SOURCE: Kovačević, Ivanka, and S. Barbara Kanner. “Blue Book into Novel: The Forgotten Industrial Fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970-71): 152-73.

In the following essay, Kovačević and Kanner discuss the writings of Tonna, whose fictional works on factory conditions and child labor are based on factual accounts and witness testimony recorded in parliamentary blue books and other official reports.

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...