I. Thinking in Pictures

In the first pages of the novel, Harkness describes the teeming Charlotte Buildings as beset by activity and noise. Slowly and cinematically the narrator narrows in on Nelly as first she is framed by her porch from the perspective of the Building's inner yard, and then as she looks at her own image in a shop window. The narrator describes her “red-brown hair” and the “wonderfully pretty” “blue shadows” that “play around the white skin as sunbeams,” but Nelly's observation in the mirrored window breaks her own image into parts: “she did not notice the shades or the tints, she was only conscious of a pair of hazel eyes with long black lashes, a nose of no particular shape, and a mouth like her mother's” (9-10; ch. 1). The difference between the narrator's apprehension of movement around the changing shades of Nelly's skin and hair and Nelly's discrete attention to her features inaugurates a perceptual pattern that occurs throughout the novel: against the novel's passage through time and space Nelly's perceptions are static images; she thinks in pictures instead of narratives.

Early in the novel, for instance, the narrator describes Nelly's ambition to “look like a lady.” “Her idea of being a lady” is captured in a series of emblematic snapshots: “to sit on a sofa, to read a novelette, to sip coffee with a teaspoon, to have someone put on and take off her boots”; a “blissful state,” as the narrator summarizes (11; ch. 1). Nelly's desire for idleness reflects a fixed idea of stylishness and plenty that she craves but does not translate into a teleological structure. In an ominous turn, she experiences her growing acquaintance with Arthur Grant as a series of pleasurable moments that represent, if temporarily, the idleness that she associates with the life of a lady. In their first outing, accompanied by George and his friend Jack, Nelly observes the strollers and picnickers at the Albert Palace and thinks “how pleasant life must be for people who kept perpetual holiday” (36; ch. 3). The oxymoron of “perpetual holiday” reveals Nelly's presentism: she sees the holiday makers as static because she does not have the particular kind of life experience that enables an informed projection of the world and its inhabitants outside of the moment she observes. Later that same afternoon, she admires a similar vista at Battersea Park, and the comparison between her observation of the scene and Arthur Grant's marks the difference between a picture and a story. “Trees and shrubs bent their branches down to the water, and beneath them children played – children in white dresses. ‘Isn't it lovely?’ Nelly asked Mr. Grant. ‘It's like a picture in a book, isn't it?’” (38; ch. 3). But Arthur's version of the same scene leads him to a chain of temporally loaded associations:

Arthur's redirection of the scene reflects its bland familiarity to him, and, in search of a fresh sensation he focuses on Nelly and muses over her physical dissimilarity to other East End girls – another conjuring up of past experience. When he calls her “a picture worth looking at” his use of “picture” differs significantly from Nelly's. He is saying, in essence, that her image is worth his time, an experience snatched and savored from a larger, unfolding narrative. This moment, moreover, leads him immediately into speculation of character that intuits, however fancifully, an understanding of her over a span of time and in different imaginary situations. In a later chapter Arthur uses this same admiring phrase when he watches Nelly watching a play: “Absolutely unselfconscious, trembling with pleasure, she was a picture worth looking at” (61; ch. 4). The repetition of the phrase confirms but also enacts the time commitment it defines for him.

Arthur compares Nelly to a picture several more times, and each one revisits their contrasting notions of the relationship between an image and a narrative sequence. The first time he sees her, she reminds him of someone or something he cannot recall, and several meetings later the resemblance crystallizes. “I know who you are like,” exclaimed Mr. Grant; “you are like Pharaoh's daughter when she found Moses; I mean the picture of a girl bending over a cradle with a look of awe on her face and her hair all about.” Nelly was pleased to “think that she resembled a picture” (69–70; ch. 5). But where Arthur's description of a narrative painting encompasses temporality – the Pharaoh's daughter progressively registering awe and bending over the cradle in a frame from the longer story drawn from his comparatively vast cultural register, Nelly's “picture” is fixed; she lacks the context of the Biblical tale to imagine the scene in a narrative sequence. (The narrator explains archly, “being a Catholic, Nelly knew very little about the Bible” [70; ch. 5]). Meanwhile, Arthur's aesthetic appreciation of the scene of a young girl with a surprise infant tragically prefigures his psychic and emotional disconnection from Nelly when she finds herself exactly in this situation with Arthur's own son. This premonitory scene and Arthur's purely aesthetic reception of it signifies Nelly's vulnerability to his bourgeois narrative advantage.

