Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

Elizabeth Gaskell A Literary Life

Shirley Foster

Literary Lives General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English, Lancaster University This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of the writers’ working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. Published titles include: Clinton Machann MATTHEW ARNOLD

Richard Dutton WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Jan Fergus JANE AUSTEN

John Williams MARY SHELLEY

Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË

Michael O’Neill PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Sarah Wood ROBERT BROWNING

Gary Waller EDMUND SPENSER

Janice Farrar Thaddeus FRANCES BURNEY

Tony Sharpe WALLACE STEVENS

Caroline Franklin BYRON

Joseph McMinn JONATHAN SWIFT

Nancy A. Walker KATE CHOPIN

Harold Pagliaro HENRY FIELDING

Roger Sales JOHN CLARE

Andrew Hook F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Cedric Watts JOSEPH CONRAD

Mary Lago E. M. FORSTER

Grahame Smith CHARLES DICKENS

Shirley Foster ELIZABETH GASKELL

George Parfitt JOHN DONNE

James Gibson THOMAS HARDY

Paul Hammond JOHN DRYDEN

Gerald Roberts GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Kerry McSweeney GEORGE ELIOT

Kenneth Graham HENRY JAMES

Tony Sharpe T. S. ELIOT

W. David Kaye BEN JONSON

Felicity Rosslyn ALEXANDER POPE

John Worthen D. H. LAWRENCE

Angela Smith KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Peter Shillingsburg WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Lisa Hopkins CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

David Wykes EVELYN WAUGH

Cedric C. Brown JOHN MILTON

John Mepham VIRGINIA WOOLF

Peter Davison GEORGE ORWELL

John Williams WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Linda Wagner-Martin SYLVIA PLATH

Alasdair D. F. Macrae W. B. YEATS

Leonée Ormond ALFRED TENNYSON

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Elizabeth Gaskell A Literary Life Shirley Foster University of Sheffield

© Shirley Foster 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–69581–X hardback ISBN 0–333–69582–8 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-Publication Data Foster, Shirley. Elizabeth Gaskell: a literary life / Shirley Foster. p. cm. — (Literary lives) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-333-69581-X 1. Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 1810–1865. 2. Novelists, English—19th century—Biography. 3. Women and literature—England— History—19th century. I. Title. II. Literary lives (Palgrave Firm)) PR4711 .F67 2002 823’.8—dc21 [B] 2002072333 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Preface

vi

List of Abbreviations

viii

Introduction

1

1

The Early Years Background and early life Education and literary influences

6 6 13

2

The 1830s and 1840s: Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings Places and contexts First writings The novelist emerges: Mary Barton Steps towards professionalism

18 18 28 34 40

3

The 1850s: Growing Professionalism Travel and contacts Writing and publishing

42 42 60

4

The 1850s: the Established Author The shorter pieces The longer works

78 78 97

5

The 1860s: Achievements and Endings People and places Gaskell and America Literary fulfilment: the shorter pieces Literary fulfilment: the novels Subsequent reputation: the nineteenth century and beyond

122 122 130 144 154 171

Notes

175

Select bibliography

192

Index

194

v

Preface The idea of a biography – even a literary one – being written about her would probably have appalled Elizabeth Gaskell. In June 1865 she wrote to an unknown correspondent, who apparently wanted to include an entry on her in a book about well-known contemporary figures, that she entirely disapproved ‘of the plan of writing “notices” or “memories” of living people’. Such a practice was, she felt, utterly ‘objectionable & indelicate’ – ‘I do not see why the public have any more to do with me than to buy or reject the wares I supply to them’ (Letters, p. 761). Her objections would probably have extended to a posthumous biography, since she, like so many Victorians, held sacred the privacy of the individual life, a view shared by her daughters who destroyed many of her letters after her death. Yet of all Victorian writers, she offers the literary biographer one of the most fruitful fields of exploration, since her work and her life were so intimately connected. She has also become one of the most popular novelists of her age, especially since her last novel, Wives and Daughters, was adapted so successfully for television. From being regarded merely as a gently humorous commentator on English provincial life, she has been positioned among the period’s canonical writers and discussed accordingly. Critical studies since the 1970s have pointed to her originality and narrative skills, from feminist, post-structuralist and cultural perspectives, and these, in conjunction with a recent major new biography and a further volume of her letters, have finally established her literary status. The considerable number of new and re-issued paperback editions of her work also attest to her place among the classics. Immensely popular in its day – though not always unproblematically so – Gaskell’s work is most usefully considered in the context of contemporary ideologies and preoccupations, as well as of her own personal background. As seems appropriate for a literary biography, which focuses on the complex interlinking of experience, creative inspiration, and literary output, this study discusses her writing with particular reference to topics such as her own literary taste and reading, her relation to other authors of the day, and her attitudes to and experiences with the professional world of letters. It also pays attention to the special conditions and problems which she faced as a woman artist, trying to negotiate between the demands of her many-faceted life. With regard to her works themselves, close attention is given to the stories and shorter pieces, partly vi

Preface vii

because these are lesser-known than her major fiction (some are still unavailable in modern editions) and partly because in many ways they represent the most experimental and varied elements of her work. This book could not have been written without reference to various invaluable earlier studies. Particularly helpful have been Geoffrey Sharps’s meticulously researched Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention (1970), with its wealth of bibliographical material, Jenny Uglow’s impressively thorough – and thoroughly readable – Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (1993), and John Chapple’s exhaustive study of her preprofessional life, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years (1997). The study has been aided, too, by the recent publication of the Further Letters, edited by John Chapple and Alan Shelston, which has made available hitherto unknown or inaccessible material. I make no apologies for my reliance on these texts and can only express my gratitude that they have made my task so much easier than it would otherwise have been. I should like, too, to acknowledge the help and advice I have received from many sources, especially the following: Alan Shelston; the Librarians and Bibliographers at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, and at the Portico Library, Manchester; Geoffrey Sharps; John Chapple; and the Special Collections Librarians at the University of Sheffield. Members of the Gaskell Society have given me assistance and encouragement. And undoubtedly there are others, not listed here, whom I should thank. I should also like to express my gratitude to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, for the award of a Mellon Fellowship, which enabled me to consult their extensive holdings in nineteenth-century fiction. Where possible, I have quoted from modern editions of Gaskell’s works. The standard edition is Ward’s Knutsford Edition (1906), but since this is less readily available I have referred to it only where there is no other easily accessible source.

List of Abbreviations Chapple

John Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997).

Further Letters

Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000).

Hopkins

A. B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: John Lehmann, 1952).

Knutsford

The Works of Mrs Gaskell, ed. A. W. Ward, 8 vols (London: John Murray, 1906) (The Knutsford Edition).

Letters

The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966).

Letters and Memorials

Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, ed. Susanna Winkworth and Margaret J. Shaen, 2 vols (Clifton: privately printed 1883–86).

Memorials

Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth, ed. Margaret J. Shaen (London: Longman, 1908).

Sharps

John Geoffrey Sharps, Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention: a Study of her Non-Biographic Works (Fontwell: Linden Press, 1970).

Uglow

Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993).

Whitehill

Jane Whitehill (ed.), Letters of Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton 1855–1865 [1932] (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973).

viii

Introduction

The links between biography and artistic production are particularly important in considering the works of Elizabeth Gaskell. She herself, unlike some of her female literary contemporaries, successfully combined marriage, motherhood, engagement with local affairs, and an often hectic social and cultural life with constant creative activity. She was always conscious of how the multifarious demands made upon her impinged on both the substance and the production of her artistic output. In her letters she frequently debates the conflict for a woman artist between engagement with the world of the imagination and the calls of home duty. On the one hand, she felt that family matters – the needs of her daughters, for instance – must predominate over her desire to write, even while, as a wry comment to her American friend Charles Eliot Norton indicates, she sometimes chafed against the necessity: ‘If I had a library like yours, all undisturbed for hours, how I would write!’ (Letters, p. 489). On the other hand, she also argued that a woman will write all the better for having ‘lived an active & sympathetic life’ (Letters, p. 695), and that it is healthy for women ‘to have the hidden world of Art to shelter themselves in when too much pressed upon by daily small Lilliputian arrows of peddling cares’ (Letters, p. 106). Her reproduction, in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, of a question from one of the latter’s letters to her articulates her preoccupation with the problem: ‘Do you, who have so many friends, – so large a circle of acquaintance, – find it easy, when you sit down to write, to isolate yourself from all those ties, and their sweet associations, so as to be your own woman . . . ?’.1 Anne Thackeray Ritchie considered that in Gaskell’s case the life/art relationship was fruitful: ‘that [she] did not “isolate herself”, but did on the contrary entirely associate her own woman with the work of her life, her readers can best realise’.2 Gaskell’s friend, Susanna Winkworth, however, 1

2

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

felt that while the diverse strands of Gaskell’s life were an important source of creative inspiration, ‘what she had actually published was a mere fraction of what she might have written, had her life been a less many-sided one’.3 Recognition of the complex imbrication of personal experience and creative work made Gaskell aware of how other women writers faced similar problems to hers, and she saw herself as belonging to what Margaret Oliphant referred to as a ‘sisterhood’ of female novelists.4 Her friendship with and interest in other contemporary female authors help to contextualize her growing professionalism in an age in which questions of literary production came increasingly to the fore, complicated by gradually changing attitudes to gender roles. It is generally accepted that the Victorian period was pre-eminently the age of the rising woman novelist. Numerous critics noted the phenomenon: in 1850, George Henry Lewes observed somewhat wryly that ‘Women carry all before them . . . the group of female authors is becoming every year more multitudinous and more successful’,5 and two years later, in more serious mode, he asserted that ‘the advent of female literature promises woman’s view of life, woman’s experience’;6 in 1865, Bessie Raynor Parkes claimed that the literary profession was ‘already conquered by its female aspirants’;7 and by 1887, the Standard’s obituary of one of Gaskell’s contemporaries, Dinah Mulock Craik, posited that it ‘is no small thing for Englishwomen to be proud of to remember that their sex has borne the largest share in the production of the recreative literature which has been read during the last two generations’.8 Many critical articles on ‘the lady novelist’ included Gaskell in their lists of examples, and while these generalizing juxtapositions tended to obscure the differences between writers they helped to produce a sense of cultural community in which Gaskell herself participated. At the same time, the phenomenon of women entering the commercial world of publishing caused considerable anxiety in some (male) circles, because it was perceived as threatening the traditional female roles of marriage and motherhood. However artistically ambitious, many women themselves internalized these anxieties. As we have seen, Gaskell was always ambivalent about the prioritization of her activities, and her usual writing habits – in a family room, freely accessible to all the members of the household – demonstrate her attempt to accommodate this ambivalence. As for many of her female contemporaries, too, worries about the effects of entering the literary marketplace led to her reluctance to use her own name as author. Charlotte Brontë’s bitter

