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Aspects of Child Labor in Tonna's Helen Fleetwood
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 51, Number 4, Autumn 2011
- pp. 783-801
- 10.1353/sel.2011.0042
- Article
- Additional Information
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This article explores the unique role of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood (1841), one of the first social-problem novels, in shaping the concerns and strategies of the genre. Writing at a moment of cultural change in the attitude toward children, Tonna's Blakean vision of child labor as diabolical allows her to offer a daring critique of social institutions. Yet her political vision is inconsistent: although she redeems the working-class child's point of view and rehumanizes this figure, Tonna's staging of child labor as originating in a metaphysical, divine plan leads her to construct children's suffering as a justifiable and even desirable ethos.