Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Margaret Harkness: A Brief Chronology
- A Note on the Text
- A City Girl
- Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews of A City Girl
- From “Novels of the week,” The Athenaeum (30 April 1887)
- “A City Girl: a Realistic Story,” The Spectator (31 March
1888)
- “Publisher’s Corner,” Our Corner (August 1887)
- From “Novels and Stories,” The Glasgow Herald (14 May
1887)
- From “New Books and Reviews,” The Sheffield Daily Telegraph (11
May 1887)
- From “Metropolitan Gossip,” The Belfast News-Letter (22 May
1887)
- Letter, Friedrich Engels to Margaret Harkness (from Engels:
Correspondence January 1887–July 1890)
- Appendix B: Other Writings by Margaret Harkness/John Law
- “Girl Labour in the City,” Justice (3 March 1888)
- “Salvationists and Socialists,” Justice (24 March 1888)
- From In Darkest London (1891)
- Appendix C: The East End in Late-Victorian London
- From Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
(1883)
- From The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. I (11 April 1888)
- From Jack London, “Those on the Edge,” People of the Abyss
(1903)
- Appendix D: Reform Initiatives for East End Women
- From Lady Mary Jeune, “Helping the Fallen,” Fortnightly Review
(1 November 1885)
- Margaret E. Harkness, “The Match Girls’ Strike,” The Spectator
(21 July 1888)
- From Captain William Booth, “A New Way of Escape for Lost
Women: The Rescue Homes,” In Darkest London and the Way Out
(1890)
- Eleanor Marx, Speech on May Day (4 May 1890)
- Appendix E: Fallen Women in Late-Victorian Fiction
- From George Gissing, The Unclassed (1884)
- From Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman
(1894)
- Arthur St. John Adcock, “The Soul of Penelope Sanders,” East
End Idylls (1897)
About the Author
Tabitha Sparks is Associate Professor of English
at McGill University.
Reviews
“A surprising Broadview decision to publish the slum novella A City
Girl, by the socially aware Margaret Harkness, has produced an
important edition, brilliantly edited by Tabitha Sparks. The story
is filled with clichés, yet contains unique descriptions of grim,
for-profit tenements, written in an intimate, non-partisan tone.
What rivets attention is the volume as a whole, not only the
expected but wonderful contemporary reviews but also pieces by
Friedrich Engels—a fascinating response written to Harkness
herself—Eleanor Marx, Jack London, Beatrice Potter, and others.
Taken together, A City Girl, Broadview edition, offers much more
than supplements to Harkness’s competent story; with satisfying
richness, it opens a teeming vista onto the impoverished world of
the story. This is a book not only for students but also for all
nineteenth-century buffs interested in darkest London, the title of
a later Harkness fiction.” —Adrienne Munich, Stony Brook
University, Co-Editor, Victorian Literature and Culture