive, and the changing demographic of working-class life-writing, see H. Rogers and E. Cuming, ‘Revealing Fragments: Close and Distant Reading of Working-Class Autobiography’, Family and Community History, 21 (2018), pp. 180–201; and Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 8–16.

  8. 8.

    C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 2.

  9. 9.

    Steedman, Landscape, p. 24. Emphasis added.

  10. 10.

    The settlement worker May Craske provides a detailed description of the ‘little girl, aged from nine to fourteen, who is the drudge of the family’ in ‘Girl Life in a Slum’, Economic Review, 18 (1908), p. 186. See also Ellen Ross’s exploration of ‘little mothers’ in Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 154–155; A. Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), pp. 88–91, 175–176.

  11. 11.

    Griffin, Bread Winner, pp. 27–36.

  12. 12.

    H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 44.

  13. 13.

    Mayhew, London Labour, pp. 45.

  14. 14.

    Steedman, Landscape, p. 127. Sally Mitchell explores what she calls the ‘separate culture’ of girlhood in this period by tracing ‘the fantasies, the dreams, the mental climate, and the desires of girls themselves’, see S. Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England 1880-1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 3, 6.

  15. 15.

    C. Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 119.

  16. 16.

    F. Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 155.

  17. 17.

    Thompson, Lark Rise, pp. 155–156.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., pp. 268, 380, 95.

  19. 19.

    J. Dusinberre, ‘The Child’s Eye and the Adult’s Voice: Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford’, The Review of English Studies, 35 (1984), p. 61.

  20. 20.

    Thompson, Lark Rise, pp. 46-47.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., p. 19.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., pp. 19, 253. The expression ‘to pig it’ means ‘to live in an untidy or slovenly fashion; to live in cheap or inferior accommodation’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Comparing the homes of the very poor to ‘pigsties’ was a common phrase in the parlance of nineteenth-century social investigation.

  23. 23.

    Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 264.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p. 32.

  25. 25.

    As Dusinberre notes, ‘[f]or Thompson the story of real people and their lives offers fictions as artistically open-ended and inexhaustible as any writer could invent’, see Dusinberre, ‘Child’s Eye’, p. 66.

  26. 26.

    R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), pp. 297-298.

  27. 27.

    Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 387.

  28. 28.

    Burnett, Destiny Obscure, pp. 26-27.

  29. 29.

    Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 374.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., p. 379.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 318. Williams drew on his own experiences of family and community life in rural South Wales for his semi-autobiographical novel Border Country (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), further exploring his attachment to place in autobiographically-inflected sections of The Country and the City and ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in idem, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 3-14.

  32. 32.

    A. Foley, A Bolton Childhood (Manchester: Manchester University Extra-Mural Department, 1973), p. 5.

  33. 33.

    Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 29. Working-class autobiographers’ own uses of the word ‘slum’, overlooked in received histories of the term, deserves further consideration. I discuss one such reclamation of the word as it occurs in Pat O’Mara’s The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy (London: Martin Hopkinson, 1934), see Cuming, Housing, pp. 69–71.

  34. 34.

    Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 45.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., p. 4.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., pp. 5-7.

  37. 37.

    As Burnett observes, many autobiographers describe in photographic detail the physical arrangement of the home as ‘the place where consciousness first dawned’. Yet as he points out, there is a paradox in that the items described are often prosaic, utilitarian, and of little monetary value: ‘the tables and chairs, wash-tubs and fire-irons, tin tea-caddies and china dogs—are usually totally ordinary and unremarkable, hardly worthy, one would think, of recall or mention’, see Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 223. On the affective role of objects in autobiography and their containment of family stories, see L. Gloyn, V. Crewe, L. King, and A. Woodham, ‘The Ties that Bind: Materiality, Identity, and the Life Course in the “Things” Families Keep’, Journal of Family History, 43 (2018), pp. 157–176.

  38. 38.

    M. Doolittle, ‘Time, Space, and Memories: The Father’s Chair and Grandfather Clocks in Victorian Working-Class Domestic Lives’, Home Cultures, 8 (2011), pp. 248–249. See also Julie-Marie Strange’s exploration of tables, chairs, and family relationships in ‘Fatherhood, Furniture and the Inter-Personal Dynamics of Working-Class Homes, c. 1870–1914’, Urban History, 40 (2013), pp. 271–286.

  39. 39.

    Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 5.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., p. 6.

  41. 41.

    As Leckie notes, ‘these are homes defined in part—and in housing of the poor as described by middle-class commentators, in main –​ by the ways things signify’, see Leckie, Open Houses, p. 24. On the ‘moral botany’ deployed by social reformers in relation to the cultivation of flowers and plants in the working-class home, see A.M. Lawrence, ‘Morals and Mignonette; Or, the Use of Flowers in the Moral Regulation of the Working Classes in High Victorian London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 70 (2020), pp. 24–35.

  42. 42.

    Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 24.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., pp. 12–13.

  44. 44.

    K. Betterton, ‘White Pinnies, Black Aprons…’, Burnett Archive of Working Class Autobiographies, Special Collections, Brunel University London, 2:71, 11.

  45. 45.

    L. Hine, ‘A Poplar Childhood’, East London Record, 3 (1980), p. 40.

  46. 46.

