Mary Garcia

Despite the anonymity of authoress, Hannah Clay, writer of “The Broken Promise,” her stories tell volumes about what kind of a message she wanted to invoke into her tales, which were all written for children. The story, “The Broken Promise” tells the story of a little girl named Mary Worthing, who shares a close relationship with her mother. When the girl’s mother leaves town, Mary makes a promise to her mother that she will not play with a neighborhood girl who often drags Mary into mischief. Ultimately, Mary breaks the promise to her mother and plays with the little girl—which leads her to be nearly killed by a bull. The almost-tragic end to Mary Worthing delivers a severe message to the child audience via the words of Mary Worthing: “’Ah! Dearest mamma, had not my will seconded the temptations those rude boys would never have mastered me. But I longed to disobey you, mamma; and have been rightly punished!’” (Clay 88). Many of Clay’s stories mirror this same type of theme almost identically.

In Hannah Clay-Leigh’s story, “Mary Vining’s New-Years Day; or The Hundred Pound Bank Note” the same type of dynamic occurs between the characters: strong relationship between the main characters, a mother and a daughter, and the absence of a father figure. And then the deliverance of a stern moral at the end of the tale, which was geared towards wayward children:
“Butter, this poor mother and daughter had none; they could not afford to buy it. Think of this dear young readers—you who as a little bird told me one day, sometimes grumble and sit with sulky little faces because your bread is not buttered quite to the edges. Think of the numbers of poor children who consider themselves well off if they get a sufficiency of dry bread, with perhaps a little coarse treacle upon it—or, oftener, nothing at all!” (Clay 99)

Another of Clay’s tales, “Annie’s Thoughts” illustrates the daily thoughts of a young girl named Annie. On one particular day, Annie describes how she gets in trouble at school and remarks:
“Oh dear! How I wish I could ever behave properly. And yet Mary was more naughty than I was yesterday; for she told me a story, and I only tore my frock, and spoiled my bonnet. But mamma was more angry with me than with her. I am a wretched little girl! I never can please anybody” (Clay 34)

These are two additional tales that showcase the close relationship between a mother and her daughter, that Hannah Clay depicts in the majority of her tales—and the almost always absent father figure. The absence of a father in these stories was not a message of empowerment for women, but it was to show how hands-on a mother should be in the home and with her children in order to raise upstanding, proper children—otherwise, the mother was not doing her job. Which is why we see in “The Broken Promise,” Mary’s almost fatal injury can be seen as a direct correlation with the fact that her mother was absent and not at home, where she should have been, preventing Mary from getting into mischief.

Clay also emphasizes the idea of guilt acting as an important tool of child rearing. Each child exudes a high level remorse at her (I rarely saw little boys being disciplined in these tales) mistakes, so much so it almost appears oppressive. I believe these extremes of obedience go hand in hand with the whole purpose of the Ladies’ Companion, which was to inform ladies of this time how to become or lead the lives of proper 19th century women. If you were already behaving in that manner, than these tales for children were meant to show little girls how they should be responding to their actions, and what they should learn from their mistakes.

Hannah Clay’s stories are indicative of the emergence of the variety of periodicals that were geared toward families and the home in the 19th century. This genre of media was made possible by the cheapening of the paper^[1] that the periodicals were printed on—no longer were journals made to only be shared and passed from group to group due to the expensive quality of the magazine’s materials (Reed 44). The initial audiences of British periodicals were serials “aimed at the working class,” which usually cost around a penny (Reed 82). The lower cost of the paper brought forth a new wave of periodicals that were geared toward a specific place for reading the periodical, such as the home, rather than an intended audience. This new concept brought about magazines that were meant for a woman whose constant domain was her house (Beetham). The “domestic” periodical^[2] can date back to mid-century, around the 1850’s, with one of the earliest magazines being the Ladies’ Companion (Usden). The publishing house “Bradbury and Evans” created the Ladies’ Companion on December 29, 1849 (Shattock). It was a “double-column weekly” that sold for three pence (which is around six cents in American money) from 1849-1850, and then it became a monthly in 1851 until 1852 (Shattock).

Jane Loudon was the first, main editor of the Ladies’ Companion. She was an interesting woman of the 19th century, best known for her work as a novelist, magazine editor, and botanical enthusiast. She received informal education, acquiring much of her knowledge from trips to Europe with her father. She began writing at the age of 17, and developed a passion for writing poetry and fictional stories. The first novel she wrote was a science fiction piece called, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century; it was anonymously published in 1827. She went on to become an editor for two different magazines the Literary Gazette and Tabby’s Magazine. After her marriage to John Claudius Loudon^[3] , she began to dabble in horticulture writings. She edited a short lived magazine called, The Ladies’ Magazine of Gardening, which was published by Bradbury and Evans; the publishing house that would soon be calling upon her to be editor of their new magazine the Ladies’ Companion (Birkbeck).

