of work available to women was expanding. As early as the 1860s, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Rye had managed, through their Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, to secure jobs for women in banks and insurance companies. The booming communications sector offered other opportunities. In 1869, the year the Telegraph Act of 1869 handed the Post Office a monopoly on telegraph services, most of the 6.8 million telegrams sent in Britain would have been dictated to women. By 1914, 7,000 women were employed by the Post Office and 3,000 in other government services. But there were massive barriers remaining, not least that women had to give up their jobs once they married. And, of course, they were paid significantly less than men.
Actually, the gender pay gap was an issue in all white-collar clerical jobs. At the Prudential insurance company, male clerks earned up to £350 a year while few women made more than £60. Women had to shoulder the burden of dressing smartly on low wages or risk losing their jobs for being scruffy.
While equal opportunity at work was still a distant dream for late-Victorian feminists, there were plenty of battles to be fought at home. The nature of the middle class was changing. The difference between lower-middle and upper-middle was becoming more defined in terms of manners and outlook, and the number of servants a family could afford to hire: just a cook and a maid-of-all-work? Or an array of different kinds of help? At the top of the scale, what mattered was that the house was beautiful – and by extension the woman beautiful, for she occupied the centre of this world, holding its elements in genteel suspension.
Rooms in late-Victorian upper-middle-class homes grew cluttered as hoarding fine things became a moral prerogative – conveniently for those who wanted to be both genteel and righteous; to reconcile, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, ‘piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass’.27 As the design historian Deborah Cohen notes: ‘Women’s sense of themselves seems from the 1890s onward to have been tied up increasingly in their décor.’28
The continuing popularity of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is revealing. It’s fair to assume most families read it aspirationally. Mrs Beeton, who died in 1865, four years after it came out, directs her advice to the manager of a large household whom she compares to the commander of an army, the assumption being that this woman has a team of servants at her beck and call to engineer show-offy dinner-party coups de théâtre, such as Service à la Russe, in which as many as fourteen courses are presented one after the other.
While husbands went off to work, middle-class ‘womenfolk’ remained at home as pampered dependents. Katharine Chorley grew up in the well-to-do Manchester suburb of Alderley Edge where ‘pheasants whirred out of copses, the crack of guns sounded through the winter, [and] cattle churned to a muddy porridge the good Cheshire soil at the entrance gates of fields.’29 Happily, this bucolic idyll existed a mere fifteen minutes’ train journey from the centre of Manchester. Chorley recalled in her memoir Manchester Made Them that once the 8.25, 8.50 and 9.18 trains had left in the morning the Edge became ‘exclusively female’:
You never saw a man on the hill roads unless it were the doctor or the plumber, and you never saw a man in anyone’s home except the gardener or the coachman. And yet it was a man-made and a man-lorded society.30
Businessmen using the trains travelled First Class. But if a wife or daughter needed to go into Manchester she would always travel Third Class because ‘to share a compartment with the gentlemen (we were taught never to call them just plainly “men”) would have been unthinkable’. In this situation ‘business trains’ were avoided if possible: ‘It was highly embarrassing, a sort of indelicacy, to stand on the platform surrounded by a crowd of males who had to be polite but were obviously not in the mood for feminine society.’31 Chorley’s less-deceived gaze is unsparing: women in such a society, she recognises, ‘existed for their husbands’ and fathers’ sakes and their lives were shaped to please masculine vanity.’32
Life for upper-middle-class women was, if anything, even stranger and more isolated. Privilege infantilised them: Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, wrote in Period Piece, her very funny memoir of her 1890s childhood, that at the end of the century there were thousands of British women like her Aunt Etty who had ‘never made a pot of tea … been out in the dark alone … travelled by train without a maid … or sewn on a button.’33
‘There were always people to do these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet, was away for a day or two: “I am very busy answering my own bell.”’34
How had this situation arisen? Because the behaviour of ‘respectable’ women was governed by strict social rules. By the 1880s public transport was making it easier for women to get around, but there were still places where they needed to be accompanied. Women who walked the streets themselves were seen as ‘either endangered or dangerous’, as one historian puts it,35 and as a rule ‘a lady was simply not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets or eating alone.’36
Virginia Woolf’s The Pargiters, an early version of the ‘essay-novel’ that would become The Years, her last work to be published in her lifetime, is partly set in the 1880s, at which point the middle-class Pargiter sisters ‘could not possibly go for a walk alone’:
For any of them to walk in the West End by day was out of the question. Bond Street was as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles … To be seen alone in Piccadilly was equivalent to walking up Abercorn Terrace in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge.37
One middle-class woman who made it her moral business to walk the streets – admittedly with a companion for safety – was the social reformer Mary Higgs. The difference was that Higgs disguised herself as a homeless woman. In 1906, twenty-seven years before George Orwell went ‘on the tramp’ to write Down and Out in Paris and London, Higgs published Glimpses Into the Abyss, an extraordinary account of life on the streets, in lodging houses and the wards of workhouses.
Born in Wiltshire in 1854, Higgs (née Kingsland) was the daughter of a Congregational minister and in 1873 became the first woman to study for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge. She drifted into teaching, but after marrying Thomas Kilpin Higgs, a minister like her father, devoted much of her time to philanthropic works: helping to manage a home for destitute women in Oldham; and engaging in utopian brainstorming with Ebenezer Howard, founder of the ‘garden city’ movement.
Higgs considered poverty to be a sort of disease, more or less infectious – she talks about the ‘microbes of social disorder’ – which the right sort of ‘remedial treatment’ could eradicate. In her introduction to Glimpses into the Abyss, Higgs describes the Oldham cottage she converted into a lodging house as a ‘social microscope, every case being personally investigated as to past life, history and present need’.38 What had been done to these women? What had they done to themselves? Higgs admitted ignorance. But she was determined to learn. The only way to do this, she decided, was to explore ‘Darkest England’ herself in a spirit of rational, scientific enquiry.
And so Higgs wandered through West Yorkshire, Lancashire and, briefly, London. She studied the Poor Law in Britain and its equivalent in Denmark. She also undertook a ‘literary investigation into deterioration of human personality’ – a ‘necessary corollary to the acquisition of a wide collection of facts’. Her inquiries took on a eugenicist gloss, shocking to us now, though it would have shocked few people at the time:
In any given individual the whole path climbed by the foremost classes or races may not be retraced. Therefore numbers of individuals are permanently stranded on lower levels of evolution. Society can quicken evolution by right social arrangements, scientific in principle.39
Higgs’ sense that improving social conditions for the poor could transform them and set them back on the road to prosperity (or at least ‘evolution’ rather than ‘devolution’) sounds progressive. But for her, people could only retrace the path appropriate to their class or race; could only hope to reach a certain, pre-ordained level of attainment. Even with all the wind in the world behind her, a working-class