Walter Besant

Children of Gibeon Walter Besant

The story focuses on the benevolent and eccentric widow from London's West End, Lady Mildred Eldridge, who adopts a washerwoman's daughter and brings her up with her own. She has a deliberate plan to find out whether or not upbringing can level class differences. Therefore, she gives the two girls new names, Valentine and Violet, but does not disclose their true identity. When the girls reach maturity, one of them, Valentine, comes to believe (wrongly) that she was adopted from the poor family. She decides to renounce her luxurious home and moves to live in the East End in order to seek her roots and get acquainted with the problems of the labouring class. Valentine and Violet befriend Melenda and two other girls who rent a modest room in a tenement house in Hoxton and toil as seamstresses from sunrise to sundown. Besant explains to his middle-class readers some basic laws of the sweatshop economy which affected mostly young unskilled women.