Fugitive Living: Social Mobility and Domestic Space in Julia Frankau’s The Heart of a Child

This chapter examines Julia Frankau’s The Heart of a Child (1908) a novel that documents a poor orphan’s social ascent. Despite the protagonist’s experience of a range of new models of domestic life – including model dwellings, a ‘home for working girls’, and an apartment (based on the Artillery Mansions in Victoria) – she remains circumscribed at each stage by her status as an unmarried woman. This novel’s satirical engagement with slum fiction reveals that all women’s lives are shaped by domestic insecurity – even if they are shaped differently.

The vicissitudes of victory: Margaret Harkness, George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905), and the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike

George Eastmont: Wanderer sealed Margaret Harkness’s disengagement from the socialist politics with which she had been actively involved since the 1880s. Its broad canvas also marked another key departure: the turn from late nineteenth-century slum fiction to the reinvigorated condition of England novel that characterised the Edwardian era. Unusually for Harkness, who wrote her books extremely quickly, George Eastmont: Wanderer underwent a long period of gestation. First mooted in the months following the 1889 Dockworkers’ Strike, the novel’s pivotal and deeply traumatic event, Harkness’s major work did not appear until some fifteen years later. This chapter attempts to decipher the painful history of this delay, situating it against the background of the author’s difficult reappraisal of her own political past and the critical interventions through which she distanced herself from the labour movement and the strike’s most significant achievement, the creation of the new unionism.

A Child of the Jago

‘The Jago had got him, and it held him fast.’ In the worst of London’s East End slums, in an area called the Jago, young Dicky Perrott is used to a life of poverty, crime, and violence. Gang warfare is the order of the day, deaths are commonplace, and thieving the only way to survive. At first Dicky dreams of becoming a High Mobsman – one of the aristocrats of Jago crime – but the efforts of Father Sturt to improve conditions offer him a different path. Dicky’s journey takes him through a savage but colourful community of pickpockets and cosh-carriers, where the police only enter in threes, and where murder erupts with an unusual horror and intimacy. Morrison’s portrayal of the Victorian underclass and its underworld drew attention to the bleak prospects for children living in such surroundings, and it is a classic of slum-fiction. In this edition Peter Miles provides a rich contextual background to the creation of the novel, and the social debates to which it contributed.