Born in Wiltshire in 1854, Higgs (née Kingsland) was the daughter of a Congregational minister and in 1873 became the first woman to study for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge. She drifted into teaching, but after marrying Thomas Kilpin Higgs, a minister like her father, devoted much of her time to philanthropic works: helping to manage a home for destitute women in Oldham; and engaging in utopian brainstorming with Ebenezer Howard, founder of the ‘garden city’ movement.
Higgs considered poverty to be a sort of disease, more or less infectious – she talks about the ‘microbes of social disorder’ – which the right sort of ‘remedial treatment’ could eradicate. In her introduction to Glimpses into the Abyss, Higgs describes the Oldham cottage she converted into a lodging house as a ‘social microscope, every case being personally investigated as to past life, history and present need’.38 What had been done to these women? What had they done to themselves? Higgs admitted ignorance. But she was determined to learn. The only way to do this, she decided, was to explore ‘Darkest England’ herself in a spirit of rational, scientific enquiry.
And so Higgs wandered through West Yorkshire, Lancashire and, briefly, London. She studied the Poor Law in Britain and its equivalent in Denmark. She also undertook a ‘literary investigation into deterioration of human personality’ – a ‘necessary corollary to the acquisition of a wide collection of facts’. Her inquiries took on a eugenicist gloss, shocking to us now, though it would have shocked few people at the time:
In any given individual the whole path climbed by the foremost classes or races may not be retraced. Therefore numbers of individuals are permanently stranded on lower levels of evolution. Society can quicken evolution by right social arrangements, scientific in principle.39
Higgs’ sense that improving social conditions for the poor could transform them and set them back on the road to prosperity (or at least ‘evolution’ rather than ‘devolution’) sounds progressive. But for her, people could only retrace the path appropriate to their class or race; could only hope to reach a certain, pre-ordained level of attainment. Even with all the wind in the world behind her, a working-class woman could never hope to be as clever and accomplished as an upper-class woman.
Higgs brought along her own secret supply of provisions – sugar, tea, plasmon (a form of dried milk) – and tolerated the filthy bedding, fleas and lack of washing facilities. But the behaviour of the people she encountered baffled her:
A conversation sprang up about the treatment of wives, and it was stated that a woman loved a man best if he ill-treated her … All the conversation was unspeakably foul, and was delivered with a kind of cross-shouting, each struggling to make his or her observations heard.40
In a workhouse tramp ward, naivety blinded Higgs to the ever-present sexual threat. A male ‘pauper’, charged with the responsibility for admitting women, ‘talked to me in what I suppose he thought a very agreeable manner, telling me he wished I had come alone earlier, and he would have given me a cup of tea. I thanked him, wondering if this was usual, and then he took my age, and finding I was a married woman (I must use his exact words), he said, “Just the right age for a bit of funning; come down to me later in the evening.” I was too horror-struck to reply.’41
Learning that ‘single women frequently get shaken out of a home by bereavements or other causes, and drift, unable to recover a stable position once their clothing becomes dirty or shabby’,42 Higgs comes to understand the catch-22 of poverty. This led her, once she had returned to her own world of middle-class comfort, to campaign for such things as pensions for widowed mothers and family allowances – some sort of safety net that might break the cycle of destitution.
-------------------------------------
At Windsor Castle on the night of 14 December 1861, Prince Albert died of typhoid at the age of forty-two. Victoria was inconsolable: his loss was, she said, ‘like tearing the flesh from my bones’. As she withdrew from the world, all that interested her was memorialising her husband and the miracle of their marriage through the likes of the Royal Albert Hall (opened in 1871) and the Albert Memorial (unveiled in 1872).
But however marvellous Victoria and Albert’s often stormy relationship had been, as an institution marriage was becoming less and less popular. By 1871 there were 3.4 million unmarried women over the age of twenty, an increase from 2.8 million in 1851 – a mixture of spinsters and widows. Whatever their circumstances, these were ‘surplus women’, considered a significant social problem in late-Victorian Britain, unless they lived lives of sainted purity.
Among this number we can count the single, celibate Florence Nightingale, who referred to herself as a nun, her only ‘sons’ the soldiers she cared for. Other less fortunate surplus women lived in special lodgings on small annuities, devoting themselves to good works because to work for money was socially unacceptable. Nightingale was scornful of these ‘lady philanthropists who do the odds and ends of charity’: ‘It is a kind of conscience-quieter,’ she wrote, ‘a soothing syrup.’43
For middle-class women who chose not to marry, options were limited. They could become governesses, educating the children of their social superiors but kept at arm’s length by the host families so that they felt no more valued or involved than servants. Writing was also acceptable, but to make a success of it you needed private means. Back in the early nineteenth century, the prolific social theorist Harriet Martineu had been able to make a living entirely by the pen. But she was considered a brazen oddity, which may be why the novelist Margaret Oliphant wrote that Martineu was ‘less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation’.44
In journalism, women’s inability to forge the necessary old-school-tie connections made the job doubly hard. As Charlotte O’Connor Eccles wrote in 1893, in an anonymous article for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:
One is horribly handicapped in being a woman. A man meets other men at his club; he can be out and about at all hours; he can insist without being thought bold and forward; he is not presumed to be capable of undertaking only a limited class of subjects, but is set to anything … Where a man finds one obstacle, we find a dozen.45
When women were employed at a senior level, it was often as a gimmick. In November 1903, the newspaper proprietor Alfred Harmsworth – later Lord Northcliffe – decided to launch a paper ‘for gentlewomen by gentlewomen’. Called the Daily Mirror, it would, Harmsworth announced in its inaugural editorial, arrange its stories so that ‘the transition from the shaping of a flounce to the forthcoming changes in imperial defence, from the arrangement of flowers on the dinner-table to the disposition of forces in the Far East, shall be made without mental paroxysm or dislocation of interest.’46 So far, so enlightened: in fact, it sounds rather like the UK edition of Marie Claire in its 1990s pomp.
To edit the Daily Mirror Harmsworth chose Mary Howarth, who had previously edited the women’s pages of his incredibly successful Daily Mail, launched in 1896 and a classic example of the so-called ‘ha’penny press’ which catered to the newly literate beneficiaries of the 1870 Education Act. All Howarth’s staff were women, and for a short time it looked as if Harmsworth’s gamble had paid off: the first issue sold a healthy 276,000 copies. Within weeks, however, circulation had plummeted to 25,000. Howarth and her team were sacked and the Mirror transformed into a picture-driven (and