Jobs for Women: the Angel in the Workforce

For 465 years, from 1377 to 1835 [the Ship and Turtle Tavern] was run by a succession of widows. During the Victorian era, the Ship and Turtle Tavern even supplied several of the West-end clubhouses. Source.

And yet we speak of working women as the exception in the Victorian era. Was that the case?

During the Industrial Revolution in the UK, young people (including women) were moving to cities at an unprecedented rate. Usually, a young person would arrive and stay with, or in the neighbourhood of, a person who knew their family, which resulted in regional concentrations of religious and cultural groups. It also created large households of people who were loosely connected.

In these households, everyone did their part (including women and children). Family economics of this type had long been the norm in rural populations, but in cities, women’s work was frequently downplayed, or entirely overlooked, as the emphasis increasingly focused on the male as breadwinner.

Victorian culture’s emphasis on separate spheres overplays the “Angel in the Household” motif, which simply doesn't describe the reality for many Victorian women and families. The obvious example being female heads-of-house, such as widows.

Moreover, the industrial revolution increased the demand for female and child labour, who could be paid less than their adult male counterparts. Still, forty percent of female occupations listed on the census of 1851 were in domestic service, with textiles and clothing services in a near second place. Women did much of the delicate work in factories that produced household goods and participated in trades that suited ideals of femininity, such as kitchen work, sewing, laundry, and retail.

Dore's Woman Pedlar.

While 'upper' working class women rented shops, the 'lower' hawked on the streets and beaches. They sold flowers, toffee apples, ice cream, cold drinks, shrimps, oysters and whelks, and offered donkey and goat rides and even fortune-telling, sometimes by budgerigar. Source.

Even in the middle- and upper-classes, the ideal of the Angel in the Household doesn’t adequately describe all that was taking place. Not only were women, like Rachel Beer, dominating the world of journalism, but many widowed and single-women had no choice, but to earn money to support their standard of living. Some, like Marie Corelli and Lady Jane Wilde (Speranza), did so by writing, but many widows carried on the family business after the death of their spouse. Many middle- and upper-class women could be found working as governesses, running boarding houses, or managing properties for income. Many of these women also played important roles in family businesses as silent partners, bookkeepers, administrative workers, and more.

Three fully-clothed women hiking their skirts at the
shoreline of the beach in Averne, Wallace G. Levison, 1897

By the 1890s, stories of the New Woman, who was educated and independent, began to emerge. Many of these women resented the stereotypes that depicted all women as seeking a husband to support them.

For more information, two excellent sources are the BBC and the Economic History Association.

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The Importance of Being Irish Gentlemen

Source of quote.

I've been thinking about the way that Oscar Wilde's family treated him when he was going to trial. The following is an excerpt from H. Montgomery Hyde's book: Oscar Wilde.

The Marquess had hired a gang of roughs and instructed them to follow Wilde and see that he did not secure admittance to any hotel in town. [...] Towards midnight, however, they lost sight of him. At this time Wilde's mother was living with Willie in Oakley Street, Chelsea, and it was to the door of their house that Wilde at length staggered in a state of complete physical exhaustion. 'Give me shelter, Willie,' he gasped as his astonished brother opened the door. 'Let me lie on the floor, or I shall die in the streets.' With these words he collapsed across the threshold, as Willie Wilde put it, 'like a wounded stag.'

[...] The family atmosphere had the worst possible psychological effect upon him. Both his eccentric mother and his drunken brother kept telling him that he must behave like an Irish gentleman and face the music. 'This house is depressing,' he complained. 'Willie makes such a merit of giving me shelter. He means well, I suppose, but it is all dreadful.'

I feel I should make it clear that Oscar's brother, Willie, wasn't housing their mother, but their mother was housing him and his wife. It was her house.

Newman Noggs and Kate Nickleby
Charles Dickens

Franny Moyle calls Oscar's trials eerily similar to his father's own scandal years before. The scandal of Wilde's father came about as part of the fallout of a relationship with a young woman, called Mary Travers. After their relationship ended, Travers accused Sir Wilde of seducing her, then published a pamphlet that parodied Sir and Lady Wilde as Dr and Mrs Quilp. In her pamphlet, Dr Quilp raped a female patient anaesthetised under chloroform. Lady Wilde was vocal and outraged; Travers sued her for libel. The legal costs financially ruined the Wildes. The case was publicized all over Dublin and Sir Wilde was criticized for refusing to enter the witness box - an act which was criticized as ungentlemanly.

Oscar's mother obviously remembered the Travers case. Her insistence that it would be ungentlemanly for him not to turn up in court clearly echoes what happened with her husband. But Willie actively prevented Oscar from fleeing.

I'm beginning to believe that Oscar's older brother, Willie, was scarred deeply by these events. As in Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart, the things that people frequently repeat about themselves are the things that they are trying to convince themselves of; that's why one doesn't go around telling people they're not crazy! Willie oft repeated that he was an 'Irish gentleman'. Never was he more adamant that his brother was also an Irish gentleman than when Oscar was thinking of fleeing to Paris.

