[7] A newspaper reporter wrote in 1869 at Alnwick that her talks were well attended, but added that this was because a lady lecturer was a novelty, recalling Dr Johnson's comments on the subject, ‘…a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs.
Blackburn noted that she planned and carried out her tours by herself, travelling all over the kingdom from John O'Groats to Lands End, accompanied only by her little dog, and that, with the power of her voice, she was able to gather audiences and hold them riveted, ‘from miners in Northumberland… and fishers in Cornwall... to agricultural labourers in the market-places of country towns’.
There she stood with a battered bonnet on her straggling grey hair, with a rough shawl pinned over her shoulders, displaying a powerful and strongly marked and somewhat bibulous physiognomy, with a body of portly development and as broad as it was long...In two minutes the whole audience was listening intently; within five she had them in fits of laughter, this time not at her but with her.
[12]By 1879 she was appearing on platforms with the principal figures of the suffrage movement and at Manchester, in October of that year, Helen Blackburn said that she 'held the meeting enchained by her grand voice and her strong and witty words, delivered with practised power'.
This relationship faced challenges, since class differences in late-Victorian England meant that women like Craigen, who took payment for their suffrage work, were likely to be regarded on the same terms as personal servants by the middle-class leadership of the movement.
(Interestingly, Leah Leneman suggests that 'she had no payment in the movement but collected minimum expenses to keep her going'[16]) She continued to protest on behalf of other causes however, contributing an article to the Nineteenth Century Review against proposals to build a Channel Tunnel, and when speaking at an anti-vivisection, anti-vaccination demonstration in Chelsea, in April 1894, she was described as ‘a stout, elderly lady of dark complexion, with a stubby beard and a strong moustache…’ [17] The Local Government Act 1894 had created a system of urban and rural district councils, and had permitted women to be councillors.
[19] Her obituary in the Zoophilist declared that 'as a woman of the people, she exercised a great influence over the working classes... We shall miss her courageous and outspoken advocacy... her racy and eloquent speeches'.