Introduction 3

attack on George Henry Lewes for focusing on the feminine qualities of Shirley (1849) in his review of the novel, ‘after I had said earnestly that I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman’,9 points up one of the perils facing the woman novelist who revealed her sex. Gaskell herself was to feel the sting of gender-biased criticism in reference to some of her more contentious works. Gaskell’s first three stories were published under the name of ‘Cotton Mather Mills Esq’, and her first full-length fiction, Mary Barton, was issued anonymously, her own proposal of ‘Stephen Berwick’ as a pseudonym reaching the publisher, Edward Chapman, too late to be put on the title page. She continued to write anonymously, even though her identity had become known; interestingly, the only work in which her name appeared on its first publication was The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She told Chapman that she actually preferred no name to an invented one: ‘I do not like assuming a name, although my desire for secrecy is as strong as ever’ (Further Letters, p. 39). She also made clear to him her strong objections to prying speculations about the authorship of Mary Barton: ‘Hitherto the whole affair of publication has been one of extreme annoyance to me, from the impertinent and unjustifiable curiosity of people, who have tried to force me either into an absolute denial, or an acknowledgement of what they must have seen the writer wished to conceal’ (Letters, p. 64). This desire to protect individual privacy was a Victorian obsession; thus it is ironic that Gaskell was equally eager to discover the identity of other anonymous writers, especially if she suspected they were women. In September 1856, for instance, she asked George Smith whether Holme Lee (the pseudonym of the novelist Harriet Parr) was a man or a woman – ‘I am always curious to know if my guesses about sex are right’ (Letters, p. 414) – and she was gleeful at being able to tell Catherine Winkworth that ‘Currer Bell. . .[is] a she’ after Brontë had sent her a copy of Shirley (Letters, p. 93). Her discovery that George Eliot was a woman, however, caused her some unease, because of the nature of the latter’s fictional material and because of her personal life. Such curiosity, however, was not mere literary voyeurism. Throughout her career, Gaskell took an interest in the progress and achievements of other women writers. She had many female literary friends and acquaintances whose advice and opinions she valued: Charlotte Brontë, Geraldine Jewsbury, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Clive. In addition, she was always anxious to help other women writers. She introduced an aspiring novelist, Margaret Bell, to Chapman in 1850,

4

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

and she was also ready to introduce Dinah Mulock to useful literary friends (an offer which Mulock politely but firmly refused). She helped another young friend, Henrietta Camilla Jenkin, to place two papers with Dickens’s Household Words in 1855, and recommended her novel, Cousin Stella, to the publisher, George Smith. In 1850, and again in 1852, she sought financial assistance for a poor Knutsford authoress, Selina Davenport, now fallen on hard times, whose novels ‘seem to me not without merit’ (Further Letters, p. 49). Gaskell’s generosity in this regard was recorded later in the century by the novelist Eliza Lynn Linton who had met her at Chapman’s many years before: I was a young beginner, and she in the zenith of her fame: but she neither crushed nor condescended – neither snubbed nor patronised. It was the fine manner of a woman to a girl – of a mistress to a neophyte; and I have always loved and cherished her memory for the graciousness of her attitude and the kind words she spoke to me that evening.10 Gaskell’s belief in the importance of mutual encouragement and support among female authors is confirmed by her correspondence with Louis Hachette, the Parisian publisher, who had been asking her for recommendations of contemporary English novelists. Asking Smith to assist her in acquainting Hachette with some of the women who wrote for him [Smith], she adds, ‘if I could conscientiously say their works were good, I would be so glad to help them. . . . I never had any one to help me, & found them [ways of getting known] all out by accident as it were; & I think other women may be like me’ (Letters, p. 433). Nearly two years earlier, Gaskell herself had sent Hachette a list of good and popular authors of the day, ‘most of [whom] are more or less known to me personally’ (Further Letters, p. 126); her list includes Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Anne Marsh Caldwell, Catherine Gore, Geraldine Jewsbury, Dinah Mulock and Margaret Oliphant, the author of Mrs Margaret Maitland. She also discussed with him arrangements for French translations of the works of Charlotte Brontë and Geraldine Jewsbury. Speaking as an established author ready to promote other authors is only one instance of Gaskell’s increasingly professional status in the arena of Victorian letters. Another is her growing assurance in her dealings with publishers as she engaged with the often perilous world of commercial interest. As contemporary correspondence with publishers reveals, women writers faced various difficulties and embarrassments in such dealings. Finances are often the crucial issue. A letter from Julia

Introduction 5

Kavanagh to George Smith in September 1849, in which she re-offers him a manuscript, is profusely apologetic for refusing his original terms: ‘I was actuated . . . by purely personal considerations . . . It is a natural and not unjustifiable mistake to value that which has cost much labour’.11 The novelist Margaret Oliphant took a much firmer line with her publishers. Writing to Macmillan in September 1858 about her story Agnes, for example, she explains that ‘[i]f you think it would answer you to give me a hundred pounds for this . . . I should be pleased to put it into your hands’, but that if he demurs, she will offer it elsewhere.12 Strongminded though she appears, however, her situation (widowed and needing to support herself and her children by her writing) foregrounds the obstacles and discouragements confronting those women who challenged the public/private dichotomy of ‘separate spheres’ by entering the commercial world of publishing. As we shall see, Gaskell herself, though not aggressive about payment, was always aware of what was a fair bargain, and was prepared to assert what she perceived as her rights, especially as family and social commitments necessitated increased income. A study of her career as a whole offers a picture of an imaginative artist who is also a businesswoman, recognizing the importance of negotiation but never allowing her creative and personal individuality to be compromised.

1 The Early Years

Background and early life Elizabeth Gaskell’s early life did not follow the archetypal Victorian family pattern. She was born in Chelsea on 29 September 1810, where her parents had come to live from Edinburgh about a year before. However, just over twelve months later, in October 1811 (the exact date is uncertain), her mother, Elizabeth Stevenson, died. Almost immediately afterwards, the small girl was sent to Knutsford to be brought up by her maternal aunt, Hannah Lumb, and the latter’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Marianne. Though Gaskell’s father, William Stevenson, was still responsible for the upbringing of her twelve-year-old brother, John, it seems that he was unwilling, or felt himself unable to cope with a motherless daughter. Gaskell was thus virtually orphaned in infancy. She did spend some of her childhood and adolescence with her father in London: one letter to her from John suggests that she was in Chelsea in late 1826, and she probably continued her studies in Latin, French and Italian with William Stevenson during the same period;1 other letters from John indicate that she had been staying there in the summer of 1828, and it seems that she was with her father at his death on 22 March 1829. But Stevenson had remarried in April 1814 – his new wife was Catherine Thomson, the daughter of a civil servant in pre-Independence America who had retired to Edinburgh – and various sources suggest that Gaskell did not get on with her stepmother. Catherine produced two children of her own and probably had little time for the young Elizabeth, while other tensions may have made the relationship a difficult one. Mrs Chadwick describes the Chelsea home as ‘a stranger’s house’ to Gaskell,2 and a later letter from Gaskell herself to Mary Howitt articulates the wretchedness of the London period of 1827–9: 6

The Early Years 7

Long ago I lived in Chelsea occasionally with my father and stepmother, and very, very unhappy I used to be; and if it had not been for the beautiful, grand river, which was an inexplicable comfort to me, and a family of the name of Kennett, I think my child’s heart would have broken. (Letters, pp. 797–8) An unpublished biographical piece by Jane Whitehill confirms this state of affairs: ‘Kindly though he [Stevenson] was, he was apt to be absorbed in his own researches and this absorption alternating with the irritation caused by his disease and his unhappiness at home formed a combination of conditions scarcely pleasant for Elizabeth’.3 Even if memory distorted the unhappiness, it is likely that the silent misery of young Molly Gibson, in Wives and Daughters, when her father marries again and brings his uncongenial, bossy new wife into the household, is in part at least a re-creation of Gaskell’s own sufferings in Chelsea. If Gaskell was not close to her father, he nevertheless had a place in her affections. Anne Thackerary Ritchie (who certainly talked to Gaskell’s daughters about their mother’s early life, though giving no specific source for her information) confidently asserts that Gaskell ‘was always tenderly attached to her father’s memory, and proud and fond of him’.4 Gaskell’s short story, ‘My French Master’ (Household Words, 17 and 24 December 1853), generally agreed to be partly autobiographical, describes a daughter’s distress as she nurses her dying father: ‘My hopes, my fears were centred in one frail body – my dearly beloved, my most loving father’.5 Stevenson, in his turn, showed concern for her welfare. A conciliatory letter from the recently widowed second Mrs Stevenson to Aunt Lumb declares that her husband ‘felt proud of his daughter. I do not recollect at present that in any instance he was either hurt or vexed about her’.6 As well as supervising her studies when she was in London, Stevenson urged her to continue self-improvement: his only extant letter to her expresses pleasure ‘that you are busy working for yourself . . . I hope you [are] again applying to your Latin and Italian’, and tells her that he is sending her the latest number of the Literary Gazette, containing reviews of Scott’s Life of Napoleon and Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean, suggesting confidence in her intellectual aptitude.7 He was probably also largely responsible for the decision to send her to the Misses Byerleys’ school in Warwickshire in 1821. In a wider sense, too, Stevenson probably had an effect on Gaskell’s subsequent literary development. He was a man of diverse interests and talents, albeit never wholly successful in any of them. Born in

