* * *

These lines, taken from the poem “Sweet Home,” were published by Eliza Cook (1818–89) in Once a Week in 1867. Accompanied by Joseph Swain's engraving (Figure 4), the poem presents an idealized portrait of a middle-class family in the nineteenth century. The home is a “blissful, holy place” where “Manhood, Infancy, and Age” can find their “love and peace” as well as “joy and grace.” Of particular interest is that Swain places the female figures – grandmother, mother with a child on her lap, and daughter – at the center of the engraving: their bodies and faces are clearly sketched, whereas father and son, the only two male figures in the engraving, merely show half their faces with their backs turned to the reader. Overall, the poem itself contains some of the striking echoes of the dominant ideology of home at the time. The scene of the family gathered around the hearth illuminates the all-embracing concept of domesticity – coziness, comfort, and intimacy.

Figure 4.

Eliza Cook, “Sweet Home,” Once a Week 3.54 (12 Jan. 1867): 43. British Periodicals. Images published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

The sentiments of domesticity are further projected into Cook's penny weekly Eliza Cook's Journal. In a poem printed in the July 1849 issue of the Journal, entitled “Loved at Home,” Henry Frank Lott assumes the persona of a poor working man to tell his reader that he feels blessed at home despite his “daily toil.” The poem begins: “I never had a ten-pound note, I care not who may know, / Nor golden brooch, nor silver chain, nor ought that's worn for show; / I've earned each meal I've had for years by honest daily toil, / Yet few have had a merrier heart or worn a gladder smile.” The poor working man then recounts how he enjoys the pleasures of domestic comfort when returning home to see his mother and sisters under the “humble roof”: “But I have had a blessed home, beneath whose humble roof / A mother's nightly prayers for me were breathed without reproof; / And where my sisters’ clustering love grew round my friendly stem, / And looked into mine eyes with hope as I looked joy to them” (168). With these words the reader is introduced to an important aspect of working-class family values as well as the ideological inscription of female presence at home. Women, the source of love and blessing, are seen as the pivot of family existence. This surely invites further reflection: what role did women play in Victorian working-class culture, especially in the 1840s and 1850s?

In response to the question, this essay will consider how Eliza Cook shares an interest in promoting the ideal of domesticity by inscribing working-class women as the center of the home in her penny weekly Eliza Cook's Journal. Attention will also be paid to how women workers’ employment outside the home becomes the source of current conflict. In order to investigate these concerns, it is essential to attend to Cook's professional and career development in the first place. Cook, understood mostly as a working-class woman poet, frequently contributed her pieces of writing to periodicals, for instance, the Weekly Dispatch, the Literary Gazette, Metropolitan Magazine, the New Monthly, the London Journal, and Reynolds's Miscellany. She had published several volumes of poetry such as Lays of a Wild Harp (1835), Melaia, and Other Poems (1838), Poems, Second Series (1845), and New Echoes and Other Poems (1864), attracting readers of all classes. Her humble origin made her one of the Victorian successors to the eighteenth-century laboring-class women poets, the so-called “Muses of Resistance,” within the social-textual context of gender and class. She is, as one might say, “an articulate and sensitive poet of working-class life” (Robinson 229), who shows compassion and sympathy towards the disadvantaged segments of Victorian society. Her achievements were neatly summed up in the October 1871 Illustrated Review: “her name is as popular in America, India, and Australia, as it is in the manufacturing and industrial districts of England” (“Miss Eliza Cook” 225).

In addition to her poetic writing, Cook also undertook the editorship of Eliza Cook's Journal from 1849 to 1854, which seemed “unusual” when it was customary for women poets to publish their works in periodicals.Footnote ¹ To Samuel Smiles, a Scottish writer and social reformer as well as a frequent contributor to Eliza Cook's Journal, Cook remarked that the publication of the penny weekly was a signal of her independence: she found “no reason why a woman should not possess sufficient brains to be allowed to try her luck in the world with kindly help as well as these ‘almighty Lords’” (Tyrrell 203; Brake and Demoor, eds. 198). In all probability the launch of the Journal marked Cook's involvement in the predominantly male publishing industry in the burgeoning printing culture of the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ² The Journal, characterized by “utility and amusement” (Cook, “A Word” 1) was primarily targeted at the artisan, the lower middle classes and women readers (Brake and Demoor, eds. 198; Robinson 246). It enjoyed sales of between 50,000 and 60,000 copies through its first year, far greater than Charles Dickens's Household Words (1850-59) with a circulation of about 40,000 (Altick 394). The Journal, a mixture of stories, poetry, and general interest articles that were usually unsigned, frequently brought larger social and cultural issues into the public eye. Each issue published articles on history, travel, and literature, topics that acceded to the public's sensitivities. Other themes covered were education, sanitation, and the conditions of working-class people. Along with Howitt's Journal, the People's Journal, and the Family Economist, Eliza Cook's Journal exemplifies “a cultural, philosophical, literary, and possibly even a political and ideological alliance between progressive elements within bourgeois culture and intellectually ambitious sections of the artisan class” (Maidment, Reading 108). It was one of “a small group of essentially literary magazines with interests in the intellectual and social progress of ‘the people,’ and in humanitarian and progressive causes” (Maidment, “Magazines” 83). The social and cultural significance of Eliza Cook's Journal thus deserves more attention than it has yet received.Footnote ³

