The Indian Uprising of 1857

The Indian Uprising was caused by an cultural and religious issue over gunpowder cartiges. The cartiges used by the Bengal army were required to be opened with ones' teeth, but were believed to be purposely greased with cow or pig fat. The consumption of such animal products was as insult to both Hindu and Muslim religions--cows were considered holy to the Hindus and pigs were considered unclean to the Muslims. The Half-Caste by Dinah Mulock Craik was originally published in 1851 Chambers's Paper for the People (vol. 12, no. 94) and brought to light many biased inequalities that could have been resolved. The "Introduction" by Melissa Edmundson references this revolution because the ideas of disrespect and inequal treatment this work that brings light can be seen influencing the revolt. A new edition was published in the same year of 1857, which I base my analysis on. 

Craik, Dinah Mulock, and Melissa Edmundson. “Introduction.” The Half-Caste, edited by Melissa Edmundson, Broadview Editions, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, 2016, pp. 9–37.

Ethnic Classification during Victorian Period

What surprised me about this book was the multi-tiered classification system used by British Citizens to classify the mixed percentages of individuals who possessed both some combination of British and Indian blood. Each classifications lead to both advantages and disadvantages within the Indian and British communities at the time: “‘Anglo-Indian’ meant ‘ those who have either no or very slight admixture with the native races’; ‘Eurasians’ were ‘those in whom the European and native descent are more evenly balanced’; and ‘East Indians’ were ‘those of remote European descent and approaching more closely to the native type’” (Craik, 14). Here are just three of the different classifications, but even within these three divisions of race, one can find subsets that would further divide individuals among racial lines. This knowledge helps the reader to indicate why there is such a large disparity between how the more British half-caste is treated compared to the more Indian half-caste.

Craik, Dinah Mulock. The Half-Caste, edited by Melissa Edmundson. Introduction: footnote 1, The Anglo-Indian (9 January 1886): pp. 19, by Melissa Edmunson. Broadview Editions, 2016.

Dinah Mulock Craik: Awarded the Civil List Pension

In 1864, Dinah was awarded the Civil List Pension, one of the few awards given to British writers at the time, for her services in literature. A Civil List pension is an honorary pension paid by the government as thanks for service. It was originally created to pay expenses for the sovereign and their families. Dinah used her pension to help struggling women writers.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Civil-List

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_list

https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/craik-dinah-maria-mulock-1826-1887

Elizabeth Gaskell's death

Elizabeth Gaskell passed away on November 12, 1865. She had been touring a retirement home for her husband and family in ​​ Holybourne in Hampshire. She suffered from a sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-five years old. Her last written work, the novel “Wives and Daughters” was never published. However, after her death, it was published posthumously in Cornhill Magazine in 1866.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton edited Jennifer Foster. 1848, Broadview Literary Texts.

“Elizabeth Gaskell Biography.” The Gaskell Society, The Gaskell Society, 5 Mar. 2020, https://gaskellsociety.co.uk/elizabeth-gaskell/.

Position of the Governess in Victorian Society

In The Half-Caste, the narrator of the story finds herself in a little bit of a quandary concerning the income of both she and her mother. Cassandra must find work in order to support herself and her mother, so she is thrust into the job of governess. She did not go to school to become a governess, but from the education she received because of her class status, she is able to scrape by and become an adequate governess for the Pryors. However, in appendix C–which deals with the role of the Victorian Governess–we find out more about the contemporary qualities that were desired in a governess at the time: “There are strong objections in the minds of some, to a lady who is compelled unexpectedly to teach, and to teach just for a living” (Craik, 144). According to this source, the circumstances that lead Cassandra to become a governess were less than ideal. She was not fully equipped to assume the role of governess. Despite some of these sentiments floating around at the time, Craik creates Cassandra to be an adept governess that looks out for the well-being of her pupil, Zillah.

Craik, Dinah Mulock. The Half-Caste, edited by Melissa Edmundson. Appendix C, From Emily Peart, A Book for Governesses (Edinburgh: W. Oliphant, [1868]), 9-22. Broadview Editions, 2016.

