Subversion of the Victorian Gender Biases Against the Working-Class Women in Janet Hamilton’s Poems, Essays, and Sketches

Contrary to the women of the upper-class who found relatively ample space in the literature of the Victorian period, working-class women were not given due consideration, denigrated into a morally inferior position and pushed into the peripheries of the society. Janet Hamilton (1795-1873), however, appears as a Scottish working-class essayist and an exceptional poet who takes women of working-classes as her foremost concern. Hamilton, in her poems, represents the difficulty of becoming socially, culturally, and politically under-privileged women of the working-classes in a class and gender-biased world of the Victorian Britain. Reducing the distance between the working-class women and the mainstream society, Hamilton’s poems have an avid propensity to construct a communal bridge across class and gender divisions, restore the moral dignity of working women and solicit sympathetic identification with the everyday plights of the working-class women. The purpose of this study is to read a selection of Hamilton’s poetry in Poems, Essays, and Sketches (1780) to unveil Hamilton’s representation of working-class women whose participation in Britain’s industrial development has been largely evaded. The study further reveals Hamilton’s rebellious pursuit of social justice and equality for the stigmatized and marginalized women of the working class.