Marian Evans uses pen name: George Eliot

In 1857, Marian Evans used the pen name, George Eliot, for the first time when she published, "Amos Barton," "Mr Gilfil's Love-story" and "Janet's Repentance" in Edingburgh Magazine. She continued to publish under this pen name when she turned to novel writing and it persisted through to the publication of Middlemarch in 1872.

Eliot, George, and Gregory Maertz. “Chronology.” Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Ont., 2004.

Ethnic Classification during Victorian Period

What surprised me about this book was the multi-tiered classification system used by British Citizens to classify the mixed percentages of individuals who possessed both some combination of British and Indian blood. Each classifications lead to both advantages and disadvantages within the Indian and British communities at the time: “‘Anglo-Indian’ meant ‘ those who have either no or very slight admixture with the native races’; ‘Eurasians’ were ‘those in whom the European and native descent are more evenly balanced’; and ‘East Indians’ were ‘those of remote European descent and approaching more closely to the native type’” (Craik, 14). Here are just three of the different classifications, but even within these three divisions of race, one can find subsets that would further divide individuals among racial lines. This knowledge helps the reader to indicate why there is such a large disparity between how the more British half-caste is treated compared to the more Indian half-caste.

Craik, Dinah Mulock. The Half-Caste, edited by Melissa Edmundson. Introduction: footnote 1, The Anglo-Indian (9 January 1886): pp. 19, by Melissa Edmunson. Broadview Editions, 2016.

Indian Civil Service

A division of government that began in 1858 was started by the British Empire. It was a very small administrative section of government. Within the office, there were elected officers that competed to be included. These officers supervised and controlled the region and the lower ranks. The lower ranks were clerks and provincial staff that did individual smaller tasks that made up the inner workings of the government. The ICS officers headed the entire operation. They were in charge of every district and oversaw every other small government and were the main leaders of British India. The division was dismissed along with the British rule in India in 1947. After Mr. Grant finished school he entered the Indian Civil Service.

Ewing, Ann. “Administering India: The Indian Civil Service.” History Today, History Today Ltd. Company, 2021, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/administering-india-indian-civil-se...

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited Tabitha Sparks. Broadview editions 1887.

The Salvation Army

The Salvation Army is a Christian organization founded in London by William and Catherine Booth. Originally Methodists, the Booths began preaching to those rejected by orthodox Christian organisations in an attempt to be inclusive of all potential followers of Christ. This organized preaching began in 1865 under the name "The Christian Mission," and in 1878 they renamed thesmelves, The Salvation Army. The group is organized like the military, with priests being assigned the rank of officers, and they're organization is comprised of both men and women in leadership roles. This organization played a major part in providing services and allocating resources to the poor and the ostracized population of London. In Maragaret Harkness' novel, A City Girl (1887), Nelly is able to find shelter and aid from a Captain of The Salvation Army. The group was welcoming to fallen women, pregnant women, and women in need and offered the resources to help Nelly through her pregnancy and raising her baby. 

The Salvation Army's International Headquarters Communications. “Transforming Lives since 1865 – the Story of the Salvation Army so Far.” Transforming Lives since 1865 – The Story of The Salvation Army so Far, https://story.salvationarmy.org/.

Dinah Mulock Craik Marries

Although she was a successful author and writer on her own, Craik eventually did fall in love and married George Lillie Craik in 1865. They married in Bath on April 29th. Connections can be made to the strength of Miss Pryor of The Half-Caste (1851) as she was autonomous and making her own decisions without a husband. While some amy be disappointed that she didn't live her life fully single, I would argue that she found love on her own terms.