Bradbury and Evans^[4] wrote directly to Loudon, explaining the magazine as “a journal for thinking women” which would “act as a medium principally for dealing with contemporary problems written from an enlightened female angle.” (Howe 109) The periodical’s early contributors were “Mary Howitt, Mary Russell Mitford and Geraldine Jewsbury” (Usden). Many of the works were serialized fictional stories and poems, novel and theater reviews, how-to guides on needlework accompanied by illustrations, and occasionally letters submitted by readers. Later, the magazine would include household hints and advice to readers, which would pave the way for future women’s periodicals. After six months, Loudon was fired and replaced by Henry F. Chorley^[5] of the Athenaeum (Zon).

The wave of domestic periodicals brought about much competition for the Ladies’ Companion, so after two years of publication it merged with two other literary magazines—Ladies Cabinet and the New Monthly Belle Assemblee (Usden).

This volume of the Ladies’ features an extensive index that categorically organizes every single work within the magazine into two main genres: “Novels, Romances, Tales, &c.” and “Poetry,” within these you can find sub-genres of texts such as “music”, “the child’s corner”, or “the work table.” There were many sub-genres such as “the work table” that were added later on in the magazine’s run that were meant to include more material for their growing audience of women.

The growing number of women that were snatching up this female-run periodical draws a parallel with historical background surrounding the Ladies’ Companion. During this time, impassioned arguments began that questioned female and male dynamics. “The 1860’s was a decade where both journalistic anonymity and the ‘Woman Question’ were the “subjects of heated debate in the press” (Fraser, Green, Johnston 27). The “woman question” revolved around the argument that woman in the periodical press could be writers in the public forum and not shirk their wifely/motherly/womanly duties needed to maintain a proper level of Victorian womanhood. The construction of women’s rights brought about the idea of varying levels of Victorian womanhood. Virginia Woolf was a famous woman writer of this time who felt the need to “do battle” with the “The Angel of the House” before she could attempt a writing career; needing to furnish “a room of one’s own”^[6] (Shattock 234). Woolf pointed out that “writing was the one profession which could be carried out within the domestic sphere; although when it came time to manage such issues as copyright and payment and authorial identity, women packed their bags and went to Town,” (Shattock 235). Writing was perceived as skill that should come naturally to a woman because it could be accomplished in the home (Shattock 235).

In 1851, an article from Eliza Cook’s Journal^[7] titled “What Will You Write for the Magazine” expresses this argument easily, when the character of the husband in the article exclaims, “it does not do for wives to turn authoresses! Here have you, my dear, spent the whole evening with no profit—while little Johnny contrived to set his pinafore on fire, and burned” (Fraser, Green, Johnston 38). The mid-19th century was still heavily influenced by the role of the mother and wife, and the fact that a woman taking up a pen and expressing herself should not abandon such roles.

Despite this oppressive ideology in which men dominated both the domestic and public worlds, women were seen as a threat to men and to themselves once they started to use their intellect (Purchase 75). But thankfully, women overcame such domination and were able to rise above to make their voices heard. Returning to Hannah Clay’s story, “The Broken Promise,” you can see that there were still many women authors, such as Ms. Clay, that were still trying to maintain the idea of female inferiority, whilst many women were trying to elevate the status of woman to an equal plain with men. The struggle between these two types of women made the magazine such an important form of press because it was being used “both as a space for the contestation and elaboration of gendered discourses and as a vehicle for social change,” (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 145).

The plethora of comparisons between the varying types of women’s magazines was easily identifiable. The first periodical in England that was dedicated solely to important “women’s affairs” was The English Woman’s Journal. But these types of women’s affairs were not the same affairs as the Ladies’ Companion felt the need to print—for instance Ladies’ deemed women’s affairs in regards to fluff pieces like recipes, doily patterns and children’s stories, and The English Woman’s Journal encouraged women to become interested in “employment” and the promotion of reform for “laws that affected the property and condition of the sexes” (Mitchell 268).

