SOURCE: Kovačević, Ivanka and S. B. Kanner. “Blue Book Into Novel: The Forgotten Industrial Fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 2 (September 1970): 152-73.

In the following essay, Kovačević and Kanner reflect on the importance of Tonna as an author who was both “of her time and at the same time ahead of it.”

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, by her persistent reading of Government reports, laboured to penetrate the underground life of thousands of women hidden away in small and dirty shops. Her exhaustive treatment of so large a body of employment, unknown perhaps to all contemporary women but Harriet Martineau, demonstrates both industry and comprehension. … Other novelists were either ignorant of this industrial chaos or were unequal to the task of handling it in fiction.

This tribute to a now forgotten English author of the 1830s and 1840s was written by Wanda Fraiken Neff forty years...