II. Can Nelly Read?

An early scene in the novel provokes this question: is Harkness's exclusion of Nelly from written narrative literal? Can Nelly read? When Arthur meets her unexpectedly on the street one day he sees Nelly “outside the bookseller's shop trying to read the name of a book in a bright blue cover” (56; ch. 4). Later in the novel, when Nelly travels into West London to spy on Arthur from outside his house, a clue about her literacy emerges. She discovers that she has lost her return ticket to the East End. “It was a long way to walk,” but she “stumbled along,” asking people on the street for directions, until she “came at last to a place where some omnibuses were waiting outside a tavern. “Bank” was written on the door of one omnibus, and she looked with longing eyes at the red seats inside it” (95-96; ch. 6). Nelly, then, has functional literacy, but the novel invites us to differentiate between this transactional skill (reading “Bank” on an omnibus) and imaginative literacy – reading extended sequences of words for their own pleasure.

Garrett Stewart writes about “the act of literary reading” in a context that helpfully distinguishes between what I am calling functional and imaginative literacy: “[t]he act of literary reading is not just a cultural disposition, part of an economy of leisure or an ideology of edification. It is also a locally positioned enterprise of reception within a socially inflected network of intertextual signals, a reception marked, precoded, co-optive” (6-7). Stewart's characterization of the “enterprise of reception” that surrounds the practice of literary reading complicates the democratizing effect of the well-documented explosion of print media in the later Victorian age. Technologies of cheap printing and the mandate for universal public education inaugurated by the 1870 Education Act often inspire triumphalist narratives of mass literacy, but Stewart's attention to social and intellectual context reminds us of the difference between availability and amalgamation: the first does not magically enable the last. Two Victorian-era reflections of the expanded literary field confirm this point. In 1859 Wilkie Collins bemoaned the vast and dreadful textual provisions for the working-class reader in an article that conceives of a new generation of readers fashioned from the pulp and dross of tabloid journalism. We are what we read, in other words. But an anonymous author of an 1892 article in All the Year Round, “A Day at the London Free Libraries,” speculates that the working classes are not so easily constituted by the written word: “at the present time the working classes of the population are not much attracted by the library. The silence and good order are a little too much for them; they miss the freedom, the chaff, the jokes of out-of-doors and the full-flavoured hilarity of the public house” (“A Day” 284). Collins uses reverse engineering to construct working-class readers from the quality of their texts, straightforwardly assuming that print availability means absorption and even overdetermination. The latter article indirectly endorses Stewart's understanding of reading as embedded in a network of material and social practices. For this author, the working class has not discovered the pleasures of reading because standing in the way is the stultified atmosphere of the library and its contrast to the freedoms of the public world. The act of reading, and whatever influences the reading materials may have on their readers, is ancillary to the conditions that make it possible or probable. This is a circuitous way of saying that despite the fact that the East End was teeming with reading materials, Harkness's Nelly is only functionally literate, and so unassisted by imaginative literacy's explanative and predictive mode of seeing the world.

Estrangement from narrative sequence and its teleological character is not exclusive to Nelly. Her friend George is similarly flummoxed by the contrast between what happens and what it might mean. In a scene where he ponders Nelly's lack of resemblance to her coarse mother and brother, the narrator explains that George “was accustomed to puzzle about things. Life was a puzzle to him. If he had had more education he might perhaps have been able to understand it but he had never been good at books. . .” (31–32; ch. 2). The narrator's observation that George (and by extension, Nelly) cannot benefit from the medium in which they are, however sympathetically, imagined recalls a similar point by George Eliot's narrator about Adam Bede’s Hetty Sorrel: “Hetty had never read a novel: if she had seen one, I think the words would have been too hard for her: how then could she find a shape for her expectations?” (135; ch. 13). Late in the century George Gissing figures a reverse example of literary modeling when Monica Madden in The Odd Women (1894) immerses herself in novels as her marriage becomes progressively hopeless. After this immersion she determines that “she had a clearer understanding of her own nature [from her reading], [and so] the type of man correspondent to her natural sympathies also became clear” (231; ch. 19).Footnote ⁷ Sally Mitchell, in The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class, and Women's Reading 1830–1880, proposes that “a woman who learned about sexuality, prostitution and seduction from novels if not from other sources had information that could help her make decisions as rational as decisions involving love ever could be” (171). Like Hetty, Nelly lacks cautionary experience, but also is unfamiliar with the epistemological practice of narrated experience, which after Mitchell's reading can have an instrumental value.

