Writing across the Class Divide

Abstract

Historians have noted that the chief characteristic of nineteenth-century British society was its structural inequality, with estimates of the proportion of the population who belonged to the ‘working classes’ ranging from 75% to 95%,1 reflecting a life of income and food precarity as well as limited access to education and occupational choice. Not surprisingly, working-class women suffered additional burdens from frequent childbearing, exclusion from skilled trades, and unequal access to existing schooling. Not until the Education Act of 1870 was an attempt made to ensure that every child receive a rudimentary primary school education until the age of ten, and even this minimal reform was unevenly enforced until the end of the nineteenth century.2 David Vincent’s The Rise of Mass Literacy (2000) records the sobering fact that in 1840 only 50% of the female population of Britain could sign their name in a marriage register, and though by 1870 this figure had risen to 70%, it seems clear that only the more fortunate and gifted among mid-Victorian working-class women could have aspired to literary composition.3