Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature (review)

The Victorian seamstress came to occupy an unusual and significant position as a cultural symbol of working-class suffering and redemption. So argues Lynn Alexander, professor of English at the University of Tennes-see–Martin, in this careful study of periodical literature, novels, governmental reports, and visual arts, in which the problem of the needlewoman occupied center stage. Alexander tracks the evolution of the iconography of the "distressed needlewoman" from the early 1840s, when she was one among many of the preoccupations of social reformers addressing the human suffering omnipresent within the industrializing city, to the 1870s, by which time her image was so well known that painters and writers merely needed to mention her existence to evoke a host of expectations and responses.

Alexander makes a persuasive case that the needlewoman was eventually adopted as a symbol of working-class suffering despite and even because of her historical roots as a member of the displaced middle classes. Needlework offered the only morally and socially acceptable alternative to middle-class women without resources who lacked the education to become governesses. These women labored to earn a living because their fathers had fallen on hard times or had died and left their daughters without support; thus, they fell into a broadly conceptualized working class solely because of material need, through no fault of their own, and continued to evoke notions of both gentility and middle-class domesticity without suggesting the threat of misbehavior or violence implicit in the male working classes. The needlewoman's example was especially compelling for the middle-class readers of the government reports, novels, and articles in which she appeared, because it took little effort to imagine oneself or one's sisters in her position.

Alexander divides the treatment of the seamstress into distinct chronological periods, noting the first appearance of the milliner as a figure of fiction in 1833. The 1843 Second Report of the Childhood Employment Commission provided an arsenal of information about the poor health and working conditions of needlewomen, and fiction writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna mined the Report in order to add power to their portrayals of exhaustion, starvation, and consumption as milestones on the way to early death. Thomas Hood's poem "The Song of the Shirt," first appearing in Punch in December 1843, further focused public attention upon the plight of the lone shirt-maker and inspired several generations of visual artists. Fictive portrayals after 1843, however, began to reshape the needlewoman so that she might serve as a symbolic as well as an actual representative of working poverty. Thus, even as the figure of the needlewoman evolved from distressed middle class to representative working class, her workplace was transformed from milliner's shop to slopworker's solitary garret, her work shifted from expensive finery to ready-to-wear men's shirts, and the solution to her distress moved away from changed behavior on the part of the woman client (whose impossible demands led to overwork and illness) to government reforms initiated by the male legislator. A second wave of literature and visual arts further emphasized the seamstress as an intermediary between rich and poor and as a link between the idyllic rural past and the industrial present, and set forth the seamstress as morally pure even when forced into prostitution by economic pressures. Governmental reports and editorials during this second wave treated the needlewoman not only as a representative of the working poor but also as part of the larger category of the "redundant woman" who was urged to emigrate to Canada or to Australia. By the 1850s, the figure had become a stereotype and ceased to provide a focus for serious novels and poetry, and within another decade, "the seamstress was considered to be a hackneyed subject" (181) for writers and appeared primarily as a "stock portrait" in the visual arts. By the last quarter of the century, argues Alexander, "The seamstress...