It can be assumed that Cook, with her enthusiasm for journalism, takes on the role of a social critic to expose the ills of an industrial society.Footnote ⁴ Her journal not only provides glimpses of the everyday lives of the laboring poor but gives voice to their experiences, ideas, and values. As such, she can be viewed as a social commentator who feels a genuine indignation at the condition of life which she sees around her. Laboring women's working environments and their social status, in particular, allow Cook to integrate her own socio-political philosophy into the pursuit of her professional editorship and tactically engage in the issue concerning female employment and cheap labor of the day. Although the topic of female labor is barely touched on in Cook's poetic writing, there remains considerable debate over women workers in her journal.Footnote ⁵ Typical examples are “Lucy Dean: the Noble Needlewoman” (1850) and “The Seamstress” (1850) which focus specifically on the harsh condition of impoverished seamstresses in the labor force. To a certain extent, Cook's politics about women are progressive.Footnote ⁶ Many pages of her journal are filled with revelations of the Woman Question in relation to women's rights, properties, and marriage laws.Footnote ⁷ However, when addressing the domestic life of working-class women in her journal, she seems to cling to the ideology of separate spheres. Contributions to her journal frequently appropriate the middle–class ideology of domesticity, illuminating the notion of respectability as well as the twin concepts of breadwinning for men and homemaking for women among the working classes. They also conform to the rhetoric of chartist domesticity, which is preoccupied with womanly virtue and female fulfillment within the private sphere of home. The Journal in this sense advocates the ideology of domesticity “with a curious blend of radicalism and conservatism” (Nestor 94). Like what domestic manuals, conduct books and advice literature instruct middle-class women to do at home, Cook's journal, with a middle-class imposition, functions as a guide to all aspects of running a household for working-class women.

By directing attention to Eliza Cook's Journal, this essay makes three points about working-class women in the Victorian cultural context. First, it attempts to investigate the part played by the Journal in the discursive formation of domestic ideology and in the construction of working-class women's identity. It is argued that Eliza Cook's Journal plays a vital role in constructing a mechanism for social discourse, serving both to generate and to contest ideological formations of working-class womanhood through the lens of the periodical press. The Journal provides a rich context for understanding how women of the laboring poor occupy a crucial and contested position in gender and social hierarchies, helping us to conceptualize their roles in relation to home and work. Second, the essay seeks to explore the image of working-class women by looking at two key aspects: domestic education and industrial arts. Domestic education is intended to ensure that working-class women know their “proper” place in society. It is instrumental in defining their role as the disseminator of domestic values, enhancing their capacities for maternal feeling and strengthening family relations. Industrial training is utilized as an art to offer working-class women routes to respectability, self-improvement, and moral standards. Third, the essay intends to discuss how the public forum of the Journal promotes a domestic model of working-class wife and establishes a point of contact between “hands” and housewifery skills. Improved housewifery, characterized by a woman's “clever hands,” increases the prosperity of working-class households and gives moral authority to the primacy of family values. It is central to the development of a working-class version of domesticity in which a wife invests her time in the unpaid work of household management and childcare. All in all, the three points outlined above are inextricably linked to a discussion of the image of a domesticated working-class woman who is judged by her closeness to the middle-class ideal of domesticity.

On these grounds, we can read Eliza Cook's Journal as an engagement with the debate surrounding working-class women in the 1840s and 1850s, a period of time when the cult of domesticity took hold of the Victorian imagination and when female employment stood at the vortex of some of the most urgent issues of the period.Footnote ⁸ I argue that in common with many nineteenth-century authors, Cook uses the magazine forum as a repository of social conscience to manipulate the notion of domesticity as “a potent rhetorical weapon,” to borrow Anna Clark's terms (The Struggle 178). I also contend that Cook's intent is not only to educate the working-class readers through her journal that could be read and shared in a family circle but to underline the domestic identity of women workers within the male-dominated working-class culture. In short, the image of the domestic woman pervades the context of Cook's journal, opening up a number of possibilities in discussing the ways in which women's part functions to reinforce and perpetuate certain Victorian values in working-class culture. It is within the larger context of home, family, and Victorian gender relations that the study of the domestic image of working-class women in Eliza Cook's Journal can be exploited to the best advantage.