8

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

Berwick-on-Tweed in 1770, he had many marine family connections, including brothers who fought in the navy during the Napoleonic Wars; although he himself did not choose a naval career, the stories which must have circulated about his relatives may have inspired Gaskell’s own focus on sailors in her fiction. After a somewhat undistinguished career at Berwick Grammar School, Stevenson trained for the Dissenting Ministry at Daventry Academy, subsequently becoming tutor in classics at Manchester Academy and preaching at Dob Lane Chapel, Failsworth, near Manchester. About three years later, perhaps because of his increasing leanings towards rationalism and scientific study, he gave up the ministry and resigned or was dismissed from the College in 1796. After his marriage to Gaskell’s mother, Elizabeth Holland, in December 1797, he tried his hand at various occupations: farming in Edinburgh, literary journalism (he was an early contributor to the Edinburgh Review, compiled the Annual Register, and was made an honorary member of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society in 1804), and private tutoring. About 1806, he was employed as private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale who had intended him to accompany him to India, but who gave him the post of Keeper of the Papers at the Treasury instead, a position which Stevenson kept for the rest of his life. At the same time, he continued work on the Annual Register, contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, wrote for various contemporary periodicals including Blackwood’s and the Westminster Review, and produced the Historical Sketch of the Progress of Discovery, Navigation and Commerce in 1824. Although there are various unsatisfactory fathers in Gaskell’s work, as well as several instances of fatherless children, Stevenson clearly in some respects provided a role model for his daughter. She can hardly have been unaware of his literary activities and would thus early have learned to value the notion of writing and studying as worthy areas of intellectual engagement. Even if she felt emotionally let down by him, his life and background must have provided inspiration for her own creative impulses. As Chadwick surmises, ‘if heredity is to count for anything, her father was responsible for her love of historical research, which is revealed in many of her stories’,8 and his investigative cast of mind surfaces in her own writing in her attention to detail and in her responsiveness to new theories and developments in her own age. Gaskell’s other immediate family relationships were similarly characterized by loss. A year or so before the death of her father, her brother John, twelve years her senior, mysteriously disappeared while on naval service. John Stevenson, following the family tradition, spent most of his life at sea, in employment with the East India Company. The age gap

The Early Years 9

between brother and sister, quite apart from their physical distance, prevented deep intimacy. Yet he was her only sibling (several other intervening children had died) and there was certainly a considerable degree of feeling between them. Indeed, some early letters to his young sister, many written while he was abroad, show that he was interested in her social and intellectual progress. He promises, for example, to send her Bernadin Saint-Pierre’s tragic-romantic novel, Paul and Virginia (1787, English translation 1820), he warns her that her Berwick cousin, Elizabeth, is overtaking her in music and writing, and he sends her details of his experiences in India. He also recalls with affection the times he has spent with her: ‘How I should [like] these fine mornings to have a stroll with you in that park where the old abbey (am I right) is – or in that where we had once upon a time a sail in a punt together when Elizabeth was a little girl of ten years old & liked brother John to kiss her’.9 He also mentions approvingly a communication from her containing a criticism of Byron’s poetry, suggesting that she was taking seriously both his and her father’s advice about her studies. Some time in 1828, John wrote again to Gaskell from London, while he was waiting to sail to the East, and his expressed regret at not being able to come to Knutsford to see her, together with wistful comments about missing her, show an uncanny premonition of forthcoming tragedy. Soon after, perhaps either on his way to, or at, Calcutta, John vanished, and his disappearance has never been accounted for. The strange dearth of references to John in Gaskell’s writings suggests her reluctance to confront memories which were psychologically painful for her. His loss, though, clearly made a considerable impact on her, shown by her fascination with unaccountable absence – from her early Household Words article, ‘Disappearances’ (1851), to her creation of characters such as the banished Peter in Cranford, the missing husband in ‘The Manchester Marriage’ (1858), and the press-ganged Charley Kinraid in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). Equally, the secret return from exile of Margaret’s sailor brother, Frederick, in North and South, may represent wish-fulfilment for her lost sibling’s reappearance; even in the fictional context, though, the re-found brother remains permanently separated from home and family. Undoubtedly the greatest personal loss which Gaskell experienced was that of her mother. Writing to a George Hope in 1849, to thank him for sending her some of her ‘dear mother’s’ letters, she expressed her sense of desolation: ‘I think no one but one so unfortunate as to be early motherless can enter into the craving one has after the lost mother’ (Letters, pp. 796–7). Her deep love for her own children and

10 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

the care with which she attended to their upbringing, evidenced in the recently published diary recording Marianne’s early development,10 attest to the importance she attached to maternal relations and her eagerness to give what she had never received. Gaskell always put her daughters’ welfare foremost: she told their former governess, Barbara Fergusson (reluctantly dismissed because she was not managing the girls properly), that any alarms about them ‘make one more inclined than ever to make their childhood happy if possible’ (Further Letters, p. 29); and she later described to her Liverpool cousin, Fanny Holland, her determination to ‘make myself as much as possible their companion and friend’ (Further Letters, p. 35). The succession of motherless girls in her fiction – the child Rosamund in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852), Mary Barton, Ruth, Thekla in ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ (1862), Libbie Marsh, Ellinor Wilkins in ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ (1863), Susan Dixon in ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’ (1855), and Molly Gibson – also reveals her intense, almost obsessive preoccupation with a very personally affective topic. Although the gap left by Elizabeth Stevenson’s death could never wholly be filled, her family provided Gaskell with much of the emotional and social support that she needed as she was growing up. Gaskell’s Holland connections, in fact, were deeply influential on her thinking and her fiction. Aunt Lumb and the other unmarried aunts in Knutsford gave her a sense of the possibilities of female solidarity and community – a sense which may have been partly responsible for her commitment to helping women, both socially and professionally. Gaskell regarded Aunt Lumb herself as ‘my more than mother . . . my best friend’;11 she probably drew on her and her older cousins, such as Mary and Lucy Holland, old Peter Holland’s daughters, in her later depictions of strong, independent women. Knutsford itself, despite its small-town image as recalled in several of Gaskell’s novels and short stories, was by no means narrow and parochial. In the early nineteenth century it was a thriving town of about three thousand inhabitants, containing a mix of gentry, tradesmen, and working-class spinners and weavers, with the addition of the aristocracy in the person of Sir William Egerton who lived at nearby Tatton Park. It had a sessions house, a parish church and a Unitarian chapel, as well as shops and several inns, and formed the focal point of the local rural community. It also had its poverty and more sordid side, but it is unlikely that Gaskell saw much of this, which is probably why the deprivation in Manchester made such an impact on her. In his study of Gaskell and Knutsford, George Payne points out the erroneousness of

The Early Years 11

assuming that Gaskell directly replicates the town and her experiences there in her fiction. But he also notes how Knutsford partly sources various topographies in her work: Cranford; Duncombe in Mr Harrison’s Confessions; Hollingford in Wives and Daughters; Eltham in Cousin Phillis; Hamley in ‘A Dark Night’s Work’; and Barford in ‘The Squire’s Story’.12 Other fictional characters and episodes, such as the cow in the flannel waistcoat, the cat who ate the lace, and the highwayman who concealed his nefarious activities under a highly respectable exterior, are also drawn from Gaskell’s Knutsford connections, as a letter of 1865 to Ruskin makes clear.13 The Hollands held a substantial place in local society, and it was her mother’s family who introduced Gaskell to the wide range of acquaintances and interests which were to play such a large part in her creative life. Aunt Lumb’s elder brother, Peter, was a well-known surgeon in the district and his children provided companionship for their more solitary cousin. The most eminent of these children was Henry, later Sir Henry Holland, FRS, Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria and intimate of many well-known writers, scientists and intellectuals; through him, Gaskell was in touch with important ideas of the day, many of which fed into her writings. Another set of Holland cousins lived at Sandlebridge, near Macclesfield, her mother’s home and the residence of her grandfather, Samuel Holland (who died in 1816) and of several of her aunts and uncles. Circles widened from this household. Uncle Swinton Holland became a successful banker with Barings, setting up house in London and buying the hall and estate of Dumbleton in Gloucestershire in 1823, both of which homes Gaskell frequently visited, the latter especially when she wanted a rural retreat. Uncle Samuel Holland, Liverpool merchant and owner of slate quarries near Ffestiniog, bought Plas yn Penrhyn, Merionethshire, in 1832, and this was one of Gaskell’s favourite vacation places, beginning with her honeymoon, and again providing the setting for several of her fictions. Beyond this family core of educated, high-achieving Unitarians were wider links: the Hollands had connections with important professional and scientific contemporaries – they were, for example, connected by marriage to the Wedgwoods and the Darwins. Also in the Knutsford area, at Styall Mill, Quarry Bank, lived Samuel Greg and his family. Greg was a prosperous mill-owner, and, like Aunt Lumb herself, the Gregs were in contact with some of the important Unitarian writers and thinkers of the day. Gaskell probably became acquainted with the family when she accompanied her Uncle Peter on his visits to the mill apprentices; she remained friendly with them, and two of the children, Samuel and William