It was never inevitable that Oscar would be convicted in court. Everybody, including Queensberry and the judge, thought that Oscar would flee to Paris. His friends even arranged transportation for him. I believe Oscar wanted to flee to Paris and that was why his brother blackmailed him into staying. His brother could not stand the idea of history repeating itself in their family.

In Willie's mind, after all, they were Irish gentlemen.

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The Importance of Being Oscar Wilde's Mother

Lady Jane Francesca Agnes Wilde (1821-1896), better known as "Speranza," was the youngest child of four in Wexford Ireland. She was an Irish nationalist some Italian roots, though she put stereotypes about that heritage to rest by being over six feet tall and devoting herself to the love of Ireland. She was a poet and her contemporaries considered her a national treasure because wrote about freedom for the people of Ireland, but as time went on tastes and politics would change, so that the younger Irish revolutionaries weren't as able to relate to her work.

She fell in love with and married William Wilde, a scrawny and often disheveled-looking man, who must have looked even smaller standing next to his larger-than-life wife; it was said that she was extremely tall and overweight, “walked like a ship at sea, the sails filled with wind.” For this, she was subject to abuse throughout her life, but developed a strong talent for putting people in their place and would defend the people she loved as well as she defended Ireland.

Sometimes, I think intelligent outcasts are the most important people the development of creativity and culture within any particular group. Henry VIII made big sleeves fashionable for men because preexisting fashions didn't suit his growing figure. Speranza dressed like gypsy, even when she could afford the fashions of her day, and wore cheap costume jewelry, sometimes made of pieces of older broken costume jewelry. The odd biographer suggests that she favoured darkness because it concealed certain physical features that made her insecure; but, according to her, she liked dark rooms lit by candles because it encouraged "bawdy talk."

These dark spaces in her house, which notable always had all of its shutters shut, were decorated with books and artifacts collected during William Wilde's archeological journeys to Egypt and by Speranza herself, who enjoyed busts and paintings from ancient Greece and Rome.

If being "the Irish Poetess" of her day weren't fame enough, she became a famous entertainer, hosting popular salons at her home in Dublin and later in London. She got know many of the most famous creatives and revolutionaries, especially feminists and the political types, that set foot in whatever city she happened to be in, which makes it hard to believe that she was all that shy about being out in the open and walking in the light. When asked how she managed to attract such interesting people, Speranza replied, "By interesting them, of course!"

In addition to the two daughters William Wilde had outside of his marriage, Speranza had two sons and a daughter. Her daughter died in childhood; her firstborn was named for her husband and would always be her favourite, even when he grew up to be a lecherous alcoholic; and her other son was Oscar Wilde. Because of her, the boys were well-educated before they even started school, though some acquaintances, like Lord Alfred Douglas, suggested she might not have provided the most wholesome environment for the boys, due to the types of people she kept around and the types of things they would discuss.

Ostensibly, "respectable people" were forbidden from her home because they were usually so uninteresting. Many of their friends attributed Oscar Wilde's wit to his mother.

Things took a turn for the unfortunate, when William Wilde Sr. was knighted. Speranza believed this misfortune came because fortune and fame attract the maliciousness of jealousy. A Dublin man, whose daughter was a patient of Sir William Wilde, the oculist, claimed Sir Wilde was sexually inappropriate in his conduct toward the young lady and would seek legal action. Speranza must have flown into a rage and wrote a nasty letter to the man, for which they were eventually sued and lost most of their wealth. It was about this time that both of Sir Wilde's daughters burned to death in a fire due to the restrictive nature of their fashionable clothes.

Sir Wilde died not long after and Speranza moved to London with both of her sons. In her reduced circumstances, she relied on the financial assistance of both her boys and earned a modest living as a journalist. She finished the work that she began years ago with her husband and published Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (1888). Oscar began making a name for himself and Speranza continued to hope that both her boys would find their place in parliament. Her favorite son wasn't doing as well as Oscar though.

In London, Speranza became active in the fight for women's legal rights; specifically, the right for a woman to retain her wealth in marriage. She was part of a successful act to support these rights, but, as luck would have it, she needed to find a wealthy wife for her favorite son. The marriage lasted less than a year and Willie came home penniless. Even after he took a second wife, Willie would live with his mother to the end of her days. Many famous people still came to her salons, but she was heard at one such event saying that her life had been reduced to "the importance of being Oscar's mother."

I believe that Speranza died of a broken heart, when Oscar Wilde went to prison. When the trials started, she didn't believe they would imprison her son and wouldn't hear of him fleeing the country. He was, after all, "an Irish-born gentleman." The official cause of death was bronchitis, but her health deteriorated rapidly after Oscar's conviction. Even her requests to visit with him were denied.

Oscar's wife, came back to London from Europe, to break the news of his mother's death to Oscar personally, so that he wouldn't take it too hard.

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