Domestic Education and Industrial Arts

Domesticity is an important manifestation of Victorian social conscience. The matricentric “cult of domesticity,” pre-eminently a bourgeois ideology, promoted the view of the home-centered, family oriented woman for the maintenance of the private sphere of home.Footnote ⁹ Very often the image of the domestic woman was conjured up as a middle-class ideal to facilitate a well-regulated family. Middle-class women were not expected to work for a living, whereas working-class women had to participate in labor outside the home for a family wage due to their husbands’ low earnings or unemployment. The notion of waged work posed a problem for married women since they were unable to fulfill their wifely responsibilities in managing the private sphere. Consequently, a number of married women workers found it difficult to balance their work and home lives.Footnote ¹⁰

Female labor was a constant source of concern and debate in the 1840s and 1850s, during which several converging factors influenced the social role of women at the lower end of the social spectrum, including the increase of women working outside their homes, the debates over Chartism, the Ten Hours Bill, and women's concern with workers’ rights.Footnote ¹¹ Female labor outside the patriarchal home, in particular, encompassed the idea of a separation between family life and paid work. It also implied the loss of female craft labor in association with the old custom of family employment. Previously, married women, together with other household members, could work at home within the domestic system of cottage industry. They devoted themselves to traditional craft skills, textile manufacturing, for example. Instead of breaking the family system, small and home-based cottage industry allowed working-class women to contribute to the family economy and create a close family bond at the same time. With the advent of industrialization, however, cottage industries began to decline, which forced many women out of the home to engage themselves in the labor market.

Women's work outside the home, on the other hand, directs our attention to the crisis in gender roles when the male breadwinner was increasingly embraced as an ideal in the mid-nineteenth century. Within the patriarchal tradition, the male head of the household was responsible for earning an income sufficient to support the entire family without the wage labor of his wife and children. Women's industrial labor thus became a source of anxiety and self-doubt for men because it meant a husband's failure to be the primary income provider. Fears for the breakdown of the male breadwinner model appeared as women's waged work began to challenge the idea of working class respectability.Footnote ¹² It was commonplace for people to associate female labor from factories with the breakdown of family life or degradation of femininity at a time when the idea about “keeping a wife at home” was pervasive. The image of degraded women workers was disruptive and therefore it prompted many to participate in the public scrutiny of domestic and moral virtue by arguing that women should be returned to the home. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), for example, Friedrich Engels deplored the disintegration of family life brought about by married female operatives’ factory work beyond the household: “The employment of the wife dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralizing consequences for parents as well as children” (153). To bring this mater of public concern into a sharper focus, Engels cited Dr. Hawkins's report: “The girls. . .have neither means, time, nor opportunity to learn the ordinary duties of household life. . .the dwelling of the mill-hands is too often no home but a cellar, which contains no cooking or washing utensils, no sewing or mending materials, nothing which makes life agreeable and civilized, or the domestic hearth attractive” (157). Female labor corrupts and eliminates domestic stability in some ways. Engel's observations also displayed that ignorance of domestic work such as knitting, sewing, cooking, washing, and child care discouraged the female operative from keeping her house. From a domestically oriented perspective, he proclaimed:

Engels was not alone in launching attacks on female labor that shattered women's domestic and maternal potentialities. Before him, Ralph Grindrod, the author of The Wrongs of Our Youth (1843), had called on his reader to bear the fact in mind that factory girls’ unawareness of domesticity was “the one great and universally prevailing cause of distress and crime among the working classes” (qtd. in Clark, “The Rhetoric” 83). The Chartists in turn showed antipathy toward married women's factory work, seeing female employment outside the home as the cause of evils. They, on the one hand, blamed domestic disorder and family unhappiness on those women workers who had to earn a family wage by working for twelve to fourteen hours a day, and on the other, accused factory work of making “girls insubordinate, selfish, and immoral” because “it deprived working men of ‘virtuous wives’ skilled in housewifery.” (Clark, The Struggle 237) The Chartists in general tended to defend working-class family values by adhering to the ideology of domesticity. The Northern Star, a Chartist newspaper, is one illustration of this. An article of 1843, “The Coal Kings and Their Law-Breakings,” attested to male views of female labor as “degrading and debasing. . .because of its cheapness” and “competition with the labor of the males.” Readers were advised to “Remove the females; keep them at home to look after their families; decrease their pressure on the labor market. . .” (4). By appealing to the notion of domesticity, the Northern Star evoked the general public's guilt about women's factory employment.

