Mary Elizabeth Braddon: The Factory Girl (1863)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Factory Girl (1863) was a cheap serial intended for working-class readers. The sprawling plot centres on Laura Leslie and her daughter, Dora, who are the targets of a diverse cast of villains. After Laura’s tragic death, Dora and her adoptive mother start a new life working in a cotton mill, but Dora’s beauty attracts unwelcome attention, putting them in danger. Dora is the classic factory girl, a nineteenth-century revision of the Gothic heroine. Republished in the US in both newspapers and as a book, and translated into French, the novel has been out of print since the 1860s. This edition reproduces the original Halfpenny Journal text and illustrations, and adds a scholarly introduction placing the novel in numerous cultural contexts, including the rise of sensation fiction; nineteenth-century popular theatre; the transformation of the genre of the Gothic; and the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.