Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century (review)

For many Victorian scholars, the seamstress narrative strikes a familiar chord, even if recalled only in the lines of Thomas Hood's tragic poem, "The Song of the Shirt." Oppressed by society, a casualty of aristocratic caprice, vulnerable to the underworld of prostitution and crime, the seamstress played a role in many a Victorian novel or penny dreadful. Yet how does our perspective change if, as editor Beth Harris suggests, we look beneath the pervasive literary image of the seamstress as victim and attempt to reconstitute the experiences of seamstresses using a wider variety of source material? Scholars from fields such as business history, art history, literary studies, and labor history plumb primary sources which include census records, company records, unpublished reports, and letters, as well as periodical and literary sources. The result is a kaleidoscope of information which profoundly enhances our understanding of the Victorian seamstress. Without minimizing the dark side of the nineteenth-century needle trades, Famine and Fashion undertakes the much-needed work of balancing the dominant, literary narrative of the seamstress as symbolic martyr with more nuanced attention to other narratives.

Although the subtitle suggests attention to the entire nineteenth century, many of the essays focus on mid-century England. Harris explains the reason for this emphasis: the 1840s saw the emergence of the idea of the seamstress as a victim rather merely frivolous or immoral. Harris also points out that most research to date on the seamstress has centered on England, a reality which makes her inclusion of essays on the United States and France particularly valuable.

Harris has organized the essays into two topics, "Reading Out" and "Writing In." The seven essays in Part 1 concentrate on literary sources, most of which were originally published in periodical form, with the goal of rereading the familiar seamstress narrative in order to highlight "the ways in which the standard narrative was resisted and transformed" (7). The first essay, by Susan P. Casteras, begins with the memorable Thomas Hood, but relates his "Song of the Shirt" (published in the 1843 Christmas issue of Punch) to the rest of his corpus, as well as to similar art, both fine and popular. Arlene Young, Joellen Masters, and Ian Haywood provide readings (respectively) of Margaret Oliphant's Kirsteen (1890), Dickens's Little Dorrit (1857), and the anonymous novel Christmas Shadows, published in 1850. In her essay on Chartist leader Ernest Jones's "The Young Milliner," a story published serially in Jones's periodical Notes to the People (1851-1852), Ella Dzelzainis weighs the effectiveness of the story in persuading women readers to embrace Chartism. Rohan McWilliam highlights the contradictory political imagery of The Seamstress: Or, the White Slave of England, a penny dreadful first published in the magazine Reynolds's Miscellany in 1850. Beth Harris's superb essay on the show-shop examines the visual appeal of both shops and seamstresses in advertisements, book illustrations, novels, and periodical fiction.

The eight essays in Part 2 aim "to place women into the history of business, education, and emigration in the nineteenth century and to place needlework into a central position for women authors" (2). Almost all of these essays focus on the United States. Several of them reveal the heretofore untold success stories of female business owners in the United States and England: Susan Ingalls Lewis in mid-century Albany, Pamela J. Nickless in antebellum and postbellum North Carolina, and Nicola Pullin in mid-century London. Wendy Gamber assesses vocational education for women in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Massachusetts, while Judith DeGroat explores the very different experience of Parisian needlewomen who struggled in vain to preserve their powerful role in the so-called "skilled" branches of the needle trades. Jacqueline M. Chambers provides a particularly astute essay on how needlework allowed American women writers to validate their authority in a male-dominated publishing environment. Jo Chimes evaluates the symbolic allure of the needlewoman in mid-century efforts to help British women emigrate, and...