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After poetry, autobiography was the principal mode of nineteenth-century working-class literary expression, and there is a deeper sense in which it may have been crucial to the preservation of a working-class sense of identity. As David Vincent has observed in his pioneering work Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, "The working class had few history books other than these autobiographies, no historians other than those who remembered and the few who wrote."' But Vincent also commented on a "major silence": there were many more autobiographies of Victorian working-class men, and it is not difficult to guess why.
How many poor Victorian women in a male-dominated social order could hope to interest a publisher? In Vincents view, the principal causes of this dearth were subordination of working-class women in the family, their de facto exclusion from working-class organizations, and a closely related "absence among women of the self-confidence required to undertake the unusual act of writing an autobiography."2
I will argue in this essay that more systematic barriers underlay this "absence ... of self-confidence." In The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe, Vincent followed rates of "literacy"-defined as recorded on census forms or manifested in the ability to sign a marriage register-and found that about forty percent of women and sixty percent of men were "literate" at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and by midcentury the rates had risen only modestly to sixty-five percent of men and slightly more than half of women.3 According to the Newcastle Commission Report of 1862, moreover, six-sevenths of the population could not be expected to pay for their childrens education in private schools.4 Most "education" available to working-class girls took place in "voluntary" or "adventure" schools, and consisted of little more than training in sewing, catechism, and orderly behavior. Finally, among women who were able to read and write, few would have had access to the leisure, knowledge, and physical means necessary to gather their thoughts, much less the ink and paper and lighting to record them. And the strait gate of publication for the few women who made it through these baffles lay through male editors and publishers who had every reason to favor and respect working-class men who had already achieved a measure of public...