What also becomes clear is that the mid-Victorian period witnessed the popularity of domestic education that aimed to make women know their “place” in society and “redefine their status as women within the household” (Bourke 184–85). Within the patriarchal and family ideologies, a majority of working-class women sought self-improvement through domestic education – they, according to Dorothy Thompson, “accepted an image of themselves which involved both home-centeredness and inferiority” (100). Charles Dickens's speech “On Learners and Workers,” delivered at the annual meeting of the Institutional Association of Lancashire and Cheshire in 1858, provides a justification for ideological constructions of working-class women. As Dickens put it, “the women of Preston in particular, have so honorably distinguished themselves, and shown in their examination papers such an admirable knowledge of the science of household management and household economy. . .” (Purvis 144). By all accounts, women were expected to be “proper feminine” so as to negotiate the demands of domesticity (Pykett 12).

Given this, it is not surprising that the public uproar over the relationship between female labor and family life in the Victorian period revealed general anxieties about the maintenance of separate spheres within working-class families. The social and cultural status of the woman worker provoked widespread public controversy in domestic ideology, which, according to Patricia E. Johnson, was “more subversive of mid-Victorian values and more dangerous to class and gender ideologies than either the representation of prostitution or working-class male radicalism” (6). To male operatives, for instance, women's factory work was “an inversion of the order of nature and of Providence – a return to a state of barbarism, in which the woman does the work, while the man looks idly on” (qtd. in Pinchbeck 200). Elizabeth Gaskell's references to the female mill worker's lack of domestic knowledge in Mary Barton (1848) illustrate exactly this contemporary issue. In a conversation with Mary Barton, Mrs. Wilson makes herself clear that she marries George Wilson with no prior knowledge of housekeeping – her factory work has deprived her of domestic training, and she is “anxious” to make her husband comfortable at home. To Mary, she says: “there never was such a born goose at house-keeping as I were; and yet he married me! I had been in a factory sin’ five years old a'most, and I knew nought about cleaning, or cooking, let alone washing and such-like work” (138-39; ch. 10). To some extent, Gaskell's portrayal of Mrs. Wilson's inability to perform her duty as an ideal wife helps us place women's deficiency in domestic experience at the very center of Victorian working-class culture.

In keeping with social issues of the day, Eliza Cook's Journal features several articles concerning how factory work deprives young women of the opportunity to learn domestic skills, rendering them unfit for family life. These articles are characterized by a consistency in tone, which is didactic and serious notwithstanding Cook's declaration on her editorial policy in her prefatory statement “A Word to My Readers.”Footnote ¹³ We may consider “Industrial Schools for Young Women,” an article published in Eliza Cook's Journal (1849), in which Samuel Smiles makes efforts to instill domestic values in his readers by adopting a certain belief in hearth and home.Footnote ¹⁴ Smiles employs the first person plural voice “we” to raise the collective consciousness of readers at the very start, arguing for the importance of domestic education to growing young women in the manufacturing towns and rural districts. In the opening address he states,

Smiles then calls on his readers to acknowledge women's enshrined location in the domestic sphere, predisposing them to find arguments about home education and domestic training – “the best part of the education of every human being is the education of home, and the training which is received at the domestic hearth.” He makes the point that the young woman “has received no education, no training in household management; can scarcely mend her own clothes, knows nothing of household economy, has not learnt how to prepare food; in short, is altogether a stranger to the duties and functions of home.” To Smiles himself, training in household management is necessary because it is a remedy for “this crying evil” (81), an evil following the employment of young women workers after marriage. This invariably anticipates the argument revealed in the 1864 British Mother's Magazine: “the want of domesticity among women – of the working classes especially – is a great source of most of the ‘social evils’ which are as a plague spot upon the nation at the present time” (qtd. in Boardman, “The Ideology” 155).

For the most part, the ignorance of domestic education and lack of womanly virtue are thought to jeopardize women's functions as wives and mothers, turning the home into a place of “Waste, thriftlessness, dirt, unhealthiness” (81). Women's participation in labor makes them ill-fitted to teach their children, even forcing their husbands to seek comfort in the public house. As Smiles comments,

This concise statement encapsulates much that is telling about Victorian working-class families generally. It is informed by a concern with the position of domestic women and the recognition of the conflict between work and family: female employment usually destroys women's capacities for maternal feeling and weakens family relations. The importance of keeping working-class women confined to the domestic sphere thereby creates a forum for Smiles to call for the establishment of female industrial schools. The purpose is to equip young women with intellectual and domestic skills and help define their role as the dissemination of domestic values: “Reading, writing, and general information, are alternated with knitting, sewing, instruction in cookery, domestic management, and the ways of making a home comfortable” (82). Taken together, Smiles uses the doctrine of separate spheres to dictate that home is a woman's place. He belittles women's waged labor so as to assign them to their proper role in the domestic sphere.