12 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

Rathbone, themselves mill-owners, were to play a significant part with regard to her ‘social problem’ novels. Without question, Gaskell owed a large part of her early intellectual stimulation to the influence of the Hollands and their acquaintances, as well as to her youthful environment. Indeed her Knutsford experience could be seen as metonymic of her creative work: just as within Knutsford society adherence to custom and tradition, and closeness of family and local relationships, co-existed with awareness of social and intellectual change, so in Gaskell’s writings, embedded within her respect for that which is known, contained and hallowed by the past, is a recognition of the new, often apparently threatening, which must be accommodated by the older world. The other most important aspect of Gaskell’s background, for both her outlook and her writing, is her Unitarianism. In broad terms, Unitarians rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and denied the divinity of Christ (and thus the doctrine of Atonement), arguing that Jesus was an exemplum, not a redeeming saviour who intervened on behalf of mankind. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Unitarians fell roughly into two groups: those who adhered to the precepts of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), who had stressed reason over feeling in the conduct of life; and those who were more drawn to the teaching of James Martineau (1805–1900), younger brother of Harriet and fellow student of William Gaskell at Manchester New College, who argued for emotion and intuition as well as rational thought.14 Gaskell herself, with her belief in toleration and forgiveness, and her insistence on the importance of personal contact and comprehension as principles of reconciliation, seems to have been more in sympathy with the latter group. Certainly the idea of Christian love underpins her writing, albeit unobtrusively; and solutions to the problems she presents there are not so much rationally or theoretically conceived as dependent on free will, feeling and example, enacted through personal communication and connection. Gaskell’s Unitarian affiliations were important, too, in an intellectual sense. As Susanna Winkworth noted, in Manchester in the 1840s and 1850s whereas among the Church of England community ‘I cannot recall one distinctly intellectual person . . . either clergy or laity’, the ‘Unitarians . . . were, as a body, far away superior to any other in intellect, culture and refinement of manners’.15 Having already been influenced by her talented Unitarian relatives, Gaskell was brought into further contact with this intellectual superiority when she came to Manchester. Unitarians were also prominent in the field of science, eager to reconcile

The Early Years 13

new scientific readings of the natural world with traditional Christian ethics. Again, Gaskell’s apprehension of this kind of thinking, through contact with some of the eminent Unitarian scientists of the day such as William Benjamin Carpenter and her own cousin, Henry Holland, surfaces in her fictional harmonization of an acceptance of preordained natural laws and belief in the gradual progress of humanity towards moral perfectibility. Just as importantly, the position of Unitarians at this time – self-contained and often socially marginalized16 – produced a consciousness of difference; with a background of social exclusion and political protest which questioned orthodox, ‘established’ belief, and prominent in campaigns for social reform, they were fearless in speaking out on subjects which they felt needed address. This, in itself, inspired Gaskell to deal with risky topics such as industrial unrest and female prostitution in her fiction, because she believed they should be brought to an ignorant public’s attention.

Education and literary influences Gaskell’s education was essentially that of a middle-class girl of her period. The solid intellectual background of her family on both sides has already been mentioned. Gaskell said that her Holland uncles and aunts ‘had all the old books’ (Letters, p. 562), presumably referring to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classics as well as to well-used sources of information such as Goldsmith’s History of England, Rollins’ Ancient History, and Lindley Murray’s Grammar.17 Other letters suggest that her favourite reading included Scott, the early nineteenth-century’s most popular novelist; and the classic allegorists, Bunyan and Spenser. Her father and stepmother gave her as an adolescent copies of poems by Cowper and Gray, choices which John Chapple calls ‘rather oldfashioned’,18 but which clearly helped to create her love of the pastoral. Such texts remind us further that Gaskell grew up with intellectually solid literary fare, rather than the more sentimental prose and poetry so often fed to young ladies of the time. Lighter entertainment was not denied her, however. Unitarians were not as ferociously anti-fiction as some Evangelical sects, and we know that as a child Gaskell enjoyed popular children’s classics such as Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (1783–9), Mrs Barbauld’s works, and Sarah Trimmer’s History of the Robins (1786) which she also read to her own children. She also enjoyed Maria Edgeworth’s novels. An indication of the range of literature which she might have encountered in her pre-adult years is provided by two comparable lists of girlhood reading: the books mentioned in the

14 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

Autobiography of Elizabeth Sewell (1815–1906), a fellow woman novelist who came from a similar social background, albeit Church of England; and a list of works read during the year 1819 by a young girl living in Ardwick, a prosperous middle-class area of Manchester, where Gaskell herself was to reside. Sewell’s formative reading included poets such as Thomson, Gray, Cowper and Burns; the essayists Bacon, Johnson, Lamb and Goldsmith; tales by Hannah More, Mrs Sherwood and Maria Edgeworth; the Romantic poets; and Shakespeare.19 The young Manchester diarist mentions Susan Ferrier’s novel Marriage (1818), Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Blair’s Sermons, Mrs Barbauld’s Hymns, Byron and Scott, Maria Edgeworth’s work, and essays from the Rambler.20 Reference to, or the influence of, many of these texts in Gaskell’s writing would suggest that they are paradigmatic of educated middle-class girls’ reading of the period, and that, for her too, classic works of the eighteenth century predominated. They also signal an important grounding in modes and genres which were to influence her own work, especially the essay, the stylistic possibilities of which she exploits to the full, and emphasis on reason and accommodation as behavioural guidelines. Gaskell’s intellectual experiences did not adhere rigidly to the guidelines for the education of young girls laid down by the popular late eighteenth-century conduct book, The Female Mentor (1798), which her father gave her on her eleventh birthday (novels should generally be avoided; modern languages, the classics and poetry are desirable, although any display of pedantry should be discouraged). But it is probably true to say that her early literary education was eclectic rather than eminently high-brow. Its main effect was probably to stimulate in her a life-long love of reading, evident in the many references in her letters as well as in the astonishingly varied list of Gaskell borrowings from the Portico Library, Manchester, during the 1850s. The formal education of girls was in many respects far from admirable in Gaskell’s youth (Miss Lemon’s fashionable establishment, attended by the superficial-minded Rosamund Vincy in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, was certainly the prototype for many existing schools for young ladies). But Gaskell herself, not unusual in receiving formal schooling, was perhaps luckier than most in the institution she attended.21 She was a boarder at the Misses Byerleys’ school in Warwickshire from about 1821 to 1826, first at its site in Barford, then at its final location at ‘Avonbank’ in Stratford-on-Avon. Family connections were probably responsible for this choice: Anthony Todd Thomson, William Stevenson’s brother-in-law by his second wife, had married Katharine

The Early Years 15

Byerley, who, with her sisters, had opened the school in Warwick in 1810; there was also a Unitarian link, via marriage, with the Wedgwood and Darwin families. The school offered a good traditional female education which combined solid learning with optional extras. Standard subjects were English reading, spelling, grammar and composition; geography; ancient and modern history. Those which had additionally to be paid for included French, music, drawing, dancing, Italian writing, and arithmetic. A conduct book published in 1825 by Fanny Byerley (Mrs William Parkes), Domestic Duties: or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies, which suggested the kind of literature suitable for young women – only that commensurate with female modesty and propriety was recommended – may also have influenced the school’s curriculum. Gaskell had generally happy memories of her schooldays, on the evidence of her letters to Mary Howitt and the semi-autobiographical recall in My Lady Ludlow (1858), and her time at the Misses Byerleys’ laid the foundation for later reading and ongoing desire for further intellectual stimulation. Two other sources from this period add to our knowledge of the tastes and interests from which the writer developed. One is Gaskell’s commonplace book, probably begun while she was at school, a collection of copied literary and musical selections, often with illustrating prints. A description of this production22 (the whereabouts of the original is unknown) indicates that it contained a variety of poetical extracts ranging from Shakespeare, Burns, Wordsworth, sentimental verse by Southey and Mrs Hemans, to Scottish ballads. Less predictable is the inclusion of selections from seventeenth-century poets such as Jonson, Vaughan and Herbert. Not only is it likely that Gaskell’s father first acquainted her with such texts, but they also represent ‘a body of literature . . . which ordinarily in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, was far from finding a place in the show-room of a young lady’s mental adornments’.23 Altogether, ‘the impression gathered from the little book is of a vivacious mind, full of what the phraseology of the day termed “sensibility” and possessing a delicate delight in the gay, the comic and the pathetic turns of emotion’.24 There is nothing very unusual here: a similar commonplace book compiled by Gaskell’s fellow authoress, Dinah Mulock, at about the same time, also contains sentimental effusions from Mrs Barbauld, Mrs Hemans and Thomas Moore, as well as extracts from Milton, Scott, Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Tasso and Gray.25 But it does suggest the range of Gaskell’s early literary predilections, and in particular the foundation of her life-long love of poetry. The other source is a series of annotated music books, held at Manchester City Library, one dated from while she was at Avonbank,

16 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

containing popular airs, ballads and arrangements copied out by Gaskell and some of her friends. These books are significant not only for indicating Gaskell’s pleasure in music, but also for revealing more about her interest in old legends and folk tales. As well as transcriptions from favourite musical genres of the day such as waltzes, Alpine melodies and Scottish airs, there are many ballads, often dealing with themes and emotions which were to be taken up in Gaskell’s own writing: stories of lost love, pastoral scenes and characters, sea tales and historical events. The words here – which are included with the music – may have remained in her mind, to be recalled later as sources for her fiction. A further source of literary inspiration from Gaskell’s schooldays may have come via Katharine Byerley, who in 1820 became Mrs Todd Thomson and thus, as has already been mentioned, was related to Gaskell by marriage. Katharine Thomson, mother of eight, was a prolific author, and offered Gaskell a role model for combining domesticity and professional literary activity. Though the degree of intimacy between the two women is unclear, Gaskell was certainly acquainted with Thomson and probably read some of her work (William borrowed her Memoirs of the Court of Henry VIII [1826] from the Portico Library in 1855). Thomson wrote mainly historical memoirs and domestic novels, and one of the latter, Constance (1833), is particularly interesting in the context of Gaskell’s own literary output. Its satirical representations of genteel society in Bath and Warwickshire – alongside its more sentimental elements – may have influenced Gaskell’s own similar material in Cranford, though shared background experience is a more likely source. There is also an incident in Constance, in which the heroine visits an old haunted house and sees a portrait of a young girl who was buried alive, which is reminiscent of that described in Gaskell’s first published piece, ‘Clopton House’ (1838), although this too may be coincidental.26 Between the end of her schooldays and her father’s death in 1829, Gaskell spent her time visiting relatives in various places, and there can have been little opportunity for serious study. But in the winter of 1829–1830 she went to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to stay with the Rev William Turner, the son of her maternal great-aunt and also related to the Hollands by marriage. Turner was minister of the Unitarian chapel in Hanover Square, and was a prominent Newcastle citizen. He was a founder of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, lectured on scientific subjects, and, in addition to his ministerial duties, established a school in Percy Street. He was also involved in the Sunday School movement and in establishing educational facilities for the working classes. Undoubtedly Gaskell benefited from the rich intellectual and

