SOURCE: Kaplan, Deborah. “The Woman Worker in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Fiction.” Mosaic: Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 18, no. 2 (spring 1985): 51-63.

In the following essay, Kaplan explores Tonna's role in the re-conceptualization of the working class.

“To the Victorians belongs the discovery of the woman worker as an object of pity,” Wanda Neff suggests in her now classic study of Victorian Working Women.¹ Although women had always labored, the conditions of their work—indeed, the very idea of women working—began to evoke shock as well as pity in the 1830s and 1840s, in the decades in which the ideology of domesticity was first applied to working women.² This ideology asserted the innate femininity of woman, a femininity constituted by such “natural” traits as purity, piety, self-sacrifice, sensibility and, especially, maternal love. And it endowed woman with the “natural” roles of homemaker and moral guardian in the...