Closely related to this emphasis is the ideal of femininity, of family and domesticity revealed in Smiles's “Employment of Young Women”Footnote ¹⁵ despite the fact that he is in favor of female employment, an index of women's self-independence and self-improvement.Footnote ¹⁶ Alongside the preoccupation with the ideal home, the article presents woman as an essential locus of production and moral authority for the entire society, which underpins much of Victorian thought: “the proper sphere of woman is the Home – that her highest duty is to minister to the domestic well-being there – that, as the nurse and moral teacher of youth, the refiner and comforter of man, the mother, the wife, and the housekeeper. . ..” The domestic environment is the primal scene within which different female identity is defined and developed. Nevertheless, “this is but a beautiful theory. . .very far from being realized in practice” if woman, like man, continues to “work for her bread, and hire herself out to labor at day's wages.” Smiles continues to provide an interesting overview of young women in England, America and France. In his words, women in America and France are better educated and have a more advanced social position than those in England. English women's education is shockingly inadequate in that “almost one-half of all the women who are married in England yearly, cannot write their own names.” Smiles extends this critique and suggests that English women workers’ lack of domestic training hinders them from being more advantageous than their French and American counterparts – “Employed in the factory, they learn nothing of the arts of domestic life” (145). Overtly, Smiles's conception of the domesticated working-class woman is much affected by the dominant ideology of separate spheres, the binary opposition between breadwinning men and homemaking women.

The issue of female domestic education is continued in “Female Industrial Schools,” an article appearing in the 1851 Eliza Cook's Journal. Using the plural “we,” the anonymous author informs the reader that “attention is being directed to the improvement of the industrial education of young women.” Readers are then invited to scrutinize how young factory women's ignorance of “household industry” brings about familial discontent and domestic disorder in their marital life, as well as how husbands seek warmth and comfort in the public houses due to their wives’ failure to take on marital obligations. As the author observes,

Citing Joseph Corbett's testimony in 1840, the author further shows how difficult it is for a working-class woman to manage the duel demands of waged labor and family responsibilities because of her insufficient knowledge of domestic skills. Corbett, a Birmingham operative, recalls his childhood memories before the Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Mines and Manufactures. Taking his mother as an example, Corbett states that she is a virtuous and industrious manufactory worker, “an excellent match for a working-man.” But when she becomes a mother of eleven, she fails to take on the obligations of being a mistress of the household. The reason behind it is that his mother is “lamentably deficient in domestic knowledge”; that is, “how to make the home and the fireside to possess a charm for her husband and children.” Domestic unhappiness occurs as a result of “the entire and perfect absence of all training and instruction to [his] mother” – “She knew not the value of cherishing in my father's mind a love of domestic objects” (203) that build up a family.

By manipulating the ideology of domesticity for its own end, Corbett goes on to describe how his father is annoyed by his mother's housework at night, which leads him to seek comfort in an alehouse:

Corbett sees it a must to offer laboring young women with improved industrial training on the grounds that “the instruction of the females in the work of a house, in teaching them to produce cheerfulness and comfort at the fireside, would prevent a great amount of misery and crime.” He thinks that if a woman is equipped with the power to make home cheerful and comfortable, then “There would be fewer drunken husbands and disobedient children” (204). Surely, through Corbett's statement, the “Female Industrial Schools” article evokes the image of domestic women. More precisely, it enhances our understanding of how domestic tasks help define working-class women's scope and space and also emphasizes the need for them to contribute to family maintenance and keep house for men.

The idea of domestic instruction for women is reiterated in a further article of February 1854, entitled “Education for Housekeeping.” As in “Industrial Schools for Young Women” and “Female Industrial Schools,” the anonymous contributor uses the editorial “we” to share the widespread Victorian belief in the necessity of English girls’ instructions at industrial schools: “We have long been trying, in our own humble way, to enforce the necessity of attention to these small things in the columns of this Journal; and we have published many articles on the uses of common air, on cleanliness and ventilation, on removal of dirt from within doors and without. . .” (247-48). To manage a household, as the author asserts, English girls must know how to perform their domestic duties such as “The cooking of a potatoe, the baking of a loaf, the mending of a shirt, the darning of a pair of stockings, the making of a bed, the scrubbing of a floor, the washing and dressing of a baby” – the so-called “all matters of no great moment” (247). By attending industrial schools, English girls would benefit from the “[i]nstructions on domestic economy, in laundry-work, needlework, cookery” and create domestic harmony accordingly. In doing so, their husbands would not “seek the dangerous comforts and excitements of the publichouse; and quite a new face would soon be put upon the social condition of the working people of England” (248). To be sure, “Education of Housekeeping” reveals much about the stereotypical image of the domestic woman, offering detailed advice on every aspect of household management and industrial skills.