The Early Years 17

cultural life she enjoyed here, both in the Turner household and in Newcastle itself, at this time a vibrant and forward-looking city. During her stay here, too, she and her cousin Ann, Turner’s unmarried daughter, paid an extended visit to Edinburgh, her father’s old abode, and here she further widened her social and cultural experience. Correspondence arising from a friendship of this Newcastle period furnishes more evidence of the kind of reading she was undertaking during these years. Five letters to Harriet Carr, daughter of George Carr, Bank of England Agent for the newly established Newcastle branch, from June 1831 to August 1832, detail her current literary enthusiasms; the list is particularly interesting because it provides information about Gaskell’s consumption of contemporary works. She mentions, for example, Bulwer’s fictional representation of the criminal underworld, Paul Clifford (1830), as well as his romantic and melodramatic historical novel Eugene Aram (1832); and she shares Harriet’s enthusiasm for William Massie’s Sydenham (1830) and Alice Paulet (1831), both ‘society’ novels. In October 1831, she also tells Harriet that she is reading for the third time Susan Ferrier’s humorous tale of Scottish domestic life, Destiny (1831). Concern with the complexities of social relations and the exploitation of more ‘Gothic’ writing, represented by these works, constitute two of the significant strands in Gaskell’s own work. Among the non-fiction which Gaskell discusses in these letters are Thomas Moore’s The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831), and the correspondence of Madame de Sévigné,27 early instances of her great interest in biography. Two other works mentioned foreshadow another ongoing interest – travel writing. She urges Harriet to read Alexander Mackenzie’s A Year in Spain by a Young American (1829, first British edition 1831). She also mentions Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), the notorious witty and acerbic account of Trollope’s experiences in North America, which she claims to have found completely absorbing and entertaining. The effects of early reading are always hard to assess, and it would be misleading to establish too categorically the influence of Gaskell’s youthful literary experiences on her own work. But it is likely that her exposure to ‘the old books’ taught her the value of good writing, while her consumption of fiction may have stimulated her own imaginative tendencies and suggested possibilities of subject matter and approach. Throughout her life, she was an avid reader and, in Jamesian phraseology, would have found many ‘germs’ from such eclectic sources. When literary inspiration combined with attentive observation of life around her, the results for her public were richly rewarding.

2 The 1830s and 1840s: Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings

Places and contexts The decades of the 1830s and 1840s brought major changes in Gaskell’s life, in terms of place, people and creative activity. Her marriage and subsequent move to Manchester laid the foundation for her future life, socially and geographically. Sometime in the autumn of 1831, after her Newcastle and Edinburgh sojourns and visits to her Liverpool cousins, Gaskell went to stay with William Turner’s eldest daughter, Mary, who was married to John Gooch Robberds, minister of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester. Here she met Robberds’ junior minister, William Gaskell, appointed to the post in 1828 and a highly eligible young bachelor. By early 1832, she and William were engaged, and she was, as she wryly told Harriet Carr, preparing to ‘learn obedience . . . something new: new to me that is’ (Further Letters, p. 19). The couple were married on 30 August 1832, and Elizabeth Stevenson became the Mrs Gaskell whose image as a model of creative domestic womanhood was to dominate so much subsequent critical treatment of her. William’s credentials were impeccable. The Gaskells were an old Lancashire Dissenting family, enjoying middle-class prosperity (though William’s mother had, it seems, been a servant). William’s father, a sail canvas manufacturer in Warrington, had been at Manchester New College, which his son attended (it was then at York) from 1825–8, after graduating from Glasgow University in 1825. At Manchester College, William made contact with some of the most prominent northern Dissenting families, many of whom were notable in the manufacturing and commercial worlds; contacts thus established were to introduce Gaskell herself to wider social and occupational spheres than she had yet encountered. 18

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 19

William had the reputation, especially later in life, of being somewhat withdrawn and bound up in his own scholarly and professional concerns, despite stories of high-spirited escapades while he was a student. In some of her letters, Gaskell grumbles mildly about his tendency to exclude himself from social gatherings and his reluctance to leave his work and take holidays with the family; she also notes his reserve with regard to the expression of emotional feelings.1 Emily and Susanna Winkworth, who took lessons from him in history, composition and chemistry in the early 1840s, and Catherine, who also studied German, Greek and English literature with him, all, however, attest to his fine qualities as a teacher, as well as to his sociability when he was so minded. While Gaskell was away in London in April 1856, for example, William escorted Susanna and Alice Winkworth to a piano recital by Madame Schumann, and ‘made himself highly agreeable’;2 and while visiting Catherine in June 1863, he stayed for three hours, talking the whole time – ‘He was so excessively genial and effusive as I have hardly ever seen him’.3 Part of William’s apparent unwillingness to socialize was of course the result of his immensely busy life. As well as his Cross Street ministry, he taught English at the Manchester Working Men’s Club and at the Mechanics’ Institute, lectured at the Missionary College and Owen’s College, and served on various Sanitary Committees; he was also Chairman of the Portico Library from 1849 until his death in 1884, and secretary of the Manchester Domestic Home Mission for many years. This intense activity accounts for the fact that increasingly the Gaskells came to lead separate lives, as she developed her own literary and social occupations which often took her from home. This is in no way to suggest that the marriage was an unhappy one. William was always supportive of his wife’s literary endeavours and helped her in her difficulties with publishers. They also had many shared interests: in the early years they collaborated on literary activity, such as researching the material for his lectures on the ‘Poets of Humble Life’4 and co-authoring her first publication, ‘Sketches among the Poor No 1’; in addition, he gave her the benefit of his knowledge of Lancashire dialect for Mary Barton, and wrote an appendix on the topic for the fifth edition. It is also certainly the case that William’s own preoccupations made him ready to give his wife essentially a free rein in her professional career, a freedom which many Victorian husbands would have been less ready to concede. After their marriage, the Gaskells moved into 14 Dover Street, off Oxford Road. The area, on the southeast side of Manchester in the Ardwick district, was popular with the middle classes at this time, being

20 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

less smoky and greener than further into the city, but was still only a mile or so from the slums and factories of Ancoats. The change from Knutsford and the other rural or small-town environments Gaskell had mostly experienced was marked, as she indicated to Mary and William Howitt: ‘I was brought up in a country town, and my lot is now to live in or rather on the borders of a great manufacturing town, but when spring days first come . . . I feel a stirring instinct and long to be off into the deep grassy solitudes of the country’ (Letters, p. 14). In many ways, indeed, Gaskell never really liked living in Manchester. She found it dirty and depressing, and its urban poverty and deprivation must have been eye-opening for her. The more middle-class, cultured aspect of the city was, however, not unfamiliar to her, since she had visited Manchester several times with her Cheshire relatives before she went to stay with the Robberds’s in 1831. She certainly attended a fancy-dress ball, given as part of a musical festival held in Manchester from 30 September to 4 October 1828 in the Theatre Royal and Assembly Rooms, and she may have gone to other such functions.5 Indeed, the Manchester into which Gaskell settled was by no means a city solely of industrial horrors and working-class suffering. It was at this time the prototype of commercial success, with a thriving cultural life, much of it dominated by the Unitarians. It had a long-established Literary and Philosophical Society and a Natural History Society. It had excellent libraries: Chetham’s Library, founded in 1657; Manchester New Circulating Library, opened in 1792; Manchester Public Free Library, the first rate-supported example of its kind in the country, opened in 1852; the Portico Library, established in 1806, of which William was Chairman for thirty-five years, and which was the source of much of the Gaskells’ reading;6 and libraries connected with Dissenting chapels in the city and with specialist organizations such as the Statistical Society. It had its own newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821. The City Art Gallery, originally the Royal Manchester Institution, designed by the well-known London architect Charles Barry, opened in 1829 and was completed in 1837.7 The Free Trade Hall, completed in 1856, became in 1858 the permanent home of the Halle Orchestra, which had been giving concerts in the city since 1849 (Sir Charles Halle was a personal friend of the Gaskells and gave music lessons to their daughter, Marianne). The city had an Athenaeum, and was especially known for its encouragement of scientific and mathematical education, among its self-aware, politically radical working class as well as the middle class. In June 1842, the annual meeting of the British Association was held in Manchester, centred on the Literary and

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 21

Philosophical Society, and visitors to the city at this time included eminent scientists such as Herschel, Sedgwick, Whewell and Roget, whom the Gaskells would undoubtedly have encountered. Another eminent visitor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose lectures on ‘Representative Men of Great Ideas’ at the Athenaeum, and on ‘Domestic Life’ at the Mechanics Institute, Gaskell heard in November 1847.8 Manchester’s substantial number of foreign residents, not only Germans such as Friedrich Engels, and Salis and Adolf Schwabe, calico printers, but also Greeks and Italians, additionally contributed to its cosmopolitan aura. It is, too, important to note that as the Gaskells became more established in Manchester, as well as better off, they increasingly extended their range of social acquaintances. The Cross Street Chapel congregation itself included prominent factory owners, members of parliament, doctors and public health campaigners. Sophisticated German merchants and factory owners like the Salis Schwabes, who had connections with some of the most eminent musicians of the day, introduced them to a wider cultural circle than they had hitherto encountered; their friends the Dukinfield Darbishires, who lived in a more salubrious environment at Rivington, also had a more luxurious and socially extensive lifestyle than the Gaskells, as did their American friends, Samuel and Julia Bradford, who lived near Pendleton, in Salford. Gaskell herself began her visits to her wealthy friend, Mrs Davenport, at Capesthorne Hall in Cheshire, in the mid-1830s, the general lifestyle of which was clearly very appealing to her. In a long letter of January 1852 to her friend, Agnes Sandars, Gaskell details, with slightly wry admiration, Mrs Davenport’s costly wedding finery, and, more importantly, notes the difference between a Sunday at Capesthorne and one in Manchester: The S[unday] School come into the beautiful conservatory to be taught, and are clean wholesome country-looking children in the midst of camellias, & [?]sweet-scented geraniums & & – the chapel through the conservatory – the pew a parlor with low luxurious sofas, a fire-place &, – how easy it seems to be good compared with a long wet tramp down to a close school-room, full of half-washed children, – that’s very wicked is it not? (Further Letters, p. 63) Clearly Gaskell (probably much more than William) found such material and social luxury very seductive, though she was too loyal to her Unitarian background to be seriously envious. Such experiences could