In lieu of books, what forms of art does Nelly know? On the first page of the novel she walks by “a group of small maidens” against a wall, “rocking their bodies slowly backwards and forwards, fanning themselves with their pinafores, and singing an East End ditty”:

The song offers the girls the aural and oral pleasures of hard-stop rhyme and a rhythm to which they can fan themselves, but it is not a story; its obligatory repetition confirms its distance from a teleology; Mary Ann perpetually is just getting by. In Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre, Deborah Vlock examines street “patter,” the “frivolous language of form rather than content, in which words are deceptive because they deviate from conventional (elite) semantics, rhythms, and syntax; a language which means meaninglessness, and therefore means something desperately significant” (94). Emphasizing form over content Vlock's analysis can explicate “My Mary Ann” as a placeholder for communication, a socializing activity that passes the time without marking, as would a narrative, the passage of time. Nelly does not herself sing this song but it usefully instances the social forms of art that comprise her presentist world.

The depth of Nelly's narrative disadvantage surfaces in a scene where Arthur impulsively takes her to the theatre, and her understanding of the melodrama on the stage displays the perceptual weakness of someone largely unfamiliar with narrative forms. Transfixed by the play, Nelly thinks the actors “all such wonderful people” but finds Arthur's comments during the intermission astonishing:

Arthur's familiarity with formulaic melodramas makes him bored by this one, whereas its novelty makes it fascinating to Nelly and, as we soon see, pitiably convincing. She doesn't admire the actors as actors but as “wonderful people,” and at the end of the next scene, the virtuous heroine's “noble self-sacrifice” “was altogether too much for Nelly's feelings. The little East End maiden hid her face behind the curtain and wept” (62; ch. 4). Arthur consoles her, and tells her that “things would all come right, that the virtuous wife would be reconciled to her husband and live happy ever afterwards, as a reward for her self-sacrifice” (62; ch. 4). Nelly's inexperience with narrative formulas moves her to genuine sympathy, as if introduced to mimetic suffering for the first time. After the play she discovers that “all turned out as Mr. Grant had predicted,” thus marking her own inability to foresee the happy and pat resolution. (In another metatheatrical clue that Nelly misses, the play foretells her own narrative resolution with Arthur: the ritualized romance favors the “virtuous wife” against the victim of a passing seduction.) When Nelly protests that the brother in the play “is dead. . . . The others may be happy, but he won't,” Arthur laughs and his comment effortlessly transforms the character in the play into the actor, and then proceeds to imagine his nighttime entertainments: “Yes, he will. . .he will come to life and enjoy a champagne supper” (62; ch. 4). Pierre Bourdieu's sociological understanding of artistic reception maps on to Arthur and Nelly's respective views of the play: “Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation – literature, theatre, painting – more than in the things represented,” whereas working-class people “chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe ‘naively’ in the things represented” (xxviii). Likewise, Nelly's relative inexperience with narrative patterns disables her preemptive judgment: her impoverished imagination comes with heavy material and emotional consequences.

A character in a comparable late-Victorian urban novel helps to illustrate Nelly's myopic field of judgment and, if indirectly, Harkness's portrayal of the narrative impoverishment of a working-class woman. George Moore's working-class heroine, Esther Waters, from the 1894 novel of that name, also finds herself pregnant, unmarried, and alone, but her reaction to this predicament strikingly contrasts to Nelly's. Before her pregnancy, Esther understands that her present actions are linked to her future experiences: “She knew her fate depended upon her resistance” (91; ch. 11). But resistance was futile and some months later Esther realizes the outcome: “the truth was borne in upon her; she foresaw the drama that awaited her, from which nothing could free her, which she would have to live through hour by hour” (105; ch. 12). Where Esther projects a painful and tedious unraveling of her future as a single mother, Nelly's reaction is unimagined. The reader realizes Nelly's pregnancy only through the abuse she suffers from the sweater's wife who had employed her, and from her brutal brother, Tom, who evidently notices her now-visible pregnancy (or is alerted to it by the sweater's wife). After these abuse scenes, George introduces Nelly to the Salvation Army captain and the female sergeant who will later take her in. In the sudden comfort of the Salvation Army waiting room, Nelly only absorbs the moment:

