ABSTRACT
THE working woman was not, like PUl1ch and Free Trade, a Victorian institution. The word spinster disproves any upstart origin for the sisterhood of toil. Nor was she as a literary figure the discovery of Victorian writers in search of fresh material. Although Mrs. Anna Jameson in 1846 wrote: "After all that has been written, sung, and said of women, one has the perception that neither in prose nor in verse has she ever appeared as the labourer,"! she was not borne out by the facts. A goodly number of working women appear in literary annals from the days of Chaucer, and a few of them are vividly unforgettable figures. Nevertheless, Charlotte Bronte, in Sbirlry, when she gave to Caroline Helstone the reflection that Lucretia spinning at midnight in the midst of her maidens "kept her servants up very late", was representing the new attitude. To the Victorians belongs the discovery of the woman worker as an object of pity, and in the literature of the early nineteenth century one first finds her portrayed as a victim of long hours, unfavourable conditions, and general injustice, for whom something ought to be done.