22 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

anyway be put to good use in her fiction: the kind of contrast which she sets up in Mary Barton between Wilson’s hunger and suffering when he goes to Carson’s house to get the infirmary order for Davenport (a curious instance of real name usage) and the lavish leisurely breakfast which the Carson family is enjoying has an additional impact for being sourced from her own knowledge. Despite the cultural and social richness which Manchester offered Gaskell, however, it was the encounter with social distress on a hitherto unknown scale which had the greatest effect on her. As a minister’s wife, she inevitably came into contact with this suffering population, the lowest in the city’s social scale, even while she refused to allow charitable work to dominate her life. As the Robberds’s daughter, Mary Herford, suggests, she steadily and consistently objected to her time being considered as belonging in any way to her husband’s congregation for the purposes of congregational visiting, and to being looked to for that leadership in congregational work which is too often expected of ‘the minister’s wife’; but, at the same time, there have been few who have been more willing than she was to give time, and thought, and trouble where she felt they would be of any service.9 Gaskell’s involvement in philanthropic work in the city is verified by various sources. A retrospective article in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1895, for example, states that ‘she worked hard amongst the poor during those dark days [the 1840s and the cotton famine of the 1860s] . . . She visited the poor operatives, tried to understand their position, and helped them where she could with money, sympathy and advice’.10 Letters to Vernon Lushington from the early 1860s, discussing her participation in relief work during the period of suffering caused by the American Civil War, add to our knowledge of her continuing commitment to charitable activities. The Winkworth sisters, too, attest to her charity work at this time, and claim that ‘she was . . . almost adored by the poorer members of her husband’s flock’.11 As well as ‘visiting’, Gaskell was deeply involved in educational schemes for the poor. She assisted Travers Madge, the prison reformer, with his Lower Mosely Street Sunday Schools, and held sewing classes for young women in her own home. Individual cases of distress, such as a local spinster who had fallen on hard times and a poor old woman on parish relief, claimed her attention, as did larger schemes like refuges for fallen women, an area of social concern which initiated her

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 23

acquaintance with Dickens in the late 1840s. William’s own involvement with sanitary and housing reform and with the Manchester Domestic Home Mission must have extended her knowledge of local living conditions. She also familiarized herself with the factory environment, as a letter of March 1864, detailing the various manufactories in Manchester and describing their machinery and products, makes clear (Letters, pp. 729–30). The Gaskells knew James Nasmyth, self-made engineer and inventor of the steam-hammer, and Gaskell took the Winkworths to see his works at Patricroft, near Manchester. Indeed, she seems to have regarded a factory tour as a part of every visitor’s itinerary, writing to her friend Tottie Fox after the latter had had to postpone a promised visit, ‘I meant to have dragged you through mills and manufactories without end, by way of getting one’s duty done to Manchester’ (Letters, p. 87). Jenny Uglow suggests that Gaskell always saw Manchester from the outside, depicting it from an essentially external perspective.12 It is certainly true that her feelings about the place were equivocal. Its damp and foggy climate had adverse effects on both her health and her garden, and its prosaic, albeit energetic materialism was antithetic to her own psychological make-up, which she once described as ‘Mediaeval, – and un Manchester’ (Letters, p. 492). And yet it was still ‘dear old dull smoky grim grey Manchester’ (Letters, p. 489), the place where all her children were born and where she was based for all of her writing life. The Gaskells had three different Manchester homes – 14 Dover Street from 1832 to 1842; 121 Upper Rumford Street from 1842 to 1850; and 42 Plymouth Grove from 1850 until her death. Although each move was a little further from the city centre, the family always lived within walking distance of William’s work and city activities. More significantly, they were also never far from the kind of environment which Engels describes so graphically in his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844–5): Right and left a multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts, and he who turns in thither gets into a filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found – especially in the courts which lead down to the Irk, and which contain unqualifiedly the most horrible dwellings which I have yet beheld. In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.13

24 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

Engels in fact lived near the Gaskells, off Oxford Road, during his time in Manchester from 1842 to 1844, and William may have read his work (which was available only in German at this time). But though Gaskell herself may have been aware of it, as well as perhaps reading James P. Kay’s The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture of Manchester (1832) and the annual reports of the Manchester Domestic Home Mission, each of which described the worst parts of the city, the vividness of her depiction of places such as the Davenports’ cellar dwelling in Mary Barton certainly owes as much to personal as to textual knowledge. Although much of Gaskell’s social and literary life was bound up with Manchester, it was – increasingly, as burdens and anxieties multiplied – a place from which to escape. In the early years of her marriage, this was hard to achieve because of growing domestic responsibilities. Between 1833 and 1846, she had seven children: a still-born daughter in July 1833; Marianne in September 1834; Margaret Emily (Meta) in February 1837; a son who died ‘while yet a baby’ (Further Letters, p. 156), born sometime between 1838 and 1841; Florence Elizabeth (Flossy) in October 1842; William (Willie) in October 1844; and Julia Bradford in September 1846. Even in these busy years, however, Gaskell managed to fulfil to some extent her desire for a change of scene. Visits were exchanged with Holland cousins from Knutsford and Gaskell relatives from Warrington, and Gaskell had a longer sojourn in Knutsford when Aunt Lumb died there in May 1837. In 1836 she began a regular tradition of spending part of the summer on the Lancashire coast, first at Poulton-le-Fylde, and then at Grange-over-Sands, which she had been recommended for Marianne’s health. In July 1843, the Gaskells spent their first holiday at Silverdale, near Morecambe Bay, a location which became a favourite vacation retreat over a period of fifteen years or more. At Silverdale they stayed in a converted tower, adjoining a farmhouse and overlooking the Bay and Lancashire coastline; the area was prettily rural and a perfect place in which Gaskell could write without unwelcome interruptions (though they did have various friends to stay here, William usually preferred the company of his family only and his wife was glad of the unaccustomed peace). Gaskell romanticized the situation in terms of its quaintness and primitiveness, relishing its lack of amenities: she wrote to Charles Eliot Norton, just before going there in June 1858, ‘Silverdale is so wild a place we may be happy to get a leg of mutton at all. I have had to dine 15 people, as hungry as hounds, on shrimps & bread & butter’ (Letters, p. 505). Part of its attraction, of course, was its difference from Manchester: here, ‘all the duties of life

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 25

seem so easy & simple compared to those of a great large town’, and even the rain is sweet, ‘not sullen down falling inky drops like [at home]’ (Letters, pp. 513–4). In 1858, Silverdale’s beauties had an added charm because they could be nostalgically linked to her trip to Rome the previous year, the two combined in a poetically articulated act of memory: ‘The secret [of the eternal pleasure] is I think in the expanse of view, – something like what gives it’s [sic] charm to the Campagna – such wide plains of golden sands with purple hill shadows, – or fainter wandering filmy cloud-shadows, & the great dome of sky’ (Letters, p. 514). Even more significantly, Gaskell delighted in the history and legends attached to the area. She was especially fascinated by the guide, said to be the descendent of the one who assisted Edward I, who led travellers on a horse across the treacherous sands of Morecambe Bay, blowing a horn trumpet; recognizing the romantic potential of this, she made it the imaginative core of one of her earliest short stories, ‘The Sexton’s Hero’. The landscape of this area also provides the background for parts of Ruth and for some other short stories. Another vacation region which was to furnish Gaskell with material for her fiction was Wales. As has already been noted, she first went there in 1827, to visit the Samuel Hollands who had bought a house at Plas yn Penrhyn. On this occasion she stayed at nearby Aber and saw Snowdonia, Conwy and Anglesey, an area which she nostalgically recalls in a letter to her sister- in-law, Lizzie Gaskell, in July 1838. A trip planned for the autumn of 1831 failed to materialize, but she returned to Wales with William on her honeymoon in the summer of 1832, adding to her knowledge of the region on a four-week tour which included Aber, Conwy, Capel Curig, Llanberis and Beddgelert, ending up at Plas yn Penrhyn. After Aunt Lumb’s death, she went there again to visit and walk with her Holland cousins. What was possibly her final visit was made with Emily Winkworth in the late autumn of 1848, to recover from the strains of writing Mary Barton, but this time her feelings must have been more mixed since for her Wales had become associated with tragedy. In July 1845, she had taken Marianne and Willie, only nine months old, to Ffestiniog, where the former contracted scarlet fever. The eleven-year-old girl recovered, but ten days later Willie caught the disease; they removed to Portmadoc, where he died on 10 August. If Wales called up both pleasure and suffering, it also embodied cultural and environmental difference. In the early nineteenth century, as Jo Pryke has argued,14 Wales had literary and artistic associations which linked it with the Picturesque and the Romantic movements: poets such as Gray and Wordsworth, as well as painters of the day, captured and