Even her question, “what would become of her?,” as the following sentence reveals, regards the immediate circumstance she would face if the comfortable room “suddenly vanish[ed],” which possibility also turns upon the magical thinking associated with a perspective untutored by causality. After this scene, Harkness's next introduction of Nelly jumps ahead a few months and figures her holding an infant. The absence of an articulation of pregnancy equivalent to Esther's, or even an account of her pregnancy and her son's birth that makes these events explicit, can make A City Girl seem unreflective, insufficiently realistic, or modestly avoidant, as many readers have argued.

IV. Subjection in Place of Subjectivity; or, Our Proxy, Arthur Grant

Attention to the absence of narrative in Nelly's world can explain her silence about the pregnancy and her seeming lack of self-reflectiveness, and can reframe some of Harkness's portraits of working-class callousness that read on an explicit level as patronizing and even brutal. For instance, the narrator introduces the courtship between Building tenants Susan, who is crippled, and Tim, “a little deformed shoeblack,” by explaining that “they had been keeping company for about a year, to the great amusement of the tenants of the Buildings, who thought it a joke that poor lame Susan should want a husband or hunchbacked Tim a wife” (80; ch. 5). In their laughter at this marital prospect Harkness explains that her tenants see “Susan” and “Tim” as wholly constituted by their bodies, not as selves in which reside thoughts and desires that transcend the physical body. The marriage of two misshapen bodies is thus a misshapen marriage, a categorical error. This materialist dismissal of Susan and Tim, part of what Harkness elsewhere refers to as the “dumb thought and dumb feeling” (92; ch. 6) of Whitechapel, denotes her representation of a consciousness untrained by narrative and its cumulative formation of modern selfhood as an idiosyncratic, predictive, and intentional construct, exactly what critics and readers have found wanting in Nelly's passive character.

The most famous critique of the novel on this score is Friedrich Engels's, who protested in a letter to Harkness that she portrays the working class in A City Girl as “a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at striving to help itself.” He goes on to insist that agitation was a necessary feature of the working-class's realistic representation:

More recently than Engels, scholars have marked a frustration with Harkness's novel that repeats his critique of its submissive representation of the working class. Sally Ledger attributes the critical frustration with Harkness to the fact that the novelist is “locked into a literary naturalism which [does] not offer much in the way of affirmation” of either socialism or feminism (50). To Dan Bivona and Roger Henkle, the characters in the novel “are largely types, uninflected into particularity; the action is desultory and fatalistic; the underlying impulses of the text are stolidly repressed” (89). Emma Liggins notes that Nelly's dependence on the Salvation Army and George at the end of the novel has been read a typical reinforcement of “women's limited capacity for resistance” (46). But Harkness's refusal to politicize Nelly – to have her articulate her oppression, her cruel treatment by her family and abandonment by Arthur – can be read as a tacit acknowledgment that the form of the novel and the consecration of interiority for which it is so valued belongs to the “oppressive medium” that “surrounds” the working class, insofar as the novel's writers, critics, publishers, and the great majority of its readers are fluent in the same conventions of narrative experience that Nelly so pointedly lacks. If we argue that Nelly's capacity for resistance is not informed by narrative experience, then our expectations of her agency necessarily change.