Craik, Dinah Mulock. The Half-Caste, edited Melissa Edmundson. Broadview Editions, 2016

Dinah Craik Adopts

In January of 1869, Dinah adopted an abanded baby girl named Dorothy. The baby was found behind a stack of bricks in the London suburb of Bromley. 18 years later, she published The Half-Caste where the main character took a motherly position over an orphaned girl named Zillah. It appears this disposition of care has been a part of Dinah's character all along.

https://omekas.library.uvic.ca/s/crafting/item/5840

The Education Act

The Education Act, also known as the Forster’s Act allowed for school boards to require the education of local towns. It was an attempt to educate children especially in the East End of London. That way they could be educated and might break away from the routines of the working-class generations before them. The act was enforced in 1870 but revisions of the act happened in 1876 and 1880. The revisions expanded the number of East End children going to school, however, it took them away from work. They were no longer able to earn money for the households which became problematic for a while. This act was still in use at the time of A City Girl and most children were being taught basic education.

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited Tabitha Sparks. Broadview editions 1887.

Publication of Middlemarch

Mary Ann Evans took three years to write and publish one of her most famous works Middlemarch. The first book was published in December but there would be seven more to follow over a period of time. Each part had characters whose lives interacted with each other in the town. That way readers could have different parts of Middlemarch, but the characters were recurring. Each section cost five shillings each and the books continued to be published throughout the year.

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. edited Gregory Maertz. Broadview Editions. 2004

"Slumming" in the East End

East End Loafers by Phil May

In the late Victorian era London's East End became a popular destination for slumming, a new phenomenon which emerged in the 1880s on an unprecedented scale. For some slumming was a peculiar form of tourism motivated by curiosity, excitement and thrill, others were motivated by moral, religious and altruistic reasons. The economic, social and cultural deprivation of slum dwellers attracted in the second half of the nineteenth century the attention of various groups of the middle- and upper-classes, which included philanthropists, religious missionaries, charity workers, social investigators, writers, and also rich people seeking disrespectable amusements. As early as in 1884, The New York Times published an article about slumming which spread from London to New York.

Slumming commenced in London […] with a curiosity to see the sights, and when it became fashionable to go 'slumming' ladies and gentlemen were induced to don common clothes and go out in the highways and byways to see people of whom they had heard, but of whom they were as ignorant as if they were inhabitants of a strange country. [September 14, 1884 ]

In the 1880s and 1890s a great number of middle- and upper-class women and men were involved in charity and social work, particularly in the East End slums. The national press covered widely shocking and sensational news from the slums. Anxiety and curiosity about slums could be heard in many public debates to that extent that, as Seth Koven writes:

By the 1890s, London guidebooks such as the Baedeker’s not only directed visitors to shops, monuments, and churches but also mapped excursions to world renowned philanthropic institutions located in notorious slum districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch. [1]

In fact, for a considerable number of Victorian gentlemen and ladies slumming was a form of illicit urban tourism. They visited the most deprived streets of the East End in pursuit of the 'guilty pleasures' associated with the immoral slum dwellers. Upper-class slummers sometimes spent in disguise a night or more in poor boarding houses seeking to experience taboo intimacies with the members of the lower classes. Their cross-class sexual fellowships contributed to diminishing class barriers and reshaping gender relations at the turn of the nineteenth century.

However, slumming was not only limited to odd amusement. In the last two decades of the Victorian era a rising number of missionaries, social relief workers and investigators, politicians, journalists and fiction writers as well as middle-class ‘do-gooders’ and philanthropists made frequent visits to the East End slums to see how the poor lived. A number of gentlemen and lady slummers decided to take up temporary residence in the East End in order to collect data on the nature and extent of poverty and deprivation. Some slummers were disguised in underclass drags in order to transgress class boundaries and mix freely with the poverty stricken inhabitants of the slums. Written or oral accounts of their first-hand observations arose public conscience and motivation to provide slum welfare programmes, and prompted political demands for slum reform.

The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the upsurge of public inquiry into the causes and extent of poverty in Britain. Some of the most outstanding late Victorian slummers were Princess Alice of Hesse, the third child of Queen Victoria; Lord Salisbury, and his sons, William and Hugh, who resided temporarily in Oxford House, Bethnal Green; William Gladstone, and his daughter Helen, who lived in the south London slums as head of the Women's University Settlement. (Koven 10) Even Queen Victoria visited the East End to open the People’s Palace in Mile End Road in 1887.