26 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

encapsulated its wildness and ‘uncivilised’ attractiveness, in images of mountain scenery and primitive peasant life. It was represented as ‘other’, with all the allure of the foreign, at a time when it was still considered a little risky to travel on the Continent. This romantic aspect of the country clearly appealed to Gaskell. Her imagination was caught by the notion of it as a wild and remote place inhabited by primitive and often barbaric people, as she wrote to Harriet Carr in 1831 (Further Letters, p. 9). With its uncultivated and dramatic scenery, so different from either Cheshire or the Lancashire that she knew, Wales became for her a site of difference, which in a fictional context could be explored and developed in terms of some of the most basic of human emotions. Its distinctive culture also fuelled her imagination. She included Welsh folksongs in her music books, and was eager to hear any local tales or legends – on her 1848 visit, for example, she noted that Uncle Sam was pouring a ‘brimful of Welsh stories . . . into [Emily’s] not unwilling ears’ (Letters, p. 61), at least some of which may have found their way into her own stories. From her earliest visit, she seems to have found its environment conducive to writing. A letter to her from her brother John in July 1828 makes reference to two possible sources of literary adaptation which she had mentioned to him: one, ‘a very pretty story of Captain Barton’, a local resident, which sounds to him like the beginnings of a novel; and the other her account of ‘a narrow escape of Kitty’s’15 on the Traeth Bach estuary near Barmouth, a type of potential disaster which seems particularly to have attracted her love for the dramatic (and which prefigures her fascination with the dangers of Morecambe Bay). More obviously, Wales directly sources two of her short stories, ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’ (1850) and ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ (1858), both probably mapped out in the 1830s, and also a section of Ruth (1853). In this decade Gaskell also discovered what was to become another of her favourite holiday areas, just north of the Silverdale/Morecambe region. In June 1849, the family went to stay at Skelwith in Little Langdale, near Ambleside, at a farm called Mill Brow. Their landlady, Mrs Preston, became a family friend: in December 1851, she stayed at Plymouth Grove, as a consequence of which several of her children became servants in the Gaskell household. The powerful influence of this locality and its inhabitants is shown by the way in which Gaskell makes ongoing imaginative use of the Lakeland connection. Its first appearance is in her short piece, ‘Martha Preston’, published in Sartain’s Union Magazine in February 1851, and the area reappears in several later works. The Lake District, like the other places that Gaskell so much valued, fulfilled a variety of functions for her. First, it gave her the relax-

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 27

ation and relief from stress which she always found in rural surroundings. Second, as has already been noted, it provided her with another source of legend and tales to be used in her fiction. It also opened up more social and literary contacts for her. On this 1849 holiday, she met Wordsworth through Edward Quillinan who arranged for the aged poet to meet the Gaskells; on 24 July 1849, Wordsworth wrote in her autograph book at Lesketh How, the home of Dr John and Margaret Davy. Mrs Davy’s mother, Mrs Elizabeth Fletcher, whom Gaskell’s father had known when she was a well-known society hostess in Edinburgh, also lived in the area, at Lancrigg, and was part of the Wordsworth circle; it was probably through her that Gaskell became acquainted with other Lakeland literary figures, including the Arnolds at Fox How, Ruskin, W. E. Forster, Harriet Martineau and Crabbe Robinson. Coincidentally, Gaskell’s first meeting with Charlotte Brontë was also in the Lake District, at Briery Close, near Ambleside, the residence of their mutual friends Sir James and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth. Gaskell’s first taste of the foreign occurred in late 1841, when she and William went to Belgium and Germany, leaving the two girls behind with an aunt. The only extant account of this trip, a breathlessly enthusiastic letter to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, makes it clear that for Gaskell the combination of romantic and historical association with the curious customs of a foreign culture was the greatest attraction. Her love for what could take her beyond the mundane and contemporary was fulfilled by ‘the sublime beauty’ and the ‘practical poetry’ of the cathedrals in Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, which seemed ‘so deserted & lonely, as if the world had stood still with them since the 14th century’ (Letters, p. 41). The scenery, too, pleased her (though, interestingly, she found the Rhine disappointing because it did not resemble the engravings with which she was familiar). Her response to Heidelberg’s beauties is particularly significant: she uses the standard tourist tropes – ‘splendid scenery, dark pine woods rocks, & the picturesque town, and noble castle to complete it . . . just the sort of scene of loveliness which made one sigh to see it’ – while mocking her own stereotypical enthusiasm – ‘don’t be tired of “splendid views”, I can’t help it there were so many’ (Letters, p. 42). Notably, also, she is fascinated by the legend of Ondine, the nymph who haunts the waters of the Neckar, and she delights in the ‘frightening & wild stories . . . some such fearful ones’ (Letters, p. 44) which she and her friends here tell each other. In a typically Gaskellian way, too, she mixes her delight in the dark and mysterious, the aesthetically suggestive, and the historically remote with a much more prosaic appreciation of the social and material pleasures of life. At Heidelberg,

28 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

she first met Mary and William Howitt, the literary Unitarians who were to feature prominently in her early career. Mary and her daughter took them to a dance festival here and Gaskell details with relish its food and boisterous jollifications. She also describes a splendid ball at a Madame Schlosser’s at which she danced all evening, amused at the German protocol that ladies must never do more than hold the tips of their partners’ fingers. It is the Gothic and Romantic side of this European experience, however, which most feeds into her fiction, not only in the stories which it directly inspired (‘The Grey Woman’ [1861] and, less dramatically, ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ [1862]), but also in the persistent strain of the curious and morbid which infiltrates almost all her work, revealing an unexpectedly dark side of her imagination.

First writings In as far as they impacted on her writing, Gaskell’s Manchester experiences were most important early in her career. Even her first works, however, show how she was inspired by a variety of interlocking influences. Her earliest publication was a poem in rhyming couplets, ‘Sketches Among the Poor, No.1’, written with William and published in Blackwoods in January 1837. It is unashamedly derivative, as she herself told Mary Howitt: ‘We once thought of trying to write sketches among the poor, rather in the manner of Crabbe . . . but in a more seeing-beauty spirit; and one – the only one – was published in Blackwood, January 1837’ (Letters, p. 33). It also contains echoes of Wordsworth, one of the poets she was reading while staying at Sandlebridge with the infant Marianne in May 1836 (she was also apparently writing imitations of some of these authors, since she talks about ‘doing’ Coleridge, Wordsworth and Crabbe (Letters, p. 6) ). Gaskell’s conviction that ‘the beauty and poetry of many of the common things and daily events of life in its humblest aspect does not seem . . . sufficiently appreciated’, reinforced by William’s experience of lecturing on ‘The Poets and Poetry of Humble Life’ to ‘the very poorest of the weavers in the very poorest district of Manchester’ (Letters, p. 33), inspired a piece which, in its combination of literary echoing and real-life reflection, was to be a model for much of her later writing. The story itself, too – a young girl from the Lake District comes to Manchester to work and never returns, though her nostalgic memories of the country remain with her – embodies a recurring theme in Gaskell’s fiction. The description of the dark house hemmed in by gloomy streets, where flowers live for barely an hour, is set against old Mary’s happy recollections of an environment of rural

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 29

beauty in which she lived in harmony with her surroundings; while the contrast is not problematized here, the foregrounding of two coexisting modes of life is a pervasive trope in Gaskell’s narratives. In particular, the old woman’s longing to return to the rural home of her childhood is recalled in Mary Barton, in Alice Wilson’s nostalgic memories of the Lancashire countryside to which she knows she will never return. Gaskell’s next published piece was her description of a visit to Clopton Hall16 in Warwickshire, included in William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places (1840). It is interesting on two counts: it established her entrée into the literary world (Howitt, as will be shown, was responsible for the publication of some of her subsequent work); and it seems to have been offered, not elicited, thus suggesting that she had already entertained the idea of public authorship. Furthermore, it is an early example of the revisionary nature of much of her work; though she gave it to Howitt around 1839, she probably wrote it many years before, after visiting the house while she was at school at Avonbank. Her relationship with the Howitts is interesting in itself. It is unclear exactly how she first made contact with them, but in August 1838 she wrote a letter to Mary Howitt, obviously continuing a correspondence and detailing various Knutsford and Cheshire customs, an exercise ‘by which I earn the privilege of again writing to you’ (Letters, p. 28). These details – an instance of Gaskell’s fascination with local myth and superstition, and perhaps linked to Victorian socio-scientific interest in this area – were incorporated into the second edition of Howitt’s Rural Life (1839). Then, on hearing that Howitt intended publishing a book about unusual houses, Gaskell probably offered her ‘Clopton House’ to him, perhaps after gaining confidence at seeing material of hers in print. This short piece, with its self-conscious striving for effect and stylistic embellishment, is characteristic of the generically hybrid essay/tale favoured by Gaskell, and particularly illustrates her interest in the Gothic. Its core feature is the story of Charlotte Clopton, whose portrait Gaskell sees and describes: assumed dead during a plague, the young girl was buried in the family vault in Stratford Church, but was found a few days later, evidently having attempted to escape, and having bitten a piece out of her shoulder in order to survive, before finally dying. Gaskell employs dramatic techniques to set her scene and create suspense: overgrown and desolate fields, signs of neglect around the house, and decaying and unused rooms inside. The influence of Ann Radcliffe is evident, not only in the (female) narrator’s declared fear of getting lost in all the rambling passages, but also in her discovery of an old chest full of bones.17

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Although literary influences, such as Wordsworth, Crabbe and Tennyson, continue to feature in Gaskell’s writing, the work which comes from her second decade in Manchester is most notable for its source in real-life experience. Her next publications, three stories which Howitt elicited from her for his new weekly periodical, Howitt’s Journal, launched on New Year’s Day 1847, are firmly linked to the known and familiar. ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, in three parts – ‘St Valentine’s Day’, ‘Whitsuntide’ and ‘Michaelmas’ – appeared in the Journal on 5, 12 and 19 June 1847; ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ appeared on 4 September; and ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’ appeared on New Year’s Day 1848. All three were issued under the pseudonym Cotton Mather Mills, and were later published separately in book form.18 Like ‘Clopton House’, they were also probably written earlier than their publication date. From the point of view of topographical influence, ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ is the odd one out in this trio, since it draws on her Silverdale experiences and the accounts of drownings she heard there. It is a simple story, narrating the bravery of a young man who sacrifices his own life so that the woman he loved and her husband, his erstwhile rival, trapped by the tide as they are crossing Morecambe Bay, can reach the shore in safety. It is also an early example of Gaskell’s fascination with the links between environment and human behaviour: the hero’s selfless bravery is paralleled by acute knowledge of local conditions and the willingness to use that knowledge for the sake of others. The two other stories constitute her first real Manchester fiction, drawing on various aspects of her early experiences in the city, before the serious unrest and poverty of the 1840s. ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, with its focus on the named urban environment of Manchester, its topographical detail of streets and buildings, and its use of a narrator whose is familiar with ‘our neighbourhood’,19 has a directly experiential resonance. Many of its social details – the lifestyle of prosperous mill-workers, their dialect, their conditions at work, and their leisure activities – show local knowledge, and are carefully incorporated into a tale of self-sacrifice and reconciliation. Libbie’s exhausting occupation as a sempstress (a topic to be taken up later in Ruth), as well as reference to suffering caused by a drunken husband, further suggest familiarity with an underside of city life. Such specificity is linked to the more psychological elements of the story, in a way typical of Gaskell’s writing. So Libbie’s loneliness is compounded by her living environment: the monotony of the buildings; the careless and hectic lifestyle of the mill-workers with whom she lodges and who are too busy to be concerned with her; and the bluntness of the factory girls and

