Margaret Harkness: Writing social engagement 1880–1921 9781526123510

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Flore Janssen is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London Lisa C. Robertson is a Post-Doctoral Associate at t he University of Warwick

Cover image: ‘Miss M. E. Harkness’, John Law. Engraving from The Queen: The Lady’s Magazine, 31 May 1890. (c) British Library Board, General Reference Collection 1864–1922 Microform. MFM.MLD45

Writing social engagement 1880–1921

Janssen and Robertson (eds)

The critical essays in this collection range from new considerations of Harkness’s well-known novels to examinations of her lesser-known periodical fiction and journalism, her relationship with contemporaries such as Olive Schreiner and W. T. Stead, and her time abroad in Australia and India. Its multidisciplinary approach brings together the work of leading scholars of nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and political criticism, and gives substance to women’s social engagement and political involvement in a socially turbulent period that saw significant developments in political and literary practice as activists and writers sought to address the conditions of the working poor. Indispensable for any student of London literature, and relevant to researchers of social, political, and literary history, this volume enriches critical understanding of the complex and dynamic world of the long nineteenth century.

Margaret Harkness

This is the first book to bring together research on the life and work of Margaret Harkness; a writer, activist, and traveller at the forefront of literary innovation and social change at the turn of the twentieth century. Fusing recently uncovered biographical information with rich contextual detail, it illuminates the extensive career of a writer committed to exposing the exploitation of individuals and the plight of marginalised communities worldwide.

Margaret Harkness

ISBN 978-1-5261-2350-3

9 781526 123503 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Edited by

Flore Janssen • Lisa C. Robertson

Margaret Harkness



Series editors: Anna Barton, Andrew Smith Editorial board: David Amigoni, Isobel Armstrong, Philip Holden, Jerome McGann, Joanne Wilkes, Julia M. Wright Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century seeks to make a significant intervention into the critical narratives that dominate conventional and established understandings of nineteenth-century literature. Informed by the latest developments in criticism and theory, the series provides a focus for how texts from the long nineteenth century, and more recent adaptations of them, revitalise our knowledge of and engagement with the period. It explores the radical possibilities offered by new methods, unexplored contexts and neglected authors and texts to re-map the literary-cultural landscape of the period and rigorously re-imagine its geographical and historical parameters. The series includes monographs, edited collections, and scholarly sourcebooks. Already published Spain in the nineteenth century: New essays on experiences of culture and society   Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction   Helena Ifill Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915: Re-reading the fin de siècle  Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen (eds) Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and afterlives   Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (eds) The Great Exhibition, 1851: A sourcebook   Jonathon Shears (ed.) Interventions: Rethinking the nineteenth century   Andrew Smith and Anna Barton (eds)



Margaret Harkness Writing social engagement 1880–1921

Edited by Flore Janssen and Lisa C. Robertson

Manchester University Press

 Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 1 5261 2350 3  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements x Chronology of Margaret Harkness’s life xi Margaret Harkness’s connections xiv Selected works by Margaret Harkness xv Note on texts cited xix List of abbreviations xxi

Introduction: rethinking Margaret Harkness’s significance in political and literary history Lisa C. Robertson and Flore Janssen

1

Part I: Harkness’s life and work   1

A law unto herself: the solitary odyssey of M. E. Harkness Terry Elkiss

17

  2

Absent character: from Margaret Harkness to John Law Tabitha Sparks

39

Part II: In Harkness’s London   3

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London Nadia Valman

  4

‘The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure’: women and leisure time in A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891) Eliza Cubitt



v

57

74

Contents   5

The vicissitudes of victory: Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), and the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike 91 David Glover

Part III: Harkness and genre: rethinking slum fiction   6   7

Soundscapes of the city in Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1887), Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), and Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel Ruth Livesey



Margaret Harkness, novelist: social semantics and experiments in fiction Lynne Hapgood

  8

‘Connie’: melodrama and Tory socialism Deborah Mutch

111 130 147

Part IV: Personal influences: Harkness and her contemporaries   9 10

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery: Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner Angharad Eyre

167

Margaret Harkness, W. T. Stead, and the transatlantic social gospel network Helena Goodwyn

182

Part V: After London: Harkness’s life and work in the twentieth century 11 12

Through the mill: Margaret Harkness on conjectural history and utilitarian philosophy 201 Lisa C. Robertson Lasting ties: Margaret Harkness, the Salvation Army, and A Curate’s Promise (1921) Flore Janssen

218

Index234 vi

Notes on contributors

Notes on contributors

Eliza Cubitt received her BA and MA in English from King’s College London and was awarded a PhD from UCL in 2016. She has taught at University College London and at Tübingen University. She has written about gossip in works by Arthur Morrison and W. Somerset Maugham in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (No. 18, 2014). Her first monograph, on Arthur Morrison and the East End, is due for publication with Routledge in late 2018. Terry Elkiss, who retired after many years as senior editor and consulting historian at an American academic publisher, also taught history at Kalamazoo College and Michigan State University. His extensive fieldwork and archival research in African, Portuguese, and British Imperial history resulted in a number of publications, including a monograph, The Quest for an African Eldorado (1981). Most recently, he has focused on uncovering and presenting the life of the activist author and world traveller Margaret Elise Harkness, a subject on which he has presented various papers and the topic of his continuing research and writing. Angharad Eyre is an early-career researcher and teaching associate at Queen Mary, University of London. Her PhD focused on the significance of the female missionary for nineteenth-century women writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Olive Schreiner, and Margaret Harkness. Following her PhD she co-edited a special issue of Women’s History Review which focused on late nineteenth-century women’s lifewriting about love, sexuality, and religion, and which was republished in March 2017 by Routledge as Love, Desire, and Melancholy: Inspired by Constance Maynard (1849–1935). She is currently a collaborating editor of a new historical resource for Routledge, entitled Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society. vii

Notes on contributors David Glover is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His publications include Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (1996), Genders (2000, 2009, with Cora Kaplan), and Literature, Immigration and Diaspora in Fin de Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act (2012). He co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction (2012) with Scott McCracken. Helena Goodwyn is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at The University of St. Andrew’s. She has research interests in British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, book and media history, and women’s literature. She is co-author (with Emily Hogg) of ‘Room for Confidence: Early Career Feminists in the English Department’, in Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges (2016). She has also published on Kate Chopin and W. T. Stead. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Americanization of W. T. Stead. Lynne Hapgood recently retired from Nottingham Trent University where she was Head of the English Department. She has contributed to journals and collections on politics and fiction in the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century city and co-edited Outside Modernism 1900– 1930 (2000). Her Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1925 (2005) broke new ground in its investigation of suburban reading and writing, a theme she continues to research through the figure of the clerk in popular and literary fiction. She is currently completing a memoir about her father, the Arsenal and England footballer Eddie Hapgood, and the making of legends in professional sport. Flore Janssen is currently completing a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. Her thesis examines women’s writing, work, and activism through the work of Margaret Harkness and Clementina Black. Ruth Livesey is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in NineteenthCentury British Literature (2016) and Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1819 (2007), in addition to articles and chapters on late nineteenth-century social investigation. She is the coeditor of The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in Britain (2013), and was until recently an editor of Journal of Victorian Culture. viii

Notes on contributors Deborah Mutch is Reader at De Montfort University, Leicester. Her field of research focuses on the fiction written and published by the members of the British socialist movement between 1880 and 1914. She has published articles in journals such as Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Studies, and Nineteenth Century Studies, and her most recent book is an edited edition of Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl published by Victorian Secrets. Lisa C. Robertson is a Post-Doctoral Associate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her current manuscript project, Housing Crisis: Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century London, evaluates the ways that the literary representation of new urban housing projects served to complicate definitions of home and identity in the metropolis. Together, Janssen and Robertson also edit the Harkives, an open access online repository of sources on and by Harkness. Tabitha Sparks is Associate Professor at McGill University in Montreal. Her research interests centre on the nineteenth-century novel, literature and medicine, and narrative theory. Her book Family Practices: Doctors and Marriage in the Victorian Novel was published in 2009. Nadia Valman is Reader in English Literature at Queen Mary, University of London and researches the cultural history of the East End. Recent publications include ‘Revisiting the Victorian East End’, a co-edited issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, and essays on the Victorian British-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill and on the East End in twentieth-century British-Jewish literature. She is also the author of the walking tour app, Zangwill’s Spitalfields (2016).

ix

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

This project might never have been begun, and would certainly not have culminated in the present volume, without the support of Terry Elkiss. His generosity and enthusiasm in sharing his knowledge on the elusive subject of Margaret Harkness has been instrumental in the development of this collection, and we cannot thank him enough for his help and encouragement. Many thanks go to all our contributors for their thoughtful, insightful, and enthusiastic participation throughout this project. Several other researchers have provided us all with the benefit of their expertise, which has been invaluable in focusing our perspectives and developing our ideas: particular thanks are due to Matthew Ingleby, Sarah Wise, Kate Newey, Carolyn Burdett, Maria Damkjaer, and Andrew Whitehead. We also owe a large debt of gratitude to the ‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’ series editors, Anna Barton and Andrew Smith, and many others at MUP, for their support and patience. We would also like to thank the British Association for Victorian Studies and Birkbeck College for facilitating, supporting, and hosting the ‘In Harkness’ London’ symposium in 2014, from which the present publication developed.

x

Chronology of Margaret Harkness’s life

Chronology of Margaret Harkness’s life

1854 – Margaret Elise Harkness born on 28 February in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, the second of five children. 1865 – Harkness family moves to Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. 1875 – Harkness attends Stirling House finishing school, Bournemouth, with her second cousin Beatrice Potter. 1877 – Harkness begins nursing training at Westminster Hospital, London. 1878 – Harkness trains as a dispenser at Guy’s Hospital, London. 1880 – Harkness receives her Reader Pass for the British Museum Reading Room. 1881 – ‘Women as Civil Servants’ published in the Nineteenth Century. 1882 – Harkness begins to lecture on Assyrian history at the British Museum. 1883 – Assyrian Life and History published, with an introduction by R. Stuart Poole. 1884 – Harkness resides in Berlin to improve her German. Egyptian Life and History according to the Monuments published. Harkness probably receives financial support from the Potter family to develop her writing career. Harkness possibly accompanies Potter on a trip to Bavaria. 1886 – Harkness takes a room in Katharine Buildings, Aldgate. Harkness is introduced to the work of the Salvation Army by Captain David Leib. ‘Black Monday’ takes place in the West End of London, 8 February. 1887 – A City Girl published by Vizetelly & Co. Harkness is involved with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and contributes to its periodical, Justice. xi

Chronology of Margaret Harkness’s life

Harkness visits colliers’ meetings in Ayrshire with James Keir Hardie. ‘Bloody Sunday’ takes place in Trafalgar Square, 13  November. 1888 – Out of Work published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Harkness corresponds with Friedrich Engels about the merits of A City Girl as a socialist text. ‘Tempted London: Young Women’ and ‘Captain Lobe: A Story of the East End’ printed in the British Weekly. Harkness breaks with the circle around Engels and Eleanor Marx and resigns from the SDF. James Keir Hardie contests Mid-Lanark by-election; ‘Tory Gold Scandal’ develops over funding for the campaign. 1889 – Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army and Toilers in London published by Hodder & Stoughton. Harkness resides in Manchester and collects information for the British Weekly’s ‘Life in Lancashire’ series and A Manchester Shirtmaker. A libel suit is threatened over the publication of Captain Lobe. Harkness returns to London on the commencement of the Dockworkers’ Strike and is actively involved in the strike. She appeals to Cardinal Manning to act as a mediator in the conflict. London Dockworkers’ Strike, 14 August–16 September. 1890 – A Manchester Shirtmaker published and A City Girl reissued by the Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. Harkness travels to Germany and Austria, and embarks on her travels to the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. Australian Maritime Strike, 15 August–November. 1891 – Harkness returns to Britain after her journey around the world. Captain Lobe reissued by William Reeves as In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe, with an introduction by General William Booth. Reeves also advertises A City Girl and Out of Work. ‘Roses and Crucifix’ begins its run in the Woman’s Herald. 1892 – Harkness edits and apparently assumes ownership of the Novel Review, previously Tinsley’s Magazine. Harkness visits Hadleigh Farm, the Salvation Army labour colony, with G. B. Shaw, Tom Mann, and others. ‘Roses and Crucifix’ completed. xii

Chronology of Margaret Harkness’s life Death of Cardinal Manning on 14 January. John Burns is elected as MP for Battersea. 1893 – In Darkest London reprinted by Reeves. ‘Connie’ begins its run in the Labour Elector. Independent Labour Party founded. ‘New Australia’ settlement established in Paraguay on 28 September. 1894 – ‘Connie’ abandoned when the Labour Elector folds. Harkness travels to Australia to report back from the Pitt Town Co-operative Labour Settlement. She remains in Australia and settles in Coolgardie. 1895 – Harkness reportedly refuses a marriage proposal from H. H. Champion. 1897 – ‘Called to the Bar: A Coolgardie Novel’ serialised in the Western Mail. 1899 – Imperial Credit published independently and printed by Vardon and Pritchard. South African War commences, lasting until 1902. 1903 – Harkness moves to Perth and begins a regular column for the West Australian. 1905 – Harkness returns to London temporarily. George Eastmont: Wanderer published by Burns & Oates. Harkness travels to India as a foreign correspondent for the West Australian and visits Ceylon (Sri Lanka). 1909 – Glimpses of Hidden India published by Thacker, Spink & Co. 1912 – Indian Snapshots published by Thacker, Spink & Co. 1913 – The Horoscope published by Thacker, Spink & Co. 1914 – Modern Hyderabad published by Thacker, Spink & Co. Harkness probably returns to Britain. First World War commences on 28 July, lasting until 11 November 1918. 1915 – The Horoscope reprinted by W. Thacker & Co. Captain Lobe reprinted by Hodder & Stoughton. 1916 – Death of Harkness’s mother, Elizabeth Seddon Tosswill. Harkness had nursed her until her death. 1921 – A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks published by Hodder & Stoughton. 1923 – Harkness dies in Florence on 10 December. 1925 – Captain Lobe reprinted by Hodder & Stoughton. xiii

Margaret Harkness’s connections

Margaret Harkness’s connections

Family

Britain Richard Potter Germany

Literary

Britain

Karl Wilhelm Eichhoff William Swann Sonnenschein William Reeves James B. Pinker Henry Vizetelly

Annie Besant Beatrice Potter Webb Ben Tillet Carl Schorlemmer Clementina Black Eduard & Regina Bernstein Edward Aveling Eleanor Marx Friedrich Engels Graham Wallas H. H. Champion H. M. Hyndman James Keir Hardie John Burns Leonard Courtney Michael Maltman Barry Olive Schreiner Robert & Gabriela Cunninghame Graham Sergei Stepniak

Australia

J. W. Hackett F. C. S. Vosper William Booth Katherine Potter David Leib

Margaret Harkness

Activist Britain

Charles Booth Cardinal Manning Bramwell Booth R.Stuart Poole

Professional Britain

E. Maunde Thompson Arabella Buckley Fisher

Britain

Political

Austria France

Tom Mann Vaughan Nash W. T. Stead

Victor Adler Laura Marx Lafargue

Australia

Michael Davitt Henry Parkes

Germany

August Bebel Karl Liebknecht

Dendrogram of Margaret Harkness’s personal connections

xiv

Selected works by Margaret Harkness

Selected works by Margaret Harkness

Fiction (including experimental writing)

John Law (1887). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Vizetelly & Co. Reprinted (1890). London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Co. John Law (1888). Out of Work. Swan Sonnenschein & Co. John Law (1888). ‘Captain Lobe: A Story of the East End’. British Weekly, 6 April–14 December. Reprinted (1889; 1915; 1925). Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Reprinted (1891; 1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe. Bellamy Library 8. London: W. Reeves. With an introduction by William Booth. John Law (1888). ‘The Gospel of Getting On. (To Olive Schreiner)’. To-day: A Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism. John Law (1889). ‘A Pantomime Child’. British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress, 27 December. John Law (1890). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Co. John Law (1890). ‘His First Day’s Wages’. Pall Mall Gazette, 13 September. Reprinted (1890). Sydney Mail, 13 December. John Law (1890). ‘Little Tim’s Christmas’. Pall Mall Gazette, 24 December. Reprinted (1891). Daily Telegraph Supplement, 16 May. John Law (1891–92). ‘Roses and Crucifix’. Woman’s Herald, 5 December–27 February. John Law (1893–94). ‘Connie’. Labour Elector, June–January. John Law (1897). ‘Called to the Bar: A Coolgardie Novel’, Western Mail 30 July–24 September. John Law (1900). ‘Ideals’. Southern Cross, 20 April. xv

Selected works by Margaret Harkness John Law (1903). ‘Two Christmases’. West Australian, 25 December. John Law (1904). ‘A Leap Year Story’. West Australian, 27 February. John Law (1904). ‘A Bush Drama. An Irony of Fate’. West Australian, 13 August. Reprinted (1904). Evening Star, 16 August. John Law (1905). George Eastmont: Wanderer. London: Burns & Oates. John Law (1913; 1915). The Horoscope. Calcutta, Simla, and London: Thacker, Spink & Co. John Law (1921). A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Non-fiction (including journalism)

Margaret E. Harkness (1881). ‘Women as Civil Servants’. Nineteenth Century, September. Margaret E. Harkness (1882). ‘Railway Labour’. Nineteenth Century, November. Margaret E. Harkness (1883). ‘The Municipality of London’. National Review, May, September. Margaret Elise Harkness (1883). Assyrian Life and History. London: Religious Tract Society. With an introduction by R. Stuart Poole. M. E. H. (1884). ‘Hospital Nurses’. Leisure Hour: An Illustrated Magazine for Home Reading (33). 152–54. Margaret Elise Harkness (1884). Egyptian Life and History according to the Monuments. London: Religious Tract Society. Margaret E. Harkness (1888). ‘Girl Labour in the City’. Justice, 3 March. Margaret E. Harkness (1888). ‘Salvationists and Socialists’. Justice, 24 March. Unsigned, ed. by Harkness (1888). ‘Tempted London: Young Women’. British Weekly, 27 April–28 December. Reprinted: ‘ “British Weekly” Commissioners’, ed. by ‘the Author of “Out of Work,” etc.’ (1889). Toilers in London, or: Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Margaret E. Harkness (1888). ‘Home Industries’. Justice, 28 August. John Law (1889). ‘A Reflection’. Justice, 20 April. Anon. (1889). ‘Life in Lancashire’. British Weekly, 10 May–7 June[?]. John Law (1889). ‘To the Editor of the Daily News’. Daily News, 23 August. John Law (1889). ‘The Strike of the London Dock Labourers’. Labour Elector, 31 August. xvi

Selected works by Margaret Harkness John Law (1889). ‘The Dockers’ “Tanner”’. British Weekly, 6 September. John Law (1889). ‘The Strike Continues’. British Weekly, 13 September. John Law (1889). ‘The Loafer. What Shall We Do with Him’. Labour Elector, 21 September. Margaret G. [sic] Harkness (1890). ‘The Future of the Labour Party’. Pall Mall Gazette, 7 March. Reprinted (1890). Labour Elector, 15 March. Unsigned (1890). ‘The Emperor and the Socialists. An Interview with Herr Bebel’. Pall Mall Gazette, 23 June. Unsigned (1890). ‘The Socialist Movement in Austria. An Interview with Dr. Victor Adler’. Pall Mall Gazette, 28 August. J. L. (1890). ‘The Loafer in Germany’. Pall Mall Gazette, 9 September. J. L. (1890). ‘The Viennese Pauper’. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 September. John Law (1890). ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In Praise of General Booth’. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October. ‘One who Knows “John Law” ’ (1890). ‘ “Salvation” and Socialism’. Pall Mall Gazette, 29 October. J. L. (1891). ‘Labour Leaders’. Pall Mall Gazette, 10 January–18 February [4 parts]. John Law (1891). ‘Princess Christian and “Captain Lobe” ’. Pall Mall Gazette, 2 March. John Law (1891). ‘John Law’s Religion’. Pall Mall Gazette, 1 September. John Law (1891). ‘A Year of My Life’. New Review, October. John Law (1892). ‘The Cardinal as I Knew Him’. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 January. John Law (1892). ‘Olive Schreiner’. Novel Review, May. John Law (1893). ‘The Children of the Unemployed’. New Review, February. John Law (1894). ‘A Week on a Labour Settlement’. Fortnightly Review, 1 August. John Law (1899). Imperial Credit. Adelaide: Privately published, printed by Vardon and Pritchard. John Law (1903–4). ‘The Passing Hour’. West Australian, 21 March–20 August [61 articles]. John Law (1904–5). ‘London Letter’. West Australian, 3 November–14 March [6 articles]. John Law (1905). ‘The Labour Colony in Essex’, Western Mail, 10 February. John Law (1905). ‘Ceylon as a Holiday Resort for Australians’. West Australian, 9 June–8 August [9 parts]. xvii

Selected works by Margaret Harkness John Law (1906). ‘Impressions of India’. West Australian, 10 March. John Law (1906). ‘Buddhism’. West Australian, 17 March–19 April [5 parts]. John Law (1906). ‘The Theosophical Headquarters at Adyar’. West Australian, 9 July. John Law (1907). ‘The Indian National Congress’. West Australian, 5 February. John Law (1907). ‘The Theosophical Convention at Adyar’. West Australian, 16 February. John Law (1907). ‘A Letter from India’. West Australian, 20 March–27 May [2 parts]. John Law (1909). Glimpses of Hidden India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. John Law (1912). Indian Snapshots. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. John Law (1914). Modern Hyderabad. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co.

xviii

Note on texts cited

Note on texts cited

Various editions of Harkness’s work were available during her own lifetime, as her published work was revised and reissued on her own initiative and that of her various publishers. A City Girl was first published by Vizetelly and Co. in 1887, and then reissued by the Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company in 1890, alongside A Manchester Shirtmaker. ‘Captain Lobe’ first appeared as a serial story in the British Weekly in 1888; a revised version of the text was published in book form as Captain Lobe by Hodder & Stoughton in 1889. The popular novel was reprinted by William Reeves as part of the Bellamy Library in 1891 and 1893 under the new title In Darkest London. The original Hodder & Stoughton edition of 1889 was reprinted in 1915 and 1925. Her travelogue Glimpses of Hidden India (1909) was revised and republished as Indian Snapshots in 1912. After the 1920s, however, her work remained out of print for several decades. The recent revival of interest in Harkness’s work has owed much to the publication of a range of modern editions of the novels she published between 1887 and 1890. These include editions of A City Girl (1887) edited by Deborah Mutch (Victorian Secrets, 2015) and Tabitha Sparks (Broadview, 2017); Out of Work (1888), introduced by Bernadette Kirwan (Merlin, 1990); In Darkest London (1891), introduced by R. A. Biderman (Black Apollo, 2003; 2009); and A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890), introduced by Trefor Thomas (Northern Herald, 2002). For the purposes of this volume, references have been standardised to original editions of Harkness’s work. Where possible, we have used the second edition of A City Girl (Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Co., 1890), the first edition of Out of Work (Swan Sonnenchein, 1888), and the second edition of In Darkest London (Reeves, 1893), as copies of these editions are currently available online from the British Library. Where contributors have referred to the original edition of A City Girl (Vizetelly, xix

Note on texts cited 1887) or Captain Lobe (Hodder & Stoughton, 1889), these references have been retained for accuracy.

xx

Abbreviations

Abbreviations

BL BLPES BM BMCA DHC HHC IISH LMU NADP NLS NUCDMLSC SDF TCDL UCTMA URSC

British Library British Library of Political and Economic Science British Museum British Museum Central Archive Dorset History Centre Hull History Centre International Institute of Social History London Metropolitan University National Archives Depot, Pretoria National Library of Scotland Northwestern University, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections Social Democratic Federation Trinity College Dublin Library University of Cape Town, Manuscript and Archives University of Reading, Special Collections

xxi

Introduction

••

Introduction: rethinking Margaret Harkness’s significance in political and literary history Lisa C. Robertson and Flore Janssen

For most of the twentieth century, Margaret Harkness (1854–1923) was known almost exclusively as the recipient of a letter written by Friedrich Engels in which he expounds his definition of literary realism. Since the 1990s, however, Harkness has been in receipt of increasing critical and popular interest, most of which has been dedicated to her late nineteenth-century novels of life in working poverty in London. Owing to her astute observations of and engagement with the lives of the urban poor, novels such as Out of Work (1888) and In Darkest London (1891; first published as Captain Lobe in 1889) have enriched considerations of the political and social complexities of the late nineteenth century, and have animated studies of the emergence of socialist and labour politics. Yet Harkness and her work remain obscure, and the extent of her accomplishments and interests is only now beginning to receive adequate attention. In fact, at the time of writing the introduction to this volume, many new and enlightening – and often unusual – discoveries are being made by its contributors. From the emergence of works of fiction on unconventional subjects – such as ‘Called to the Bar’ (1897), a novella written while Harkness was living in Western Australia and recently unearthed by Terry Elkiss – to the appearance of a number of translations in various European languages that attest to Harkness’s international reputation, this new historical material helps to illuminate the life and career of a perennially fascinating and very active woman. It is no surprise, then, that the critical landscape surrounding her is an equally dynamic field: important work is currently being conducted by established scholars and 1

Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement new researchers, and we are delighted to include the efforts of many of them in this collection. While one purpose of the present volume is to collate current scholarship on Harkness and her work and to situate it within the critical debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an equally important aim is to open up avenues for further enquiry. This is the first collection to bring together research on the life and work of author and activist Margaret Harkness, and we hope more will follow as scholarship expands.

Harkness and her work

The research currently being carried out by contributors to this volume has helped to piece together Harkness’s life and career, many aspects of which remain shrouded in mystery. Her death certificate, discovered by Irene Snatt in the 1980s, confirms that she died on 10 December 1923 at the Pensione Castagnoli in Florence; she was buried the following day at the local Allori Cemetery in a ‘tomba di seconda classe’. Her death certificate refers to her simply as a ‘spinster of independent means’ (HHC, U DLB/8/19, 13 May 1987). Yet this simple description masks the complexities of her social, economic, and professional identities. Although Harkness’s father was an Anglican clergyman, and her family was solidly middle class, she was denied financial support as a consequence of her decision not to marry, and her career reflects her pursuit of an independent income. In 1877 she moved to London in order to train as a nurse at Westminster Hospital, and later undertook training as a nursing dispenser at the Apothecaries’ Hall. Yet, not long after accepting a post at Guy’s Hospital she determined that it was a career unsuited to her, and turned to writing (BLPES, Passfield Papers 2/1/2/2, c. 1878).1 While living in London, Harkness may have shared accommodation for a short time with Beatrice Potter (later Webb), a second cousin, and together both women developed friendships with a circle of intellectuals based around the British Museum Reading Room, including such famous contemporaries as Olive Schreiner and Eleanor Marx, who shared Harkness’s interest in social and political questions. During the early 1880s, while living opposite the British Museum in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, Harkness produced a number of articles on subjects related to labour and economic issues for a wide range of prominent periodicals, including the Nineteenth Century and the National Review. Later in the decade, she would also begin to publish 2

Introduction regularly in socialist periodicals such as Justice and To-day, using both her own name and the pseudonym ‘John Law’. Harkness’s first novel, A City Girl: A Realistic Story, was published in 1887. The story of cross-class seduction, abandonment, and unmarried motherhood was described by Engels as reflecting ‘realistic truth’ and exhibiting ‘the courage of the true artist’ (Engels, 1974: 115). A series of novels engaging with the lives of the working poor followed this first effort. Each of these novels offered a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of urban poverty during a period of financial crisis and labour unrest, often also including other marginalised groups such as immigrant and religious communities. Out of Work (1888) presented readers with an image of unemployment during the year of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and the Trafalgar Square Riots. Also in 1888, Harkness published the serial story ‘Captain Lobe’, which explored the relationship between the practices and philosophy of socialism and the Salvation Army, in the Christian progressive British Weekly. An edited version of the story was published in book form in 1889; it was reprinted in 1891 as In Darkest London, with an introduction by ‘General’ William Booth of the Salvation Army, and included in William Reeves’s ‘Bellamy Library’. Her 1890 novel A Manchester Shirtmaker delved into questions of sweated labour and workers’ unity. During this time Harkness also published a number of short stories and serialised novels in periodicals, and while the subjects and settings are often varied, the treatment of contemporary social and political concerns remains constant. Following a precedent established by Charles Dickens, Harkness published short stories for Christmas editions of periodicals, such as ‘A Pantomime Child’ (1889), published in the British Weekly, and ‘Little Tim’s Christmas’ (1890a), published in the Pall Mall Gazette, which foreground concerns about the broader social consequences of poverty and under-employment. In the early 1890s she also published serial stories in periodicals associated with radical politics, through which she explored the connections between sexual and labour exploitation: ‘Roses and Crucifix’ (1891–92), in the feminist Woman’s Herald, told the story of a young female bar worker, while ‘Connie’ (1893–94), published in the Labour Elector under the editorship of Harkness’s political associate H. H. Champion, followed a young actress who loses her job when she resists the advances of her employer. The themes of Harkness’s writing are perhaps not surprising, given her personal commitments: she was for a time a member of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), worked on the 1888 election campaign for Scottish socialist and Independent Labour Party leader James Keir 3

Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement Hardie, supported the Matchwomen’s Strike of 1888, actively participated in the Dockworkers’ Strike of 1889, and travelled to Germany, Austria, New Zealand, Australia, India, Ceylon, and even, purportedly, the United States, for the purpose of investigating the international political situation. During the mid-1890s Harkness relocated semi-permanently to Australia and continued her prolific writing career in the Australian press, contributing journalism and serial fiction to the Western Mail and the West Australian. However, she remained preoccupied with the social issues that had formed the basis of her work in Britain. Her 1899 pamphlet Imperial Credit explained her position on British labour politics, and her 1905 novel George Eastmont, Wanderer offered her retrospective of the Dockworkers’ Strike of 1889. However, new impressions also made their way into her work: many of her publications in the Australian press discuss contemporary conditions and politics in various Australian regions. Her 1897 serial novel ‘Called to the Bar’ was subtitled ‘A Coolgardie Novel’ and was set in the mining town in Western Australia where she was then living. It was as a correspondent for the West Australian that she travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India, where her previous political associate Annie Besant had settled permanently in 1898. She produced three works based on her experiences in India and Ceylon: the travelogue Glimpses of Hidden India (1909; revised and republished as Indian Snapshots in 1912), the novel The Horoscope (1913), set on a plantation in Ceylon, and a study of Modern Hyderabad (1914). For the setting of her last known novel, A Curate’s Promise (1921), Harkness returned to the East End. She now depicted the area that had been the focus of her first novels undergoing the destruction of the First World War, and used this context to revisit the relationship between socialism and religion through the dual perspectives of pacifism and imperialism. It is likely, as research into the life and work of Harkness and her contemporaries moves forward, that the list of her works and catalogue of her interests and accomplishments will continue to expand. In their indication that ambition and engagement often surpassed apparent opportunity, the details of Harkness’s life have the potential to complicate current ideas of women’s limited social position at the turn of the twentieth century.

4

Introduction

Critical context

As Harkness’s personal experiences and political interests touched on numerous contemporary debates, so now does scholarship on Harkness incorporate and – as this collection shows – expand a range of current critical discourses. In the context of the revival of interdisciplinary interest, especially since around 2000, in urban social history, particularly London’s East End during the development of what Stephen Yeo calls the ‘religion of socialism’ (1977), a new investigation of Harkness’s investment in and relevance to such themes will advance these debates more widely. Although much remains to be discovered in regard to the contemporary reception of Harkness’s work, the recognition of her debut novel by Engels, the most famous contemporary socialist, has given her a claim to critical consideration which has been accepted by generations of scholars of Marxist thought on literature. As early as 1959 Peter Demetz’s monumental study of the literary conceptions and influence of Marx and Engels, Marx, Engels and the Poets [Marx, Engels und die Dichter], devoted a section to A City Girl in order to contextualise Engels’s comments on Harkness’s use of realism and her representation of class consciousness in that text. Although Demetz’s reading is restricted to this single novel, and is inclined to be dismissive of it, it confirmed Harkness’s place in a canon of socialist fiction. This recognition prompted a small but significant body of critical work on Harkness, specifically in Germany, offering rigorously historicised readings of her early novels. In his expansive analysis of late-Victorian social writing, Der spätviktorianische Sozialroman von 1880 bis 1890 (1977), Werner G. Urlaub included what remains one of the most detailed examinations of Harkness’s publishing history and the reception of her writing. A close historical examination of Harkness’s life and her first novel followed soon after: Beate Kaspar’s Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1984) offers an impressive range of historical and biographical information, as well as a careful study of A City Girl ’s complex relationship to contemporary literary styles and political ideologies. Kaspar’s study became the basis for an article by Dorothee Beckhoff (1987) which places particular emphasis on the ways in which Harkness’s engagement with literary conventions allowed her to explore the social conditions and class position and consciousness of her protagonists. At the same time, in Norway, an Englishlanguage text was produced that was partly responsible for renewing interest in Harkness in the English-speaking academic community. Gerd Bjørhovde’s Rebellious Structures (1987) posits a holistic analysis of 5

Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement Harkness’s writing project in the broader context of women’s writing at the fin de siècle, considering readership, contemporary attitudes to social class, and the influence of gender on Harkness’s writing and reception. The interest in different European countries in Harkness’s work reflects her transnational reputation as well as the international influences on her political thinking and writing style, which drew inspiration from the naturalist novels of authors like Émile Zola. The 1990s witnessed a wide-ranging revival of interest in Harkness’s work in the English-language academy. Of great value in this process was a new edition of Out of Work (1990), introduced by Bernadette Kirwan, which appeared as part of Merlin Press’s Radical Fiction Series. The broader analysis of Harkness’s writing project was taken up by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who often shared an interest in Harkness’s investment in an analysis of the intersections of gender and social class. To name a few examples: Deborah Epstein Nord’s extended project on women’s networks at the fin de siècle, culminating in the enduringly valuable Walking the Victorian Streets (1995), recognises Harkness’s originality in representing new literary figures in the developing literature of London’s East End; and Sally Ledger, building on Bjørhovde’s work, included Harkness’s first novels and the subjectivity of their protagonists in her study The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (1997). By the end of the decade, entries on Harkness were included in Late Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists (Sypher, 1999) and the Dictionary of Labour Biography (Bellamy and Kaspar, 1987), and gradually information on her life and work became more widely available, creating a fruitful basis for further interest and research. From this time onwards, many of the contributors to the present volume began to engage with the development of Harkness scholarship, each offering original work contextualised within current critical debates. Ruth Livesey developed her initial examination of A City Girl in the context of the political implications of women’s involvement in social work (1999) into a chapter on women’s social investigation and methods of ‘disciplining space’ (2007b: 88). Lynne Hapgood, who had already produced examinations of the role of socialism in the work of female political writers (1990; 1996), contributed a chapter on Harkness to John Stokes’s Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts (2000), in which she considers Harkness’s position against the background of increasing critical interest in London’s East End. David Glover’s study Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England (2012) offers new insight into the social make-up of the communities which 6

Introduction Harkness’s fiction describes. Both independently and taken as a body of foundational research in Harkness scholarship, these scholars’ work has made an important contribution to the present understanding of the socio-political environment in which Harkness worked. Further scholarship by Ellen Ross, whose work on gender ideology in urban working communities in her collection Slum Travelers (2007) has helped to shape a historical image of the environment in which Harkness worked, and Seth Koven, whose study Slumming (2004) revived critical interest in philanthropic work and social research in the late nineteenthcentury East End, has helped to fill in the contextual background of Harkness’s social project. Both Matthew Beaumont (2005) and Ruth Livesey (2007a) have developed scholarly conceptions of the relationships between socialism and feminism during the period, each with explicit and productive reference to Harkness’s life and work. Deborah Mutch (2013) and Rob Breton (2010) have produced innovative readings of Harkness’s relationship to different literary styles and the nature of politically engaged publishing at the end of the nineteenth century. These historical and critical advances form the basis of many of the chapters in this collection, and many are developed further in the chapters of this volume.

Expanding critical categories

Although Harkness has received less critical attention to date than her career warrants, it is clear that her life and work have continued to inspire scholarship for over half a century. As new evidence continues to emerge, new critical perspectives allow for useful reinterpretations of existing information. The myriad different social, political, and historical themes on which Harkness and her work touch continue to push and reform critical boundaries. As early as 1982, John Goode predicted that a more complete profile of Margaret Harkness would be valuable for the many ways it would illuminate the ‘fraught conjecture of radical feminism and socialism’ (Goode, 1982: 52) at the turn of the twentieth century. It is becoming increasingly evident that the study of Harkness’s work will not only contribute important new perspectives on the political and historical origins of working-class politics, the welfare state, and pan-European social movements, but will also help to embroider studies of other critical categories, such as genre analysis and postcolonial studies. The contributions to this volume promise to be of significance in furthering this project. 7

Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement 1880­ –1921 begins by addressing Harkness’s life and work with two contributions that develop current biographical understandings of Harkness’s life. Terry Elkiss’s meticulously researched biographical portrait in chapter 1, ‘A law unto herself: the solitary odyssey of M. E. Harkness’, draws on newly uncovered archival material in order to establish a profile that expands Harkness’s public voice as ‘John Law’. While this volume illuminates Harkness’s own biography, and that of many of her colleagues, friends, and even adversaries, it is committed to exploring the nuances between biography and history, as well as fiction and non-fiction. This concern is central to Tabitha Sparks’s chapter 2, ‘Absent character: from Margaret Harkness to John Law’, which shows how the ‘bio-critical approach’ that has dominated studies of Harkness’s work proves to be incompatible with her own literary objectives. The London location of Harkness’s best-known work strongly influenced both her representations of working poverty and her own thinking in response to the social problems she sought to portray, and in Part II, ‘In Harkness’s London’, three contributors engage with different representations of London life and politics in Harkness’s work. Nadia Valman’s chapter 3, ‘Walking Margaret Harkness’s London’, considers Harkness’s portrayal of multiple viewpoints in one narrative, and her experimentation with formal conventions of fiction to express the perpetually incomplete nature of social struggle. Eliza Cubitt’s chapter 4, ‘The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure: women and leisure time in A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891)’, explores another kind of marginalised experience in the East End: that of women’s leisure activities. Cubitt investigates how Harkness’s representation of a ‘vibrant, noisy East End of London’ contradicts the ‘perceived duality of a nineteenth-century city’ that was thought to contain leisure and labour on opposite poles. David Glover, in chapter 5, ‘The vicissitudes of victory: Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), and the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike’, engages with Harkness’s representation of the labour politics of East London. Glover reads the novel, which documents the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike but expresses doubt about its broader achievements, as a ‘symptom of the difficulties’ Harkness faced as an active participant in that struggle. Harkness’s writing not only offered a fresh perspective on her chosen subject matter, but also pushed the boundaries of literary genre. This collection puts forward three contributors’ enquiries into the imbrication of generic categories in Part III, ‘Harkness and Genre’. In chapter 8

Introduction 6, ‘Soundscapes of the city in Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1887), Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), and the Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel’, Ruth Livesey examines the ‘profound disorientation’ created by Harkness’s representation of character through ‘aural documentary’, and the ways this eschewed the ‘epistemic regimes of the eye’ that dominated naturalist discourse. Lynne Hapgood’s chapter 7, ‘Margaret Harkness, novelist: social semantics and experiments in fiction’, investigates the limitations of the novel form when its project is the representation of working-class characters. In studying the range of contemporary – and often competing – discourses represented in Harkness’s fiction, Hapgood suggests that her novels use affect to communicate to readers the social alienation experienced by their characters. In chapter 8, ‘ “Connie”: melodrama and Tory socialism’, Deborah Mutch explores the ways that Harkness uses the ‘dual lenses’ of melodrama and certain characteristics associated with ‘Tory socialism’ to allow readers to engage with and predict the dramatic conclusion of this unfinished novella. While Harkness’s connections and associates appear throughout this volume, the two chapters in Part IV, ‘Personal influences’, offer a focused examination of the literary and cultural relationship between Harkness and two of her well-known contemporaries. In chapter 9, ‘Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery: Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner’, Angharad Eyre expands earlier studies by scholars such as Epstein Nord to consider afresh the affective relationships and political ambitions of what Epstein Nord describes as networks or communities of independent women (Epstein Nord, 1995: 181). Eyre understands the friendship between Harkness and Schreiner to be one that provoked a shift in Harkness’s fiction, one which moved away from realism and towards a mode of representation punctuated by mystery and allegory to articulate the hope for a better future. In chapter 10, ‘Margaret Harkness, W. T. Stead, and the transatlantic social gospel network’, Helena Goodwyn examines the extent to which both Harkness and Stead made use of the ‘rhetoric of progressive Protestantism’ across the generic categories of their writing: realist fiction, activist journalism, and critical travel writing. In examining the ‘clash between socialist and evangelical rhetoric’ in the context of emerging ‘modern marketing methods’, Goodwyn exposes the problems inherent in labels of ideological inconsistency as applied on gendered terms. Harkness’s work in the twentieth century has still been virtually untouched by scholarship, and in Part V, ‘After London’, this collection 9

Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement suggests some potential avenues for exploration of Harkness’s later work. In chapter 11, ‘Through the mill: Margaret Harkness on conjectural history and utilitarian philosophy’, Lisa C. Robertson evaluates the writing which Harkness produced during her time in the countries that are now India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Robertson argues that Harkness’s work during this period consciously eschews conventional historical methodology and offers an important counter-narrative to colonial history. In chapter 12, ‘Lasting ties: Margaret Harkness, the Salvation Army, and A Curate’s Promise (1921)’, Flore Janssen examines continuity and change in Harkness’s representations of London poverty and the work of the Salvation Army in the 1880s and 1920s, and considers the possibilities explored in Harkness’s final novel of ‘making good’ in a society facing the destruction wrought by the First World War. Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement 1880­–1921 makes a useful companion text to the two new editions of A City Girl that have been published by Victorian Secrets in the United Kingdom, edited by Deborah Mutch (2015), and by Broadview Press in North America, edited by Tabitha Sparks (2017). As these texts begin to appear more frequently on the reading lists of universities and colleges, and encourage a new generation of researchers to re-evaluate existing perceptions of Harkness and her work, the contributions offered by scholars in this volume will provide important groundwork for any study of representations of urban life around the turn of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

Harkness’s work continues to reform critical boundaries and broaden notions of women’s opportunities for professional development and political engagement across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her life and work were guided throughout by her own initiative. Many women involved in late nineteenth-century socialist circles, like Eleanor Marx or Beatrice Potter Webb, benefited from the support of male affiliates and family members, but Harkness appears to have been socially and politically self-reliant. Earning her living by her pen, she was largely economically self-supporting as well. There can be no doubt, furthermore, of the independent spirit required for her numerous global and transcontinental migrations in an era when many women had only recently achieved legal recognition as independent persons, following the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1882. Harkness’s writing offers its own sense of independence. While some scholarship has 10

Introduction designated Harkness’s exploration of ideologies as divergent as socialism and Salvationism as evidence of her inconsistency, it seems, rather, to be the case that each of her novels uses a different narrative voice to explore various subjects, often for diverse audiences. As Harkness writes of her protagonist in George Eastmont, Wanderer, her ‘mental history had been one of continual development’ (Law, 1905: 21), and this development guided her selection and treatment of subjects in fiction and journalism. This volume illuminates new aspects of Harkness’s life and work directly, but also outlines the complex and dynamic world in which she and her contemporaries operated. In compiling this collection we have aimed to present a collation of Harkness scholarship to date, on which our contributors have built in order to offer exciting new insights into a fascinating figure operating at the heart of many contemporary debates that have reverberations even into the present day. In doing so we hope to have laid more solid foundations than have been available to scholars hitherto, upon which may be constructed new critical and historical analyses that we expect to have significant impact not only on the future of Harkness scholarship but on critical conceptions of social and political dynamics at the turn of the twentieth century. In rethinking Harkness’s life and work, we hope the collection will inspire broader rethinking of the critical categories and historical assumptions through which we define the long nineteenth century. We present this volume as an invitation to researchers everywhere to contribute to the development of a richer understanding of Harkness’s life and work as well as to rethink the cultural and political landscape in which she lived.

Note

1 Joyce Bellamy and Beate Kaspar suggest 1881 as the date, on account that it seems to have ‘caused a rift with her family’ (1987: 104).

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1887). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Vizetelly. —— (1888). Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein. —— (1889). ‘A Pantomime Child’. British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress, 27 December.

11

Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement —— (1890a). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. —— (1890b). ‘Little Tim’s Christmas’. Pall Mall Gazette, 24 December. —— (1891). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe. London: Reeves. —— (1891–92). ‘Roses and Crucifix’. Woman’s Herald, 5 December–27 February. —— (1893–94). ‘Connie’. Labour Elector, June-January. —— (1899). Imperial Credit. Adelaide: Vardon and Pritchard. —— (1905). George Eastmont, Wanderer. London: Burns & Oates. —— (1909). Glimpses of Hidden India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. —— (1912). Indian Snapshots. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. —— (1913). The Horoscope. Calcutta, Simla, and London: Thacker, Spink & Co. —— (1914). Modern Hyderabad. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. —— (1921). A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917. London: Hodder & Stoughton. —— (1990). Out of Work. Introduction by Bernardette Kirwan. London: Merlin Press. —— (2015). A City Girl: A Realistic Story [1887]. Ed. Deborah Mutch. Brighton: Victorian Secrets. Harkness, M. (2017). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. Ed. Tabitha Sparks. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Additional works cited Beaumont, M. (2005). Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England, 1870–1900. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Beckhoff, D. (1987). ‘Thomas Martin Wheeler und Margaret E. Harkness: Zwei Wegbereiter des sozialistischen Romans im 19. Jahrhundert’. Radikalismus in Literatur und Gesellschaft des 19. Jarhunderts. Ed. Gregory Claeys and Liselotte Glage. Frankfurt, Bern, New York, and Paris: Peter Lang, pp. 127–43. Bellamy, J. and B. Kaspar (1987). ‘Harkness, Margaret Elise (1854– 1923): Socialist Author and Journalist’. Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. 8. Eds. Joyce Bellamy and John Saville. London: Macmillan. 103–13. Bjørhovde, G. (1987). Rebellious Structures. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Breton, R. (2010). ‘The Sentimental Socialism of Margaret Harkness’. English Language Notes (48.1). 27–39.

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Introduction BLPES (British Library of Political and Economic Science), Passfield Papers 2/1/2/2, Margaret Harkness to Beatrice Potter, n.d. [1878] Demetz, P. (1967). Marx, Engels and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism [Marx, Engels und die Dichter]. Transl. Jeffrey L. Sammons. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Engels, F. (1974). ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York, NY: International General, pp. 115–17. Epstein Nord, D. (1995). Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Glover, D. (2012). Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’. The Socialist Novel in Britain. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester, pp. 45–66. Hapgood, L. (1990). ‘Circe Among Cities: Images of London and the Language of Social Concern 1880–1900’. PhD. University of Warwick. –––– (1996). ‘The Novel and Political Agency: Socialism and the Work of Margaret Harkness, Constance Howell and Clementina Black: 1888– 1896’. Literature & History (5.2). 37–53. –––– (2000). ‘ “Is This Friendship?”: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community’. Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. J. Stoke. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 129–43. HHC (Hull History Centre), U DLB/8/19 ‘Certified Copy of an Entry of Death’, information obtained by Irene B. Snatt and sent to Joyce Bellamy, 13 May 1987. Kaspar, B. (1984). Margaret Harkness, A City Girl: Eine literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung zum naturalistichen Roman des Spätviktorianismus. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Koven, S. (2004). Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ledger, S. (1997). The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin-deSiècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Livesey, R. (1999). ‘Women, Class and Social Action in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’. PhD. University of Warwick. –––– (2007a). Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. London: Oxford University Press. –––– (2007b). ‘Women Rent Collectors and the Rewriting of Space, Class and Gender in Late Nineteenth Century London’. Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 87–106. Mutch, D. (2013). British Socialist Fiction 1884–1914. 5 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto.

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Margaret Harkness: writing social engagement Ross, E. (2007). Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sypher, E. (1999). ‘Margaret Harkness (John Law) (1854–1953)’. LateVictorian and Edwardian British Novelists: Second Series. Ed. G. M. Johnson. Detroit: Gale Research. 150–5. Urlaub, W. G. (1977). Der spätviktorianische Sozialroman von 1880 bis 1890. Bonn: Bouvier. Yeo, S. (1977). ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain’. History Workshop Journal (4). 5–56.

14

Introduction

Part I

Harkness’s life and work

A law unto herself

1

••

A law unto herself: the solitary odyssey of M. E. Harkness Terry Elkiss

I am a law to myself, no one can compel me to do something or leave another undone. (Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army [1889a: 157–8])

For far too long the English radical author, political activist, and world traveller Margaret Harkness has remained an enigmatic figure known principally to a handful of scholars. Her life has been a closed book, largely disregarded or marginalised: as Gerd Bjørhovde states, ‘[f]ew writers can more properly be termed a footnote in the history of literature than Margaret Harkness’ (1987: 59). If acknowledged at all, she has been mentioned as the recipient of a missive from Friedrich Engels (IISH, K 565, [early] April 1888) in response to her first novel, A City Girl (1887). The letter has become a foundational document of Marxist literary criticism, but until recently Harkness herself has remained hidden in the shadows. In fact, from cradle to grave, one detects perplexing omissions and dubious assertions that have only served to efface her place in the historical record. To address this oversight, the following chapter draws upon known, obscure, and rediscovered sources from various archives and libraries to offer a tentative summary of Harkness’s largely overlooked life and unrecognised accomplishments.1

Formative years, 1854–80

Margaret Elise Harkness was born on 28 February 1854 in what is presently Great Malvern, Worcestershire, to Anglican curate Robert Harkness (1826–86) and his wife, the former widow Elizabeth Seddon 17

Harkness’s life and work Tosswill (1824–1916). The Reverend Harkness, who, like his four brothers, joined the ‘family business’ by preparing for the church at St John’s College, Cambridge, was regarded as an ambitious young man with a respected lineage. His wife was the daughter of a wealthy lace manufacturer in Leicester and related to the railway magnate Richard Potter, whose nine daughters included the notable Beatrice Potter (later Webb). Margaret, who was christened at Great Malvern’s Holy Trinity Church by her father, was the couple’s second child in a family that included a step-sister, an older brother, and subsequently three siblings. In 1865, following an interim tenure at St Mary Magdalene in Sternfield, Suffolk, Reverend Harkness moved his growing family to Dorset when he was appointed to the desirable position of rector of Wimborne St Giles. The small parish village was dominated by the estate of the reformer and politician Lord Shaftesbury. It was here that Harkness spent much of her later childhood and adolescence. Although this rural parish was a restrained and conservative environment, her early home was hardly an impoverished one. The rectory had not fewer than twelve bedrooms, a walled garden and a sizable orchard. Her father’s benefice included a profitable glebe from which he earned additional income (Cooper, 2007: 9). The 1871 Census indicates that the household had several servants and even a German governess for the younger children. Harkness, in her singular reflection on her childhood, indicated that she and her siblings ‘wintered at a seaside place’ with money neither a concern nor ‘talked about’ (1899a: 11). There is no reason to assume that the adolescent Harkness was troubled or ‘an hysterical egotistical girl with wretched health and worse spirits’ (BLPES, Passfield/1/2/1, 24 March 1883), as she was characterised by her second cousin Beatrice Potter, who herself had an unhappy childhood (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 8  April 1884; Webb, 1926: 59–60). In fact, Harkness’s early life was apparently not only comfortable, but seemingly conventional. The Salisbury and Winchester Journal mentioned her as a fifteen-year-old bridesmaid at the wedding of her step-sister Mary (Anon., 1869: 7). It is probable that Harkness’s parents expected that she would soon follow Mary’s traditional passage to the altar. In this respect, among others, she was to thwart their wishes. In 1875, Harkness, at the somewhat advanced age of twenty, was dispatched to Stirling House, an exclusive finishing school in Bournemouth, which had been established a little more than a decade earlier to provide ‘educational advantages for the daughters of gentlemen only’ (CarteretBisson, 1884: 489). If her parents’ strategy was either to make her more 18

A law unto herself marriageable or to equip her to be a governess, it was a dismal failure. Letters from this period to Beatrice Potter, with whom she had now formed a close friendship as a Stirling House classmate, clearly attest to her hatred of the idea of marriage. As the older of the two, Harkness was beginning to develop a curiosity over issues that challenged her strict religious upbringing and raised questions about her own ethical and social responsibilities, declaring: ‘I am determined as long as I shall live to try and learn as much as my poor mind is able’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, c. 1876). Although the responses of Beatrice Potter are not extant, there is reason to believe that Harkness’s reflections both startled and stimulated Potter’s own thinking, as she admitted in her diary in 1876: I have indeed altered my religious belief this last six months to an extent I should never have thought possible a year ago. I see now that the year I spent at Bournemouth I was vainly trying to smother my instinct of truth in clinging to the old faith. And now that I have shaken off the chains … shall I rise to something higher or … [be] unable to decide which way to go. (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 16 August 1876)

As for Harkness, slipping her shackles involved the first step of convincing her parents to support her departure from her rustic Anglican home for London to train as a nurse, one of the few acceptable positions available for young women. With their reluctant approval, Harkness was accepted in 1877 at the rudimentary nursing education programme at Westminster Hospital, situated near the Houses of Parliament and across the way from Westminster Abbey. In spite of its illustrious location, the hospital was conspicuous for its insanitary conditions, caused by defective plumbing, which almost led to its closure just prior to her arrival. Nonetheless, it was here that Harkness anticipated achieving her independence and escaping both her family and the ‘matrimonial market’ that she dreaded. However, she soon realised that she had no love of nursing. In addition to the long hours, endless regimentation and deplorable environment, her life remained intellectually and socially suffocating. With her own health suffering and facing her family’s continuing agitation, Harkness grudgingly retreated to Dorset, probably late in 1877. Although parental objections prevented her return to Westminster Hospital, by the following year she was once again in London, determined to complete her nursing studies, now as an apprentice dispenser at Guy’s Hospital. In her continuing correspondence with Potter, Harkness reported on her new labours and family demands as well as a ­surprising 19

Harkness’s life and work panoply of minor injuries and afflictions. As for her patients, their ailments were of less interest to her than their ‘minds and manners’, as were the ‘crude ideas’ of the women sharing her boarding house under its autocratic matron, Miss Granville (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, 22 February 1878). Although her descriptions were often interlaced with sarcasm, she also seriously contemplated the future for those in her position, observing: ‘So few women have enough character to live an unmarried life, and not sink into a nobody, or still worse into a financial nuisance.’ She added: ‘It is a great thing for women to have a better education. It will make life easier for them. I believe women will be in a very different position in another hundred years. This is a hard time for them’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, c. 1878). By the following year, Harkness was finding some aesthetic delight in her London surroundings in addition to becoming attracted to the ideas of a burgeoning socialist movement. She now described herself to her cousin as a ‘radical nurse’, far more interested in her patients’ political attitudes than their maladies. In fact, although her nursing background offered her some new opportunities, she remained disillusioned about her status. ‘If I were a man I would be a doctor – as a woman I can’t.’ For now, she surmised, ‘[t]here is no career – no profession for women. I don’t believe we have come to the core of the thing yet – anyhow I have not’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, 5 February 1880). With her growing interest in social and political issues, Harkness had begun the process that would shortly impel her along an unfamiliar path.

Making a name for herself, 1880–87

On 26 July 1880, the name of Margaret Elise Harkness appeared on the signature book of the Reading Room of the British Museum Library, with the intention of obtaining a reader’s ticket (BMCA). It was within and around the library that she was to encounter a coterie of literary and learned radical women with whom she would become well acquainted, including Clementina Black, Amy Levy, Eleanor Marx, Olive Schreiner and Annie Besant.2 By the following year, Harkness had embarked upon a new direction, expanding beyond her ascribed nursing responsibilities. She now sought to express herself publicly on various issues through her published writings. Harkness’s earliest known articles, ‘Women as Civil Servants’ (1881a) and ‘Railway Labour’ (1881b), both appeared in the respected liberal journal the Nineteenth Century. The two essays revealed her concern for 20

A law unto herself the position of working men and women, questioning aspects of their employment and compensation. For the more conservative National Review, she next contributed a detailed, if rather staid, study entitled ‘The Municipality of London’ (1883), displaying her early proclivity for recognising her readership. These works were rapidly followed by the production of two books for the Religious Tract Society’s By-Paths of Bible Knowledge series: Assyrian Life and History (1883) and Egyptian Life and History according to the Monuments (1884). These volumes have been dismissed as ‘banal vulgarisations of the work of more serious scholars’ (Goode, 1982: 50). Although manifestly written to fulfil the publisher’s requirements, the studies in the series were prepared by those with an understanding of and access to the most current information. Harkness not only was a British Museum Library reader but also had become acquainted with numerous experts in the antiquities department of the institution, with whom she consulted in preparing her volumes. As a reviewer for the St James Gazette suggested, Harkness provided the ‘sort of knowledge that is likely to be most useful and most acceptable to the ordinary reader’ (Anon., 1883: 7). Moreover, even while continuing her nursing and writing, she had become a lecturer at the museum and in 1882 began to offer courses on Assyrian history with the approval of Edward Bond, principal librarian, and Samuel Birch, the keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities. During this busy period, Harkness spent time in Berlin to work on her writing, as well as on her German. She was now intent on trying her hand at fiction, as she explained to Beatrice Potter, with whom she remained in contact (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, 3 January 1884). Harkness had limited funds, however, and her stay in Germany was brief. She was back in London by the beginning of February with a somewhat unconvincing book proposal for George Bell and Sons, which had produced a series of children’s books, Great Englishmen (1881) and Great Englishwomen (1884). She suggested two new volumes, ‘Great Boys’ and ‘Great Girls’, or a single work, ‘Famous Children’, which she would write under the guidance of British Museum authorities, including her friend, archaeologist and numismatist Reginald Stuart Poole (URSC, MS 1640/307/219, 10 February 1884). One can only presume that the book project was unsuccessful, but Harkness remained undaunted in her plan to follow a writing career. Facing continued family criticism or silence, as well as monetary difficulties, she appealed to the wealthy Potter family, by way of Beatrice, for financial assistance. With their help she planned to vacate her nursing 21

Harkness’s life and work duties, at least temporarily, and pursue writing on a full-time basis. In a heartfelt plea, Harkness explained: ‘I cannot do things in a half and half way, [sic] My life is not happy, it must be an effort to do my utmost and best’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, 29 February 1884). Since Harkness did commence a writing life, it appears that the Potters were agreeable to her entreaty.3 As she departed nursing, she wrote a passionate defence of those employed in the profession for the Religious Tract Society periodical, the Leisure Hour: ‘Let no one imagine this is work which all women can do. It is far otherwise. Think of the patient courage it demands, the strength of character it takes, to go day after day, night after night, doing the sometimes disagreeable and often wearisome duties’ (1884b: 152). Her writing would reflect the same resolute dedication. In the summer of 1884, Harkness is believed to have been the unidentified ‘intimate friend’ who accompanied Beatrice Potter on a journey to Bavaria (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 15 October 1884), but both cousins would soon be back in London, engaging in their respective and related activities in the East End. Harkness undertook research for her first published novel, which would explore her growing concern with the most impoverished residents on the margins of society. Rather than studying in the British Museum Library, she determined to live among the poor. She took a room in May 1886 in the newly opened Katharine Buildings in Aldgate and was recorded in the official Rent Book as a ‘literary woman’ whose purpose was that of ‘observation’ (BLPES, Coll Misc 0043: 99). This housing had been established by the East End Dwellings Company, a quasi-philanthropic enterprise with capitalist underpinnings that included dividends of five per cent. The accommodations were designed for ‘unskilled laborers, day workers at the docks, and men and women living by casual employment’ (O’Day, 2004: 157). It was here that Beatrice Potter had replaced her sister Kate as a ‘lady visitor’-cumrent collector who interviewed and selected the prospective workingclass tenants to live in the buildings. She also promoted health practices, good housekeeping, thrift and a variety of middle-class values among the inhabitants of the East End, whom she described as a ‘constantly decomposing mass of human beings’ (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 8 March 1885). As both a resident tenant and self-designated observer, Harkness held a different view from her cousin’s. She paid meticulous attention to the entire area, noting especially the role that the Salvation Army was undertaking to alleviate not only the spiritual suffering but also the physical miseries of the poor. In the resulting novel, A City Girl, she attributed 22

A law unto herself much credit to that organisation in struggling against social and economic adversity. The novel was published under the pseudonym John Law (1889a) by Henry Vizetelly, who was later to face prosecution for his English translations of Émile Zola’s works. John Law was the name that Harkness would continue to employ for the rest of her books, as well as much of her journalism. Although her identity became widely known by many readers, she may have wished to conceal the Harkness name for the sake of her conservative family, who disapproved of her emerging radical ideas about women and the labouring poor. Her alias was clearly an allusion to the Scottish banker, economist, and adventurer John Law of Lauriston (1671–1729), whose activities led him to flee England following a deadly duel and to barely escape from France after causing the near collapse of that nation’s economy. The pseudonym may also have been a reference to Harkness’s paternal ancestor of that name who served as a noted bishop in Ireland from 1782 to 1810.

