SOURCE: Kestner, Joseph. “Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's The Wrongs of Woman: Female Industrial Protest.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2, no. 2 (fall 1983): 193-214.

In the following essay, Kestner discusses the cultural and factual basis of The Wrongs of Woman.

In the opening paragraph of his essay Chartism (1839), Thomas Carlyle warned the British public about the “Condition-of-England Question,” calling for national inquiry about social abuses:

A feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it. … To us individually this matter appears, and has for many years appeared, to be the most ominous of all practical matters whatever; a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody. The time is...