Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Hannah Cullwick
-
Standard Name: Cullwick, Hannah
Birth Name: Hannah Cullwick
Nickname: Mary
Married Name: Hannah Munby
HC
wrote seventeen diaries between the years 1854 and 1873, plus numerous letters chronicling in detail her life as a lower servant, as well as her long cross-class courtship and eventual marriage to Arthur Munby
. Whether one views her as exceptional or as typical of the one third of women between the ages of fifteen and twenty who were in service at this historical place and time, her writing offers a rare glimpse into the harsh material conditions of maids of all work, as well as the complex cultural intersections of class, gender, race, sexuality, labour, and the body as represented by a working-class woman in later Victorian England.
Cullwick, Hannah. “Introduction and Notes”. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, edited by Liz Stanley, Rutgers University Press, 1984, pp. 1 - 28, passim.
"Hannah Cullwick" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/Hannah_Cullwick_portrait_in_man.jpg/646px-Hannah_Cullwick_portrait_in_man.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
During her tenure she encountered the very best and worst of late Victorian poetry. Her published reviews, which critic Marysa Demoor
characterises as expressing a hesitant modernism,
Demoor, Marysa. “Women Poets as Critics in the Athenæum: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, No. 1, pp. 51 -71.
Munby
, who had encouraged his secret wife, Hannah Cullwick
, to record her experiences of servant life, registered in his diary his delight at the discovery of EMP
's publication: I left his shop...
Textual Features
Ellen Johnston
In contrast to the life-writings of her working-class contemporary Hannah Cullwick
, EJ
's autobiography is remarkably self-reflexive and literary. She says that an account of her life in Dundee alone, her trials, disappointments, joys...
Textual Production
Michelene Wandor
Other radio plays that MW
has written about women writers include An Uncommon Love, based on Hannah Cullwick
's relationship with Arthur Munby
, A Consoling Blue, about Jean Rhys
's writing of...
Timeline
10 January 1863
The Metropolitan Railway
, the first underground railway in the world, opened; it ran between Bishop's Road(Paddington) and Farringdon Street in London.
Arthur Munby
published this year two books reflecting his interest in the working classes—the pseudonymous Vulgar Verses contained some work in dialect, while Faithful Servants collected hundreds of epitaths and obituaries—plus Vestigia Retrorsum, a...
1893
Arthur Munby
published a narrative poem called Susan: A Poem of Degrees, a thinly disguised account of his tempestuous secret love for working-class diarist Hannah Cullwick
.