John Law: novelist, journalist, activist, 1887–94

While the name John Law was seemingly a personal and ‘complex joke’ (Kirwan, 1990: vii), Harkness’s first novel was not. In her deceptively simple story of a working-class seamstress and a middle-class married man, Harkness wrote more than sentimental melodrama. It was, as her subtitle implied, ‘a realistic story’. Although she denied the importance of plot as a ‘bourgeois thing’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, c. 1887) and even contended during an interview with the Evening News and Post that, as a novelist, she cared ‘nothing for art’ (Anon., 1890a: 2), her work belied these assertions, as did her most notable critic, Friedrich Engels. The book came to his attention by way of Vizetelly and he read it with apparent care. Although he praised it and even suggested that Harkness exhibited ‘the courage of a real artist’, he was critical of her portrayal of the working class as a ‘passive mass, unable to help itself’ and requiring external assistance, notably ‘from above’. In essence, her realistic tale was ‘not quite realistic enough’ (IISH, K 565, [early] April 1888). However, Engels was forced to admit in his critique that Harkness was probably accurate in her portrayal of the working poor in the East End, himself regarding them to be more passive than other working people whom he had observed. There are two essential points that are rarely mentioned with respect to the Engels commentary. First, published editions of his notable letter 23

Harkness’s life and work are based on an extensively annotated and truncated draft (held in the International Institute of Social History [IISH]), and not on the actual letter that was received and read by Harkness. In addition, it has not been widely known that Harkness responded to Engels. In her reply she stated: ‘Many things you say about my little book are very true, especially the want of realism in it. It would take too long to explain in a letter my difficulties in this direction. They arise chiefly from a want of confidence in my powers, I think, and also from my sex’ (IISH, L 2161 [5?] April 1888). Although in her letter to Engels Harkness was modest about her abilities, she was already well regarded by her growing group of radical colleagues. Olive Schreiner found her to be a likable young woman ‘who is making a path for herself in the world’ (UCTMA, BC16/Box1/ Fold1/1884/1, 3 June 1884), and Eleanor Marx sought her as a dependable source for and guide to the East End (Kapp, 1976: 220–1, 261). Moreover, the newly minted novelist was also expanding her career in freelance journalism. In 1887 and 1888 she was employed by the Nonconformist British Weekly: A Journal of Social and Christian Progress. Harkness edited a series of short articles entitled ‘Tempted London: Young Men’ (1887–88) and subsequently wrote all or most of the following series, ‘Tempted London: Young Women’ (1888). At the same time, she was also busy preparing her second novel, Out of Work (1888), noted for its realistic depiction of the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887, undertaken by distinctly non-passive workers. Moreover, it also offered a description of what the downtrodden dockworkers faced, foreshadowing more dramatic events. These writings clearly marked Harkness’s role in the socialist political scene as not only an eye-witness but also as a member (albeit shortstanding) of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) of Henry M. Hyndman, where she probably met labour leaders, such as John Burns and Tom Mann, and fellow radical journalist Henry Hyde Champion. Her membership may have begun in 1887, or even 1888, when she became a frequent contributor to Justice, the SDF weekly newspaper, published and often edited by Hyndman. In that same period, Harkness told Graham Wallas, a leading figure in the Fabian Society, that she was reluctant to join any socialist group (Wallas/1/7, 1888). Her ambivalence may have been influenced by Scottish miners’ leader James Keir Hardie, an occasional opponent of some of the SDF policies, with whom Harkness had spent time in Ayrshire attending colliers’ meetings (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, 1887) prior to his unsuccessful Mid24

A law unto herself Lanark parliamentary bid in April 1888. She played a part in Hardie’s by-election and, through her letters to the editor of the Star (1889c: 4; 1889d: 4), even implicated herself, justifiably or not, in the campaign’s questionable financing. The election was more likely financed through the machinations of the SDF leadership.4 George Bernard Shaw’s diaries place Harkness in London during the summer of 1888, where it is likely she was working to complete her serial ‘Captain Lobe: A Story of the East End’ for the British Weekly. She also found time during July to support the Matchwomen’s Strike and to protest the equally dangerous and unremunerative labour of the women ‘home workers’. Harkness even made a generous contribution to the Fund to Relieve Boxmakers (LMU, TUC Library Collections, Strike Fund Register [1888]: 76) for women engaged in such ‘home industries’ who were ‘thrown out of employment by the action of these plucky young girls’ during the strike, as she observed in Justice (Law, 1888c: 2). Although remaining committed to the poorest of the poor, her attitude to the SDF had changed. Not only was Hyndman, with his authoritarian and anti-feminist attitude, repellent but the organisation was also becoming more divisive, declining, for instance, to support the Salvation Army. The Salvationists had a pragmatic policy of ‘soap, soup, and [only lastly] salvation’, an effort which Harkness particularly praised in two contributions to Justice, much to the chagrin of the editor (Law, 1888a: 2; 1888b: 2). Harkness resigned from the SDF not long after her close associate Champion had been expelled by Hyndman in November 1888, and following the earlier departure of several of her other colleagues, including Eleanor Marx and William Morris. When her latest serial appeared in book form with the revised subtitle Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army (1889), she retained a chapter on the socialists, critical of their petty jealousies and idle chatter, specifically citing Hyndman. He may have been the source of a threatened libel charge and the reason the book was briefly removed from circulation, according to the Pall Mall Gazette (Anon., 1889: 6). Harkness made a formal apology for the chapter in a letter to the editor of Justice (presumably directed to Hyndman; 1889b: 3), describing her socialist comrades as ‘not a happy family’, but, nonetheless, indicating that her chapter was not true and she was sorry for writing it. Less than a month later Potter indicated that ‘Poor Maggie’ had borrowed £200 as compensation for the libel of what she believed to be a former lover (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 19 May 1889), although in a later interview for the Evening News and Post Harkness indicated that her book was the source of the libel threat (Anon., 1890a: 2). 25

Harkness’s life and work Meanwhile, in spite of, or resulting from, financial problems, Harkness was already busy with a new assignment from the British Weekly, probably contributing several unsigned articles, as Flore Janssen has discovered (Janssen, 2018: 108), to its 1889 series ‘Life in Lancashire’. She was also doing research in Greater Manchester for her fourth novel, A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day (1890), the subtitle providing a not so subtle rejoinder to the earlier critique by Engels. In one chapter, her memorable depiction of the collective action of 200 women shirt-makers on the arrival of a known ‘sweater’ who barely survives their anger made clear that there was nothing passive about these workers. The reviewer at the Pall Mall Gazette identified a ‘proletariat not utterly helpless, as of old … [but] growing rapidly conscious of its power’ (Anon., 1890b: 3). With this work, Harkness had turned to portraying the ‘radicalism of the sweated women … for the key images of rebellion’ (Thomas, 1993: 92). By the summer of 1889, Harkness had returned to London, working with Champion on his paper the Labour Elector as well as continuing her role as roving correspondent for the British Weekly. However, she was shortly to play a vital role in the growing labour movement not only as a journalist but also as a participant in London’s Dockworkers’ Strike from mid-August to mid-September. Her reports on the status of dockworkers, their wives, and children, as well as the important role of the Salvation Army and the courageous efforts of the labour leaders, encouraged public sympathy for the strikers in their struggle over their wages and hours. Moreover, in a letter to Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, Harkness indicated that she had actively solicited funds for the workers and their families, attended the meetings of the strike committee in Poplar at the Wade’s Arms pub, and was present at the massive rallies in Hyde Park (NLS, Inventory Acc. 11335/141, [c. 25 August 1889]: f. 34). She was working behind the scenes of the struggle, often with Eleanor Marx, while Burns, Mann, and Champion along with trade unionist Ben Tillett and socialist MP Robert Cunninghame Graham faced the crowds. Nonetheless, it was Harkness who, in a critical moment of desperation during the strike, rushed to her friend, Cardinal Edward Manning, archbishop of Westminster, on 5 September to obtain his assistance in negotiating a settlement (Purcell, 1896: 662). She was later to state in the Pall Mall Gazette that she had believed that ‘if he did not act, blood might run in the streets’ (1890e: 2). The leaders of the strike even officially praised her for this effort. The peaceful resolution of the conflict marked an important victory for trade unionism, but for Harkness herself it may well have seemed a pyrrhic triumph. 26

A law unto herself By the following year, the Labour Elector had collapsed and Harkness’s close (if not always reliable) friend Champion had departed temporarily for Australia. Her disenchantment with the labour movement’s methods and uneven achievements, as well as some of its socialist practitioners, was growing. Even her long-standing relationship with Potter was reaching a breaking point, in spite of the fact that Harkness was shortly to introduce her to Sidney Webb, the Fabian economist and Potter’s eventual spouse, at her flat across from the British Museum in January 1890.5 In the summer of 1890 Harkness travelled to Germany and Austria and began to report on labour conditions in these two countries, interviewing prominent socialists such as August Bebel and Viktor Adler for articles in the Pall Mall Gazette (1890b: 1–2; 1890c: 3). She subsequently offered a more comprehensive study of her travels and observations in the New Review, stating that there was ‘much to learn from Germany, and still more from Austria, with regard to the treatment of paupers, loafers, and out-of-works. These people have not been ignored on the Continent, as has been the case with us’ (1891b: 379). After her return to London, Harkness was again to witness the petty quarrels and strident individualism among some of her socialist associates. However, she continued to admire the Salvation Army’s practical approach to the poor. She praised the policies of General William Booth and his followers in the Pall Mall Gazette, and even pointed out that, despite their Christian tenets, the Salvationists believe ‘not God but MAN is responsible for the poverty of England’ (1890d: 2). Notwithstanding the clarity of her perspective, she felt compelled to contradict reports that she was a member of the Salvation Army or represented any religious organisation (1891a: 1). Although her socialist dream had faded, Harkness had abandoned neither socialism nor her concerns over social justice. In March 1891, having recovered from an undisclosed illness, she embarked on a more distant voyage to Australia, New Zealand, and purportedly the United States, to continue her evaluation of the plight of international labour for the New Review (1891b: 375–84). She seems to have returned later that year with a renewed vigour in advocating for those who were poor and oppressed. She contributed a long, serialised story, ‘Roses and Crucifix’, to the Woman’s Herald, a feminist journal, which had recently been retitled and refocused by its editor, Henrietta Muller. Harkness also began editing the financially strapped Tinley’s Magazine, a middle-brow cultural journal, in association with her comrade Champion, one of her only personal or professional associations that was to extend for another 27

Harkness’s life and work few years. In 1892 the magazine was renamed the Novel Review and was ostensibly under Harkness’s ownership and editorial direction in conjunction with Champion. It now aimed not only to provide comprehensive coverage of contemporary novels but also to offer new short works of fiction and character sketches of literary figures. One prominent contributor, George Bernard Shaw, believed that the journal would fail, and even returned his payment cheque, noting in his 1892 diary that ‘I did not care to take it from her, as she is presumably not making anything out of the review’ (Shaw, 1986: 783). He was right, and by end of the year the periodical had ceased publication. Harkness faced additional financial difficulties at this time as the limited accounts of her book sales indicate from the records of one of her publishers, Swan Sonnenschein (URSC, MS 3282 [1888–92]). During 1893 Harkness began serialising ‘Connie’, another realistic story of a young working-class woman apparently deceived and abandoned by her upper-class lover, for the resurrected Labour Elector.6 However, she was to leave it unfinished when the publication folded once again the following January. At this point, having questioned the socialist movement, shed numerous friends, and suffered pecuniary and professional reversals, Harkness set a new course that would lead her away from England.

John Law Down Under and beyond, 1894–1923

In February 1894, Harkness departed from London once again, and returned to Australia. Her objective was to undertake an examination of the Pitt Town Co-operative Labour Settlement in New South Wales. Harkness had earlier been impressed with the Salvation Army labour colony scheme and even visited Booth’s newly established Hadleigh Farm in Essex with Shaw, Mann and others in April 1892. She now sought to see how this Australian cooperative agricultural community for unemployed men and their families functioned. Not unlike her earlier investigative efforts in London’s East End and Manchester’s Angel Meadow, Harkness decided to observe for herself by taking more than a cursory view and residing there temporarily. She slept in a tent, endured heavy rains and nameless insects, and sustained herself with a meagre diet of damper bread and tea. The result was a detailed article on the settlement and the sustainability of such projects for the Fortnightly Review (1894: 206–13). Having undergone these rigours, and with no apparent desire to return 28

A law unto herself to England, Harkness made her way to Western Australia. Settling in the rough-and-tumble gold mining town of Coolgardie, she opened a typewriting office (under the name, curiously, of Marguerite Harkness) where she could earn a living while collecting information for a new novel and continuing her journalistic career. Coolgardie was a woeful, arid environment composed of a few wooden and corrugated iron buildings as well as numerous miners’ tents; there was little water and less sanitation. It is not surprising, considering her medical knowledge, that Harkness’s initial article for the Australian press concerned public health, specifically typhoid. It pointed out the ineptness of the local doctors and the valiant labours of the underpaid nurses in combating the fever. Her views appeared across the Australian press, once again under the name of John Law. In October 1895, Irish nationalist and radical Michael Davitt, on a lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand, had a brief visit with Harkness, finding her hard at work with her typing. According to Davitt, she informed him that her old friend Champion, now in Melbourne, had proposed to her. Harkness reportedly had enraged him when she enquired if he was more interested in marrying her or her money. She revealed to the surprised Davitt that Champion had already spent a portion of her meagre inheritance to finance the Labour Elector and other enterprises (TCDL, TCD MS 9565, 14 October 1895: 124v.) Davitt was opposed to their matrimonial union, as were her former friends Clementina Black and John Burns, who had heard hints of this possibility in London (BL, Add. Mss. 46294, 1 November 1894: ff. 226). Although Champion indicated that he planned to visit Coolgardie, there is no evidence in the West Australian press that he ever did so, and contact between the two ended probably before 1898, when Champion married Elsie Belle Goldstein, sister of prominent feminist Vida Goldstein. Harkness’s typewriting business was thriving and she hinted at expanding it to other nearby mining communities. Moreover, she was in the process of establishing a ‘residential club’ for miners to offer them housing and recreation. However, after a lawsuit with a business partner over her typing enterprise was followed by a fire which destroyed her newly opened club facilities, Harkness returned to writing as her primary profession. From July to September 1897, she published ‘Called to the Bar: A Coolgardie Novel’, a serial for the Western Mail in Perth. Her lively tale captured Australian colloquial speech, the local environment, and contemporary events in an account replete with episodes depicting fraud, political corruption, prostitution, gun play, insanity, arson, and 29

Harkness’s life and work death. Her sensational narrative was composed to engross her West Australian readership. Following this departure from her earlier social-problem novels, Harkness next undertook a purposeful study of the history and characteristics of the British Empire’s banking system and provided recommendations for its revisions. In 1899, while briefly in Adelaide, she self-published her analysis under the title Imperial Credit. The short work included a personal statement of her continued support for those with neither land nor money, in spite of her own mistreatment by and disenchantment with ‘the people who call themselves socialists’ (1899a: 3). Harkness added that this pamphlet marked her farewell to the labour movement. Nonetheless, during her stay in Adelaide she made her voice heard for that cause yet again. In a letter to the editor of the Southern Cross, Harkness condemned the failure of the Catholic Church to educate itself on the issues of capital and labour, which were fundamental for it to be welcomed into the workers’ movement (1899b: 11). Harkness continued her extended sojourn in Australia, asserting that her health would not then permit her to return to England. She relocated now to Perth, where she assumed a position on the city’s leading newspaper, the West Australian, and began a weekly series entitled the ‘Passing Hour’ in 1903. Her feature columns dealt with local politics, social and cultural events, and scientific discoveries, often including amusing anecdotes and short poetic selections. In late 1904 she was sufficiently fit to undertake a sojourn to London, probably carrying a manuscript draft of her latest novel, which would be published as George Eastmont, Wanderer in 1905. The work was partly autobiographical, with depictions of East End poverty, socialist politics, and the Dockworkers’ Strike, as well as a long section on Australia. During her brief stay in England Harkness continued to write for the West Australian, producing a ‘London Letter’ on the sights, conditions, and personalities of the city that was designed to appeal to her colonial audience. Her own life as a ‘wanderer’ was not, however, complete. On 17 February 1905 Harkness boarded the passenger steamer Golconda to make her passage to India. She was now employed as one of her newspaper’s foreign correspondents. Her first articles consisted of a nine-part series, entitled ‘Ceylon as a Holiday Resort for Australians’ (1905, 9 June–8 August), which marked her foray into travel writing. Thereafter, Harkness provided dispatches to the West Australian from diverse locales in Ceylon and across India on an array of topics covering history, social customs, and religion, with several articles discuss30

A law unto herself ing the growing Theosophical Movement in Adyar of her old friend, the former socialist Annie Besant (1906: 5; 1907a: 4; 1907b: 3). It is apparent that the vibrant subcontinent intrigued Harkness, and she was soon no longer a newspaper reporter but a fully fledged writer of serious travel literature which, as Lisa C. Robertson notes in chapter 11 of this volume, were truly works of socio-cultural history. In 1909 Harkness produced the successful Glimpses of Hidden India that offered personal insights into the cultural values, traditions, and past of various Indian events and locations. The volume was updated and revised, with some anti-colonial passages and critical comments deleted, to be republished as Indian Snapshots (1912). Despite her distance from Britain, Harkness kept a keen eye on the sales of her books and publishers at home, questioning her London literary agent James B. Pinker on recent transactions involving the advertising and pricing of her works. Writing to Pinker from Colombo, she indicated that she had sent him the manuscript of a new novel, ‘The Editor of the Daily News’, adding: ‘I think this book is better than any work of mine you have seen’ (NUCDMLSC, James B. Pinker Papers (A55), Box 43, Folder 15, 7 September [?1912]). Unfortunately, this work has never been found, but Harkness’s notes to Pinker suggest that her fiction writing continued in conjunction with the production of her travel books. In 1913 she published The Horoscope, a novel depicting the conflicting attitudes and ultimate fates of two brothers, one Buddhist and the other Christian, in Ceylon. That volume was followed by Modern Hyderabad (Deccan) (1914), a detailed study and guide to the city and region. It seems likely that just prior to the First World War Harkness decided to return to Britain, specifically once more to Dorset. Her aged mother required her nursing skills, and she remained with her until her death in 1916. The following year, Harkness wrote to the current rector of Wimborne St Giles, J. A. Bouquet, enquiring about establishing a memorial for both her parents. She also pointed out the poor condition of her father’s grave, laying blame on her younger brother William, ‘a rich man’ and ‘no doubt very busy’ (DHC, PE/WSG/IN8/2, 25 June 1917 and 2 July 1917), from whom, like other family members and former friends, she had become estranged.7 Having discharged her filial obligations in Dorset, Harkness informed Reverend Bouquet that she was soon to depart for France, where she had work to undertake, the nature of which remains unknown. There is no evidence that her journalistic career continued, but her writing had 31

Harkness’s life and work not been abandoned. In 1921 her last known novel, A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917 appeared. In it she returned to her earlier subjects of the East End and the Salvation Army, but in a world transformed by the horrors of the First World War. Flore Janssen details and analyses this important and under-studied novel in chapter 12 of this volume. Within two years of publishing this novel, on 10 December 1923, Margaret Harkness died in the small Pensione Castagnoli in Florence. She was buried the following day at the local Allori cemetery in a ‘tomba di seconda classe’, indicating that her remains could be exhumed in twenty years’ time. Her death certificate identified her simply as a ‘spinster of independent means’ (HHC, U DLB/8/19).

Conclusion

Margaret Harkness appears to have preferred avoiding notoriety and attention throughout her life. As she stated in Imperial Credit, ‘My birth, sex, and temperament have prevented me from coming forward openly among those who are in the labor ranks’ (1899a: 3).8 She was never silent, however, in writing about the injustices and human suffering that she witnessed, particularly among the poor and working classes in late nineteenth-century London and Manchester. Through her journalism and fiction, as well as through political activity, she engaged on their behalf. With her departure from Britain, she abandoned neither her ideals nor her capacity to speak her mind as she investigated remote communities and cultures. With the same perceptive skills as participant-observer that she had utilised since her earliest London days, she also successfully negotiated new environments, displaying a sense of initiative, adventure, and curiosity. As a single, professional woman sustained by her own resources, she anticipated an arduous life, noting: ‘I shall never be happy – but I shall do my little best to make others so’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/2, 3 January 1884). Despite persistent obstacles, Margaret Harkness, in words and deeds, confronted challenges over her ideology, career, and gender as well as her economic and social status. She remained undaunted, obstinate, self-willed, and, most decidedly, independent.

32

A law unto herself

Notes

1 Much of what is known about Margaret Harkness derives from documents in the British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES), including twenty-one letters (BLPES Passfield/2/1/2/2) addressed from Harkness to Beatrice Potter, largely from 1875 to 1880, as well as an 1882 note from Harkness to Kate Potter (BLPES, Courtney/3/53) and an 1888 missive written by her to Graham Wallas (BLPES, Wallas/1/7). This collection also contains the complete Beatrice Potter Webb diaries in both manuscript (BLPES, Passfield/1/1) and typescript form (BLPES, Passfield/1/2), and an unsigned manuscript (possibly by Edward Pease, a founder of the Fabian Society and close friend of the Webbs) that provides a partial outline of Harkness’s life (BLPES, Coll Misc 0887). In addition, there are five 1917 letters in the Dorset History Centre (DHC) from Harkness to J. A. Bouquet (DHC, PE/WSG/IN/8/2) that have served, along with her novels and some of her articles, as the basis for the few significant biographical sketches on her by John Goode (1982), Joyce Bellamy and Beate Kaspar (1987), and Eileen Sypher (1999). Since around 2010, previously unknown Harkness letters, articles, and references have been uncovered in repositories in four different continents and extensive new research has been undertaken by a number of scholars to reinterpret her life and writings. Some of their work is represented in this volume. 2 The subject of a community of what Olive Schreiner called ‘brain-­ labouring’ women (1911: 123) is considered by Deborah Epstein Nord (1995: 181–206), Lynne Hapgood (2000: 129–43), and Susan David Bernstein (2013: 1–73). 3 Harkness had nursed Laurencina Potter during her final illness in April 1882, which may have influenced support for her request to the Potters. Months later, Harkness wrote a note to Kate Potter warmly appreciative for offering her a ‘helping hand’, although she did not specify to what she was referring (BLPES, Courtney/3/53, August 1882). 4 The ‘Tory Gold’ affair (as it became known) originated in 1885 as a questionable electoral strategy devised by Hyndman, Champion, Michael Maltman Barry, and others that was linked to the SDF’s acceptance of Conservative Party funds for their candidates. The events, which were revealed in the Pall Mall Gazette (Anon., 1885: 2), were the source of a scathing assessment by Engels in a letter to Eduard Bernstein (7 December 1885; Engels, 2010: 366–8) as well as Shaw’s view that the SDF had made a ‘huge mistake in tactics’ (Shaw, 1892: 6). Harkness took responsibility for financial involvement in Hardie’s 1888 campaign

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Harkness’s life and work and denied that Conservative funds or Champion were involved. Potter suggested that Harkness simply ‘served as a go-between’ since she herself did not possess the required financial resources (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 13 November 1889). 5 In perhaps the most evident example of her hostility to Harkness, Potter remembered in detail her first meeting with Sidney Webb at her cousin’s residence, which she noted in her diary (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 27 December 1929), although in her earlier published autobiography she indicated that the introduction was provided by a nameless ‘woman journalist’ (Webb, 1926: 392). In fact, she never acknowledged Harkness in any of her published works. Although the cousins seemingly had been confidantes during their time at Stirling House and for several years subsequently, they also exhibited a competitiveness. While in London during the late 1870s–80s, they did meet and spend time together, but they followed different trajectories in becoming social reformers, political activists, and notable writers. Harkness introduced Potter not only to Sidney Webb, but also to Annie Bessant (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 8 June 1933), and probably a number of other radical thinkers who frequented the British Museum and with whom she acquainted Potter in 1882 (BLPES, Passfield/1/2, 13 February 1882). In turn, Beatrice Potter and her family were responsible for providing financial aid and emotional support to Harkness, helping her to embark on a writing career. The eventual rupture between the two women occurred not long after the meeting with Sidney Webb as Potter found an intellectual home in the Fabian Society and Harkness continued her quest that would take her away from Britain. 6 ‘Connie’ is fully analysed by Deborah Mutch in chapter 8 of this volume. 7 With respect to William, the 1893 dedication to him in Captain Lobe was deleted when the novel was republished in 1915. Correspondingly, within his household, the name of his radical sister was never mentioned (Bellamy and Kaspar, 1987: 109). 8 Although Imperial Credit was published under the male name John Law, it seems probable that Harkness’s reference to her ‘sex’ was meant to refer to her female gender.

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Harkness, M. E. (1881a). ‘Women as Civil Servants’. Nineteenth Century, 10 (September), pp. 369–81. –––– (1881b). ‘Railway Labour’. Nineteenth Century, 12 (November), pp. 721–32.

34

A law unto herself –––– (1883a). ‘The Municipality of London’. National Review, 1 (May), pp. 395–407 and 2 (September), pp. 96–105. –––– (1883b). Assyrian Life and History. London: Religious Tract Society. –––– (1884a). Egyptian Life and History according to the Monuments. London: Religious Tract Society. –––– (1884b). ‘Hospital Nurses’. Leisure Hour: An Illustrated Magazine for Home Reading, 33, pp. 152–4. Law, J. [Harkness, Margaret] (1887). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Vizetelly. Anon. [Harkness, Margaret] (1887­–88). ‘Tempted London: Young Men’. British Weekly, 7 October–20 April. Anon. (1888). ‘Tempted London: Young Women’. British Weekly, 27 April–28 December. Harkness, M. E. (1888a). ‘Salvationists and Socialists’. Justice, 24 March, p. 2. –––– (1888b). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Justice, 14 April, p. 6. –––– (1888c). ‘Home Industries’. Justice, 25 August, p. 2. Law, J. (1888a). Out of Work. London: Sonnenschein. –––– (1888b). ‘Captain Lobe: A Story of the East End’. British Weekly, 6 April–14 December. –––– (1889a). Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Harkness, M. E. (1889b). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Justice, 20 April, p. 3. Anon. [Harkness, Margaret] (1889). ‘Life in Lancashire’. British Weekly, 10 May–7 June[?]. Harkness, M. E. (1889c). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Star, 20 September, p. 4. –––– (1889d). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Star, 25 September, p. 4. Law, J. (1890a). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Co. –––– (1890b). ‘The Emperor and the Socialists’. Pall Mall Gazette, 23 June, pp. 1–2. –––– (1890c). ‘The Socialist Movement in Austria’. Pall Mall Gazette, 28 August, p. 3. –––– (1890d). ‘ “Salvation” vs. Socialism – In Praise of General Booth’. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October, pp. 1–2. –––– (1890e). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Pall Mall Gazette, 29 October, p. 2. –––– (1891a). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Pall Mall Gazette, 1 September, p. 1. –––– (1891b). ‘A Year of My Life’. New Review (5), pp. 375–84. –––– (1891–1892). ‘Roses and Crucifix’. Woman’s Herald, 5 December–27 February.

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Harkness’s life and work –––– (1894). ‘A Week on a Labour Settlement’. Fortnightly Review, 1 August, pp. 206–13. –––– (1893–1894). ‘Connie’, Labour Elector. June–January [incomplete]. –––– (1897). ‘Called to the Bar: A Coolgardie Novel’. Western Mail, 30 July–24 September. –––– (1899a). Imperial Credit [pamphlet]. Adelaide: Vardon and Pritchard. –––– (1899b). ‘Letter to the Editor’. Southern Cross, 13 October, p. 11. –––– (1903–1904). ‘Passing Hour’ [feature columns]. West Australian, 21 March–20 August. –––– (1905a). ‘Ceylon as a Holiday Resort for Australians’. West Australian, 9 June–8 August. –––– (1905b). George Eastmont: Wanderer. London: Burns & Oates. –––– (1906). ‘The Theosophical Headquarters in Adyar’. West Australian, 9 July, p. 5. –––– (1907a). ‘The Theosophical Convention at Adyar’. West Australian, 16 February, p. 4. –––– (1907b). ‘Benares’. West Australian, 12 August, p. 3. –––– (1909). Glimpses of Hidden India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. –––– (1912). Indian Snapshots. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. –––– (1913). The Horoscope. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. –––– (1914). Modern Hyderabad (Deccan). Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. –––– (1921). A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Additional works cited Anon. (1869). ‘Dorsetshire’. Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 16 October, p. 7. Anon. (1883). ‘Review of Assyrian Life and History’. St James Gazette, 9 October, pp. 6–7. Anon. (1885). ‘Correspondence’. Pall Mall Gazette, 4 December, p. 2. Anon. (1889). ‘To-Day’s Tittle Tattle’. Pall Mall Gazette, 30 July, p. 6. Anon. (1890a). ‘A Slum-Story Writer’. Evening News and Post, 17 April, p. 2. Anon. (1890b). ‘New Books’. Pall Mall Gazette, 9 April, p. 3. Bellamy, J. and B. Kaspar (1987). ‘Harkness, Margaret Elise (1854–1923): Socialist Author and Journalist’. Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. 8. Eds. Joyce Bellamy and John Saville. London: Macmillan, pp. 103–13. Bernstein, S. D. (2013). Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bjørhovde, G. (1987). Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the Novel 1880–1900. Oslo: Norwegian University Press.

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A law unto herself BL (British Library), Add. Mss. 46294, Clementina Black to John Burns 1 November 1894. BLPES, Coll Misc 0043, ‘Katharine Buildings Rent Book’, 1885–90. ——, Coll Misc 0887, ‘Sources for a Biography of Margaret Harkness’, n.d. ——, Courtney/3/53, Margaret Harkness to Kate Potter, August 1882. ——, Passfield/1/1, Beatrice Potter Webb, MS. Diary. ——, Passfield/1/2, Beatrice Potter Webb, Typescript Diary. ——, Passfield/2/1/2/2, Margaret Harkness to Beatrice Potter, 1875–87 [21 letters]. ——,  Wallas/1/7, Margaret Harkness to Graham Wallas, 1888. BMCA (British Museum Central Archive), Signature of Readers Book, 1879–80. Carteret-Bisson, F. S. D. de (1884). Our Schools and Colleges. Vol. 2: For Girls. London: Simpson, Marshall & Co. Cooper, A. (2007). ‘A Rebel in the Rectory’. Dorset Year Book, pp. 9–11. DHC (Dorset History Centre), PE/WSG/IN/8/2, Margaret Harkness to J. A. Bouquet, 9 June–2 July 1917 [five letters]. Engels, F. (2010). ‘Letter to Eduard Bernstein’. Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 47: Letters 1883–86. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 366–8. Nord, D. E. (1995). Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 45–66. Hapgood, L. (2000). ‘ “Is This Friendship?”: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community’. Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. John Stokes. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 129–43. HHC, U DLB/8/19 ‘File: Margaret Elise Harkness’ [research materials and correspondence for the Harkness entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, including a copy of Harkness’s death certificate obtained by Irene B. Snatt]. IISH (International Institute of Social History), K 565, Friedrich Engels to Margaret Harkness [draft], April 1888. ——, L 2161, Margaret Harkness to Friedrich Engels, [5?] April 1888. Janssen, F. (2018). ‘Women Writers, World Problems, and the Working Poor, c. 1880–1920: “Blackleg Work in Literature” ’. Ph.D. Birkbeck, University of London. Kapp, Y. (1972–76). Eleanor Marx. 2 vols. New York: Pantheon. Kirwan, B. (1990). ‘Introduction’, Out of Work. London: Merlin Press, pp. vii–xix. LMU (London Metropolitan University), TUC Library Collections, ‘Strike

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Harkness’s life and work Fund Register’ [1888] [including unidentified press clipping of contributions to the Boxmakers, n.d.]. NLS (National Library of Scotland), Inventory Acc. 11335/141, Cunninghame Graham Papers, Margaret Harkness to Gabriela (Gabrielle) Cunninghame Graham [c. 25 August 1889], f. 34. NUCDMLSC (Northwestern University, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections), James B. Pinker Papers (A55), M. E. Harkness, 1906–1912, Box 43, Folder 15, Margaret Harkness to James Pinker [five letters]. O’Day, R. (2004). ‘Caring or Controlling? The East End of London in the 1880s and 1890s’. Social Control in Europe. Vol. 2, 1800–2000. Eds. Clive Emsley, Eric Johnson, and Pieter Spierenburg. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 149–66. Purcell, E. S. (1896). Life of Cardinal Manning: Archbishop of Westminster. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Schreiner, O. (1911). Women and Labour. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Shaw, G. B. (1892). The Fabian Society: Its Early History. London: Fabian Society. –––– (1986). The Diaries, 1885–1897. 2 vols. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sypher, E. (1999). ‘Margaret Harkness (John Law)’. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 197, Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists (Second Series). Ed. George M. Johnson. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, pp. 150–5. Thomas, T. (1993). ‘Ancoats and the Manchester Slums in Two Late Victorian Novels’, Manchester Region History Review, 7, pp. 85–92. TCDL (Trinity College Dublin Library), TCD MS 9565, ‘Travel Diary of Michael Davitt’, 1895. UCTMA (University of Cape Town, Manuscript and Archives), BC16/ Box1/Fold1/1884/1, Olive Schreiner to William Schreiner, 3 June 1884 (Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription). URSC (University of Reading, Special Collections), MS 1640/307/219, M. E. Harkness to George Bell & Sons, 10 February 1884. ——, MS 3282 [1888–92], Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Archive. Webb, B. (1926). My Apprenticeship. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

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Absent character

2

••

Absent character: from Margaret Harkness to John Law Tabitha Sparks

As a review of the articles, reissued novels, and scholarly collections that include reference to Margaret Harkness shows, the slow but steady recovery of this once obscure late-Victorian writer confirms fairly consistent patterns of emphasis and estimation. The most common subjects in Harkness scholarship are her socialist politics and her connections to prominent social theorists and reformers, such as Eleanor Marx, Beatrice Potter Webb, and Friedrich Engels.1 This historicist vein applies to work on Harkness by literary scholars who have reconstructed her associations with the socialist movement and a variety of reform initiatives (slum housing, ‘visiting’ schemes, the Salvation Army) as lenses through which to examine her fiction. Her substantial record of journalism, especially that focused on labour conditions in London’s East End, and her oft-cited experience living in Whitechapel’s Katharine Buildings in the late 1880s, can reinforce the documentary character of her fiction.2 Gerd Bjørhovde typifies this interpretative pattern when she writes that Harkness’s slum novels had ‘a political and a social aspect as well as a literary one. The literary aspect seems in fact to have been secondary to the political and social ones’ (Bjørhovde, 1987: 66). The historical and biographical approach summarised here reflects interests well beyond the consideration of Harkness herself. The rise of interdisciplinary programmes and methods has accompanied (and been influenced by) the roughly simultaneous formation of New Historicism and its wide-angled understanding of the contexts surrounding and informing a text. The academic publishing industry, facing market realities of rising costs, increasingly markets books across disciplinary lines. And almost fifty years of feminist scholarship since the 1960s has 39

Harkness’s life and work f­acilitated the recovery of women writers like Harkness, long obscured by a variety of institutional, intellectual, and political biases. Historicist momentum in scholarship, publishing, and feminist criticism makes possible Harkness’s return to print, but it also exerts particular pressures and expectations on her literary reception, and the subject ‘Margaret Harkness’ can seem to be more ripe for scholarship than her novels themselves. The novels, moreover, inspire a contradictory range of responses. They have been classified under such contrary descriptions as radical, sentimental, escapist, naturalistic, patriarchal, and feminist.3 More consistent is the presence of Harkness herself as an interpretive device: if they disagree on how to characterise the novels, critics are generally fascinated by the way that Harkness’s cryptic life, and especially her political experience, shaped (or might have shaped) her fiction. Here are some examples: ‘it seems as if Harkness’s use of naturalism was closely bound up with her socialist convictions, and indeed, at the time when she was writing her slum novels her political commitment was strongest’ (von Rosenberg, 1987: 156); ‘Nelly [in A City Girl] shadows the sensibility of a victimised young woman from a higher social class – perhaps of Harkness herself’ (Henkle and Bivona, 2006: 88); ‘[Harkness’s] construction of the unemployed, silent and socially invisible Jos [in Out of Work] enables her to explore a state of political impotence which is analogous to her own lack of political status and potency as a woman’ (Hapgood, 1996: 46); ‘[b]y seeing the truth through the alien utopia of the Salvation Army [in In Darkest London], Margaret Harkness seems to wish to correct the possible vagueness of her own political perspective’ (Goode, 1982: 64). To recap, briefly: Harkness’s eye-witness and journalistic experience in the East End inevitably informs her novels, and her documentary authority can eclipse her literary choices. Scholarly trends have resulted in a body of scholarship on Harkness that tilts towards the socio-­historical and biographical. When directed at a study of Harkness’s fiction, both of these methodological inclinations invite speculation into her own history, her political loyalties and relationships, and how these personal experiences manifest in her novels. As a mode of analysis, causal links between Harkness the individual and the content of her novels mirror one of the primary conventions of Victorian biography and realist fiction: the study or representation of unique personhood as a key to unlocking motives, relationships, and behaviour. But as I explore in this chapter, the bio-critical approach runs up against some particular challenges when it concerns Margaret Harkness. 40

Absent character First, her novels resist the character-based analysis typical of Victorian realism. She quite consistently instances characters that are difficult to identify with or even understand. The inhabitants of slum neighbourhoods in A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891, first published as Captain Lobe in 1889), two early Harkness novels that I draw from here, are generally unreflective and stereotypical, as many critics have pointed out, with the obliqueness of their inner selves operating as commentary on the barrenness of their lives. Second, Harkness published all of her fiction and some of her non-fiction under the name ‘John Law’. A woman writer’s use of a male nom de plume was unexceptional in the nineteenth century, and usually represented a facilitated approach to publishing and a pre-emptive move against misogynist criticism in the largely patriarchal world of letters. While these explanations can be projected onto Harkness’s use of ‘John Law’, they cannot also explain why she was content to use ‘Margaret Harkness’ for some of her most controversial journalism, nor do they correspond to other historical records of her non-conformism. ‘John Law’, then, can be only imperfectly explained as a barrier that Harkness set up as she turned to fiction in the late 1880s; after 1890, she used ‘John Law’ almost exclusively across genres. Along with an analysis of her detached and static character portrayals, I consider the distancing instantiated by her pseudonym as part of a tactical rejection of the personalised character analysis more familiar to literary realism and bio-criticism than to the novels that John Law writes.

The refusal to psychologise

Early in In Darkest London, Captain Lobe of the Salvation Army visits a ‘penny gaff’ in Whitechapel, and is confronted by a character first referred to only as ‘Midget’, although he is later named as ‘Napoleon’.4 ‘I’ve something to ask of you, captain!’ ‘What is it, Midget?’ ‘Do you think I’ve got a soul, or do you think as there’s no soul in midgets?’ (Law, 1893: 6)

Napoleon’s question is an early sign of In Darkest London’s unconventionality. By posing the question of the existence of the soul in a raucous theatre, the reader enters into an environment unaccommodating to a complex, private self: not only does Napoleon not know if he has a soul or not, but he does not even treat the subject as more than an idle curiosity, asked in passing, in a crowd. Captain Lobe provides an ecclesiastical 41

Harkness’s life and work answer, and the chapter continues its hectic tour of chaotic and unruly Whitechapel. James Eli Adam’s succinct definition of ‘the very construction of realistic “character” ’ in Victorian fiction can identify how this scene and Harkness’s novels generally differ from most realist novels: ‘[character] is grounded in forms of alienation; it presupposes minds able to withdraw into psychic space free from, or at least resistant to, social determination’ (Adams, 2009: 24). By outsourcing the question of his soul to Captain Lobe, Napoleon divests it of the privacy that would lead to its existence in the first place. He lives, following Adam’s model, fully in the realm of social determination, predicated by his physical body’s definition of his identity. The realistic characterisation described by Adams and formed by literal and figurative privacy depends on material practices denied to Harkness’s ‘slum dwellers’. But critics have frequently drawn attention to the flatness of Harkness’s characters, usually as a sign of literary weakness and in an implicit comparison to the private selfhood conventional to the realist novel and the middle-class social organisation it assumes. Roger Henkle and Dan Bivona find her characters ‘sparsely psychologized’, and write that Arthur Grant’s dismissive estimation of Nelly in A City Girl is ‘crudely true to the limitation with which she has been rendered by Harkness’ (Henkle and Bivona, 2006: 88); Sally Ledger concludes that Nelly is ‘an emphatically unexceptionable girl’ (Ledger, 1997: 45). To Ingrid von Rosenberg, Harkness’s characters similarly show ‘rather simple character psychology’ (von Rosenberg, 1987: 157), and Eileen Sypher concedes that readers ‘may find Harkness’s novels difficult not because they are demanding literature but because they seem so transparent’ (Sypher, 1993: 197). Or, in an omission that demonstrates the treatment of Harkness’s novels as social documents, critics elide the subject of her characterisation altogether. By Harkness’s era, the subject of individualisation and psychological portraiture in working-class characters in the Victorian novel has a history. Victorian novels about the poor emerge in two dominant periods: the ‘Condition of England’ novels of the 1830s, 1840s, and early 1850s, which include Charles Dickens’s street children in Oliver Twist (2008 [1837]), Benjamin Disraeli’s Chartist agitators in Sybil (1845), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s unemployed or sick factory workers in Mary Barton (1995 [1848]) and North and South (1995 [1855]). A later iteration surges in the 1880s and 1890s, this time focusing on urban conditions. Along with Harkness’s desperate and downtrodden poor in London and Manchester these novels include Gissing’s wretched ‘slummers’ in 42

Absent character Workers in the Dawn (2008 [1880]), Demos (2012 [1886]), and The Nether World (2014 [1889]), George Moore’s hapless drifters in Esther Waters (2012 [1894]), and Arthur Morrison’s street criminals in A Child of the Jago (2012 [1896]). This two-part history elides many exceptions and I use it only to set up a general thesis about two Victorian moments in which novels about poor people consolidated into an identifiable trend, each roughly united in its sympathies against a callous, inhumane government (the early period) and an urban sprawl taxing the limits of social control (the later one). The artistic construction of ‘the poor’ in both periods has inspired critique based on charges of faulty or insufficiently realistic characterisation. Dickens and Gaskell are found guilty of sentimentalising the poor and subverting their structural problems into individual domestic resolutions. Gissing, later on, reflects, along with his sympathy for the poor, an intermittent disgust and sense that their desperation stems, at least in part, from weakness and lack of self-discipline. For the most part, Harkness’s slum novels evade clear resolution, with the determining geography of poverty as a constant unbroken by any one character’s special insight or agency. Her characters cannot use subjective means to challenge their material experience. Attesting to a causal relationship between slum environment and superficial characterisation, John Goode explains that Harkness differs from most realistic novelists by refusing to imagine, in any detail, a character’s interior consciousness: ‘Harkness does not, as with other “realists”, offer [Nelly Ambrose] a consciousness which somehow transcends her environment’ (Goode, 1982: 54). Turning to the world that Harkness describes in A City Girl and In Darkest London, we immediately see the absence of the kind of material separation that would figuratively condition individualism. The communally organised Charlotte’s Buildings in A City Girl, for instance, structurally prohibit private, family space and the identity formation that we quite automatically extend to an individualised domestic sphere. Harkness’s narrator explains that ‘children played around the court, the mothers gossiped in the doorways, the men smoked and talked politics on the balconies’ (Law, 1887: 5). During the summer, ‘six hundred people’ ‘slept on the stairs and the balconies – ­anywhere out of their hot, crowded rooms’ (Law, 1887: 27). This rough categorisation of characters into gender and age groups rather than nuclear families and particularised individuals reflects the challenge of an artistic accounting for six hundred people – one without the sorting device of the private home. When Nelly Ambrose thinks about the middle-class life of Arthur Grant, she feels ‘that he lived in a different 43

Harkness’s life and work world … a world shut in by the golden gates of domestic peace and happiness’ (Law, 1887: 93–4), and she is right. Her prohibition from that world is as psychological as it is topographical: when she makes this observation, she is looking through his window, after a disorienting trip to the West End of London, and just before a policeman accuses her of loitering. In a scene in In Darkest London, Salvation Army workers enter a slum dwelling which similarly lacks any kind of demarcation that can separate characters into discrete individuals: ‘They reached a large human bee-hive, where five or six hundred people have cells to live in, and went up some stairs to find the room of the unfortunate woman whose fate it had been to have too many children. On the third floor they stopped to enter a place about which buzzed an angry crowd of human insects’ (Law, 1893: 76). The woman that the Salvation Army workers seek is identifiable only as a singular example of the larger situation, a phenomenon which is not exclusive to a human identity: her ‘unfortunate’ reality of having too many children also describes the entire population she lives among, the building itself, and a beehive. Harkness explains her depersonalised approach to character in a note added to Chapter IV of In Darkest London. An asterisk by a mention of Mr Pember, the conniving factory manager who wants to marry the orphan Ruth, leads to her explanation of the difference she draws between historical and literary significations: As some people – for instance, General Booth, Mr. Barnett, and Captain Cooke – are mentioned by name in this book, readers may perhaps think that all of the characters represent living men and women. The people whose names are given occupy an unimportant place in the story; consequently there has been no attempt to disguise their personalities. But the principal characters, such as Mr. Pember, are all types, not real men and women. Captain Lobe is a type of Salvation Army captain; Jane Hardy is a typical nineteenth-century Proletarian spinster; Ruth and Hester do not exist in East London. I hope that my English readers will understand this; also my translators, who are introducing ‘Captain Lobe’ into Sweden, France, Russia, and Germany. (Law, 1893: 92)

Unusually for realism, particular people are unimportant, and so retain their individual (and historical) identities, and ‘types’ denote the novel’s representational value. This explanation reads, indirectly, as a refutation of Engels’ advice concerning A City Girl. Engels wrote that Harkness erred in making her working-class people ‘a passive mass’, and hoped, at the end of his letter to Harkness, that she might ‘reser[ve] the active side [of the working class] for another work?’ (Engels, 2001: 168). As if 44

Absent character directly repudiating Engels, in this later work Harkness not only typecasts her characters but calls attention to doing so. The realism that Engels calls for in his request for more ‘striving’ characters, she suggests, is incompatible with her understanding of slum neighbourhoods and their structural prohibition of realist individuation. A comparison to an earlier-century depiction of poverty exemplifies how Harkness’s public slums obviate personalised representations. One of the main settings in Gaskell’s Mary Barton is the Barton home, shared by the heroine, Mary, and her father, John, who for most of the novel is an unemployed factory worker facing increasingly desperate poverty. In the Manchester of the 1840s, their home, though modest, is a discrete space, and it stages the family’s decline into poverty in personal detail. We see Mary’s tension mount along with the steady disappearance of the furniture and personal effects of the Barton home, a literal disappearance of the signs of their existence in a callous world. Without making too reductive a connection between domestic privacy and the development of idiosyncratic character, it can be said that Gaskell’s description of John Barton dramatically diverges from Harkness’s stolid and undifferentiated ‘types’: ‘John Barton became a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! But being a visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for others, if not for himself’ (Gaskell, 2008: 150). Gaskell’s impassioned agent of protest (who seems to embody everything that Engels found missing from Harkness’s workers in A City Girl) accords with a literary tradition predicated on privacy, one that Harkness’s slums cannot accommodate. ‘Soulful’ characters like John Barton, despite his tragic end, are formally embedded in a novel tradition that aligns with the rise of the middle class in industrial England as capable of achieving an individuated, domestic privacy that is itself precursor to psychological interiority. A working-class character in Gertrude Colmere’s 1911 novel Suffragette Sally, like Gaskell’s John Barton, possesses an interior voice familiar to the middle-class realist tradition. While Sally, a servant, cannot fully articulate her thoughts and desires, her urge to do so naturalises psychological selfhood as a human trait indivisible to material circumstances. After her introduction to the suffrage movement, ‘[Sally] only wanted to hear; to hear – and – how she wanted to ask questions, to understand! To understand it all, just because she understood a part; because the wonder of it and strangeness of it were not completely strange, entirely unknown; because, in some queer way, some unknown things in herself seemed to have a dim knowledge of the 45

Harkness’s life and work things the lady said’ (Colmere, 2007: 50). Sally’s ineffable recognition of the transformative power of the suffrage idea equips her with a capacity for social and psychological growth that the novel, in turn, slowly develops in its portrait of the formation of a working-class suffragette. But Harkness’s characters are difficult to absorb into this developmental story of selfhood. If Harkness’s ‘slum dwellers’ are ‘types’ deprived of the identifying differences that define middle-class life and consciousness, her depiction of a middle-class character reinforces this distinction. Arthur Grant, the married, bourgeois seducer of Nelly Ambrose in A City Girl, probes his own character and disposition with the keenness of a novelist. He even imagines that he will ‘start a novel someday’, and his conception of what kind of novel he will write resembles the high realism of the 1880s: ‘he would introduce some curious psychological studies he had come across, and some strange events. He would have no plot in it. Plots had gone out since the time of Thackeray and George Eliot. His novel should be a study of character, that is, an epitome of Arthur Grant’ (Law, 1887: 69). Here and elsewhere, the free indirect speech of Arthur Grant discloses his egotism and intellectual detachment. His seduction and desertion of Nelly is facilitated by his purely aesthetic appreciation of her, and though he notes her ‘difference’ from other East End girls, the difference is a measure of beauty. As to her internal qualities, he airily decides that ‘she was no psychological study, this little Whitechapel girl. Just something pretty to look at’ (Law, 1887: 70). To be clear: Nelly is no psychological study in so far as Arthur Grant and other readers of realism understand psychology as a sophisticated register of self-knowledge informed by literature, culture, and the detachment (both material and emotional) that makes these privileges possible. Finally, Arthur Grant’s prospective novel as a ‘study of character’ in the quotation above reflects his free indirect speech, but the next clause – ‘an epitome of Arthur Grant’ – is the narrator’s sly, diegetic redirection. The narrator, by relating a fictional ‘study of character’ to Arthur Grant himself, correlates this inward-looking stylistic trend with the epitome of bourgeois egotism, or the detachment that enables Arthur Grant to exploit Nelly. When Arthur discovers that Nelly had given birth to and was the mother of his illegitimate baby, he processes the news through literary analogies: his tears, he thinks, ‘were as sentimental as those of a German lover’, and his affair with Nelly prompted him to ‘compar[e] his wife to Thérèse and himself to Rousseau’ (Law, 1887: 122). With Arthur Grant as her most sustained example of psychological realism, Harkness (as Law) shows that where Arthur’s use of a literary register 46

Absent character to understand himself may be self-indulgent, his direction of it to Nelly (‘she was no psychological study’) has ruinous consequences on her life. As the counter-example of Arthur makes clear, Harkness’s superficially represented ‘types’ are not aesthetic failures but reflections of circumstances hostile to the cultivated individualisms of the middle classes. Her insistence on types that identify only bare patterns of behaviour or work (the labour mistress, the loafer, the city girl, the masher) suggests that the registers of personalisation which we usually find in realist novels are a middle-class conceit. And, as I suggest in a different context below, her refusal to construct psychologically legible selves extends to her own public record as well.

Not Margaret Harkness

If ‘John Law’ was ever meant to conceal Margaret Harkness’s real identity, the efficacy of the pseudonym was short lived, as by the time that her second novel, Out of Work, was published in 1888, reviewers were gesturing to her real identity with knowledge of her living experience in the East End: The lady who writes under the pseudonym of John Law is specially well qualified – through prolonged personal investigations – to speak of life in the East-end of London. She is able to tell us in very truth how the poor live, and it is this undeniable stamp of reality in her descriptions which furnishes the chief attraction of her books. (Anon., 1888: 3)

Given that Harkness had already established a respectable toehold in journalism before beginning her fictional career as ‘John Law’, it is unlikely that the pseudonym was meant as a disguise. The journalism she published, whether under ‘Margaret Harkness’ or ‘John Law’, does not indicate a writer who avoided conflict or confrontation, which the adoption of a pseudonym might facilitate. Critics have speculated about the choice of ‘John Law’, and Joyce Bellamy and Beate Kaspar note that Out of Work was dedicated to John Law of Lauriston (1671–1729), ‘a director of finance in France’ who, ‘although unsuccessful – was regarded by some French historians as the precursor of modern State Socialism’ (Bellamy and Kaspar, 1987: 105). But we cannot definitively know Harkness’s motives for choosing the name, nor did she provide this biographical reference when she used it. The persona of the author, or what Foucault calls the ‘author function’, signifies a discursive construct separate from the actual identity of the 47

Harkness’s life and work writer. The distance is magnified when the ‘real’ writer uses a pseudonym. While we do not know what ‘John Law’ meant to Harkness, if this name referred to a historical figure or an alter ego, we can determine that, if anything, it stands for ‘not Margaret Harkness’. Treating ‘John Law’ as a strategic deflection instead of a disguise or expedient path towards publication means maintaining a critical position that concedes partial knowledge from the outset; it means accepting that we can examine what was attributed to John Law without expecting to find a solid answer for the motives and intentions behind it. This is not an unfamiliar course of events for a literary scholar, but it does diverge from the investigative temperament discussed earlier, and specifically the satisfactions connected to a historical or biographical process predicated upon uncovering, revealing, and personalising. The triumphalist narrative that has – quite necessarily and successfully – underwritten much of feminist ­criticism’s reclaiming techniques falters in the conscious choice to reassert ‘John Law’, and, counter to one’s well-honed feminist instincts, imagine what this shadowy (and masculine) discursive construct has to tell us in place of Margaret Harkness. To pursue the signage prompted by ‘John Law’ means pushing into the background the experience of the Margaret Harkness who lived in Whitechapel for a time, wrote critical journalism about slum life, and had tempestuous relationships with individuals and organisations and an especially vexed connection to socialism. It means accepting that this erasure is what Harkness was setting in motion by using ‘John Law’ beyond a point when the pseudonym could have had any efficacy of concealment. John Law must be important for exactly that neutrality, with the objective reason then almost invariably attached to maleness, to a Scottish name, one that carries in it the very definition of jurisprudence. These terms of estrangement are almost categorically oppositional to what most of us do when we think about scholarship on ‘forgotten women writers’, but nevertheless they describe how Harkness registered her own relationship to her fiction. After the publication of A City Girl in 1887, Harkness almost exclusively published under ‘John Law’, sometimes with this name in quotation marks. She wrote about her personal experiences through the filter of the John Law alter ego, as in distinctly biographical articles like ‘A Year of My Life’ (Law, 1891) which considers the state of socialism on the Continent, and ‘The Cardinal as I Knew Him’ (Law, 1892), which eulogised Cardinal Manning, whom Harkness worked with during the London Dockworkers’ Strike of 1889. Both of these articles refer to her own experiences reimagined through the persona of a man, and her 48

Absent character masculine identification changes significantly the experiences she narrates. (Ironically, ‘John Law’s’ reference to Cardinal Manning as ‘my best friend’ (1892: 2) might appear more reasonable in its fictiveness than this claim from Margaret Harkness’s point of view.) We see a precedent for similar first-person gender reassignment in Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (2011 [1885]), in which Linton reimagines herself as male as she recounts her loss of faith and disastrous marriage to William Linton (who is himself recast as female). Earlier feminist scholarship has characterised such female-to-male transformations and adoptions of male pseudonyms as symptoms of a woman writer’s deeply embedded inferiority. Elaine Showalter thus describes Charlotte Brontë’s decision to write about her experience teaching in Belgium through a male narrator, William Crimsworth, in The Professor (1855): ‘woman writers’ like Brontë, Showalter writes, ‘internalized the values of their society’ (1977: 136–7), and so preferred, or at least defaulted to, male subjects and subjectivities. But understanding Harkness’s presentation as Law as a socially conditioned response to the patriarchy undermines her manifest creation (‘John Law’ and the fiction and journalism attributed to him) and validates in its place our sympathetic ­identification of the limitations facing late-Victorian women writers. This sympathy, as I have been suggesting, can function in contradistinction to the manifest record left by Harkness. Rather than treat John Law as a sign of Margaret Harkness’s tortured gender identity, I am suggesting that we approach his name as announcement of her fictional project – the first step in a strategy of narrative depersonalisation that extends to her characters as similarly oblique fictional entities, entrapped by circumstances beyond their control. Just as literary characters do not necessarily implicate historical, human subjects, pseudonyms do not necessarily hint at the author’s personal experience: in fact, in a literal way, they do the opposite. But our fascination with Harkness and her seemingly troubled, lonely life operates as an almost irresistible invitation to subject the fiction to (her) history. In The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, Lynn Linton (writing as Kirkland) makes a cultural observation about the rise of science that, when directed at fiction, challenges the personal register so familiar to feminist recoveries of women writers. Late-Victorian intellectual society, s/he writes, was a time when ‘the emancipation of human intellect from superstition in the substitution of the scientific method for the theological, was the great event of the time and made itself felt everywhere’ (Lynn Linton, 2011: 288). Harkness’s identification as Law can be seen as an e­ xtension of the 49

Harkness’s life and work depersonalisation that was a trademark of this era’s naturalist fiction and authoritative, progressive, materialistic thought more generally. While Law’s novels are not uncomplicated visions of a naturalist universe (they do not, for instance, illustrate the power of degeneration or heredity in any detail), the detachment associated with naturalism is less accommodating to a bio-critical mediation of the novels through Harkness’s own life.5 A comparison to a male writer can bring this point into relief. Criticism of Les Rougon-Macquart, Émile Zola’s twenty-novel cycle of a family beset by hereditary disease, for instance, rarely directs interpretation of the novels to the influences we see in Harkness criticism: Zola’s personal relationships, the shifting nature of his politics, his neurosis. Of course, this textual as opposed to personal reception of Zola takes for granted that his experience as a bourgeois man did not exert the historically specific demands on his writing career as Harkness’s experience as a politically active New Woman did. Without discounting all of the ways that Harkness does not disappear smoothly behind the persona of ‘John Law’, and without denying that the reasons for the replacement of her name with his are fascinating to imagine, acknowledging that ‘John Law’s’ novels propose a very different reading than Margaret Harkness’s seems both historically appropriate and, ironically, bio-critically respectful. Her evasion of private life in her fiction and the absence of autobiographical information she left behind are constituent, if challenging, parts of her legacy.

