"Life and Death of a Work Girl"

An article entitled “Life and Death of a Work Girl” was published in the Illustrated Police News on April 20, 1867 and reports on the death of a working-class woman named Ellen Chatfield. She is sympathetically described as a “poor work girl” who had been “struggling against a hopeless poverty” and “worn out by almost ceaseless toil,” and who had taken a powerful narcotic “either to drown her sorrows or else to end her existence.” The article continues to relate her story in similarly sympathetic terms, paying particular attention to her “miserable” living conditions owing to extreme poverty. A witness by the name of Jane Laslett, who had resided in the same house as Ellen, explains that Ellen had been driven by poverty to “pledge some goods belonging to her employer” and had resolved to “work hard and redeem the goods,” but her evidently failing health indicated that she had been overworking herself. The landlady had become concerned one morning that Ellen had not stirred as usual, and subsequently found her lying on her bed, dead from an apparent laudanum overdose.

The article ends with a surprisingly candid and uniquely touching statement about the nature of the circumstances of Ellen’s death: “The melancholy end of the miserable girl Chatfield is one of the very many instances of the poorly paid workwomen in the metropolis and the provincial towns--poor creatures who ‘sew with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt.’” The account, and perhaps in particular the final sentence, reads considerably more like a narrative story than a report in a newspaper; the expressive language with which the reporter recounts Ellen’s story is reminiscent of the way in which an author introduces and situates a fictional character within a larger narrative. The affectionate and sympathetic tone of the account seems to suggest that the publication of this particular story was believed to serve a greater purpose than simply to provide the details of an untimely death. Not only is Ellen’s tragic story immortalized by its publication, but it is also rendered unforgettable by the injection of pathos into what would otherwise be yet another report of the discovery of a dead body.

The article raises some interesting questions about the expectations of reportage in the Victorian period and perhaps even today. To what extent does sentimentalism in a newspaper report affect the truthfulness of the representation of its subject? Should a line exist between reporting the objective details of a case and making assumptions about the circumstances of the case based on the details alone? While this article provides no easy answers to such questions, the evident sympathy of the reporter for the woman whose life had been characterized by such seemingly relentless suffering is so moving that perhaps some readers were roused to action against the unfair treatment of working-class women as a result of the article’s publication. And if so, perhaps the reporter had done his job.