The selfhood that we quite automatically look for in A City Girl is more about our familiarity with “the novel” than with the representation of a working-class girl with a near-total exclusion from a reading culture and the developmental, layered, and accumulative wisdom that constitutes narrativity. Our accretive awareness of Nelly's psychological privation and her failure to meet our fictional expectations of a reflective heroine, moreover, uncomfortably resembles and accompanies Arthur Grant's, who Harkness elects as the novel's ostensible villain but who becomes, in a seemingly inevitable class betrayal of Nelly, the reader's own proxy. The affinity between Arthur's philosophical detachment and the psychological properties of the late-Victorian realist novel, in other words, becomes so profound that as the gulf between Arthur and Nelly widens – for her, with catastrophic consequences – Arthur's almost pathological insensitivity and the reader's frustration with her passivity become similar conceits, constituted by their formation in a middle-class, literary culture.

That is, from the beginning of the novel, a privileged and essentially literary understanding of selfhood underwrites Arthur's willingness to exploit Nelly. Underwhelmed by his work as a hospital treasurer and blandly content with his wife and children in West Kensington, Arthur seeks intellectual gratification through diverse interests including a plan to write a novel based on the naturalist mode:

This passage channels Arthur's free-indirect speech until the last clause; by naming “Arthur Grant” the narrator slyly makes a more decisive connection to him than he would articulate himself, and in so doing, reveals the way that Arthur's literary vision is fully (if unknowingly) self-reflexive. The novel that Arthur maps here has disconcerting similarities to A City Girl insofar as it allows his preferences for psychological study and plotlessness to predicate the terms that later enable him to seduce and desert Nelly. “This little Whitechapel girl,” Arthur observes a few pages later, was “no psychological study, just something pretty to look at. She had not much to say for herself” (70; ch. 5). The narrator checks Arthur's callous treatment of Nelly by commenting, “he quite forgot that hands have hearts,” (71; ch. 5) but the seduction, abuse, abandonment, and death of the infant that follow from his dismissal of her reveal Arthur and Nelly's respective incorporations of literature and narrative. Arthur immerses himself in the worldview – jaded, psychological, sexually progressive – of a naturalist novel very much like the one he dreams of writing (about himself), while Nelly, uninflected by the moral and practical teleology naturalized in narrative art, becomes his subject. Functionally literate Nelly never stands a chance against the self-indulgent story Arthur casts himself in to stir his bourgeois torpor.

Arthur's reaction to Nelly's pregnancy and the infant's death, which he learns about at the same time, confirms that her unrealized character functions as his artistic adventure, his substitute for the novel he thinks about writing. In a scene that deviates from late-realism and naturalism's contempt for coincidence and sentimentalism, Arthurs runs into Nelly as she leaves the hospital with her (their) dead baby. Shocked to find her so changed and to realize that the child was his, Arthur experiences emotions that he processes through a selective literary lens. “Of course he was dreadfully sorry . . . that night tears came into his eyes. . . . He was very proud of those tears – they were as sentimental as those of a German lover” (165; ch. 12). He considers unburdening himself to his wife after thinking of “Rousseau's confession to Thérèse after the adventure in the Rue des Moineaux. He often compared his wife to Thérèse and himself to Rousseau . . . ” (165–66; ch. 12). As far as Nelly is concerned, Arthur does arrange to pay for the baby's burial, a pragmatic response to Nelly's grief that concretizes the meaning and end of their affair in purely economic terms, as is fitting to the worldly wisdom of naturalism. But for himself, Arthur's Germanic tears and his identification with the freethinking Rousseau reveal a sentimental identification with the European Romanticists – a self-affirming generic substitution through which he can claim tragedy instead of exploitation.

Present day critics have written extensively about the danger that Victorians ascribed to the romantic and sentimental novel's influence, especially over young and impressionable girls. Less has been written about the more rudimentary benefits that familiarity with narrative as a causal sequence might instantiate. Before Nelly can be misled by the kind of deceptive romance that helps to explain Bella Royston's suicide in Gissing's The Odd Women (1894), for instance, she would need to be practiced in the experiential art of narrative whereby decisions and actions are both meaningfully consequential and susceptible to her own influence as a protagonist in life. The ingrained presentism that Harkness constructs in Nelly, who thinks in pictures and does not foresee her own future, moves the target of concern away from particular works (such as those that alarm Wilkie Collins) and implicates a more basic practice with any kind of narrative as the foundation from which foresight, agency, and individual personality emerge. In its absence, Harkness suggests that a working-class subjectivity cannot meet the demands and expectations of late-Victorian realism, and the readers who look for it in a character like Nelly might sooner identify with Arthur's class-bound preference for art over life.

