“Ne’er Were Heroines More Strong, More Brave”: Victorian Factory Women Writers and the Role of the Working-Class Poet

Abstract

ABSTRACT Self-identified women factory poets remained a rare phenomenon within the larger mid-Victorian outpouring of working-class verse, publishing mostly after 1846 and more frequently after 1860. This article examines the verses of four mid-Victorian women poets, self-identified as factory workers, who published a significant body of work either in periodicals or in published volumes. The poems of all four—“Marie”, Ellen Johnston, Fanny Forrester, and Ruth Wills—are autobiographical in cast; all record personal difficulties or depression, and each poet responded self-consciously to her working- and middle-class audiences. Although only Johnston and Forrester refer to the specifics of factory labour within their poems, all of these writers affirm their solidarity with their fellow workers, celebrate the heroism of survival under difficulties, and support politically reformist causes such as independence movements or abolition. All four assert the special mission and subject matter of the working-class poet and thus the significance of their own verses as a form of personal self-validation, a witness to otherwise unrecorded lives, and a tribute to their wider working-class community.