Children of Gibeon
Edited by Kevin A. Morrison
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Children of Gibeon
by Walter Besant
Edited by Kevin A. Morrison
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Contents
v
Editor’s Introduction
Children of Gibeon
1
by Walter Besant
Appendices
363
Appendix A: Economic and Geographic Divides of Victorian London
365
Appendix B: Literary and Social Contexts
369
Appendix C: Working-Class Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Domesticity
385
Appendix D: Contemporary Reviews of Children of Gibeon
391
Contents
iii
Editor's Introduction
ne of the most arresting images of nineteenth-century European visual culture is the careworn seamstress. Often depicted alone in the domestic environment that doubles as her workspace, and intensely
contemplating her plight or weary and overcome by fatigue, she is an image of perplexing beauty. Despite her
austere surroundings, which signify the meagerness of her life, she frequently radiates inward virtuousness.
The cover illustration of this Cognella edition depicts one such seamstress, who has passed out from exhaustion.1 As the sun begins to rise, the oil lamp that has provided the only light by which she has nocturnally
sewn—an activity that caused much blindness among working-women—continues to illuminate her figure.
Her limp body, partially resting on a small table, is juxtaposed with the unrumpled bed, in which she has
not slept. The empty bowl from which she has presumably eaten dinner signifies the inadequacy of her diet.
Its placement on an otherwise unused stool, within such close proximity, indicates that her fatigue was so
overpowering that she was unable to perform the simple act of leaning over and moving the stool to support
her legs. Scraps of fabric are scattered on the floor. As she sleeps, the seamstress clutches the dress that she
has been sewing for a wealthy female consumer. From its position, obscuring the lower half of her body,
the dress almost seems to be partially worn. But for the accident of birth, the painting seems to suggest, the
seamstress might have dressed in the very clothes she is instead condemned to sew.
That one’s cultural environment significantly influences—or even determines—one’s fate is a central point
of Walter Besant’s Children of Gibeon (1886). Lady Mildred Eldridge, a wealthy widow from London’s West
End, visits a former servant and is overwhelmed by the washerwoman’s struggle, as a single parent, to care for
her large family. Lady Mildred offers to adopt Hester Monument’s two-year-old daughter and raise the child
alongside her own daughter, who is the same age. Lady Mildred renames the children Violet and Valentine so
O
1 A Tired Seamstress by Angelo Trezzini (1827–1904). The exploited seamstress was a transnational concern in the nineteenth
century.
Editor's Introduction
v
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Children of Gibeon
that they, and everyone else, will remain ignorant of their true origins. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to each
other, neither girl knows whether she is Beatrice Eldridge, the daughter of an heiress, or Polly Monument,
a washerwoman’s child. Lady Mildred promises Violet and Valentine that, when they are twenty-one, she
will reveal their identities. While raising the two girls as her own, she also makes it possible for Polly’s older
brother Claude to receive a gentleman’s education: he excels in secondary school, secures a scholarship to
the University of Cambridge, and enters the legal profession. These efforts are part of Lady Mildred’s grand
experiment to prove that “there are, in every condition of life, children who may be trained and educated to
have the manners and the instincts of the most well-bred and the most cultured.”
When the girls turn twenty, they are introduced to the Monument family. While Violet shrinks in fear,
Valentine, convinced that she is really Polly, relocates to working-class London, hoping to get to know her
family and her people. She moves in with Polly’s older sister, the fiery Melenda, a poorly treated and badly
paid seamstress. Although driven to sewing out of economic necessity, Melenda is nevertheless resolutely
independent. She accepts jobs from an apparel manufacturer, performing them at home, rather than working
in a factory, because of the greater freedom this ostensibly provides. She dismisses all attempts, familial or
otherwise, to help her, and she insults her brother Claude as nothing more than the product of upper-class
charity.
Melenda shares a rented room in a tenement house with two other beleaguered working-women. Lotty
and Lizzie, along with Melenda, perform a very specific task in the manufacturing of apparel. They sew
buttonholes. The subdivision of labor—which by the mid-1880s was spread among a significant number of
divisions, each responsible for a tiny segment of the overall product—enabled manufacturers to hire unskilled
workers, often women, for a pittance. Through Melenda, Lotty, and Lizzie, Besant explores what he calls “the
Law of Elevenpence Ha’penny.” Manufacturers, the novel contends, have discovered that a worker’s subsistence
is manageable on eleven and a half pence a day.2 Anything below this daily wage would make it impossible for
the worker to survive, while anything above it would, precisely because it is unnecessary to ensure the worker’s
subsistence, cut into the manufacturer’s profits.
