George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture

Emma Liggins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351933971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

George Gissing's work reflects his observations of fin-de-siècle London life. Influenced by the French naturalist school, his realist representations of urban culture testify to the significance of the city for the development of new class and gender identities, particularly for women. Liggins's study, which considers standard texts such as The Odd Women, New Grub Street, and The Nether World as well as lesser known short works, examines Gissing's fiction in relation to the formation of these new identities, focusing specifically on debates about the working woman. From the 1880s onward, a new genre of urban fiction increasingly focused on work as a key aspect of the modern woman's identity, elements of which were developed in the New Woman fiction of the 1890s. Showing his fascination with the working woman and her narrative potential, Gissing portrays women from a wide variety of occupations, ranging from factory girls, actresses, prostitutes, and shop girls to writers, teachers, clerks, and musicians. Liggins argues that by placing the working woman at the center of his narratives, rather than at the margins, Gissing made an important contribution to the development of urban fiction, which increasingly reflected current debates about women's presence in the city.

Introduction

In a letter to his sister Margaret in 1880, George Gissing aligned himself with the enlightened views on women which were gaining currency at the fin de siècle,

it is unfortunate that in past times women's education and training has been so frivolous and absurd as to inevitably produce rather contemptible creatures in the vast majority of cases. You may be happy that you are young in an age which is becoming more enlightened as to women's true place and work in the world.¹

At the beginning of his writing, career, the novelist was already expressing progressive opinions on the topical question of women's work. By endorsing the need for education and training, he set an agenda for fiction which would interrogate the familiar Victorian theme of 'women's true place' from a fresh, alternative perspective. Rhoda Nunn's often-quoted contention in Gissing's most famous novel, The Odd Women (1893), that 'When one woman vanishes in matrimony, the reserve offers a substitute for the world's work' (p. 37)² could be taken as an apposite summary of the divergent paths taken by his various independent heroines; whilst the majority either chafe against or resign themselves to the restrictions of domesticity, a significant number capitalise on their single status to achieve the liberty guaranteed by paid employment. By the early 1890s the female desire for greater economic independence, produced by the lack of financial support available from fathers and the increasing surplus of single women, ensured that more women than ever before felt compelled to enter the labour market According to an 1894 article on 'Women's Work: its Value and Possibilities' in the Girl's Own Paper, 'the woman who works ... is nowadays held more admirable than she, who ... spends her days in domesticity, or profitless self-occupation ... commercially and artistically the woman of this end of the century has the world at her feet'.³ Carving out a new place for the working woman in urban culture, Gissing's novels 'incorporate the full scope of women's work',⁴ from prostitutes, bar-maids and actresses to industrial workers such as factory-girls and seamstresses to those working in the new professions, including shop-girls, clerks, doctors, business women and journalists. More recently, David Kramer has attested that 'his texts are historically accurate portrayals of a developing, but still vastly unequal, labour market', addressing 'the complex reality of a changing work world for English women at the end of the nineteenth century'.⁵

This commitment to accuracy was shared by the social investigators, who addressed similar concerns in their statistical studies of women's living and working conditions in the major cities. This study sets out to compare representations of the working woman in Gissing's fiction and in investigatory discourses such as government reports, periodical articles and feminist pamphlets in order to highlight common narratives about the freedoms and dangers facing the woman worker, and the value and possibilities of her labour, in the two accounts. Barbara Harrison has charted the process by which 'women at work', as well as the nature of that work, became a social problem at the turn of the century: 'whether it was by choice or necessity, women's participation in the public domain of paid work, even when that work was done in the home, threatened the social and moral order'.⁶ But the threatening figure of the working woman was not unique to Gissing's writing - she was widely used by naturalist and New Woman novelists to symbolise both the possibilities and the risks of the newly commercialised urban culture. This book is not then limited to readings of Gissing's narratives as it also examines general shifts in the representation of the working heroine across naturalist and New Woman fiction. Cross-referencing the dominant fictional trends and paradigms in other contemporary genres enables an identification of possible influences on the author whilst locating his work in the wider context of the fin-de-siècle literary marketplace. Feminist historians have alerted us to the ambiguities of the balance between work and leisure in women's lives, indicating that a consideration of female employment should also take account of after-work behaviour and the ways in which it is financed.⁷ Rather than confining my analysis to an examination of femininity in the workplace, I have followed feminist historians in adopting a broader view of women's work cultures in this period by also considering the woman worker's leisure activities, accommodation and, if married or widowed, her child care arrangements. A full picture of the 'new urban female style of "being at home" in the city' highlighted by Judith Walkowitz⁸ only becomes apparent through an examination of women's experiences of both labour and leisure in relation to class differences. At a time when both gendered identities and the parameters of women's work were still very much 'matters for negotiation', Gissing's systematic and wide-ranging dramatisation of 'the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions that the woman worker embodied'⁹ made an important contribution to late-Victorian debates about new female lifestyles and women's 'restricted access to the public life of the city compared to men'.¹⁰

