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A City Girl, Eleanor Marx, feminism, Friedrich Engels, George Eastmont, literature, Margaret Harkness, novel, socialism, Utopia, Victorian, women's writing
7/07/2014: Recent comments, and this post’s tendency to crop up in Google searches for Harkness, have made me realise that is important to point out that I wrote this post shortly after my first encounter with Harkness. I have since refined my views and changed my mind about a couple of the points I made below (primarily re: the aims of her writing project and her attitude to her middle-class readership). I have not taken down this post as it has helped me meet some wonderful people also working on Harkness, but for a more relevant, accurate and up-to-date reflection of my views on her work, please also consider my article for London Fictions (see link at the bottom of this post) and other Harkness-related posts on this blog.
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I have been spending some time recently reading criticism of Margaret Harkness, a now largely forgotten late-nineteenth-century socialist novelist. A fascinating figure, she identified strongly with socialist and proto-feminist ideas, although she never permanently allied herself with any branch of the socialist movement.
She devoted much of her life to working with the labour movement in the East End, and to writing realist novels about the living conditions of the London poor. She was briefly associated with Engels’s London circle, and good friends with Eleanor Marx, with whom she visited the East End and helped to organise the London Dock Strike of 1889.
Her first novel, A City Girl, prompted Engels’s famous prescriptive letter on socialist literature, and her later work, despite her break with his social circle, reflects his advice on the need to write ‘typical characters under typical circumstances’. The novel’s protagonist is a young working class girl who has a child with a married middle-class man, and Harkness’s treatment of this topic challenges the Victorian sexual double standard and enables a proto-feminist reading of the woman who tells the Salvation Army captain that the child she has had is ‘Mine’, and re-establishes herself in society despite her ‘fall’.
All in all, Harkness sounded like the Victorian novelist I had been waiting to discover. Nevertheless, I find her difficult to respect – her wavering views, the undecided undertone running through her work, her need to pander to her middle-class readership. And the final blow is delivered by her last novel, George Eastmont, in which the hero is an aristocratic social reformer attempting to drag the passive working class out of the abyss. Her last novel most justifies Engels’s critique that she makes the working class appear a ‘passive mass’: she seems unable to conceive of a working class able to produce its own leaders and revolutionaries.
Interestingly, however, she seemed aware of the contradictions in her own views, to a certain extent. While she was eking out a living as a journalist hack, she wrote of herself, ‘I read the papers, and have a little political world of my own’. And I saw the temptation in that.
However much I perceive myself to be standing up for the causes to which I am devoted, I recognise a similar tendency to dream up a Utopia of equality for myself. So much of my time is spent reading ‘the papers’, and refining my views in conversation with like-minded people, that I forget to test them against my opponents, or sometimes to incorporate experiences alien to my own perception. I often attempt to avoid confrontation with people whose views I know to be incompatible with my own – and as a result am sometimes not able to construct a well-argued defence for the opinions which, to me, have come to seem so natural. Hence, I come out of debates not feeling that I have been wrong, but that I have not made myself understood.
So the lesson here is: don’t be like Margaret Harkness. Speak your mind. Like-minded thinkers will help you refine your ideas, and your opponents will teach you to defend them. Don’t isolate yourself. It may lead you to write a paternalistic horror like George Eastmont, and that just wouldn’t do.
25/5/2013: My post on Margaret Harkness’s novel In Darkest London has now appeared on the London Fictions website. Read it here.
I am impressed by your comments on Harkness, a writer whom I am writing a paper about. Could you tell me where to find Harkness’s view of her writings, as is quoted in the second-last paragraph. It does not seem easy to find Harkness’s novels in publication now, not to mention her journals. Your help would be much appreciated.
I know, she’s almost impossible to find information about, isn’t she? I was hoping to focus a PhD thesis on her, and was flatly told not to, because sources are just so scanty.
