The Female Philanthropist and the Victorian Text 1838 - 1894

My thesis pursues the presence of the female philanthropist across a range of Victorian texts, beginning with the legacy of Hannah More's writings to early Victorian conceptions of the female philanthropist and ending with Mrs Humphry Ward's Marcella. By reading the female philanthropist's different textual appearances in fiction, tracts and biographies, my project explores the ways in which the figure contributed to changing constructions of class and gender.

• Chapter One: 'Charity is the Calling of a Lady, the Care of the Poor is her Profession': Hannah More's Philanthropic Legacy

Texts: Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), Henry Thompson's The Life of Hannah More: with Notices of her Sisters (1838) and Sarah Lewis' Woman's Mission (1839)

• Chapter Two: The Possibilities of Female Philanthropy for Frances Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell

Texts: Frances Trollope's The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and My Lady Ludlow (1859)

• Chapter Three: Clever Women

Texts: Charlotte Mary Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), Hannah More (1888) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871)

• Chapter Four: Spectres of Degeneration

Texts: Clara Collet's 'Undercurrents' (1891-4) and George Gissing's Workers in the Dawn (1880)

• Chapter Five: 'But there were Lady Bountifuls and Lady Bountifuls': The Changing Sphere of the Philanthropic Heroine

Texts: Beatrice Potter's 'Pages from a Work-Girl's Diary' (1888) and Mrs Humphry Ward's Marcella (1894)