Notes

1 See, for example, Goode (1982); Ross (2007); Hapgood (1996, 2000); and Livesey (2007). 2 S. Brooke Cameron and Matthew Dunleavy similarly conclude that ‘[c]urrent criticism on Harkness and her slum fiction is preoccupied with the author’s representation of late-Victorian social reform’ (Brooke Cameron and Dunleavy, 2015: 108). 3 See Goode (1982); Beaumont (2007); Breton (2010); von Rosenberg (1987); Swafford (2007); and Koven (2004), respectively. 4 A penny gaff was a temporary theatre (often set up in the back of a shop) that featured short, sometimes bawdy acts, or exhibitions of ‘freaks’, as with Napoleon, the ‘Midget’. 5 Law’s novels can benefit from the interpretive optics of naturalism from the perspective of an objective narrator, but are not encompassed by this

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Absent character category textually: as Rob Breton has deftly shown, the novels rely on a sentimental rhetoric to appeal to their potentially indifferent, middle-class readers (Breton, 2010).

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1887). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Vizetelly & Co. –––– (1891). ‘A Year of My Life’. New Review, October, pp. 375–84. –––– (1892). ‘The Cardinal as I Knew Him’. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 January, p. 2. –––– (1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe [1891]. London: Reeves. Additional works cited Adams, J. E. (2009). A History of Victorian Literature. Chichester: WileyBlackwell. Anon. (1888). ‘New Books’. Pall Mall Gazette, 7 August, p. 3. Beaumont, M. (2007). ‘ “A Little Political World of My Own”: The New Woman, the New Life, and New Amazonia’. Victorian Literature and Culture (35). 215–32. Bellamy, J. and B. Kaspar (1987). ‘Harkness, Margaret Elise (1854–1923), Socialist Author and Journalist’. Dictionary of Labour Biography (vol. 8). Ed. Joyce Bellamy and James Saville. London: Macmillan, pp. 103–13. Bjørhorde, G. (1987). Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the Novel 1880–1920. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Breton, R. (2010). ‘The Sentimental Socialism of Margaret Harkness’. English Language Notes (48.1). 27–39. Brooke Cameron, S. and M. Dunleavy (2015). ‘Angels of the Slum: Women and Slumming in Margaret Harkness’s In Darkest London’. Papers on Language and Literature (51.2). 107–39. Colmere, G. (2007). Suffragette Sally [1911]. Ed. Allison Lee. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Dickens, C. (2008). Oliver Twist [1837]. Ed. Stephen Gill. New York: Oxford World’s Classics. Disraeli, B. (1845). Sybil; or, The Two Nations. London: Colburn. Engels, F. (2001). ‘Engels: Correspondence January 1887–July 1890’. Marx/ Engels Collected Works (vol. 48). New York: International Publishers, pp. 166–8.

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Harkness’s life and work Gaskell, E. (1995). North and South [1855]. Ed. Patricia Ingham. New York: Penguin. –––– (2008). Mary Barton [1848]. Ed. Thomas Recchio. New York: Norton. Gissing, G. (2008). Demos [1886]. Middlesex: Echo Library. –––– (2012). Workers in the Dawn [1880]. Ed. Debbie Harrison. Brighton: Victorian Secrets. –––– (2014). The Nether World [1889]. epubBooks.com. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’. The Socialist Novel in Britain. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 45–66. Hapgood, L. (1996). ‘The Novel and Political Agency: Socialism and the Work of Margaret Harkness, Constance Howell and Clementina Black: 1888–1896’. Literature and History (5.2). 37–52. –––– (2000). ‘ “Is this friendship?”: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community,’ in J. Stoke (2000), Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. J. Stoke. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 129–43. Henkle, R. and D. Bivona (2006). The Imagination of Class: Masculinity and the Victorian Urban Poor. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Koven, S. (2004). Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ledger, S. (1997). The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin-de-Siècle. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Livesey, R. (2007). Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynn Linton, E. (2011). The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland [1885]. Ed. Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff. Brighton: Victorian Secrets. Moore, G. (2012). Esther Waters [1894]. Ed. Stephen Regan. New York: Oxford World’s Classics. Morrison, A. (2012). A Child of the Jago [1896]. Ed. Peter Miles. New York: Oxford World’s Classics. Ross, E. (ed.) (2007). Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Showalter, E. (1977). A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Swafford, K. (2007). Class in Late-Victorian Britain: the Narrative Concern with Social Hierarchy and Representation. Youngstown: Cumbria Press. Sypher, E. (1993). Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel. London: Verso. von Rosenberg, I. (1987). ‘French Naturalism and the English Socialist

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Absent character Novel: Margaret Harkness and William Edwards Tirebuck’. The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 151–71. Zola, E. (1871–93). Les Rougon-Macquart. Paris: Charpentier.

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Absent character

Part II

In Harkness’s London

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London

3

••

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London Nadia Valman

In an interview published in 1890 in the Evening News and Post, Margaret Harkness described the genesis of her first novel A City Girl: A Realistic Story (1890a [1887]). ‘Walter Besant had brought out his first book on the East-end,’ she writes, ‘and I was so disgusted with its untruthfulness that I conceived the idea of writing a story which should picture the lives of the East-enders in their true colours’ (Anon., 1890: 2). Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), subtitled ‘An Impossible Story’, initiated the genre of slum fiction that was to use the license of the novel form and its paternalistic middle-class protagonist to imagine bold solutions to London’s social crisis. Besant proposed the redemption of the slums through cultural uplift; a few years later Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) suggested the forcible removal of the underclass to labour colonies. Harkness, by contrast, eschewed both utopian and dystopian fiction, and for her East End novels drew on urban journalism and social investigation. Her narratives were constructed of street observations and conversations. This chapter discusses Harkness’s 1880s novels A City Girl (1887), Out of Work (1888), and Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army (1889; reissued as In Darkest London in 1891) in which representing the ‘true colours’ of East End life is the impetus for experimentation with the forms of urban fiction. Harkness’s apparent ingenuousness in claiming that she could simply ‘picture the lives of the East-enders in their true colours’ belies the angst experienced by writers of the 1880s over how to represent the ‘truth’ of contemporary London. In a diary entry for 22 August 1885, Harkness’s cousin Beatrice Potter recorded a conversation with Charles Booth in which they 57

In Harkness’s London discussed the possibility of social diagnosis. He, working away with clerk on the Mansion House Inquiry into unemployed, and other work of statistical sort. Plenty of workers engaged in examination of facts collected by others – personal investigation required. Pall Mall have started this but in worst possible way, shallow and sensational. (Webb, 1982: 137; italics in original)

Their frustration with existing census data led, on the one hand, to Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903), which used new methodology such as systematic interviewing, and produced new forms of representation such as the well-known Maps Descriptive of London Poverty. Potter, on the other hand, while decrying the melodramatic mode of the Pall Mall Gazette’s New Journalism, searched for a form of writing that would draw on Booth’s statistical evidence, but also on her personal observation, and create ‘more of a picture’ (Webb, 1982: 212–13). Testing the waters with affective, narrative-driven investigative journalism, Potter published ‘Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary’ in the Nineteenth Century in 1888, but by 1889 she was once again dissatisfied: The last month or so I have been haunted by a longing to create characters and to move them to and fro among fictitious circumstances – to put the matter plainly, by the vulgar wish to write a novel! … I have in my mind some more dramatic representation of facts than can be given in statistical tables and in the letterpress that explains these – some way of bringing home to the hearts of the people, rich and poor, those truths about social organisation that I may discover. (Webb, 1982: 298)

If statistics were incapable of conveying political vision, the novel offered a tempting but ‘vulgar’ alternative. This ambivalence about the novel was widely felt among socialists like Potter and Harkness in the 1880s. Novels were associated with mass production, narrative perspective remained middle class, and plots remained conventional; even purportedly socialist novels of the period prioritised romance over politics. For Marxist writers like George Bernard Shaw and William Morris, argues Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, ‘the realist novel as a genre is guilty of capitalist mystification, preventing the recognition of true social conditions’ – one reason for Shaw’s turn to the dialogic form of drama (Miller, 2013: 90). It is in this context of uncertainty about literary form, I want to argue, that we must read Harkness’s experiments with the novel.

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Walking Margaret Harkness’s London

Journalism and fiction

In the late 1880s Harkness was unusual among social activists for publishing both novels and investigative journalism. While scholars have considered her journalism as a source for her fiction, its significance as an intervention into contemporary debate over the representation of the poor has been overlooked. In the series of unsigned articles on women workers’ lives that she edited (and most likely wrote) in the liberal nonconformist periodical British Weekly in 1888 (later reissued as Toilers in London [Harkness, 1889]), Harkness critiqued misrepresentations of the London working class. Her essay on flower girls, for example, directly disputes the sentimentalism of the Pall Mall Gazette, insisting that the Gazette’s portrait of London’s neat, bright flower girls is a myth, since flower girls wear second-hand, damaged boots which ‘show [their] dirty stockings or naked feet’ (Harkness, 1889: 6). On the other hand, Harkness also objects to manufactured pathos: ‘During mid-winter there is practically no water-cress; so the piteous tales which one reads about children shivering while they wash cress under pumps are rather exaggerated’ (Harkness, 1889: 8). Instead, there is a concern for accurate documentation through the gathering of detail and statistics that aligns Harkness’s journalism more with the ethnography of Henry Mayhew or Booth’s social science than with the New Journalism of W. T. Stead. Above all, Harkness urges empathy with her subjects: after writing of a young woman who spends an evening gossiping with her friends in a gin palace, giving her baby alcohol to keep it quiet, she admonishes the reader for their conditioned response: ‘It is easy to say that she should not do this, but when one sees what her “home” is, one finds it difficult to mete out the harsh judgement that comes so readily to the lips of those who never venture inside the precincts of slumdom’ (Harkness, 1889: 26). Mostly, however, the British Weekly articles give voice to the interviewees without directing the reader’s interpretation. One essay (Law, 1889a) consists of an account of a conversation among servants about their treatment by their employers, in which the narrator figures only to ask questions. The narrative style and approach developed in Harkness’s British Weekly articles also plays a significant role in her novels. However, the overlap between Harkness’s journalism and her fiction has led scholars to find the latter aesthetically flawed. ‘Because of her overall attempt to provide scope,’ argues Eileen Sypher, ‘the descriptive texture of her novels is thin – much as one might find in a newspaper sketch,’ including ‘spare scenes’, many ‘marginal characters’, and ‘lean, 59

In Harkness’s London short sentences’ (1993: 113). Ingrid von Rosenberg, too, notes the failure to integrate Salvation Army scenes into the plot of In Darkest London, resulting in ‘a loose series of unconnected tableaux seen from a distance’ (1987: 157) Yet if, as Miller has argued, the use of flat character was a technique deliberately adopted by Morris and Shaw as a revolt against realist conventions of interiority, we must reconsider the uneven texture of Harkness’s prose too (Miller, 2013: 111). Certainly, much of the narration in her novels recalls the measured tone of her journalism, documenting without comment, but there are also moments that, conversely, approach melodrama. For example, the narrator of In Darkest London abandons empathy for fire and brimstone in the dramatisation of a scene set at closing time in Whitechapel, when public houses ‘vomited forth their cargoes of depravity and vice, and the air rang with the oaths of women who sell their babies for two shillings or eighteen pence, and with the curses of men lower than the beasts but for the gift of speech’ (Law, 1893: 18). In Out of Work, on the other hand, an account of two elderly female beggars at the door of a public house is interrupted by analysis: ‘There they sit day and night, those sphinxes. And there they will stay until Laissez-faire and his army lose the day, until his banners are seized by the enemy’ (Law, 1888: 120). Here, the narrator’s diagnosis of the economic forces that have produced the women’s poverty is voiced in a prophetic register. The inconsistency of Harkness’s narratorial persona and perspective might be ascribed to her own shifting political allegiances, or the instability of a labour movement that was divided about how much agency to confer on working people (Sypher, 1993: 106). John Goode, however, regards the fluctuations of Harkness’s narrative style as a strength: ‘she is alive to the puzzle of a new reality and she makes … a new mode of fiction out of the instability’ (Goode, 1982: 53). Meanwhile, the mobile identifications of Harkness’s writing reflect not only the instability of socialist politics in the 1880s but the changing relationship of women to the urban environment. Middle-class women of the 1880s, including Harkness, Beatrice Potter, and Amy Levy, experienced new opportunities as professional writers and social investigators, new forms of living together, and new freedoms to move in the city. Their writings, Deborah Epstein Nord suggests, ‘reflect a certain precariousness or tentativeness in their social positions and, as a consequence, in their own notions of themselves … a proliferation of ambiguous identifications and personae as the possibility if not the reality of female spectatorship begins to emerge’ (1995: 182, 185). But, Judith Walkowitz argues, as new social 60

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London actors they produced ‘new stories of the city that competed, intersected with, appropriated, and revised the dominant imaginative mappings of London’ (1992: 18). For Margaret Harkness especially, the London streets were the setting and the stimulus for new ways of looking and writing.

Invisible flâneurs

Late nineteenth-century middle-class women entered into an experience of the city that had long been embodied in the figure of the flâneur. The notion of the flâneur, as Lynda Nead writes, ‘describes a form of metropolitan existence; a way of consuming the spectacles and experiences of the modern city’ (2000: 67). Revelling in anonymity, he strolls through the streets, detached yet highly sensitive to the transient glimpses it yields of other lives. However, in Walter Benjamin’s famous account ‘the flâneur both reflected and resisted the consumerism of the capitalist city and its circulation of commodities. He was part of the visual spectacle of the city, but resisted its rational planning and mapping’ in his idle wandering (Nead, 2000: 68). Scholars have contested the absence of women from this account of modernity, for women could not idle in the streets without risk (Wolff, 1985). Yet there were also new opportunities for the female spectator in the expanding culture of West End shopping, which targeted women with the latest products displayed in luxurious and fantastical settings. ‘Modern consumption’, writes Rachel Bowlby, ‘is a matter not of basic items bought for definite needs but of visual fascination and remarkable sights of things not found at home’ (1985: 1). The glass of the shop window, Bowlby argues, reflected an idealised image of the female consumer: ‘Through the glass, the woman sees what she wants and what she wants to be’ (1985: 32). For women, then, city strolling was not the active engagement with strangers described by Benjamin, but a passive experience as subjects of consumer culture. In her novels, Harkness frequently depicts her protagonists in relation to urban commercial culture, exemplified by the shopping street. At the opening of A City Girl, for example, the young seamstress Nelly Ambrose makes her way towards a Saturday-night market, turning to the reflective surface of a shop window to smooth her auburn hair and admire her own hazel eyes. The prospect of shopping induces narcissism in Nelly; her excitement about her imminent purchase is indistinguishable from her consciousness of herself as a commodity on display in the public street. The image of a young woman preening herself in the glass draws on a 61

In Harkness’s London familiar moral rhetoric: female vanity will lead inevitably to ruin. But what Harkness emphasises is Nelly’s belief that consumption is the route to social advancement. This is visible in her purposeful walk through and beyond Charlotte’s Buildings where she lives – which draws negative attention, as it is a perceptible signal to her neighbours that ‘she fancies ’erself’ and holds an aspirational desire to leave (Law, 1890a: 9). Indeed, oblivious to the revelries of the working-class street, Nelly continues on her route ‘completely occupied’ by her mission to buy a new feather for her Sunday hat, impelled by her cherished ambition ‘[t]o look like a lady’ (Law, 1890a: 10). Nelly’s experience of going to market mimics that of West End shopping. The distinctively syncopated rhythm of ‘passionate contemplation and frenzied activity’ that characterised the modern department store shopper is also felt by Nelly as she hurries and lingers among the East End shops and barrows (Highmore, 2005: 51). On her way, she ‘took no notice of anybody or anything; she looked neither to the right nor the left, but walked quickly towards the market’, yet when she reaches the trimmings stall she becomes enraptured and indecisive (Law, 1890a: 10). She ‘admired everything’ while buying nothing, her desire aroused but unsatiated (Law, 1890a: 12). That the street exemplifies the alluring but false promise of consumer culture is underlined in chapter 6, when Nelly slowly paces a West Kensington terrace, observing ‘with a hungry look’ the luxurious interiors on display through unshuttered windows (1890a: 91). Pregnant and abandoned by her wealthy lover, Nelly grasps the hopelessness of her social aspirations when she spies him from the cold street, playing with his children in a comfortable drawing room. Her West End window-shopping reveals the bourgeois life that will always be unattainable for her. Another bitter reversal awaits Nelly when the sweater she works for gives her notice on account of her pregnancy, and Nelly wanders Whitechapel in search of employment: ‘She looked in at the shop windows, hoping to see cards saying that hands were wanted, but no cards were hung up’ (1890a: 102). Nelly walks the streets no longer as the buyer of fashionable commodities but as the seller of her labour. The flânerie of the unemployed forms the central action of Harkness’s second novel, Out of Work. The novel tracks the descent of Jos Coney, a village carpenter who migrates to London looking for work but finds only casual employment in the docks and drifts into drinking, vagrancy, illness, and destitution. For Jos, the street is a reflexive space, a silent choric presence constantly in communication with him. Throughout the 62

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London novel, he wanders the streets of London in search of work, unaware of the economic forces that limit his agency and unable to shape the unfolding of his destiny, while the street narrates back to him the stages of his fall. When he returns on the train from his first day as a dock-labourer, it is in the company of drunken fellow workers, and ‘[a]s he left the carriage, with Jim and Bill rollicking beside him, he saw people turn away’ (Law, 1888: 135). By this reaction Jos understands that ‘he had dropped to a lower level of things than he had been in before’ (Law, 1888: 135). The urban audience of strangers witnesses the story of his change, and ‘[h]e pulled his hat over his eyes, as though he did not wish to be recognised’ (Law, 1888: 135). But when Jos is on the street he reacts with a similar alienated shudder to the image of his ragged clothes and bleeding feet: ‘He caught sight of himself in a shop window and turned away’ (1888: 135). A further step downwards comes when, after a day’s tramp from East London westwards and back to the east again in search of work, Jos sits on a bench, slightly elevated from the surface of the street, where he observes the horses and vehicles of travellers passing by, but sits too low to make eye contact with their riders. Once he has stopped regular work the narrative’s temporal markers become vague: ‘Weeks and months passed by … Once he took his clothes out of pawn’ (164); ‘Once or twice he was put on night-work’ (167); ‘Work got slack’ (168). Tramping removes Jos from the collective experience of time and space. This gradual expulsion from the urban crowd reaches its fulfilment in the last section of the novel. Jilted by his aspirational sweetheart Polly Elwin in the public street, Jos finds himself without an audience: ‘Passers-by took no notice of him … Hundreds of people came and went while he stood there, thinking’; the rush of the city continues as if he is not there (1888: 230). As Jos makes his way along the commercial Mile End Road, his movement ironically mimics that of a shopper, stopping intermittently to gaze at the dark spectacle of East London. He continues walking, without a clear destination, the long road stretching endlessly into a landscape in which he has lost his purpose. The thoroughfare through Mile End and down to Limehouse is his Calvary: He went back to the main road, where people bought and sold, talked and quarrelled, where he did not know a single human being. The streets swarmed with men, women, and children, the open doors of the houses showed rooms teeming with inhabitants; but he was as lonely there as in a sepulchre. Had he worn a gold chain, some one would have robbed him; had he been a Jack Tar, some siren would have beguiled him into a publichouse. But he looked like a tramp, so no one took any notice (1888: 237)

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In Harkness’s London As Jos begins to recall his early years in a village where everyone knew each other, the novel registers the urban alienation later diagnosed by Georg Simmel in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903). But in emphasising the commercial setting of Jos’s walk, Harkness draws attention to the experience of London for those excluded from the culture of consumption. As Jos is progressively erased from the fabric of the city he becomes an ironic kind of flâneur, an observer who cannot be seen. The brutality of the commercial city, in both Out of Work and A City Girl, is exposed by the figure of the urban wanderer.

London dioramas

The characteristic perspective of early nineteenth-century London literature, argues Epstein Nord, was dioramic. ‘The urban spectator of this period’, she writes, ‘whether writer or imagined subject, experienced the sights and people of the street as passing shows or as monuments to be glimpsed briefly or from afar’ (1995: 20). These static representations of human life, for example in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821), do not unfold over time, and make no sustained demand on either the rambler or the reader (Epstein Nord, 1995: 20). But the ephemeral urban sketch, with its detached narrator, remained a dominant literary form throughout the nineteenth century even as the inequalities of London life became more visible and troubling. As Lynda Nead writes, in these vicarious tours of the city streets, mid-Victorian London was ‘written and consumed as visual spectacle’ (2000: 57). Richard Rowe’s series of newspaper articles later published as Life in the London Streets (1881) begins with a whistle-stop tour around the low-life entertainments of East London on a Saturday night in conventionally all-male company. The narrator watches as his chaperon points out known local criminals, and he observes some illustrative melodramatic tableaux, including ‘a policeman in controversy with a blear-eyed knave, who cowered before him like a frightened beast, but with just a hint in blear eyes of the savage gleam that may be seen in the eyes of a cornered rat’ (Rowe, 1881: 11). Here, the narrator comes titillatingly close enough to his subject to see into his eyes, but remains insulated from physical danger by the presence of his companion, another police constable. Shifting his gaze, he then surveys the Whitechapel Road, the East End’s chief artery, – that broad, blazing, brawling, utterly unhomelike thoroughfare, set out with long lines of street stalls (dimly

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Walking Margaret Harkness’s London lighted with candles stuck in blacking-bottles, or flaring with ‘portable gas’ and smoky, stinking oil-flames), and thronged with Whitechapel roughs, drunken drabs, anxious marketers, and poor purposeless folk, who seem to have congregated simply for the sake of company and to warm themselves by the gas. (Rowe, 1881: 18)

Once again, although the narrator appears to be near enough to smell the oil lamps, he speaks from a vantage point distant enough to appraise it in its entirety at a glance. With its picaresque narrative and aloof narrator, Rowe’s urban sketch draws its drama from social inequality but refrains from examining social relations. In her novels, Harkness draws on these conventions of urban representation which produce London as a moving pageant offering momentary glimpses of other lives for a detached spectator. However, Harkness’s observers are strikingly different figures from the male slum tourists of urban journalism, and interpret the city accordingly. In Out of Work, for example, the streets are depicted from the viewpoint of East Ender Polly Elwin. Polly’s material aspiration and moral smugness shape her perceptions as she walks through Whitechapel on her way to class at her Methodist chapel in the Commercial Road: It was evening. Men had left their work, and stood about public-houses. Children crowded the pavements. Here and there a hurdy-gurdy kept the people dancing, boys with boys, girls with girls, even mothers nursing babies. Polly had nothing in common with the young women, whose untidy clothes and hair made her shudder; and they sometimes threw an envious look at the pretty Methodist, who, with eyes on the ground, in neat dress and hat, went on her way, a way altogether unknown to fringes and draggled feathers. So she passed through some of the worst streets our metropolis can boast of, full of degraded human beings, filthy overcrowded houses, and shops that sell adulterated grocery, putrid meat, watered milk, and second-hand clothing. (Law, 1888: 70–1).

The narrative here mediates Polly’s perspective as she moves through the streets, taking in brief details of her surroundings and, in emulation of a middle-class journalist, dramatically recoiling from what she sees. Unlike her own carefully ordered lower middle-class home, the houses of the poor cannot contain their inhabitants, who spill out promiscuously into the streets. Their idle stances, too, contrast with her purposeful movement. But Polly’s visceral reaction and interior narration also tell us indirectly of the fragile carapace of respectability that she holds close as she walks, insisting to herself that she has nothing in common with 65

In Harkness’s London these women, even as she notices the appreciative glances that denote their shared interest in female clothing and appearance. This refusal of sympathy across class signals the harsh individualism that will make Polly a key agent in the fall of Jos Coney and the novel’s tragic conclusion. Yet, in the final sentence of the paragraph the narratorial position appears to move beyond her consciousness and towards a more omniscient account of the streets of ‘our metropolis’. Polly’s disgust at workingclass Whitechapel is shared with narrator and reader alike. This complex, shifting narration, which both critiques and partakes in repulsion from working-class culture, is also a striking feature of Harkness’s third novel, In Darkest London, again set primarily in Whitechapel. The novel’s opening follows Captain Lobe, a young Salvation Army worker, as he walks past market stalls and public houses on his way to the Army’s barracks. In the Whitechapel Road the narration expands momentarily to offer an authoritative assessment of the scene for readers who may be more interested than the austere Salvationist in its exoticism. That road is the most cosmopolitan place in London; and on a Saturday night its interest reaches a climax. There one sees all nationalities. A grinning Hottentot elbows his way through a crowd of long-eyed Jewesses. An Algerian merchant walks arm-in-arm with a native of Calcutta. A little Italian plays pitch-and-toss with a small Russian. A Polish Jew enjoys sauerkraut with a German Gentile. And among the foreigners lounges the East End loafer, monarch of all he surveys, lord of the premises. It is amusing to see his British air of superiority. His hands are deep down in the pockets of his fustian trousers, round his neck is a bit of coloured rag or flannel, on his head is a tattered cap. He is looked upon as scum by his own nation, but he feels himself to be an Englishman, and able to kick the foreigner back to ‘his own dear native land’ if only Government would believe in ‘England for the English,’ and give all foreigners ‘notice.’ (Law, 1893: 3­–4)

The scene is familiar in a number of ways. Its urban actors are glimpsed as part of a thrilling moving pageant in which, along with other sideshows, ‘foreigners’ form the objects of entertainment as if staged for the spectator’s ‘interest’. Indeed, the experience of the East End as theatrical spectacle continues as the narrative progresses, taking the reader into a penny gaff to see a man with a withered arm throwing knives, and a dwarf dressed as Napoleon. The image of Whitechapel as a place of convivial cosmopolitanism flatters the reader, and augments the authority of the narrator, with a vision of Britain as the epicentre of international trade, imperial power, and benevolent refuge. 66

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London What makes this passage so uncomfortable to read is the instability of the narratorial perspective. The ‘East End loafer’, initially part of the ‘amusing’ scene, moves into prominence at the end of the paragraph as an alternative commentator on it. Although he is at first the object of mockery, with his ‘British air of superiority’, and his politics informed by the jingoistic language of the music hall, his hostile view of Whitechapel’s cosmopolitanism is left to resonate without final comment. He has taken over the role of urban observer from the captain and become the scene’s narrator, momentarily aligned with the reader. The air of menace with which he ascribes his own lack of employment to foreign immigration underscores a vision of the street as a place of power and looking. From his standpoint, the scene is reinterpreted in terms of a conception of the city as profoundly divided. Switching narrative attention to the loafer gives Harkness an opportunity vicariously to voice the socio-economic argument and anti-alien rhetoric that, Seth Koven claims, she shared with the reactionary propagandist Arnold White (Koven, 2010: 44–6). Indeed, a version of this argument is repeated by the labour-mistress Jane Hardy at the end of the novel, where it is similarly left unglossed. Yet Harkness’s writing also offers other angles on alien immigration, including, in a British Weekly article on ‘Foreign Servants’, the sad story of two Jewish girls who come to London in search of employment but, without friends or family, find themselves, like other London workers, the victims of an unregulated economy, and descend quickly into illness and destitution. In fact, the shifting narratorial perspective of In Darkest London enables Harkness to obfuscate her own view on immigration. Instead, her urban sketch opens up to reveal the ugly interiority of the loafer, and a city that is thrumming with latent violence.

Urban encounters and literary form

Friedrich Engels’s famous critique of A City Girl noted that the novel represented the working class as essentially passive: ‘All attempts to drag it out of its torpid misery come from without, from above’ (Engels, 1974: 115). By the time of Harkness’s last novel of the 1880s, In Darkest London, we can see the impact of this comment. The novel includes working-class organisers and activists in the figures of Jane Hardy, the ‘strong-minded proletarian spinster’, and Captain Lobe and the ‘slum sisters’ of the Salvation Army (Law, 1893: 108). Harkness had become increasingly convinced that, as she declared in an article in the Pall Mall 67

In Harkness’s London Gazette in October 1890, ‘General Booth’s scheme will do more than anything else at present towards driving poverty out of England, and advancing the day when Love will become a Religion’ (Law, 1890b: 2). Salvation Army workers came from the communities they served and, as Harkness simply put it, ‘the slummers [slum dwellers] love the Salvation Army’ (1890b: 2). In Darkest London developed the sympathetic representation of Captain Lobe, who first appears in A City Girl, and who, unlike her lover or her family, offers the desperate Nelly unconditional support. But, as I now want to argue, Harkness’s interest in the work of the Salvation Army also had a significant impact on her literary form. In Harkness’s novels, conventional plot structure is under pressure. A City Girl and Out of Work both follow a clear linear structure: Out of Work gains its rhetorical power as a story of Christ-like betrayal and martyrdom and A City Girl enacts a similarly Christian narrative of repentance and redemption. However, John Goode has argued that the relatively upbeat ending of A City Girl – in which Nelly’s sufferings at the hands of an irresponsible middle-class lover and an intolerant local community are transcended by her future prospects in marrying her old sweetheart and new work in a writers’ colony – deliberately fails to enact a broader resolution of the story’s conflicts: ‘The political consciousness is uncontained by the narrative sequence’ (Goode, 1982: 57). Conversely, in Out of Work Harkness draws on narrative convention only to shock the reader out of complacency: she ‘sets up fictional expectations which are defeated by the specific recalcitrance of the social actuality’ (Goode, 1982: 60). In In Darkest London, however, Harkness explores more experimental forms of narrative in tracking the actions and words of the Salvation Army captain and the slum sisters. The Salvationists’ movements through the streets, and their unique philosophy of loving tolerance, prompt a different form of storytelling. The novel is set in 1886, when the Salvation Army had moved beyond its early, unsuccessful phase of open-air preaching and had established its characteristic style of eye- and ear-catching public spectacle. It had also just inaugurated a new policy of pursuing social work in the slums through providing food, shelter, and employment training. This context makes sense of the uncertainty and failure that pervades Harkness’s representation of slum social work. On the opening page of In Darkest London, as if to make this point clear, Captain Lobe gently remonstrates with a young woman patient in the London Hospital to leave her female partner and return to the Salvation Army refuge, with no success. In chapter 5 the reader is taken on a tour of the Seven Dials slum in Covent Garden with 68

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London the unnamed ‘slum saviours’ and factory owner Ruth, their new recruit. The slum saviours walk not in the city’s main thoroughfares but in its forbidden spaces (Walkowitz, 1992: 75). One details the violence and abuse they routinely endure and the fear they must conceal from those to whom they minister. They must move down a building from the upper floors to the lower, rather than upwards, otherwise they would be hounded out of the building. They move digressively through the streets, without a predetermined route, their pace interrupted according to the needs of those who call upon them as they walk by: ‘Everywhere people greeted them. Sometimes a woman begged them to visit a sick relation, or a man asked for a paper. Again and again, they were stopped by women who had a tale of misery to relate, by children whose mothers wanted “to see sister for a minute” ’ (Law, 1893: 46). They are beset with challenges. In one common lodging house they sing hymns with the residents, in another they are greeted with mockery: From kitchen to kitchen the slum saviours went, heedless of rebuffs. Once or twice they brought a man to his knees, one who was recovering from a fit of drinking. Some people seemed to think that the slum saviours could give them something. Some jeered at the Salvation Army, not a few stopped to argue about religion. (1893: 49)

Ceding the direction of their movement to the people’s will, the sisters also accept any and all responses to their mission. The use of speech, or accounts of conversation, is striking in Harkness’s novels. Ellen Ross has noted the distinctively aural texture of women’s slum writing, which she ascribes to the material realities of middle-class women’s slum work in roles that required them to listen and to talk (2007: 14­–15). Indeed, in the opening scene of A City Girl, based on the Katharine Buildings where Harkness briefly lived, we eavesdrop on tenants commenting on the governance of their buildings and stories told among the children about what lies beyond. Out of Work, too, begins with the unreported ‘hisses which the denizens of the slums had mingled with faint applause’ as they watch Queen Victoria’s visit to the People’s Palace in Mile End, and which the narrator warns ‘may a year or so hence prove dangerous’ (Law, 1888: 2). In In Darkest London, however, conversations with Salvationists are presented without comment, as if recorded verbatim: ‘Every breath you draw is a gift from God. He has let you live so long. He might have cast you into hell years ago, brother. Give up your sin. Come to Him.’

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In Harkness’s London ‘It’s hell to live in a place like this,’ the man answered, looking round the dark room, and at the faces of the lodgers. ‘Have you any money? Give me food first. I’ll attend to salvation afterwards.’ ‘Gold and silver have I none,’ was the girl’s reply; ‘but what I have, that I give unto you.’ ‘Then, my lass, you can carry your preaching somewhere else. Don’t come here to talk of salvation to a man like me. I’m hungry.’ (Law, 1893: 50)

This exchange appears to be adapted from a scene in one of Harkness’s British Weekly articles, in which a group of slum sisters enters a common lodging-house kitchen in Shoreditch, singing a hymn: The people took little notice, but went on with their work or their supper while the girls were singing. Presently a Salvation lass began to speak about heaven and hell, and became so excited that she waved her arms above her head, and swung them in front and behind without heeding passers-by. A poor toy-maker was carrying his merchandise out of the room, and she swept the tray from his hands in her energetic appeal to the Deity. The man made no complaint but quietly picked up his goods, some of which were broken past repair. ‘Never mind, sister,’ he said, when the slum lassie paused to say that she was sorry, ‘but next time you preach keep your arms quiet.’ (Law, 1889: 64–5).

In the British Weekly article, the lodgers ignore the women, and the Salvationist preaches ‘without heeding passers-by’. The mutual disregard of the city street continues indoors. In the context of the article, the anecdote’s function is clear: it is there to underline the miserable passivity of the toymaker, who subsists on the edge of destitution and cannot even muster resistance to the careless destruction of his livelihood. In the novel, however, the scene is less easy to read. Rendered in full in direct speech, it becomes an intimate encounter in which the interlocutors directly confront one other. Rather than repressing the contradictions of slum saving, the novel pushes them to the surface. Such short narratives of attempted conversion or religious disputation recur throughout the novel. The narrator’s retreat in these moments leaves the episodes without interpretation, and with equal moral and argumentative weight given to each party. They seem to reference the reportage of social investigation, with its reverence for the spoken testimony of the interviewee. But they also suggest Harkness’s attraction to forms of activism, and forms of narrative, that do not demand immediate resolution. 70

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London

Conclusion

In 1891, after travels in Europe, America and Australia investigating the Labour Question, Margaret Harkness returned to London with renewed optimism about the city’s future. ‘I have been taught hope and patience,’ she wrote in an essay published in the New Review, ‘The slums of England will pass away, but not yet.’ (Law, 1891: 384; emphasis in original). In her fiction, Harkness had already begun to explore forms of writing that could articulate the open, unfinished nature of social activism. In other ways, her writing aimed to contribute to political progress by fostering empathy for the lives of the poor. She depicted the city through the eyes of its outcasts and probed beneath the surface of its spectacle. In both her journalism and her fiction, she flexed the role of the narrator to foreground the voices and perspectives of many different East Enders. Pushing against the familiar tropes of urban journalism and the paternalism of late-Victorian slum fiction, Harkness represented the London street as a site of unresolved social struggle, of hostile and loving encounters.

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1888). Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein. —— (1889a). ‘Brush-Makers’. Toilers in London: Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis. London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 58–67. —— (1889b). ‘Foreign Servants’. Toilers in London: Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis. London: Hodder & Stoughton, pp. 141–50. Harkness, Margaret (ed.) (1889). Toilers in London, or: Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Law, J. (1890a [1887]). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. –––– (1890b). ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In praise of General Booth’. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October, pp. 1–2. —— (1891). ‘A Year of My Life’. The New Review, October, pp. 375–84. –––– (1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe [1891]. London: Reeves.

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In Harkness’s London Additional works cited Anon. (1890). ‘A Slum-Story Writer’. Evening News and Post, 17 April, p. 2. Besant, W. (1882). All Sorts and Conditions of Men. London: Chatto & Windus. Booth, C. (1889–1903). Life and Labour of the People in London. London: Macmillan. Bowlby, R. (1985). Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York and London: Methuen. Egan, P. (1821). Life in London. London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones. Engels, F. (1974). ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York, NY: International General, pp. 115–17. Epstein Nord, D. (1995). Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 45–66. Highmore, B. (2005). Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Koven, S. (2010). ‘The Social Question and the Jewish Question in Late Victorian London: The Fictions and Investigative Journalism of Margaret Harkness’. Imagination and Commitment: Representations of the Social Question. Ed. Ilja van der Broek, Christianne Smit, and Dirk Jan Wolffram. Leuven: Peters, pp. 37–48. Miller, E. C. (2013). Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morrison, A. (1896). A Child of the Jago. London: Methuen. Nead, L. (2000). Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Potter, B. (1888). ‘Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary’. Nineteenth Century (24.139). 301–14. Ross, E. (2007). Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Rowe, R. (1881). Life in the London Streets; or, Struggles for Daily Bread. London: Nimmo and Bain. Simmel, G. (1950). ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ [1903]. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolf. London: Macmillan, pp. 409–24. Sypher, E. (1993). Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel. London and New York: Verso.

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Walking Margaret Harkness’s London von Rosenberg, I. (1987), ‘French Naturalism and the English Socialist Novel: Margaret Harkness and William Edwards Tirebuck’. The Rise of Socialist Fiction 1880–1914. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987, pp. 151–71. Walkowitz, J. R. (1992). City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago. Webb, B. (1982). The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Vol. 1. 1873–1892 Glitter Around and Darkness Within. Ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. London: Virago. Wolff, J. (1985). ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’. Theory, Culture and Society (2.3). 37–46.

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4

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‘The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure’: women and leisure time in A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891) Eliza Cubitt

‘The power of enjoyment’: working women and leisure

The need expressed by social reformers for ‘good moral public amusements’ for the British people in the late nineteenth century was countered by a fear that ‘progressive degradation of popular amusements’ was inevitable because working people did not know how to enjoy themselves in a wholesome manner (Jevons, 1878: 500). While lamenting the loss of pre-Industrial ‘Merrie England’ and its fairs and fêtes, reformers aimed to both provide and regulate entertainment for the labouring classes. In ‘The Amusements of the People’ (1884), Walter Besant directed this rhetoric specifically towards female factory workers. Walking in the streets together and laughing mirthlessly, Besant asserted, was evidence of their incapacity for correct forms of leisure, their lack of the ‘power of enjoyment’ (Besant, 1884: 347, 350). The ‘wearisomeness’ of ‘the noisier enjoyments’ was used as criticism of working-class women’s leisure (Anon., 1892a: 186). This reflects a wider drive by those who, like Besant, saw themselves as sympathetic friends of the poor, towards ‘rational recreation’ for the urban working classes. Many social reformers and philanthropists expressed anxiety that working-class people would spend their time and money on pursuits not propitious to cultural elevation and self-improvement (Jevons, 1878: 501). While rational recreationists understood and supported the need 74

‘The problem of leisure’ for leisure as repose from the demands of excessive hours of dull labour, the moral imperative they felt in directing working-class leisure prohibited an affective response from that leisure (Parratt, 2001: 150–2). The worry was that leisure time for the populace was used for ‘not so much calm as stimulus, not so much beauty as excitement’: there could be unbridled pleasure in leisure (Anon., 1882: 1049). Men’s leisure was increasingly a focus of social reformers and philanthropists, due to the widening of male suffrage, decreased working hours, and relatively higher wages. The 1867 Reform Act, which extended the franchise to working-class adult urban men, meant that rational recreationists focused their efforts on this group in order to ensure a ‘civilised’ electorate (Beaven, 2005: 17). Women’s leisure was less often a subject of consideration. Indeed, Brad Beaven suggests that ‘only when women’s out-of-work activities affected either the domestic sphere or men’s leisure time did female recreation merit attention’ (2005: 18). However, the texts I examine in this chapter focus their anxiety regarding unwholesome, too-pleasurable leisure on unmarried women. Married women, it was recognised, were unlikely to have sufficient time or money for leisure (Besant, 1884: 346). Any leisure they did attain would likely be under the purview of their husbands and therefore within patterns of acceptable gender management. As probably the only working-class women with the time and money to enjoy new forms of commercial leisure, unmarried women were the focus of anxieties that modern industrial life did not fit girls to become domesticated wives and mothers (Parratt, 2001: 8). Harkness’s depiction of a vibrant, noisy East End of London complicates the perceived duality of the nineteenth-century city, supposed to contain ‘leisure to the West, and labour to the East’ (Ackroyd, 2000: 677). However, for the women in two of Harkness’s East End novels, A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891, first published as Captain Lobe in 1889), leisure is difficult to access, and drawing too much pleasure from it can be dangerous. In these texts, leisure never has the ‘troubling, subversive potential’ for resistance which earlier Victorians saw as a possible effect (Parratt, 2001: 7). Harkness counters the view of rational recreationists in her negation of leisure as a tool for reform. Its limited availability and its impurity – it frequently becomes, for working women, another form of work – makes leisure incapable of providing the solution to the ‘low level of monotonous and yet excited life’ of the East End identified by Harkness’s cousin Beatrice Webb, née Potter (quoted in Walkowitz, 1992: 56). Harkness suggests that none of the bodies at work in the East End – the Salvation Army, middle-class philanthropists, or 75

In Harkness’s London radical political groups – has paid appropriate and sufficient attention to the problem. Harkness’s representation of women’s leisure as concomitantly necessary, insufficient, and damaging demonstrates her working through some of the contradictions within her own nascent feministsocialism. Her ‘ambiguous identifications’ of working-class life allow us to probe leisure’s uneven provision throughout the East End (Epstein Nord, 1995: 184–5). Apparent inconsistencies within Harkness’s spare prose persuade us to consider why the issue of leisure was a contentious one. The historiography of Victorian leisure has been formed, on the one hand, by those who ‘have been quite concerned about the “problem” of mass recreation’, and, on the other, by the predominantly Marxist analyses of ‘history from below’ in the later twentieth century which challenged such views as being inflected with Victorian bias (Sandiford, 1981: 271; Griffin, 2002: 620). While many socialists ‘remained fierce critics of popular leisure’ because it perpetuated patterns of work which were physically and economically destructive (Beaven, 2005: 47), Harkness’s observations on the issue are productively abstruse. Harkness’s writing gives expression to the social inequities she condemned, but also reveals certain imbalances in her own socialist thinking. Her early novels were published during a period when the ‘urban politics of anger’ had become ‘a politics of consolation, when workers became resigned to the power of the state and its bureaucracy as well as to the … all-pervasiveness of the modern work and capital regime’ (Melman, 2011: 45). Harkness’s project is part of a larger representation of the East End and its inhabitants as contributing to the late-Victorian commodification of working-class leisure. Her representations of women’s leisure and its dangerous proximity to pleasure bear superficial similarities to representations by Besant, Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, and W. Somerset Maugham, all of whom treat the East End as the site of limited, often disorderly leisure for working people. Yet Harkness counters a distrust of working women’s leisure by focusing more closely on the indeterminate borders between work and leisure. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1912 [1899]) postulates that: ‘A degree of leisure and of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised … as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless, human life’ (Veblen, 1912: 37–8). For women in Harkness’s East End, leisure cannot be ‘beautiful and ennobling’ (Veblen, 1912: 38): it is frequently neither restful, wholesome, nor fun. For indolent men in 76

‘The problem of leisure’ these texts, the working woman at leisure is a spectacle. For unmarried women, pleasure is punishable and leisure a temporary aspiration before the drudgery of married life commences.

‘I have been nowhere. I have done nothing’: leisure in A City Girl (1887)

A City Girl opens in a chaos of noise: the refrain of the music-hall song ‘My Mary Anne’ rises above the voices of children playing in the ‘Charlotte’s Buildings’ (Law, 1890: 2–3), the home of the protagonist Nelly Ambrose. This area of London teems with leisure, but the noise and sociability are uncomfortable and unrestful, and offer Nelly nothing ‘particularly new to look at’ (Law, 1890: 55). While the novel challenges Annie Besant’s argument that East and West London might unite across many divides but never leisure (Besant, 1886: 13), characters from different social classes do not participate in leisure activities on an equal basis. Nelly ‘sorely want[s] a little diversion, a little amusement’, but these are unavailable due to her lack of time and money (Law, 1890: 56). There are no girls’ clubs to provide rational recreation for Nelly, and she cannot access other clubs unless as the guest of a man. The Radical Club, for example, ‘is open to wives and sweethearts as well as men’, her companion George tells her – but not to single women (Law, 1890: 25). Nelly is denied access to leisure because she cannot go out without a male companion to provide both funds and propriety: ‘She had had no “outing” … because George had been busy whitewashing the wash-houses’ (Law, 1890: 56). Nelly’s difficulty represents a broader shift in traditional forms of urban working-class leisure towards the commercialisation of leisure, which Kathy Peiss suggests created new audiences and profited by the commodification of heterosocial culture (Peiss, 1986: 186). The crossclass allure of heterosocial leisure makes possible Nelly’s seduction by the middle-class sometime socialist Arthur Grant. For Nelly, the boundaries between work and leisure are indistinct. She works in her bedroom, and the other room of the apartment she shares with her mother and brother is a shop. Nelly is required to serve her family under the pretext that, as the shop is in their home, their work is continual. As Peiss suggests, despite the freedom offered to unmarried wage earners, which created ‘rhythms of time and labour more similar to men’s than married women’s’, their leisure ‘was sinuously intertwined with the rhythms of household labour’ (Peiss, 1986: 5). While Catriona Parratt views the dissolution of boundaries between work and play as 77

In Harkness’s London empowering for women’s creation of pleasure, here it is decidedly problematic (Parratt, 2001: 5). From the opening of the novel, Nelly’s ideal – a ‘life of complete idleness’ – is impossible (Law, 1890: 11). If leisure was, as Veblen defined it, the ‘non-productive consumption of time’, Nelly cannot be at leisure because nearly all her time is productive (Veblen, 1912: 43). Nelly attempts to seek variety in the East End streets. There is no respite inside: ‘she was tired of work, and home meant getting supper ready and washing up’ (Law, 2015: 70). Seeking refuge from work in the streets, Nelly encounters Arthur, to whom she laments her lack of leisure: ‘I have been nowhere. I have done nothing … nothing but work’ (Law, 1890: 58). In Vere Street in Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth (1897), lack of traffic allows the street to become a place for leisure, but this is never a safe space. Liza’s dance to the organ-grinder’s music with her friends is stopped abruptly when the watching men try to kiss her (Maugham, 2000: 10–11). One of these men is the married Blakeston, with whom she later has an affair. Her mother anticipates the outcome of Liza’s street games: ‘I don’t know what you get up to in the street with all those men. No good, I’ll be bound’ (Maugham, 2000: 21). Despite public use of the streets as leisure spaces, they remained perilous to single women. Arthur ‘would never have thought of [Nelly] any more’, were it not for her appearance in the street (Law, 1890: 50). Nelly’s presence in the street makes her available for Arthur’s pleasure. At the opening of the novel Nelly’s only leisure is vicarious – she buys sweets for the children of the ‘buildings’ and fetches alcohol for her family. Vicarious leisure, Veblen suggests, was ‘performed for the quasipersonal corporate household’ (Veblen, 1912: 67). This seems pertinent to Nelly’s relations with her family, which are based on her economic value to them. Her freedom to go out with Arthur indicates not independence but neglect. When she returns late from an outing with him, her mother and brother ‘did not ask her why … In the East End girls come and go at all hours of the day and night without comment, especially “hands,” like Nelly, who help to pay the rent’ (Law, 1890: 66). The limited leisure available to Nelly indicates negligence by the company who built Charlotte’s Buildings. Reformers were concerned that improving leisure would be impossible to implement ‘within the dark and degenerate “rabbit warrens” of the modern city’ (Beaven, 2005: 27). The lack of provision for Nelly’s leisure when the problem of her accommodation has purportedly been solved problematises the value of middle- and upper-class interventions. Besant and others presented the 78

‘The problem of leisure’ myth that working-class children did not know how to play, disregarding the problem that, as Harkness portrays at Charlotte’s Buildings, even well-meaning housing interventions neglected to provide specified leisure areas. The children play in inapposite spaces, and even these are under threat. The bleakness of the wasteland which is their ‘playground’ is matched only by the futile hope of the residents that it will be made into a ‘pleasure-ground for casuals’ (Law, 1890: 22). The children’s determination to play is a small and temporary act of defiance in an atmosphere in which discussions of leisure are focused on ‘issues of control over space and regulation of behaviour’ (Beaven, 2005: 39). The children’s game of ‘building houses with the stones and bricks’ suggests Harkness’s self-­conscious criticism: it implies that the developers of Charlotte’s Buildings have been merely playing at reform (Law, 1890: 22). Superfluous male leisure results in the parasitic indolence of the loafers, the men who idle outside pubs and who allow women to work to support them, like Nelly’s brother Tom. In In Darkest London, Captain Lobe views loafers (always male) as ‘the most hopeless’ of the inhabitants of the East End (Law, 1893: 4). Toilers in London describes how a woman could become a ‘victim of a loafer’, a man who would allow her to look after him financially (Anon., 1889: 260). In Darkest London’s factory manager, Mr Pember, is a parasitic figure who does no work but makes his office look like leisure apartments; there is even a bed (Law, 1893: 168). Arthur, too, is a dangerous variety of loafer. ‘Awfully dull’ by himself while his wife is on holiday, Arthur purports to be concerned that Nelly ‘ought to have more amusement’ (Law, 1890: 63). His promise of leisure to Nelly is a threat masked by his male middle-class socialist idealism. He believes that he is benevolently ‘giving a little East End girl great pleasure’, when he is in fact using her to entertain himself (Law, 1890: 76). After the death of their child, however, Arthur realises ‘what a heavy price she had paid for a few hours’ amusement’ (Law, 1890: 125). The unsatisfying close of the novel does not suggest any improvement upon this picture. Nelly and George will marry and move to a socialist retreat in the countryside to work as caretakers. This future does not promise any increase in leisure or pleasure for Nelly. As suffragette and socialist Hannah Mitchell (1872–1956) wrote in her autobiography, ‘young Socialist men’ were as bad as their conservative counterparts in expecting unceasing labour from women towards their comfort (quoted in Parratt, 2001: 100–1). While Liza of Lambeth’s leisure-seeking causes her death from miscarriage, Nelly survives to receive a proposal from George after the death of her illegitimate child. In demonstrating the 79

In Harkness’s London possibility of a ‘fallen’ woman’s recovery, Harkness seems to promise a revelatory picture of female independence, but she dampens the effect by suggesting the bleakness that lies ahead for Nelly. Nelly’s move can be no more positive than her submission to the professedly socialist Arthur. Nelly has had her few hours’ amusement, and misery has cured her of the need for leisure: ‘girlish pleasures seemed such silly things. She had no wish now for theatres and outings’ (Law, 1890: 179).

‘Trembling with pleasure’: melodrama and seduction

The Parliamentary Special Committee set up in 1892 to investigate and regulate the safety and social usage of theatres and music halls found evidence that these two types of venue had distinct audiences (Anon., 1892: 673). This finding is supported by A City Girl as well as Liza of Lambeth. Nelly and Liza aspire to attend melodramas but never mention the music hall. Appealing to both ‘the pit and the gallery’, melodramas had oldfashioned, cross-class appeal, expressing neither ‘obscenity nor Ibsenity’ (Anon., 1889: 397–8). Although many critics saw melodrama as crude, overall the enjoyment of such plays was widespread (Quilter, 1887: 547). Melodrama was the ‘attainable ideal’ of modern theatre: its appeal to the working women in these texts suggests their cultural cultivability (Anon., 1883: 1692). The theatre ought to be a safe, cross-class, heterosocial space, more elevating than the unruly music hall in which ‘ladies’, the conservative National Observer declared, were ‘armed with a full sense of the danger they [ran]’ to their reputation and their person (Anon., 1892c: 530). For Nelly, who aspires to the ‘blissful state’ of ‘being a lady’, the theatre provides a feeling that she is elevated in status (Law, 1890: 11). She ‘felt a “lady” for the first time in her life’, but this is both subjective and temporary (Law, 1890: 59). At the theatre, Liza and Nelly both unwittingly take risks as great as the Observer suggests ladies would in attending the music hall. In the semi-public space of the theatre, unlike in the street, unmarried couples could affect a certain level of anonymity, and the melodrama could become a mode for seduction. These plays prompt sensations through which pleasure becomes both thrill and empathy. Theatre invokes a pseudo-solitary affective response, experienced with, but not only as, a crowd. Such responses ought to create the desired effect of rational recreation, whereby working-class leisure-seekers could ‘begin to discriminate carefully their own life and its delights from other people’s’ (Anon., 1882: 1050). However, Nelly’s emotional investment in the play is naively earnest, as if the characters 80

‘The problem of leisure’ are real. Her empathetic response distinguishes her from Arthur, who derides the play: they are not ‘a united audience’ (Jevons, 1878: 509). The play, performed by a West End company, is ostensibly a chance for inhabitants of the East End to watch West End actors, but Arthur spends the entirety of it watching Nelly. On their river trip at Kew, Arthur tells Nelly that she reminds him of a painting: he sees her as ‘a picture worth looking at’, not as a person (Law, 1890: 39). Nelly’s response to the play so entertains Arthur that he is moved to ‘put his arm round Nelly’s waist. He could not help it, [she] looked so wonderfully picturesque’ (Law, 1890: 62). She is the embodiment of entertainment for him. While Nelly is watched by Arthur, the ebullient Liza’s enjoyment of theatre is a proxy entertainment for those around her: ‘people turned to look at her, and said: “She is enjoyin’ ’erself” ’ (Maugham, 2000: 68). Blakeston’s wife could not go to the theatre even ‘if she wanted; she’s got the kids ter look after’ (Maugham, 2000: 56). According to her neighbours, Liza takes an unfair share of the ‘power of enjoyment’: she is said to have ‘all the pleasures of a ’usband an’ none of the trouble’ (Maugham, 2000: 89). Despite its reputation as superior to music halls, in these texts the heterosocial space of the theatre is unsafe for female audience members, whose responses are watched by others. Theatre, even melodrama, ought to be an ‘encouragement to simple pleasures’ but is manipulated into an ‘inducement to vice’ (Greville, 1884: 22). Nelly’s natural empathy is prompted by the play, but her ‘strange exhilaration’ and her physical response, ‘trembling with pleasure’, is matched by Arthur’s, to her destruction (Law, 1890: 59, 61).

The Palace as paradise

The Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Crystal Palace built to house it, as Joseph McLaughlin writes, ‘induced a near hysteria among its opponents over the prospect of the … huge working-class populations expected to attend’ (McLaughlin, 2000: 6; Flanders, 2007: 29). Although this angst had subsided somewhat by the 1880s, the legislation in 1871 to provide bank holidays suggests that mass working-class leisure continued to be viewed as a threat that required regulation (Beaven, 2005: 16). Nelly’s positive response to the Albert Palace at Battersea demonstrates the elevating properties of these exhibitions, which were intended to promote leisure with ‘propriety and freedom from moral harm’ (Jevons, 1878: 501). However, A City Girl also problematises the continuing cross-class attraction of such exhibitions. Their advantages are momentary; their 81

In Harkness’s London ill-effects long lasting. Nelly’s is the idealised working-class response to the Palace; she quietly and happily feels herself to be ‘passing in congenial company through scenes … in some sense dignified and dignifying’ (Anon., 1882: 1049). The Palace effects a dream-like state of transfiguration in which the difficulties of Nelly’s life are erased: ‘she felt in Paradise’ (Law, 1890: 41). The Palace changes how she sees herself, her family, and her companions. She is ‘delighted with everything’, but when they leave ‘the spell [is] broken’ and Nelly is ‘rudely awakened’ from her dream (Law, 1890: 41). In Gissing’s The Nether World (1992 [1887]), a bank holiday trip to ‘the Paliss’ ends in a similarly rude awakening for Pennyloaf Hewett, but without the dream in which Nelly’s reverie begins. For Gissing, bank holidays are ‘for the repose and recreation of multitudes who neither know how to rest nor how to refresh themselves with pastime’ (Gissing, 1992: 105). Exhaustive description and breathless prose portray a pandemonium of leisure in this passage. The incapacity of the people for simple enjoyment makes their behaviour by turns ‘imbecile joviality’, ‘idiot admiration’, or dullness (Gissing, 1992: 108, 109, 111). This celebration, coinciding with Pennyloaf’s wedding day, reveals the ­misguidedness of her marriage even as it begins. Gissing twists a hyperbolic colloquialism of pleasure into a presentiment of doom: ‘we shall die of laughter’ (Gissing, 1992: 110). This episode of unrestful leisure is the beginning of Pennyloaf’s work as a wife. On their return journey, she has ‘hard work to get her husband as far as the station’ (Gissing, 1992: 111). The ‘Paliss’ outing typifies the work Pennyloaf performs while others seek leisure. She must also care for her alcoholic mother, who, Pennyloaf laments, ‘never did get over a bank holiday’ (Gissing, 1992: 113). The novel reveals a social decrepitude which can only be resolved, the narrator states, with ‘no beer shops and no Bank-holidays’ (Gissing, 1992: 113). However, the sympathetic portrayal of Pennyloaf challenges the narrator’s own expressions of the incorrigibility of the workers seeking leisure. The focus on Pennyloaf’s responses suggests an awareness that if there is ‘always something aggressive about deliberate merrymaking’, it is most often women who are the victims of such aggression (Anon., 1892a: 186). By going to the Albert Palace on an ordinary Saturday, rather than a bank holiday, Nelly has an experience that is calmer and more pleasant than Pennyloaf’s, but the outcome is equally sobering. The perception of worsening behaviour on bank holidays was variously attributed to the regulatory nature of such holidays – they reduced the possibility of 82

‘The problem of leisure’ selecting one’s own break from work, and so curtailed freedom – and to a collective incapacity of working people to disport themselves properly (Meller, 2013: 15; Beaven, 2005: 16). In Liza of Lambeth Liza feels a bank holiday is ‘a little like two Sundays running, but with the second rather worse than the first’ (Maugham, 2000: 28). The bank holiday is limiting rather than enabling to Liza’s freedom, so that ‘she almost wished it were an ordinary work-day’ (Maugham, 2000: 28). In Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894), Lizerunt’s experience of a bank holiday is similar to Pennyloaf’s. Morrison suggests both the unmanageability and the enfeeblement of town dwellers, who take the opportunity of the holiday to ‘howl at large’ but who prefer going to Wanstead Flats, where there is ‘no danger of losing yourself as in Epping Forest’ (Morrison, 2008: 31). Decorous Nelly’s enchanted but quiet daydreaming and her willingness to experience new forms of leisure contrast with such depictions. Nelly’s experience suggests that the choice of when best to access these facilities ought to be open to the individual, to prevent the ‘shrill jollity of the crowd’ (Anon., 1892a: 186). Yet, in the calm depiction of Nelly’s submission to ‘rational recreation’, Harkness does not explicitly suggest a need for reform, but insinuates the insufficiency of these entertainments. Nelly responds properly to the entertainments, but they have no lasting influence on her life: the spell will always be broken. Despite numerous snide comments at the expense of their working-class characters, Morrison and Gissing usefully demonstrate that ‘popular amusements are no trivial matter’ (Meller, 2013: 12). This recognition of the critical nature of leisure in the lives of inhabitants of the East End, especially when they lack the choice of the day or the nature of the leisure activity, is useful to our understanding of the limitations of working-class women’s leisure. Lizerunt’s and Pennyloaf’s depictions disclose the male-led chaos of the bank holiday, which quells working women’s ‘power of enjoyment’. Both Liza and Nelly experience leisure as the vicarious leisure objects of others. Having initially declined to go on the bank-holiday outing, Liza gives herself up to pleasure and is entertaining to all around her, for ‘where she was there was no dullness’ (Maugham, 2000: 36). Liza is the entertainment for the entire street in which she lives as well as for the married man with whom she has an affair.1 Going to the Palace on an ordinary day rather than a bank holiday allows Nelly to encounter Arthur and prompts an inauthentic social parity which is damaging to her. By partaking of leisure, Liza and Nelly become objects of leisure. Nelly’s quiet and unobtrusive dreaminess at the Albert Palace suggests 83

In Harkness’s London hopefulness for schemes of rational amusement. However, the disparity between Nelly’s proper response and Arthur’s improper viewing of her as a picturesque object, rather than as somebody who experiences leisure and its affect, indicates that male superfluity of leisure – Arthur’s having ‘nothing to do’ – is as much a problem as women’s lack of ‘rational recreation’ (Law, 1890: 58).