Having been trained in a very small portion of the overall manufacturing process, Melenda, Lotty, and
Lizzie possess no transferable skills and are unsuited for any other kind of employment. “They cannot go into
[domestic] service,” Besant writes, “because they know nothing, not even how to lay a table or how to dust a
room; they cannot emigrate because they would be of no use in any colony; they can only sew, and, like the
steam-engines which are kept going, till they fall to pieces of old age and rust, on coal and water, the sewinggirls are just as simply kept at working-power till something goes wrong with the wheels, on bread and butter
and cold tea.” The three women have themselves become sewing machines, working from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m.
Melenda may have chosen to work outside the factory, but, Besant suggests, the home has essentially become
a substitute for the factory or the small workshop.
The women are part of a vast contingent labor force variously known as sweated workers or outworkers.
Sweating meant a form of employment that required a significant amount of hours for a minimal amount
of pay in unregulated environments. A worker’s home was one such location. Others included makeshift
2 One penny (plural: pence) is equivalent to one hundredth of a pound, as one penny is equivalent to one hundredth of a dollar.
Victorian British currency includes pence (d.), shillings (s. or /-), crowns, and pounds (l. or £). Twelve pence are equal to a shilling, five
shillings to a crown, and four crowns (twenty shillings) to a pound.
Editor's Introduction
vii
facilities, workshops, the back rooms of shops, and residential basements—“any place,” James Schmiechen
notes, “beyond the policing eye of the respectable artisan, manufacturer, or government inspector” (p. 3). The
somewhat euphemistic phrase outworkers referred to everyone in the clothing and related trades who did not
perform work in a factory. Because the manufacturing of apparel in the nineteenth century was cyclical, with
periods of concentrated production, the capitalist found great advantage in this system. Instead of owning
a factory that would then sit idle during slack periods, the manufacturer would instead employ workers as
needed (Schloss, pp. 70–72).
Seamstresses were often used by artists and authors to call attention to working-class suffering because
Victorian society tended to view this form of employment as essentially respectable. A narrative or image of
a seamstress who performs her labor within a domestic setting was evocative because it provided a workingclass figure with whom the middle classes could sympathize. Knitting and sewing, particularly as an intergenerational practice of sociability, were essential elements of middle-class domesticity. Women who worked in
factories or small workshops instead of the home were viewed with suspicion. They were perceived as having
betrayed their intrinsic domestic affections and, therefore, as possessing questionable moral standards. While
the seamstresses of Besant’s novel are all inherently virtuous because they do not appear in factories, the novel
nevertheless asks whether one’s residence can truly be considered a home if it functions chiefly as a place of
work. Moreover, Besant suggests that Melenda, Lizzie, and Lotty unlike women who work in factories, have
no opportunities to form unions that might improve their employment conditions and rate of pay.
If Melenda represents the highly independent working-woman who retains her virtue through a combination of pride and ceaseless toil, Lotty and Lizzie stand for, respectively, the physically debilitated laborer and
the easily seduced dreamer of a better life. The unregulated nature of their work, with the performance of the
repetitive tasks associated with sewing by hand in a stooped posture for fifteen hours a day, has taken its physical toll on all three women. Lotty, who suffers from severe back pain, is described as a “thin delicate-looking
creature, about twenty-three or twenty-four years of age,” with hunched shoulders and a face that is “pale and
worn.” Her eyes have the “patient expression which comes to those who suffer continually.” Lizzie, although she
too is malnourished, has the “makings of a really beautiful girl.” She possesses a small “rosebud” mouth, the lips
of which are generally parted, “as if the soul of the maiden within were waiting to receive the sweet and holy
gifts and graces for which her eyes show her yearning.” Besant notes, “It is impossible to see such a girl without
longing immediately to take her away and place her where she may be in perpetual commune with things
lofty and spiritual.” The men who notice these same features have far more earthly considerations. Indeed, her
virtue is threatened by those who would lure working-girls into sexual liaisons with promises they have no
intention of keeping. To be sure, Lizzie, as well as Melenda and Lotty, are stock types. But they nevertheless
represent “genuine slum dilemmas” (Keating, p. 99).
