From Times Literary Supplement

The Industrial Revolution was powered by the labour of working-class women—in industries such as cotton manufacturing, women and girls accounted for between 60 and 80 per cent of the workforce. Images of male breadwinners toiling to support entire families on a single wage obscured the fact that most women worked full- or part-time to supplement insufficient household incomes.

Women were indeed the "hidden hands", whose industrial and domestic drudgery was denied and belittled. Patricia E. Johnson's well-argued study reveals how Victorian class and gender ideologies suppressed female workers' true contribution. By applying a feminist historicist analysis to "industrial" novels by Disraeli, Dickens, Eliot, Kipling, Charlotte Bronte and others, she ably illuminates the changing status of women in nineteenth-Century British society.

Hidden Hands begins by examining contemporary reactions to the findings of the Children's Employment Commission of 1842 on the Conditions of work in collieries and mines. While addressing the issue of poor wages and unsafe conditions, this "blue book" contained impassioned descriptions of women workers: "young females, dressed like boys in trousers, crawling on all fours, with belts around their waists, and chains passing between their legs. The chain . . . had worn large holes in their trousers, and any sight more disgustingly indecent or revolting can scarcely be imagined than these girls at work. No brothel can beat it."

Johnson argues persuasively that the report provoked a discourse which portrayed working women as degenerates and fostered their symbolic retreat from the public sphere into domesticity. In fictional terms, this process was played out in the industrial novels of the 1850s, which she contends "often reveal a desire to disable or kill off the factory girl". Hard Times and North and South are cited as examples which struggle to rewrite the "bad”, factory girl narrative - before publication, Dickens deleted an episode portraying the death of a factory girl. Women's task was to stay at home and keep their men away from the twin dangers of drink and politics, an orthodoxy which inevitably offered greatest benefit to middle-class industrialists.

Times Literary Supplement