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Samuel Smiles and the Woman Question in Early Victorian Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Extract

When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiles's interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content.

By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiles's own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the women's movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for women's rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

1 Smiles, Samuel, Autobiography (London, 1905), p. 344Google Scholar.

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50 Ibid., pp. 324, 327. Smiles had been anticipated by “Mistress Margaret Dods of the Cleikum Inn, St. Ronan's” [Christian Isobel Johnstone, an Edinburgh radical journalist], who had taken up the challenge of making cookery part of “the science of good living” and “the diffusion of useful knowledge” in her The Cook and Housewife's Manual: A Practical System Of Modern Domestic Cookery and Family Management (Edinburgh, 1833)Google Scholar. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (c. 1776–1859), was the author of Woman and Her Master (1840).

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56 Smiles referred to Eliza Cook's Journal enjoying sales of nearly forty thousand copies in 1850 (Samuel Smiles to R. W. Smiles, 26 March 1850, Manchester Public Library, National Public Schools Association, M136/2, 3/3047). According to Gleadle (The Early Feminists, p. 43), the circulation was between fifty and sixty thousand copies a year earlier.

57 Woodring, Carl R., Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence, Kans., 1952)Google Scholar. For the friendship between the Smiles and Howitt families, see Smiles, Aileen, Samuel Smiles and His Surroundings (London, 1956), p. 68Google Scholar; Lee, Amice, Laurels and Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt (London, 1955), p. 188Google Scholar.

58 Questions about the parts played by women in the conduct of the periodical press during the mid-nineteenth century require research. George Eliot's subeditorship of the Westminster Review is well known; William and Mary Howitt acted as a team in the production of their journal; Christian Isobel Johnstone edited Johnstone's Edinburgh Magazine and, when that was incorporated with Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, she took a prominent part in it; Charlotte Elizabeth Phelan (Tonna) edited the Christian Ladies' Magazine; Anna Richardson produced periodicals for the antislavery and peace movements; and doubtless other examples could be adduced.

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63 Eliza Cook's Journal (30 August 1851).

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84 [Smiles, S.], “The Seamstress,” Eliza Cook's Journal (11 May 1850)Google Scholar. Authorship of this article is acknowledged by Smiles in Samuel Smiles to R. W. Smiles, 11 May 1850, Manchester Public Library, National Public Schools Association, M136/2, 3/3055.

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