The push for domestic education for working-class women is also supported by “Homes and Housewives,” an article of 1854, which not only deals with household management issues but covers issues of women workers’ inabilities to read or write. It carries a social commentary on the “lowest educational condition” of female operatives, “a very lamentable and disgraceful state of things,” in the factory districts of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and Staffordshire. As the author points out, forty-eight per cent of the women of England could not write their names in 1841. In 1851 the proportion was reduced by three per cent only – “of the 154,206 women married in England in the year 1851, not fewer than 69,812 signed their names with marks!” It is argued that a woman with “so imperfect a training in the arts of making a home happy” would create “the frightful amount of domestic unhappiness” – “there is very little of order, comfort, or economy to be found within her household.” Girls, like their mothers, are also deprived “of all opportunities for domestic training, grow up into women with scarcely an idea of cookery, needlework, washing, or even the most ordinary occupations of the housewife” (404). Through the introduction of the Rev. Mr. De Rienzi's speech delivered before the committee of last session on Criminal and Destitute Children, the author also illuminates how women's imperfect domestic education brings about crime, drunkenness, and profligacy. Husbands are driven to “the grosser pleasures of the public-houses” (405) due to their wives’ failure to make their homes attractive and comfortable. The “miserable education and domestic training” of working-class women thereby constitute “one important cause of the low condition” of their homes (404). Together with the above-mentioned articles like “Industrial Schools for Young Women,” “Female Industrial Schools,” and “Education for Housekeeping,” “Homes and Housewives” gives a nod to the importance of working-class womanhood embedded in femininity and domesticity, encouraging the retreat of women from the workplace back into the home. While it praises the efforts of industrial schools that aim to provide women with necessary training for playing a productive role in the private realm, the article, nonetheless, limits women's sphere of influence to home and family when viewed through a feminist lens.

Eliza Cook's Journal, as we have seen, envisages the prospect of working-class women advancing their own position through home education and domestic training. The education of women in industrial skills is promoted as a means of “leveling up,” in hopes that they can perform homemaking duties and avoid familial discontent as a result. In addressing the importance of domestic skills in her journal, Cook evokes the image of domesticated working-class women who are defined through the distance from the public sphere of work.

“Clever Hands” and Housewifery Skills

It may well be argued that domestic education is an attempt made by the middle class to publicize the ideology of domesticity among the working classes. Working-class women subsequently take on the role of agents to transport middle-class values into their homes (Poovey 125). By virtue of the different roles they play in society, men assume the role of breadwinner and women assume the role of housewife or homemaker. In these assumed roles, the function of a working-class husband is to provide economic support for the family, while his wife's primary task is to tend the hearth and raise the children. In other words, a wife is defined and judged according to the attributes of true womanhood, which “could be divided into four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman” (Welter 152). To retain the gender distinction, several contributions to Eliza Cook's Journal appear to argue in favor of the reading public that construct the image of an ideal domestic woman as someone who is aware of her place in the household and knows how to practice her housewifery skills. They grapple with many fundamental issues of housewifery and supply an ideological complication alongside the concept of domesticity, especially a working-class version of domesticity. A salient example is “Homes and Housewives,” an article mentioned earlier, which assures the reader of the natural extension of women's proper work in the home. The article articulates a clear understanding of how women's status is validated within the ideology of separate spheres. The author announces to the reader that

Typical is the home that takes on ideological significance as the bulwark of social and cultural solidarity. It is a proper place for “a well-ordered, industrious, and moderately-educated woman” to fulfill her maternal and wifely duties. As the article attests,

The author is of the opinion that “the clever hands of a woman are worth more than all her bright glances.” When men fall in love, they are attracted by their beloved ones’ “bright glances,” for instance, “the glance of a bright eye. . .a bit of a coquetry. . .a pair of cherry cheeks. . .a handsome figure.” Not until men discover their homes are “stupid and cheerless” do they realize the function of women's “hands” that add an important dimension to their housewifery skills. The author goes on to describe: “If the substantial element of physical comfort be absent from the home, it soon becomes hateful, the wife, notwithstanding all her good looks, is neglected, and the public-house separates those whom the law has joined.” In consequence, women are encouraged to make use of their “clever hands” to assist in the household and please their husbands: “[s]latternly wives make bad husbands, and often, too, bad husbands help to make wives more slatternly.” With this statement, the author makes a strong claim against those ignorant women who are unable to make their husbands comfortable at home, arguing for the necessity of domestic industrial training as a way to enhance women's “future sphere as wives, mothers, and housewives” (405).

