Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women by Florence s. Boos

Author:Florence s. Boos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Mary Ann Ashford (1787 to After 1861)

The 91-page Life of a Licensed Victualler’s Daughter, Written by Herself was carelessly printed with several pages out of order in 1844 by Saunders and Otley , a well-known publishing house which had issued the work of better-known authors such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton.7 All that is known about Mary Ann Ashford is derived from her narrative and what appears in the census and marriage and death records, which list the names of her parents, siblings, husbands, and children,8 all in accord with her account. Furthermore, there seems little reason to doubt the authenticity of her tale, for it lacks the elements of romance, melodramatic adventure, or sudden accession to fortune which might signal a fictive account, and which we will find later in the apparently fictional servant’s narrative The Autobiography of Rose Allen. As Jean Fernandez notes, “The aesthetic of realism that Ashford claims to espouse is one that appeals to the ‘matter-of-fact’ reader, who disdains sensation.”9

Ashford’s preface pointedly raises questions of class and the extent to which stereotypes dominate the representation of ordinary women workers:In the month of July, 1842, as I was passing the site of the Royal Exchange, … my attention was caught by one of the very numerous bills with which the boards … were covered: it ran thus – “Susan Hopley, or the Life of a Maid Servant.” This book, I thought to myself, must be a novelty; for although female servants form a large class of Her Majesty’s subjects, I have seen but little of them or their affairs in print: sometimes, indeed, a few stray delinquents, from their vast numbers, find their way into the police reports of the newspapers; and in penny tracts, now and then, a “Mary Smith,” or “Susan Jones,” is introduced, in the last stage of consumption, or some other lingering disease, of which they die, in a heavenly frame of mind, and are duly interred. (iii–iv)

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