wrote three parts for her Tales: The father’s tale’, The grandmother’s tale’, and a third section, called ‘Pestilence’, a drama rather than a tale. She dedicated it to ‘Mr Sadler ... the champion who first stood forward in behalf of those poor children’11 and appended extensive notes from the minutes of evidence and from Southey’s own essays. Blackwood offered to print her three parts separately in ‘Maga’, but she was not enthusiastic. Partly, as she explains to Southey, she felt the context to be inappropriate:

doi:10.4324/9780429459375-55

Chapter

wrote three parts for her Tales: The father’s tale’, The grandmother’s tale’, and a third section, called ‘Pestilence’, a drama rather than a tale. She dedicated it to ‘Mr Sadler ... the champion who first stood forward in behalf of those poor children’11 and appended extensive notes from the minutes of evidence and from Southey’s own essays. Blackwood offered to print her three parts separately in ‘Maga’, but she was not enthusiastic. Partly, as she explains to Southey, she felt the context to be inappropriate:

Chapter

wrote three parts for her Tales: The father’s tale’, The grandmother’s tale’, and a third section, called ‘Pestilence’, a drama rather than a tale. She dedicated it to ‘Mr Sadler ... the champion who first stood forward in behalf of those poor children’11 and appended extensive notes from the minutes of evidence and from Southey’s own essays. Blackwood offered to print her three parts separately in ‘Maga’, but she was not enthusiastic. Partly, as she explains to Southey, she felt the context to be inappropriate:

ABSTRACT

But also, her piece needs to be read as a whole, particularly in order to ‘place’ the viewpoint of the protected middle-class child, which is gradu ally exposed to harsher realities. Caroline Norton’s A Voice from the Factories (1836) is generally given the accolade as the first of such writings by women of the period, yet Bowles’s work appeared three years earlier. Why is it not better known? It was produced hastily (at her own request) and also cheaply (in paper, not boards), and it failed to make any mark on the public.