City Girls: Representations of Female Labour in Margaret Harkness’s 1880s Writings

Abstract

This article examines Margaret Harkness’s contribution to representations of gendered urban labour in the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on her portrayal of unskilled and precariously employed female workers – or “city girls” – in both her fiction and non-fiction. Through a close reading of Harkness’s slum novels, including A City Girl (1887), Out of Work (1888), In Darkest London (1891) and A Manchester Shirtmaker (1890), as well as journalistic pieces such as “Girl Labour in the City” (1888) and Toilers in London (1889), the article explores the narrative and aesthetic strategies Harkness uses to depict the structural disempowerment, economic marginalisation, and epistemological deprivation experienced by working-class women in late-Victorian cities. The article argues that Harkness’s refusal to imbue her characters with psychological depth or conventional interiority, often criticised by scholars as artistic failure, should instead be understood as a deliberate formal intervention. By flattening subjectivity and emphasising disorientation and opacity, Harkness resists middle-class realist and naturalist modes of representation, offering instead a more politically and structurally attuned portrayal of female unskilled work. Rather than embodying moral growth or agency, Harkness’s characters exist on the margins of intelligibility and action, a narrative choice that speaks to the limited tools and frameworks available to them for making sense of their exploitation.