‘A minute to call my own’: working leisure, philanthropic pleasure

Harkness’s efforts to reveal the social reality of the East End are sometimes undermined by her willingness to use tropes which her own texts suggest are of limited use. In the opening chapter of In Darkest London Harkness indulges in a cliché about inhabitants of the East End: ‘The only things in which East End people take an interest are murders and funerals. Their lives are so dull, nothing else sets their sluggish blood in motion’ (Law, 1893: 9). This assertion is contradicted by the labour mistress Jane Hardy, who is critical of the entertainments which thrill young female factory workers and seeks educational recreation. It is further complicated in the flatly affectless, almost mute factory owner Ruth, whose efforts to observe the lives of the young women who work for her never afford purposefulness to her own leisure, as philanthropic work did for many wealthy women (Parratt, 2001: 185). Throughout the novel leisure is portrayed as divisive. The Salvation Army brings to the East End a distrust of forms of entertainment and leisure associated with vice. Army workers ‘would imagine it ­un-Christlike to leave sinners to perish while they themselves enjoyed clubs, concerts, dinner-parties, crushes, and other entertainments’ (Law, 1893: 13). Relishing sacrifice, they express negligible concern about a lack of enjoyment in the lives of others (Beaven, 2005: 33). Lobe views leisure as potentially evil. He cannot comprehend the ‘satisfaction [inhabitants of the East End] get by fuddling their brains in public-houses and by coarse love-making’ (Law, 1893: 211). Even the companionship required for happiness is mysterious to Lobe: he cannot appreciate the dullness which two poor young women, Patty and Susan, evade by staying together, despite his own loneliness (Law, 1893: 2–3). Harkness’s measured praise of the Salvation Army is vexed by this inability to concede a requirement for leisure. The labour mistress criticises the Salvation Army’s distaste for leisure. Jane distrusts the abstemiousness which the Salvation Army advocates, particularly in their 84

‘The problem of leisure’ disregard for Samuel Barnett’s concerts and exhibitions at Toynbee Hall. These, she tells the Salvation Army workers, are educational and pleasurable (Law, 1893: 134–5). This discussion takes place immediately before Jane’s introduction of Ruth to the penny gaffs where her factory workers spend their leisure time. Barnett’s entertainments are presented as inaccessible, even irrelevant, to young women workers (Law, 1893: 106). Toynbee Hall is never mentioned in A City Girl, despite its geographical proximity to the other real-world places surrounding Nelly’s home, such as Petticoat Lane Market. The absence of the Hall from this imagined landscape is conspicuous. The implication is that neither of these two major philanthropic presences – the Salvation Army and the Settlements – have made leisure accessible to the people of the East End. Jane is deeply critical of the affect of the waxworks, which she shows to Ruth as an example of the factory workers’ entertainments. While scholars have stressed this exhibition’s importance (McLaughlin, 2000: 10–14; Koven, 2004, 65), these analyses have overlooked the significance of Harkness’s representation both of working women’s leisure and of the labour mistress’s perspective of this leisure. Most of the bodies on display in In Darkest London – the dwarf Napoleon, the tattooed man Captain Dan Fisher, the waxwork murderers in the chamber of horrors, and the subjects of the Last Supper – are male. This challenges the tradition of wax models, which, as Pamela Pilbeam has observed, were predominantly female from the inception of their usage as anatomical models in the eighteenth century (Pilbeam, 2003: 4–6). The novel’s socialist-­feminist figure, Jane, examines the East End waxworks with a critical gaze. Ruth’s gaze is less interrogatively critical, but nevertheless the revulsion which the exhibition inspires causes her to faint. Using Ruth and Jane as critical viewers of the factory workers’ entertainments, Harkness casts a judgemental eye on the unsuitability of such pursuits. Ruth’s delicacy reflects the inappropriateness of the entertainment. Jane tells Ruth that horror attracts the factory workers to the waxworks; they pay to ‘feel their flesh creep’ (Law, 1893: 149). The text’s judgement of this is problematised by the apparent masochism of the female Salvation Army workers. Neighbours of the ‘slum sisters’ admit that they tried to burn down the women’s shutters one night in retaliation against disparaging the street in the War Cry, but the slum sisters seemed enlivened rather than terrified: ‘it’s no good trying to scare ’em, they just enjoys it’ (Law, 1893: 253). The violence of the slums seems to thrill the slum sisters: the fear they feel affords them pleasure. While the factory workers watch the ‘cosmorama’ and ‘panorama’ of the world at 85

In Harkness’s London the penny gaff, the panoramic view that Lobe takes of Whitechapel Road and the thrill felt by the slum sisters intimates that for outsiders the East End is an exhilarating panorama of physicality. For Jane, leisure is indivisible from work. When she first discloses how she is able to travel, Jane seems proud of her resourcefulness: ‘I take the place of a stewardess, and she comes here as labour-mistress; so I get a trip for nothing’ (Law, 1893: 85). Yet Jane later reveals the insufficiency of this ‘holiday’ in an embittered monologue: ‘slave all day, that is my life, unless I take a stewardess’s place on a boat, and then I just go to the other side of the water and back, without seeing anything but sick folk’ (Law, 1893: 126). This parity of work and leisure is also apparent in Ruth’s sweet factory, where the workers have turned the backyard into a ‘bit of garden’. Here there is ‘a mound of earth, surrounded by oyster shells … in the centre was an Aunt Sally made of cocoa-nut, with a hideous grin on her face, and two arms which held in their grim embrace a surprise packet. This prize fell to the lot of the girl who could knock it down with a stone or stick’ (Law, 1893: 87). This entertainment makes the factory workers’ lunch hour a grotesque imitation of leisure, as the coconut creature they have created is a grotesque imitation of themselves. The ‘prize’ of the packet of sweets is a product of their own work, so that this game is simply a poor mimicry of labour. Further, the knocking down of the ‘Aunt Sally’ reflects the casual violence with which the young women are surrounded, particularly ‘the favourite slum game – woman baiting’, in which missiles are thrown at a fractious woman (Law, 1893: 17).2 In All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), Walter Besant advocates working women’s leisure but unwittingly presents the defunctness of the labour itself. 3 Philanthropic heiress Angela disguises herself as a dressmaker, but hires young women to make dresses for herself only, thus introducing an entirely unsustainable model of work. She intends instead to look after the girls ‘out of their work-time’ (Besant, 1882: 78; emphasis in original). The middle-class activities Angela provides, however – lawn-tennis, gymnastics, and dancing – take place within the managed time of the working day and the controlled space of the workplace. This close management reflects Angela’s distrust of pleasure. She will not call the philanthropic institution which she invents a ‘Palace of Pleasure’ but a ‘Palace of Delight. Pleasure seems to touch a lower note’ (Besant, 1891: 51). Angela’s repeated statements to Harry that the workers must be made ‘discontented’ are defied by the opening of the Palace, which confirms Angela’s regulatory approach to working-class leisure and implores the 86

‘The problem of leisure’ depoliticisation of the working class: ‘The Palace will be for joy and happiness, not for political wrangles’ (Besant, 1891: 330). The ‘Palace of Delight’ is a proscriptive setting for the amelioration of discontent, despite Angela’s avowals that she is trying to inspire just that. Harkness voiced her chariness of Besant’s ‘pretty stories’ in In Darkest London: the slum doctor comments that people who believe such tales would be served right if they ‘walk straight over the precipice’ (Law, 1893: 190). Yet Harkness does not provide an alternative model. Ruth’s ideal, to become a Salvation Army worker, seems misguided, as she is unfit for the work; but advocating greater intervention in the lives of Ruth’s factory workers risks imitating the depoliticised delight promoted by Besant. Ruth is an almost silent character. She is as formless as the waxworks to which Jane compares her: ‘a girl made of wax, that anyone can twist into any shape they like’ (Law, 1893: 142). In the lack of thrill Ruth experiences when witnessing the factory workers’ entertainments and her lack of intervention in their lives, Harkness eschews a representation of the provision of working women’s leisure as second-hand pleasure. Yet the life which Ruth chooses remains dependent on her share in the factory earnings: she receives £1 a week on which to live as a trainee in the Salvation Army, until she marries Lobe. The blankness of Ruth’s character and the unevenness of her interventions into the factory workers’ lives means that she is not a useful alternative model to the philanthropic women whose knowledge of leisure could, in the East End, be re-evaluated and made useful. Ruth and Jane remain incapable of ­accessing leisure or pleasure. Without these, their futures are as sombre as their characterisation.

Conclusion: ‘Happiness’

In 1892, the Spectator published an article entitled ‘Happiness’, which echoed many of the previous two decades’ criticisms of popular leisure. There were, the writer declared, two kinds of happiness – ‘one of which morally intoxicates and takes full possession of the senses, while the other heightens them, intensifies the sympathies, stimulates the vision and lends energy to the imagination’ (Anon., 1892a: 186). Harkness’s representations of women’s leisure complicate such interpretations, presenting apposite responses to and desires for leisure among working-class women. But the extension of sympathies which Nelly experiences when watching the melodrama, and the stimulation of vision which Jane gains from attending public lectures, are insufficient to lead to happiness. As 87

In Harkness’s London Peiss argues, ‘understanding working women’s culture calls for a doubled vision, to see that women’s embrace of [leisure] could be a source of autonomy and pleasure as well as a cause of their continuing oppression’ (Peiss, 1986: 6). Harkness’s ‘highly ambivalent relationship’ to women’s culture in the East End allows for this doubled vision (Epstein Nord, 1995: 205). Harkness offers little clarity as to the cure for the blankness of East End women’s lives. Even the Salvation Army women are not the ‘Happy Eliza and Converted Jane’ of the music hall song, but are merely contented with their self-sacrifice (Walkowitz, 1992: 74–5).4 The elevation which Victorian rational recreationists saw as the value of leisure is striven for but not achieved in these novels. While Nelly seeks ­diversion and Jane an elevating, educational leisure, their status as unmarried working women prevents this. Jane’s feminist-socialism is only ever nascent, despite her desire to learn, and Nelly is lost to ‘that old, old story’, as Engels called it, of seduction by a man whose situation in life offered her at least a ‘few hours’ amusement’ (Law, 1890: 172). Single working women could not realise the ‘power of enjoyment’. For Harkness, women’s leisure remains ‘a profoundly liberating – and unfulfilled – feminist demand’ (Peiss, 1986: 188). The fear that married women’s lives would be even less rewarding due to the lack of pleasure available to them is hinted at in the unsatisfactory marriages that Nelly and Ruth will make. Bleak futures lie before them both; Harkness insinuates that the fulfilment of women’s social role is not the fulfilment of their pleasure.

Notes

1 For my discussion of Liza’s relationship to her neighbours, see Cubitt (2014). 2 I wish to acknowledge the helpful insight of the anonymous peer reviewer of this chapter, who brought the relationship between the violence of the ‘Aunt Sally’ game and the women’s lives to my attention. 3 The emphasis upon working women’s leisure is particularly of interest when one considers that Besant, in a study of working-class leisure, had declared himself unable to discover ‘anything at all’ about women’s leisure activities (Beaven, 2005: 18). 4 For the music-hall song, ‘Happy Eliza and Converted Jane’, composed by Will Oliver and initially performed by Sisters Cuthbert, see http:// monologues.co.uk/musichall/Songs-H/Happy-Eliza-And-ConvertedJane.htm [Accessed 16 March 2017].

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‘The problem of leisure’

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Harkness, Margaret (ed.) (1889). Toilers in London. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1890). A City Girl [1887]. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. —— (1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe [1891]. London: Reeves. Additional works cited Ackroyd, P. (2000). London: The Biography. London: Vintage. Anon. (1882). ‘The Quest of Holidaymakers’. Spectator (55), pp. 1049–50. Anon. (1883). ‘The Possibilities of Melodrama’. Spectator (56), pp. 1691–2. Anon. (1889). ‘London Day by Day’. Spectator (63), pp. 397–8. Anon. (1892a). ‘Happiness’. Spectator (69), pp. 186–7. Anon. (1892b). ‘Theatre and Music-Hall’. Spectator (68), pp. 673–4. Anon. (1892c). ‘Theatre v. Hall’. National Observer (7), pp. 177. Beaven, B. (2005). Leisure, Citizenship and Working-class Men in Britain, 1850–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Besant, A. (1886). ‘How London Amuses Itself: West End and East End’. Our Corner (8), pp. 13–23. Besant, W. (1882). All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story. London: Chatto and Windus. Besant, W. (1884). ‘The Amusements of the People’. Contemporary Review (45), pp. 342–53. Cubitt, E. (2014). ‘ “The Screaming Streets”: Voice and the Spaces of Gossip in Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and Liza of Lambeth (1897)’. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (18). n.p. Epstein Nord, D. (1995). Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Flanders, J. (2007). Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. London: Harper Perennial. Gissing, G. (1992). The Nether World [1889]. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Greville, V. (1884). ‘I. The Need of Recreation’. Fortnightly Review (35.205). 21–30. Griffin, E. (2002). ‘Popular Culture in Industrializing England’. Historical Journal (45.3). 619–35.

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In Harkness’s London Jevons, W. S. (1878). ‘Methods of Social Reform’. Contemporary Review (33), pp. 498–513. Koven, S. (2004). Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Maugham, W. S. (2000). Liza of Lambeth [1897]. London: Vintage. McLaughlin, J. (2000). Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia. Meller, H. (2013). Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 [1976]. New York: Routledge Revivals. Melman, B. (2011). ‘Horror and Pleasure: Visual Methodologies, Sensationalism and Modernity in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft (37). 26–46. Morrison, A. (2008). ‘Lizerunt’, in Tales of Mean Streets [1894]. London: Faber Finds, pp. 29–47. Parratt, C. M. (2001). More than Mere Amusement: Working-Class Women’s Leisure in England, 1750–1914. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Peiss, K. (1986). Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-ofthe-Century New York. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pilbeam, P. (2003). Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks. London: Hambledon Continuum. Quilter, H. (1887). ‘The Decline of the Drama’. Contemporary Review (51), pp. 547–60. Sandiford, K. A. P. (1981). ‘The Victorians at Play: Problems in Historiographical Methodology’. Journal of Social History (15.2). 271–88. Veblen, T. (1912). The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899]. London: Macmillan. Walkowitz, J. R. (1992). City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago.

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The vicissitudes of victory

5

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The vicissitudes of victory: Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), and the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike David Glover

In April 1890 Margaret Harkness marked the publication of her latest novel by telling an interviewer for London’s Evening News and Post that A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890) would be the last of what she called ‘my slum stories’ (Law, 1890b). These were the four short books produced in a sudden concentrated burst between 1886 and 1889 under the pen-name of ‘John Law’ while she was still in her early thirties, novels that had built her reputation as an unflinching observer of the harsher reaches of urban proletarian life and for which she continues to be known today. But that spring, despite growing interest in her work both at home and abroad, she felt that four was ‘enough’: ‘I shall never write another’ (Law, 1890b). In practice, however, Harkness found herself unable to abandon the poverty-stricken lives she had so chillingly chronicled in the 1880s. In 1891–92, for example, her serialised melodrama ‘Roses and Crucifix’ explored the precarious male-­ dominated world of female bar-workers in central London; and Harkness spent much of the fin de siècle in shaping George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), a political novel partially set in the same East End that had played such an essential role in Out of Work (1888) and Captain Lobe (1889, and republished in 1891 as In Darkest London with an introduction by General William Booth of the Salvation Army). Yet, notwithstanding such points of continuity, a sense of perplexity remains: what had happened to make Harkness contemplate a 91

In Harkness’s London c­ omplete break with her literary past in 1890, and to what extent did her work change in that decade? This chapter argues that the answers to these pressing questions are closely bound up with the long gestation of George Eastmont, Wanderer, her last major book and a text that can equally be read as a symptom of the difficulties Harkness had believed she faced and as a resource for a better understanding of what was at stake in this unexpected and halfforsaken declaration. At one level, her dilemma is illuminated by a simple personal chronology: in April 1889 Harkness had been in Manchester, busily researching and drafting what she subsequently claimed to be her final slum story, but with the sudden outbreak of a rapidly escalating Dockworkers’ Strike in early August she had returned to London’s East End and immersed herself in the struggle for improved wages and conditions, one of the very few women to serve alongside its major socialist organisers Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, John Burns, and Henry Hyde Champion. Not only had she ‘worked very hard in connection with the Dockers’ Strike’, but she had also liaised directly with Cardinal Manning, helping to bring him into the negotiations where his presence was key in ensuring that the majority of the dockers’ demands were met (Law, 1890a). A fictionalised version of the political debates provoked by the strike forms the middle section of George Eastmont, Wanderer, which features a cluster of characters who notionally serve as fictional analogues for some of the real historical figures mentioned above, including Cardinal Manning – and Harkness herself. The dockworkers’ victory creates a crisis in the life of the novel’s eponymous hero, because he no longer feels certain as to how a socialist society can be brought into being, let alone what form socialism should take. Although he is a seasoned activist who has already faced an unsuccessful prosecution as a leader of the angry demonstrations by the unemployed around Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly two years earlier, he now doubts whether rallies and strikes represent the right way forward. Instead, he resolves to remove himself from London and take a long, hard look at the questions that trouble him from the other side of the Empire. The trajectory of the novel’s political inquiry passes from the heart of the metropolis to Sydney and out into rural New South Wales, interlaced with an epistolary counter-circuit that travels from London to Sydney via Cockermouth and Limerick. The broad transnational scope of George Eastmont, Wanderer contrasts sharply with the dense localism of Harkness’s previous work, and in this sense it is undoubtedly the most ambitious of all her books. In the 1890 interview she unhesitatingly agreed that her writings from the 1880s 92

The vicissitudes of victory were best described as ‘tracts, rather than novels’, stories that would sway the reader’s emotions and help to bring about an amelioration of the modern city’s worst evils (Law, 1890b). Picking up on an intensifying concern with conditions in the East End, Harkness’s fiction had been prominently advertised during the Dockworkers’ Strike, further helping to boost her sales. By contrast, her 1905 novel offered something very different, exploring the impact of social inequalities largely through the consciousness and experience of a single individual. Generically, this was very much a text for its times, in at least two respects. Firstly, by tacking between the extremes of the class structure and moving across generations, George Eastmont, Wanderer anticipated the Edwardian revival in the ‘condition of England’ novel that came to be associated with E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and others, writers who sought to anatomise the social and cultural dilemmas arising during the fin de siècle and to gesture towards the preconditions for a possible happier future. And secondly, in placing a crisis of belief at the centre of her novel, albeit a crisis in which questions about the true meaning of socialism are inseparable from debates about the contemporary relevance of Christianity, Harkness was in effect responding to the challenge posed by Mrs Humphrey Ward in her extraordinary bestseller Robert Elsmere (1888), where the interrogation of religion finds its provisional resolution in Elsmere’s departure from his Surrey parish in order to set up a community-based educational mission among East End working men. If Harkness ultimately inverted the topographical itinerary of Ward’s novel by presenting the country rather than the city as the most likely setting for ethical and political progress, her depiction of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the strike also contrasted with the secularised interpretation of Christianity in Robert Elsmere. Unlike Ward, Harkness had little interest in the critique of church doctrine and sought to imagine a future in which religion and socialism would complement each other in the slow evolutionary labour of building a more just society.

A long view

How long Harkness actually spent in writing the life of George Eastmont remains unknown. According to her second cousin and old school friend Beatrice Potter (later Webb), as early as November 1889 Harkness had promised, or perhaps threatened, to bring out a book that would tell the inside story of the Dockworkers’ Strike. Potter’s diary intimates a deep sense of shock at what she regarded as her cousin’s disloyalty towards her 93

In Harkness’s London co-workers, evidenced in Harkness’s vainglorious assertion that: ‘I can tell you nothing now, but I shall get out of the whole thing someday – then I can tell you all’ (Webb, 1982: 303). In fact, while Harkness seems to have been quite discreet as to the precise content of these coming revelations, Potter felt sure that she would soon dishonour her former comrades. Despite Potter taking the moral high ground, her curiosity had been piqued and the following February her feelings of outrage had softened and the journal entries show her riveted by Harkness’s indiscretions. At times the tenor of Potter’s response suggests that she might possibly have been referring to a written draft. One passage in her diary reads: ‘The picture she gives of Burns and Mann … is very fine – and it may be true’ (Webb, 1982: 324). But, in contrast to the later novel, in Potter’s record Harkness is at the centre of events in ‘a huge whirlpool and her friends seem like monsters (of virtue or wickedness) in a nightmare’, ‘monsters’ that ‘this time … are lovable’ (Webb, 1982: 323–4). Unfortunately, these confidences came to an abrupt end in the autumn when Harkness announced in a ‘curt letter’ that she was leaving England forever, by which time Potter’s private accusation of ‘treachery’ had resurfaced (Webb, 1982: 341). However, in practice Harkness’s departure from England was neither as immediate nor as decisive as her terse note had foreseen. Her visit to Germany and Austria in late 1890 was cut short by ill-health and it was not until the following year that she embarked on her first substantial visit to Australia and New Zealand. In 1893 she returned to Australia, where she continued to write fiction and newspaper articles until 1904, when she sailed back to London and arranged the publication of George Eastmont, Wanderer before resuming her peripatetic life by setting out for India and Ceylon in February 1905. In terms of its composition George Eastmont, Wanderer had to await Harkness’s second and longer stay in Australia before she had all the material that she needed to complete her book. However, the juxtaposition of real and imaginary events overseas and at home poses its own problems. For example, Eastmont’s sojourn in Australia begins with a conversation in Sydney with a young ‘bushman’ from Queensland in which they discuss the plight of ‘New Australia’, a utopian socialist experiment in Paraguay. Founded in September 1893 by a Brisbane journalist, this venture underwent a damaging schism in May 1894, a date that gives a fair guide as to when Eastmont might have disembarked. But the account of inter-party parliamentary manoeuvring in ‘the Colonies’ and the fraught relationship between the Labour Party and the Liberals in later chapters lacks any clear historical timeline and could have been 94

The vicissitudes of victory set at any point in the early 1890s (Dyrenfurth and Bongiorno 2011: 30–8). These idiosyncratic allusions sit oddly with the abrupt change of focus in the final pages, when Eastmont abandons Australia after being asked by his dying grandfather to take over the running of his Irish estate. Passing through London, he hears a paper-boy crying the news that Cardinal Loraine has just died. The death of Cardinal Manning, the model for Cardinal Loraine, occurred on 14 January 1892, and was commemorated by one of the great late-Victorian London funerals when 100,000 people packed the streets between Brompton Oratory and the cemetery at Kensal Rise. A comparison of the historical record with the fictional temporality of George Eastmont, Wanderer places Cardinal Loraine’s demise at least half a decade after the end of the Dockworkers’ Strike, and therefore several years later than that of the real Cardinal Manning. Of course, by deliberately putting Loraine’s death at the close of her novel Harkness has created a political time-lag that gives Eastmont the opportunity to do exactly what he had announced he intended to do: investigate a range of socialist alternatives in another culture. But this chronological lapse plunges the narrative deeper into backwash from the Dockworkers’ Strike that Eastmont had sought to escape, raising important questions about the relationship between historical truth and fictionalised history. What had happened between 1889 and 1905, the fifteen years between the dockworkers’ victory and the appearance of George Eastmont, Wanderer, both in terms of the political history of ­nineteenth-century British socialism and the evolution of Harkness’s own political views? How did the aftermath of the strike colour its depiction? More specifically, why is the strike, as reinvented in the novel, such a deeply traumatic episode, marked by a swell of contradictory judgements and a prevailing mood of uncertainty, compromise, ­incomprehension, and even shame, a mood in sharp contrast to the triumphalism and euphoria that had been generated by the advances in pay and organisation achieved by the trade union movement in September 1889? ‘Isn’t the strike splendid’, Harkness’s close friend Olive Schreiner had enthused in a letter to Edward Carpenter on 4 September (Rowbotham, 2008: 133). But ‘splendour’ is the last word one would apply to the anguished portrayal of events in George Eastmont, Wanderer, in which the central characters are more frequently pulled apart than brought together. In her remaining years in England, Harkness regularly recurred to the issues raised by the Dockworkers’ Strike, producing a series of sharply worded political interventions as she tried to clarify and work through 95

In Harkness’s London the significance of what had happened. Gradually the memory of the strike turned from a locus of celebration into a constant irritant, a source of difficulty to be repeatedly probed and examined. In one of her columns written around the mid-point of the dispute, for example, Harkness noted the surprise with which its irruption had been greeted, not least among men like Ben Tillett who had spent years trying to organise the dockworkers without success; and she went on to praise ‘the unskilled labourer’ who ‘is showing just now in brilliant colours’, though many of them ‘have not been to bed since the strike began’. Her warmest words were for the wives and children whose loyalty and encouragement had given the strikers ‘strength and determination’, despite the fact that these family members bore what John Burns called ‘the heaviest burden’ (Law, 1889). By the time she was contemplating a visit to prominent members of the German Social Democratic Party, Harkness had begun to see the beginnings of an indigenous Labour Party as the natural successor to the strike, a development that was at least as unexpected as the strike itself. Her open letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, published in the first week of March 1890, traced the new party’s origins back to the 1887 demonstrations in central London, and especially the rioting on ‘Black Monday’, characterising the party’s new leaders as ‘the heroes of Trafalgar Square grown older and wiser’, a phrase which she repeated in her closing defence of peaceful, disciplined parliamentary struggle (Law, 1890a). But one month later, when the Evening News and Post asked her how she saw the future of the working classes, Harkness could only shake her head and would not be drawn on the question of ‘the labour leaders’ (1890b). Shortly after her return from Germany, she indicated that her views were starting to undergo a major change. In a short article entitled ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In Praise of General Booth’ featured on the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette on 21 October 1890, Harkness endorsed the view of the editor, W. T. Stead, that the victory of the dockworkers was nothing more than pure chance, a ‘fluke’. But, pushing this argument further, she claimed that ‘the greatest fluke of all was that last autumn three of the Socialist leaders happened to be working together in amity’. This public attack, explicitly blaming Burns, Champion, and Mann for putting their own quarrels before the common socialist cause, represented the Dockworkers’ Strike as an ephemeral inspirational interlude in a protracted tale of stifling political disappointment, a moment that had ‘come and gone’, leaving ‘the social millennium’ as far away as ever. Harkness never under-estimated the everyday hardship of the East End slum neighbourhoods and she felt that without some immediate 96

The vicissitudes of victory action the lives of ‘slum-dwellers’ in every English city would continue to be destroyed by destitution, starvation, and despair. As in her novel Captain Lobe (Law, 1889b), she again portrayed the Salvation Army as better prepared to help the poor than her socialist comrades; and she went on to denounce the tactics of organised labour for ‘setting employed against employers, preaching a class war, and persecuting blacklegs’ (Law, 1890c). On reading this article Potter was livid at her cousin’s act of betrayal, an attack on her fellow radicals and on socialism itself. The caustic dismissal of the work of Burns, Champion, and Mann had added ‘another treachery … to the long roll’, just as Potter felt that Harkness had now finally turned her back on her (Webb, 1982: 343). Harkness wrote a detailed appraisal of her erstwhile co-workers early the following year in a series of portraits of ‘labour leaders’, again in the Pall Mall Gazette. The figures were the same as before: Burns, Champion, and Mann, but with the addition of Liberal MP R. B. Cunninghame Graham. Witty, acerbic, highly judgemental, and unmistakably the work of someone with a keen worldly knowledge of her subjects, these columns were written to inform and entertain, with scant respect for political sensitivities. They also offered a piecemeal post-mortem on the fall-out from the Dockworkers’ Strike. John Burns, ebullient, gloomy, but always ‘true to the people’, was already an MP and so ‘a Samson shorn of his strength’ (Law, 1891a); Tom Mann was restless, enthusiastic, and a born organiser, yet completely unforgiving once crossed (Law, 1891c); while the adventurous Cunninghame Graham had an artistic bent that inclined him towards anarchism rather than socialism or Marxism (Law, 1891d). However, it was the sketch of the strike’s publicist and chief negotiator, Henry Hyde Champion, that cut closest to the bone. Secretive, independent-minded, and sometimes regarded with suspicion by his allies and followers, Champion is depicted as inexorably bound to his own class background despite his attempts to break with this past. Harkness starts her column by approvingly citing John Burns’s view that ‘Champion is a patrician’, but her most serious criticism is that, once the success of the strike had been secured, he promptly abandoned trade union politics and left for Australia (Law, 1891b). The language used in these columns inevitably recalls Potter’s comments in her diary on Harkness’s account of the central protagonists in the strike, notwithstanding the absence of any hard evidence that their discussions in February 1890 were based on similar material. But whether or not Potter read draft versions of these texts, Harkness’s attempt to put her impressions into words was clearly a kind of preparatory work 97

In Harkness’s London for her 1905 novel. This is especially true of her unflattering portrait of Champion, and the fictional George Eastmont is in several respects remarkably close to the Champion that she dissected in the Pall Mall Gazette. According to Harkness, the key to Champion’s identity lay in his earnest desire ‘to declass himself’ by dropping his family and friends. But while he had achieved this goal, the ‘ideal’ was deeply paradoxical, since the creation of a declassed self left the wider field of social inequalities quite untouched. In short, Champion simply found that he was ‘declassed in a world of classes’ – though Harkness was disappointingly vague as to how self-aware he was about his putative predicament (Law, 1891b). Worse still, like anyone who tries to distance themselves from their class of origin, Champion risked being looked upon as a turncoat who would be thoroughly distrusted by members of the poorer classes. Such is the self-lacerating psychological condition of alienation, extensively explored through free indirect discourse, which lies at the heart of George Eastmont, Wanderer.

History as fiction

If Harkness’s 1891 view of Champion provided the stimulus for George Eastmont – indeed, for the whole conception of the novel – then it is also essential to avoid conflating these two figures and thereby reading the fictionalised Dockworkers’ Strike too quickly as an alternative history of the 1889 dispute. To preserve the incommensurability between fiction and fact some important caveats are in order here. In the first place, Champion’s own references to his class position were surprisingly matter of fact, a far cry from the anguish of the novel’s ­eponymous hero. For example, in his pamphlet on The Great Dock Strike in London, August 1889, published the following year, Champion bluntly declared that the reason he had undertaken to write a short history of the dispute – ‘the greatest struggle between Capital and Labour that this generation of Englishmen has seen’ – was because he was ‘the only man, not a member of the working classes by birth and education, who has been privileged to watch the whole movement at close quarters’ (Champion, 1890: 3). And in the decades after 1889 the discrepancies between the persona that Champion presented to his readers and the character of the fictional Eastmont were, if anything, still more pronounced. The breezy self-­confidence of Champion’s ‘unconventional’ autobiographical reminiscences published in the Melbourne magazine Trident in 1908 is, for instance, 98

The vicissitudes of victory very hard to square with the darker ruminations of Harkness’s radically unsettled protagonist (Champion, 1983). One reason for this dissonance lies in Harkness’s predilection for high melodrama, which required the extensive rewriting of historical events. Episodes were coarsened and crudely recast in order to give the predicaments portrayed in her narrative a more intense emotional charge. A case in point is Champion’s obscure, short-lived marriage to Juliet Bennett in August 1883, which ended with her death from alcoholism and syncope in March 1886 (Whitehead, 1987: 26). In George Eastmont, Wanderer her Doppelgänger ‘Julia Hay’ is humiliated by her husband’s neglect and obvious ambivalence towards their cross-class marriage, a fate made harder to bear by the hostility and condescension of his wealthy upper-class family. Unknown to Eastmont, she is addicted to opium drops and dies from an overdose while Eastmont is in prison awaiting trial for his part in the ‘Black Monday’ demonstrations. In her last ‘reverie’ Julia fantasises being taken into the bosom of his family and dreams that she is ‘in [the] high life’ (Law, 1905: 91). Eastmont’s workerist romance has only the most meagre place for her, without the least hint of ‘the love men and women talk about’, and always subordinated to what he thinks are the needs of ‘the People’ – though, throughout his life with Julia, he continues to dine at his club (Law, 1905: 110). Their awkward home life and misshapen marriage form a primary site for the shame and guilt that are central to the politics of the novel, haunted by illusory dreams of escape and fulfilment. But there is misrecognition on both sides. Julia is not the representative of the proletariat that Eastmont supposes her to be: she is the daughter of a small farmer who is an employer of wage-labour, and she understands divisions within the working class far better than he does, refusing to see them as one large, immiserated mass. As a friend of Eastmont caustically observes, ‘his marriage seems to have been only one of half a dozen other Socialistic experiments’, rather than a genuine expression of desire (Law, 1905: 44). Eastmont blames himself for Julia’s lonely death because his political zeal had landed him in gaol for two weeks, unaware of her suffering and unable to help her. His more perceptive comrades (including Mary Cameron, whose position in the strike resembles Harkness’s own) solicitously keep Julia’s addiction a secret until after he has been set free, a revelation that comes with the starkly disabusing rider that a reliance on ‘narcotics’ is ‘growing amongst working men’ (Law, 1905: 104). In a crowning irony, Eastmont takes out Julia’s ring and, standing beside her grave, silently vows that 99

In Harkness’s London henceforth he will be wedded solely to ‘the People’, those who lack a voice that might be heard by Parliament (Law, 1905: 111). Yet the bare facts that are known about the historical Champion are at variance with the kind of moralising detail that Harkness puts into her novel. For, unlike Eastmont, Champion was never imprisoned, but was released on bail immediately after his arrest and subsequently acquitted. Moreover, hardly any information has survived about his partner Juliet Bennett, who actually died three weeks before the ‘Black Monday’ trial opened, or about the nature of Champion’s relationship with her. Interestingly, Harkness’s depiction of the Dockworkers’ Strike undercuts her own claim to have brought the Roman Catholic Church into the negotiations, ceding this role to Eastmont, who goes directly to Cardinal Loraine and asks for his help. This is an especially poignant move for Eastmont to make, because the novel opens with a meeting between the two men in which the cardinal chides Eastmont for his vain belief that he could cast off his familial background and ‘become one of the People’ (Law, 1905: 7). Had Eastmont remained within his own class, the cardinal tells him, he might have accomplished far more, without betraying his concern for social justice. All that Eastmont has done is to ‘inflame the masses’ and assumed the leadership of ‘an ignorant rabble’, a futile endeavour that will ‘lead to nothing’ since ‘English working men will never join Socialists’ (Law, 1905: 8). While Harkness stresses the religious significance of the cardinal’s intervention and the Catholic faith of many of the strikers, their trust in the prelate derives from a charismatic power memorably displayed in an evangelical tableau. When Loraine addresses the men from a platform in ‘a great hall’, ‘a halo of light’ seems to appear ‘round his head’ and he has the face of ‘an angel’. Nevertheless, this is an intensely contradictory image: a moment before we have been told that the cardinal has ‘discarded’ the ‘pomp of the Church’ and ‘stood before them a citizen like themselves’ (Law, 1905: 149–50). And, in so far as Harkness is aligning the strike with a redemptory narrative, the implication is that industrial action has the capacity to bring ordinary men and women closer to God. But this is precisely the conclusion that Eastmont resists for the remainder of the novel. The third and final part of the book is the story of the hero’s Wanderjahre in Australia, his long disengagement from the mainstream of British socialist politics and his search for a more practicable option than the trade union route that he can no longer bring himself to follow. Cardinal Loraine’s warning serves as an implacable subtext in the scenes where Eastmont is lauded as the hero of the hour. Acclaimed by 100

The vicissitudes of victory the crowd as the leader of a new popular movement at an early socialist rally in Hyde Park, Eastmont feels as if ‘the scum of London held him up to be laughed at’, so great is the gulf between his inner self and his attachment to the lives of the masses (Law, 1905: 39). These feelings later come to a head as the Dockworkers’ Strike nears its conclusion. After addressing the dockworkers, Cardinal Loraine invites Eastmont back to his house to discuss the strike. In what will turn out to be their final conversation, the cardinal warns Eastmont that ‘pride keeps you from believing’, despite praising him for having ‘acted well through this Strike’. Eastmont obstinately insists that ‘my work is my religion’, but the exchange unleashes a torrent of doubts about his future (Law, 1905: 150–1). Then, at the next meeting of the strike’s organising committee, Eastmont finds himself in disagreement with one of his closest allies, the union leader Dick Charleston – a character that reads like a hybrid of Tom Mann and Ben Tillett. This too is a kind of end game: the last time these individuals will meet together as a closely knit group. The argument between the two friends identifies a major fault line between different visions of the road to socialism, while the unresolved question of the bearing of Christianity on the socialist project hovers in the background and is taken up in conversations with Mary Cameron. Charleston thinks that the lesson of the dockworkers’ struggle is that the trade unions should push for ‘one gigantic union of all the working men in Great Britain’, a body that would have the economic and political clout to defeat the employers in a general strike and force the state to nationalise all the large industries in the country (Law, 1905: 163). Eastmont is Charleston’s first choice for secretary of this new body. Eastmont refuses. His objections to Charleston’s position are twofold. First, he believes that Charleston has over-estimated the potential for unity among ordinary working people. The new unskilled trade unionists lack the cultural capital of their older predecessors in the aristocracy of labour – ‘the cream of the working classes’ – and so will never be able to organise effectively, because they are constantly prone to squabbling among themselves. Certainly this new trade union movement is unlikely to be a match for the combined power of the employers, who can outflank them by making tactical concessions, just as the dock companies had done. Progress against such adversaries would be hopelessly slow. And crucially, Eastmont argues that Charleston’s stress upon industry diverts attention away from what is a more pressing or fundamental problem: that of ‘the Land Question’. Due to the concentration of landownership in the hands of a small, wealthy minority, rural workers can 101

In Harkness’s London find no work in the countryside and the towns and cities become desperately overcrowded, producing an oversupplied labour market. Having spoken his mind, Eastmont walks out, his exit marked by the words: ‘The strongest man is he who stands alone’ (Law, 1905: 162–7), a reprise of a phrase said to have been uttered by John Burns on hearing that his comrade-in-arms was about to leave Britain and quoted by Harkness in her portrait of Champion in the Pall Mall Gazette (Law, 1891b). This parting of the ways between the two men marks a political rupture in the novel. Eastmont and Charleston will see each other again at the victory rally in Hyde Park, but only because, at the very last minute, Eastmont changes his mind and decides to attend as an observer of what he believes to be an ill-conceived spectacle. Despite their public altercation, Eastmont’s private reflections show that he remains racked by doubt and his only firm plans are to immerse himself in the study of socialism, to see ‘if giving up the land to the People is the solution to the social problem’ (Law, 1905: 166). He tells Charleston of his plan to travel to ‘the Colonies’ in order to examine at close hand how new and untried experiments work in practice: cooperative land settlements, a Labour Party in action, and the prospect of an advanced land tax. Yet Eastmont cannot be frank with Charleston, he cannot reveal that he is still hovering on the brink of leaving. After his uncompromising critique of the new unionism, to express uncertainty would be a sign of the weakness of his own case. So, finally, Eastmont has to spin a coin to make this leap in the dark possible.

Questions of cooperation

What Eastmont finds in Australia is a dispiriting riposte to Charleston’s optimism, an Australia haunted by the defeat of the 1890 Maritime Strike in which the solidarity of shipboard labourers, dockworkers, gas stokers, and coal miners had been ruthlessly broken by state violence and seriously undermined by a lack of funds, since the strikers never benefited from the sort of popular support throughout the Empire that the London dockworkers had received (Fitzpatrick, 1968: 116–21; Barnes, 2006: 141–55; Svensen, 1992). As Champion witheringly observed, what the Maritime Strike’s failure showed was that even ‘the most gigantic federation of labour … will break like an egg against an ironclad’ when opposed by determined, well-organised employers (Champion, 1891: 236). At the same time, members of the newly established Labour Party were in political disarray, and were soon hopelessly 102

The vicissitudes of victory divided by their entanglement in parliamentary battles over protectionism versus free trade. Having just arrived in ‘the Colonies’, Eastmont decides to pursue his study of practical social projects by taking a clerical post at a rural labour settlement, ostensibly based on communitarian principles, to gain firsthand knowledge of how such ventures might successfully work. Again, he is sorely disappointed. At ‘Blackheath’ he discovers a camp with a population of failures, some alcoholics, some in poor physical or mental condition, like specimens from a Victorian textbook on degeneracy, while the shrewishness of the women only deepens the despondency of the men – an echo of the young bushman’s suggestion that the quarrelsomeness of women precipitated the breakdown of ‘New Australia’, an emblem of the ills stemming from a lack of female emancipation. Collectively the camp’s inhabitants represent the lowest, least redeemable elements in modern society, marooned in a rustic slum. They merely exude ‘a deadness, a want of hope’ (Law, 1905: 210). On his very first night Eastmont dreams that he is a shackled Prometheus, chained to a rock above a sea, which he later interprets as ‘a sea of poverty’, and he comes to loathe the people he had come to help (Law, 1905: 208). ‘Blackheath’ was inspired by a visit Harkness made to the Pitt Town Co-operative Labour Settlement in February 1893, the largest of a small number of state-licensed experimental communities designed to ameliorate the high levels of unemployment in the years after the Maritime Strike. By the time she published George Eastmont, Wanderer the experiment had come to an end almost a decade earlier, with Pitt Town ­succumbing to dwindling numbers and internal divisions in mid-1896. In August 1894 Harkness wrote a critical report for the Fortnightly Review on what she had seen there, noting ‘how hard the men worked’ and ‘how peaceably they have lived together’ on the land. What struck her most forcibly was how poorly the Board of Control, the governmentappointed superintendent, and ‘his impossible consort’ managed the settlement (Law, 1894: 213). Effectively, the settlers had ‘sold themselves to the Government for rations’ and were essentially ‘penniless’ (Law, 1894: 207). The articles of the scheme were supposed to protect their rights as Australian citizens, but a petition to the Minister for Lands was dismissed by an official from the State Labour Bureau with the threat of replacing them by ‘one hundred starving men from Sydney’ (Law, 1894: 213). Harkness found obvious signs of discontent among the women settlers, but this was hardly surprising: only two of the thirteen settlements allowed women any formal role in decision making (Trahair, 103

In Harkness’s London 1999: 315–16). Like the fabled ‘New Australia’, Pitt Town was a world away from the utopia that Harkness had hoped to encounter. And so it is for Eastmont at ‘Blackheath’. Nevertheless, the co-operative ideal continues to offer a glimpse of hope throughout the novel and retains its place as the only remaining remedy for the weaknesses of the new unionism, despite the absence of any actually existing exemplars. Eastmont was already imagining a bucolic commune in Essex immediately after his wife’s death, before the Dockworkers’ Strike sweeps all such thoughts away. And, at the novel’s close, chastened and enlightened by his experiences, he now cautiously believes that it still might be possible to put such an experiment on a more viable footing. What had Eastmont learned from Australia, and from his sobering time at ‘Blackheath’ in particular? Part of the answer to this urgent query is spelled out in Harkness’s boldest and most combative attempt to rethink the meaning of socialism for her own time. Imperial Credit by ‘John Law’ was a dense, elliptical, forty-page pamphlet published privately in Adelaide in 1899, whose central thesis prefigures and informs the disagreement between Charleston and Eastmont in the 1905 novel. To be sure, it comes with all the familiar hallmarks of Harkness’s writing from the 1890s: the determined farewell flourish, here a firm ‘good-bye to the Labour Movement’ combined with the dogged stance of a reluctant voice in the wilderness, someone who feels she has failed to fight her corner, due to a reticent disposition and debilitating bouts of ill-health. As a result, her real views have been consistently ignored, misunderstood, and disparaged ‘by the people who call themselves socialists’ and this is her final effort to set the record straight (Law, 1899: 3). As in George Eastmont, Wanderer, Harkness’s primary target is the role of the state, a ‘leviathan’ that contemporary socialists mistakenly think can be tamed and made the servant of humankind. Instead, they have produced a kind of state fetishism (Law, 1899: 5–7). Thus Fabians, such as Beatrice Potter and Sidney Webb, looked to an active democratic state to create a robust civil society supported by public services based upon the municipalisation or nationalisation of transport, energy, and communications. On the other hand, the radical Liberal MP John Burns wished to direct state power towards funding healthcare and pensions for the working class on the grounds that labour is the source of all wealth, a position from which Harkness dissents by underscoring the complex and ultimately indivisible relations between mental and manual labour which cut across conventional class boundaries. Within the Labour movement the enthusiasm for and equivocations around wealth amounted to a form 104

The vicissitudes of victory of ‘hysteria’ about the power of money, masking the extent to which the ‘free’ flows of capital and labour were purely imperial phenomena (Law, 1899: 10–12). In Harkness’s eyes ‘floating capital and floating labour have made England great, but both are charged with dynamite, for the one is used by speculators and the other by demagogues’ (Law, 1899: 38). To defuse the dislocation caused by the factory system Harkness could envisage only two solutions: either new types of assisted emigration that would further reinforce the bonds of empire, or new schemes to give people a stake in the land, in other words a recognition of the continuing need to prioritise the land question. She writes approvingly of the economist Henry George’s influential work on this issue and accepts that the nationalisation of land and a single land tax are important, but she insists that these ideas do not go far enough because they fail to see how money and capital have changed the nature of land. The nationalisation of land simply would not work without the nationalisation of capital. Regrettably, at this point her argument runs out of steam. ‘I can go no further’, she confesses (Law, 1899: 39). The impasse reached in Imperial Credit marks the limit of the future envisaged in George Eastmont, Wanderer. Eastmont inherits his grandfather’s estate in Limerick and plans to farm the land on cooperative lines, bringing to life the ideas that he had developed in diagnosing what had been missing in ‘Blackheath’: ‘a living wage’ for everyone, including himself; ‘a People’s Bank’ to provide for ‘hard times’; the pooling of machinery and livestock; and cooperative arrangements for buying and selling that avoid middle-men wherever possible (Law, 1905: 239). This was, he had then believed, ‘all the communism human nature is fitted for at present’ (Law, 1899: 210). Yet, by the end of the novel, ‘co-operation’ has displaced ‘communism’ and Eastmont hopes ‘to see some drastic changes … in the system of land-tenure in England’ leading to ‘happier lives’ and a gradual withering away of class distinctions over several generations, echoing the ‘Anarchism’ or ‘voluntary Socialism’ espoused by his old friend the Rev. Edward Podmore in Cumbria (Law, 1905: 237; 239). Harkness’s provisional, unfulfilled conclusion turns its face away from the larger public world, with its ‘marvellous associations and varied interests’, through which Eastmont has long been travelling in what finally seems like a curiously protracted Bildungsroman (Law, 1905: 220). In so doing, Harkness was recapitulating an earlier nineteenthcentury rural utopian politics, notably the tradition exemplified by the followers of Robert Owen, and also reflecting the widening success of utopian fiction in the hands of writers like William Morris at the fin de 105

In Harkness’s London siècle, as well as the impact that Kropotkin’s anarchism was having upon her own search for a political vision fit for the twentieth century (Taylor, 1983; Beaumont, 2005; Law, 1890c). But in making this double gesture towards a submerged past and an undetermined future, Harkness had produced an ideologically freighted novel that was as much a ‘tract’ as her ‘slum stories’ of the 1880s had ever been.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the editors of this volume for their scrupulous and helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1888). Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein. —— (1889a). ‘The Strike of the London Dock Labourers’. Labour Elector, 31 August, p. 136. —— (1889b). Captain Lobe. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ____ (1890a). ‘The Future of the Labour Party’. Pall Mall Gazette, 7 March, p. 7. –––– (1890b). ‘A Slum-Story Writer’. Evening News and Post, 17 April, p. 2. –––– (1890c). ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In Praise of General Booth’. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October, pp. 1–2. —— (1890d). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. –––– (1891a). ‘Labour Leaders. I. – John Burns’. Pall Mall Gazette, 10 January, pp. 1–2. –––– (1891b). ‘Labour Leaders. II. – Henry Hyde Champion’. Pall Mall Gazette, 7 February, pp. 1–2. –––– (1891c). ‘Labour Leaders. III. – Tom Mann’. Pall Mall Gazette, 13 February, pp. 1–2. –––– (1891d). ‘Labour Leaders. IV. – R. B. Cunninghame Graham’. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 February, pp. 1–2. —— (1891e). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe. London: Reeves. –––– (1891–92). ‘Roses and Crucifix’. Woman’s Herald, 5 December –27 February.

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The vicissitudes of victory –––– (1894). ‘A Week on a Labour Settlement’. Fortnightly Review, 1 August, pp. 206–13. –––– (1899). Imperial Credit. Adelaide: Vardon and Pritchard. ­––––  (1905). George Eastmont, Wanderer. London: Burns & Oates. Additional works cited Barnes, J. (2006). Socialist Champion: Portrait of the Gentleman as Crusader. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Beaumont, M. (2005). Utopia Ltd. Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900. Leiden: Brill. Champion, H. H. (1890). The Great Dock Strike in London, August 1889. London: Swan Sonnenschein. –––– (1891). ‘The Crushing Defeat of Trade Unionism in Australia’. Nineteenth Century, February, pp. 225–37. –––– (1983). ‘Documentary Essay. “Quorum Pars Fui”: The Autobiography of H. H. Champion’. Ed. Andrew Whitehead. Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History (47). 17–35. Dyrenfurth, N. and F. Bongiorno (2011). A Little History of the Australian Labour Party. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Fitzpatrick, B. (1968). A Short History of the Australian Labour Movement. Melbourne: Macmillan of Australia. Rowbotham, S. (2008). Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love. London: Verso. Svensen, S. (1992). ‘Motives and the Maritime Strike’. The Maritime Strike: A Centennial Retrospective. Essays in Honour of E. C. Fry. Ed. Jim Hagan and Andrew Wells. Wollongong: Five Islands Press Associates, pp. 13–23. Taylor, B. (1983). Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. London: Virago. Trahair, R. C. S. (1999). Utopias and Utopians. An Historical Dictionary. London and Chicago: Fitzroy, Dearborn. Ward, Mrs Humphry. [Mary Ward] (1888). Robert Elsmere. London: Smith & Elder. Webb, B. (1982). The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Vol. 1. 1873–1892 Glitter Around and Darkness Within. Ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. London: Virago. Whitehead, A. (1987). ‘Henry Hyde Champion (1859–1928). Socialist Publisher and Propagandist’. Dictionary of Labour Biography Vol. VIII. Ed. Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville. London: Macmillan, pp. 24–32.

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Part III

Harkness and genre: rethinking slum fiction

Soundscapes of the city

6

••

Soundscapes of the city in Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1887), Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), and Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel Ruth Livesey

This morning I walked along Billingsgate from Fresh Wharf to the London Docks. Crowded with loungers smoking bad tobacco, and coarse careless talk with clash of halfpenny on the pavement now and again … The lowest form of leisure – senseless curiosity about street rows, idle gazing at the street sellers, low jokes. (Beatrice Potter Webb, Diary, 6 May 1887 [Webb, 1992]) I enjoy the life of the people at the East End … I feel I can realize it – see the tragic and comic side of it … I feel that my painstaking study of detail will help me towards that knowledge of the whole, towards which I am constantly striving. Anyway, I shall leave steps cut in the rock, from the summit of which man will eventually map out the conquered land of social life. (Beatrice Potter Webb, Diary, 5 May 1888 [Webb, 1992])

East London erupts onto the pages of late nineteenth-century journals and diaries as noise: sound out of place; an unexpected assault on the ears of those used to the muffled interiors of middle-class homes.1 Although one of the earliest exposés of East End poverty of the 1880s was entitled ‘The Bitter Cry of Outcast London’ (Mearns, 1883), those philanthropists and investigators drawn by its call – such as Beatrice Potter (later Webb) – found lamentations less audible than the clash, the row, jokes, and comments on passers-by. Hurdy-gurdys and barrel 111

Harkness and genre organs; street sellers’ cries and children’s games; thin walls in crowded dwellings in which yells, shouts, sex, laughter broke through concepts of private domestic life; all form part of a staple repertoire of private records of the encounter with East London in the 1880s. The public response on the part of social investigators, journalists, and literary explorers during the 1880s was, however, conducted under the regime of the eye, not the ear. To ‘realize’ the East End, as Potter commends herself for doing, is to represent it in a familiar visual form capable of analysis, whether as comedy, tragedy, or as a map. To stabilise the East End as a form for textual circulation was to see it, and to see it was to know it. Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl (1890 [1887]) is, however, a novel that resists the primacy of the eye as a means to know and write East London. Its relentless aural documentary does not ‘realize’ but, rather, externalises character through repeated phrases and leitmotifs, and it conjures up being in place through fragmented sounds of the city streets. The result is profound disorientation for readers schooled in a n ­ ineteenth-century realist tradition in which the novel delivers characters and subjectivity through temporal depth and reflective interiority, a mode of ‘reading for character’ that, as I have suggested elsewhere, in turn informed the techniques of documentary social investigation (Livesey, 2004).2 The investigatory techniques of Potter, Harkness’s cousin and fellow resident in the philanthropic housing development Katharine Buildings, participated in the project of mapping and tabulating poverty initiated by Charles Booth. Potter’s aim, in the 1880s at least, was to look down ‘from the summit’ upon the ‘conquered land of social life’ (Webb, 1992: 205). Meanwhile, the forms of literary naturalism that flourished alongside social investigation in 1880s Britain also emphasised the primacy of a quasi-scientific eye in tracing the outcomes of heredity determinism and environment, made legible in the physiological dimensions of character. But Harkness’s novel refuses either of these epistemic regimes of the eye. The novel’s protagonist, Nelly Ambrose, lies in the midst of ‘the men and women fighting and swearing, the children crying, the boys shouting and singing’ and is drawn compulsively to ‘a voice that was like music when compared with Whitechapel voices’ (Law, 1890: 50). In its discomfiting, juddering awkwardness A City Girl, I suggest, presents the narrative possibilities of what Steven Connor has termed the ‘auditory self’ and the resultant ‘disintegrative principle’ of being caught in the middle of noise (Connor, 1997: 203–23). Read against canonical fiction of the time, A City Girl is a rough oddity of a novel, valued by most nineteenth-century scholars for its 112

Soundscapes of the city reflection on an actual place and community (Katharine Buildings is lightly fictionalised as ‘Charlotte’s Buildings’ in the book) from the point of view of a woman who – at some points at least – strongly aligned herself with the socialist movement. But the novel has also become part of a much wider debate about literary genres and the politics of modes of representation that flourished from the 1880s onwards. Throughout the twentieth century Harkness and her first novel have been kept in a broader critical perspective thanks to the letter Friedrich Engels wrote in response to receiving a copy of A City Girl from Harkness’s publisher, Vizetelly.3 In this much-quoted letter, Engels asserts the primacy of a particular type of literary realism as a means to reflect human agency within the interstices of history. Engels’s intervention situates Harkness’s work – as I wish to do here – in the rich context of reflections on the future of fiction in the 1880s and the political associations of its modes in the era of what Nicholas Daley has termed the ‘demographic imagination’ (Daley, 2015). The aural, disintegrative principle of A City Girl collides with other fictions of the period that explored innovative ways to write of urban mass culture and, in turn, stimulated debate around the value of realism or romance, naturalism or melodrama. In order to amplify Harkness’s London soundscape in this context I want to contrast it with Henry James’s novel of poverty and anarchy in 1880s London, The Princess Casamassima (1922 [1885–86]). The Princess Casamassima is a self-­ consciously experimental foray into naturalism and political activism that throws into relief the experimental value of genres in A City Girl and its resistance to the aesthetic. James’s quest to know the lives of others by a kind of auscultation of internal monologue – an exteriorisation of the limits and possibilities of self-knowledge – is in its own way an aestheticised inverse of Harkness’s disintegrative principle of an auditory self, unable to achieve epistemic self-reflection, caught in the battering crosscurrents of sound waves.