The three women live on Ivy Lane in Hoxton. Just north of central London, Hoxton was then part of the
Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch, on the outer edges of what came to be known as the East End. The
borders of the East End have always been fuzzy and contested. The area only began to be represented on maps
in the nineteenth century and only considered a fairly homogeneous geographical segment of the metropolis
in the early 1880s (Palmer, Newland). The East End is generally thought to include various boroughs to the
north of the Thames River and to the east of London—that is, not the greater urban environment but the
official City of London, which is little more than a square mile, the borders of which are defined in part by the
viii
Children of Gibeon
remnants of an old medieval wall. In contrast to the prosperous West End, which contained all the amenities
of civilized life, the East End was one of the worst slums in Europe.
Until the early part of the nineteenth century, Hoxton was home to many affluent families. Over the
course of several decades, the wealthy began relocating from central and eastern London to the West End
and the suburbs of the greater metropolitan area suburbs. They were lured away, in part, by the promise of
modern housing with ample amenities, situated in more desirable communities with better transportation
links. Whereas the urban rich and poor had lived in close proximity to one another in the eighteenth century,
an expanding consciousness about sanitation, coinciding with the marketing of socially segregated residential
districts by property developers, had resulted by the early 1860s in “a dramatic geographic division of wealth:
West End and East End, rich and poor” (Weiner, p. 7).
By the 1880s, prominent intellectuals and politicians became increasingly concerned about the palpable
discontent among the working classes. Nascent social movements, offering critiques of capitalism and advocating political reform, were effectively taking root in the East End—such as the socialism that Sam Monument,
another of Hester’s offspring, propagates in the novel. The Earl of Rosebery, a Liberal who served as prime
minister in the 1890s, lamented that London was becoming divided into two distinct zones, essentially realizing within its confines what Benjamin Disraeli had identified long before as a more general division of the
nation into the rich and the poor. This division, Lord Rosebery concluded, had serious implications for the
future of London: “I hold that it is a great and sacred responsibility, not merely for our statesmen … but for
all our leading citizens, in whatever capacity it may be given to them to lead, to endeavour to prevent the
formation of those distinct nations [as exist in Continental Europe] within our metropolis” (qtd. in Weiner, p.
200). The geographic and physical separation of the classes—with areas of concentrated wealth and poverty,
combined with the demographic changes taking place in the East End as a result of an influx of immigrants
(to which the novel refers on several occasions)—had laid the foundation for revolution.
Addressing itself to these issues, Children of Gibeon was hailed by readers as a “purposeful” novel (Underhill,
p. 257). It depicts government, science, religion, and socialism as equally impotent in solving the problems
London was facing. Besant suggests that, in fact, only novelists—by which, of course, he means himself—can
offer the kind of capacious social vision on which social unity can be based, because they “are the only true
philosophers of modern times, and ought to be the only statesmen.” If science, embodied in Children of Gibeon
by a young doctor, provides an impetus for the care of the poor, it also engenders disenchantment and worldly
cynicism. Religion, premised on the notion that all are the children of God, may provide greater inspiration.
But its concern with the salvation of souls, Besant argues, leads to little practical change, as evinced by the
assistant priest in the novel, whose labors are for naught. If socialism recognizes injustice, its advocates, such
as Melenda’s brother Sam, rail at “the system” and dream of a utopian future while failing, Valentine contends,
to look after capitalism’s individual “victims” in the here and now.
Instead of the socialist version of equality, rather uncharitably depicted in the novel as leading to a world
as bleak as the one the characters already inhabit, Besant proposes a future in which the working classes can
achieve cultural parity with those above them in the social hierarchy. Valentine and Claude, who become
partners in efforts to bring about social unity (rather than, say, equality), conceive of an alternative revolution,
unlike the commune Sam envisions, that balances individual responsibility with shared beneficence. This
revolution is to begin with the recognition among the members of the middle and upper classes of a common
Editor's Introduction
ix
humanity, which the affect-laden images of seamstresses invite as well. Indeed, in one passage the novel addresses directly an explicitly female reader who, but for her circumstances, might have led a different sort of
life:
My very dear young lady, you who sit at home in ease, how would you like to find yourself in food,
frocks, fire, furniture, music, boots, bonnets, books, trinkets, gloves, and all the thousand-and-one
things that go to make a girl’s life, on sevenpence ha’penny a day? But these girls are not like you?