Again, Gaskell's Mary Barton makes a timely contribution to the debates surrounding working-class women, housekeeping and domesticity. In an exchange with Mrs. Wilson and Alice Wilson, Mary Barton reveals that her father John Barton “does not like girls to work in factories.” To this, Mrs. Wilson responds with her gendered notion of work and place, offering an explication of why factory work takes a married woman away from her proper sphere, her home, and even her husband:

Mrs. Wilson then hopes Prince Albert can “make a law again poor folks’ wives working in factories” as waged labor prevents the wives from performing their duties as housekeepers or homemakers:

By questioning Queen Victoria's wifely role and domestic duties, Mrs. Wilson acknowledges the chronic problems of female labor that plague working-class culture at the time.Footnote ¹⁷

In an attempt to cast feminine virtues and familial responsibilities within Victorian journalistic discourse, “Home Power” (1849) gives a fuller explanation of housewifery in Eliza Cook's Journal. The article upholds the idea that home, “the crystal of society,” is the place where the wife acts as the “chief director” of “home power” (129), “that of household economy, management, and cleanliness” (130), for example. The implication is that the husband can benefit from “a judicious and well-managing wife,” an exemplar of the values of the cult of domesticity:

Such an assumption certainly encourages working-class women to focus their attention on domestic practices as household economy is enhanced by a wife's devotion to household affairs exclusively. The author goes further to make this point:

As the above quote indicates, the word “dirt,” the cause of disorder and moral poison of youth, is meant to increase feelings of shame and guilt among working-class women. Domestic cleanliness reflects the intimate relationship between housekeeping and moral worth. As Deborah Simonton neatly sums up, cleanliness had served as an important index of the distinction between the better-off and the poor as well as bourgeois and laborers by 1800. John Wesley's “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” one of the most familiar proverbs of every-day life, typifies exactly the idea of keeping a neat and clean household. Cleanliness, whether it was “a classed notion” or a gendered notion of “female chastity and purity,” helped to clarify the meaning of female domesticity in the nineteenth century (93).

In certain instances, the conceptual ideas of cleanliness and order are instrumental in the discussion of the theory and practice of household management. Eliza Cook's Journal expounds this view most directly in the 1852 article “Comfort at Home”: “The home must be made gay and bright – reflecting the taste, order, economy, and domestic virtues of the good housewife” (159). In a sense, working-class women are expected to build a tidy and pleasant home, rather than tear it down with their own hands. Cleaning and maintaining a household, an indicator of “the truest economy,” is a woman's main occupation:

Being similar to what we have noticed in “Homes and Housewives,” the preceding passage fosters the guilt of an untidy, slovenly and dirty house in sharp contrast to a warm and cozy living space. Only by making “the house snug, clean, and tidy” can the poor man's wife experience a sense of well-being closely bound up with their knowledge of housekeeping and household economy. A married woman's duty toward the home, so to speak, is to secure its order and comfort. This is reminiscent of what the “old maid” makes explicit in “Hints for Wives” (1853) – the wife “must renew the treadmill task of yesterday” after her husband goes to work. During her husband's absence, she “must wash the same faces, make the same beds, sweep the same rooms. . .must find occasional moments to ‘stitch – stitch – stitch’ the innumerable garments needed in a family” (400).

William Lovett's 1853 book Social and Political Morality illustrates this point very well. In a chapter on “Duties of Husbands and Wives to Each Other,” Lovett asserts that the meaning of wifehood becomes more solidified within a domestic view of woman. As the Chartist leader declares, “Certainly no other place affords such cheerful and refreshing influences to gratify the mind and console the heart of man, tired of his daily toil, the cares and routines of business, as a clean and comfortable home.” The husband is in need of “a neatly attired wife, whose eyes welcome his approach, and whose cheerful voice and conversation speak gladly to his soul.” Lovett continues: “To render a home thus attractive is chiefly the wife's duty. If, however, instead of industriously dispatching her household duties in proper time to be ready for her husband's coming, she foolishly wastes it in gossiping and gadding, her home will soon cease to be cheerful, and, in his eyes, will lose much of its charms” (91). Lovett's sentimental ideal demonstrates that a Victorian wife's position is inextricably linked to her domestic work, female presence and managerial function.

