ABSTRACT
Catherine Cookson’s rise from Tyneside slum dweller to Dame of the British Empire is a modern story, one with several markers of the twentieth century. These include the relative insignificance of an illegitimate birth and the opportunity for a poor, uneducated woman to achieve financial security and prosperity on her own merit, first in the service sector and later as the beloved author of over one hundred novels. But despite the modernity of her own experience, Cookson set many of her novels in the Victorian era, reflecting a time when the same respectability and success that she won for herself were less likely scenarios. Even in works that she situated in the twentieth century, Cookson utilized discourses and plot formulas from the Victorian age, as her 1969 memoir Our Kate exemplifies. This heavily fictionalized account charts her mother Kate’s life, but it is rife with the conventions of the Victorian age and, more specifically, of a Victorian fictional subgenre: the rags-to-riches story of an orphan displaced from his or her well-bred family. Cookson, born Catherine (Katie) McMullen, was not an orphan, but the representation of her early life in Our Kate bears the stigmas and traits common to many Victorian orphan tales. Cookson believed that her maternal grandmother was her mother until age seven, when neighbor children told her of her “bastard” status and she realized that Kate was her mother, not her older sister. Cookson never met her father, but her fantasies about him-many of them fed by the scraps of gossip and rumor that explained Kate’s disastrous seduction and “fall”— follow the melodramatic plotline of classic Victorian orphan novels, including Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). These novels all depict deserving orphans who achieve happy and secure lives, broadly reflecting the industrial era’s rising middle class and its substitution of canny self-making for inborn gentility. But in a complication of that narrative of success, they also reveal the orphan hero or heroine’s respectable bloodline and thereby dilute the argument that effort and character wholly underwrite a deserving class rise. In Our Kate, Cookson reproduces this paradox, for while she represents explicitly her rise to fame and fortune as the consequence of hard work, self-sacrifice, and talent, she
identifies with the (rumored) gentlemanliness of her biological father, ultimately if indirectly crediting her success to his innate influence.1