That, I assure you, is not at all the case. It is a falsehood invented by the Devil when he invented
the figment of nobility, gentry, and villain. If you desire to know what the work-girl really is, go to
the looking-glass and study very carefully, not your bonnet, which is very becoming, nor your face,
which is so pretty that one wishes he was young enough to fall in love with it, nor the dressing of
your hair, which might be much more artistic, but the unseen self which lies behind the face. That
is the working-girl as well as yourself, my dear young friend.
Lady Mildred’s grand experiment of adopting Polly and educating Claude is essentially an attempt to recuperate the working class for universal humanity. The novel suggests that once those of a privileged background
understand that, in one character’s phrasing, “there ain’t a great deal of difference between us after all; it’s
mostly a matter of clothes,” a cultural revolution can then proceed apace, remaking the working classes in the
image of the middle class.
Claude and Valentine establish an Earthly Tract Society for precisely this purpose. Offering short, pithy,
and practical information, their tracts displace what Besant elsewhere calls “the education of the gutter” (“From
Thirteen to Seventeen,” p. 36). The most important of these tracts, on which Claude and Valentine collaborate
especially closely, are included in the domestic series that is at the foundation of the society’s efforts. “It began
with the Tract on Wives,” Besant describes the society’s early development, “meaning the right treatment of a
wife, with her husband’s plain duties towards her; the corresponding Paper on Husbands; on Children, with
a parent’s duty to his offspring; on Language, the word used in its popular sense, and with special reference
to the use of the Universal Adjective;3 on the House; on Woman’s clothes; on Dinners; on clean Streets; on
Water; on Fresh Air; on Amusements; on Holidays; on Beer; on Pretty Things; on Dressing the Hair; on
Boots; on Wages, high and low; … on Hours of Work; and so on.”
Although this revolution begins at home, its effects are nevertheless far-reaching. The change in Ivy Lane is
instantaneous. It becomes a “Show Street,” with the houses “as beautifully clean as a Dutch village, the blinds
are white, … there are flowers in every window, and these are clean; within, the floors are scrubbed, walls
are dusted, water is filtered; the men have quite left off getting drunk; they never swear unless the situation
demands strong and plain words; they do not beat their wives; the women do not scream and fly into rages;
quarrelling among them is almost unknown.” With a newfound respect for herself, the seamstress will enter
into cooperative efforts with others like her to improve working conditions and pay for all. The diffusion of
the middle-class ideal of domesticity—doled out to the working classes in simple, comprehensible lessons—
“solves,” according to the logic of the novel, the inequities on which social conflicts have been based.
3
A common adjective in London at the time was bloody, an expression of anger or loathing.
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Children of Gibeon
If the notion of an underlying human essence (“the unseen self ”) seems quaint today, or at least hopelessly
problematic, and the novel’s proffered solutions to sweated outwork either preposterous or pernicious (a mere
change of clothes rather than a change in systems), Children of Gibeon nevertheless remains a vitally important
historical document in understanding the social and epistemological changes occurring in the closing decades
of the century. For Besant’s readers, the novel represented a significant challenge to their willful blindness
to the human costs of manufacturing apparel—“so great is their sympathy with those who suffer,” as Besant
ironically puts it, “that they cannot bear even to think of them, much less to talk about them”—and their blithe
attitude toward philanthropy, “treat[ing] every painful case [of human want] with half-a-crown4 and a basket
of grapes.” One of Besant’s contemporaries thought the title summed up the meaning and moral of the novel
most of all:
The Children of Gibeon … were a tribe condemned by Joshua [leader of Israel] to perpetual
bondage—to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation” [for deceiving him].
Mr. Besant knew … that in all our back streets there are hundreds and thousands of women who
are continually occupied in working out life-long sentences of toil, compared to which the tasks of
the Egyptians were light, and the daily labour imposed by the slaveowner was merciful; toil coupled
with miserable pay, chiefly absorbed in satisfying the rent collector, insufficient food, and deprivation of all that makes life tolerable, not to say happy. This terrible life-sentence, from which there is
no escape and of which there is no mitigation, is pronounced upon these poor women at their birth:
it is their punishment for the crime of being born. They have been condemned unjustly—not justly,
as were the Children of Gibeon—to perpetual bondage. (Underhill, p. 257)
Following the novel’s publication, “the bright light of publicity” was shown on the outwork system (Record, p.