    E. Hutchinson, ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’, Burnett Archive, 2:429, 15.

  47. 47.

    Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 218.

  48. 48.

    Humphries notes that in working-class memoir ‘[w]omen’s struggles against dirt were celebrated with almost as much frequency as their struggles against want, suggesting the error that is made in overlooking the contribution of cleanliness to comfort’, see Humphries, Childhood, p. 140.

  49. 49.

    Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 9.

  50. 50.

    Hutchinson, ‘Bells of St Mary’s’, p. 38. The exact identity of the official is never confirmed, although Hutchinson considers the fact that it may have been a council official or prison worker (her father had been imprisoned for union activities).

  51. 51.

    Hutchinson, ‘Bells of St Mary’s’, p. 38.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., pp. 38-39.

  53. 53.

    Davin, Growing Up Poor, pp. 63–68.

  54. 54.

    M. Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914), p. 192.

  55. 55.

    Reading, of course, was one way in which children could inhabit worlds of their own indoors, and Rose’s The Intellectual Life provides multiple examples of how working-class children found the space, time, and means to become avid readers in the home. More generally, sending children to play outdoors may have seemed a safer option for working-class parents; nineteenth-century coroners’ reports, for example, supply evidence of children who died from burns and scalding injuries related to indoor play, see V. Holmes, ‘Dangerous Spaces: Working-Class Homes and Fatal Household Accidents in Suffolk, 1840-1900’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 2012).

  56. 56.

    E. Bold, ‘The Long and Short of It. Being the Recollections and Reminiscences of Edna Bold’, Burnett Archive, 2:85, 1.

  57. 57.

    Bold, ‘The Long and Short of It’, pp. 14, 12.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 32.

  59. 59.

    Betterton, ‘White Pinnies’, p. 8.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., pp. 8, 21.

  61. 61.

    For an account of dollhouses as they feature in middle-class autobiographies, see N. Wei-Ning Chen, ‘Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World’, Children’s Literature in Education, 46 (2015), pp. 278-295.

  62. 62.

    Steedman, Landscape, p. 127.

  63. 63.

    Mayhew, London Labour, p. 67.

  64. 64.

    Steedman, Landscape, p. 137.

  65. 65.

    Burnett, Destiny Obscure, p. 240. By contrast, Samuel Bamford details how he played lively games with his ‘playmates’, made up of the pauper boys and girls at the Salford poor law workhouse overseen by his father; see Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Volume One: Early Days (London: Frank Cass, 1967), pp. 69-70.

  66. 66.

    A. Langley, [Untitled], Burnett Archive, 2:466, 22.

  67. 67.

    G. Foakes, Four Meals for Fourpence (London: Virago, 2011), p. 57.

  68. 68.

    Hutchinson, ‘Bells of St Mary’s’, p. 53.

  69. 69.

    Foley, Bolton Childhood, p. 9.

  70. 70.

    J. Begiato, ‘Moving Objects: Emotional Transformation, Tangibility, and Time Travel’, in S. Downes, S. Holloway, and S. Randles (eds), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions Through History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 239-241.

  71. 71.

    Jack Lawson converted an ordinary orange box into a bookcase, while Arthur Harding recalled how such boxes served in the family home, alternatively, as chairs, storage and a baby’s cot; see Lawson, A Man’s Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1932), pp. 80-81; R. Samuel, Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 21. Holmes addresses the makeshift use of ordinary objects in poor homes in her paper ‘The Egg-Box Cot: Renewing and Repurposing in the Victorian Working-Class Home’, British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS) Annual Conference, ‘Victorian Renewals’, University of Dundee (2019).

  72. 72.

    Sarah Dyson, unpublished journal, in The Voices of Children 1700–1914, ed. I. Stickland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), p. 194. Cited in Wei-Ning Chen, ‘To the Doll’s House: Children’s Reading and Playing in Victorian and Edwardian England’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, UCL, 2014), p. 278.

  73. 73.

    A. M. Chase, ‘The Memoirs of Alice Maud Chase’, Burnett Archive, 1:141, 21.

  74. 74.

    Chase, ‘Memoirs’, p. 22.

  75. 75.

    Chen, ‘Playing with Size’, p. 278.

  76. 76.

    S. Sontag, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: NLB, 1979), p. 20. In a similar vein, Susan Stewart argues: ‘That the world of things can open itself to reveal a secret life […] is a constant daydream that the miniature presents’, see Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 54. The functional uselessness of the dollhouse is nicely illustrated in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1904) in which Tom Thumb and his wife Hunca Munca remain desperately frustrated in their attempts to enjoy the domestic comforts of the miniature home.

  77. 77.

    M. Roper, ‘Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), p. 59.

  78. 78.

    A. Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 3.

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  1. Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

    Emily Cuming

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  1. Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

    Joseph Harley

  2. Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Vicky Holmes

  3. Suomen maatalousmuseo Sarka/Sarka – The Finnish Museum of Agriculture, Loimaa, Finland

    Laika Nevalainen

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Cuming, E. (2022). Spaces of Girlhood: Autobiographical Recollections of Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Working Class. In: Harley, J., Holmes, V., Nevalainen, L. (eds) The Working Class at Home, 1790–1940. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89273-9_5

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