ABSTRACT
In 1844 Richard Redgrave’s emotive portrait of an exhausted seamstress caused a fellow member of the Royal Academy to declare that “if any circumstances could make reader wage war against the present social arrangements it is the contemplation of this truthful and wonderful picture.” For most feminist historians, it seems, the image of the poor dressmaker functions most successfully as a signifier of the limitations of nineteenth-century middle-class women’s lives, whose employment options are shown to be needlework, governessing, or descent into prostitution. In Sunny Memories, Harriet Beecher Stowe commented on popularity of novels depicting the poor, which had supplanted those about aristocratic high life. As tradeswomen the milliners and dressmakers could have been classified as middle class but within this essentially Tory discourse, the middle classes were noticeably absent. In addition to tales of tradeswomen who allegedly beat or starved their apprentices to death, Cobden cited a Times editorial, which squarely laid the blame on the milliners and dressmakers.