12); articles were written on the sweated seamstress; and one reader established a cooperative sewing association, along the lines represented in the novel, to which Besant lent his support (Besant, Autobiography, pp.
246–48). With a dozen employees, a forewoman, and a directress, the association sought to establish itself
as a model of improved working conditions and greater pay. While the efficacy of the resulting efforts can
be debated, a comment about Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story (1882)—which
inspired philanthropists to establish the People’s Palace in the East End, modeled on the novel’s Palace of
Delight for the poor—could easily apply to Children of Gibeon as well. Not just a “novel with a purpose,” it was
a “novel with a result” (Billson, p. 619).
***
Children of Gibeon was serially published from January to December 1886 in Longman’s Magazine, a periodical that catered to middle-class families, and in a three-volume edition in 1886. It was subsequently published
in a number of editions in both London and New York. The text in this volume follows the 1887 edition
published by Chatto and Windus in one volume. I have, however, regularized spelling and capitalization by
consulting later editions. I have also silently corrected the misspelling of some characters’ names in the novel
4
An English coin worth two and a half shillings or thirty pence.
Editor's Introduction
xi
and in the ancillary material. The assistance of two exceptional graduate students made this Cognella edition
possible. Elizabeth Stearns helped me with formatting and proofing, and Thomas Witholt drafted many of
the annotations. I am grateful to them both.
Kevin A. Morrison
Syracuse University
Works Cited
Besant, Walter. Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant. New York: Dodd, 1902.
– – –. “From Thirteen to Seventeen.” As We Are and As We May Be. London: Chatto, 1903. 24–49.
Billson, Charles James. “The English Novel.” Westminster Review 138 (1892): 602–20.
Keating, P. J. The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. London: Routledge, 1979.
Newland, Paul. The Cultural Construction of London’s East End: Urban Iconography, Modernity, and the Spatialisation of
Englishness. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
Palmer, Alan. The East End: Four Centuries of London Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.
Record [Valparaiso, Chile] 25 Apr. 1888: 11–12.
Schloss, David. “Women’s Work and Wages.” Longman’s Magazine 12 (1888): 61–73.
Schmiechen, James A. Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades, 1860–1914. Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1984.
Underhill, John. “Character Sketch: Walter Besant.” Review of Reviews (1893): 250–61.
Weiner, Deborah E. B. Architecture and Social Reform in Late-Victorian London. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994.
Children of Gibeon
By Walter Besant
Contents
PROLOGUE
PART I
Polly-Which-Is-Marla
PART II
The Stroke of Fate

BOOK I
I. At Nine O’Clock
II. Which Is My Sister?
III. Jack Conyers
IV. The Haven of Rest
V. The Law of Elevenpence Ha’Penny
VI. An Unlucky Day
VII. After Melenda
VIII. Alicia
IX. Sam
X. The Great Renunciation






















BOOK II
I. “I Am Your Sister”
II. The City of Hogsden
III. On Curls and Dimples
IV. Lotty’s Romance
V. A Real Day’s Work
VI. Behind St. Luke’s
VII. The Professor of Yiddish
VIII. Lotty’s Foolish Dream
IX. Showing How the Band Played
Contents


Children of Gibeon
X. The Reverend Randal Smith
XI. A Dead Man’s Steps
XII. The Wooing of the Sphinx
XIII. A Useless Crime
XIV. Ask Me No More
XV. Brother Joe’s Discovery
XVI. The Earthly Tract Society
XVII. The Step Without
XVIII. Le Père Prodigue
XIX. In the Churchyard
XX. The Lady with the Parasol
XXI. A Friendly Father
XXII. The Doctor Speaks
XXIII. How Melenda Was Drilled
XXIV. Melenda Is Vanquished
XXV. Lizzie’s Temptation
XXVI. No Defence
XXVII. Alicia
XXVIII. Return, O Shulamite!
XXIX. The Last Evening
XXX. The Bishop’s Deathbed
XXXI. Home Again
XXXII. The Finding of the Inquest
XXXIII. Coming of Age
CHAPTER THE LAST. Valentine Speaks
























