for the fate of these white wage slaves? Born in slums, driven to work while still
children, undersized because underfed, oppressed because helpless, flung aside as
soon as worked out, who cares if they die or go on the streets, provided only that the
Bryant and May shareholders get their 23 per cent, and Mr. Theodore Bryant can
erect statues and buy parks? Oh if we had but a people’s Dante, to make a special
circle in the Inferno for those who live on this misery, and suck wealth out of the
starvation of helpless girls.
Failing a poet to hold up their conduct to the execration of posterity, enshrined
in deathless verse, let us strive to touch their consciences, i.e. their pockets, and
let us at least avoid being “partakers of their sins,” by abstaining from using their
commodities.
White Slavery in London, Annie Besant, 1888
This article is unusual for the Victorian period right from the outset as it was written by a female social activist. All women, let alone those from the working class, had great difficulty making their opinions heard in the nineteenth century, so this article is fairly unusual. Additionally, it was uncommon in this period for the working class to have a journalistic voice, as the Labour Party had not yet been formed. Until 1900, there was no official political voice for the working class, as many people believed that God had not intended this group of people for anything other than manual labour.
However, the working conditions were unfortunately not unusual for London at this time. Although the Factory Acts were passed in the early nineteenth century, they were mainly ineffective and Victorian factory owners continued to employ young children who had no other means of survival. This article in particular was written about the employees of a match factory, bringing to mind Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, The Little Match Girl, published in 1845, which also centred around themes of child labour and the cruelty they endured. Another well-known author with personal experience of such slavery was Charles Dickens, who worked in a blacking factory as a young child. This period in his life greatly influenced him and was the basis for many passages from novels such as David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, which exemplify the author’s deep passion for rights for the working class.
Besant sets the tone of this recount from the first sentence of the extract by using the pre-modifying adjective “bitter” to describe the abstract noun “memory”. The present tense verb “survives” reflects the position of the workgirls: they are not living, but merely surviving in the factory. The strength of the memory is emphasised here, as it is implied that as long as the girls survive, the memory will too. The first paragraph of the extract is written almost entirely in a tone of bitter irony, balanced with empathetic earnestness. Noun phrases such as “the greatness of his own public spirit” and “the privilege of contributing” are highly ironic, criticising the meanness and the selfishness of Mr Bryant. In particular, “public spirit” exemplifies the typical upper-class Victorian attitude as this man cared nothing for the ‘real’ public, i.e. the girls working in his factory. The second quotation is also made more effective by the clause that follows, the first which gets to the heart of the matter. As Besant reveals the extent of the factory owner’s harshness towards the girls, she begins to use inverted commas to further emphasise the irony, bringing her own anger into the article.
The explanation of why the girls “don’t want no holidays” is a good insight into the harsh working conditions of the Victorian era. Although described as slavery, the sad truth is that many, many people of all ages were forced to work all day, every day, simply to earn enough to survive. Due to the Industrial Revolution, agriculture in rural areas was modernised. New machines took the jobs of farm workers, meaning that they had to seek work elsewhere. In his poem Rural Morning, John Clare criticises the unrealistic expectations which industrial changes meant for workers, personifying industry and labour, and enabling rural and urban workers to relate to the harshness described. The opening of new manufacturing plants heralded thousands of new opportunities for these new Londoners, but the reality quickly set in. As described in David Copperfield, any education the children had soon melted away with the mindless repetitiveness of the work needed. The promise of a few pence in payment was the only incentive, as it enabled them to buy food for their families and stay out of the workhouse, explaining the anger of the girls after Mr Bryant’s decision.
The factory owner is certainly represented as the villain in this article. The compound noun phrase “cruel plundering” has connotations of piracy, contrasting with his societal image as a man of respectability. The key point Besant is making here is that despite Bryant’s high social position, he is lower in morals than the socially low girls he employs, a concept similar to the one Dickens expounds on in Great Expectations. In this novel, Dickens presents many characters who are upper-class but deficient in any form of morality or conscience, such as the criminal Compeyson. In comparison, many more characters of a low social standing but high and noble attributes such as fairness and generosity, like blacksmith Joe Gargery and the convict Magwitch, are represented as the antithesis to the contemporary age of coldness and cruelty.
The author also presents the argument that “chattel slaves”, or slaves completely owned by their masters, are better cared for than their factory worker counterparts. By using two consecutive rhetorical questions of contrasting lengths, Besant addresses the reader directly. It is likely that this article would have gained sympathy from the reader as the target readership of the publication was a chiefly working-class audience who would have been able to empathise with the plight of the girls. The writer also uses a number of compounds to further emphasise her point, such as “undersized because underfed” and “oppressed because helpless”. The first quotation uses the same prefix for continuity, implying an undeniable link between the two conditions, while the second quotation uses the assonance of the “ess” sound to tie the two adjectives together. By contrasting the “white wage slaves” with the “shareholders” and the example of Mr Bryant as a representation of greedy factory owners, Besant presents a strong argument and the perfect opportunity to argue her suggested point of action in the following paragraph.
Although primarily targeted at a working-class readership, Besant’s article makes clear her level of education, and is possibly more accessible to middle- and upper-class readers through the literary references. On a simple level, the author’s description of the girls letting “their blood trickle on the marble” is merely disturbing, but an educated reader would identify the link between the payment in blood and Shakespeare’s drama The Merchant of Venice. In his play, the victim is the Christian Antonio, a character with whom a Victorian readership would symapthise, while the villain is the archetypal Jew Shylock, whom the same readership would despise. By cleverly linking the girls with Antonio and the factory owner with Shylock, Besant is persuading an educated group of society to support her cause, when they may not originally. Additionally, she references the Italian poet Dante’s poem, Inferno, and puts forward the argument that greedy factory owners deserve to be in their very own circle of Hell. Through this reference, Besant implies that the behaviour of the rich is decidedly un-Christian, and portrays the girls as martyrs, appealing to the strong religious beliefs of Victorian society. To round off the religious inferences, the author uses a direct quotation from the Bible, “partakers of their sins” and couples it with an infinite verb from the semantic field of religion, “abstaining”, implying that the actions of the factory owners are deeply sinful. She suggests that a boycott is not so much a political or industrial action, but a moral action. By using Biblical evidence, Besant makes it almost impossible for a contemporary reader to disagree with her.
