ABSTRACT
“The Young Milliner” is the second of four short stories by the Chartist leader, Ernest Jones. A melodramatic tale of the physical and moral destruction of a seamstress, it was published serially under the collective title Woman’s Wrongs. Nonetheless, the Chartist majority supported women’s exclusion and so it remained policy. Writing later about “The Young Milliner,” Jones located its seamstress heroine, Anna, as a member of the upper working class——within which, in a just society, “the best specimen of womanhood would be the likeliest found.” Jones’s introduction to Woman’s Wrongs reveals his novel to be a fictional execution of this strategy. “Every order of society,” he asserts, “has domestic sufferings peculiar to itself, sufferings, besides those to which ‘all flesh is heir’——brought on by the vile mechanism of our system.” Furthermore, woman’s suffering is to be shown “not merely in one class or order—but upward, downward, through all the social grades.”.
