‘This surging tide of wretchedness’: Gender, danger and progress in nineteenth‐century Newcastle Upon Tyne∗

∗ This article is based upon a paper presented at the Australian Historical Association Conference, Perth 1994. I wish to thank Matthew Allen, Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern for their comments on the original paper.

Abstract

The urban landscape of Victorian Newcastle upon Tyne provides the location for this article, which examines constructions of working‐class femininity in the city across a range of sites. It explores the ways in which women were positioned in discourses about disease, vice, sex and death, and argues that it was as the unsettling vector of disorder that the figure of the poor working‐class woman was most typically invoked in Novocastrian narratives of ‘progress’.

Notes

∗ This article is based upon a paper presented at the Australian Historical Association Conference, Perth 1994. I wish to thank Matthew Allen, Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern for their comments on the original paper.