The Education Act

The Education Act, also known as the Forster’s Act allowed for school boards to require the education of local towns. It was an attempt to educate children especially in the East End of London. That way they could be educated and might break away from the routines of the working-class generations before them. The act was enforced in 1870 but revisions of the act happened in 1876 and 1880. The revisions expanded the number of East End children going to school, however, it took them away from work. They were no longer able to earn money for the households which became problematic for a while. This act was still in use at the time of A City Girl and most children were being taught basic education.

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited Tabitha Sparks. Broadview editions 1887.

Publication of Middlemarch

Mary Ann Evans took three years to write and publish one of her most famous works Middlemarch. The first book was published in December but there would be seven more to follow over a period of time. Each part had characters whose lives interacted with each other in the town. That way readers could have different parts of Middlemarch, but the characters were recurring. Each section cost five shillings each and the books continued to be published throughout the year.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. edited Gregory Maertz. Broadview Editions. 2004

First Edition of Middlemarch Published After Series

After the success of Middlemarch, published in a series throughout the years of 1871-1872 as a way to make the novel less expensive and thus more accessible to the literate public, the novel was compiled together in 1872 from this series to form the first edition of Middlemarch, consisting of four volumes. Gaskell opposed the separating of her novel into segments, but the publisher ignored her requests. However, Gaskell's publisher worried about the continued interest in following the full novel as each of Middlemarch's books was independent. Nonetheless, the novel was a success, leading the the four-volume's publication out of the three-volume format typical of the time.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edited by Gregory Maertz, Broadview Press, 2004.

Wikipedia contributors. "Middlemarch." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 18 Oct. 2021. Web. 6 Dec. 2021.

"Slumming" in the East End

East End Loafers by Phil May

In the late Victorian era London's East End became a popular destination for slumming, a new phenomenon which emerged in the 1880s on an unprecedented scale. For some slumming was a peculiar form of tourism motivated by curiosity, excitement and thrill, others were motivated by moral, religious and altruistic reasons. The economic, social and cultural deprivation of slum dwellers attracted in the second half of the nineteenth century the attention of various groups of the middle- and upper-classes, which included philanthropists, religious missionaries, charity workers, social investigators, writers, and also rich people seeking disrespectable amusements. As early as in 1884, The New York Times published an article about slumming which spread from London to New York.

Slumming commenced in London […] with a curiosity to see the sights, and when it became fashionable to go 'slumming' ladies and gentlemen were induced to don common clothes and go out in the highways and byways to see people of whom they had heard, but of whom they were as ignorant as if they were inhabitants of a strange country. [September 14, 1884 ]

In the 1880s and 1890s a great number of middle- and upper-class women and men were involved in charity and social work, particularly in the East End slums. The national press covered widely shocking and sensational news from the slums. Anxiety and curiosity about slums could be heard in many public debates to that extent that, as Seth Koven writes:

By the 1890s, London guidebooks such as the Baedeker’s not only directed visitors to shops, monuments, and churches but also mapped excursions to world renowned philanthropic institutions located in notorious slum districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch. [1]

In fact, for a considerable number of Victorian gentlemen and ladies slumming was a form of illicit urban tourism. They visited the most deprived streets of the East End in pursuit of the 'guilty pleasures' associated with the immoral slum dwellers. Upper-class slummers sometimes spent in disguise a night or more in poor boarding houses seeking to experience taboo intimacies with the members of the lower classes. Their cross-class sexual fellowships contributed to diminishing class barriers and reshaping gender relations at the turn of the nineteenth century.

However, slumming was not only limited to odd amusement. In the last two decades of the Victorian era a rising number of missionaries, social relief workers and investigators, politicians, journalists and fiction writers as well as middle-class ‘do-gooders’ and philanthropists made frequent visits to the East End slums to see how the poor lived. A number of gentlemen and lady slummers decided to take up temporary residence in the East End in order to collect data on the nature and extent of poverty and deprivation. Some slummers were disguised in underclass drags in order to transgress class boundaries and mix freely with the poverty stricken inhabitants of the slums. Written or oral accounts of their first-hand observations arose public conscience and motivation to provide slum welfare programmes, and prompted political demands for slum reform.

