Margaret Harkness’s Journalistic Fiction and Women’s Work in the East End

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Margaret Harkness's writings on women's work in the East End's home industries. The decades of the late nineteenth century saw an explosion in casual labour, with much of this work being performed by poor women in their own homes. At the same time, middle-class women found new opportunities for professional and social mobility through documentary journalism, which often looked to the East End with its many possible sites for investigative discussion. As a journalist focusing on the slums and—importantly—as a middle-class woman, Harkness enjoyed unprecedented access to female workers in home industries. Her first and third novels, A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1889), borrow heavily from her journalism in both content and writing techniques—such as the “doorsill glimpse”—in order to convey the short-term and unstable nature of this casual labour.