The English Woman’s Journal was established in 1858 by the women of Langham Place Circle, and was headed by Bessie Raynor Place. Sadly, this radical periodical could not achieve financial stability and had to merge with another periodical in 1864, which then also failed. In 1866, Jessie Boucherett was able to revive The English Woman’s Journal under the name Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Question, a quarterly (and at one point monthly) review that would last until 1901 (Mitchell 268). The editors of this periodical attributed its major success as being that it ability to “record women’s progress in social and industrial questions in all parts of the world” (Mitchell 268). The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Question would achieve such a high status that it would become a reference for any questions regarding the law, women’s right in terms of medicine, education and employment.

Proof that The English Woman’s Journal had an impact on women of 19th century and the fact that it encouraged women to act, and not sit idly by tending to their husbands, could lie with Emily Faithfull. Faithfull, who was a member of the Langham Place Circle, found the Victoria Press in 1860. She did so for the sole reason that she wanted to give women the opportunity to work in the printing trade. Victoria Press became the printer of the English Woman’s Journal, and the Transactions of the National Association of the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), and also other works from other organizations (Mitchell 285). Faithfull’s press garnered such attention, that it drew even Queen Victoria’s notice, and eventually her approval to the extent that Faithfull was dubbed “Printer and Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty” (Mitchell 285). Faithfull would go on to establish Victoria Magazine, a periodical that combined both serious articles involving women’s issues and also lighter works that could appeal to a broader spectrum of readers. Regardless of her work in improving the rights of women, Faithfull’s is “important chiefly for her work in improving women’s employment opportunities” (Mitchell 285).

All of this dialogue about women’s suffrages in the variety of women’s periodicals would jump start the women’s suffrage movement in 1866, which would lead to campaign for women’s right to vote in the eighties and nineties (Purchase 214). The intensity of social anxieties that was felt all over the country was discussed at length in the stories of women writers. The tale of a child being bored by a bull was not merely for enjoyment, but it was meant to convey a message of how a woman needed to be at home with her child instead of gallivanting off. Each woman had a significant message that they intended to explore by exuding their feelings through the themes of their works.

In Hannah Clay’s, “The Broken Promise” we can see the major theme of this text was the important of the relationship between mothers and daughters, and the emphasis on the role of women in the domestic sphere and their imprisonment within it.
Sally Shuttleworth’s essay, “Ideologies of bourgeois mother in the mid-Victorian era” examines the construction of motherhood in Victorian literature. She claims that:
“Motherhood was set at the ideological centre of the Victorian bourgeois ideal. Virtually any reference to motherhood in the social texts of the era seemed to call forth, as if by necessity, yet one more recitation of the maternal creed. We hear endlessly of the mother’s sacred mission to rear children, and of her spiritual grace which, filling the domestic sphere, uplift her weary husband” (Shires: Shuttleworth 31)

These ideals that a mother was supposed to uphold during the mid-19th century could have been slowly eradicated by the emergence of the “women’s movement in the 1860’s, but female reformers were reluctant to voice a challenge to the sacred ideals of motherhood” (Shires: Shuttleworth 31).
Regardless of the radicals of this time, women who entered the public forum would often enter into writing “anonymously rather than over the signatures of individual contributors…anonymity enabled women to enter the profession” (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 27). The true feelings regarding women writers who emphasize their “belief systems” would emerge which explained for the call for anonymity from female writers. An article from 1864 called “Literary Women’ in the London Review” which explains in so many words that “to be a great writer require a classical education; this is unavailable to women; ergo, women can’t be great writers; or if they do somehow acquire the necessary education, they must pay the price of their womanhood” (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 33). The anonymity of a woman writer meant that she could hide from the criticism that she would surely receive as a result of merely being a woman writer (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 27). Despite the rampant anonymity of many women writers, studies have unearthed the fact that twenty percent of published, Victorian writers were women—and amongst these writers, the majority of works were either novels or children’s literature, and the minority were literary criticisms (Purchase 75). Regardless of the topic, the main goal of these women was to get published in the oppressive male-dominated society of the 19th century (Purchase 213).

The relevance of the story “The Broken Promise” to British literature students of today could be attributed to the fact that there is such an obvious message of the role of the mother within its lines. This theme seems to be a reoccurring societal construction within British literature so much so that it could be considered a trope amongst literary analyses.

The absent mother, throughout the story, leads to the wayward actions of her daughter and her almost-fatal injury. This is a clear expression of the fact that the place of the mother should be in the home and not off traveling. It’s an intriguing analysis for women of our time because the majority of us have grown up in an age and country where women have the freedom to do as they please—whether it be work, not work, stay at home, raise kids, marry, not marry…the choices are endless.

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