Feminist Social Investigation

Gissing's intervention in debates about women's work came at a 'timely moment', when 'the public mind had become agitated on the subject of women's labour'.¹¹ From the 1880s onwards a new generation o f female social investigators, including Clara Collet, Eliza Orme and Clementina Black, dedicated themselves to exploring the working conditions of women across the range of occupations and campaigning for their improvement, not only in well-established workplaces such as factories and mills but in the new shops and offices and in industries carried out in the home. Collet, who was to become one of Gissing's closest friends, served her apprenticeship as a researcher for Charles Booth for 'The Trades of East London' in The Life and Labour of the People of London (1889) and as an Assistant Commissioner for the Royal Commission on Labour in 1892, before beginning employment as Labour Correspondent for the Civil Service at the Board of Trade in 1893, a highly unusual and well-paid job for a Victorian woman.¹² Like the aspiring urban novelist, the social investigators sought to observe and classify the occupations, lifestyles, health and morality of the urban poor, their middle-class viewpoints inevitably colouring their judgements to varying degrees. Their research and its ramifications raised a series of key questions about social status and gendered behaviour in the public sphere: what factors affected women workers' entry into the labour market and choice of occupation? Where did they live and what forms of entertainment did they spend their wages on? Was it possible or desirable to combine work with marriage and child care? Moreover, their observations did not remain limited to working-class conditions, as increasingly by the 1890s both novelists and investigators turned their attention to the lifestyles of self-supporting middle-class women, those 'poor ladies' forced into the labour market for the first time with minimal education or training. In an 1888 article on 'Woman in the Labour Market', Christina Bremner validated woman's right to labour whatever her social position, but tempered the potentially radical claim that it was in everyone's interests 'that women shall work where necessary or desirable, and receive the full value of their labour' with the disclaimer that equally 'women shall remain in the home where necessary or desirable', inadvertently reinforcing the domestic ideal.¹³ The desirability and necessity of paid work for educated ladies, at a premium around the turn of the century, partly testified to their revolt against the domestic space and the role it enforced, at a time when all women faced charges of 'unsexing' by choosing to earn a living in the male-dominated public sphere. The growth of feminist campaigning and trade unionism in this period, combined with the publication of reports, pamphlets and women's periodicals, in which 'no section is more really important than that which deals with women's employment, giving descriptions, suggestions, advice',¹⁴ were instrumental in mapping the evolution of the modern working woman.

The uncertain social status of the woman worker identified by the investigators was the product of large-scale shifts in women's education, vocational training and employment associated with the rise of the New Woman. Definitions of the working woman were broadening in relation to changes in female employment patterns; the working lady was no longer a contradiction in terms but a new social phenomenon, emblematic of rapid developments in late-nineteenth-century urban culture. Similarly, those employed in industry and semi-skilled occupations were staking a claim to new liberties on the streets and in urban spaces, setting an example to be adopted by professional middle-class women. As Clementina Black argued in 1889, 'the need of earning money has compelled them to become free, and has compelled the world to recognise their freedom ... the fact that some women, because they have to work, have to live alone and to go about alone at all hours, has made it possible for all women to do so'. More thorough training has enabled them to become 'better fitted to control their own lives'.¹⁵ The freedom to 'go about' in the city guaranteed by economic independence was therefore made available to those from different class backgrounds, an argument for the revision of critical views of the New Woman as exclusively middle-class. But class difference was often also elided in women's struggles for autonomy in the labour market. As Philippa Levine has claimed in her discussion of feminist campaigns around female labour, the problems facing working-class women in industrial England were, in some ways, not as far removed from the needs of their middle-class sisters as we tend to imagine'.¹⁶ The old divisions between the working-class woman and the middle-class woman, reliant on the lady's exclusion from the world of work, had to be rejected as increasingly out of date. Deborah Epstein Nord has noted the tendency of female social investigators such as Collet to bring both lower-middle-class and working-class women, 'working women of a variety of nuanced class differences' into the same discussion, as 'shifts in middle-class women's lives at the end of the century made possible this perception of an unbroken continuum of women's work and experience'.¹⁷ Whereas factory girls certainly had different priorities to office workers or aspiring female doctors, they clearly shared a set of concerns about unequal pay, potential discrimination or harassment, and their restricted access to the public sphere. These shifts in class boundaries appealed to an author with an enduring interest in the 'unclassed', who, like fellow novelist Thomas Hardy, repeatedly chose to focus on characters stranded between social groups because of changes in status, education or lifestyle. Arlene Young has suggested that the author empathised with such characters because he used them to dramatise his own lower-middle-class discontents and marginality, as he too struggled to assert his place in the new commercial culture.¹⁸

A focus on Gissing's interest in social investigation and its conclusions also demands an examination of his close friendship with Clara Collet and the relevance of their exchange of materials to an understanding of their divergent accounts of female labour. As an early admirer of Gissing's work, Collet had praised his 'accurate and deep knowledge of working class life' in the 1880s fiction in a lecture to the Ethical Society in 1891,¹⁹ and then set out to engineer a meeting with a man whose interests and situation clearly overlapped with her own investigatory concerns. The dynamic of 'pecuniary struggle' which energised Gissing's writing according to Collet²⁰ was especially resonant for the underpaid women she interviewed, who, like his self-supporting heroines, were confined by their limited spending power in a culture organised around men. Similarly, the author evidently envied the independence of the investigator, pronouncing her 'the sole and single person of my acquaintance who is living a healthy, active life, of large intercourse w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Index