The ‘little political world’ comment appeared in a letter to Beatrice Potter, I think in February 1880. It’s quoted by Lynne Hapgood in ‘Is this friendship?: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the idea of socialist community’, which was printed in ‘Eleanor Marx: Life, Work, Contacts’, ed. by J. Stoke (Ashgate, 2000). Sypher, Von Rosenberg and Seth Koven are also worth looking at, and J. Goode’s arguments on ‘A City Girl’ in ‘Margaret Harkness and the socialist novel’ are quoted quite a lot. And definitely have a hunt for Beatrice Potter’s letters.
I hope this helps – good luck with your paper, and let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Thanks very much for the information. I am now making a bibliography about Harkness’s studies. It’s really a pity that we could not learn more about her except through her novels, which have now been re-printed by some publishers. I could not even get her picture or portrait!
Hi Louis,
I don’t know if you noticed from the other comments, but LC Robertson has managed to find a portrait of Margaret Harkness! It also resembles one of the sitters in a photograph of the Match Girls’ Strike committee. Both images can now be found on the London Fictions Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/londonfictions
F.
Dear friends,
I have just come across your accurate and perceptive comments on Maggie Harkness. I have been researching materials for a biography of her for several years and managed to add a few details on her life (and writings), especially in Britain. What is most distressing is the lack of material related to her farflung travels, especially her time in the United States and extended period in India (with the exception of her travel books and single novel).
Ms. Harkness more than deserves our respect, she deserves her honored place in history as related to women journalists, editors, world travelers, novelists, radical activists, anticolonialists, and associates of many late 19th-century British intellectuals, labor leaders, and authors. Hope you are interested in continuing this discussion as I do not wish to join the growing list of those who have abandoned scholarly works on this woman. I recently uncovered some of her late letters in Dorset and am consulting the Dollie Radford diaries this week at the Clark Library at UCLA.
If possible, we might share email addresses for convience.
Cheers,
Terry
P.S. There are no known existing portraits or photos of Margaret Harkness.
Hi Terry,
Thanks for getting in touch, it’s great to hear that you’re working on such a worthwhile project. Considering how little information is generally available on Harkness’s life, I salute your courage in taking it on, and will look forward to its publication! I’m very glad you’re so determined, too: as you say, too many scholars have abandoned work on her.
It would be great if we could all share what information we have on her. Andrew (see comment above) is particularly interested in Harkness’s association with HH Champion and her travels to India; and LC Robertson told me her copy of ‘A Manchester Shirtmaker’ includes a portrait from the Graphic that must be of Harkness. As a literature student just finishing my MA I’m afraid I can’t add anything substantial, but since I am very interested in working on Harkness’s slum fiction as part of a PhD, hearing about your discoveries would be incredibly helpful.
If you wouldn’t mind, I will send you an email on the address you posted your comment from.
Best,
F.
Thanks for kind words and encouragement–it often seems like one is wandering in the wildness when following the trail of the extraordinary Ms. H. My single purpose as a historian is to place her accomplishments and significance in the historical record (whether I do it or assist some other young scholar in the field). I am in the process of attempting to have George Eastmont: Wanderer republished since it is virtually unavailable (one library copy in the US). I would like to see Margaret Harkness’s efforts in the the 1889 Dock workers’ Strike delineated and provide a sociohistorical context of the novel with a detailed biographical introduction and annotations that may possibly alter or modify your assessment of this work, which is truly worthy of perusal, warts and all.
I’m delighted to read your consideration of Harkness’ work, and would be rather interested to speak to you more on this subject. I’ve been studying her specifically for a few years now, and it seems to me that scholars who have been eager to point out her inconsistent commitment to political and religious ideologies attribute this to idle feminine capriciousness (for instance Seth Koven in _Slumming_ the metaphor ‘forever trying on and taking off’ which, to me, smacks of serious sexism!) rather than to serious opposition to the principles of these movements. Consistent throughout her work is that these very systems are founded upon women’s exclusion. Your reading of _Geroge Eastmont: Wanderer_ is very interesting. I rather read it as a novel that elucidates the problems of socialism — rather than celebrate its accomplishments. That the hero is aligned with Jesus indicates the misguided, patronising and self-satisfying ambitions of those middle-class socialists with whom she worked (the character is based on H.H. Champion) and also refers to the power hierarchies systemic to both Christianity and Socialism. I think you’re entirely right to identify a strain of reservation to ideology that runs through her novels, but I attribute this to a distance of criticism and her awareness that these were ideologies structured on her very exclusion (especially as, unlike her cousin Beatrice Webb she was neither married nor monied). For this reason I think she’s a novelist who at least deserves our respect.
