BOOK REVIEW: Patricia E. Johnson.HIDDEN HANDS: WORKING-CLASS WOMEN AND VICTORIAN SOCIAL-PROBLEM FICTION. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001.

Abstract

Patricia Johnson's Hidden Hands takes as its starting point an apparent anomaly—the fact that the industrial novels that so frequently feature women almost totally neglect "women factory workers" (1), the "hidden hands" "whose [...] poorly paid labor" "made the achievements of the Industrial Revolution possible" (4-5). What this suggests, for Johnson, is that representations of women's industrial labor revealed the contradictions inherent to Victorian class and gender ideologies in a way that (male) working-class [End Page 363] radicalism could not. In her words, "To represent [a working-class woman's] life was to confront the cost of enforced domesticity as well as the many exceptions to the ideal of the working-class male breadwinner"—an ideal embraced, in the mid-1840s, by male working-class activists and upper- and middle-class observers alike (7). Thus finding the factory girl too hot to handle, industrial novelists instead explore the "troubling issues" she raises through "other, more manageable female characters" (3). In a sense, in other words, factory girls continuously haunt the industrial novel, sometimes speaking loudest when they seem most thoroughly silenced.