Helen Fleetwood

by Charlotte Elizabeth

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Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1843

About the author

Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna was a popular Victorian English writer and novelist who wrote as Charlotte Elizabeth. Her work focused on promoting women's rights (see her books The Wrongs of Women and Helen Fleetwood) and evangelical Protestantism. She went deaf at the age of 10. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote of her memoir Personal Recollections (1841): "We know of no piece of autobiography in the English language which can compare with this in richness of feeling and description and power of exciting interest.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Fleetwood is an orphan living with the Green family, in rural Suffolk, in the early nineteenth-century. Helen's father died in a freak storm while fishing at sea, and her mother died soon after of a broken heart. For a short time, the Greens and Helen enjoy their prosperous lives working on their small portion of land. One day a strange man, later revealed to be the notorious Mr Ferris, appears in the local parish to distribute pamphlets, which promote factory work in the north of England. As the Green family are a potential future burden on the parish, the Greens are soon enticed and deceived into leaving their comfortable home, and move to the slums of the industrial city of Manchester, where many hardships await. "Helen Fleetwood" is an early 'Condition of England' novel, which seeks to expose the corruption and injustice in the factory system.

[Lillerina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a fan. Helen is a saint, everyone who lives in a city is corrupt and evil and the country is the best and the poor would be happy if they would only find Jesus and stop crying about how their children are dying in the factories.

[Kari · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've never rooted for the villains so much in my life. Self-righteous family got what was coming.