Socialism and the genres of fiction

In his letter to Harkness, Engels was quite generous about her first novel and its narrative of the seduction and abandonment of a workingclass girl, but equally clear how it fell short of what he believed was needed in socialist art. Despite her research during time spent living in Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel in 1885–86, Engels was convinced that Harkness’s novel was not ‘realistic enough’: ‘Realism’, he wrote, 113

Harkness and genre ‘to my mind, implies, ‘besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances’ (Engels, 1974: 115). A City Girl, Engels believed, lacked such realism because the working class featured as a passive mass, moved only by the actions of outsiders. This, Engels argued, was simply not the truth of the matter, the true tendency of historical materialism, the reality of his own experience of struggle alongside the militant proletariat. Harkness’s characters were ‘typical enough’, but ‘the circumstances which surround them and make them act, are not perhaps equally so’ (Engels, 1974: 115). Characters, for Engels, needed to embody a dialectic relation between self and environment in which the stimuli of historical circumstances result in a process of action and reaction. Yet Harkness’s text repeatedly refuses such a model in which the self is plastic and reactive, capable of looking back and imagining forward in a process of self-development. History as the engine of change – as historical materialism – simply fails to appear in A City Girl. Harkness’s characters are exteriorised sounding posts immersed in the multiple waves of clashing noise in the urban landscape; speech is performative rather than reflective; and most ‘thinking’ in the text is, we are reminded, uttered out loud. The rise of auditory technologies – the telephone, phonograph, ­phonogram – from 1875 opened the way for a new phenomenon of the listening and sounding self in which voice and noise could be heard and preserved in isolation from the emitting material form (Connor, 1997: 205–8). In such a deracinated soundscape of late-Victorian Britain the utterance could float free from the self, speech detach from reflective subject. Although Henry Mayhew’s earlier form of social investigation had placed a record of the voices of the poor at its centre in the form of the interviews that illuminate London Labour and the London Poor, these are pre-eminently narratives that attempt to map a life-story in short sketches of personal history and daily life. Mayhew’s voices are always attached to carefully described subjects, who were, in turn, often illustrated in the engravings that accompanied the volumes. However, in Harkness’s fiction the voice as an articulation of coherent narrative self or personal history is practically mute. Her subjects are hearing, sounding, but incapable of intro- or retrospection, and the narrator serves to amplify their words as noise, rather than to elucidate insight through narrative. Reflecting on the phenomenology of noise in this age of technological innovation, Connor unravels the concept of a hearing self in contrast to that of a seeing subject. The hearing subject is one ‘imaged not as a point, 114

Soundscapes of the city but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as channel through which voices, noises and music travels’ (Connor, 1997: 207). In this dispersed model of the auditory self, character cannot simulate an active response to environmental circumstances – seeing, reflecting, picturing consequences – but only transmit or echo the conflicting, overlapping noises of the times. Harkness’s working-class characters in A City Girl exhibit such auditory selfhood, echoing the din of the streets. There are moments throughout A City Girl in which Nelly and George slide from character to mechanical sound-object: barrel organs cranked up to produce familiar motifs. In pointing out this slippage from responsive creation to passive replication in Harkness’s lead character, I am of course coming close to Engels’s perception of undue passivity in Harkness’s representation of the proletariat – one that is emblematic of a broader socialist critique of late nineteenth-century literary naturalism that runs from his work, to Georg Lukács, to Frederic Jameson. Elizabeth Miller has identified the long critical history of such readings in which the pessimism and heredity determinism epitomised in descriptions of the working class by Emile Zola, or George Gissing, or Harkness reflect only a middle-class view of ‘reality’: one in which the working class is misrepresented as an object, rather than the agent of history (Miller, 2013: 97). When Engels’s letter is placed in its late nineteenth-century British context, however, it becomes clear just how out of step with the literary culture of that time and place was his demand for an art of the typical and real. The vogue for literary naturalism during the 1880s and 1890s has left us with some memorable narratives of slum life, such as Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) or Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). Such fictions are invaluable in understanding middle-class anxiety about the poor – and in particular the nature of London’s East End – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the political journeys of thinkers such as Beatrice Potter or William Beveridge. But these are far from being what Engels believed to be the most useful and truthful sort of art: that of social realism of a variety most closely associated with the historical novels of Balzac or Walter Scott; narratives in which characters are moved by the forces of history and yet can play their part in shaping it, unlike the foredoomed slum residents of these later naturalist fictions who are destined from birth to repeat the failures of their forebears and never move. From the 1880s into the twentieth century, social and historical realism of the sort praised by Engels smacked of the deeply old-fashioned in a world striving to be modern. Literary naturalism, by contrast, 115

Harkness and genre c­ haracterised one important tendency of that world of the modern, but it also embodied a structural pessimism about the possibility of social transformation at odds with socialism itself. Naturalism, however, was only one strand of the avant-garde in the arts during this period – and one soon to find itself on the wane. Among Harkness’s fellow travellers in the so-called ‘religion of socialism’ in Britain during this period one of the most popular modes of fiction was that of deliberate anti-realism and the world of possibility beyond the everyday; forms of romance, dream, and allegory, charting a voyage inwards to the self in all its fragments; genres much more closely akin to the artistic legacy of the aesthetic movement and which have a palpable influence on some of the later experiments of literary modernism.4 In this sense, Harkness’s brutally anti-romantic novel, A City Girl, seems – appropriately enough for a writer who was always at odds with her closest allies – doubly estranged from the norms of her artistic and political moment. In the context of socialist circles in 1880s London, Harkness’s work appears resolutely anti-aesthetic and resistant to utopian socialist romance forms. For all that Harkness was knitted into the community of what Wilde termed ‘poetical socialists’ (Wilde, 1889: 3) around the British Museum and Bloomsbury, her artistic output, unlike that of Clementina Black, Isabella Ford, Olive Schreiner, or Dollie Radford, seems almost deliberately to eschew the literary formulae that these writers shared with many other middle-class socialists. In Harkness’s fiction the narratives of hope dreamed from an oppressive present – the visionary forms of romance, dream, allegory so prevalent in socialist fiction and poetry of the 1880s – are resoundingly absent. If Harkness’s work renounces the dream of another possible future, its debt to literary naturalism is also attenuated in the work’s form. As I have suggested, the novel does little to dwell on the determining idea of character and environment that did so much to shape British versions of the naturalist novel. What the disintegrative auditory principle of A City Girl does do, however, is rework some of the inherited radical formulae of the melodrama and reshape the sensory affect of that genre. Melodrama is a genre in which emotion and sensation is externalised and rendered visible in often quite static tableaux: a realisation of narrative and social truth in a mute moment held still; its sensory mode is a drama of the eye. In A City Girl, Harkness reworks some familiar tropes and plots lines of radical melodrama only to subvert them. The aurality of A City Girl threatens to overset not just the externalised mode of inherited melodramatic forms but also the famil116

Soundscapes of the city iar parameters of realism and naturalism as modes of social description. The impulse to show, to see, to map, to know is immobilised in a drama of sound in which the singular perspectival view gives way to a ‘plural permeated space’ in which many voices are heard simultaneously (Connor, 1997: 207).

Sound and melodrama in A City Girl and The Princess Casamassima

Melodrama was undoubtedly one of the most popular modes of narrative in the nineteenth century.5 Although its roots are often perceived to lie in the ‘illegitimate’ theatres of the early part of the era, by the 1880s its history as a form of and for ‘the people’ was firmly established. Travelling from stage to page, through the efforts of radical writers such as G. W. M. Reynolds and, of course, Charles Dickens, it harnessed familiar elements of characterisation, plot, and tempo to translate its affect from the public experience of the theatre to the homes and street corners in which periodicals were read (McWilliam, 1996; and John, 2001). In its long association with populism and its stock plots of corrupt aristocrats preying on innocent poor foundlings, melodrama embodied a radicalism in its content as well as its form. The mode is one of extremes of emotion, exteriorised onto archetypal characters; self is performed on the surface, rather than glimpsed in depth. But for all the unleashing of ressentiment against the aristocracy in this dramatic form, the endings tend to recuperate anger with a romantic solution: orphans are found to be missing heirs to fortunes; virtue triumphs; and individuals struggling in poverty are rescued into comfortable futures. The significance of the genre, as Martin Meisel suggests, lies less in these complacent resolutions than in the tableaux that render the conflicts as static realisations: a mute appeal of innocence threatened, of the wealthy exploitation, that endures long past the endings (Meisel, 1984: 40–7). The visual is at the heart of melodrama’s writing of the present. A City Girl follows some well-used formulae from earlier nineteenthcentury melodrama, and in particular the radical fictions of G. W. M. Reynolds. The heroine, Nelly, is a beautiful seamstress with a secret hanging around her birth and paternity, much like the titular heroine of Reynolds’s The Seamstress: or The White Slave of England (1853) (see McWilliam, 2005: 99–114). The plot recapitulates the familiar crossclass seduction-story staple of the genre, in which Nelly’s respectable working-class lover, George, has his happiness threatened by a rival 117

Harkness and genre of a higher class. Marriage to George offers a chance of moderate selfimprovement, but Nelly is seduced by the gentleman dilettante Arthur Grant, and then forgotten as the summer moves on. The dénouement of this plot of seduction occurs, as Jessica Hindes has suggested so often happens in Reynolds’s work, around the body of a dead baby (Hindes, 2015).6 Nelly runs into Arthur Grant when leaving the hospital with her baby’s corpse a year later, setting up an archetypal realisation akin to the melodrama: falling, exhausted, at his feet in the street, Nelly opens her shawl to reveal the dead infant to Grant: ‘It’s your baby,’ she declaims, at the end of the chapter (Law, 1890: 170). Of course, even in terms of plot there are some telling diversions from the form of earlier nineteenth-century melodrama. Nelly might lose her baby, but she survives the end of the story to marry George and move out with him to work as a servant to a writer’s colony in the countryside – one which sounds suspiciously like the one projected by the Fellowship of the New Life in the late 1880s.7 The developments of the 1880s – whether socialism or Salvationism – offer a possibility of alternative endings to the melodrama of rescue through true paternity. But the engine of popular radicalism in mid-century radical melodrama – that bubbling ressentiment of the dispossessed and a plot in which a woman’s body lies at the heart of a broader social struggle – is desperately muted in A City Girl. Harkness frames sexual desire for all as a mundane form of consumer choice, much like Nelly’s dilemma between choosing a red or a blue feather for her hat which opens the story.8 George also eventually offers marriage to Nelly out of a sense of cool inevitability, wishing he had never left the service, yet again. There is no sense that he is out for vengeance to right the wrongs endured by his class at the hands of the powerful. If melodrama has left an enduring cultural archetype with us, it must be in the shape of villains whose role is written all over their surface, snarling, swirling, seducing their way across stage and page. But Arthur Grant is just passing the time. Nelly might appear to him as a ‘picture worth looking at’, but the visual aesthetic of the middle-characters in the novel is one purely of transient surface consumption in this novel, rather than a means to realise: ‘She was no psychological study, this little Whitechapel girl, only something pretty to look at. She had not much to say for herself, but she put on her wreath and looked like a woodnymph … he quite forgot that “hands” have hearts’ (Law, 1890: 71). Grant’s crude aestheticism is a critical parody of the cultural moment of the fin de siècle in which to appreciate an object through the eye is to take personal possession of its meaning for oneself alone. His regime of the 118

Soundscapes of the city eye obtrudes on the East End to pick its choicest sensations for himself, rather than to know it or its inhabitants. There are indications throughout the narrative of A City Girl of a quite conscious play with some of these attributes of genre and shifting literary fashions during the 1880s. A key moment in Arthur Grant’s seduction of Nelly is when he takes her to an East End theatre staging not a melodrama of stark contrasts but the domesticated family drama of a more contemporary French play reminiscent of the works of Eugene Scribe or Victorien Sardou. Nelly is rapt by the narrative of this drama in which ‘The virtuous wife was forced, to shield the honour of her mother, to become the victim of a secret by reason of which her brother appeared as her lover and was shot by her enraged husband’ (Law, 1890: 61). As he makes some money on the side as a theatre critic, however, the plot line of the well-made play, successor to melodrama, is all too familiar to Arthur Grant: All turned out as Mr Grant had predicted; the virtuous wife, after having been divorced, disowned by father and mother, starved and robbed of her child, was given back to her sorrowing husband by a strange hocus-pocus of events, in which the funny man played a prominent part. The French villain retired amid the hisses of the audience … (Law, 1890: 63)

George Bernard Shaw, rising to the height of his own theatre-reviewing career and socialist activities in the late 1880s, did much to satirise such predictable formulae of resolution, naming it ‘Sardoodlism’ in 1895.9 But for Nelly Ambrose the neat plotting of the play has less effect than the ‘strange excitement’ she feels on hearing Grant whistle its music (Law, 1890: 60). A City Girl, then, sets up a world in which the aesthetic appears to be exhausted. Plots are tired and familiar; the ‘funny man’ of the wellmade play disperses the ressentiment of the melodrama, and melodramatic tableaux are stripped of affective power. Even Nelly’s near echo of the actress’s plangent cry as the curtain falls when she encounters Arthur outside the hospital seems to lead nowhere other than to slight moral discomfort and the payment of a gas bill and some funeral expenses for his baby. Mr Grant has literary ambitions of his own quite the opposite of the drama of action of the well-made play: He meant to start a novel when he came back to town, into which he would introduce some curious psychological studies he had come across, and some strange events. He would have no plot in it. Plots had gone out since the time of Thackeray and George Eliot. His novel should be a study of character, that is, an epitome of Arthur Grant. (Law, 1890: 69)

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Harkness and genre The more recent trend in fiction aligned with the aesthetic movement for ‘curious psychological studies’ accompanied by supernatural ‘strange events’ – one might think here of the short fictions of Walter Pater or, slightly later, Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde – is, Harkness implies, mere egotistical self-indulgence on the part of introspective middle-class authors like Grant. The lives of others remain a blank to the middle-class observer. But, as Harkness’s novel reminds us, they are not silent. Harkness was far from alone during the later 1880s in criticising the presumption of easy access to interiority and subjectivity in the form of fiction. The desire to invoke otherness outside the self – the decentring sense of the world viewed through other eyes – is a struggle invoked explicitly by Henry James in his work on the ‘Art of Fiction’, published originally in 1884. In James’s works, increasingly, there is the simultaneous burden of knowledge that is constantly brought before the reader – the fact that we can never really thoroughly enter into the lives of others, stopping short at the threshold of what ourselves we see and hear only to speculate on others’ worlds. As Tony Tanner points out, in narrative content and form alike, James’s works take characters and readers right to the doorway of these inmost spaces, and relish hovering just outside. In James’s fiction, this process of wanting ‘to penetrate; but also … to be prevented from penetrating’ attaches to the only ever partial glimpses given of characters’ interiority and motives in those novels (Tanner, 1995: 19–20). For James, certainly, an emphasis upon visual sensation was one means to keep implied readers constantly alert to the fiction of seeing through others’ eyes, and the impossibility of really knowing them and the limitations of their own self-knowledge. The epistemic regime of the eye is one that is always inadequate to the task of knowing subjects in James’s fictions. During the 1880s, James returned again and again, in his shorter fiction and travel writing, to the encounter with the spectacle of London through this play on an idea of estranged vision. However, The Princess Casamassima, serialised in the Atlantic Monthly in 1885–86, is his only attempt to depict the world of urban poverty and political activism and to consider the estrangement of vision in London as a matter of socio-­economic division, rather than as an effect of foreignness for the American abroad. The Princess Casamassima is a story of anarchism in London. The novel follows the fortunes of a refined young bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who presumes himself the illegitimate son of an aristocrat. The novel imagines Hyacinth, raised in an unlovely London courtyard by his adoptive mother, a dressmaker, almost accidently prom120

Soundscapes of the city ising to sacrifice himself for the anarchist movement in an impassioned moment, only to find himself pulled between opposing forces that lead to his eventual suicide: anger at exclusion from the leisured old world of culture and beauty; desire to possess that world represented by the Princess Casamassima; repulsion from the low pleasures of modern popularism; attraction to its frank, vigorous energy, personified in the luscious figure and appetites of his friend, the young shop assistant Millicent Henning. James himself seemed almost surprised by the turn in his interests from the clash of aristocratic old and moneyed new worlds to a study of contemporary London. ‘You see I am quite the naturalist,’ he wrote to a friend, after relating that he had been to Millbank prison to research the setting of the opening scene in the latter novel (Edel, 1980: 3.61). For all that James admired what the French naturalists were achieving during the 1880s, his novel is an aesthetic critique of that genre of fiction. The princess puts her beautiful things into storage so that she can experience the aesthetic deprivation of the common people; all in pursuit of something that feels, to her, like urgently modern experience. She collects anarchists and causes, instead of books and bibelots, with a ruthless appetite for fresh impressions. In James’s aesthetic version of a political novel – one of, as David Weir points out, anarchy and culture – the future of art itself, personified by Robinson, is in a state of self-destructive paralysis, torn between old aristocratic culture and the inevitable dawn of mass populism (Weir, 1999; see also Ó Donghaile, 2011: 39–55). The self-critical would-be artist, Robinson, simply cannot decide which world to destroy and which world to preserve and thus makes an end to himself. Meanwhile the traditional connoisseur and patron of the arts, the princess, abandons her aristocratic husband, and even Hyacinth with his aesthetic leanings, in her pursuit of something that ‘is real … is solid’ (James, 1987: 330). Turning her back on cosmopolitan high culture and the pursuit of beauty, she echoes James’s satirical experiment with naturalist fiction, embracing the utterly unidealistic, phlegmatic anarchist, Paul Muniment, who approaches revolution in a manner akin to his profession: a wholesale chemist. The future, it seems, threatens to lie in the scientific spectacle of Zola’s Roman Experimental, and an end to the aesthetic. As a result of the visible protest on the streets of London in 1884, mass politics had moved into James’s field of vision. ‘Nothing lives’ ‘in England today’, he wrote, ‘but politics’ (Edel, 1980: 3.84). Writing to a friend in America in the summer of 1884, James urged him to ‘come and see’ the ‘spectacle of a general election, with a new and immensely democratised electorate’ in London that year (Edel, 1980: 3.49). James’s 121

Harkness and genre introduction to The Princess Casamassima, written later that year, is unapologetic about the vague sketch he provides of anarchism, only wanting to tantalise with dim glances of ‘what “goes on” irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface’ of contemporary society (James, 1987: 48). Hyacinth is conceived as a would-be cosmopolitan man of books, ‘capable of profiting’ from ‘civilisation’ and culture ‘yet condemned to see these things only from the outside – in mere quickened consideration, mere wistfulness and envy and despair’ (James, 1987: 34). Poverty, for James, is always that of a cultural exclusion from the visible world of beauty: of being able to have a glimpse and hear a few notes, but not to taste and touch. As work as varied as that by Jonathan Crary and Chris Otter has made us aware, the act of looking during the later nineteenth century was inextricably interlaced with a sense of mediating techniques and technologies of vision (Crary, 1990; Otter, 2008). To look, and to look at London’s urban scene in the late 1880s in particular, was to negotiate a series of alternate frames and lenses or to throw new light on old subjects: an assumption given narrative form in the retitling of Harkness’s Captain Lobe (1889), as In Darkest London in 1891 (Law, 1893). In this easy borrowing of H. M. Stanley’s trope of imperial venture, the East End – and the place of poverty more generally – becomes labelled as a continent of darkness. This in turn positions the explorer as the privileged bringer of light and vision; pushing open a chosen path of selective illumination in the editorial effects of artificial light. But, as I have suggested, this paradigm of visibility and selective vision from the privileged torch-bearer is misapplied in Harkness’s work, for all that it is an excellent fit to James’s novel, with its dim glances of ‘what “goes on” irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface’ of contemporary society (James, 1987: 48). James’s novel, like Harkness’s, owes a debt to nineteenth-century melodrama in its plot.10 Hyacinth Robinson is accepted as a ‘revolutionist ab ovo’ by his fellow anarchists on the grounds of his existence as a ‘victim of social infamy’. He is the putative child of a peer of the realm who seduced and abandoned his mother, who then murdered her faithless lover (James, 1987: 282). In the consistent focalisation of narrative through Hyacinth, the modern city is gas lit as if a stage upon which he perceives (unreliably) lovely aristocrats and predatory sexual rivals, agents of destruction and threats to domestic peace. In James’s novel, the city and its inhabitants, its soundscape of traffic, hurdy-gurdy music and children’s songs, misery and poverty, are repeatedly reduced to a ‘mitigated far-away hum’, or ‘deep perpetual groan’: a muffled aesthetic ‘undertone’ in sitting rooms 122

Soundscapes of the city in which the future of art and politics are discussed by sharply rendered characters, each with an individual back story (James, 1987: 420, 283). Hyacinth’s journey into the aesthetic world of fine things attunes him to gradations of volume, stripping away the ‘loud … unpractical babble’ of his initial confederates for conspiratorial whispers with the real representatives of anarchism (James, 1987: 291). His old companion Millicent progresses from merely having a loud laugh that rings out unexpectedly in the upper-class neighbourhoods they wander through (James, 1987: 278), to being, in the first edition, ‘a loud-­breathing feminine fact’, obtruded alongside his attempts at an aristocratic entry.11 Noise, in The Princess Casamassima, is filtered through an aesthetics of musicality in which Hyacinth can impose a diminuendo on the London streets to glimpse inwards at his and others’ motives. Harkness’s contemporaneous emphasis on the ear in A City Girl is profoundly disorientating precisely because the aural arrives without such techniques of selection, filtration, focus, fade in, and fade out. The immersive and unmediated soundscape of Whitechapel that opens A City Girl presents a stark contrast to James’s aesthetic vision of selective auditory focus. Hyacinth Robinson can fade out the individual ‘loud-breathing’ of Millicent in his quest for culture; at the opening of A City Girl we hear the massed bodies of Charlotte’s Buildings as ‘from six to eight hundred people stewed and panted’ in the summer night heat (Law, 1890: 1). In the first two chapters of the novel, life in Charlotte’s Buildings and the street market is rendered through the ear rather than the eye: a matter of street calls, noisy neighbours, a chorus of women’s voices, the sound of a Hail Mary drowned out by the hurdy-gurdy. The effect is of a world of noise from all quarters that cannot be drawn together into a single subjective point of view, but is dispersed over the membranes of auditory selves with little sense of interiority or depth. This aural landscape of urban noise, it seems, is one that cannot be recorded and thus placed within any kind of aesthetic tradition. All is surface transience rather than interiorised memory. Nelly’s exchange with the man trying to sell finery at the market can stand as one example for the many in which what at first appears to be internalised self-reflection drawn out by the narrator is immediately rendered in prosaic speech: She could not make up her mind, and would not let him make it up for her. ‘I’ll go to Petticoat Lane tomorrow morning,’ she said aloud, much to the young man’s disgust. ‘Maybe I’ll see there what I want.’ (Law, 1890: 12)

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Harkness and genre Nelly’s mind exists for readers only in the moment of enunciation, having no reflective depth in silence. Harkness’s immersive urban soundscape represents a radical act of defamiliarisation within the melodramatic tradition: character and emotion are externalised as sound, not sight. Harkness’s characteristic aural documentary style – in which character is notated through repeated leitmotifs such as George’s repeated wish that he had ‘never left the service’ – is expressive of her general resistance to the literary fashions for ‘character’ and ‘personality’ in the 1880s: something she rails against in In Darkest London (Law, 1893: 117–22). This aural externalisation puts her at odds with the influence Zola was exerting on the novel and naturalist experiment in the late 1880s. The tendency in Zola’s manifesto for the Roman Experimental is to establish character in depth through a back story of heredity and environment, before allowing that determinism to play out in the narrative. The narrator is ever ready to probe, to expose, to examine the figures on the page through a scientific gaze. But Harkness’s fictions remain resolutely in the now, arriving with little trace of ‘before’ and a frighteningly blank vista of the future, on which these speaking voices seem incapable of leaving any impression of ever having been in the world. Its soundscape is a claustrophobia of presence against which the implied reader has no defence and no means to filter. In the decades that followed Harkness’s novel this disintegrative auditory principle became a keynote of modernist experiment in the forms of vorticism and futurism. Neither Harkness nor James presage such experimental blastings of narrative in the face of mass modernity. But both test out the limits of inherited literary genres and the failures of an aesthetic appreciation to attend to the politics of life of the modern city.

Listening to Katharine Buildings

I want to end by returning to Katharine Buildings and Harkness’s time spent there researching A City Girl alongside Beatrice Potter, as she took her own first steps in social investigation. The archival correspondence between Potter and the resident lady rent-collector of Katharine Buildings, Ella Pycroft, discloses a world in which struggles over noise and appropriate volume structured daily interactions and determined future residency. Harkness appears to have been unusually tolerant of the soundscape of her surroundings, and on her visiting the philanthropic club run on site by Pycroft the latter noted that ‘Miss Harkness’ was ‘a much nicer tenant’ than a previous middle-class resident ‘because 124

Soundscapes of the city she likes the people & doesn’t think everything is wrong’ (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/7, 6 July 1886). But, by the autumn of 1886, Pycroft was wearied of stand-up rows with the residents, stand-offs in the club about the sort of songs suitable for singing there, noise on every staircase and landing. For the tenants themselves, however, Potter’s first published attempts to realise and visualise them as representative in ‘A Lady’s View of the Unemployed at the East’ in the Pall Mall Gazette (Potter, 1886) was an unparalleled act of violence by the epistemic regime of the eye. Pycroft’s fellow philanthropic volunteer at the Buildings, Maurice Eden Paul, was himself shocked by the article, which was then read out loud in the club room by a tenant, Joseph Aarons, to his fellow residents, ‘and great were the discussions thereon’, Pycroft noted (BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/7, 19 February 1886). Aarons was moved to write a long letter to Potter outlining the grounds of discontent felt by himself and his fellow tenants in her representation of them as inhabitants of a building ‘designed and adapted to house the lowest class of the working poor’ (BPLES, Passfield/2/1/2/8, 2 March 1886). Surrounded by an interpretative community of investigators that attempted to visualise and categorise them as symptoms of degeneration, or shifting labour markets, or plain old sin, Aarons asked Potter to attend to the complicity of middle-class philanthropists themselves in constructing the material soundbox of the Buildings. The communal toilets on each stairwell had only the thinnest of partitions, Aarons noted, between compartments, and thus male and female users ‘must become cognisant’ of the fact of each other’s presence if there at the same time, leading to ‘horrible vulgarity and wretched depravity’ in speech; poor sanitation drove tenants from the stench to hold conversations outside the buildings. The noisy body, for the working-class tenants of Katharine Buildings, was enmeshed in a material environment determined by property owners and managers. ‘All we would ask here’, Aarons concluded, ‘is justice due to us as a body of people’ Potter had lived alongside. Aaron’s letter from Katharine Buildings opens the door to another potential mode of social documentary: one that seeks to understand the meanings of embodied space experienced by its residents – a form of research through co-produced knowledge that dominates current practice in the work of many development agencies. Harkness’s emphasis on aural transcription in A City Girl, I would conclude, is a technique partially responsible for the sense of passive determinism in her narrative. But it is also, in its odd, rebarbative surface, a gesture towards the failings 125

Harkness and genre of the epistemic regime of the eye deployed by Potter. Far from mastering or containing the subjectivity of working-class inhabitants of East London, the aural disintegrative principle of the novel shadows forth a potential new model of encountering the lives and environments of others. Plunged into the soundscape of hearing in medias res, A City Girl forces us to craft an attentive, rather than investigative, reading position, straining to hear something particular, whilst never being able to fade out the noises of the city into a mere hum.

Acknowledgements

This chapter reworks some elements of a discussion of the context of socialist fiction previously published in ‘Political Formations: Socialism, Anarchism, Feminism’, in Late Victorian into Modern: TwentyFirst Century Approaches (2016), edited by Laura Marcus, Michele Mendelssohn, and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr.

Notes

 1 For the wider context of thinking sound in the period I am indebted to Picker (2003) and Bailey (1996).  2 For an alternative reading of the novel as an attempt to capture workingclass subjectivity see Sparks (2017).  3 On Harkness and genres of the socialist novel see Miller (2013: 82–121).  4 See Sumpter (2008: 88–230); Vaninskaya (2010); Livesey (2007); Linehan (2011).  5 For an authoritative overview see John (2008).  6 On the wider significance of dead babies in slum narratives of the time see Le Fevre (2014).  7 The Fellowship of the New Life was an organisation of idealist intellectuals including Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Olive Schreiner who espoused collectivist and anti-capitalist ideas.  8 On the commodity fetishism of A City Girl see Le Fevre (2014).  9 See Meisel (1984: 48–52) on the changing dramaturgy from melodrama to the well-made play, from ‘situation’ to ‘construction’. 10 On James’s wider debts to the genre see Brooks (1995). 11 See James (1922: 117). The Brewer edition reproduces James’s revised New York edition of 1909 in which this passage is excised to favour a visual analogy.

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References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1890). A City Girl [1887]. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. –––– (1893). In Darkest London [1891]. London: Reeves. Additional works cited Bailey, P. (1996). ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise’. Body and Society (2). 49–96. BLPES, Passfield/2/1/2/7, Ella Pycroft to Beatrice Potter. ——, Passfield/2/1/2/8, Joseph Aarons to Beatrice Potter. Brooks, P. (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Connor, S. (1997). ‘The Modern Auditory I’. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Middle Ages to the Present. Ed. Roy Porter. London: Routledge, pp. 203–23. Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Daley, N. (2015). The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edel, L., ed. (1974–1984). The Letters of Henry James (4 vols). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Engels, F. (1974). ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York, NY: International General, pp. 115–17. Gissing, G. (1889). The Nether World. London: Smith, Elder. Hindes, J. (2015). ‘Revealing Bodies: Knowledge, Power and Mass Market Fictions in G. W. M. Reynolds’s “Mysteries of London” ’. Ph.D. Royal Holloway, University of London. James, H. (1884). ‘The Art of Fiction’. Longman’s Magazine (4.23). 501–21. —— (1922). The Princess Casamassima [1885–86] (2 vols). London: Macmillan. –––– (1987). The Princess Casamassima. Ed. Derek Brewer. Harmondsworth: Penguin. John, J. (2001). Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, and Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. –––– (2008). ‘Melodrama and its Criticism: An Essay in Memory of Sally

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Harkness and genre Ledger’. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century [e-journal] (8). http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.496. Le Fevre, V. (2014). ‘Fin de siècle Horrors: Women, Streetwalking, Spectacle and Contagion in London Slum Narratives, 1800–1900’. Ph.D. Royal Holloway, University of London. Linehan, T. (2011). Modernism and British Socialism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Livesey, R. (2004). ‘Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’. Journal of Victorian Culture (9.1). 43–67. –––– (2007). Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880– 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McWilliam, R. (1996). ‘The Mysteries of G. W. M. Reynolds: Radicalism and Melodrama in Victorian Britain’. Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison. Ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck. London: Scolar Press, pp. 182–98. —— (2005). ‘The Melodramatic Seamstress: Interpreting a Victorian Penny Dreadful’. Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Beth Harris. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 99–114. Mearns, A. (1883). The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the Abject Poor. London: Clarke. Meisel, M. (1984). Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Dramatic Arts in Victorian Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, E. (2013). Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morrison, A. (1896). A Child of the Jago. London: Methuen. Ó Donghaile, D. (2011). Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of the Modern. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Otter, C. (2008). The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Picker, J. (2003). Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, B. (1886). ‘A Lady’s View of the Unemployed at the East’. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 February, p. 11. Sparks, T. (2017). ‘Working-Class Subjectivity in Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl’. Victorian Literature and Culture (45). 615–27. Sumpter, C. (2008). The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Tanner, T. (1995). Henry James and the Art of Non-Fiction. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Vaninskaya, A. (2010). William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History, and Propaganda, 1880–1914. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Soundscapes of the city Webb, B. (1992). The Diary of Beatrice Webb vol.1: Glitter all Around and Darkness Within. Ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. London: Virago. Weir, D. (1999). Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Wilde, O. (1889). ‘Poetical Socialists’. Pall Mall Gazette, 13 February, p. 3.

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7

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Margaret Harkness, novelist: social semantics and experiments in fiction Lynne Hapgood

Since the early 1970s there has been increasing curiosity about a writer who responded to ‘the puzzle of the new reality’ by creating, in the short time between 1887 and 1889, ‘a new mode of fiction’ (Goode, 1982: 53) in three distinctively different and intriguingly problematic novels set in London. Part of the challenge today in addressing Harkness’s literary achievement is that the emphasis of earlier critics has been more on the importance of her work to the broader texture of literary history, particularly European Naturalism, and on her novels’ relation to nineteenthcentury socialist thought, rather than their intrinsic merit.1 Many early biographical mysteries have now been illuminated, or at least given an informed framework,2 and Harkness’s work is becoming increasingly accessible, thanks to excellent modern editions of her London novels and a wide range of critical work, the most recent of which can be found in this volume. Crucially, we should now feel confident that we can acknowledge, clarify, and formulate purely aesthetic questions raised by the writing itself. Focusing on Harkness’s trilogy of London novels, A City Girl (1890 [1887]), Out of Work (1888), and Captain Lobe (1889), and specifically their East End location, I hope to tease out and articulate some of the particular and peculiar characteristics of Harkness’s literary work.

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Experiments in realism

My starting point for focusing on the aesthetic interest of these novels must be to ask how Harkness approached the fundamental question of how the discourse of an authentic literary realism can be simultaneously stable (an accessible, truthful representation of social conditions at a particular historical moment) yet sufficiently unstable to suggest an evolving discourse (a vision of future possibilities both linguistic and political). This difficulty was certainly not unique to Harkness, but in a period of significant social change it went to the very heart of her task. Social semantics, that is, a common discourse carrying cultural meaning in the process of refinement by dynamic contemporary usage, is the raw material that a novelist draws on. Harkness’s task in writing novels about contemporary social conditions necessarily required her to employ the shared language and conventions of the present but, crucially, to listen and hear the as yet unarticulated but evolving meanings of the future. Profound semantic change was already well under way when Harkness began writing. The concept of ‘poverty’ was slowly being stripped of its moral turpitude and re-understood in political terms, shifting from the semantics of personal weakness to those of social responsibility. A ‘loafer’ was gradually being understood to be ‘unemployed’.3 The definition of ‘working classes’, now distinguished from the ‘masses’, was to be further refined by Charles Booth’s class ladder of social positioning (Booth, 1889: 33ff, 62). The reinvention of socialism in the late nineteenth century was a major catalyst for semantic as well as social change. The socialist discourse of economics and organisation infiltrated a range of opposition groups such the Fabians, the New Trade Unionism, and, ultimately, the Independent Labour Party. Significantly, it was less influential, as Elizabeth Miller argues, when it came to fiction. Socialist discourse, fundamentally antithetical to a fictional construction of an imagined society, always struggled with ‘the aesthetic problem of realism’ (Miller, 2013: 97). Early in his comprehensive survey of London, Charles Booth, long celebrated as the first social scientist, and convinced that statistics would bring rationality to the increasingly emotional social debate about poverty, unexpectedly found himself facing his own semantic dilemmas. He had no problem with fiction; indeed he opens the first book of what was to become his monumental survey of London with praise for ‘that gift of the imagination which is called “realistic” ’ (Booth, 1889: 6). However, as a committed Methodist he clearly experienced some unease as he found 131

Harkness and genre his carefully researched material moving him not towards a rationalisation and reaffirmation of the power of statistical analysis but towards the recognition that ‘poverty’ could not simply be described in numbers. He finally sought a balance which recognised that ‘[i]n intensity of feeling such as this, and not in statistics, lies the power to move the world. But by statistics must this power be guided if it would move the world aright’ (Booth, 1889: 598). The ritual and moral formulae of some of the established churches were not immune to changing social semantics. Gospel teachings, reinterpreted as the original socialism/communism, offered a humanising inflection to the scientific/economic basis of Marxist socialism, and were given energy and intellectual currency in the writings of priests like Stewart Headlam, James Adderley, and others.4 They gained considerable exposure in the pulpits of urban congregations by inspired ­revolutionary preaching that, ‘[i]n fact, early Christians did not distinguish between theological and economic doctrines’ (Noel, 1909: 6). The new humanist direction in Christian discourse was to prove a powerful counter-influence to both socialist economic theory and hard statistics. Compassion and mercy, rather than sin and punishment, were put firmly back in the social conversation.

Evolving discourse

A first step towards understanding how Harkness participated in changing language and testing out experimental forms capable of capturing modernity can be found in a comment she made in 1891 in ‘A Year of My Life’, an article written for the New Review after five years of frenetic creativity. It offers readers one possible clue as to how her early literary approach – that of textual heteroglossia – evolved. She does not mention her novels in this article and, in fact, she would not write another novel for several years.5 However, in her discussion she makes an interesting comment on the political scene which I think sheds light on a fictional technique that shapes all three of the London novels. In referring to the success of the Dockworkers’ Strike in 1889, she writes: They [socialists] cannot realise the infinitesimal part which Socialism played in the evolution of the unskilled worker … Improved educational opportunities and the lowering of the Franchise helped most of all in the evolution of the masses … Bitter cries from the people who felt the position of the unskilled workers a disgrace to England, angry threats from the Socialists, the patient work of certain modern economists, and the quiet

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Margaret Harkness, novelist but effective labours of ‘Trades Union’ ladies amongst working women, all helped to bring about the crisis. (Law, 1891a: 376–7)

She acknowledges the socialists’ contribution but argues that society’s complexity required a variety of means to achieve a satisfactory outcome. In this brief comment she refers to parliamentary achievements as important to class ‘evolution’ because, by inference, these laws give the masses the opportunity to gain the tools of analysis and the ability to influence their society. She acknowledges that other voices, such as the analytical work of economists and the grassroots activism of male and female trades unionists, are not only necessary but vital. Significantly, she also endorses the efficacy of emotion, of moral outrage (‘[b]itter cries’ surely credits the impact of Andrew Mearns’s 1883 pamphlet, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London), and of righteous anger. No one voice, no one pressure group, no one ideology, however theoretically persuasive, was going to provide an answer to London’s problems or dominate the language of the future. On the other hand, their combined pressure and the debates which their exchanges engendered could provide an irresistible catalyst for action and a forcing-house for semantic change. Does this comment go some way to explaining Harkness’s determination not to endorse any one discourse but to give textual room to the heteroglossia which characterises the London novels? If we translate her words into a specifically literary discourse, we could argue that she turned to a kind of Blakean resolution that ‘without contraries is no progression’ (Blake, 1969: 149). The confused, under-developed opinions of the inhabitants of Whitechapel, the various opinions of their social betters, the pronouncements of State and Church, must have seemed to offer a red-hot version of progressive ‘contraries’ out of which a future might be forged. If such an egalitarianism of voices could be realised in a fictional structure, a balance of power could be struck by clearing a space for the voices of the dispossessed at the structural centre around which the discourses of religion, institutions, and political groupings could revolve without privilege or prejudice. Such an approach would be extraordinarily radical, running widdershins to the well-defined contemporary genre of Victorian novels and social protest novels in particular. It would overturn the established hierarchy of class; it would subordinate individualising strategies of plot and character; it would necessarily subordinate and democratise the narratorial voice. A vision for a new fiction indeed. At the centre of Harkness’s novels were to be the voices of men and women ‘who are not heard and who do not speak’ (Rowbotham, 1983: 8): ‘Unless 133

Harkness and genre attention is paid to the nature of their silence there can be no transmission of either memory or possibility and the idea and practice of transformation can accordingly not exist’ (ibid.).

Parallel vernacular

Harkness launches the material world of her first novel, A City Girl, on a tumult of noise. The reader’s first impression is of a lively, rowdy community, a cacophony of voices, songs, arguments, conversations. The authenticity and vivacity of this strategy immediately anchors the novel’s realistic surface texture, but, as David Glover suggests, ‘the noisy heteroglossia raises … more questions than it can answer’ (Glover, 2012: 67). In fact, this many-voiced society obscures the psychological wasteland of what Harkness calls ‘the land of dumb thought and dumb feeling’ (Law, 1890: 99). Noisy Whitechapel is in fact silent, inhabited by those who rarely stop talking but who have not yet spoken. Harkness identifies the contemporary poverty of language, the failure of language to carry appropriate meanings, as a fundamental obstacle to working-class people’s ability to interrogate what seemed the inevitability of material poverty and social oppression, an obstacle more limiting, more imprisoning, and more psychologically destructive than poverty itself. George and Nelly, the narrative spine, are neither quite part of nor entirely separate from the relentless whirl of words around them as they pursue their daily routines. Their understanding of the material world they inhabit is filtered through numerous working-class conversations and a specific vernacular voice, short phrases which Harkness marks out with inverted commas. These are subtly incorporated into the narrator’s comments but, like the narrator, act to mirror the status quo rather than to direct the text or progress the narrative. These phrases are not quotations; they operate as a language within the common language of the residents of Charlotte’s Buildings. They are referenced by a narrator because there is no paraphrase for the associated social perspectives and psychological attitudes they carry. So tenants speak about being ‘kept under’, ‘what we learned them ourselves’, ‘to better himself’, or be ‘stylish’, and so on. These phrases, which I shall call a parallel vernacular, are, in fact, sedimented working-class knowledge, the fossilised infrastructure of evolving social semantics, their vagueness effectively fixing unarticulated social attitudes, and so unconsciously conspiring to block inquiry. In addition, Nelly and George each adopt a personal language which 134

Margaret Harkness, novelist they appear to rely on as the expression of individual consciousness. The discourses that surround Nelly rarely connect with, or even acknowledge, her lived experience. At the deathbed of her friend Susan, Nelly is hypnotised by the rhythm and mystery of the alien Latin words spoken by the Catholic priest, which she decides are more ‘efficacious than English words said by an ordinary man or woman’ (Law, 1890: 134). The words are ‘efficacious’ because, devoid of meaning, they allow her to imagine her own dream of heaven unchallenged. Later in the novel, at her own baby’s funeral, she felt ‘there was something consoling in the way he [Father O’Hara] said the words, something which carried Nelly’s thoughts to the Heaven she believed in’ (Law, 1890: 180). Nelly’s unquestioning acceptance of the Church’s right to speak for her, albeit incomprehensibly, means that she abdicates the right to speak for herself. In her portrayal of Nelly, Harkness first suggests a frequently recurring theme, the psychological corollary of language poverty. In the early part of the novel, Nelly’s closest friend and companion is her mirror. However, since Catholic discourse has effectively deprived her of selfdetermination and her mirror shows her only a reflection of herself, she becomes locked into a self-affirming world. Once she has discovered this ‘fantasy-self’ as her best friend, she decorates it with feathers, experiences theatrical performances as reality, and believes the flattering words with which Arthur Grant seduces her. She is unable to question her circumstances. As David Trotter points out: ‘No mere allegiance to family, faith, occupation, community, fiancé can match the power of this narcissistic dream as an expression of identity’ (Trotter, 1993: 31). Under pressure, when frightened and alone, Nelly slips into self-referring conversations until, outside the hospital, she talks only to herself. ‘ “It is one of the top windows,” she said to herself, “somewhere near the roof” ’; ‘ “Now I’ll know just where my baby is,” she murmurs; “I’ll not quite lose sight of it” ’ (Law, 1890: 157). George provides an equally interesting but different example of language poverty. ‘Life was a puzzle’, he tells himself early in the novel (Law, 1890: 31), words he repeats on several occasions. Later he answers his own puzzle: ‘I wish I’d never left the Service’ (Law, 1890: 110). George understands himself through the bland, formulaic phrases which sum up his ‘character’ in his discharge document. This military discourse of achievement is the beginning and end of his identity. When, later in the novel and seeking comfort in his distress, he shows Captain Lobe, the Salvation Army worker, this document, he thinks he is explaining everything – his life, his disappointment, his sense of betrayal. And then, 135

Harkness and genre aware of the failure of his attempted communication, he, like Nelly, is capable only of pure emotion and he breaks down and cries ‘like an infant’ (Law, 1890: 115). In terms of fictional realism, the reconciliation of Nelly and George at the end of the novel brings about a social improvement in both of their lives. Harkness avoids the emotional drama of tragedy: she has subverted the fallen-woman narrative as, at the close of the narrative, she moves with George to a job with accommodation in the country. However, she has also decisively negated any possible potential for self-realisation. Neither George nor Nelly has found a way through the barrier of silence towards a shared language of communication or comprehension. Both find in themselves, not each other, the only person who listens and understands. The novel uncomfortably and inconclusively closes with George’s voice as he simply ‘muttered to himself between his teeth’ the words that, for him, encompass all meaning: ‘I wish I’d never left the Service’ (Law, 1890: 184). As an example of a brave fictional experiment, this ending asks and answers a significant literary question. When the realistic material is largely antithetical to either a happy ending or a hoped-for future, how can a fictional resolution be found? It was an age-old question that became particularly pertinent to fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. Glover suggests (with tongue in cheek?) that ‘[p]erhaps the stirring of proletarian militancy belonged to a more revolutionary future and to novels still to be written’ (Glover, 2012: 66), but he is right to signal the many attempts to resolve the possible aesthetic irreconcilability of current misery and future hope. We might consider other contemporary writers: Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), for instance, which reenacts boating on the Thames as a passage through history while particularising the possibility of happiness as they assert their joy in democracy. We might consider also William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which links a historical account of the 1880s and a de-individualised utopian community in a reimagined London inside a dream sequence.6 Harkness has no interest in a temporary happy moment or an imagined golden future. In a completely different register she bravely reworks a conventional happy/tragic conclusion as a dull, desperate self-­ interested realism; the hope of relative material security lived within a non-communicative and psychological silence. However, and I think this is important, George and Nelly have survived, and it is in this brutally unromantic non-ending-of-an-ending that the faintest hope of change lingers as a possibility. ‘What is to-day … alleged to be “pessimism” ’, as 136

Margaret Harkness, novelist another contemporary novelist, Thomas Hardy, wrote as he looked back over his long writing career in ‘Apology’ (1922), ‘is, in truth, only such “questionings” in the exploration of reality’ (Hardy, 1962: 526).

The psychology of silence

Written hard on the heels of A City Girl, Out of Work is a very different kind of realist novel. The title alerts us first. It announces new subject matter dealing specifically with the contemporary issue of unemployment. It is indeed a powerfully dramatic novel set in a moment of fear and anticipation when the map of London starts to become the territory of the working classes, and specifically of unskilled and ­under-employed workers. Exhausted, oppressed, sick, and desperate as they are, they begin to materialise into public view, to spread out over the city’s parks and streets, filling doss houses, pubs, and clubs, sleeping in public squares, and even marching down elegant West End roads. London is ‘occupied’ in a number of finely conceived and emotionally charged set-piece scenarios. The unemployed, pushing their way across the boundaries of working-class neighbourhoods to mass in front of the National Gallery and around the statue of Nelson, or, in another episode, queuing up at the dock gates in threatening numbers, are seen as menacing and violent, although in reality it is the need for food and a job that fills the dockworkers’ minds. A Victorian readership had no problem with novels that transgressed boundaries between the real world and the fictional realistic world. Harkness used this convention to allow current political events to be omnipresent but to move in and out of focus, sometimes being the assumed backdrop of domestic scenes such as the dockworker’s house and Jos’s stay in the doss house, sometimes a historically accurate focal point as in the Trafalgar Square Riots. In effect, as Rob Breton neatly expresses it, Harkness engenders the ‘synchronic emotive reaction’ of a personal encounter while directly engaging ‘the reader in broader, diachronic political arguments’ (Breton, 2010: 35). Harkness sets the scene in three innovative ways. First, the historical drama of her material provides the sequence of events and allows her to reduce an individualised narrative structure to vanishing point. Jos is the name around which events revolve but his story is exemplary, not individual. Unlike Nelly and George, Harkness allows him no anchor, no location. The reader must follow him randomly as he wanders London. Second, she builds on the fictional device of the many-voiced city, giving voice to named and often socially provocative philosophies and ­ideologies 137

Harkness and genre as public speakers vie for the hearts and minds of the working classes. Last, in an acknowledgement of the text’s historicity, it is the reader who is asked to engage in completing history (the successful outcome of the Dockworkers’ Strike) and to resolve the tension between the semantics of scientific discourse (Marxist economics, Booth’s statistics) and the moral feeling for those who suffer (Christian compassion and human service). In addition, with fine dramatic and emotional power, Harkness dissects the nature and impact of language poverty with a forensic ruthlessness. Although the significance of the clamour of voices is more clearly defined than in A City Girl, paradoxically and cleverly, it is only by ­inference that the reader hears them. This version of working-class London portrays a silent world and the psychology of silence becomes the dominant theme and its metaphorical infrastructure. Men are silent at the very moment when, realistically, they might shout out – at the dock gates waiting for work, and, again, as the police move them on from Trafalgar Square. Jos, a country boy newly arrived in London, feels he shares no common language with those around him: His attitude towards the public was one of silence; he listened to conversation but seldom said more than “yes” and “no”. He could talk if he chose; in fact he was sometimes surprised when he heard himself talking, for, like many uneducated men, he knew more than he was conscious of knowing (Law, 1888: 129).

The parallel vernacular noted in A City Girl is initially present, but its range of expression is rapidly absorbed into the all-pervasive mantra ‘out of work’, a motif that occurs first in A City Girl and which, as Out of Work progresses, resonates like a drumbeat through the text, excluding all other meanings from the minds of the unemployed and dismantling Jos’s consciousness. ‘Out of work’ is a literal description of a particular economic and social condition, but as it becomes absorbed into the parallel vernacular’s accumulative meanings it tells of social determinism and of psychological despair. Harkness reinforces the silence with an insistent textual rhythm that constantly moves from the verbal to nonverbal. All conversations, comments, and communication are swallowed up in silence. In Victoria Park, for instance, while evolutionists, socialists, Freethinkers, speakers of every kind, shout rallying cries from their soap boxes, they are unheard by men ‘glad to lie like logs on the ground’ (Law, 1888: 48). Or they peter out in silence. Harkness makes the tragedy of language poverty more explicit and more destructive in Out of Work. The historically specific events of mass 138

Margaret Harkness, novelist unemployment and hunger riots in 1886 and 1887, at that time at the forefront of readers’ minds, heighten the horror of the exploitation of those who cannot speak for themselves. The two levels of the discourses of unemployment – organised protest (remote and irrelevant) and individual collapse (silence) – allow her to drive home the impact of language deprivation. The language of the desperate who are fighting their corner finally resorts to the sub-human ‘hisses’ of angry animals as we witness police herding up the protestors in Trafalgar Square. Jos Coney and his faithful follower Squirrel gradually regress from blank non-verbal to the sub-verbal condition of small, vulnerable, furry animals. Verbally and therefore psychologically extinguished, Jos is finally physically extinguished, illustrating with his short life another London narrative, that is, degeneration: ‘in this greatest town of all, that muscular strength and energy get gradually used up; the second generation of Londoner is of lower physique … than the first, and the third generation (where it exists) is lower than the second’ (Booth, 1889: 553). Breton argues that Jos’s story and his death are part of ‘[a]n unapologetic and unreserved appeal to emotion’, and perhaps he is right (Breton, 2010: 29).7 There is certainly room for considering whether the refreshed significance of depoliticised, deinstitutionalised ‘feeling’ emerging from a Marxist/ Christian dialectic had the effect of asserting itself in fictional terms in Harkness’s novels. On the other hand, to what emotion is the appeal directed? That is not an easy question to answer when Jos’s death on his mother’s grave, marked ‘Silent and Safe’, is as apparently pointless as his appeal to God – ‘Help me, O God, for I cannot help myself!’ (Law, 1888: 276) – which, like everything he has ever said, goes unheard. Out of Work introduces a further important aspect of Harkness’s readiness to experiment in her fictions. Her acute understanding of the relationship between the politics of labour and the politics of gender informs her experiment to challenge gender identities and to dismantle gender as a fixed state (see Hapgood, 1996). The realistic context of unemployed dock labourers is, of course, historically male defined, but Harkness explores the impact of social alienation not only through Jos’s retreat from language but on his manhood. When he loses his job, his socially defined masculinity steadily leaches away. Polly breaks off their engagement when she considers him economically, socially, and then, by implication, sexually useless. Squirrel, who attaches herself to him when she meets him in the doss house, is equally de-gendered. She acts a nurturing female role but is a street survivor, part wild, part child, asexual, with no access to socially defined womanhood. Is Harkness also suggesting that 139

Harkness and genre Squirrel might be Jos’s gender alter ego – his intrinsic femaleness? It is certainly interesting that when Jos experiences an existential breakdown in Trafalgar Square, Squirrel vanishes from the text, her last words ‘Oh, Jos!’ (Law, 1888: 268).

Voices from the slums

Why does Captain Lobe, published rapidly after Out of Work and with what appear to be similar objectives, seem such a very different novel, perhaps hardly a novel at all? One reason, I suggest, is that Out of Work was written as history in progress. The year following the book’s publication saw the particular story of the Dockworkers’ Strike triumphantly concluded, with world-changing possibilities for those involved at the time.8 There is certainly a note of elation in Harkness’s references to that success. She may even have felt that her novel played its part. Whether that is true or not, in the brief intervening time between the publication of Out of Work and Captain Lobe, political action swept through the East End of London. The success of organised labour in demanding better pay and conditions, with the Dockworkers’ Strike following hard on the Bryant and May Matchwomen’s Strike of 1888, gave some reassurance of a real and achievable future. With Captain Lobe Harkness changed her focus to take up her hardest challenge yet, to write about those men and women whom William Booth was to call ‘the submerged tenth’, those who were still part of the past. In Captain Lobe, there is a radical change of structure to shape the different kind of material Harkness had chosen to write about. The novel is effectively plotless. Instead, readers are imagined in a kind of panopticon within which the poor can be viewed in their various encounters with the sweater, the publican, the dock employers, the priest, the penny-gaff manager. Strikingly, there is also a marked change of emphasis from the poor to the middle class. The egalitarian, many-voiced city now becomes the uncertain voices of those individuals who best know on a daily basis the miseries and terrors of the slums. Chapter by chapter, Harkness shifts centre stage to the voices of those who work with the poor in the East End and to the institutions located there. Within this structure, Harkness sometimes struggles to remain faithful to her egalitarian mission because there is inevitably a change of perspective. Captain Lobe, the Salvation Army worker who also appeared in A City Girl, becomes a quasi-narrator, an incidental guide through the sufferings of the East End. Although he plays a part in a marginal 140

Margaret Harkness, novelist love narrative, his Salvation Army role usurps a linear plot for a series of East End scenarios. Not that Captain Lobe provides a stable centre or rallying point. For all his goodness and unstinting efforts, his neutrality turns inwards under extreme stress and exhaustion, showing him to be as confused as George and Jos. His fragments of religious consolation are as unenlightening as the dockworker’s scraps of Marxist doctrine in Out of Work. ‘I wonder why one sees so little result from so much effort’ (Law, 1889: 73), he says to himself, a puzzle he cannot acknowledge openly. Gradually, talking to himself becomes a habit: ‘he had a habit of talking aloud’, we are told, even on the street where he is on one occasion overheard by the East End doctor (Law, 1889: 188). There is a shift to a distinctly darker tone in Captain Lobe, appropriate to the nature of the material and Harkness’s struggle to translate the condition of ‘moral degradation’ that she witnessed into fiction when the ‘[i]nk turns to blood when one writes about them’ (Law, 1891a: 381).9 The aesthetic balance between science and empathy becomes tilted. Since empathy seems to be the only source of hope, however ephemeral and contingent, it is feeling that rushes in to constitute the non-verbal human discourse. In the worst slums, the inarticulate masses cannot rise above ‘the universal adjective’ (Law, 1889: 217); constant hunger withers bodies and souls; alcohol rots the brain and the will; babies are a curse and their deaths a relief. The labour mistress Jane Hardy is even prepared to imagine how ‘a leetle pressure of the finger and thumb on the windpipes of the girls’ would save them and the world from the grief of endless reproduction (Law, 1889: 185, 275). The underlying unarticulated shadow over those who struggle to help is that obliteration may be the only way forward. Even so, Harkness is consistently concerned to show the other side of silence: that the poor are capable of kindnesses that fall outside the capability of language. She does not flinch at portraying the terrible misery, criminality, and violence of the inhabitants of the slums, but she also identifies their world as a forcing-house for the social evolution of ideas and people and a possible arena for the betterment of society through ‘hope and patience’ (Law, 1891a: 384; emphasis in original). Harkness’s boldest experiment with semantic and fictional change, the glue that holds the structural edifice of Captain Lobe in place and maintains the egalitarian centre of the text returns us to the ultimate anti-hero, Captain Lobe himself. The pronoun ‘he’ gives Captain Lobe a gender, but throughout the text his behaviour diffuses gender specificity. He is as effectively depoliticised by his religion as Jos is by his unemployment, and his role in the Salvation Army is analogous with 141

Harkness and genre women’s stereotypical function as spiritual and moral arbiter. Equally important to this argument is Harkness’s emphasis on Captain Lobe’s physical size and weakness; he is always referred to as the ‘little Captain’, and his low physical and mental resources are stressed. The concluding sentence of the novel may surprise the reader, but only for a moment: ‘He quite upsets my theories about men’, announces his friend Jane Hardy, ‘but there, he isn’t a man – he is a woman.’ Captain Lobe is the wo/ man whose gender fluidity transforms the female/male stereotype and embodies the importance of unquestioning daily human compassion in the struggle for a more humanised society. The complementary role of political activist falls to Jane Hardy, whose characterisation shows a similar fusion of the male and female. She is the character who may be, or could be, allowed a dominant voice in the hoped-for egalitarian society. We met someone similar in Out of Work in the dock labourer who has attempted to read, learn, and understand political theory, but his understanding is nascent, his masculine identity static. Jane Hardy is one step further on, a woman produced by her times. She is specifically presented as a new type who ‘now appears for the first time before the public’ (Law, 1889: 116).10 The newness is not only her new industrial role but a new way to live outside ‘the love plot’ and a new way of relating to other women. However, within the decentred structure of Captain Lobe she is still, in 1889, just another example of an under-informed but determined autodidact, a mixture of intelligence, political potential, and empathetic human kindness. With hindsight, modern readers know that, embryonic as she is, she will be the textual and historical survivor. In her portrayals of Jos/Squirrel and Lobe/Hardy, Harkness anticipates what was to become an increasingly important discussion about gender fluidity over the next twenty years. In 1908, for instance, the kind of woman represented by the labour mistress would be described by Edward Carpenter (it would seem) in his book The Intermediate Sex as a specimen of the ‘homogenic woman, as a type in which the body is thoroughly feminine and gracious … but in which the inner nature is to a great extent masculine, a temperament active, brave, originative, somewhat decisive … Her love goes out to younger and more feminine natures than her own’ (Carpenter, 1909: 34; emphasis in original).11 Particularly interesting for my argument is the perceived relationship between sexual orientation and political achievement or fulfilment which Carpenter goes on to discuss. His comment that ‘in all times such women – not being bound to men by ordinary ties – have been able to work more freely for 142

Margaret Harkness, novelist the interests of their sex’ (Carpenter, 1908: 35) helps us to recognise in the text of Captain Lobe the close relationship between the labour mistress’s drive for social justice and her attachment to the women in her care – that is, the close relationship between political and sexual revolution. Together, the characterisation of Captain Lobe and Jane Hardy reinterpret the meaning of masculinity and femininity for the future.

Conclusion

Each of Harkness’s London novels is consciously organised with considerable sophistication. She is prepared to experiment in pursuit of effective articulation, displaying a certain defiance in adapting or simply ignoring existing literary conventions. Novels intentionally and densely threaded with contradictory emphases, historical references and contemporary realities, competing viewpoints and parallel narratives, are written in an emotionally charged and unexpectedly transparent language. Metaphor and literary conceits are entirely absent. As a contemporary reviewer expressed it: ‘We have all heard of the logic of fact; but there is also a rhetoric of fact, and this it is that Mr John Law uses to effect’.12 Each discourse is semantically and taxonomically identified for its social/­political/ moral role and its historical place. I would argue that reading the novels is more akin to seeing through a literary lens than to an expression of a literary style. What we see through that lens and hear through that ‘rhetoric’ is original, provocative, and profoundly moving.

Notes

 1 See, for example, Keating (1971); von Rosenberge (1987); or Bjørhovde (1987).  2 See, for example, Bellamy and Kaspar (1987), and Terry Elkiss’s chapter 1 in this volume.  3 The earliest recorded use of ‘unemployed’ as a substantive was in the Pall Mall Gazette on 10 May 1882 (Oxford English Dictionary). ‘Unemployment’ was not in common usage until c. 1895.  4 The fusion of Marxist and Christian discourse which, by the 1890s, had done much to encourage an ethically acceptable socialism is very underresearched. For examples of the debate, see Headlam (1888); and in fiction, Adderley (1893).  5 After 1891 Harkness continued to write fiction in serial form. ‘Roses and Crucifix’, for example, ran in the Woman’s Herald (December 1891­–

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Harkness and genre February 1892) and the first instalments of the unfinished ‘Connie’ appeared in the Labour Elector (June 1893–January 1894). Her last fulllength novel, as far as we know, was A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks (1921).  6 For a fuller discussion of nineteenth-century fictional socialist utopias see Hapgood (2005).  7 Writing in the Morning Post on 9 July 1888 about the recently published Out of Work, Harkness quotes Keir Hardy, the future Labour leader, to support her argument in setting out the struggle between facts and feeling as the most effective way of reaching the public.  8 See also David Glover’s chapter 5 in this volume.  9 See also Keating’s definition of ‘optimism’ (1971: 244). 10 Progressive but undoubtedly provocative ideas such as these could have been one reason for the distance that grew between Harkness and Eleanor Marx. The essay Marx wrote with Edward Aveling, ‘The Woman Question’, published in the Westminster Review in 1886, was emphatic in its rejection of ‘the feminine man and the masculine woman’. See Francis (2000: 126). 11 In Imperial Credit (1899), Harkness opens her argument by quoting at length from Carpenter’s essay ‘Transitions to Freedom’ in Forecasts of the Coming Century (1897). They both clearly shared a sense of the need for radical changes on every front. 12 This quotation from a review which appeared in Saturday Review is reproduced on the front paper of the newly published popular edition of Captain Lobe, retitled In Darkest London (Law, 1891b).

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1888). Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein. –––– (1889). Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army. London: Hodder & Stoughton. –––– (1890). A City Girl: A Realistic Story [1887]. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Co. –––– (1891a). ‘A Year of My Life’. New Review, October, pp. 375–84. –––– (1891b). In Darkest London. London: Reeves. –––– (1899). Imperial Credit. Adelaide: Vardon and Pritchard.

