“Love has as many facets as a bursting star”: Narrative and Tolerance in The Black Velvet Gown

In Catherine Cookson’s 1984 historical fiction, The Black Velvet Gown, she dramatically subverts many conventions of the Victorian novel, most prominently narrative expectations about gender and social class. Her heroine is Biddy (Bridget) Millican,1 whose father Seth works in the mines (“pits”), and whose enterprising mother Riah2 comes from the Shields wharves, where her own father is a fisherman. This is a world that Cookson of course knew well from her own childhood.3 The novel begins in the 1820s but is set mostly in the 1830s, and reform is in the air. It concludes in March of 1841 with a cross-class marriage and the establishment of a school for both sexes run by Biddy and her upper-class husband Laurence.