Benevolent middle- and upper-class women went to slums for a variety of purposes. They volunteered in parish charities, worked as nurses and teachers and some of them conducted sociological studies. Such women as Annie Besant, Lady Constance Battersea, Helen Bosanquet, Clara Collet, Emma Cons, Octavia Hill, Margaret Harkness, Beatrice Potter (Webb), and Ella Pycroft explored some of London’s most notorious rookeries, and their eye-witness reports gradually changed the public opinion about the causes of poverty and squalor. By the turn of the nineteenth century thousands of men and women were involved in social work and philanthropy in London slums.

Death of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot)

Mary Ann Evans, known by pen name George Eliot, spent a long life of writing down many novels, most notably Middlemarch. This demonstrated what a wonderful author she was, having made many interesting pieces of readings for many to enjoy. She was married to George Henry Lewes, the editor of The Leader, in 1855 where they were happy together for many years to comes, until 1878 where he passed away. She proved how much she cared for him bu finifhinsg the final volume of Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind. Eventually she would meet John Walter Cross, originally giving him Italian lessons until she agreed to marry him in 1880. At the same year they moved to Cheyne Walk, where she caught a cold and died toward the end of the year. She was buried next to her first husband, while her second husband made a biography of George Eliot. Overall, this shows that she did indeed have lived a good life, she cared for her first husband by finishing his work and then was buried next to him. So in return, it was right that her second husband got to write about her as well.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. "George Eliot." Victorian Novelists Before 1885, edited by Ira Bruce Nadel and William E. Fredeman, Gale, 1983. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 21. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1200002772/LitRC?u=sand82993&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=e989404b. Accessed 12 Nov. 2021.

Entertainment in The Albert Palace

The Albert Palace is a place in A City Girl that Jack, Nelly, George, and Mr. Grant go to on their day off. At Albert Palace, citizens were able to visit and spectate a good number of different activities like exhibitions, theatrical and dance performances, gardens, and various other entertainments (57). The building is located in Battersea, in the borough of Wandsworth, London. One of the main attractions of the Palace was its gardens. They were designed by Sir Edward Lee with terraces standing next to the main Prince of Wales Road entrance. The gardens contained many different features like fountains, a conservatory, and a bandstand. The Albert Palace interested me because it was one of the only places that I saw in the readings where the lower class characters were congregating for pleasure. In books like Mary Barton, the characters were too poor to afford any form of entertainment. It was cool to see the situation for citizens that were in the upper half of the working class like Nelly and George. 

Wikipedia contributors. "The Albert Palace." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 9 Mar. 2020. Web.

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited by Tabitha Sparks. Broadview editions 1887.

Margaret Harkness publishes first novel

In 1887 Margaret Harkness published her first novel A City Girl: A Realistic Story. This work was considered a slum novel and it was not the first of its kind set in the East End of London in the 1880s. She published the work under the name John Law. She adopted this pseudonym in 1886 and used it for most of her writings. The Vizetelly & Co. Intermittent work in Scotland became her publisher on behalf of Keir Hardie.

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited Tabitha Sparks. Broadview editions 1887.

The Aliens Act of 1905

The Aliens Act of 1905 was a watershed in British history, marking as it did a victory for the opponents of unrestricted alien access into Britain. It was significantly the first such legislation to be passed in peacetime. In the context of what was to follow, it was the point at which the liberal, ‘Open Door’ approach to immigration began to close; a process that continued throughout the twentieth century.

Harkness publishes last known work

A Curate's Promise  is published in 1921 and she dies two years later. This last publication continues to focus on the Salvation Army and their efforts to help the urban poor. Harkness, who often published under the name Law, finishes her career with this work, showing that she remained focused on the plight of the poor.

Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl, edited Tabitha Sparks. Broadview Editions, 2017