The British Workman, an illustrated magazine aimed at the working-class readership, echoes this judgment. In a piece entitled “Neatness and Cleanliness” (1857) the writer makes a comparison between two working-class houses after visiting them. The writer recollects that the house of a superior workman was “convenient” and “roomy,” yet “[e]verything was out of order” – “the chairs and tables looked as if they had never been well rubbed since they were bought; the floor, as if it had not been cleaned for a week at the least. The children were very dirty, ragged, and noisy.. . . The woman herself was a pleasant, gentle-looking person, but dirty and untidy in the extreme.” The writer felt very sorry for the workman's wife because she was unable to “practice neatness, order, and cleanliness” at home, which in part resulted in her husband's drunkenness. By contrast, another house in the same row was “clean and bright” because of the wife's “clever hands” – “there was throughout an air of great comfort and neatness.” Such “a pleasant sight” owed much to efforts of the wife, a successful domestic manager who “was clean and tidy in her dress, and looked good humored and cheerful” (119). In these terms, the “Neatness and Cleanliness” article views full-time housewifery as an ideal, and one which is bound up with domestic production in highly positive terms. “Hints for the Wives of Working Men” is another article published in the British Workman in 1857 that advocates the idea of housewifery among working-class women so as to solve the problem of drunken husbands. The author communicates to its reader that “when a man has been working hard for his family, it is certainly the wife's duty to do all she can to make his home comfortable, and to spend the money thus hardly earned, as carefully and judiciously as possible” (119). Equally revealing is “Family Secrets; or, the Two Wives and the Two Homes,” a diptych printed in the October 1857 issue of the British Workman, which vividly presents a sharp contrast between two wives and two homes (Figure 5). The caption reads “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” inviting the reader to draw an analogy between familial chaos/discomfort on the left side of the diptych and domestic order/harmony on the right. The diptych, with its contrasting scenes, provides a valuable context for understanding the ideological inscription of the full-time investment of the housewife's labor in the home. Working-class women are advised to invest more time in domestic production so that they can improve the living standards of their families.

Figure 5.

“Family Secrets; or, the Two Wives and the Two Homes,” British Workman (1 Oct. 1857): 136. Internet Archive.

With this in mind, it is worth looking at the connection between domestic unhappiness and drunken husbands that remains a central signifier in the discussion of male tyranny and wife beating in marriage. Consider, for example, “Treatment of Women,” an anonymous article appearing in Eliza Cook's Journal in 1851, which presents the ill-treatment of women in a critical light:

By voicing a trenchant critique of wife-beating and wife-selling, the article calls attention to the problem of domestic misery and male violence within the private sphere of home.

The peculiar status of drunken husbands plays a crucial role in the “everyday story” of wife-abuse and creates a broad arena for debate in Victorian print culture. The wife beater Daniel Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), the black eye of the brick maker's wife in Bleak House (1852–53), and Michael Henchard's selling of his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) are remarkable examples of marital violence in the working-class families.Footnote ¹⁸ Equally important is the comic weekly magazine Punch, which participates in the discussion of wife-assault penalties in “What May be Bought for Five Pounds!” (1848):

In “Penal Dancing for the Protection of Women” (1853), Punch cites the cases of three brutal husbands – two tailors and one collier – to ridicule “the existence of a downright mania for wife-beating” (236) among the working classes. A similar note is struck in “The Servant's Warning,” a piece printed in the 1857 Punch, in which a female servant accuses her cruel husband of wife-beating: “I am married to a wretch who beats and kicks me like a brute, / So that I'm all over bruises on my skin from head to foot. / Both my eyes is black, you see, my nose is flattened to my face. / Oh, that I was still a servant, and had never left my place!” (23). Within the context of journalism, the public visibility of spousal assault is suggestive of the complex role of working-class women in Victorian culture that celebrates the values of male authority and female loyalty.

T. Holme's “The Wife's Lament,” another short piece published in the British Workman, rings with sentiments similar to those found in Punch. A working man's wife sees the came-home-late-drunk husband as a threat to the home. In her view, alcohol use should be bound by law:

* * *

The drunken husband is a crucial reference point in the dissemination of a particular form of domestic ideology, one that emphasizes the practice of housewifery among the working-class women. This subsequently takes us back to the messages conveyed in “Homes and Housewives,” many of which we have already discussed, – “we require a better industrial and domestic training for our girls, with a view to their acquiring the art and the skill requisite to make the homes of men and children comfortable. It may take a long time to. . .extend the benefits of civilization to the humbler classes of the community” (405). Housewifery is taken as a means of establishing domestic peace and social stability in some fashion. The need for working-class wives to manage their households reflects the contemporary antipathy toward the female breadwinner within a male-centered working-class culture. Either cleanliness or order is a confirmation of the wife's pre-eminent role in housekeeping, which serves as an index of her success as a domestic manager and also prevents her husband from drinking and seeking comfort in the public house.

As this study has shown, domesticity in Eliza Cook's Journal is set off as a value system to extol feminine virtues and celebrate the enduring values of domestic practices to help make sense of working-class women themselves. A woman worker's role is indicated by journal articles such as “Home Power,” “Homes and Housewives,” and “Comfort at Home,” which both appropriate and contest the legacies of Victorian femininity to show how the domestic sphere becomes a site of politics, a field for the exercise of highly developed management skills. Accordingly, the centrality of the home is well established and articulates a vision of the working class as male, assigning a domestic role to the wife who is always subject to challenge by her husband. Although the domestic image of working-class women is not an ideal that has ever been fully achieved, it can be used as a conceptual tool for understanding the ambivalence inherent in Victorian class and gender ideologies. The possibility of adhering to the feminine-domestic ideal is much more ideological than real for the working classes.