Abstract
This article examines interclass strategies to bring about reform in mid-nineteenth century England. It specifically explores the way the Ten Hours’ Advocate, a paper written for the working classes, looked to present itself as a middle-class periodical in order to further the argument for factory reform. In reproducing fiction filched from middle-class periodicals, the Advocate performed its argument for the Factory Bill: that the Bill would ease social tensions, dissipate the Chartist or radical threat, and ensure a “return” to traditional gender roles. The appropriated fiction is mild, rather bland; the non-fictional argument for reform is direct and unapologetic. That the Advocate was opportunistic in the way it made the case for reform is an example of the advantages provided to reformers by the absence of strict copyright laws and by Victorian periodical culture in general. But it also contextualises the debate over the family-wage argument and the working-class role in hardening the Victorian sexual division of labour.
Highlights
Single-minded, the Ten Hours’ Advocate and Journal of Literature and Art (26 September 1846 – 12 June 1847), “organ” or journal of the Lancashire Central Short-Time Committee, co-opted a great deal of fiction from a variety of contemporary periodicals to fill out its pages during its short run
When the Ten-Hours’ Act or Factory Bill was passed in June 1847, the paper immediately announced that it was folding and that it would issue only one more weekly number
Looked at from a distance, only a very few of the adopted stories directly reflect the Advocate’s program for factory reform, though there was plenty of fiction circulating at the time in the same papers that the Advocate took its material from that represent women and children degraded by factory work, causing familial ruin and so forth
Summary
Single-minded, the Ten Hours’ Advocate and Journal of Literature and Art (26 September 1846 – 12 June 1847), “organ” or journal of the Lancashire Central Short-Time Committee, co-opted a great deal of fiction from a variety of contemporary periodicals to fill out its pages during its short run. Looked at from a distance, only a very few of the adopted stories directly reflect the Advocate’s program for factory reform, though there was plenty of fiction circulating at the time in the same papers that the Advocate took its material from that represent women and children degraded by factory work, causing familial ruin and so forth. The factory story was still easy to find in “family” and “improvement” periodicals such as Mary and William Howitt’s People’s Journal, and certainly the partial victories in factory reform prior to the paper’s run were not considered sufficient by Philip Grant, editor of the Advocate. The layers of conjectural manoeuvring behind the paper’s schemes of appropriation, the use of middle-class voices, are imbued in and demonstrate popular strategies of persuasion and promotion, of soft selling, aimed at countering the image of the working classes that drew them as politically ambitious on the one hand or culturally deplorable on the other. Behind representations of eased social tensions, class harmony, or even the “subtext” of a working class eager for incorporation, is an attempt to win reform, setting the stage for further social change
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