The Forgotten Woman for the Period

The victorian novel as we know it was written by, for, and largely about the 60,000 or so families who could afford a guinea for a year’s library subscription ¹ or a shilling a month to buy a new book as it came out in parts or in a magazine. The customs and values of the established middle class are preserved in these novels and in memoirs, diaries, letters, history, and laws. The lives of the poor are recorded—if largely through middle-class eyes—in parliamentary blue books, sanitary investigations, and the works of sociologists, muckrakers, and novelists-with-a-purpose. By the beginning of the Victorian period the industrial working class existed as a distinct group with mores and traditions largely established, and available to us through the work of recent historians. But there still remains a segment of the population which is largely forgotten. They were people too busy earning and cooking their daily bread to write about themselves, and successful enough at it that no one mounted investigations to find out how they survived or if they were likely to make a revolution. They did not lead public lives; their women in particular were, in this era, more and more withdrawn from any direct contact with national economic life into an increasingly private sphere.