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Margaret Harkness, novelist Additional works cited Adderley, J. (1893). Stephen Remarx: The Story of a Venture in Ethics. London: Arnold. Bellamy, J. M. and B. Kaspar. (1987). ‘Harkness, Margaret Elise (1854– 1923): Socialist Author and Journalist’. Dictionary of Labour Biography VIII. Ed. Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville. London: Macmillan, pp. 103–13. Bjørhovde, G. (1987). Rebellious Structures: Women Writers and the Crisis of the Novel 1880–1900. Stockholm: Norwegian University Press. Blake, W. (1969). Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Booth, C. (1889). Labour and Life of the People of London Vol 1: East London. London: Williams and Norgate. Breton, R. (2010). ‘The Sentimental Socialism of Margaret Harkness’, English Language Notes (48.1). 27–39. Carpenter, E. (1897). ‘Transitions to Freedom’. Forecasts of the Coming Century. Ed. Edward Carpenter. Manchester: Labour Press. 174–92. —— (1908). The Intermediate Sex. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Francis, E. (2000). ‘Socialist Feminism and Sexual Instinct: Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy’. Eleanor Marx 1855–1899: Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. John Stokes. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 113–27. Glover, D. (2012). Literature, Immigration, and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel of the 1880s’. The Socialist Novel in Britain. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 45–66. Hapgood, L. (1996). ‘The Novel and Political Agency: Socialism and the Work of Margaret Harkness, Constance Howell and Clementina Black 1888­–1896’. Literature and History (3.5/2). 37­–52. –––– (2005). Margins of Desire: The Suburbs in Fiction and Culture 1880–1920. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hardy, Thomas. (1962). The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan. Headlam, S. D. (1888). The Laws of Eternal Life: Being Studies in the Church Catechism. London: Verinder. Jerome, J. K. (1889). Three Men in a Boat. Bristol: Arrowsmith. Keating, P. J. (1971). The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mearns, A. (1883). The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. London: Clarke.

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Harkness and genre Miller, E. C. (2013). Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morris, William. (1890). ‘News from Nowhere or, An Epoch of Rest’. The Commonweal (January to October). Noel, C. (1909). Socialism and Church Tradition. Manchester: Clarion Press. Rowbotham, S. (1983). ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’. Dreams and Dilemmas: Collected Writings of Sheila Rowbotham. London: Virago, pp. 5–32. Trotter, D. (1993). The English Novel in History 1895–1920. London and New York: Routledge. von Rosenberg, I. (1987). ‘French Naturalism and the English Socialist Novel: Margaret Harkness and William Edwards Tirebuck’. The Rise of Socialist Fiction 1880–1914. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 151–71.

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‘Connie’

8

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‘Connie’: melodrama and Tory socialism Deborah Mutch

That night she danced with a heavy heart and went home tired and restless. Sleep only came to her by fits and starts, and in her dreams she saw the Boss talking to the manager of the theatre. So the next morning she was not astonished to hear that her services were no longer required, that she must look out for another engagement. (‘Connie’ [Law, 1893–94: September 1893, p. 10]) You are my brother’s mistress, a woman of no reputation, whose proper place is the workhouse. Living here, you do harm to my brother, whose duty lies at home. … If you really care for him you will leave this house at once; you will go away before he returns to London. (‘Connie’ [Law, 1893–94: October 1893, p. 11])

These incidents in the story of Connie Ufindel, the eponymous protagonist of Margaret Harkness’s unfinished serial ‘Connie’, present the reader with two economic threats experienced by workers in precarious employment: unemployment and eviction. Connie finds herself trapped by three overwhelming pressures which, as the story develops, are exacerbated by her illegitimate pregnancy: the power of the employer who can remove her income on a whim; the power of the landlord who can remove her shelter at will; and the power of ‘respectable society’ that can remove her reputation and, therefore, her future ability to regain employment and shelter. This chapter will discuss Harkness’s approach to the tripartite oppression of working-class women through her fictional representation of the character Connie, and the dangers that threaten her and her unborn child. Reading the unfinished novella through the dual lenses of melodramatic form and Tory socialism, I will discuss Harkness’s use of the former to present the working-class woman’s powerless and 147

Harkness and genre ­recarious existence under late nineteenth-century British capitalism p and her use of the latter to suggest a potential solution through socialism based on reciprocal duties and responsibilities under an empathetic socialist leadership. ‘Connie’ is the last of Harkness’s social-problem novels produced during the period of her involvement with different aspects of the British socialist movement. Henry Mayers Hyndman founded the first British socialist group, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), in 1884, and the fissiparous nature of British socialism began at the end of the same year when William Morris and ten other members of the SDF board, including Eleanor Marx, left to create the Socialist League. The complexity of British socialism was based on vastly different ideas of how socialism was to be achieved: Morris founded the Socialist League to promote a revolutionary socialism in opposition to Hyndman’s goal of parliamentary change; the Fabian Society (also founded 1884) sought to use the existing mechanisms of parliament to implement socialist policy; the Independent Labour Party (founded 1893) aimed to create a separate workers’ parliamentary party with the financial aid of the Trades Union Congress. Some socialists, including SDF members Henry Hyde Champion, John Burns, and Tom Mann, joined forces with the trade union movement, and New Unionism – a combination of socialism and trade union practices – was created. Harkness’s social-condition fiction was produced under the pseudonym ‘John Law’ while she moved through these socialist circles. She published A City Girl (1887) and Out of Work (1888) while she was a part of the Marx–Engels family circle, having been introduced to Eleanor Marx by Friedrich Engels to give Marx the benefit of her knowledge of London slums (Hapgood, 2000: 131). At this point Harkness was contemplating becoming a member of the SDF, writing to Graham Wallas in 1888: ‘I am waiting to see what the Federation does in the way of Parliamentary action before I join any Socialist Party’ (BLPES, Wallas 1/7). There is no evidence that she did join the SDF, but her association with the group introduced her to Henry Hyde Champion, with whom she was involved, along with former SDF members Tom Mann and John Burns, in organising the London Dockworkers’ Strike of 1889. During this period she published Captain Lobe (serialised in the British Weekly in 1888, and published in book form in 1889), A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890), and ‘Roses and Crucifix’ (serialised in the Woman’s Herald in 1891–92). Finally, ‘Connie’ was serialised in Champion’s Labour Elector between June 1893 and January 1894 (Law, 1893–94). 148

‘Connie’ As ‘Connie’ is one of the least-known of Harkness’s publications, I will begin by providing a brief outline of the story. Connie Ufindel is a dancer in the London theatres who forms a relationship with the upper-class Humphry Munro, the son of a country squire. She leaves her alcoholic father to live an independent life, but when the Boss, her predatory theatre manager, fires her for dining with Munro after rejecting his own advances, she moves into a house in Kew paid for by Humphry. The house is initially taken to prevent the couple’s separation, as the Boss’s influence over other London theatrical companies would force Connie into provincial repertory theatre, but the affection between Connie and Humphry leads to cohabitation and Connie’s pregnancy. Humphry’s sister, Diana, discovers the pregnancy and evicts Connie before Humphry is informed. Connie is rescued from homelessness by Bess and Flora, two strangers whose description suggests they may be high-class prostitutes, who take her into their home. Humphry discovers Connie’s pregnancy and eviction, and searches for her. He also informs his father of her pregnancy and the squire accepts that Connie should be Humphry’s wife. This is where the story ends for the reader, because the Labour Elector ceased publication after the issue of January 1894.1

Ideological melodrama

Literary critics studying Harkness’s fiction have noted her use of naturalism: for instance, Ingrid von Rosenberg claims Harkness as an early English naturalist writing ‘almost as early as George Moore, who is commonly regarded as Zola’s first British disciple’ (von Rosenberg, 1987: 160). While Harkness does utilise naturalism in ‘Connie’, particularly through the sexual relationship between Connie and Humphry, I want rather to focus here on her radical use of melodrama. In The Melodramatic Imagination Peter Brooks points out that traditional melodrama, with its origins in the French Revolution, was an inherently democratic form. In this early iteration the threats directed at working-class characters by aristocratic villains are overcome and the victorious workers restore a balance of power. As such, Brooks argues, ‘[melodrama] represents a democratization of morality and its signs. … If the social structure of melodramas often appears inherently feudal … it is also remarkably egalitarian, and anyone who insists upon feudal privileges is bound to be a villain’ (Brooks, 1995: 43, 44). Throughout the nineteenth century melodrama had been used and adapted to express the discontent and political arguments of workers’ movements and ideologies such as r­ adicalism 149

Harkness and genre and Chartism to demand their rights, the vote, and the improvement of working-class conditions. Across the nineteenth century the melodramatic opposition of villainy and virtue expanded beyond the theatre and literature and was drawn into social commentary through novels, newspaper reports, pamphlets, and speeches to create what Elaine Hadley has termed the ‘melodramatic mode’: the genre ‘emerged … as a polemical response to the social, economic, and epistemological changes that characterized the consolidation of market society in the nineteenth century’ (Hadley, 1995: 3). Similarly, in chapter 3 of City of Dreadful Delight (1992), Judith R. Walkowitz discusses the political use of melodrama in two famous campaigns for women’s rights in the years prior to ‘Connie’: Josephine Butler’s campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1868, 1869, repealed 1886), and W. T. Stead’s journalistic investigation into child prostitution and trafficking, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (Anon., 1885). Both Butler and Stead used the melodramatic genre to present, respectively, the victims of the repressive laws and aristocratic paedophilia as victims of both the state and class power. The claustrophobic tone of ‘Connie’ arises from the melodramatic pressures on the worker imposed by both the landowner and the employer. By presenting the traditional aristocratic villain and the radical villainous employer, Harkness gestures towards the continuation of working-class female vulnerability under capitalism despite what might appear to be progress towards democracy and equality across the nineteenth century. Harkness uses character-level melodramatic tropes in ‘Connie’ to make plain the villainous–virtuous divide through outward appearance. Connie is described in chapter 1 as possessing ‘[g]olden curls [that] surrounded her face, which was very young and childlike’ (Law, 1893–94: June 1893, p. 10) and, as such, Harkness visually indicates her as the innocent menaced by villains. Both the aristocratic Diana Munro and Connie’s employer, the Boss, have the dark colouring that Michael R. Booth notes is traditionally associated with the melodramatic villain. Diana is both dark haired and emotionally hard; she is the ‘raven-haired villainess’ (Booth, 1965: 20) that Booth notes as rising to prominence in theatrical melodrama after 1850: ‘coils of dark hair were neatly arranged about her head. … Her eyebrows were straight and black, and they gave to her grey eyes a steel-like glance’ (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 14). Her heart is as black as her hair signifies: throughout the fragment of fiction, she bullies her father, deceives her brother, and evicts the pregnant Connie. A villainous and powerful aristocrat such as Diana is a standard 150

‘Connie’ melodramatic trope intended to generate empathy towards her victim. As Elisabeth Anker notes: Melodramas encourage visceral responses in their readers and audiences by depicting wrenching and perilous situations that aim to generate affective connections to victims and the heroes who rescue them. Using a morally polarizing worldview, melodramas signify goodness in the suffering of victims, and signify evil in the cruelty of antagonists. … [I]ndividual characters are often the metonymic substitute for economic or social classes. (Anker, 2012: 136)

The clash between Diana and Connie as the ‘metonymic substitutes’ for, respectively, the landed aristocracy and the working classes depicts not only the imbalance of power but also the left-wing and melodramatic stereotypes of the aristocracy as ‘bad’ and the working-class as ‘good’. Diana is not simply the villainous aristocrat flexing her power; she is also representative of the declining British aristocracy whose land- and agriculture-based economic strength was being eclipsed by commercial and industrial profits during the 1870s and 1880s (Cannadine, 1996: 17). Diana instructs Connie to leave Humphry and their house because his relationship with Connie ‘has kept him from making an honourable marriage’ with ‘a girl in his own position’ (Law, 1893–94: October 1893, p. 11). Diana’s primary concern here is that Connie is poor. Her concept of honourable marriage is one that brings wealth into the family, and she sets out her expectations to her brother: I tell you, Humphry, it is your duty to marry. … You can’t make money at the Bar, so you must do so in the only way open to a man of your position. … Because the place is going to ruin for want of money, and you can’t get money in any other way. It’s a duty you owe to your position. (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 14)

She views the acquisition of wealth as something to be achieved through marriage and dismisses Humphry’s legal work as unimportant. Her name aligns her with the Roman goddess of hunting, fertility, and sacrifice (Fischer-Hansen and Poulsen, 2009: 11), and Diana hunts and sacrifices the pregnant Connie for the Munro family wealth. Connie, on the opposite side of the villain–virtue binary, is presented as both a sacrificial victim to the perpetuation of aristocratic social and economic strength, and as a figure in possession of the pride and dignity of the ‘respectable’ working classes, which she demonstrates in her refusal to be bribed. Connie is hard working and, until she loses her employment in the theatre, financially independent: despite her youth she reminds her 151

Harkness and genre father that ‘I’ve slaved for you ever since I can remember’ (Law, 1893–94: July 1893, p. 11), and despite her poverty she refuses the money that Diana offers her to leave Humphry, which she finds an ‘insult’ (Law, 1893–94: October 1893, p. 12). It is through this presentation of independence that Harkness brings her melodramatic characters into the Zeitgeist of the fin de siècle. While Sally Ledger calls attention to Eleanor Marx’s argument that working-class women would be unaffected by the demands made by the middle-class ‘New Woman’ (Ledger, 1995: 40), Connie enjoys the financial, domestic, and sexual freedoms of women in a higher social position. Nevertheless, her apparent independence cannot prevent homelessness and potential starvation because of her reliance on others for employment and shelter. No worker, male or female, is independent, as they rely on the sale of their labour to employers in a crowded employment market. The unspoken warning in the fiction is that only the end of capitalism can remove the vulnerability and dependence of the workers. At the opening of the novella, Connie is an unmarried working-class woman who lives and works with little support from others: she has no family to cushion a financial blow; and she is offered little protection under a law that enfranchised men only. Even the New Union movement was generally resistant to the inclusion of women workers in their combinations. As Louise Raw avers, male trade unionists often denied that women held a valid place in the work-force, arguing that women should be restricted to labour in the home (Raw, 2009: 61). Connie, as a single, non-unionised female worker, still remains vulnerable to oppression by the powerful wealth-holders in the 1890s. Thus Diana, the traditional aristocratic villain, is joined in her tyranny over working-class Connie by the figure of the employer. The theatrical manager whom Connie refers to as ‘the Boss’ mirrors the traditional aristocratic villain in his oppressive practices, and through this character Harkness also draws her melodramatic tropes from the midnineteenth-century radical use of the genre. The Manichaean d ­ ualism – oppressor and oppressed, high and low, men and women – at the heart of melodrama made it a useful genre for radical and socialist narratives. Kate Newey, for instance, points to Douglas Jerrold’s villainous f­actory overseer in The Factory Girl (1832) as an early example of this shift in the genre (Newey, 2000: 30). Radical and Chartist authors had used the employer-as-villain as a criticism of workers’ oppression under industrial and capitalist practices as the country shifted from the predominantly rural-agricultural (and feudal) economy of the first part of the nineteenth 152

‘Connie’ century to the predominantly urban-industrial (and capitalist) manufacturing economy from the mid-century onwards (Shaw-Taylor and Wrigley, 2014: 90). As Sally Ledger points out: ‘the aesthetic grammar of popular melodrama – founded on binary oppositions and frequently violent conflicts – was much more consonant with the vocabulary of class identity and class conflict’ (Ledger, 2002: 32). Marx and Engels similarly set out their critique of industrial capitalism in melodramatic form, ‘connect[ing] revolutionary heroism with the social victimization of the proletariat’ in the Communist Manifesto (Anker, 2012: 138). Thus, melodrama expands to encompass those who hold the power to give and withdraw employment under capitalist practices alongside the aristocratic villain. Working-class readers and audiences would be expected to identify with the terrors which the characters felt towards those who hold the power of life and death through the giving or withdrawing of paid employment. Connie, after her dismissal, could face destitution and starvation in the same way as the unemployed Jos Coney in Out of Work and the destitute and widowed Mary Dillon in A Manchester Shirtmaker. The Boss, though, retains some of the traditional villainous traits of early melodrama: he intends to separate Connie from her lover, poses a sexual threat as she understands her employment is determined by her acceptance – or at least tolerance – of his sexual demands, and, like Diana, is signalled as ‘villain’ by his dark colouring. However, unlike Diana, the Boss’s melodramatic darkness is implied rather than explicit: She thought of the diamond merchant who financed the theatre, a Jew, who had taken a fancy to her from the very first, and offered her presents. … How he leered at her when he stood at the wings, with ‘Master’ written on his ugly face! (Law, 1893–94: September 1893, p. 9)

The migration of Russian Jewish émigrés between 1880 and 1914, after the Russian pogroms of 1881 and 1882, substantially increased the Jewish population in Britain, especially London, and generated much racial and xenophobic prejudice (Gray, 2010: 235). The consternation surrounding the Jewish immigrants seeped into contemporary literature and the Boss takes his place alongside other Jewish characters associated with the theatre, such as Oscar Wilde’s sexually predatory Isaacs in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and the manipulative Svengali in George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). Although Jewish immigrants at this period were most likely to be employed by co-religionists and to work in ‘the ready-made clothing trade, cabinet making and bootmaking’ (Holmes, 153

Harkness and genre 2016b: 45), the historic association of Jews and usury, and the prominence of rich Jewish financiers such as Leopold de Rothschild, gave scope for antisemitic criticism of both rich and poor Jews. While radical conservatives such as journalist Arnold White published articles on ‘the “pauper alien”, an undoubted synonym for the immigrant Jew’ (Johnson, 2013: 46), on the opposite side of the political spectrum the socialist Hyndman was also particularly vituperative about Jews. Excusing his antisemitism as a critique of capitalist practices, Hyndman published articles in the SDF paper Justice blaming ‘the most loathsome set of Jew capitalists and Christian financiers’ (Hyndman, 1896: 4) for the botched Jameson Raid and claimed that the impending South African War was driven by the ‘ruling classes and their masters, the capitalist Jews’ (Hyndman, 1899: 5). Antisemitism was not restricted to the SDF, though, for Harkness’s cousin the prominent Fabian Beatrice Potter (later Webb) declared in an article for the Nineteenth Century that ‘[the pursuit of profit] is this dominant race impulse [sic] that has peopled our Stock Exchange with Israelites’ (quoted in Englander, 1989: 556). In fact, antisemitism was prevalent throughout the socialist movement and was not directed solely to wealthy Jews: Potter similarly criticised the poor Jews in London’s East End for their drive for financial acquisition during her research for Charles Booth’s mammoth study, Life and Labour of the People in London (Holmes, 2016a: 20). Thus, despite the rapid development of Jewish trade unions in cities such as Manchester and Leeds (Endelman, 2002: 138–9), and prominent socialist Jews – Karl Marx being the most important – the figure of the Jewish employer remained the epitome of the capitalist villain. The use of melodrama in Harkness’s socialist fiction harnesses ‘the nature of melodrama … to individualize and personalize, to treat all ideas, all social problems in terms of individual conflict, courage, weakness, and vice’ (Booth, 1989: 102). As such, the presentation of the personal encompasses the social and political. Harkness perpetuates the left-wing use of melodrama as ‘a cyclical narrative of victimization and overcoming’ (Anker, 2012: 139) while adapting the traditional genre to provide a vehicle for her specific form of socialism.

A Tory-socialist conclusion?

The revolutionary origins of melodrama, and its adaptations across the nineteenth century by successive radical groups, make melodrama a highly politicised form. However, it is not only the content that is 154

‘Connie’ politicised but also, as Patrick Joyce argues, the recipients of the content: ‘simply by receiving the conventions of melodrama those who received them were being constituted as political persons’ (Joyce, 1994: 179). Therefore, despite Harkness’s omission of any direct reference to socialism or broader political ideologies, the reader is drawn into the politicised world of Connie’s story. If Harkness had followed the original melodramatic form, then both Humphry Munro and his father would be positioned as the aristocratic threat. As it is, Humphry loves Connie and fills the role of loving and protecting hero, while the squire accepts Connie as a family member at the end of the fragment. In appearance, the squire’s colouring situates him closer to the blonde and virtuous Connie – he is ‘a handsome old man’ with ‘snow-white hair and white moustache’ (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 13) – than to his own dark-haired, villainous daughter. Through this intra-class alignment Harkness nuances the polarisation of bad/aristocrat and good/worker by removing the alignment of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to social class and shifting the focus to Tory and liberal political ideologies. As Mark Bevir explains, ‘[l]iberalism and evangelicalism dominated Victorian thought’ with the focus on the individual, morality, and laissezfaire and free trade politics, but this classical liberalism was challenged by ‘the collapse of classical economics and the crisis of faith’ at the fin de siècle (Bevir, 2011: 23, 26–7). The socialist rejection of ­individualism and wealth acquisition at the expense of the worker is at the base of Harkness’s melodramatic villains. Both Diana and the Boss abuse Connie to achieve their own economic or sensual pleasure, but while the Boss is the catalyst for Connie’s trajectory into homelessness, the primary focus for the story is the role and responsibility of the aristocratic landowner. In Chartism Carlyle lamented what he perceived as the decline of social relationships through the ascendancy of liberal individualism. The acquisition and accumulation of money was not an indication of leadership, he argued; rather, it signified a narrow-minded and selfish attitude that was damaging social relationships and causing poverty and dissent among the working class (Carlyle, 1885: 46). Although Harkness resisted Friedrich Engels’s advice against presenting the British ­working class as a ‘passive mass’ (Engels, 1974: 115), Connie is powerless in the face of both the Boss and Diana’s power, and their characterisation as villainous liberal individualists rather than heroes is a way in which Harkness uses melodrama to construct political criticism in narrative form. The character traditionally positioned as the villain, the ­landowning Squire Munro, 155

Harkness and genre instead indicates the fading feudal and paternalist squirearchy in a period of ascendant capitalism. The squire’s love of his land, sense of history, and appreciation of nature hark back to an earlier nineteenth-century form of paternalism that David Roberts associates with the country squire, localism, history, and nature (Roberts, 1979: 224). The squire is introduced mourning the sale of a copse to cover the lost rent from his empty farms. As he drives his son, Humphry, past the sold copse he laments its loss: ‘I remember when the wood was planted. If I could have let the Home farm that copse should not have been touched’ (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 13). The squire’s nostalgia emphasises both his connection with his land and his responsibilities as a landowner to ensure the land is made useful. His sense of duty is located in old-fashioned paternalism, but the squire is not the beneficent hero of ‘Connie’. On the same journey the squire and Humphry ‘passed a wagon loaded with food for cattle; a man walked beside the horse and a small boy was perched on the top of the turnips. Farther on they met two old women carrying bundles of sticks’ (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 13). The people living on Squire Munro’s land are less important to him than his historical connection to the land, his appreciation of nature, or, more importantly, the wealth derived from farming the land. The harvest is designated for wealth-generating cattle through the sale of milk or meat, while the elderly have to forage for fuel on the land they tenant. The boy on top of the cattle feed may have been working with the farmer leading the cart, suggesting that he is put to work at a young age when he should have been attending school. Roberts notes that earlier in the nineteenth century ‘[i]t was the pride of the squires to do acts of kindness’, and cites George Banks, who would not rent his land to farmers unless they promised to pay their labourers fair wages, and John Tollemache, who granted an allotment and a cow to his labourers (Roberts, 1979: 224). Squire Munro, however, prioritises his wealth by mourning his copse and lamenting his empty farms. The squire’s paternal failings are not restricted to omission (tacitly accepting that children are kept from school, allowing the elderly to go cold and hungry) but are also presented through his weakness in response to his daughter’s liberalism. It is Diana who pressures him to sell the copse and who accuses the curate of interfering for distributing blankets to the needy; the squire comments: ‘You know Di is very economical. I don’t know where the place would be but for her’ (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 13). Thus Squire Munro personifies the twin pressures of liberal 156

‘Connie’ ideology on old-fashioned paternalism: the rejection of reciprocal duties and responsibilities as ‘interference’ in favour of individualism, and the reduction of human relationships to what Carlyle termed the cash nexus. In Chartism, Carlyle looks back to the period of feudal power, where: Cash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man; it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low … as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was the low related to the high (Carlyle, 1885: 46; emphasis in original).

Harkness takes a similar stance in Imperial Credit (1899), discussing the attitudinal shift from the period of her youth, when ‘money was a very desirable thing when attached to land’ (Law, 1899: 11), to the contemporary open celebration of wealth and consumption. The desire for a return to perceived reciprocal relations and responsibilities between ‘high’ and ‘low’ social groups is the foundation of the Tory political narrative, which, as Bevir describes, yearns to return to a pre-industrial, medievalist social system: Tory radicals expressed their views through a medievalist historiography. The Middle Ages represented a time of harmony and order … The stout yeomen of medieval England were attached to the land or an established trade and economically independent; the yeomen were a free and vigorous people who, guided by an enlightened aristocracy, provided the backbone of an upright nation. (Bevir, 2011: 67)

Tory ideology encompassed the social structure of Church, monarchy, and the people; patriotism; a united country and people; a rejection of liberal individualism; strong but benevolent leadership by the aristocracy; duties and obligations acknowledged and executed by all. Many British socialists imbricated their socialism with the Tory narrative, promoting socialism as a benevolent form of leadership towards a more equal and united society. Both Carlyle and John Ruskin, who described himself as ‘a violent Tory of the old school’ (Ruskin, 2005: 13), were most frequently cited as having influenced the socialism of the twenty-nine Labour MPs voted into parliament in the 1906 general election (Bevir, 1995: 878). Robert Blatchford, the editor of the best-selling Clarion periodical, described himself as a ‘Tory Democrat’ (Thompson, 1951: 230) and Hyndman is described by Bevir as ‘want[ing] statesmen to ensure that socialism would arise peacefully’ (Bevir, 2011: 79). The issue of statesmanship and leadership – a new form of paternalism – was at the heart of the Tory-socialist vision: the traditional social leaders of 157

Harkness and genre monarchy, Church of England, and aristocracy had absolved themselves from their historical responsibilities and Tory socialists presented themselves and their politics as the new statesmen. Upper-class former SDF member H. H. Champion set out this form of paternalist Tory socialism in an unsigned article entitled ‘The Social Revolution of China’, where he proposed that governments had a duty to their people: ‘The state should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with the view of succouring the working-classes, and preventing their being ground to dust by the rich’ (Anon., 1887: 4). Although John Goode’s summary of Harkness describes her as either ‘a woman of consistent ideas who worked opportunistically … a radical feminist converted to socialism in the mid-1880s and disillusioned by it in the early 1890s, or simply a neurotic of wide but volatile sympathies’ (Goode, 1982: 52), she appears to have been drawn to the Tory-socialist aspect of the British socialist movement. Her associations with the SDF and with Champion meant that she would probably have been involved in Tory-socialist debates. While ‘Connie’ maintains the Tory criticism of individualist liberalism and weakened aristocratic power, the character of Humphry – alongside Connie – gestures towards a potential new society structured on the lines of Tory socialism. Humphry Munro is initially presented as an example of what Joyce terms ‘the politics of beer and Britannia’ and an embrace of leisure (Joyce, 1982: 292). At home, Munro is depicted surrounded by the tools of his leisure pursuits – ‘horsewhips and tennis rackets’ (Law, 1893–94: June 1893, p. 11) – and he meets Connie at a music hall – her place of work, but a place of leisure for him. This situates Humphry within the Tory enjoyment of sportsmanship, gambling, beer, and entertainment, in opposition to the liberal promotion of decorum and self-improvement. Gareth Stedman Jones recognises the music hall as the site of an affinity between the upper and working classes, citing the protests against Mrs Ormiston Chant’s attempt to screen the bar at the Empire, Leicester Square in her 1894 campaign against ‘indecency on the stage’ (Bland, 1992: 398). The screen was smashed by a group of ‘200–300 aristocratic rowdies’ led by a young Winston Churchill (Stedman Jones, 1983: 233); thus Humphry’s taste for music-hall entertainment situates him in a Tory tradition that unites him with the working-class Connie. The final line of the last published chapter of ‘Connie’ – Squire Munro’s statement to Humphry that, if he marries Connie, ‘[y]our wife must be my daughter’ (Law, 1893–94: January 1894, p. 12) – also gestures towards a potential unity between the upper and lower social 158

‘Connie’ groups. It suggests a conclusion in the manner of Benjamin Disraeli’s Young England novel, Sybil (1845), where ‘daughter of the people’ Sybil Gerard and upper-class Charles Egremont unite to symbolically heal a nation divided into opposing and destructive social groups: the selfish, idle aristocracy and the ignorant, revolutionary working class. The Young England group were concerned with two social tendencies: the disintegration of society as the forces of ‘democracy’ and economic change undermined the old forms of social control, and the deteriorating condition of the poor as traditional mechanisms of social protection broke down (St John, 2010: 15). Similar concerns motivated the Tory socialists who worried about the disintegration and atomisation of society and the condition of the poor under capitalism, but they looked to socialist leadership rather than a benevolent aristocracy. Robert O’Kell rejects criticism of Sybil for the dilution of the upper and lower social groups by uncovering Sybil’s aristocratic heritage and reads the novel as an allegory for uniting ‘sensitive but secular leadership to the spirit of piety and devotion’ (O’Kell, 2013: 260). If we attempt to extrapolate an ending for this fragment, then a reading of ‘Connie’ as an adaptation of Sybil provides a potential route to a conclusion. The characters in ‘Connie’ can be mapped onto the main characters of Sybil, beginning with the protagonists, Humphry and Connie. Connie, like Sybil Gerard, is dispossessed and vulnerable, but where Sybil regained her land and aristocratic heritage, Connie, as a worker, is reliant on employment for survival: she has been dispossessed of her labour under capitalist economics. There are suggestions throughout the fragment that Connie’s heritage is not exclusively working class: Diana recognises gentility in Connie’s movements, stating that ‘[s]he moves well, and is graceful – almost a lady, I should say (Law, 1893–94: October 1893, p. 11), and Connie uses received pronunciation when she laments that her father ‘forgets all about one, and leaves one to a stranger’ (Law, 1893–94: June 1893, p. 10). Comparably, in A City Girl Nelly Ambrose is described as superior to her grubby, alcoholic mother and brother, and her paternity is ambivalent as ‘her mother had been a lady’s maid before she married’ (Law, 1890: 66). As Harkness produces no deus ex machina, nor even a popularis ex machina, for Nelly, however, it might also be assumed that no one other than Humphry will come to Connie’s rescue. The triumvirate of aristocratic characters – Humphry, Diana, and the squire – echoes Disraeli’s prominent aristocrats – respectively, Egremont, Lord Marney, and Sir Vavasour Firebrace – and Raymond Williams’s categories of emergent, dominant, and residual social groups (Williams, 159

Harkness and genre 1977: 121–7). Harkness is more sympathetic to the squire’s nostalgia than Disraeli is towards Sir Vavasour, the baronet who wants to take his place in the pomp and ceremony of the aristocracy alongside ‘the nobles of whom they are the popular branch’ (Disraeli, 1980: 78). O’Kell describes him as ‘the absurd Sir Vasavour [sic], [who] imagines that the salvation of the country depends entirely on the restoration of baronets’ rituals and privileges’ (O’Kell, 2013: 261). While Disraeli’s baronet wants to be treated as an equal by the higher aristocracy (the word ‘vavasour’ refers to the vassal of a feudal lord who also has tenants on his land), Harkness’s squire also mourns his declining power but accepts the rise of liberalist economics, deferring to his daughter. Diana echoes Egremont’s elder brother, Lord Marney, but where Marney exerts aristocratic entitlement and disdain, Diana looks only to increase her family wealth, regardless of the costs to others, and embraces the cash nexus. Humphry, united with Connie, may be the symbolic hope for the future as Egremont and Sybil were for Disraeli. Both Egremont and Humphry have a ‘native generosity of … heart’ and a mind ‘worth opening’ (Disraeli, 1980: 60); both enhance their lives through useful work: Egremont as a Member of Parliament, Humphry in his studies for the Bar. Humphry retains the country squire’s localised paternalism and abhorrence of the cash nexus, but he renounces power through land ownership, declaring that: ‘If father died, I should sell the place’ (Law, 1893–94: August 1893, p. 14). Thus, the contrast between the old paternalist landownership and Humphry’s rejection of it for a more socially responsible way of life also suggests a democratic paternalism as the aristocratic Humphry joins forces with the independent worker Connie. The absent conclusion may raise hopes for a happy ending through three perspectives. First, through Harkness’s use of melodrama: as Paul J. Marcoux points out, the foundations of melodrama are that human beings are generally good and that villains are ejected so that the community can restore ‘natural’ order, tranquillity, and a unified society (Marcoux, 1992: 4). Second, the fiction is serialised in the socialist press and so, despite Booth’s statement that ‘melodrama is a dream world inhabited by dream people and dream justice, offering audiences the fulfillment and satisfaction found only in dreams’ (1965: 14), the narrative is situated in a publication (interacting with other socialist publications and groups) that is working to translate those dreams of a fairer and more just society into reality. Third, if Harkness had planned a faithful socialist adaptation of Sybil, then the uniting of Egremont and Sybil would be mirrored in Connie and Humphry. 160

‘Connie’ Regardless of the intended conclusion, the relationship between Connie and Humphry, as a metonymic substitute for social relations, draws together ‘high’ and ‘low’ social groups in a (possibly) mutually beneficial union. As Joyce argues, ‘melodrama is directly implicated in the very construction of the sense of “community” and social identity itself’ (1994: 180), and the potential new utopia of support and respect between the social groups gestures towards Tory-socialist social aims.

Note

1 The full text of ‘Connie’ is available in annotated form in British Socialist Fiction, 1884–1914 (2014) by Deborah Mutch, and online at the Harkives.

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1887). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Vizetelly. –––– (1888a). Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein. –––– (1888b). ‘Captain Lobe: A Story of the East End’. British Weekly, 6 April–14 December. –––– (1890). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. —— (1891­–92). ‘Roses and Crucifix’. Woman’s Herald, 5 December–27 February. —— (1893–94). ‘Connie’, Labour Elector June–January. –––– (1899). Imperial Credit. Adelaide: Vardon and Pritchard. Additional works cited Anker, E. (2012). ‘Left Melodrama’. Contemporary Political Theory (11.2). 130–52. Anon. [Henry Hyde Champion] (1887). ‘The Social Revolution of China’. Common Sense, May, p. 4. Anon. [W. T. Stead] (1885). ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. Pall Mall Gazette, 6–10 July. Bevir, M. (1995). ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’. English Historical Review (110.438). 878–901. –––– (2011). The Making of British Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Harkness and genre Bland, L. (1992). ‘ “Purifying” the Public World: Feminist Vigilantes in Late Victorian England’. Women’s History Review (1.3). 397–412. Booth, M. R. (1965). English Melodrama. London: Herbert Jenkins. –––– (1989). ‘Melodrama and the Working Class’. Dramatic Dickens. Ed. Carol Hanbery MacKay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 96–109. BLPES, Wallas 1/7. Harkness, M. (1888). Letter to Graham Wallas. Brooks, P. (1995). The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cannadine, D. (1996). The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. London: Macmillan. Carlyle, T. (1885). Chartism. New York: Alden. Disraeli, B. (1980). Sybil [1845]. London: Penguin. Du Maurier, G. (1894). Trilby. London: Osgood, McIlvaine. Endelman, T. M. (2002). The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Engels, F. (1974). ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York, NY: International General, pp. 115–17. Englander, D. (1989). ‘ “Booth’s Jews”: The Presentation of Jews and Judaism in Life and Labour of the People in London’. Victorian Studies (32.4). 551–71. Fischer-Hansen, T. and B. Poulsen (2009). From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’. The Rise of Socialist Fiction. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester, pp. 45–66. Gray, D. E. (2010). London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City. London: Continuum. Hadley, E. (1995). Melodramatic Tactics, Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800–1885. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hapgood, L. (2000). ‘ “Is This Friendship?”: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community’. Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. John Stokes. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 129–43. Holmes, C. (2016a). Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1971. Abingdon: Routledge. –––– (2016b). John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971. Abingdon: Routledge. Hyndman, H. M. (1896). ‘Imperialist Judaism in Africa’. Justice, 25 April, p. 4. –––– (1899). ‘The Jews’ War on the Transvaal’. Justice, 7 October, pp. 4–5. Johnson, S. (2013). ‘ “A Veritable Janus at the Gates of Jewry”: British Jews and Mr Arnold White’. Patterns of Prejudice (47.1). 41–68.

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‘Connie’ Joyce, P. (1982). Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England. London: Methuen. –––– (1994). Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ledger, S. (1995). ‘The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism’. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 22–44. –––– (2002). ‘Chartist Aesthetics in the Mid Nineteenth Century: Ernest Jones, a Novelist of the People’. Nineteenth-Century Literature (57.1). 31–63. Marcoux, P. J. (1992). Guilbert De Pixerécourt: French Melodrama in the Early Nineteenth Century. New York: Peter Lang. Newey, Katherine. (2000). ‘Climbing Boys and Factory Girls’. Journal of Victorian Culture (5.1). 28–44. O’Kell, R. (2013). Disraeli: The Romance of Politics. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press. Raw, L. (2009). Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History. London: Continuum. Roberts, D. (1979). Paternalism in Early Victorian England. London: Croom Helm. Ruskin, J. (2005). Praeterita [1886]. New York: Knopf. Shaw-Taylor, L. and E. A. Wrigley (2014). ‘British Population during the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century’. The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain: Volume 1 Industrialisation, 1700–1860. Ed. Roderick Floud, Jane Humphreys and Paul Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–88. Stedman Jones, G. (1983). Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. St John, I. (2010). Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics. London: Anthem. Thompson, L. (1951). Robert Blatchford, Portrait of an Englishman. London: Gollancz. von Rosenberg, I. (1987) ‘French Naturalism and the English Socialist Novel: Margaret Harkness and William Edwards Tirebuck’. The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. Brighton: Harvester, pp. 151–71. Walkowitz, J. R. (1992). City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago. Wilde, O. (1890). The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Ivers. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part IV

Personal influences: Harkness and her contemporaries

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Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery

9

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Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery: Margaret Harkness and Olive Schreiner Angharad Eyre

In 1888, in To-day, Margaret Harkness published an allegory, ‘The Gospel of Getting On’, which suggested that socialists were the only true nineteenth-century Christians. She dedicated the allegory to Olive Schreiner, the South African author famous for The Story of An African Farm (1883), whom she had met during the 1880s in London. Harkness encountered Schreiner’s writing within a wider context of a society that was revisiting and reassessing conventional religious practice, and at various points in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Harkness publicly expressed admiration for the social ideas explored in Schreiner’s writing. This chapter traces a shared philosophy of religious re-visioning that, I argue, encouraged Harkness to re-examine her own positions on Christianity and socialism, and prompted her to undertake experiments with form and genre. In order to demonstrate the effect of this religious ­re-visioning more precisely, I provide a reading of Harkness’s novel In Darkest London (1893 [1891]), which shows her engaged in her own reformulations of Christian religion.

Harkness and religion

Scholarship on Harkness has tended to concentrate on her involvement in the 1880s socialist movement, especially in the Matchwomen’s Strike of 1888 and the Dockworkers’ Strike of 1889 (Hapgood, 2000: 135–6; Koven, 2004: 167). Work to more fully recover Harkness’s journalism has significantly positioned her among socialist-activist and non-fiction 167

Personal influences writers such as Clementina Black and W. T. Stead (Koven, 2004: 153– 68).1 The religious aspects of Harkness’s novels have been less examined, with scholars either taking her word that she did not belong to any faith (Law, 1891) or associating her with the faiths of the Salvation Army and Christian Socialism (Koven, 2004: 167; Sypher, 1993: 115). Although Harkness grew up as the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, she cut all ties with her family when she moved to London, and it can be assumed that she rejected her family’s religion at the same time (Webb, 1992: 79). However, though her cousin Beatrice Webb (née Potter) wrote in 1889 that Harkness had no religion, she reported chatting about both ‘human and divine’ subjects in 1885 (Webb, 1992: 139, 279). As I will argue, it was Harkness’s struggle with socialism and orthodox Christian faiths that led to her particular religious reformulations and utopian visions of the future. Schreiner’s work has been studied for its utopian philosophies of feminism, socialism, and pacifism (Burdett, 2001; Heilmann, 2004). Scholars have drawn attention to the significance of her engagement with London’s intellectual groups such as the Fellowship of the New Life – an idealist group of socialist artists who stressed collectivism and men and women’s fellowship in opposition to the individualism, personalism, and egoism of capitalism – and Karl Pearson’s radical discussion group the Men and Women’s Club, which debated Pearson’s beliefs in evolution and essential sexual difference between men and women (Livesey, 2007: 44–68; Walkowitz, 1992: 135–65). Schreiner’s religious faith has most often been characterised as agnostic. Like Harkness, she also rejected the orthodox religion of her father, in this case a German Methodist missionary to South Africa. Burdett has argued that Schreiner found an alternative to the faith of her upbringing in the ideas of evolutionary connectedness and progress expressed in Herbert Spencer’s First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862), and the similar ‘romantic conception of natural harmony’ of Emerson (Burdett, 2001: 27–8). A number of scholars have identified aspects of Emersonian transcendentalism in Schreiner’s writings (Jay, in Schreiner, 2003: xix; Kissack and Titlestad, 2006: 33). Though the 1880s was a time of agnosticism in the face of Comtean positivism and scientific advances (deVries, 2010: 190), it should be remembered that agnosticism was not synonymous with – nor did it logically progress to – atheism. Agnostics were often also adherents of ‘freethought’, which, in the 1880s and 1890s, contained its own faith that, in the future, metaphysical questions would be solved, doubts resolved, 168

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery and ‘ultimate Truth’ revealed (Berkman, 1989: 51–2). A state of hopeful agnosticism could be sustained by Spencer’s popular concept in First Principles: the ‘Unknowable’. Even scientific writing at this time could emphasise what was still unknown or unknowable, and so preserve a space of mystery that could be filled by religious faith (Fyfe, 2004: 3). Agnosticism could often lead to unorthodox reformulations of Christian theology as agnostics struggled to re-form their old religion so that it could be reconciled with new experiences and beliefs. The socialist thinking with which Schreiner and Harkness engaged was not diametrically opposed to Christian religion. Christian Socialists, followed by the Anglican Church, championed a conception of Christ the worker, focusing on his Incarnation and humanity – rather than his sacrifice and suffering, which had been stressed in Atonement theology (Hapgood, 1995: 187–90; Ross, 2007: 20–1). The Salvation Army too, though it originally stressed Atonement teachings, moved towards a focus on the Incarnation and on material ministering to the poor (Yeo, 1977: 13). However, as Hapgood argues, this materialist move by Christian groups left a spiritual void that socialist groups and writers moved to fill with visions of utopias. For example, the Fellowship of the New Life invoked ideas of millenarianism, predicting that the new life would be a heaven on earth, coming about as part of the redemption of the Second Coming, when all classes and genders would be reconciled (Livesey, 2007: 45; Yeo, 1977: 8–23). In this discursive context, readers could interpret Schreiner’s writings as producing unorthodox, yet still religious, and even at heart Christian, utopias. Scholars have noted that her collection of allegories, Dreams (1890 [Schreiner, 2003]), was received by suffragettes as a comforting expression of feminist spirituality (deVries, 2010: 198; Heilmann, 2004: 129–30). Margaret Harkness was even more likely in the late 1880s to have received Schreiner’s writings as a reformulation of religion, as she was struggling with disappointments and searching for ways to make sense of the world. The turn of the decade was a time of disillusionment for socialist artists (Livesey, 2007: 72; Hapgood, 2000: 133–42), and especially for women. The Dockworkers’ Strike had failed to bring about revolutions of class or gender, as unions accepted more pragmatic gains. The personal experiments of the time also foundered; Pearson’s Men and Women’s Club did not achieve its ambitious aim to treat men and women equally, and Schreiner and many other women members left the club with regret (Walkowitz, 1992: 149–59). By the end of the century Amy Levy and Eleanor Marx had both committed suicide, 169

Personal influences providing evidence of what Deborah Epstein Nord sees as the tenuousness of independent women’s lives in these days (Epstein Nord, 1990: 737). The 1880s vision of a new life – a heaven on earth, where classes and genders would be reconciled – had become clouded by the 1890s. In response, Harkness turned to Schreiner’s writings and found there a feminist reformulation of Christianity, to which she responded by attempting to emulate Schreiner’s art and create her own unorthodox Christian utopian visions.

A gospel of love

Harkness not only admired Schreiner, but believed that they were workers in a shared mission. As a journalist she wrote articles about Schreiner, in which she positioned herself as working closely with Schreiner in a shared artistic project. Although their personal relationship appears to have been difficult at times, Schreiner did admire some of Harkness’s work and granted that they were fellow workers for the cause of class and gender equality. In 1888, in a letter to Beatrice Potter, she praised Harkness’s socialist novel, A City Girl (1887), and in 1891 she wrote to W. T. Stead that Margaret Harkness was ‘a woman who will yet do great & good work for the working classes with her pen’ (NADP, T120 (M722): W. T. Stead Papers/12, 15 March 1891). She also wrote directly to Harkness: ‘I would rather you wrote one great generous article in a newspaper showing how large & impersonal the soul of woman be, than thousands of conversations with me. […] I believe you will yet do greater & greater good work in our world’ (NADP, T120 (M722): W. T. Stead Papers/4, January 1891). The correspondence between Schreiner and Harkness, as well as Harkness’s own journalism during this period, indicate that she drew inspiration from Schreiner’s work as she experimented with form and genre to express her ideas in her own writing. Though Harkness’s 1890 Pall Mall Gazette article is titled ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In praise of General Booth’, it could easily have been titled ‘In praise of Olive Schreiner’. In this article Harkness expresses her disappointment with socialism: ‘My Socialistic dream was vanishing … the great strike has come and gone, and we are very little nearer the great social millennium’ (Law 1890b: 1). One better solution to social ills, she suggests, is the Salvation Army. However, she also advances a second, more radical, solution for social reform: a gospel of love, for which she quotes Olive Schreiner: 170

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery A letter from Olive Schreiner lies before me while I write this, in which she says, ‘If the world is ever to be saved, it will be saved by love, and by nothing else.’ I believe she is right. I believe that love will one day grow strong, even in the slums of our great cities, and that then THIS world will be heaven. (Law, 1890b: 1)

Harkness summarises Schreiner’s philosophy in a way that implies they are consciously developing this religious social vision together. However, she is already transforming Schreiner’s meaning by turning Schreiner’s ambiguous, hypothetical language – ‘if this world is ever to be saved’ (my emphasis) – into a more concrete prediction for the ‘slums’. Schreiner’s letter is typically agnostic; she hopes for a better future for humankind, but this is a hope which is deferred, tentative, and ambiguous, based as it is in the unknown. The dedication of her first volume of allegories, Dreams, reads: To a small girl-child, who may live to grasp somewhat of that which for us is yet sight, not touch. (Schreiner, 2003: 2)

Her vision of the future is doubly, or even permanently, deferred – the girl-child of the future still might not even grasp it – so it is the hope itself, which almost takes the form of a prayer, in which Schreiner and her readers can have faith. While Harkness in her article concedes that their vision of the future is yet to come to fruition, she moves on quickly to insist with certainty that she at least knows how the new world will not be brought about: ‘Our time is far off; and certainly it will not be brought about by setting employed against employers, preaching a class war, and persecuting blacklegs’ (Law, 1890b: 1). Harkness’s polemical journalism could not accommodate the mystery of the unknowable, and therefore could not formulate effective utopian visions. In 1892 Harkness published an article titled ‘Olive Schreiner’ in the Novel Review, in which she provides her interpretation of Schreiner’s religious position and mission: Miss Schreiner … is saturated with the Christian faith, although she has renounced its shibboleths … She is a moral teacher – a prophetess. Her chief prophecy is that the reign of Love will one day begin on earth, and that men will then live together in amity, making this world a heaven […] In politics she is an anarchist, looking forward to the day when law shall be put aside like a worn-out garment, and love shall rule over perfect men and perfect women. (Law, 1892: 114–15)

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Personal influences Harkness here collapses the boundaries between religion and politics. ‘Love’ is the agent and ruler of both religious and political prophecies, and the capitalisation of the first ‘Love’ implies that, in both contexts, Harkness believes that Schreiner is referring to a Divine Love. The political vision relies on the religious prophecy: in millenarian thinking, human politics would be overturned by the establishment of heaven on earth; in Harkness’s vision, there will similarly be no need for the ‘wornout’ garment of humanity’s laws. Harkness aligns herself firmly with her representation of Schreiner’s beliefs. Her description of ‘looking forward to the day when law shall be put aside’ (my emphasis) eschews hypotheticals, suggesting that she believes that this prophecy will come to pass. The tone of the piece is highly approving, and both the religious adherent and the writer can be heard in Harkness’s question: ‘Will she ever paint anything more perfect than the picture of the man who set free the bird “Immortality”, or write a finer poem than that of the “Single Feather” which fell from heaven?’ (Law, 1892: 112). In this question, Harkness is referring to Schreiner’s allegory of ‘The Hunter’ that first appeared in The Story of an African Farm, and was reprinted in the collection Dreams (Schreiner, 2003). The story is ostensibly non-Christian; Burdett characterises it, as told to Waldo in African Farm, as ‘a parable of a positivist, or scientific world view’ (Burdett, 2001: 24). The protagonist, in a life-long quest for the illusive bird of Truth, has to exchange the consolations of a human God and immortality for the mountains of ‘Dry-facts and Realities’, and it is only in death that he attains one feather of Truth (Burdett, 2001: 24). However, the allegory could also be interpreted as an unorthodox Christian vision of utopia, as it depicts a tentative faith in a new world to come, one that might be enjoyed only by those who come after, and that would be won through sacrifice. Naomi Hetherington argues that by republishing the text in Dreams, Schreiner transforms it into an allegory of female emancipation; just as the small girl-child may grasp the future, those who come after the Hunter may capture Truth (Hetherington, 2011: 54). In death, the Hunter’s last words promise this future: ‘ “Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb … My soul hears their glad step coming,” he said; “and they shall mount! They shall mount!” ’ (Schreiner, 2003: 12). Schreiner’s conclusion allows the Hunter’s soul to outlive his worn-out body: his soul is enabled to ‘hear’ as he experiences a supernatural aural ‘vision’ of the success to come. The story of the Hunter also fits established Christian 172

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery frameworks. The Hunter can be compared to Moses, who died before he could reach the Promised Land. And, as Harkness remembers, the Hunter’s sacrifice is rewarded by a single feather of ‘Truth’ that falls from above: ‘Softly it fluttered down, and dropped on to the breast of the dying man. He felt it with his hands. It was a feather. He died holding it’ (Schreiner, 2003: 12). In referring to the feather falling ‘from heaven’, Harkness insists on interpreting the allegory within a Christian framework. It is likely that, before she wrote her own allegory, Harkness also read Schreiner’s ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, published in the New Review in 1887 (Jay, in Schreiner, 2003: 5, 21, 24). Told in three acts, or ‘dreams’, this allegory prophesies how woman’s emancipation will bring about the new world of equality between the sexes, in what Ann Heilmann interprets as a Christian story of suffering and salvation (Heilmann, 2004: 131). The first two dreams focus on woman’s painful emancipation; the second dream bears a strong resemblance to ‘The Hunter’, but this time it is explicitly Woman who must sacrifice – she must relinquish man, depicted as a biting child at her breast, in order to pioneer a way to the new world: ‘Down the banks of Labour, through the water of Suffering’ (Schreiner, 2003: 18–19). She is strengthened in her sacrifice by the sound of feet, the feet of the women and men who will follow, and the promise that these feet will later cross over the river (Schreiner, 2003: 20). What remains with the reader is Woman’s fortitude as she ‘grasped her staff’ and set off to dedicate herself to the slow process of making a track to the edge of the river – so that one day the bodies of women like her might form a bridge over which future women will cross. Though twentieth-century scholars have been dismayed at this sacrifice of female individuality (McCracken, 1996: 237; Chrisman, 1990: 142–3), Schreiner’s readers, including Harkness, would have identified it as a feminist transformation of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice in the service of mankind. The third dream presents the better future to be won by the woman’s sacrifice, which is named as heaven on earth (McCracken, 1996: 237), though it is an unorthodox heaven based on gender equality and androgyny. Though Schreiner’s narrator must wake from this dream, she stresses the passing of time – the next day the sun will ‘arise again’ – to signal a confidence that mankind is advancing, day by day, closer to this utopia (Schreiner, 2003: 21). McCracken notes her use of the masculine for the sun ‘he would arise again’ as a disruption that recalls the reader to the present (McCracken, 1996: 237); however, it would also remind readers 173

Personal influences of the biblical prophecy that the future would be brought about by Christ rising again, thus situating an unorthodox, feminist utopian vision within Christianity. Julie Melnyk has noted how Christ tended to feature in women’s theological writing: as a suffering saviour with whom they could identify; as an embodiment of powerful and transformative Love; and as a model of feminised man and a preview of an androgynous life to come after the Apocalypse (Melnyk, 1998: xvi–xvii).2 Harkness’s admiration for both the art and the message of Schreiner is apparent not only from her articles but also from her emulation of Schreiner’s style in her 1888 allegory, ‘The Gospel of Getting On’. In publishing a Christian allegory in To-day, a magazine of ‘scientific socialism’,3 Harkness was implying that this branch of socialism lacked a spiritual mission – however, her allegory did not present much of an alternative. Her heavy-handed effort identifies ‘the false gospel of getting on’ followed by Victorian capitalist society, and contrasts it unfavourably with the ‘true’ gospel of the Bible: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. This is the whole law and the prophets’ (Law, 1888: 83). The short story narrates the effects of following the false gospel for the young male protagonist and for the young woman who dies as a result of his desire to get on. A catechistic dialogue with ‘a voice’ – presumably God – explains the allegory’s message. Finally, the gospel itself is revealed in material form, as a grotesque written document, supernaturally taking on the blood and pain of its working-class victims (who are familiar from socialist literature): ‘The capitals were written in blood. There was the trail of a dying crofter’s finger upon it, and blots – the sweat of Irish peasants’ (Law, 1888: 84). The allegory ends with a divine judgement against this gospel and the blessing of a small group of socialists still steadfastly following the Bible’s gospel in Christ-like martyrdom: ‘they had crowns of thorns on their foreheads; and they pressed the thorns down into their flesh’ (Law, 1888: 84). Harkness suggests that Jesus’s gospel of love was still very much a painful law to follow. Indeed, this allegory suggests another meaning to Harkness’s choice of pseudonym, usually believed to refer to an eighteenth-century economist (Lucas, 2005).4 John can also allude to John the Apostle, and the author of Revelation (in the nineteenth century these were believed to be the same person), to whom Harkness refers as the ‘Apostle of Love’ in In Darkest London. If the surname, Law, refers to the biblical law of Harkness’s allegory, the pseudonym itself contains alternative Christian theologies – a God-is-Love theology based on Incarnation, and that of Evangelical Atonement. 174

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery It was only in her novel In Darkest London that Harkness was able to reconcile the beliefs of her childhood Evangelicalism with Schreiner’s unorthodox feminist visions of the future. In this novel, the law of the gospel becomes less important than the gospel of love, as the voice of John Law becomes subordinated to that of the Salvation Army’s Captain Lob(v)e.

The slums and utopia

In Darkest London first appeared as a serial called ‘Captain Lobe’ in the Christian periodical the British Weekly through 1888. It has been read both as a realist socialist novel and as a demonstration of Harkness’s rejection of socialism in favour of the Salvation Army (Hapgood, 2000: 139; Sypher, 1993: 10–11). While socialism and the Salvation Army are important to this novel, Harkness presents spirituality in the slums more generally, and presents new, unorthodox Christian visions of the future. In her London, Salvation Army women, ‘slum saviours’, move through the streets, pubs, and dwellings of slum neighbourhoods, dispensing pamphlets and exhortations to the ‘slummers’, while Captain Lobe preaches at meetings and debates doctrine with agnostic socialists. The novel is to an extent a picaresque: the protagonists pass through urban scenes and interact with characters such as an ‘East End Doctor’, ‘Factory Girls’, and ‘Hop Pickers’. The novel also makes space to represent the more supernatural elements of London, such as the religious prophec­ ies of the Salvation Army, the dreams of converts, and Captain Lobe’s disturbing visions of hell. In this way Harkness extends the mythological depictions of the East End that other late nineteenth-century writers such as journalist Arthur Mee or novelists Mrs Humphrey Ward and Robert Buchanan were producing to create the setting for a new vision of unorthodox Christian utopia (Hapgood, 1995: 187). The novel’s plot revolves around Ruth – a factory-owning orphan, who attempts to become a slum saviour and falls in love with Lobe – and Lobe himself, who wrestles with religious doubt, the problem of the slums, and his vocation in the Salvation Army. Eventually Lobe sails for Australia, leaving Ruth in the Salvation Training Home to wait the two years before they can be married. There are two other significant characters in the novel: the ‘labour mistress’, Jane Hardy, who, though uneducated, makes socialist and feminist arguments; and a nameless New Woman, who is an ex-socialist agnostic, resembling Harkness in many respects.5 Harkness’s novel stages a debate between socialism and Salvationism. 175

Personal influences The New Woman gives voice to this debate, rejecting both in favour of an Incarnation-based, practical Christian charity. Her rejection of socialism is primarily a rejection of the socialists themselves, who she complains do ‘next to nothing’ and ‘spend their time quarrelling’ (Law, 1893: 153). She also ridicules the lack of a practical programme for change: ‘we are told how bad things are for the working classes, and afterwards we are asked to go to sleep and wake up Anarchists’ (Law, 1893: 154). When Lobe asks her about the Christian Socialist movement she is vague: ‘I believe such people exist; but I do not think that they are making much progress’ (Law, 1893: 156). Yet her suggested replacement for socialism is the Christian gospel of Harkness’s 1888 allegory: ‘So far as I have seen we should not stand in need of Socialists, if the rule of “Love thy neighbour as thyself” had ever been, or could even now be put into practice’ (Law, 1893: 157). The New Woman also rejects Salvationism, suggesting that Harkness was more ambivalent about the Salvation Army than scholars have suggested (Ross, 2007: 90). Harkness presents the early version of the Salvation Army in this novel, and its doctrine is one of Atonement evangelicalism, holding that the conversion of the poor is more important than the amelioration of their material needs (Yeo, 1977: 13). In the chapter ‘Slumdom’, Harkness’s slum saviours refuse to give to the poor, saying ‘you must give up your sins; then God will send you food’ (Law, 1893: 50). One of the starving men counters this lesson with a doctrine that evokes Incarnation ideas: ‘The Bible calls God a father, and no father would starve his son for sinning. He would give him food first, and speak about his sin afterwards … don’t come here to talk of salvation to a man like me. I’m hungry’ (Law, 1893: 50). Though the next chapter is a continuation of ‘Slumdom’, Harkness ends this chapter here, giving the hungry sinner the last word. The New Woman makes the argument for practical Christian charity in imitation of Christ, declaring to Lobe that ‘[i]f Christ were to walk down the Whitechapel Road this evening … he would feed the hungry men and women’ (Law, 1893: 67). She also rejects the Salvation Army’s belief in hell as a ‘terrible doctrine’, and the belief in any sort of afterlife as an impediment to working earnestly to change social conditions (Law, 1893: 69). It was the Salvation Army’s practical Christian work in the slums of which Harkness approved (Sypher, 1993: 115), and though she portrays the slum saviours’ doctrine as harsh and unchristian, she stresses their admirable ability to go among the poor, treating them, and being treated in return, with respect and kindness. One woman who had 176

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery treated them badly while drunk gives them flowers as a peace offering; a man defends them in a pub, saying ‘they are the only folks that come among us. They have been good to my missus’ (Law, 1893: 59). The New Woman also admires the slum saviours for this, and, when she is dying, resolves to leave all her money to them, twice calling them ‘our nineteenth-century heroines’ (Law, 1893: 254, 256). The New Woman’s practical charity can also take the form of loving kindness, as when she comforts the freak-show performer, Napoleon, who worries that because of his deformity he might not have a soul, and might be destined for reincarnation rather than heaven. The New Woman comforts him with a Schreiner-like vision of the future: ‘You need not be afraid to come back again. Things are changing … barriers are breaking down, and classes are amalgamating. By the time you come back all men will be brethren … Love will be strong, even here in Whitechapel; and this earth will be heaven.’ However, because she cannot tell him when this future will come to pass – and because she admits to Lobe that this vision of the future cannot satisfy her – she kisses Napoleon to give him comfort (Law, 1893: 71). By the end of the novel, though, the love that Harkness and the New Woman admire in the slum saviours is not simply the human love for one’s fellow man promoted by Christian Socialism, but something more supernatural. Throughout the novel, a sense of the presence of other worlds is invoked through the Salvation Army’s references to heaven and hell, the New Woman’s comforting speech about heaven on earth, and a number of dreams and visions. Early in the novel, Harkness dedicates almost a whole chapter to the speech of a Salvation Army convert, who describes his belief that they are living their lives ‘in Salvation War’ (Law, 1893: 39), and a dream in which he ‘seemed to see’ a hypocritical nineteenth-century clergyman carried away by an evil spirit for his want of earnestness (Law, 1893: 35–6). Similarly, Lobe describes dreams in which he ‘seem[s] to see Satan carrying off [his] people’ (Law, 1893: 159). Before her death, the New Woman also has a dream, through which she rediscovers a more traditional Christian faith. In a letter to Lobe she describes her allegory-like dream, which had been prompted by a newspaper article about an East End woman who, in despair, had smothered her baby so that it would not have to suffer life.6 In the New Woman’s dream, God appears in the courtroom and arraigns those gathered there for the crime of crucifying him in the shape of the East End poor. He demands: ‘Is it nothing to you, O nineteenth-century Christians, that 177

Personal influences men starve and drink, that women in despair kill their infants?’ (Law, 1893: 255). The previously agnostic New Woman draws a mysterious lesson from this divine vision. Using Schreiner’s words again, the New Woman tells Lobe: Heaven is no far-off country we are to inherit, but love – I mean the good within us. I believe that love will grow strong, even down in Whitechapel; but before then there will come to pass all that St John, the Apostle of Love, foresaw in the Book of Revelation … Perhaps, after all, my God, and the God of my father, are not so very different. (Law, 1893: 256)

The New Woman here draws on the most mysterious part of the Bible of all – Revelation – to predict the coming of a better future to be brought about by those like the slum saviours. In this way, she reconciles her feminist-socialist vision with traditional millenarian Christian beliefs. The novel also presents another, more unorthodox, suggestion for how a feminist Christian utopia might come to pass. The end of the novel holds out the promise of progress towards a new future as Lobe sets off for Australia, and Jane Hardy, the labour mistress, considers emigrating in order to advance her experience of this future. She believes in ‘the infinite capabilities of women … for progress’ (Law, 1893: 263; emphasis in original), and believes that these new-world countries might be the place where women will progress and men will be ‘subjected’ (Law, 1893: 263). Harkness, too, puts her faith in women for the evolution of relationships between the sexes. Rather than being married to Lobe at the close of the novel, Ruth is left in a relationship with Jane, who ‘began to treat [her] like a younger sister’ (Law, 1893: 273). In this relationship there is a beneficial crossing of the classes – they have already helped women factory workers together – and even a suggestion of a biological crossing. Jane recognises that Ruth is ‘one of those people who cannot stand alone, who must fall to the earth if they have nothing to keep them upright’ (Law, 1893: 280), and that she, as a ‘hardy’ specimen of a woman, must prop her up. Harkness’s earlier suggestion that classes are amalgamating imbues this relationship with special significance; this mysterious crossing of these natures and classes might be what brings about the better future. Finally, the eponymous Lobe himself, who throughout the novel is presented androgynously as physically small and delicate, is explicitly acknowledged by Jane Hardy to be a new kind of man. The last words of the novel are her declaration that: ‘He isn’t a man – he is a woman’ (Law, 1893: 281). Earlier in the novel Lobe described the evolution of his Christianity from Evangelical, to Methodist, to Salvationist, declar178

Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery ing ‘I shall leave directly I find any religious organization that is more in earnest’ (Law, 1893: 160); it would seem that Woman is this more earnest evolutionary zenith. The androgyny or evolution of Lobe recalls the heaven of Schreiner’s Dreams; for both Schreiner and Harkness, a better future is predicated on a mysterious evolution of the sexes. Harkness’s In Darkest London, then, produces a number of tentative visions of the future, all of which can be interpreted within Christian frameworks, while they transform the theology to fit socialist and feminist utopias. In this period of disillusionment in the late 1880s, Harkness found inspiration in Schreiner’s religious allegories, and In Darkest London shows that this inspiration led her not only to develop her art, but also to contribute to a new feminist theology.