Familiarity with the formula of the novel, moreover, has since A City Girl’s publication led readers to conclude that the story ends happily in Nelly and George's marriage. Shortly after the baby's funeral George comes to Nelly's lodgings and tells her that he has accepted a new position in the country, as a caretaker to a kind of writer's commune. There is work for two caretakers, he tells her: they should marry and move there together. But a close look at the last lines of the novel reveals that the offer of marriage is not actually resolved.

On the basis of this conversational impasse, many readers of A City Girl have projected a satisfying closure. For John Goode, “a very conventional ending is completed – it has a ‘happy’ (individual) ending” (58); John Sutherland airily resolves that “at the end of the novel, George takes her back and makes an honest woman of her” (126); Gerd Bjorhovde and Sally Ledger respectively claim that “Nelly is starting out a new life with her old sweetheart, George” and “her situation is finally ameliorated . . . [by her move] to a rural idyll” (75; 48).Footnote ⁸ A City Girl’s earliest reviewers came to similarly sanguine conclusions. In the Glasgow Herald we read that “as soon as the baby is dead [Nelly's] own proper sweetheart comes and offers to forgive and forget, and asks her to marry him at once. This she does, and presumably lives happily – and virtuously – ever after” (“Novels and Stories” 10); in Time: “Nelly eventually marries an earlier lover, who forgives her transgression, and the story ends happily enough” (“Critical Notices” 638); and in the Athenaeum, after comparing “John Law's” models to “Daudet and Tourguénief. . .rather than Zola,” the reviewer speculates that neither “of those great writers would have contrived so happy an ending for what threatened to be a tragedy” (“Novels of the Week” 573).

The willingness of two very different generations of readers and critics to celebrate George and Nelly's unwritten marriage has more to do with the formula of the marriage plot novel than with Harkness's actual and elliptical language. True to form, Nelly first dodges George's proposal (“I ain't worth it!”) and then fantasizes about life in the country with her dead child; she neither answers the question nor remarks upon her future at all. George has the momentum of plan-making behind him (“I'll come tomorrow evening and we'll talk about the wedding”) but his — and the novels’— last words at the very least complicate a foregone conclusion in marriage, and, more forcefully, preempt its routinely claimed “happiness.” Throughout A City Girl his rebuttal to “puzzling” situations is this phrase, “I wish I'd never left the Service.” Its repetition and topical discordance with the problems at hand express George's generalized frustration, his nagging sense that the Service would have solved the mysteries of life for him, and, closer to my own purposes, his bungled participation in narrative movement and coherence. Backward looking, fully speculative, unelaborated upon and never developed, George's wish is unattached to his present or his future.

That Nelly and George's suggestive but atonal conversation ends A City Girl better accords with the episodic thinking we have seen in Nelly all along than with the conventional resolution of the Victorian marriage plot novel. The absence of the commenting narrator in this scene suggests that her guidance has served its purpose, or disintegrated; like the reader must do, the narrator has given up trying to mold Nelly's story into a meaningful narrative arc. To do so, the novel suggests, would be a middle-class imposition on the representation of a working-class consciousness. Perhaps anticipating the Modernists who followed her, Harkness's portrait of Nelly is less a political or feminist evasion, as so many have argued, and more an original, proto-modern juxtaposition of a stop-frame mind in a discursive form.

In its critical history A City Girl has been held to standards of historical accuracy (Engels), and has fallen short, and held to literary standards that value introspection, agency, and closure (see most contemporary discussions of A City Girl), and here too it has fallen short. It is my purpose here to read Nelly's narrative silences and stasis as Harkness's interpretation of a pictorial, non-literary imagination, and so to notice the lack of narrative influence in the novel more broadly: the absence of reading for pleasure, of books in tenants’ rooms or conversations, and of narrative structure as a modality for observation or projection in characters including Nelly and George, especially as they contrast to the self-consciously literary Arthur and his penchant for writing himself into naturalist scenarios. The novel's estrangement from the expectations of both history and fiction can, at the very least, suggest that political critique is alive and well in A City Girl as a subjective portrait of working-class intellectual impoverishment.