Thank you, I would love to have a chat about Harkness with someone who knows so much about her. Your readings seem very thorough and sound. I admit I’m fairly new to her work, but she fascinated me immediately with her explicitly socialist and proto-feminist stance. I would love to work on her myself, but was advised against it by a former tutor who had written on her and found it challenging owing to the lack of available source material.
I would love to hear more of your views on her writing, which seem to have a well-considered nuance to them that I’m sure would benefit my own analysis. It is really rather tragic that, when we come across writers who were very progressive in their own day, we are still inclined to hold them to modern standards, and find them wanting as a result. As I mentioned in my post, on a personal level I understand her wavering views – recognising my own in them – but on a literary level I do find it introduces a degree of weakness to her otherwise strong texts.
I did enjoy ‘Slumming’, and Koven is a critic I usually trust, but I would definitely be interested in hearing more about your reading of him: I can definitely see your point about his condescending tone.
May I email you so we can go further into this?
Yes, absolutely! I’m not sure I know all that much about her, but I’ve read her novels fairly compulsively at least. I’m horrible with online matters — are you able to see my email address through this post as an administrator? (I’m reluctant to post it online due to spam and whatnot).
Thank you! Yes, I can see your email address, and will be in touch with you soon.
How intriguing – an image of Margaret Harkness. Is anyone in a position to share it?
From what Lisa said, it’s on the cover of her edition of A Manchester Shirtmaker – and comparing it to a photo of the organisers of the Match Girls’ Strike, she may well be on there too!
As L.C. Robertson says, ‘George Eastmont’ was not simply a novel about an upper class socialist, it was a novel all about H.H. Champion – it’s as much memoir as fiction. The nature of Champion’s relationship with Harkness is unclear – indeed so much of the details of Harkness’s life are obscure, and I’ve never seen a likeness of her. But I rather imagine that ‘George Eastmont’ may have been her way of achieving a measure of closure. Champion had by then been settled for a decade in Australia.
Harkness went on to write a book about India, where she spent quite a lot of time.
Andrew Whitehead
Thanks for commenting, Andrew! I’m always pleased to be contacted about Margaret Harkness, it shows that she’s not quite as forgotten as we tend to think.
You’re certainly right about Eastmont representing Champion, but I’m not sure I accept that this excuses what seems to be the underlying message of the novel. With Harkness, there is always such a strong sense of the personal being political and vice versa (I’m thinking, for instance, of the character types in ‘Darkest London’, which all represent her own views to greater or lesser extent), that I find it difficult not to read recommendations into Eastmont which, considering her previous political views, seem quite regressive.
I haven’t read her book about India, it sounds like it would be worth chasing up.
Would you be interested in writing about a Harkness title for the London Fictions website (it’s at www-dot-londonfictions-dot-com)?
A
Thank you so much, Andrew, I am honoured! I would be happy to write on ‘Out of Work’ or ‘In Darkest London’, having recently read and written on them, if either of those would be appropriate?
May I email you (it would be from my Birkbeck gmail account) for more details?
All best,
F.
Sure – awkashmir-at-gmail-dot-com … glad you are interested.
Cheers
A
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Helpful info. Lucky me I found your web site accidentally, and I am
surprised why this accident didn’t happened in advance! I bookmarked it.
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well please would you reread the letter of engels which clearly understand the book which you do not have you read and understood balzac this may be a start. He understands the book and ends the letter this way I mean blimey your article is embarrassing did you get an a level in literature. please dont tell you have a degree.
engels letter evaluates the book in a wonderful way gosh please heaven help us all if you cant understand a simple letter from engels you wont under the genius from balzac