The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the upsurge of public inquiry into the causes and extent of poverty in Britain. Some of the most outstanding late Victorian slummers were Princess Alice of Hesse, the third child of Queen Victoria; Lord Salisbury, and his sons, William and Hugh, who resided temporarily in Oxford House, Bethnal Green; William Gladstone, and his daughter Helen, who lived in the south London slums as head of the Women's University Settlement. (Koven 10) Even Queen Victoria visited the East End to open the People’s Palace in Mile End Road in 1887.

Benevolent middle- and upper-class women went to slums for a variety of purposes. They volunteered in parish charities, worked as nurses and teachers and some of them conducted sociological studies. Such women as Annie Besant, Lady Constance Battersea, Helen Bosanquet, Clara Collet, Emma Cons, Octavia Hill, Margaret Harkness, Beatrice Potter (Webb), and Ella Pycroft explored some of London’s most notorious rookeries, and their eye-witness reports gradually changed the public opinion about the causes of poverty and squalor. By the turn of the nineteenth century thousands of men and women were involved in social work and philanthropy in London slums.

Married Woman's Property Act

Married Women’s Property Act

As per English common law, women did not have any right to dispose of property or to make a will after marriage without the consent of their husband. Only widows could claim any property for themselves. Most of the property of the woman before marriage (obtained from the father), and after the ceremony, the husband got this property. This was enforced by the Common Law Doctrine of Coverture.

If you compare the rights of a married and unmarried woman, the unmarried woman had much more rights than the married woman had. Unmarried women could buy and sell property, make wills, and have total control over all things they owned.

Also since many people realised that only a minority of women got married for love, the question was why get married at all? The reason of marriage for many women, in spite having to give up their property, inheritance, and freedom, was to marry into a higher social status.

A woman wanting to divorce her husband was looked down upon; also they would not be given any of their property owned before marriage. So, a majority of widows, who were left with only 1/3 of their husband’s property, preferred to remarry to have protection under the law for their children.

Prime Minister William Gladstone, in 1882, passed Married Women’s Property Rights Act. This gave married woman equal rights to the average unmarried woman. Although they did not have equal rights as their husbands, this was nevertheless a huge progress for the married woman.

Under the Married Women’s Property Act, a married woman could keep their inheritance and property post marriage, but still needed the consent of her husband in buying or selling of the property.

Robert Harkness Dies and Margaret Harkness Becomes Radical

Robert Harkness, father to Margaret Harkness, passed away in 1886. As an Anglican priest, Robert had much influence over Margaret's religious life and subsequent views. After her father's death, Margaret becomes involved in many radical political movements to help prevent or alieve poverty in the East End, even adopting the pseudonym "John Law" to publish her writings in favor of the movements. A City Girl is among several works of Margaret's attempting to bring attention to the poverty of the East End against the comfortability of the West End of London and the political divisions between the working and middle class. 

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl: A Realistic Story, edited by Tabitha Sparks, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, 2017.

Margaret Harkness publishes first novel

In 1887 Margaret Harkness published her first novel A City Girl: A Realistic Story. This work was considered a slum novel and it was not the first of its kind set in the East End of London in the 1880s. She published the work under the name John Law. She adopted this pseudonym in 1886 and used it for most of her writings. The Vizetelly & Co. Intermittent work in Scotland became her publisher on behalf of Keir Hardie.

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited Tabitha Sparks. Broadview editions 1887.

Dinah Craik's, John Halifax - Hits the Movie Screen

Silent Short Film John Halifax, Gentleman, 1910

Craik wrote her most popular work in 1857 titled John Halifax, Gentleman. It was made into a silent film in 1910. Later, in 1938, this film was made again in the U.K. and starred actors John Warwick, Nancy Burne, and Roddy McDowell. It tells the story of John Halifax who, despite humble beginnings, becomes a highly respected local businessman. As partner in a mill he weathers the turbulent economic times of the early 1800s. It was also adapted for television by the BBC in 1974.