Notes

1 The open-access online resource Harkives (www.theharkives.wordpress. com) has made a significant contribution to the recovery of Harkness’s journalism. 2 Melnyk’s observations are based on a study of women writers who she argues were transforming theology through writing novels, such as Emma Jane Worboise, Charlotte Yonge and Ellice Hopkins. 3 For information about To-day see Mutch (2013). 4 Another explanation for the pseudonym is that she was using a family name – George Henry Law, bishop of Bath and Wells was a relation by marriage (Contemporary Authors Online, 2003). 5 Sypher argues convincingly that she is a self-portrait (1993: 115). 6 Compare also the protagonist of A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890a), who kills her baby daughter to spare her further suffering.

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1887). A City Girl: A Realistic Story. London: Vizetelly. —— (1888). ‘The Gospel of Getting On’. To-day: Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism, March, pp. 83–4. –––– (1890a). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. –––– (1890b). ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In praise of General Booth’. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October, pp. 1–2.

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Personal influences –––– (1891). ‘ “John Law’s” Religion’. Pall Mall Gazette, 1 September, p. 1. –––– (1892). ‘Olive Schreiner’. Novel Review, May, pp. 112–16. –––– (1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe. London: Reeves. Additional works cited Berkman, J. A. (1989). The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Burdett, C. (2001). Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chrisman, L. (1990). ‘Allegory, Feminist Thought and the Dreams of Olive Schreiner’. Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism. Ed. Tony Brown. London: Frank Cass, pp. 126–50. Contemporary Authors Online (2003). ‘Margaret Harkness’. Gale. go.galegroup. com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=blibrary&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH10 00127309&it=r [Accessed 20 September 2017.] deVries, J. (2010). ‘More Than Paradoxes to Offer: Feminism, History and Religious Cultures’. Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain 1800–1940. Ed. Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 188–211. Epstein Nord, D. (1990). ‘ “Neither Pairs nor Odd”: Female Community in Late Nineteenth-Century London’. Signs (15). 733–54. Fyfe, A. (2004). Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain. London: University of Chicago Press. Hapgood, L. (1995). ‘Urban Utopias: Socialism, Religion and the City, 1880 to 1900’. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 184–201. –––– (2000). ‘ “Is This Friendship?”: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community’. Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. John Stokes. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 129–43. Heilmann, A. (2004). New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hetherington, N. (2011). ‘Feminism, Freethought and the Sexual Subject in Colonial New Woman Fiction: Olive Schreiner and Kathleen Mannington Caffyn’. Victorian Review (37). 47–59. Kissack, M. and M. Titlestad (2006). ‘Olive Schreiner and the Secularization of the Moral Imagination’. English in Africa (33). 23–46. Koven, S. (2004). Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Socialism, suffering, and religious mystery Livesey, R. (2007). Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain 1880–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lucas, J. (2005). ‘Harkness, Margaret Elise (1854–1923)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn. Oxford University Press. www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/56894 [Accessed 21 September 2017]. McCracken, S. (1996). ‘Stages of Sand and Blood: the Performance of Gendered Subjectivity in Olive Schreiner’s Colonial Allegories’. Women’s Writing (3). 231–42. Melnyk, J. (ed.) (1998). Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of their Fathers. London: Garland. Mutch, D. (ed.) (2013). British Socialist Fiction, 1884–1914. London: Pickering and Chatto. NADP (National Archives Depot, Pretoria), T120 (M722): W. T. Stead Papers/12, Olive Schreiner to William Thomas Stead, 15 March 1891. Accessed through Olive Schreiner Letters Online, www.oliveschreiner. org [accessed 21 September 2017]. NADP, T120 (M722): W. T. Stead Papers/4, Olive Schreiner to Margaret (Maggie) Harkness, January 1891. Accessed through Olive Schreiner Letters Online, www.oliveschreiner.org [accessed 21 September 2017]. Ross, E. (2007). Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty 1860–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schreiner, O. (1883). The Story of An African Farm. London: Chapman & Hall. —— (2003). Dreams: Three Works by Olive Schreiner. Ed. Elisabeth Jay. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press. Spencer, H. (1862). First Principles. London: Williams and Norgate. Sypher, E. (1993). Wisps of Violence: Producing Public and Private Politics in the Turn-of-the-Century British Novel. London: Verso. Walkowitz, J. (1992). City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Webb, B. (1992). The Diary of Beatrice Webb vol.1: Glitter all Around and Darkness Within. Ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. London: Virago. Yeo, S. (1977). ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain, 1883–1896’. History Workshop Journal (4). 5–56.

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Margaret Harkness, W. T. Stead, and the transatlantic social gospel network Helena Goodwyn

To be a journalist in the second half of the nineteenth century was often to be caught between accusations of evangelism and commercialism. For Margaret Harkness and W. T. Stead the desire to reach as wide an audience as possible created a tension between their idealism and popularism that each sought to overcome by marketing their respective social-activist texts as part of a wider, transnational network of reform. This chapter, therefore, considers Harkness’s 1889 novel Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army, reprinted in 1891 as In Darkest London, and Stead’s 1894 socio-religious treatise If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer, in light of each author’s attempts to align themselves with a movement of greater significance than their writings could achieve on their own: the transatlantic social gospel network. This movement has been described by Christopher H. Evans, Paul T. Phillips, Daniel T. Rodgers, and others as significant because it used the evangelising impulse of the ‘gospel’ to insist upon institutional reform of the ‘social’ at a time of ‘intense, transnational traffic in reform ideas, policies, and legislative devices’ (Rodgers, 1998: 3). Rodgers identifies this period of Western moral and religious re-evaluation as beginning in 1870, coinciding with, or precipitating, the Second Industrial Revolution, and ending with the Second World War. Considering the implications of Harkness’s and Stead’s engagement with these discourses – the social gospel movement – provides a context for Harkness’s writings that has hitherto been missing in discussions of her influence.1 182

The transatlantic gospel network Evidence of this atmosphere of moral and religious reassessment can be found in records of public meetings; private correspondence; all manner of published texts including poetry, travel writing, and journalism; pamphlets such as The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883); and social reform texts such as the Salvation Army’s In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890), published on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter explores the complex interplay between emerging modern marketing methods and the international network of cross-referencing between writers of fiction and non-fiction texts, exemplified here by Harkness and Stead. The establishment of an international web of reciprocal references gave the authors who were positioning themselves as part of a social gospel network the authority they needed to establish themselves as writers of legitimate reform treatise in a marketplace saturated with similar texts.

Harkness, In Darkest England, and In Darkest London

The anonymous, sensational penny pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, published in October 1883, achieved mass readership as well as lively speculation as to the identity of its author. Unlike the case of James Greenwood’s infamous ‘Amateur Casual’ pseudonym, used to excite intrigue on the publication of his ‘A Night in a Workhouse’ series in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1866, The Bitter Cry was not published anonymously with the intention of titillation – or so said the subsequent arguments that surrounded its authorship.2 Rather, it was published collectively, under the auspices of the London Congregationalist Union, as a critique of the awful living conditions in the areas of London which it explored. In its refusal to adhere to established allegations of immorality and godlessness as explanation for the terrible poverty and other conditions of life it witnessed, the pamphlet was arrestingly modern. Its emphasis upon ‘systemic social reform’ or ‘what many social gospelers [sic] called “social salvation” ’ is the defining feature of what ‘sets the historic social gospel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries apart from other types of religious reform’ (Evans, 2015: 196). The sensation caused by The Bitter Cry of Outcast London caught the attention of the newly appointed editor-in-chief of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, who gave the pamphlet substantial coverage and backing, beginning with the article ‘Is it Not Time?’ which appeared on 16 October 1883. The article asked a series of escalating rhetorical questions, designed to excite the reader into a frenzy of indignation: 183

Personal influences Those who have no concern about another life have all their energies at command for the amelioration of this – but what is being done? What rich man except the American Peabody leaves his fortune to rehouse the poor? How many thinkers dedicate themselves to an exhaustive study of the method of ameliorating the condition of the homeless? Where is the leader of men who will preach a new crusade against the crying evil of our times? (Stead, 1883: 1)

In the weeks and months following its publication, The Bitter Cry was present in some form or another in almost every issue of the Pall Mall Gazette. This, in turn, led to the pamphlet enjoying a much-increased circulation, thus sparking greater popular interest in its subject matter. Stead’s manipulation of the pamphlet was critical to establishing his reputation at the Pall Mall Gazette, but, more than this, it gave him an object lesson in how to repackage and repurpose material in promotion of a cause. This lesson then came into direct use when General Booth asked Stead to act as scribe, or ghost writer, for his controversial, doctrinal text In Darkest England and the Way Out. In the immediate aftermath of the publication of In Darkest England in 1890, critics of Booth and the Salvation Army suspected Stead’s involvement and focused on his infamous reputation and association with the Eliza Armstrong case in order to destabilise the validity of the Salvation Army’s scheme. In the pamphlet Salvation Syrup or, Light on Darkest England: a Reply to General Booth, George William Foote revels in the knowledge that Stead wrote In Darkest England in the […] manner of ‘the born journalist’, that is, in the fashion of the ‘Modern Babylon’ and the adventures of Eliza Armstrong. He contributes the descriptions, the gush, the hysterics, the sentences crowded with adjectives and adverbs. Sometimes he writes a whole chapter, unless our literary scent misleads us; sometimes he interpolates the General, and sometimes the General interpolates Stead. (Foote, 1891: 9)

Proof of Stead’s penmanship of In Darkest England is not at issue here as, undoubtedly, he is its author.3 Instead, what we are concerned with is the association of an already successful publication, coupled with uncertainty surrounding the identity of the author, being simultaneously exploited to promote and market another text. Margaret Harkness’s novel Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army was originally published in 1889 by Hodder & Stoughton under the pseudonym John Law. It was then republished in 1891 as In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe, under the same 184

The transatlantic gospel network pseudonym, by the radical London publisher William Reeves, with an introduction by General Booth.4 The remarketing of Captain Lobe was, on the surface, confirmation of Harkness’s association with and promotion of the Salvation Army; yet the extent to which she was actually comfortable with such an association is questionable. The clash of socialist and evangelical rhetoric is the central tension that makes Harkness’s novel an important text in any attempt to understand how the periodical press, charitable organisations, and novelists negotiated their relationships to each other in an increasingly connected world. Taking advantage of this connectivity, publishers were beginning to make use of increasingly sophisticated yet internationally standardised marketing methods to link popular texts. The repackaging of the novel as In Darkest London to link it directly with In Darkest England alters the reception of the narrative as more emphatically in favour of the Salvation Army, and yet the text was not revised to remove some of the criticisms of both Booth’s mission and his missionaries that run throughout it. From the very beginning of the novel the titular captain is presented in a manner that appears matter of fact but is actually subtly undermining: A little man, […] slightly made, and delicate. The life he led took the strength out of him; for he felt every word that he said, and the sympathy which he showed to his fellow-men was a fire fed by self-sacrifice. He was no milk-and-water religionist, this little captain. He did not preach about hell, and then go home to enjoy a good meal of roast beef and plum-­pudding. If he consigned a sinner to the burning pit, he gave the sinner half of his own dinner to eat on the journey, and recognised the fact that a man’s soul has an intimate relationship with a man’s stomach. He hated sin in the abstract; but he loved sinners, and most of all he loved his Whitechapel people. (Law, 1893: 11)

The insistent emphasis on the slightness of ‘this little captain’ suggests that we should interrogate the apparent praise in the passage more closely. There is a tone of derision detectable in Harkness’s diction which is verified by the end of the chapter, where we find Lobe wondering how to persuade a young woman, Patty, to return to Salvation Army accommodation. Lobe ponders why Patty would prefer the freedom of a ‘cheap, dirty lodging’ to the Salvation Army institution with all its rules and regulations, and he is unable to understand her friend’s disparaging reference to its ‘dullness’ (Law, 1893: 12). Harkness tells her reader, in a moment of knowing meta-humour, that ‘people who really believe in hell do not indulge in the morning 185

Personal influences paper, or join a circulating library’ (Law, 1893: 13), and yet the very rebranding of her novel must be interpreted as a move towards an audience interested in, perhaps even participants in, the work of the Salvation Army. Everywhere in the novel are indications of Harkness’s equivocal view on the Salvation Army: from the robotic, rote behaviour of the officers, to the assertion that ‘few educated men and women’ join the Army (Law, 1893: 33), to Lobe’s deep-seated fear of Ruth (to whom he becomes engaged at the end of the novel) becoming a slum saviour. This is perhaps a justified fear when the real good performed by the slum saviours ‘nursing the sick, and feeding the hungry with [thei]r own scanty rations’ leads, as Lobe admits, to an ‘early death’ (Law, 1893: 30). And yet, just as the novel portrays the role of the salvationists as problematic, it humanises them in their treatment of the performer Napoleon, whose dwarfism is made a spectacle of by Harkness. More significantly, for the purposes of this argument, the novel places Christ, ‘were [he] on earth this morning’ (Law, 1893: 39), in the Salvation Hall in the East End of London and not in the safety of the West End, within the walls of the established Church of England. Such an image of Christ, amidst the gin palaces and alleyways, is the defining trope of the social gospel movement. The juxtaposition of the holy and the profane is designed to shock the reader into a renegotiation of modern life which ultimately rewards the work of the Salvation Army. Nonetheless, the novel’s somewhat ambivalent attitude toward the teachings of the Salvation Army is, surprisingly, acknowledged by Booth in the preface to the 1891 edition. The effect of this concession to the existence of an uneasy alliance with Harkness actually serves to enhance the credibility of each party’s position: I am quite aware that the author of this volume, is in many respects very far from accepting our discipline, or subscribing to our theology, but to many, the witness here given will be none the less valuable on that account. So far as we are concerned we are glad to welcome this aid, to make known a little of the darkest depths of the moral, social, and material abyss, into which our officers have descended in search of God’s jewels ‘For he that is not against us is for us’ […]. (Booth, 1893: i–ii)

By drawing attention to the inconsistencies in tone and negative depictions of Salvation Army life described by Harkness in the novel, Booth adds weight to its claim to verisimilitude. But, just as Harkness cannot help poking fun at the humourless and unworldly nature of the Salvation Army in the guise of the officer Captain Lobe, so too does General 186

The transatlantic gospel network Booth find it difficult not to stray into the hellfire and brimstone of the Army’s original purpose. To collaborate with sensational journalists like Stead and novelists like Harkness was to enter new territory for the Salvation Army, which, as little as ten years before, had been solely preoccupied with the task of saving souls. Harold Begbie argues in his biography of Booth that in 1880 ‘[t]his impulse [to save souls] was purely evangelical; it did not become what is called humanitarian or economic till [sic] ten years later. At its beginning, The Salvation Army was a society of men and women which existed only to preach the repentance of sins’ (Begbie, 1920: 434). The ‘ten years later’ that Begbie refers to is the year of In Darkest England’s publication. Evidence that supports the idea that the Salvation Army had indeed altered its course to join the social gospel movement can be found in General Booth’s letter to the Pall Mall Gazette from 1883 in which he responded to The Bitter Cry, stating adamantly that ‘the root of the difficulty [wa]s not material, but moral’ (Booth and Stead, 1883: 11). By the time of Harkness’s novel the Army had tempered its evangelism to the point that Harkness could admire its work and accept the rebranding of her novel. A letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in March 1891 clarified her pragmatic attitude to its renaming: Whatever its faults may be, it is a true picture of the work now done by the Salvation Army. I did not christen it ‘In Darkest London,’ but its godparents could not have found a better title for a book describing what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears in the East end of this metropolis. No one could have been more prejudiced against the Salvation Army than myself when I first began what the Socialists are pleased to call my ‘Oriental studies.’ ‘Do you ever read the Bible?’ Mr Bramwell Booth once asked me. ‘No,’ I answered; ‘I have seen so much humbug amongst religious people that it makes me physically ill even to look at a Bible.’ I own that I admire the Salvation Army now, and that I watch with intense interest the object-lesson General Booth is about to give to the public. If he fails, others will build on his foundation, for it is a step in the right direction. The Salvation Army is honest and it is not snobbish: that is why I like it. (Harkness, 1891: 3)

Harkness insists upon informing the reader that the new name for her novel was not of her choosing, but that her appreciation of the Salvation Army’s objective in producing In Darkest England is genuine, in spite of her conflicted relationship with Christianity. Just as Booth’s reference to Harkness’s ambivalence in the introduction to the new edition of the novel adds to its credibility, so does Harkness’s public ­declaration of her 187

Personal influences ‘prejudice’ against the Army, and the allusion to her research as a journalist in the East End, emphasise the text’s authenticity. Elsewhere, in an earlier article entitled ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In Praise of General Booth’ (Law, 1890), despite her difficult and often antagonistic association with Stead, Harkness recounts a remonstration ‘with the editor of a big London paper (not a little organ that lives by such things) on the iniquity of flattering the labour leaders and turning the heads of men already too conceited’: ‘Well,’ said the editor, ‘I am sorry for them, poor fellows, but we must have copy. If Christ came to earth again we should send a reporter to the Last Supper.’ ‘No, you would not,’ I said, ‘for there is only one journalist in London who would discover Jesus Christ if he came again.’ I meant the man who is helping General Booth with his social scheme at present. (Law, 1891: 1–2)

The man to whom Harkness refers is none other than W. T. Stead, whose work on In Darkest England inspired the successful publication of If Christ Came (Stead, 1894) four years later during his first visit to the United States of America.

Stead, If Christ Came, and In His Steps

Stead’s experience in recycling and recasting material from his articles promoting The Bitter Cry for use in In Darkest England provided him with good practice for composing a text that would be similarly both sensational and didactic in If Christ Came. In its own right If Christ Came caused a small sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, but, like Harkness, Stead could not have predicted that his book would closely coincide with the publication of another which gained much greater popularity: Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, first published in 1896. In the case of this unanticipated alliance the relationship was reversed: whereas for Harkness a non-fiction text exceeded the popularity of her fictional offering, for Stead, Sheldon’s novel eclipsed his non-fiction book, though this, too, was still very successful. The strong resemblance between Stead’s monograph and Sheldon’s novel led Stead, in publishing a second edition of If Christ Came, to advertise its relation to the social gospel movement, of which Sheldon’s novel was overtly a part, on its very dust jacket. This repeats the move that William Reeves made in renaming Harkness’s novel from Captain Lobe to In Darkest London, enabling it to appear as a sister text to In Darkest England. Thus, 188

The transatlantic gospel network on the front cover of the second British edition of his Chicago critique, Stead spliced the two titles together to form: The Precursor of ‘In His Steps.’ If Christ came to Chicago! … What Would Jesus Do? (Stead, 1899a)

It is easy to understand why Stead reissued his book on Chicago in this way, when the phenomenal success of Sheldon’s is considered. While it is difficult to establish exactly how many copies In His Steps sold, Gregory S. Jackson refers to the novel as in all likelihood ‘the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century’, and states that it sold ‘eight million copies’ (2009: 158). Timothy Miller, in his biography of Sheldon, Following In His Steps, suggests that ‘tens of millions’ were sold ‘at least’ (1987: 85–7). The general success of the novel, it is broadly agreed, is comparable only to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and the Bible. To be associated with such a phenomenon was an opportunity Stead could not pass up, and so, in the English 1899 edition of his book, Stead attempted to make the influence of If Christ Came on Sheldon’s novel explicit: When I published my book about Chicago five years ago, I said:– ‘The suggestion “If Christ came” seems to me destined to be the watchword of a revival of Civic religion, the signs of which are not lacking either in the American Republic or in the British Empire.’ The extraordinary, nay, the unprecedented sale of Mr. Sheldon’s story, ‘In His Steps’, and its related volumes – a sale which is said to have reached the phenomenal figure of a couple of millions in the first months of this year – would seem to indicate that I was not mistaken in my expectation. The Sheldonian books, which have been so greedily bought up and so eagerly discussed, are one and all variations upon the note which I sounded in ‘If Christ Came to Chicago!’ The only difference is that Mr. Sheldon dealt with the subject as a novelist, whereas I was compelled to confine myself to a record of the actual facts of the city’s life as I found them in the year of the World’s Fair. One hundred and fifty thousand copies of my book on Chicago were sold in Britain and America, but it has been for some time out of print. [...] ‘In His Steps’, alike in its diagnosis of the disease and in the remedy which it prescribes, might have been written for the express purpose of popularising the teaching of ‘If Christ Came to Chicago’. (Stead, 1899a: 1)

Sheldon, eight years Stead’s and three years Harkness’s junior, born in 1857 in Wellsville, New York, was, like Stead and Harkness, a 189

Personal influences ‘reformer’, an ‘idealist’, a ‘believer’, and a ‘popularizer’.5 Like Stead and Harkness, he was the child of a clergyman. Like Stead, the literature of his youth consisted of Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and others, and, like Stead, his first chosen occupation was to write, composing stories at the age of twelve, which led to him to send articles to editors of a variety of publications before becoming a writer for the Youth’s Companion magazine (Miller, 1987: 9). In later life, Sheldon turned, again like Stead, to creating compendiums: synthesised, simplified texts such as The Everyday Bible, which was itself a pre-cursor to the Reader’s Digest Bible (Miller, 1987: 101). In the preface to the 1899 English edition of If Christ Came, quoted above, Stead reports that Sheldon’s novel has been ‘so greedily bought up’ and ‘so eagerly discussed’. His use of the word ‘greedily’ and the repetition of the adverb ‘so’ suggest frustration, even jealousy, at Sheldon’s success with a novel that, Stead then adds, ‘might have been written’ to popularise Stead’s own non-fiction text. It is not difficult to detect a certain peevish quality to Stead’s tone here: ‘I was compelled to confine myself to a record of the actual facts’ (my emphasis). However, he does not go so far as to accuse Sheldon of plagiarism, as that charge would have created a negative association between the two texts, when a positive promotion of Sheldon’s bestselling novel as somehow owing its success to Stead was clearly to Stead’s advantage. Stead’s disappointment, if he felt any, that his book had been usurped in terms of mass appeal by Sheldon’s novel was assuaged by the fact that In His Steps could have been written with the ‘express purpose of popularising the teaching of “If Christ Came to Chicago” ’ (Stead, 1899a: 2). The ‘related volumes’ to which Stead alludes in his 1899 preface are, it seems more than likely, the numerous ‘spin-offs’ which Stead’s book and Sheldon’s novel inspired, including Milford W. Howard’s If Christ Came to Congress (1894), Isaac G. Reed Jr.’s From Heaven to New York (1964 [1894]), Edward E. Hale’s If Jesus Came to Boston (1895), Olla P. Toph’s Lazarus (1895), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Supply at Saint Agatha’s (1896), and Cortland Myers’s Would Christ Belong to a Labor Union? (1900). These publications overtly announced their affiliation with the social gospel in their titles, and the rhetoric employed in them combined the same hybrid mix of evangelising and socially progressive idealism that Harkness’s and Stead’s earlier works had used. Analysing the way in which these texts interacted, alongside the international salience of organisations like the Salvation Army, exposes not only the intimate relationship between progressive politics and religious rhetoric in the 190

The transatlantic gospel network final decades of the nineteenth century, but also the surprising fluidity of Anglo-American influence during this time. These patterns of influence also serve to highlight the fact that, on both sides of the Atlantic, the authors and publishers of social reform texts were intent on walking a fine line between the documentation and analysis of the problems faced by modern society and the creation of exoticised, often eroticised, tales of titillation and despair that ensured sales. In chapter 5 of If Christ Came, ‘The Scarlet Woman’, Stead mentions a book entitled In Darkest Chicago. The title of this American publication again conjures immediate connections with In Darkest England and the Way Out and Henry Morton Stanley’s In Darkest Africa, published a few months earlier than In Darkest England, in June 1890. Stanley’s In Darkest Africa was, as the opening chapter of In Darkest England makes clear, the inspiration for its title, but also for many of the book’s tropes and semantic choices. As Seth Koven has documented in relation to other nineteenth-century social commentaries, these texts, and novels like In Darkest London, figured areas of extreme poverty ‘as sites of spectacular brutality and sexual degradation’ (Koven, 2004: 4) in which the working classes feature as the racialised other. The figuring of the poor as ‘more like beasts than human beings’ (Law, 1893: 245) is a common analogy, despite the tales of individual suffering that seem to work to the contrary. Harkness and Stead both exhibit awareness of the problem of finding a balance between documentation and analysis, and the divulging of sordid and brutal episodes. For Harkness a reminder that ‘the scum [are no] worse than the rest’ and that while the ‘scum is brutal, the refined is vicious’ (Law, 1893: 14) is enough to justify the motivation to witness or read about cruelty as a unifying feature of existence. Stead too is aware of this phenomenon in the opening section of his narrative account of Chicago’s social ills, as he tells his reader that Harrison Street Police Station has a ‘weird fascination about it’ (Stead, 1894: 4). Slums, or, in the case of Stead’s If Christ Came, tenement housing areas in Chicago, were ‘distant outposts of empire peopled by violent and primitive races’ (Koven, 2004: 4). They were places of guaranteed ‘good copy’ where the writer’s imagination could find dramatic inspiration: Harrison Street Police Station is one of the nerve centres of criminal Chicago. The novelist who had at command the life story of those who, in a single week, enter this prim brick building surrounded by iron palings, would never need to draw on his imagination for incident, character, plot,

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Personal influences romance, crime – every ingredient he could desire is there ready to hand, in the terrible realism of life. (Stead, 1894: 3)

They were places too onto which the writer could map their social, political, and religious aspirations, as Stead would do throughout If Christ Came, and Harkness, to a lesser degree, in In Darkest London. The language employed by Stead throughout If Christ Came is interchangeable with that of In Darkest England and the articles in which he promoted The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. The description of Harrison Street Police Station in If Christ Came ‘in the midst of darkest Chicago’ mirrors the description of the ‘scores’ of ‘dossers’ forced to sleep on the ‘stone abutments’ that line the Thames Embankment: ‘Behind the iron bars of its underground cages are penned up night after night scores and hundreds of the most dissolute ruffians of both sexes that can be raked up in the dives of the levee’ (Stead, 1894: 2). In Darkest England pre-empts the message of If Christ Came: As Christ came to call not the saints but sinners to repentance, so the New Message of Temporal Salvation, of salvation from pinching poverty, from rags and misery, must be offered to all. They may reject it, of course. But we who call ourselves by the name of Christ are not worthy to profess to be His disciples until we have set an open door before the least and worst of these who are now apparently imprisoned for life in a horrible dungeon of misery and despair. The responsibility for its rejection must be theirs, not ours. (Booth, 1890: 29)

The conflict between recognition of a need for public reform and a belief in the power of private redemption is ever present in Harkness’s novel and Stead’s If Christ Came; the latter, in particular, emphasises the individual’s obligation to ‘[b]e a Christ’ (Stead, 1894: 432). This returns us to the tension with which this chapter opened, between idealism and popularism.

Progressive politics and social Protestantism

In ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’ John Goode writes: we don’t know … whether [Harkness] was a woman of consistent ideas who worked opportunistically in a series of alliances (her own image of herself), a radical feminist converted to socialism in the mid-1880s and disillusioned by it in the early 1890s, or simply a neurotic of wide but volatile sympathies vacillating between seeing herself as a journalist in pursuit of ‘cold-blooded copy’ and a rejected saviour of the working class. (Goode, 1982: 49)

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The transatlantic gospel network This description of Harkness could have been applied, without much modification, to her contemporary Stead, whose campaigns such as The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (2007 [1885]) brought him as much veneration as condemnation. Stead was aware that he was seen as ‘inconsistent’, and deemed it ‘the most familiar of the jibes’ he was attacked with as a journalist of the New school, with all its attendant associations of sensationalism, textual and typographical innovations, and c­ ommercialism.6 In his treatise The United States of Europe: on the Eve of the Parliament of Peace, published in 1899, Stead acknowledged the accusation and admitted: ‘It is quite true that I have infinitely varied the method by which I have sought to attain the ultimate ideal that at the very beginning of my journalistic career I set myself to realize’ (Stead, 1899b: 59). His ‘ultimate ideal’, akin to that of an ambition to be the saviour of the working class, was to become ‘a prophet’ promoting the ‘Christian ideal of citizenship’ (Stead quoted in Robertson Scott, 1952: 108–10), or, as in his well-known article ‘Government by Journalism’, published seven years later, to become not prophet in fact but ‘ruler’: ‘the uncrowned king of an educated democracy’ (Stead, 1886: 664). Removing the bombast from Stead’s self-aggrandising rhetoric, Rodgers explains that ‘the making of the Atlantic era in social politics’ ‘hinged on a new set of institutional connections with the industrialising nations of Europe’ and ‘required new sorts of brokers to span that connection’ (Rodgers, 1998: 4). As journalists-cum-novelists-cum-international-commentators Harkness and Stead were just such brokers, regardless of whether we choose to see them as cold-blooded hacks or good Samaritans. During this period, as identified by Rodgers: ‘between the democratic confidence of the early nineteenth century and the hubris of the late twentieth century’, [t]hese were years in which city politicians in the United States could battle the pros and cons of city-owned streetcars on the basis of Glasgow’s experience, […] when certain model cities in England and Germany drew social progressives from around the world, when other nations’ social politics, in short, were news. (Rodgers, 1998: 4)

Writers like Stead and Harkness were, therefore, able to capitalise on the desire for texts that dealt with social reform from a British perspective. Moreover, Stead, whose political convictions would have seen Britain and America reunite, was almost uniquely placed to witness and chronicle the transition of global dominance from the UK to the USA, as Americanisation grew at an unprecedented rate.7 193

Personal influences As this chapter has sought to delineate, in this period texts like The Bitter Cry, In Darkest England, and Harkness’s edited collection on women’s work and exploitation, Toilers in London (1889), could be legitimately compared to American equivalents such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904). As a consequence of such comparisons, and related borrowings, a web of common concerns and referents began to emerge, ­forming the transatlantic social gospel network. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel, The Silent Partner (1870), in its detailing of the unpleasant working conditions of a New England textile mill, bought and reformed by a young lady of society and wealth, bore a relationship to the mid-century British social problem novels of Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and, later in the century, Harkness. Similarly, Stead’s In Darkest England and If Christ Came, Harkness’s Toilers in London, and the American muckraking works of Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, and others, were the immediate descendants of texts like The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. The final words, taken from the gospel of Mark, of Stead’s 1902 study of Americanisation – The Americanisation of the World – could easily have featured in either of the texts discussed in this chapter: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ (Stead, 1902: 164). They serve as a reminder to us that, at the turn of the century, ‘progressive politics was intricately entangled with social Protestantism’ (Rodgers, 1998: 63). Harkness’s last novel, A Curate’s Promise: a Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917 (1921), and many of Stead’s early twentieth-century publications were designed as vehicles for promotion of this progressive social Protestantism, which scholars, mostly of American history, have referred to as the ‘social gospel movement’ or simply the ‘social gospel’.8 My use of it in this chapter, with reference to Harkness and Stead, contributes to its reformulation as a term of transatlantic importance. In their writings in the daily press, in realist fiction, and in their respective memberships of social and political societies and federations, Harkness and Stead positioned themselves as contributors to both the social gospel and the more general movement towards international collaborative analysis and discussion of contemporary issues of import facing an increasingly globalised world. Harkness’s awareness of the global reach of her fiction can be witnessed in an interview entitled ‘A Slum-Story Writer’ published in the Evening News and Post following the publication of A Manchester Shirtmaker in early 1890, where she was keen to make the point that the novel had been translated 194

The transatlantic gospel network into Swedish and Russian, and that a French and German edition were to be anticipated (Anon., 1890: 2). The geographical similarity of the European and American urban cityscapes allowed for comparative study, and enabled readers of the fiction of Harkness and others to easily translate the Whitechapel Road to Manhattan’s Mulberry Street in their imaginations, or vice versa. The shock factor of the image conjured up by a character in Harkness’s In Darkest London of Christ walking down the Whitechapel Road (Law, 1893: 67–8), or by Stead in If Christ Came of Christ entering a saloon in Chicago, gave impetus and legitimacy to an environment of international social reform. Whether judged as cold-blooded copy hounds or passionate prophets, Harkness and Stead engaged, throughout their careers, in the production of realist fiction, activist journalism, and critical travel writing that was imbued with the rhetoric of progressive Protestantism.9 In doing so they contributed to the development of a transnational ­socio-­religio-progressive forum or, as the title of this chapter suggests, a transatlantic social gospel network that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth.

Notes

1 Rodgers (1998) examines the entire period, but this chapter confines its focus to the period 1870–1912. 2 See Mearns (1970) for some discussion of the authorship furore. 3 For example, several sections of the first chapter of In Darkest England are taken verbatim from Stead’s very first article about The Bitter Cry, ‘Is It Not Time?’ (1883). 4 Beaumont compares Reeves’s publishing agenda to the radical American publisher Charles H. Kerr’s ‘Pocket Library of Socialism’ as another example of the transatlantic networks of influence and equivalence that existed during this period (Beaumont, 2003: 94). 5 These are all terms used by Sheldon’s most recent biographer, Timothy Miller (1987: xi). 6 For a definition of New Journalism and discussion of Stead’s involvement in its formulation see Brake and Demoor (2009: 443). 7 Stead’s publication in 1902 of The Americanisation of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century – which he wrote as a result of studying the flow of American influence reaching back across the Atlantic – was a culmination of many years spent tapping into what Mary Nolan calls

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Personal influences ‘dense informal networks’ of social reformists, in Europe, and across the Atlantic (Nolan, 2012: 38). 8 In ‘American Progressivism: Transnational, Modernization, and Americanist Perspectives’ Alan Lessoff writes: ‘Historians have long understood both the Social Gospel and its nemesis, social Darwinism, as transatlantic tendencies’ (Lessoff, 2012: 66). But the term ‘social gospel’, I would argue, is still framed as a predominantly American designation. Work continues to be done to challenge this assumption, as in Hutchison (1975), Thompson (1990), Phillips (1996), and Evans (2015). 9 The term ‘realist’ is still the most accurate descriptor for Harkness’s works of fiction, despite the now famous pronouncement by Engels that A City Girl was not realistic enough (Engels, 1974: 115).

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1889a). Captain Lobe. London: Hodder & Stoughton. —— (1889b). Toilers in London: Inquiries Concerning Female Labour in the Metropolis. London: Hodder & Stoughton. —— Law, J. (1890a). A Manchester Shirtmaker: A Realistic Story of To-day. London: Authors’ Co-operative Publishing Company. —— (1890b). ‘ “Salvation” v. Socialism: In Praise of General Booth’. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 October, pp. 1–2. –––– (1891). ‘Princess Christian and “Captain Lobe” ’. Pall Mall Gazette, 2 March, p. 3. –––– (1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe [1891]. London: Reeves. –––– (1921). A Curate’s Promise: a Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Additional works cited Anon. (1890). ‘A Slum-Story Writer’. Evening News and Post, 17 April, p. 2. Beaumont, M. (2003). ‘William Reeves and Late‐Victorian Radical Publishing: Unpacking the Bellamy Library’. History Workshop Journal (55.1). 91–110. Begbie, H. (1920). The Life of General William Booth, 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

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The transatlantic gospel network Booth, W. (1890). In Darkest England and the Way Out. London: Salvation Army. —— (1893). ‘Introduction’. Law, J. In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe [1891]. London: Reeves. Booth, W. and W. T. Stead (1883). ‘ “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London”: General Booth’s Ideas’. Pall Mall Gazette, 22 October, p. 11. Brake, L. and M. Demoor (eds) (2009). Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Ghent: Academia Press. Engels, F. (1974). ‘Letter to Margaret Harkness, Beginning of April 1888 (draft)’. Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York: International General, pp. 115–17. Evans, C. H. (2015). ‘The Social Gospel as “the Total Message of the Christian Salvation” ’. Church History (84). 196–8. Foote, G. W. (1891). Salvation Syrup, or, Light on Darkest England: a Reply to General Booth. London: Progressive Publishing Company. Goode, J. (1982). ‘Margaret Harkness and the Socialist Novel’. The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition. Ed. H. Gustav Klaus. New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 45–66. Hale, E. E. (1895). If Jesus Came to Boston. Boston, MA: Lamson, Wolffe, and Company. Howard, M. W. (1964). If Christ Came to Congress [1894]. New York: Living Books. Hutchison, W. R. (1975). ‘The Americanness of the Social Gospel: an Inquiry in Comparative History’. Church History (44). 367–81. Jackson, G. S. (2009). The Word and Its Witness: the Spiritualization of American Realism. London: University of Chicago Press. Koven, S. (2004). Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Lessoff, A. (2012). ‘American Progressivism: Transnational, Modernization, and Americanist Perspectives’. Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1890s to 1940s. Ed. Thomas Welskopp and Alan Lessoff. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, pp. 61–80. Mearns, A. (1970). The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. Ed. Anthony S. Wohl. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Miller, T. S. (1987). Following in His Steps: a Biography of Charles M. Sheldon. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press. Myers, C. (1900). Would Christ Belong to a Labor Union? New York: Street and Smith. Nolan, M. (2012). The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Personal influences Phelps (Ward), E. S. (1871). The Silent Partner. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston. –––– (1896). The Supply at Saint Agatha’s. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Phillips, P. T. (1996). A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Reed, I. G. (1894). From Heaven to New York. New York: Optimus. Riis, J. (1890). How the Other Half Lives. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Robertson Scott, J. W. (1952). The Life and Death of a Newspaper: An Account of the Temperaments, Perturbations, and Achievements of John Morley, W. T. Stead, E. T. Cook, Harry Cust, J. L. Garvin and three other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette. London: Methuen. Rodgers, D. T. (1998). Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. London: Harvard University Press. Sheldon, C. M. (1898). In His Steps. What Would Jesus Do?. London: Partridge. Stanley, H. M. (1890). In Darkest Africa. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stead, W. T. (1883). ‘Is it Not Time?’. Pall Mall Gazette, 16 October, p. 1. –––– (1886). ‘Government by Journalism’. Contemporary Review (49). 653–74. –––– (1894). If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer. Chicago, IL: Laird and Lee. –––– (1899a). If Christ Came to Chicago! London: ‘Review of Reviews’ Office. –––– (1899b). The United States of Europe: On the Eve of the Parliament of Peace. Toronto: Morang. –––– (1902). The Americanization of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century. 4th edn. London: Markley. –––– (2007). The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: Report of the Secret Commission [1885]. Ed. Antony E. Simpson. Lambertville: The True Bill Press. Steffens, L. (1904). The Shame of the Cities. London: Heinemann. Thompson, D. M. (1990). ‘The Emergence of the Nonconformist Social Gospel in England’. Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and America: Essays in Honour of W. R. Ward. Ed. Keith Robbins. Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell, pp. 258–60. Toph, O. P. (1895). Lazarus. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Printing Co.

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Part V

After London: Harkness’s life and work in the twentieth century

Harkness on conjectural history

11

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Through the mill: Margaret Harkness on conjectural history and utilitarian philosophy Lisa C. Robertson

When Horace Hayman Wilson, first Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford, penned his preface to the fourth edition of James Mill’s compendious The History of British India (HBI), he attested to the crucial role of personal knowledge in historical work. This intimate cultural knowledge, Wilson explains, ‘enables the historian to judge of the real value of that evidence to which he must have recourse for matters that are beyond the sphere of his own observation’ (Mill, 1840: 1.iii). The historian with personal knowledge will be in a situation to estimate with accuracy the opportunities which an author of an account of India may have enjoyed of gathering authentic information; he will be in the way of learning something of the narrator’s pursuits, habits, occupation, and prepossessions, and by daily experience will be prepared for the many circumstances by which observation is biased, and opinions are instilled. He will know what to credit, what to mistrust, and what to disbelieve. He will be qualified to select the pure metal from the dross, to separate the false from true. (Mill, 1840: 1.iv)

Unfortunately for Mill, he was deficient in all of these qualities. Wilson explains that the possession of personal knowledge is one ‘great recommendation of which Mr. Mill does not seem to have been aware … the want of which his pages present many striking examples’ (Mill, 1840: 1.iii). When Mill first published HBI in three large volumes in 1817, he had not set foot in India; and, as Wilson points out – with more than a little incredulity – he had no knowledge of its languages, nor its 201

After London l­iterature, nor its customs. Yet Mill’s utilitarian philosophy, from which his son J. S. Mill’s liberalism so departed (Hadley, 2010: 7), enabled him to frame this inadequacy as a unique advantage: he believed it was one that allowed for a theoretical viewpoint of the country and its inhabitants, and permitted the writing of an objective history. Both Jane Rendall and Jennifer Pitts explore Mill’s grounding in the philosophies of the Scottish Enlightenment, and more specifically the conjectural history espoused by David Stewart and Adam Smith, even if such philosophies proved difficult to reconcile with his radical utilitarianism (Rendall, 1982; Pitts, 2005). Mill’s commitment to conjectural history – that is, a methodology that emphasises speculation and broad theories of moral science – seemed misguided to Wilson, whose intimate knowledge of Sanskrit literature and Hinduism meant that he favoured a version of history that was grounded in particulars of cultural identity. In fact, Knud Haakonssen comments that the ‘confrontation between Mill’s text and Wilson’s extensive editorial notes often reads like a caricature or parody on the standard view of the transition from eighteenth- to nineteenthcentury historiography’ (1985: 631). That is to say that by the point that Wilson’s densely annotated critical edition of Mill’s HBI appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century, historiographical trends had shifted away from conjectural history and its focus on cause and effect and individual human agency, and towards methods that entertained notions of unintended consequences and the role of social and cultural institutions (Haakonssen, 1985: 630). Margaret Harkness, who embarked on a voyage to Madras by steamer in 1905, had acquired the quality of personal knowledge that Wilson so prized by the point at which she published her first book on Indian themes in 1909. Initially traveling from Perth as a foreign correspondent for the West Australian, to which she had contributed as a regular columnist since 1903, Harkness first arrived in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Although her earliest column as foreign correspondent focuses on Ceylon as a ‘holiday resort’, her subsequent contributions explore Indian religion, culture, and history – and many of these efforts are partially reproduced and expanded in her non-fiction books Glimpses of Hidden India (1909) and Modern Hyderabad (1914). Glimpses of Hidden India was republished as Indian Snapshots (1912), with substantial revisions that reflect both social change and the development in Harkness’s thinking about colonial India. While Glimpses of Hidden India has reasonably been defined as travel literature (Elkiss, 2019: 31), this chapter explores the ways in which Harkness’s text engages with nineteenth-century traditions of 202

Harkness on conjectural history historiographical writing about India. More precisely, Harkness’s writing challenges a model of conjectural history that emphasises objective theory and cause and effect, in favour of a study grounded in the close examination of cultural diversity, social and institutional history, and people’s lives. As such, Harkness’s Glimpses of Hidden India can be read as a cultural history of India and, as I will develop, one that responds to James Mill’s HBI.1 There is little doubt that Harkness would have been familiar with Mill’s HBI, which was the period’s predominant reference work on India and one which, according to Rendall, ‘exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century’ (Rendall, 1982: 43). Harkness’s Indian books indicate that she read as extensively as she travelled – and did both concomitantly.2 For this reason it is all the more significant that James Mill’s name does not appear in Harkness’s Indian books. It is clear by the time of their publication that conjectural history was politically out of fashion, as was the remote and hubristic perspective of an individual such as Mill, who ‘had no sympathy with Indian civilizations past or present’ (Rendall, 1982: 44). This distance, Javeer Majeed claims, is the result of Mill’s tandem objectives in HBI: to ‘ascertain the true state of the Hindus in the scale of civilization’ (Mill, 1840: 2.135), and more urgently to argue for the necessity of government reform in Britain (Majeed, 1992: 8–10). Although Mill is absent from the pages of Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness does quote a passage from a study by one of his contemporaries in Modern Hyderabad (Law, 1914: 36): the statesman and historian Montstuart Elphinstone. Like Mill, Elphinstone was associated with the philosophical circles of the University of Edinburgh, and crucially was one of a number of writers who, Rendall explains, ‘felt the need to offer a history of India that would counterbalance Mill’ (Rendall, 1982: 68). Elphinstone, who was appointed to the civil service of the British East India Company and sailed for Calcutta at age twenty-seven and would eventually become Governor of Bombay, had the personal knowledge that Wilson thought Mill lacked. Elphinstone’s History of India, first published in 1841, was one that ‘focused on the Indian past rather than the history of European rule in India’ (Rendall, 1982: 68). To be sure, Harkness quotes from a great number of historical sources in her writing; as such, a reference to Elphinstone’s history may not seem significant. She refers also to a new edition of Henry George Keene’s The History of India, first published in 1893 and reissued in 1906. Keene, who was born in India but educated in England, was a member of the 203

After London civil service as well as an eminent historian. Yet Harkness identifies in his writing the imperial prejudices that her own writing rejects. She explains that Keene’s History of India ‘is a very valuable book; but Mr. Keene, like other English historians, has ignored altogether the work done by Indians in subordinate positions during the last fifty years, work that has enabled Englishmen to become a credit to themselves and to England’ (Law, 1909: 230). As Edward Said would later point out in his influential study Orientalism, the work of colonialism was in part achieved by a literature that sought to efface the presence and the power of the colonies (Said, 1978). It is notable that Harkness engages with the work of historians whose methodology was grounded in a personal knowledge of India. While her own work accounts for the history of colonialism in India – she covers not only the British Empire but also the Mughal Empire that preceded it – she is, like Elphinstone, interested in writing about the complex engagement between society and its institutions and the ways in which this cultural complexity gives rise to social change. For Harkness, conjectural history, based as it was on a methodology intended to assess the development and relative sophistication of cultures, would certainly have seemed pernicious in its emphasis on cultural inequality. That is not to say, however, that Harkness’s principal objective in writing Glimpses of Hidden India was to intellectually challenge conjectural history. Instead, this chapter indicates the ways that her writing about India challenges official versions of colonial history because of her long-standing commitment to documenting social and cultural conditions. In Glimpses of Hidden India Harkness shares the goals of those historians who sought to broaden historical writing by way of thinking through cultural particularity, while nevertheless doing so from a Western perspective.3 This chapter focuses on two significant ways in which Harkness engages with the British historiographical tradition of writing about India: first, in her efforts to interpolate her own individual experience into a theoretical tradition; and second, in her emphasis on the specific forms of inequality wrought by colonialism. In the opening chapters of Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness explains that while travelling through India she ‘wanted to come in touch with Indians, not to become a unit of the governing community’ (Law, 1909: 3). In so doing, she emphasises the significance of personal knowledge in historical writing. Glimpses of Hidden India offers a counter-narrative to historical writing such as Mill’s in its commitment to exploring cultural interpretations of historical experience. 204

Harkness on conjectural history

‘The history of those days’: personal knowledge and historical narrative

The heterogeneous tone that characterises much of Harkness’s work is a consequence of her effort to incorporate a variety of perspectives into one coherent body of writing. Flore Janssen notes that Harkness’s final novel, A Curate’s Promise (1921), ‘reflect[s] a variety of attitudes and opinions without imparting value judgements or seeming to impose a narrative authority’ (Janssen, 2019: 226), and does so in part by shifts in genre and tone. This is also true of Harkness’s Glimpses of Hidden India, which fuses a range of generic styles in order to produce a book that unites national and institutional history, biography, political journalism, and personal essay. The result is a work of narrative history – in style, if not in strict chronology – informed but not dominated by her own authorial voice. By this I mean that Harkness integrates personal knowledge and experience with conventional or institutional history, and, consequently, she asserts her authority but denies its universality. The opening scene of Glimpses of Hidden India positions Harkness as the narrative conduit through whom the reader will experience those aspects of India that remain ‘hidden’ in traditions of imperial history. The book begins as follows: ‘It must be sad to visit a country where the English are so much disliked.’ So said a Russian officer, who had been through the siege of Port Arthur. I looked at him with astonishment; but said nothing, for I had always heard that the Russians desire to replace the English in India, and I thought that the sad-eyed officer, who wore deep mourning, was prejudiced by national aspirations and jealousies. We were returning from Kandy, having visited there the Temple of the Sacred Tooth; and we carried on a desultory conversation in the train. ‘Where are you going to?’ he asked. ‘India,’ I replied. And then he said, in French, the words with which I open this book – words so true, so sad, and, at the present time, so full of significance. (Law, 1909: 1)

The beginning of Glimpses of Hidden India signals an intellectual and political shift from the conventions of colonial history both in subject and in tone. Harkness’s first sentence indicates the degree to which she wishes to distance herself from the English ‘governing community’ (Law, 1909: 3) of India. She acknowledges that the Russian officer’s comment, while perhaps motivated by ‘national aspirations and jealousies’, is nevertheless ‘so true, so sad, and […] so full of significance’ (Law, 1909: 1). 205

After London She also distances herself from England by speech: French is here represented as the lingua franca, acknowledgement of which also indicates to the reader her proficiency in that international language. This opening passage establishes an important keynote of Harkness’s study, and it is one that seeks to redress what Harkness identifies as the staggering ignorance of the English where India is concerned, which has in no small way been motivated by the endeavour to measure ‘Indian progress on western lines’ (Law, 1909: 238). She explains that ‘Englishmen in India talk as if England had held India from time immemorial; and while Indians now study those 150 years with the greatest care, the majority of Englishmen in India are woefully ignorant of all that took place in them, except, perhaps, the Mutiny’ (Law, 1909: 11–12). With this statement, Harkness also provides an indication of the intended audience for her book: Englishmen (and women) in India. Yet the degree of historical and cultural research brought together in this book indicates that it is not intended as a travel guide for English tourists. In fact, she comments that ‘[w]riters of Guide-books apparently do not care for beautiful scenery, [for they] judge places by hotel comforts’, and explains that ‘[t]he hotels in Hyderabad could be improved, no doubt; but long may they continue in their present condition, if by so doing they help to keep away western tourists’ (Law, 1909: 74–5).4 The attention Harkness affords to contemporary political disputes and religious tensions indicates that the book is intended for Englishmen and -women who live in India, but those who wish to distance themselves from attitudes and positions of national superiority and instead to ‘understand Indian culture’ (Law, 1909: 40). Harkness is regularly dismissive of individuals who declaim their participation in England’s imperial project in order to consolidate personal authority, and in an observation related to that which she makes in Captain Lobe about the ‘East End loafer, monarch of all he surveys’ (Law, 1889: 3), she comments: ‘From viceroy to shopkeeper, and shopkeeper to Tommy Atkins, each English person in India says to himself: “I belong to the conquerors of India” ’ (Law, 1889: 36). In fact, she notes that India is dominated by ‘English people – people who cannot understand, or appreciate, Eastern culture, Eastern religions, and Eastern habits, and who are apt to think that everything they do themselves must be admirable because it is British’ (Law, 1909: 46). The ignorance of English people, combined with the air of ‘British superiority’ (Law, 1889: 3), Harkness suggests, produces ‘the undercurrent of dislike for England that is so strong everywhere to-day [particularly] among Hindus’ (Law: 1909: 59). 206

Harkness on conjectural history Harkness’s Glimpses of Hidden India not only opens with an unconventional acknowledgement of political and cultural tension, but also regularly reasserts the perniciousness of both colonialism and colonial discourse. One of the most effective ways that Harkness identifies the means by which colonial discourse operates is through her methodology which, as suggested, fuses narrative history with personal history. In the book’s second chapter Harkness’s writing shifts in tone from a personal essay that describes her journey to Madras through a detailed history of ‘The Conquest of India by the English’. Yet her writing of history is one that incorporates personal experience: In the Reading Room of the Madras Museum is a marble statue of Lord Cornwallis, who succeeded Warren Hastings as Governor-General of India in 1786. The pedestal of the statue shows Lord Cornwallis receiving as hostages the sons of Tippoo Saib, embracing them – and assuring them of his fatherly care and protection. Tippoo was a religious fanatic, who stood in the way of the Saib Company. So his treasury was emptied and his kingdom was divided among his enemies. […] I have often stood before that statue, thinking of the dramatic scene made famous by the pen of a great artist; and afterwards I have turned to the history of those days and have read how Tippoo’s heart was broken. (Law, 1909: 17)

Harkness’s account of the Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767­–99) – the conflicts which saw the British East India Company firmly establish control over India – focuses not on Lord Cornwallis, who has all of the warmth of a ‘marble statue’, but on the sympathetic figure of Tipu Sahib, whose ‘heart was broken’. This passage also articulates the ways in which Harkness fuses personal knowledge to historical narrative. This is a moment of ecphrasis that unites several forms of artistic expression into a coherent but unconventional historical narrative: she moves from a meditation on a statue, to the sacking of Tipu Sahib’s treasury and capture of his children, to an allusion to a scene by a ‘great artist’, and finally, to ‘the history of those days’. By uniting a broad range of historical sources with a narrative of her own experience, Harkness contextualises and diversifies colonial history. Much of Harkness’s writing on India synthesises different methods of cultural representation with her own experience, and this is one of the ways in which her writing offers a counter-narrative to histories such as Mill’s HBI. This practice was at least partly recognised by an early reviewer of Indian Snapshots who comments ‘[that she] has to a great extent followed other writers; but there is an independent expression of 207

After London opinion’ (Anon., 1912: 12). Harkness’s reflection on the ways in which colonial discourse operates is instructive, and as such the following passage is worth quoting in its entirety: I went to India with the conviction that the English had done a great work there by bringing order out of chaos. Setting aside the belief held by so many Christians that the Almighty had sent the English to India ‘to convert the heathen,’ I believed, because I had been so taught, and had so read, that the English had found Mahomedans and Hindus fighting together in India, and that if England withdrew to-day from her unselfish task of keeping order, then Indians would fight among themselves until Russia, or some other European Power, took the control of Indian affairs. But historical documents have shewn me that during the years of Mahomedan supremacy in India roughly speaking from the time when William the Conqueror went to England until the battle of Plassey less fighting was carried on in India than in Europe. The power of the Mahomedan Emperors waxed and waned, and never touched some parts of India; and during that long period, Mahomedans and Hindus were more homogeneous in India than English and Indian people have ever been, or are to-day. It has been considered politic to write of things in India as England would like them to be; but now that our Indian fellowsubjects are greater students of modern Indian history than Englishmen take the trouble to be, it is wiser to state facts than to spread fancies. (Law, 1909: 17–18)

In this passage, Harkness reflects on her own experience of the ways in which cultural belief operates through education and language: she believed because she ‘had been so taught, and had so read’ (Law, 1909: 17). As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demonstrates in ‘Three Women’s Texts’, her foundational criticism of liberal American feminism that focuses on the figure of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), literature played an important role in the consolidation of colonialism through discourse in the nineteenth century (Spivak, 1985: 243). Harkness’s emphasis on the ways in which discourse helps to neutralise the violence of colonialism into activities such as ‘the unselfish task of keeping order’ is significant, for her own writing seeks to dismantle the mythologies that support the belief in England’s ‘civilising mission’. She acknowledges the propensity of English authors to ‘write of things in India as England would like them to be’, and not as they are; and that the histories written by the English ‘spread fancies’ (Law, 1909: 18). In Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness exposes the ways in which such colonial discourse produces the English belief in their own cultural superior208

Harkness on conjectural history ity, which in turn fuels widespread ‘anti-English feeling’ in India (Law, 1909: 59). Travelling through areas little known to English people, and avoiding ‘mention of all things English’ (Law, 1909: 59), meant that Harkness personally experienced such resentment: she explains that ‘children came out of huts and threw stones at me and boys drove cattle in my way, if they had the opportunity’ (Law, 1909: 59). As such, Glimpses of Hidden India redresses the pernicious colonial ‘fancies’ of English historians and instead seeks to ‘state [the] facts’ of Harkness’s own experience.

