‘[D]onning the Garb of a Pit Girl again’: Imagining the ‘Pit Brow Lassie’ in Late-Victorian Fiction

Abstract

This article analyses various representations of the figure of the ‘pit brow lassie’ with a particular emphasis on two novels; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’ Lowrie’s (1877) and John Monk Foster’s A Pit Brow Lassie (1889). It argues that pit brow women provided a focus for discussions of the interplay of class and gender roles in Victorian Britain. The article begins by tracing the history of attitudes towards women’s employment in the mines in Victorian Britain and the role which visual representations of pit brow women played in the campaigns for and against their employment. It then analyses the way in which the representation of the pit brow women in That Lass O’ Lowrie’s shifts from an ideologeme of pity to one of respect and self-respect. It argues that Burnett’s novel is, in part, a re-purposing of earlier ‘Condition of England’ novels with gender replacing class as the main axis of social reconciliation. As part of this re-purposing it argues that while the novel uses the perceived deficiencies of working-class women to justify the agency of their middle-class counterparts, it also represents its working-class heroine as an object of middle-class desire. Next the article explores John Monk Foster’s A Pit Brow Lassie highlighting the ways in which it both normalizes and defends the work of pit brow women and, in contrast to Burnett’s novel, makes female labour integral to the development of its plot. It analyses the ways in which Foster’s representation of pit brow women differs from Burnett’s and argues that these differences arise from a combination of generic, publication and authorial factors. However, despite these differences the article argues that Foster’s novel also eschews the ideologeme of pity in favour of respect/self-respect.