Beyond ‘a school for English character’: education and the civil service

Just as Harkness’s methodology unites narrative history and personal knowledge in an effort to redress the deficiencies of colonial mythology produced by conjectural historians like Mill, so does the scope of her writing address subjects of particular importance in Mill’s HBI: education and the civil service. In both Glimpses of Hidden India and Modern Hyderabad, Harkness pays particular attention to the ways that oversights and inefficiencies in education and government produce many of India’s social and political problems. As such, these are issues that she believes can be addressed and ameliorated – if not solved – with targeted changes to government policy and individual consciousness. Despite Mill’s confidence in the power of education to shape individuals, communities, and nations, Haakonssen points out that Mill ‘does not believe in the piecemeal improvement of the Hindus through schooling’ (Haakonssen, 1985: 635). Mill’s essay ‘Education’ (1815), originally written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, communicates his belief in education as not only schooling but a form of broad moral training (Mill, 1969: 18); his proposal for India, therefore, was the wholesale implementation of a utilitarian ethic and a full reconstitution of the legal code (Mill, 1969: 108; Haakonssen, 1985: 635).5 This is a programme, Haakonssen explains, which does not recognise that ‘these institutions form part and parcel of the social life of a people, [and] cannot for the purpose of reform be separated from the rest of the intractable, historically-conditioned matter of society’ (Haakonssen, 1985: 635). The understanding of an institution as an ‘intractable, historically-­conditioned matter of society’ is a central concern in Harkness’s discussion of education in India. In Glimpses of Hidden India, she focuses on three principal forms of education: government education, university education, and the education provided by Christian missionaries. It is the last of these forms 209

After London of which Harkness is most critical, for she acknowledges that it is only poverty that compels local citizens to send their children to missionaries and it is therefore little better than bribery. She explains: the missionaries whom I met in India, with a few notable exceptions, were men and women with crude intellects and narrow minds, people who repelled and disgusted learned Hindus and cultivated Mahomedans, and who showed by words and deeds that they thought a white skin superior to a black one. (Law, 1909: 128)

The government education available in India, Harkness acknowledges, is laudable for its near universality; she refers to Alexander Mackenzie, who believes that in ‘no country of the world are such facilities for the attainment of knowledge provided for the masses of the population … on a scale of fees so low as to be almost nominal’ (Law, 1909: 133). Yet Harkness believes that there is one central failure in this system, which is that the ‘cheap western education’ begun by the missionaries has been continued by the government – and its primary insufficiency is that it lacks ‘any religious or moral teaching’ (Law, 1909: 135).6 This government education, which is paid for by ‘taxes that fall heavily on “the patient, toiling millions” of India’ (Law, 1909: 134), has been detrimental in its exclusive emphasis on materialism. Harkness quotes a man she refers to as ‘an intelligent Parsi’, who explains: ‘The English system of education does not suit the Oriental mind. Cramming and examinations may be all right for the West, but in the East they make boys like parrots. We want our boys to think; not to shine in the examination hall, and then to forget all that they have learnt’ (Law, 1909: 135). It is university education that Harkness treats with the greatest approval, particularly several colleges that represent new ‘educational undertakings’ (Law, 1909: 181). For instance, she speaks of the ‘Mahomedan College at Aligarh’ as the ‘first attempt of Mahomedans in India to give to their sons a modern, western education in conjunction with their own religion’, and notes that it is ‘sometimes held up to Hindus as an example’ (Law, 1909: 181). She also speaks favourably of the Central Hindu College, an institution affiliated with the University at Allahabad, ‘where a western education is given and the religion of Hindus is practised’ (Law, 1909: 175). Harkness notes that the college’s success is partly a consequence of the influence of Theosophists who, with the ‘donations of wealthy Hindus’ (Law, 1909: 176), sought to establish a college that would help to unite a disparate educational system. Yet Harkness is sceptical of the ways that Theosophy might perpetuate in 210

Harkness on conjectural history disguise the structures of inequality wrought by colonialism. She explains her objection to ‘the way in which Mrs. Besant, at the present time, tries to wrap up the Christian religion in Hindu swaddling clothes’ and the ways that a number of Western Christians ‘try to spread a sort of Hindu Christianity; and the result is today a good deal of mental unhappiness’ (Law, 1909: 180).7 Given the extent of discussion on the subject of education in Glimpses of Hidden India, it might initially seem difficult to gain a clear impression of Harkness’s position on education in India, but her thoughts on these matters are coherent: she expresses most enthusiasm for a system that fuses both English and Indian subjects and methods. Her position is, however, more than politely politic, for she believes that a system of integrated education is the one most likely to foster forms of citizenship that would thrive under representative government and produce effective political leaders. In Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness emphasises the reciprocal relationship between education and good governance. This is one of the few positions that both she and Mill share: that education plays a crucial role in political reform. While Harkness expresses her belief in a system of universal education – she makes a number of significant comments, for instance, on the education of girls and women in India – Mill’s HBI gives voice to his belief that Indians were not at a suitable stage of development to make education worthwhile or reform possible. Mill’s HBI, as Uday Singh Mehta explains, was motivated by a ‘philosophically serious purpose, and that was to establish on rational grounds a clear scale of civilizational hierarchies’ (Mehta, 1999: 91). Both Mehta and Harrington note that while this model does suggest the potential for progress, in Mehta’s words, the ‘actualization of this potentiality typically turns to a force external to this civilization’ (Mehta, 1999: 94). For Mill, this is colonial governance justified by what Jennifer Pitts describes as the ‘uneasy alliance of utilitarianism and conjectural history’ (Pitts, 2005: 123). Mill believed that ‘religious nonsense’ (Haakonssen, 1985: 636) would interfere in political education in India, and ultimately render any system of representative government ‘unsuitable’ (Harrington, 2012: 583). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Mill also ‘went out of his way to argue against the introduction of Indians into any part of the higher administration of their country’ (Haakonssen, 1985: 636). The historical exclusion of Indians and Eurasians from the civil service is a practice that receives particular censure from Harkness in Glimpses of Hidden India. She notes that it was only under the administration of Lord Elgin (1893– 98) that opinion shifted to the belief that members of the civil service 211

After London ‘should be recruited more or less exclusively from the natives of India’ (Law, 1909: 224). It is only natural, she claims, that when government does not reflect the diversity of those it governs, the result will be resentment and social unrest. Both in Glimpses of Hidden India and in Modern Hyderabad, Harkness praises the efficient and progressive government administration of Hyderabad (although its education system and public infrastructure do no escape her criticism): there is in Hyderabad little discontent. Why? In Hyderabad the Prime Minister is a Hindu, and the Private Secretary of the Prime Minister is a Parsi. Mahomedans have from the time of Akbar placed Hindus in prominent positions; and history tells us that Hindus have served Mahomedans faithfully. Englishmen do not trust Indians; consequently the most important, and the best-paid billets are held by themselves. And the consequence is what? Jealousy. Discontent. Bitterness. (Law, 1909: 81–2)

The government administration in Hyderabad works as efficiently as it does, according to Harkness, on account of its representative and inclusive nature – even if there is much yet to be achieved in terms of gender equality in such positions. In this passage, Harkness refers not only to the individual prejudices of certain English individuals who ‘do not trust Indians’ but to England’s refusal to permit self-governance in India. Such refusal was, no doubt, sustained by histories such as Mill’s that perpetuated notions of the country’s incapacity for self-government. Despite the ‘uniformly dark picture of Hindu society’ (Forbes, 1951: 29) that Mill expresses in HBI, the book became the ‘standard and mandatory manual for officials of [the East India Company] and eventually a required textbook for candidates for the elite corps of senior administrators in the Indian Civil Service’ (Forbes, 1951: 23). While it fell out of favour by the end of the nineteenth century, its influence in the Indian Civil Service endured well into the period during which Harkness lived in India. In his influential article ‘James Mill and India’, Duncan Forbes identifies Mill’s text as a ‘good and perennially useful example of the influence on the minds of administrators and politicians of half-baked “philosophical” history’ (Forbes, 1951: 23–4), which, he explains, while ‘universal in its choice of subject-matter is not universal in understanding’ (Forbes, 1951: 20). Although the Indian Civil Service was, as stated, open to Indians by the point at which Harkness published Glimpses of Hidden India, she notes that ‘in order to pass the examinations [Indians] must go to England and compete there with Englishmen’ (Law, 1909: 233). This is a model of training that Harkness believes reproduces ine212

Harkness on conjectural history quality and must result in the kinds of civil unrest and violent protest that she witnessed while in India.8 Simply permitting Indians to occupy certain levels of government would accomplish little so long as the English exploited India for the purposes of providing administrative training for their own governing classes. Harkness explains: An Englishman is sent here for five years. The first year is spent in learning some Indian language. The next three years are passed in gaining sufficient knowledge of the country to carry on the work. And after one year of useful ­employment, the Englishman goes home. (Law, 1909: 64–5)

Harkness is not only critical of Mill’s historical method in HBI, nor does she only seek to expose the prejudice of his belief in the ‘superstitious minds’ of a ‘rude nation’ (Mill, 1840: 1.277) – although she most certainly performs both of these tasks. She identifies, and is deeply critical of, the ways in which the work of historians such as Mill is produced in such a manner as to seem of service to the colony but uses colonial discourse to justify and reproduce forms of cultural exploitation. Just as Mill’s HBI is not truly a history of India but, as Majeed demonstrates, a work of philosophy preoccupied with notions of reform in Britain (Majeed, 1992: 131–35), the English members of the civil service by whom his book was read would prepare in India for meaningful careers in England (Majeed, 1990: 213). Harkness quotes an individual whom she describes only as an ‘eminent living Englishman’ and who, she explains, has called India ‘a school for English character’ (Law, 1909: 233). It is no surprise, Harkness suggests, that ‘Indians sometimes ask how much longer millions of their compatriots are to form the character of English civilians, a character they do not admire’ (Law, 1909: 233).

Conclusion

For an individual who was himself preoccupied with the ‘backwardness of the Indian “mind” ’ (Mehta, 1999: 90), Mill’s own career, where India is concerned, seems to have been conducted in reverse. It was not until after he had published HBI that he was appointed an official at India House, and eventually to the post of examiner of correspondence at the British East India Company – although he never did travel to India to develop the personal knowledge that Wilson believes would have enriched his historical work (Mill, 1840: 1.iii–iv). In Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness produces a narrative history that acknowledges the quotidian violence of colonialism in India and the ways in which it 213

After London has been justified by historical traditions of colonial discourse. Yet it is her own narrative experience, her personal knowledge of India, that provides the framework for her examination of the relationship between society and its structures. Harkness’s fusion of genres – narrative history, political journalism, personal essay – produces a cultural history of India during a period of increasing support for Indian home-rule. While this chapter has focused on the ways in which Harkness engages with the traditions of English writing about India, most specifically in her emphasis on personal knowledge and her commitment to an education that will produce effective self-governance, this period of Harkness’s writing corresponds to her earlier work and its emphasis on social structures of inequality, as well as questions of labour and unrest. All of these themes are consolidated in one particular anecdote, in which Harkness relates her experience of visiting the Calcutta market. In this chapter Harkness offers readers a number of continuities with both her own writing on London and that of her contemporaries. Her opening sentence – ‘let us visit the Calcutta market’ (Law, 1909: 110) – is not unlike George Gissing’s request, ‘Walk with me, dear reader, into Whitecross Street’ (Gissing, 1880: 1.1); and she suggests that ‘Howra, the principal railway station in Calcutta, might, with a little imagination, be mistaken for Waterloo’ (Law, 1909: 108). Perhaps of most importance for the present chapter, however, is an account of a purchase that Harkness makes when offered a Christian idol in Calcutta: ‘Will you have an idol made in England, or made in Germany?’ I was asked in a Calcutta bazaar. ‘Thank you’ I replied, ‘I will have a Swadeshi bronze image of Krishna’. (Law, 1909: 127)

Here, in the Calcutta market, Harkness reaffirms her commitment to examining the relationship between individual experience, cultural practice, and social institutions, just as she does in her writing more broadly.

Acknowledgements

This research and the writing of this chapter have benefited from the helpful recommendations and generous commentary of Terry Elkiss, Flore Janssen, Sarah Knor, and Andrew Whitehead.

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Notes

1 Like many of her contemporaries, Harkness makes no fixed distinction in her usage of the terms ‘English’ and ‘British’ in her Indian writing. However, the latter is most often used to refer to government structures or colonial territories (for instance, ‘British judicial systems’ (Law, 1909: 68) or ‘British India’ (12)), while the former is more generally applied both to individuals (‘Englishman’ (3)) as well as cultural organisations and social trends (‘English education’ (244)). I have followed Harkness’s usage and, as a consequence, the language of this chapter focuses on English culture and its colonial institutions. Although James Mill was himself Scottish, and trained in the methods of the Scottish Enlightenment, his History of British India became an important text for training members of the civil service in India and also contributed to colonial mythologies and discourse more generally (Rendall, 1982: 43). For this reason, it is appropriate to speak of Mill’s influence on both British governance in India and also English colonial culture. 2 In Glimpses of Hidden India, Harkness remarks on visits to the Oriental Library in Adyar (Law, 1909: 17), the library at the Waltair Club in the Bay of Bengal (89), the Imperial Library in Calcutta (108), the Moorshedabad Library (154), the library of the Central Hindu College of the University of Allahabad (177), the Library at Pondicherry (158), and registers her surprise to not find a library in Bombay (184); in Modern Hyderabad, Harkness worked from the Administrative Reports on State Affairs found in the Hyderabad State Library, as she acknowledges the standard history used for civil service examinations is out of print (Law: 1914: 21) and that ‘some of the most important books on these subjects [the Nizams and their Ministers] are becoming rare, even in Hyderabad itself’ (24). 3 For an important discussion of the ways that subaltern studies has developed a form of historiography that practises ‘history as critique’, and in so doing writes ‘the colony back into the centre of Empire’, see Chakrabarty (1991). I am grateful to Sarah Knor for bringing this article to my attention, as well as the important role of historiography in subaltern studies more generally. 4 Harkness does offer some guidance for international travellers in both Glimpses of Hidden India and Modern Hyderabad, but the tone of these books is distinct from her earliest series for the West Australian, which focuses on India and Ceylon as holiday destinations (1905: 7). Harkness’s subsequent journalism examines the social, cultural, and historical themes that emerge in her non-fiction books. See, for example, Law (1906).

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After London 5 For a more extensive indication on Mill’s thoughts on the relationship between education, religion, and society, see ‘Education’ (Mill, 1969: 30–1) as well as the essay ‘Schools for All, in Preference to Schools for Churchmen Only’ (Mill, 1969: 120–93). 6 In ‘Eyes and No Eyes’, an essay published in the Fortnightly Review, W. S. Lilly quotes a passage from Harkness’s Glimpses of Hidden India and comments on English education in India (Lilly, 1910: 634–6). He explains: ‘I believe that what is called “the education” which, not with perfect discrimination, but with no discrimination at all, we have bestowed upon India is an almost unmixed evil: and that, as we shall see presently, is the opinion of Indians well qualified to judge’ (Lilly, 1910: 633). 7 In the revised edition of this text, Indian Snapshots (1912), much of the material that refers to Annie Besant is expurgated. Harkness and Besant were affiliated by their participation in radical political groups in London, and both women were active in the 1888 Matchwomen’s Strike. While Besant first travelled to India in 1893 after becoming a member of the Theosophical Society, Harkness did not arrive until 1905 and came by way of Australia. Although Harkness addresses the Theosophical movement in her writing, she does not seem to have been interested in it as a spiritual practice. Further research will hopefully uncover a more precise picture of the relationship between Harkness and Besant while both women were living in India. 8 In Glimpses of Hidden India and Modern Hyderabad, Harkness discusses the emergence of anarchism and violent protest. The opening chapter of Modern Hyderabad affords particular attention to Lord Hardinge’s visit to Hyderabad, which was disrupted by local protest and widespread anarchist activity.

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1889). Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army. London: Hodder & Stoughton. –––– (1905). ‘Ceylon as a Holiday Resort’. West Australian, 9 June–8 August [nine parts]. –––– (1909). Glimpses of Hidden India. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. –––– (1912). Indian Snapshots. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co. —— (1914). Modern Hyderabad. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co.

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Harkness on conjectural history Additional works cited Anon. (1912). ‘Indian Snapshots’. West Australian, 2 November, p. 12. Chakrabarty, D. (1991). ‘History as Critique and Critique(s) of History’. Economic and Political Weekly (26.37). 2162­–6. Elkiss, T. (2019). ‘A Law Unto Herself: The Solitary Odyssey of M. E. Harkness’. Chapter 1, this volume, pp. 17–38. Forbes, D. (1951). ‘James Mill and India’. Cambridge Journal (5.1). 19–33. Gissing, G. (1880). Workers in the Dawn. 3 vols. London: Remington and Co. Haakonssen, K. (1985). ‘James Mill and Scottish Moral Philosophy’. Political Studies (33). 628–41. Hadley, E. (2010). Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harrington, J. (2012). ‘Orientalism, Political Subjectivity and the Birth of Citizenship between 1780 and 1830’. Citizenship Studies (16.5–6). 573–86. Janssen, F. (2019). ‘Lasting Ties: Harkness, the Salvation Army, and A Curate’s Promise (1921)’. Chapter 12, this volume, pp. 218–33. Keene, H. G. (1906). The History of India: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Nineteenth Century [1893]. 2 vols. Edinburgh: John Grant. Lilly, W. S. (1910). ‘Eyes and No Eyes’. Fortnightly Review (86). 629–44. Majeed, J. (1990). ‘The History of British India and Utilitarianism as a Rhetoric of Reform’. Modern Asian Studies (24.2). 209–24. –––– (1992). Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mehta, U. S. (1999). Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mill, J. (1840). The History of British India [1817]. 4th edn. Ed. H. H. Wilson. 10 vols. London: James Madden. –––– (1969). James Mill on Education. Ed. W. H. Burston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitts, J. (2005). A Turn to Empire: The Rise in Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rendall, J. (1982). ‘Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill’. Historical Journal (25.1). 43–69. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Spivak, G. C. (1985). ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’. Critical Inquiry (12.1). 243–61.

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12

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Lasting ties: Margaret Harkness, the Salvation Army, and A Curate’s Promise (1921) Flore Janssen

Margaret Harkness published her final novel in 1921, two years before her death in 1923. The text is set at the height of the First World War: its full, lengthy, and very precise title is A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917. Appearing after Harkness’s long absences from Britain and Europe, during which she transferred her professional life and writing career to Australia and India, A Curate’s Promise shows a significant degree of continuity with the novels she published in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. Although no evidence has yet come to light to indicate when she wrote A Curate’s Promise, it does not appear to have been produced and published with the same urgency as her earlier novels, which tended to be written and printed within the space of about a year. However, it is clearly and decisively situated in its time and place. Its subject is contemporary, twentieth-century Britain; and, as Graham Bottrill notes, ‘[t]here is real recognition in this novel of an old world disappearing [as well as] a clear indication of a new world emerging’ (Bottrill, 2006: 385). While the novel describes changes in the places and social groups which Harkness had made her specialism in the late nineteenth century, it does not engage in much nostalgic or critical comparison between the East End of London in Harkness’s past and present. Rather, Harkness described war-time London with the same precision and immediacy that had characterised her writing throughout her career, from her descriptions of British urban conditions in the late nineteenth century to her representations of Australian working communities around the turn of the twentieth century, and India and Ceylon a few years later. 218

Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army Many of the scenes in A Curate’s Promise would have been recognisable and verifiable for British readers a few years after the end of the First World War, as they had seen comparable sights and events for themselves in a war-torn country that was sending ever growing numbers of young men to the front, while suffering shortages and damage from air raids at home. Many of the details shown in the novel, however, are likely to have been as new to her readers as they are to the novel’s protagonist. Like Harkness’s late nineteenth-century social novels, A Curate’s Promise presents a protagonist who embarks on social exploration of the same kind that she herself engaged in and published on; these characters, then, act as the reader’s conduit into parts of London that were less familiar to middle-class readers. As the character Benjamin Digby is introduced to new aspects of London life and the experience of different social groups, these are also introduced and explained to the reader. In this way, Harkness is able to explore a number of under-represented aspects of life during the First World War. The primary focus of the novel is on the work of the Salvation Army during the war, particularly in British cities. This subject may be seen as a continuation of the interests that had been central to Harkness’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century: two of the novels she published at the end of the 1880s, A City Girl (2015 [1887]) and Captain Lobe (1889), had set out to introduce, describe, and commend the methods of the Salvation Army. This sense of continuity is emphasised by her choice of publisher for A Curate’s Promise: Hodder & Stoughton were the publishers of the British Weekly, in which ‘Captain Lobe’ had been originally serialised in 1888; in 1889 they also published the story in book form. Yet another link to Captain Lobe is the introduction to A Curate’s Promise provided by Bramwell Booth, the son of Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth, who had succeeded his father as ‘General’ of the organisation. William Booth had supplied a comparable introduction to the 1891 William Reeves edition of Captain Lobe, retitled In Darkest London as an echo of Booth’s own 1890 tract In Darkest England and the Way Out, which had proposed a number of sweeping solutions for the poverty and other social problems which the Salvation Army tried to combat. Like his father, Bramwell Booth expressed appreciation of the way Harkness’s novel offered her readers what he calls a ‘living picture’ of the Salvation Army’s work (Law, 1921: np). This chapter offers an introduction to what is one of Harkness’s least studied novels.1 As the majority of readers will not be familiar with the text, I begin with an outline of the plot, adding historical context in 219

After London order to illustrate Harkness’s engagement with contemporary ideas and social issues. Building on these contextual observations, I examine in more detail Harkness’s use and explorations of literary genre within the novel, and the range of attitudes to the war that she puts across through the voices of her characters. Through these topics, I hope to be able to give a sense of A Curate’s Promise as a novel providing continuity of style as regards Harkness’s priorities as a writer and social commentator, as well as a representation of the developments that Britain and London had undergone since the publication of her social novels at the end of the nineteenth century.

Plot and context

The protagonist, Benjamin Digby, is the titular curate, ‘an assistant to a parish priest’ in the Church of England (Oxford English Dictionary). The ‘promise’ in the title places him in a dilemma that becomes increasingly pressing as the First World War wears on. He is the youngest son in a wealthy country family with strong military connections; but at the age of fourteen, at his mother’s request, he promised to forgo a military career and become a clergyman. As he was ordained as a priest in 1914 (Law, 1921: 5), any participation in the war, the novel suggests, was precluded from the beginning. At the time when the novel is set, conscription had been in force for well over a year, having been introduced ‘early in 1916 when never-ending losses, particularly along the Western Front, left the British army desperate for more men’ (Ellsworth-Jones, 2007: 2). The clergy, however, ‘were exempt from conscription’ (Clifton, 2015: 188), and so, while the whole country is engaged in the war effort, Digby is left behind. The novel opens with a letter to Digby from his eldest brother, Lionel, an officer in the trenches in France, which states, ‘[t]here never was a war like this war, for every one, and everything, seems to go into it’ (Law, 1921: 3). Digby’s frustration, the main motivation for his actions throughout the novel, derives from the fact that he cannot ‘go into it’ like everyone around him. There is no question, however, of Digby’s breaking his promise to his late mother, and not merely because of a sense of family honour. For Digby, his own promise exists in a context of world politics, as he compares it explicitly with the outbreak of war. Personal and national honour are presented in parallel when he notes: ‘a broken promise has brought England into the present conflagration; at any rate, has put a match to a political situation that threatens to leave Europe in ruins, even if England 220

Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army escapes. It is true I was only a boy when I gave that promise; but I knew what I was doing; and to break that promise – well, I won’t do it’ (Law, 1921: 11). Poignantly, once Digby’s resolution has been stated, both his thoughts and the text proceed to consider a strong source of tension within the novel by contemplating the various ways in which Digby could, in fact, participate in the war effort. As the text follows Digby’s thoughts at this point, however, none of these options seems to be given serious consideration: indeed, the majority are listed and crossed off as soon as they are presented. Although clergymen were exempt from conscription, this did not mean that they could not volunteer for active service (Clifton, 2015: 188). Digby does express a wish that his bishop would permit him to ‘join up for the period of the war’, but, Harkness states, ‘he had been saying that for a long time – for three years, in fact – and without any result, because his Bishop wanted curates’ (Law, 1921: 6). However, by the time the novel opens he is no longer a curate, having given up his position to a relative of his parish priest, or rector. Deliberately leaving the rector under the impression that he intends to apply for an army chaplaincy, Digby finds himself in September 1917 staying in a London hotel, ‘in order to look round, see things, and think’ (Law, 1921: 8). One of the first things he sees as he is ‘looking round’ in London is a captured deserter being escorted back to France to be executed. Confronted with the personal impact of warfare on this soldier, Digby decides: If I do not feel sure and certain that I can help a man like that, I ought not to ask the Bishop for a chaplaincy; for I should be taking the place of a better man than myself, of some one who feels, or ought to feel, sure and certain that he has the power to help a man like that, a man who is face to face with death. (Law, 1921: 9–10)

The possibility of an army chaplaincy thus disposed of, Digby is left with two options to explore: making munitions – a possibility which is never seriously pursued in the novel – or doing useful social work in Britain. This second option is what prompts him to investigate the work of the Salvation Army. The novel’s interest in the Salvation Army is established with the first chapter, which relays the letter to Digby from his officer brother Lionel. Lionel commends the organisation’s material and emotional support for troops at the front, and entrusts Digby with a blank cheque in personal recognition of this work. Digby decides to accompany the cheque with a request to ‘General’ Booth to be shown some of the Salvation Army’s 221

After London activities in London, and from this point onwards the reader follows him as he is inducted into the organisation’s work, from visits to impoverished pensioners to aid provided to victims of bombing raids. One of the crucial aspects of the Salvation Army’s work to which Digby is introduced is their prison visits, including visits to incarcerated conscientious objectors (COs). Accompanying Brigadier George Overton, his primary guide to Salvation Army activities, on one of these prison visits, Digby is brought back into contact with his cousin Cyril. Cyril Digby is a CO imprisoned in the fictional Deeds jail, and at the start of the novel neither Digby nor his brother Lionel harbours anything but contempt for ‘that young blighter’ (Law, 1921: 3). However, Overton induces Digby to visit Cyril and the cousins reach a new understanding before Cyril’s death in prison shortly afterwards. By the close of the novel Digby has decided to leave the Church of England in order to offer to run a Salvation Army lodging house for men. The novel ends inconclusively, except as to the matter of Digby’s decision; it is unclear as yet whether Booth will accept his services, and whether, without his status as a clergyman to protect him, he may be conscripted. However, this is no longer a matter of importance to Digby; he is determined that the Salvation Army will offer him an opportunity to ‘make good’ (Law, 1921: 154) by contributing to the creation of a safer and better world after the war, particularly for impoverished urban communities. As he sees it, this will allow him to make up for his idleness during the first years of the war, in a way that is better suited to his abilities than any of the other possibilities he explored at the start of the novel. Within this simple narrative, Harkness is able to address significant complexities within attitudes to and perceptions of both the war and social problems on the home front. The following sections of this chapter will explore how Harkness’s use of different genres and voices within this short novel works to convey realities and ideas that would remain underrepresented and even controversial throughout the twentieth century.

Genre and representation

The novel combines a range of literary styles to address the various topics brought forward in Digby’s story. Although it uses a comparable format to Harkness’s late nineteenth-century social novels in using a protagonist as the reader’s guide to the social circumstances under discussion, in style it is unlike those of her works which follow a single protagonist 222

Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army constrained by their environment, such as A City Girl and Out of Work (1888), as well as the series of vignettes which makes up Captain Lobe. Digby’s social position and education give him significant freedom to sample different social and cultural environments, more like the wellto-do and high-born ‘wanderer’ George Eastmont than Nelly Ambrose in A City Girl or Jos Coney in Out of Work, whose movements and ambitions are restricted by their poverty. However, the novel’s focus on Digby’s growing attraction to the Salvation Army gives the narrative a clear direction, which is less evident in Captain Lobe’s episodic efforts to introduce the reader to the organisation and its practices. The setting of A Curate’s Promise ranges across a number of very different social and cultural environments, and every one of these is presented in a different style and tone of writing; the result is a blend of genres perhaps more comparable to Harkness’s Australian adventure serial ‘Called to the Bar’ (1897) than to any of her British-based social novels. The entire first chapter of the novel takes the form of the letter to Digby from his brother Lionel, describing the work of the Salvation Army behind the trenches in France. The rest of the narrative follows Digby, relaying his thoughts, but primarily the conversations he has with other characters. The novel introduces a series of Salvationists, led by Brigadier Overton, who first takes Digby under his wing; and the history and practices of the Salvation Army are explained by these characters. Digby’s own emotional development is also sparked to an important extent by his conversations with third parties, such as his uncle James, whom he is expected to succeed as rector on the Digby family estate, and his cousin Cyril, the CO. Midway through the novel, when he has just begun to explore the work of the Salvation Army, Digby decides to spend an evening at his uncle’s vicarage on the family estate, a time capsule of nineteenth-century country life. In this deliberately Victorian setting, Digby and his uncle have a long, revealing conversation in which his family relations and back story are explained. They speculate on his mother’s reasons for demanding his promise to enter the Church of England, and Digby’s own childhood and his close relationship with Cyril are discussed. These memories help to embolden Digby to speak to his cousin, and the conversation also reveals a great deal about the development of both cousins’ social ideas and aspirations. While much of the story, then, is told through conversations between different voices, the middle of the novel is enlivened by a sequence of scenes of almost cinematic vividness, in which Digby witnesses the Salvation Army’s activities during an air raid, evacuating people from 223

After London burning houses and providing food, shelter, and medical and emotional support for those bombed out of their homes. These scenes are full of sensory detail – the noise of sirens, the rush of panicked crowds, the glare and heat of fire – and convey a strong sense of purpose as well as chaos and urgency. Scenes like these emphasise the sense of ‘an old world disappearing’, as Bottrill states (Bottrill, 2006: 385); it is being violently effaced, as the ‘new world emerging’ produces the means of its own destruction. By the time she wrote A Curate’s Promise, Harkness could look back on four decades as a professional, published, and paid writer, producing work in different styles and genres for different publishers and periodicals. It is unlikely, therefore, that the combination of genres in texts like A Curate’s Promise is attributable to an inability on Harkness’s part to produce a more clearly stylistically coherent novel – indeed, her other, better-known novels do not reflect a comparable generic inconsistency. It is conceivable, therefore, that these shifts in narrative style, strongly linked as they are to the situations and environments being described, are intended to reflect the fragmented society that has produced the differences in experience which Digby encounters as he compares his own upbringing and his family’s priorities with the conditions he sees through the Salvation Army, and the Salvationists’ responses to them. Even in the novel’s genre, there is a clash between nineteenth-century traditions and contemporary realities. Harkness’s fiction was defined throughout her career by a dedication to the accurate depiction of the environment in which the narrative is set, from 1880s London to early twentieth-century India; and A Curate’s Promise is similarly committed to representing a contemporary London. Harkness herself was definitely in Britain for much of the duration of the First World War. Deborah Mutch and Terry Elkiss, in their biographical sections on Harkness in Mutch’s critical edition of A City Girl, indicate that Harkness probably returned to Britain in 1914 or even earlier; certainly she was in Britain in 1916, nursing her mother through the latter’s final illness (Law, 2015: 30, 33). Elkiss and Mutch note that Harkness indicated in 1917 that ‘she must soon return to France for unidentified work’ (Law, 2015: 33). The mention of a ‘return’ to France invites speculation as to whether she visited France in war time or maintained contacts there at the time, but no further evidence is available on this subject at the time of writing. The information provided in the first chapter of A Curate’s Promise, on the Salvation Army’s work at the front, could have been gleaned from 224

Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army Salvationists in Britain or from the wealth of Salvation Army publications issued during the war. From the weekly War Cry and the internationally orientated monthly All the World to Mary Booth’s 1916 account of Salvation Army relief work with the British Expeditionary Force, With the B. E. F. in France, or the short pamphlet The Salvation Army and the War (Anon., 1915), Salvation Army literature was full of accounts of Salvationists’ efforts behind the trenches to provide food and care to soldiers, and Salvationist soldiers’ determination to extend support and friendship to fellow soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Details such as the awarding of the Victoria Cross to a Salvation Army stretcher-bearer, James Fynn, mentioned in Lionel’s letter (Law, 1921: 2), were well reported in the Salvation Army press.2 There is therefore no clear indication that Harkness might have been drawing on personal observations when describing the Salvation Army’s war work in France. The scenes in the novel that reflect the Salvation Army’s work in London are drawn with a level of descriptive detail more comparable to the style of the vignettes that make up Captain Lobe than to contemporary accounts in Salvation Army periodicals. The chapters describing the bombing raid are particularly evocative, and it seems probable that a high level of realism would have been necessary in these sections, as Harkness’s readers were themselves likely to have experienced raids or heard firsthand accounts of them, and would therefore notice inaccuracies. The raid scenes again emphasise the difference in experience resulting from social inequality. In Digby’s hotel, the ‘considerate management’ offers the basement to the guests as a shelter, and bridge tournaments are held there as a distraction; an elderly lady shows her detachment from the potential danger by imagining how raid stories will be told to her grandchildren, who ‘will be just as much thrilled by the raid-scenes as we have been by pictures of the Indian Mutiny’ (Law, 2015: 47). Out of frustration and a desire to be useful, Digby then decides to go to Whitechapel to offer his help to the Salvation Army in its raid work. Walking from Aldgate to Whitechapel – his omnibus having stopped to await the ‘All clear’, ‘for the guns are right over us’ (Law, 2015: 49) – he finds that, in the East End, the sense of immediate danger is much greater. Here, ‘[s]hrapnel pattered on roofs, and guns fired from north, south, east, and west’ (Law, 2015: 49), ‘red and yellow lights sprang up, and fire-engines dashed along the road, followed by ambulances, and people began to crowd together and move eastward, talking of incendiary bombs and fires’ (Law, 2015: 49–50). Under these conditions, Digby finds Salvationists rescuing the inhabitants of burning buildings, 225

After London c­onducting the injured to ambulances, and offering food, drink, and shelter. As he runs errands for the Salvationists, he witnesses their different activities. The precise dating of the narrative has made it possible to trace a corresponding account of an air raid on Tuesday, 2 October, in an article entitled ‘Caring for the Raided’, published in the War Cry of Saturday, 6 October 1917. The article mentions nearly all of the activities Harkness describes, with the exception of the dramatic rescue work of one Salvation Army sergeant in the novel, who is shown carrying injured women and children out of their burning houses. Looking back on the days since the raid, the War Cry is able to describe how the Salvation Army continued throughout the week to feed and shelter those who have lost their homes, and adds that ‘[a]rrangements have also been made for the cartage of furniture … from some of the ruined homes’ (Anon., 1917a: 5). According to the article, raid victims were told on application to the Town Hall to ‘[g]o off to The Salvation Army! They’ll care for you all’ (Anon., 1917a: 5), strongly suggesting that the response of the Salvation Army was deemed both prompt and adequate by raid victims as well as by local authorities. Placing Digby in the thick of these activities allows Harkness to relay them in an evocative and urgent style, and the immediacy of these scenes brings the Salvation Army up to date in the ‘new world’ of war-time London. While Brigadier Overton, when he first introduces Digby to the Salvation Army, seems primarily inclined to relate the history of the organisation, the Salvation Army’s activities during the raid prove that it continued to respond in a timely and suitable way to the changing and urgent needs of the urban poor.

Attitudes to the war

Critics including David Glover (2012: 67), Ruth Livesey (2019) and Lynne Hapgood (2019) have discussed the different ways in which Harkness’s novels from the 1880s incorporate a plurality of voices. The generic diversity of A Curate’s Promise introduces a comparable range of voices to reflect a variety of attitudes and opinions without imparting value judgements or seeming to impose a narrative authority. This is particularly evident in the novel’s engagement with different, and even controversial, attitudes to the war. As Digby develops his moral thinking over the course of the novel, noticeable shifts occur in his perception of the war. Initially he feels ‘hor226

Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army ribly out of it!’ (Law, 1921: 10) and wishes to be allowed to join up and go ‘where I have wanted to be for three years – … in the trenches’ where he ‘may go over the top, perhaps’ (Law, 1921: 8). Like his brother, he is contemptuous of his cousin Cyril, the CO. In the course of the narrative, however, besides the condemned deserter, he meets private soldiers, or ‘Tommies’, who are home on leave or through injuries, and Harkness reveals that his motivation for wishing to go to the front is less that of an enthusiastic young man eager for adventure, and more the product of a certain solidarity with the soldiers. She writes that ‘[h]e had too many relations in the Army to be ignorant of what was really going on in France, or to believe the camouflage of the newspapers’ (Law, 1921: 35). He is aware that the soldiers on leave whom he meets at a Salvation Army hostel ‘had not the enthusiasm, the lofty purpose of the volunteers who had rushed to the Colours in 1914. These men were trying to make the best of a bad job, for they had been conscripted, and if they did not go over the top, their officers would shoot them’ (Law, 1921: 35). It is based on this knowledge that he asks himself: ‘And where had he been all that time?’ (Law, 1921: 35). His motivation, then, is not the glory of involvement in war, and in fact, by the close of the novel, he no longer cares whether he goes to the trenches or not, as he has conceived a plan to make himself useful in Britain in the service of the Salvation Army. This, he feels, will enable him to offer support to the soldiers on the home front, and help to build a better world for them to return to. It should be noted that Digby’s conclusion does not follow an ideological ‘line’ dictated by the Salvation Army or any other organisation; rather, it is a synthesis of all the voices he has encountered over the course of the novel – including, as well as the different members of the Salvation Army, his uncle James, the old-world vicar, and also, crucially, his CO cousin Cyril. It is useful, at this point, to explore some of these voices and their impact on Digby’s moral and emotional development in the novel. The Salvation Army and its ‘General’, Bramwell Booth, did not declare an ideological position with regard to the war, leaving this moral judgement up to individual members. Booth took his cue from his father’s response to the South African War; during that conflict the War Cry printed ‘cover features and peace poems … expressing sorrow and longing for peace’, as ‘whichever side might win the political struggle, the Army would be the loser since the Salvationists were on both sides by virtue of nationality’ (Clifton, 2015: 99–100). On the subject of volunteering for military service, Booth wrote in the War Cry in July 1915 that ‘[e]very man must pray and then follow his conscience’ (Clifton, 2015: 227

After London 196). Clifton does add, however, that COs were extremely rare in the ranks of the Salvation Army, and that the subject is scarcely discussed at all in Salvation Army sources. His own research revealed evidence of ‘only two Salvationists who were imprisoned as absolute objectors’ (Clifton, 2015: 195) – meaning that their convictions prevented them from taking any part in the war effort at all, as opposed to members of the so-called Non-Combatant Corps who declined to fight but did other military work (Bibbings, 2009: 32). Clifton goes on to point out that ‘[Salvation] Army sources make no mention whatever’ of these two men, and that this silence ‘contrasts sharply with the many accounts of the large number of Salvationists at the front. Indeed, The War Cry, somehow sensing a need for readers to be, if not actually reassured, at least informed, stressed how few Salvationist objectors there were’ (Clifton, 2015: 195). The attitude of Salvationists towards COs in the novel is also relatively unforgiving. Even Brigadier Overton, whose work includes visiting the objectors in prison, tells Digby that ‘the conscientious objector’s clause … ought never to have been passed’ (Law, 1921: 93), and explains that ‘the conscientious objectors need a firm hand over them’ since, while there are ‘a few men in prison who have real scruples about fighting … most of the conscientious objectors want to save their skin, and not a few are on the look out for notoriety’ (Law, 1921: 94). It should be noted here that there were several reports of extremely harsh treatment of COs in prison; for instance, on 23 August 1917 the C. O.’s Hansard, a weekly periodical that published parliamentary proceedings relevant to conscientious objectors, recorded the case of one CO who was kept in solitary confinement on bread and water for months (Anon., 1917b: 512–13). Overton’s sweeping statements with regard to the prisoners he visits appear to lack any awareness of situations like these. Even though it is Brigadier Overton who facilitates Digby’s visit to Deeds jail, then, Cyril’s story is separate from the strand of the narrative that pertains to the Salvation Army. I suggest that Cyril’s presence in the novel works in two interconnected ways: firstly, Harkness is able to use Cyril’s voice to criticise the attitudes of organised religion, and specifically the Church of England, to the war; and secondly, this criticism of the Church gives Digby a further prompt to search for other ways of expressing his religious sentiments and, as he puts it, ‘liv[ing] the Christlife’ (Law, 1921: 128). Cyril, the narrative reveals, attended university in Germany; later it transpires that, prior to the war, he and a Swiss academic had begun to write a book illustrating the incompatibility of war with Christian faith. Cyril condemns the ‘eulogies on war that are now 228

Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army being poured out from the pulpits’ and the way ‘clergymen speak of a soldier’s death as “the supreme sacrifice,” and say that a man who is killed in action will go straight to Heaven’ (Law, 1921: 100). He leaves Digby a letter after his death in which he describes how ‘just as the militarist spirit is ruining Germany, so it will destroy England, if it is allowed to take root here and spread among the unthinking and ignorant – and therefore the despised and much-imposed-upon masses’. To this he adds: ‘in the long run it is the masses that make, or mar, a country, never mind how long the imposition and the disdain may continue’ (Law, 1921: 145). Although Digby is not, at any point in the novel, personally opposed to warfare, Cyril’s observations help him towards both of the realisations which prompt his departure from the Church of England in favour of the Salvation Army: namely, the hypocrisy of the Church and its detachment from ‘the masses’, and the importance of ameliorating the conditions of working people in order to improve the post-war future of the country. Based on his experiences over the course of the novel, he concludes that ‘if Christ came to this world to-day, He would be where He was two thousand years ago, among the poor and the outcasts; he would not be in a Bishop’s palace or at an Archbishop’s banquet’ (Law, 1921: 128); and he determines that the Salvation Army will give him an opportunity to help ‘the masses’, in a way that the Church of England does not. His observation regarding the social priorities of a contemporary Christfigure echoes a comparable statement in In Darkest London, made by the character referred to as the ‘agnostic’, who is frequently assumed to be a version of Harkness herself. She asserts to Lobe: ‘If Christ were to walk down the Whitechapel Road this evening, do you think that He would stop to discourse about doctrine? No; He would feed the hungry men and women’ (Law, 1893: 67). In their war-time setting, Digby’s conclusions are an indictment of the British Army and public opinion of the war, as much as of the Church of England, when he tells his brother: Do you ever think what will happen to the Tommies after the war is over? Do you know the sort of homes they must come back to …? It’s all very well for officers to call the men “splendid” … ; the men can’t be splendid unless they have proper homes and work under proper conditions. (Law, 1921: 152)

Unable to change the fact that soldiers go to their deaths, and their families at home are killed in air raids of the kind he witnesses, while the Church and the government preach patriotism and sacrifice, Digby 229

After London decides instead to contribute towards the improvement of the world to which the surviving soldiers return. Bottrill follows his observations on the novel’s representation of a new world subsuming the old with the following conclusion: ‘How to live amongst all these new developments is more than Harkness can desire or articulate. Instead she asserts in the face of it a species of subjectively self-contained and spiritualised heroism, leaving fundamentally intact the very social and property relations that had produced the problems in the first place’ (Bottrill, 2006: 385). I contend that this difficulty of ‘how to live’ in the ‘new world emerging’ is precisely what the novel tries to address, and that its strength is in its ability to articulate this difficulty as it is experienced by the various characters. Digby himself is of course the primary example, as he is torn between the conservative influence of his family, his promise to his mother, and the changing circumstances of the twentieth century; and the novel offers a resolution that at least satisfies him personally – even if, as Bottrill points out, it hardly changes the structure of society. It is made clear that the old-world attitudes of the rest of his family – Lionel and uncle James – are out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. Cyril, too, attempts to find his own way of adapting to a changing world, and perhaps changing it for the better, and ends up sacrificing himself for the beliefs he developed independently. He explains: ‘When the war broke out, I left Professor Schlieman to finish the book and came home; for I thought that as “example is better than precept,” my example might possibly influence some Christians’ (Law, 1921: 145); instead, his prison sentence brings about his death. Harkness herself, it is true, appears to endorse Digby’s choice of the Salvation Army as the most appropriate means of ‘making good’ in the changing world she describes; in this, a strong element of continuity with her earlier London-based work is evident. The novel reflects disillusionment with organised socialist politics, but not with socialist thought: when Digby’s brother asks him, ‘[h]ave you become a Socialist?’, he responds, ‘[n]ot more of a Socialist than Jesus Christ’ (Law, 1921: 152). The novel, then, may be read as reflecting a search for personal ways of ‘making good’ in a changing world in which the urban working poor continue to be left behind. Each of the characters looks for ways of bringing about a better world after the carnage of war, without betraying their own conscience.

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Conclusions

A Curate’s Promise is a short novel, amounting to no more than some 150 pages, and its highly limited availability makes it easy to overlook. This chapter, therefore, has aimed to provide some introduction to this under-studied text, and to give a sense of the richness of thought and opinion present in a novel that is, like most of Harkness’s fiction, deceptively plain and simple. There is a continuity of style and themes between this text and her earlier British-based social novels; while it is clear that Harkness made a conscious effort to reflect an updated, contemporary London, her own enduring interest in social problems and ways to combat them is still strongly evident. While recognising the changes and developments that had taken place in Britain since her departure at the end of the nineteenth century, she also describes the social and economic problems that remain, and highlights their importance in a project for social change and improvement in the twentieth century. The novel reflects a range of experiences and opinions in a style as fragmented as the society it represents. Harkness does not provide answers to the social problems she addresses, but she effectively reveals the personal struggles inherent in political conflict and social neglect, and introduces a range of characters searching for ways to respond to social change early in a new century. The novel carries a note of optimism that is significantly less evident in her earlier novels, as Digby, at least, finds a way of ‘making good’. With this chapter, I hope to have introduced a range of new readers and scholars to this rich novel. The wealth of perspectives and ideas that it reflects make it worthy of further study, research, and analysis, and in exploring the opinions and motivations of under-represented characters – including the CO as well as the social activists within the Salvation Army – it also invites broader questions regarding the reading of First World War literature and historiography. By raising awareness of this text I hope to have alerted future researchers to the novel’s complexity and to encourage them to explore it further than I have here been able to do.

Acknowledgements

I owe many thanks to Steven Spencer and his colleagues at the Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. Their knowledge and recommendations have been invaluable in collecting information on the historical context of Harkness’s novel. My gratitude is also due to Clare Falvey 231

After London for her willingness to share her expertise on Salvation Army history and her ideas about this under-studied novel. As ever, I am grateful to Terry Elkiss and Lisa C. Robertson for their knowledgeable suggestions and help in shaping this chapter.

Notes

1 At the time of writing, Graham Bottrill remains virtually the only researcher to have written on A Curate’s Promise (2006: 383–5). The novel itself had not been readily available hitherto, but a digitised copy of the text has now been made freely accessible online by the Salvation Army International Heritage Centre: https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/hark​ ness. 2 See, for instance, ‘To Save and to Serve’ in All the World. Private James Fynn’s mother is quoted as saying: ‘I am very proud of my son gaining the V.C. especially as it was not won for killing men, but for saving his poor wounded comrades’ (Anon., 1917c: 307).

References

Works by Margaret Harkness cited (listed chronologically) Law, J. [Margaret Harkness] (1888). Out of Work. London: Swan Sonnenschein. –––– (1889). Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army. London: Hodder & Stoughton. –––– (1891). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe. London: Reeves. —— (1893). In Darkest London: A New and Popular Edition of Captain Lobe [1891]. London: Reeves. –––– (1897). ‘Called to the Bar: A Coolgardie Novel’. Western Mail, 30 July–24 September. –––– (1905). George Eastmont, Wanderer. London: Burns & Oates. –––– (1921). A Curate’s Promise: A Story of Three Weeks, September 14–October 5 1917. London: Hodder & Stoughton. –––– (2015). A City Girl: A Realistic Story [1887]. Ed. Deborah Mutch. Brighton: Victorian Secrets.

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Margaret Harkness and the Salvation Army Additional works cited Anon. (1915). The Salvation Army and the War. London: Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. Anon. (1917a). ‘Caring for the Raided’. War Cry, 6 October, p. 5. Anon. (1917b). ‘Prison Diet Insufficient’. C. O.’s Hansard, 23 August, pp. 512–13. Anon. (1917c). ‘To Save and to Serve’. All the World, July, pp. 307–10. Bibbings, L. S. (2009). Telling Tales about Men: Conceptions of Conscientious Objectors to Military Service during the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Booth, M. (1916). With the B. E. F. in France. London: The Salvation Army. Booth, W. (1890). In Darkest England and the Way Out. London: Salvation Army. Bottrill, G. (2006). ‘British Socialist Literature: From Chartism to Marxism’. Ph.D. Cardiff University. Available at: orca.cf.ac.uk/55629/1/U584107. pdf [Accessed 2 February 2014]. Clifton, S. (2015). Crown of Glory, Crown of Thorns: The Salvation Army in Wartime. London: Salvation Books, The Salvation Army International Headquarters. Ellsworth-Jones, W. (2007). We Will Not Fight: The Untold Story of the First World War’s Conscientious Objectors. London: Aurum. Glover, D. (2012). Literature, Immigration and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hapgood, L. (2019). ‘Margaret Harkness, Novelist: Social Semantics and Experiments in Fiction’. Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880–1921. Chapter 7, this volume, pp. 130–46. Livesey, R. (2019). ‘Soundscapes of the City in Margaret Harkness, A City Girl (1887), Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1885–86), and Katharine Buildings, Whitechapel’. Chapter 6, this volume, pp. 111–29.

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Index

Index

A City Girl (1887) 3, 5, 6, 10, 17, 22, 40, 41, 42–7, 48, 57, 61–2, 64, 67, 68, 69, 77–84, 85, 112–20, 123–6, 134–8, 140, 148, 159, 170, 196n9, 219, 223 A Curate’s Promise (1921) 4, 32, 144, 194, 205, 218–32 A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890) 3, 26, 91, 148, 153, 179, 194 agnosticism 168­­–9 agnostic 171, 175, 178, 229 anarchism 97, 105–6, 120–3, 171, 176, 216 antisemitism 154 aristocracy 117, 151, 157­–60 aristocratic 121­–3, 149­–60 Australia 1, 4, 27, 28–30, 94–5, 97, 100, 102–4, 175, 202, 216n7, 218, 223 Barnett, Samuel (1844–1913), cleric and reformer, founder of Toynbee Hall 44, 85 Besant, Annie (1847–1933), socialist, activist, theosophist 4, 20, 31, 77, 211, 216n7 Besant, Walter (1836–1901), novelist 57, 74–6, 86–7, 88n3 Black, Clementina (1853–1922), novelist, activist, reformer 20, 29, 116, 168 Black Monday (8 February 1886) 96, 99, 100 Bloody Sunday see Trafalgar Square, Trafalgar Square Riots

Booth, Charles (1840–1916), researcher and statistician 57–9, 112, 131, 138, 154 Booth, William (1829–1912), founder of the Salvation Army 3, 27, 44, 68, 91, 140, 183–95, 188, 219 Booth, William Bramwell (1856–1929), Salvation Army leader 219, 227 British Museum 2, 20, 21, 22, 27, 34n5, 116 British Weekly 3, 24, 25, 26, 59, 67, 70, 219 Burns, John (1858–1943), trade unionist and politician 24–6, 29, 92, 94, 96–7, 102, 104, 148 ‘Called to the Bar’ (1897) 1, 4, 29, 223 Captain Lobe (1889) 17, 25, 34n7, 41–5, 75, 91, 97, 122, 140–3, 148, 182, 184–5, 188–9, 206, 219, 223, 225 ‘Captain Lobe’ (1888) 3, 25, 175, 219 Carpenter, Edward (1844–1929), socialist poet 95, 126n7, 142, 144n11 Catholic Church 30, 93, 100, 135 Champion, H. H. [Henry Hyde] (1859–1921), socialist journalist and activist 3, 24–9, 33n4, 92, 96­–100, 102, 148, 158

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Index George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905) 4, 11, 30, 91–106, 223 Gissing, George (1857–1903), novelist 42­–3, 76, 82–3, 115, 214 Glimpses of Hidden India (1909) 4, 31, 201­–16

Charlotte’s Buildings see Katharine Buildings Christ 68, 169, 173, 174, 176, 182, 186, 188­–95, 228–30 Christianity 93, 101, 167–79, 187, 211 Church of England 158, 186, 220, 222, 223, 228­–9 colonialism 30, 94, 102–3, 204–24 Condition of England novel 42, 93 see also social-problem novel 30, 148, 194 ‘Connie’ (1893–94) 3, 28, 147–61 Cunninghame Graham, Robert Bontine (1852–1936), Liberal politician and writer 26, 97

homelessness 149, 152, 155, 184 Hyndman, H. M. [Henry Mayers] (1842–1921) founder of the Social Democratic Federation 24, 25, 33n4, 148, 154, 157

Dickens, Charles (1812–70), novelist 3, 42, 43, 117, 194 Disraeli, Benjamin, First Earl of Beaconsfield (1804–81), Conservative politician and novelist 42, 159–61 Dockworkers’ Strike (1889) 4, 26, 30, 48, 91–110, 132–3, 138, 140, 169 Engels, Friedrich (1820–95), political theorist 1, 3, 5, 17, 23­–4, 26, 33n4, 39, 44–5, 67, 88, 113–15, 148, 153, 155, 196n9 Evening News and Post 23, 25, 57, 91, 96, 194 Fabian Society 24, 27, 33n1, 34n5, 104, 131, 148, 154 factory workers 42, 45, 74, 84­–7, 175, 178 Fellowship of the New Life 118, 126n7, 168, 169 fin de siècle 6, 91, 93, 105–6, 118, 152, 155 First World War (1914–18) 4, 31–2, 218–31

Imperial Credit (1899) 4, 30, 32, 34n8, 104, 105, 144n11, 157 In Darkest London (1891) 3, 40, 41–7, 60, 66–70, 75, 79, 84–7, 122, 124, 174, 175–9, 182, 183, 184–8, 191–5, 219, 229 Independent Labour Party see Labour Party India 4, 30–1, 201–14, 218, 224, 225 Indian Snapshots (1912) 4, 31, 202, 207, 216n7 James, Henry (1843–1916), novelist 113, 120–4 The Princess Casamassima (1885–86) 113, 120–3 journalism 4, 23, 24, 39, 41, 47, 48, 49, 57, 58–60, 65, 71, 167­–8, 170, 171, 193, 195, 214, 215n4 Judaism 67, 153­–4 Justice 2–3, 24, 25, 154 Katharine Buildings 22, 39, 69, 112, 113, 124­–6 Charlotte’s Buildings 43, 62, 77–9, 134 Keir Hardie, James (1856–1915), trade unionist and politician 3­–4, 24­–5, 33n4

Gaskell, Elizabeth (1810–65), novelist 42–5, 194

Labour Elector 3, 26–9, 148–9 labour movement 26­–7, 30, 60, 96–7, 104, 188

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Index New Review 27, 71, 132, 173 New Unionism see trades union movement New Zealand 4, 27, 29, 94 nursing 2, 19–20, 21–2, 29, 31, 33n3, 186, 224

Labour Party 3–4, 94, 96, 102, 131, 148 Levy, Amy (1861–89), poet and novelist 20, 60, 169 Liberal Party 94, 97, 104 liberalism 155–8, 202, 208 loafer 27, 47, 66–7, 79, 131, 206 Manchester 26, 28, 32, 42, 45, 92, 154 Mann, Tom [Thomas] (1856–1941), trade unionist 24, 26, 28, 92, 94, 96–7, 101, 148 Manning, Cardinal Henry Edward (1808–92), faith leader 26, 48­–9, 92, 95 Marx, Eleanor (1855–98), political writer and activist 2, 10, 20, 24, 25, 26, 39, 144n10, 148, 152, 169–70 Marx, Karl (1818–83), political philosopher 5, 153, 154 Marxism 5, 17, 24, 58, 76, 97, 132, 138, 139, 141, 143n4 Matchwomen’s Strike, 1888 4, 25, 140, 167, 216n7 Mearns, Andrew (1837–1925), cleric and reformer 111, 133, 183, 192, 194 melodrama 23, 60, 64, 80–1, 87, 91, 99, 113, 116–19, 122, 124, 147–61 Mill, James (1773–1836), philosopher 201–4, 209, 211–13 Modern Hyderabad (1914) 4, 31, 202, 203, 209, 212, 215n2, 215n4, 216n8 Moore, George (1852–1933), novelist 43, 149 Morris, William (1834–96), socialist artist and writer 25, 58, 60, 105, 136, 148 Morrison, Arthur (1863–1945), novelist 43, 57, 76, 83, 115 naturalism 40, 50, 112, 113, 115–17, 130, 149

Out of Work (1888) 3, 6, 24, 40, 47, 60, 62–70, 91, 137–42, 148, 153, 223 philanthropy 7, 22, 74, 75, 84–7, 111, 112, 124, 125 Potter (Webb), Beatrice (1858–1943), social investigator and activist 2, 10, 18, 19, 21–2, 25, 27, 33n1, 34n4, 34n5, 39, 57–8, 60, 75, 93–4, 97, 104, 111–12, 115, 124–6, 154, 168, 170 pseudonym 3, 23, 41, 47–50, 174, 179n4, 184–5 Pycroft, Ella (c. 1856–1926), housing reformer 124–5 realism 1, 5, 24, 41, 44–7, 113–17, 131, 136, 192, 225 Reynolds, G. W. M. [George William MacArthur] (1814–79), novelist 117–18 ‘Roses and Crucifix’ (1891–92) 3, 27, 91, 143n5, 148 Salvation Army 3, 11, 22–3, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 39, 40–1, 44, 60, 66–70, 75–6, 84–8, 97, 118, 140–1, 168, 169, 170, 175–8, 183–8, 190, 218–31 Schreiner, Olive (1855–1920), novelist 2, 20, 24, 33n2, 95, 116, 126n7, 167–79 Shaw, G. B. [George Bernard] (1856–1950), novelist, playwright, activist 25, 28, 33n4, 58, 60, 119 Sheldon, Charles Monroe (1857–1946), minister and writer 188–90

236

Index slum fiction 50n2, 57, 71 slums 39, 41–8, 57, 59, 67­–71, 85–7, 96–7, 103, 115, 140–1, 148, 171, 175–8, 191 Social Democratic Federation 3, 24–5, 33n4, 148, 154, 158 Somerset Maugham, W. [William] (1874–1965) 76–81, 83 Stead, W. T. [William Thomas] (1849–1912), newspaper editor and investigative journalist 59, 96, 150, 168, 170, 182–95 suffrage 45–6, 75, 132, 150, 152, 169 theatre 41, 50n4, 80–1, 117–19, 147, 149–53 Toilers in London (1889) 59, 79, 194 trade union movement 26, 95, 97, 100–2, 104, 131, 133, 152, 154 Trafalgar Square 24, 92, 96, 137–40 Trafalgar Square Riots (13 November 1887) 3, 137

unemployment 3, 103, 137–9, 141, 143n3, 147 United States 4, 27, 71, 120, 121, 184, 188–95, 196n8 utopianism 40, 57, 94, 104, 105, 116, 136, 161, 168–79 Vizetelly, Henry (1820–94), publisher 23, 113 Wallas, Graham (1858–1932), activist, Fabian Society leader, founder of the London School of Economics 24, 33n1, 148 War Cry 85, 225­–8 Webb, Beatrice, Baroness Passfield see Potter (Webb), Beatrice Webb, Sidney, First Baron Passfield (1859–1947), socialist politician 27, 33n1, 34n5, 104 Zola, Émile (1840–1902), novelist 6, 23, 50, 115, 121, 124, 149

237