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 31

youths who make fun of her plainness.20 At the same time, the closeness of communal habitation, though claustrophobic, also initiates the friendship between Libbie and the crippled boy, Franky Hall, and leads to some happiness. The description of the Whitsuntide visit to nearby Dunham Park, in part two of the story, with its depictions of the canal-boat journey, the rural wooded aspect of the park (the narrator’s observation of its capacity for ‘lapping the soul in green images of the country’ (p. 384) voices Gaskell’s own need to find relief from urban drabness) and the joyousness of a rare working-class holiday, further builds up a story in which character and environment are inextricably linked. This middle section has a Wordsworthian resonance, pointing to the power of natural beauty to make souls grow ‘all unconsciously, as souls do grow’ (p. 387) and concluding in a mode of nostalgic rhetoric which asserts the restorative effect of memory. Alongside its literary echoes, it also articulates Gaskell’s own ambivalent response to Manchester: Far, far way in the distance on that flat plain, you might see the motionless cloud of smoke hanging over a great town, and that was Manchester, – ugly smoky Manchester, dear, busy, earnest, nobleworking Manchester; where their children had been born, and where, perhaps, some lay buried; where their homes were, and where God had cast their lives, and told them to work out their destiny. (p. 387)21 Other elements of the story, including the emphasis on the nurturing ethos of the working class, and on love between women, indicate Gaskell’s sympathetic observation as well as being themes which she develops in her later fiction. Libbie’s compensation for a personally unfulfilled life in bringing joy to Franky, by buying him a canary, and the force of her selflessness in creating harmony between Libbie and Mrs Hall, as well as between the latter and her neighbours, are paradigmatic of recurring narrative tropes in Gaskell’s work. The third of the three stories, ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’, a tale about domestic squabbling between two couples living in the same building, is set in an unnamed town, and there is nothing to indicate specifically that this is Manchester. It seems likely, though, that it too draws on Gaskell’s knowledge of city life, this time of newspaper writers rather than factory workers, and it certainly highlights the potential stresses of close domestic proximity. Set, like ‘Libbie Marsh’, in the 1830s, it relies more on social satire and a sense of the absurd than the

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earlier story, thus linking it to Cranford rather than to Mary Barton, though it has a more self-conscious sentimental morality than the former. It also again foregrounds a female spirit of reconciliation – it is the two women, not their husbands, who initiate the first steps towards harmony. Additionally, its portrayal of a mother’s terrible anxiety when her child gets croup may emanate from Gaskell’s memory of Willie’s death, three years previously. Gaskell published two other tales in the 1840s. ‘Hand and Heart’ is a moralizing children’s story about an unbelievably virtuous boy who manages to convert all around him to Christian values, printed in the Manchester Sunday School Penny Magazine in July 1849. A slight work, it belongs to the tradition of children’s moral fables, as penned by writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Mozely and Sarah Trimmer (many of whose works Gaskell knew). More significant is her ‘The Last Generation in England’, not only because it foreshadows the strand of her work best exemplified in Cranford, but because it is her first incursion into the American publishing world. Through the offices of Mary Howitt, who herself published there, the story was taken by Sartain’s Union Magazine and included in their July 1849 number. In the opening section, the unnamed narrator explains that a chance reading of Southey’s The Doctor has inspired her to record some details of country town life, ‘either observed by myself, or handed down to me by older relations’; she also makes it clear that her purpose is primarily informative: ‘even in small towns scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing; and much will appear strange, which yet occurred only in the generation immediately preceding ours’.22 This claim, of course, has particular resonance for an American audience, wholly unfamiliar with English provincial life. The town itself is not named, but some of the material, later incorporated into the instalments of Cranford (the cow with flannel waistcoat and drawers, the cat who swallowed the lace, and the tea-tray which had to be retrieved from under the sofa, for instance), was avowedly drawn from Gaskell’s actual Knutsford experiences, confirming its real-life source. The daily activities and anecdotes described may have been gossip current in the Holland circle, too. For all that memory is important here, though, the tone is social-scientific rather than nostalgically reminiscent. Linked with Gaskell’s output in this decade are two more Manchester stories; published in the 1850s, they can usefully be considered here since they were probably partly written as early as the 1830s and similarly exploit her northern urban experience. The first – and more substantial – is ‘Lizzie Leigh’, published by Dickens in his Household Words in

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March-April 1850. Dickens asked Gaskell if she would contribute something to his new journal on 31 January 1850; the agreement between them was confirmed on 2 February; and the first instalment of the story was in proof by 27 February. Given this rapidity, it would seem unlikely that Gaskell had had to invent something completely new; instead, she probably revised a piece which she already had to hand. ‘Lizzie Leigh’, with its themes of movement from country to town, the plight of fallen women, the influence of environment, and the redemptive power of female love, as well as its extensive use of dialect, both echoes Gaskell’s previous work and looks forward to her subsequent productions. Dealing with the pre-1840s, its topographical exactitude, like that of ‘Libbie Marsh’, suggests personal knowledge. It also has connections with William’s Temperance Rhymes (1839), vivid poetic sketches of urban poverty and figures of deprivation, including a drunken wife and a prostitute, presumably based on actual contact. At the beginning of the story, Anne Leigh and her two sons leave the rural environment of their farm near Rochdale and move to Manchester, because the ‘lost’ daughter, Lizzie, has gone there, and her mother believes that she is still alive. The contrast between the open views and natural beauty they have left, and the enclosed dark area they now inhabit, though less foregrounded than in ‘Libbie Marsh’, sets the scene for an examination of human behaviour and its consequences. More importantly, it hinges on the subject of the ‘fallen woman’, and in so doing combines two generic prototypes. Lizzie’s employment as a young, friendless female servant in Manchester, her seduction and subsequent pregnancy, her brief spell in the work-house, and her final descent into prostitution replicate the histories of some of the poor girls of Gaskell’s own acquaintance around this time. In 1847, her maid, Anne, became pregnant and was deserted by her lover; and her concern for a young dress-maker’s apprentice, Pasley, now turned prostitute and in the New Bailey prison, whom she hoped to help to emigrate, initiated her acquaintance with Dickens just a few weeks before she agreed to give him this story. The ‘fallen woman’ theme is complemented by that of the Prodigal’s return. In this, the central character leaves a happy childhood home for the seductions of the city, is rescued, and comes back penitentially and restored by forgiveness; the most immediate model for Gaskell here was probably Wordsworth’s Michael (1800), though in this poem, the lost child fails to return. Characteristically, however, Gaskell treats her tale from a gendered angle. Lizzie’s eventual recovery and partial redemption (she herself never loses her sense of shame and guilt) are due to the strength of maternal and female love: notably, both Mrs Leigh and Susan Palmer,

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Will Leigh’s fiancée, are readier to forgive Lizzie than are her father and her brother. Lizzie’s return to the country with her mother is not intended to be seen as triumphant, and the rest of her life is presented as penance and self-sacrifice. But Gaskell’s acute awareness, well established after only a few years of living in Manchester, of the extent of working-class suffering created by urban conditions is presented here with insight and sympathy. The other Manchester tale appeared several years later. ‘The Manchester Marriage’ was published in Household Words in December 1858, and is significant more for its theme of disappearance than for its study of northern city life. In fact only the earlier part of the story is set in Manchester, with emphasis not on urban conditions, but on the rugged individualism of the central character, Mr Openshaw, a Manchester industrialist; the second part deals with life in London. Its narrative of a wife remarrying after she thinks her first husband has been lost at sea, and the subsequent unexpected return of the missing man (whom, however, she is prevented from meeting due to her second husband’s solicitous concern for her peace of mind) embodies Gaskell’s preoccupation with disappearance and foreshadows her more extensive and psychological probing treatment of the theme in Sylvia’s Lovers, five years later.

The novelist emerges: Mary Barton Mary Barton (1848) is the best-known of Gaskell’s fictions of urban realism, its subtitle, ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, indicating its regional specificity.23 The directly experiential source of much of the narrative is clear from details such as the carefully observed conditions of working-class life in the city, in both relative affluence and terrible poverty; the use of Lancashire dialect; the knowledge of actual streets and districts; and the reference to well-known figures connected with the region. Some of Gaskell’s information may have come from government or local reports, and her topographical detail is not always completely accurate – the kinds of slum conditions she describes, for instance, would have been most common in the district known as Little Ireland, near today’s Oxford Road Station, rather than in the streets she does name, which are further into Ancoats. But her specificity was enough to shock many of her readers into hitherto unawakened awareness of the suffering caused by industrialization; and the displeasure of several local factory owners, who felt that she had unfairly represented them, indicates the novel’s factual impact.

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 35

The book opens in a period just before the ‘Hungry Forties’, when the factory workers were relatively well-off (John Barton comments about the factory girls that ‘they can earn so much when work is plenty, that they can maintain themselves anyhow’),24 but, unlike her other Manchester short stories, moves into the next decade, when, after the failure of the Chartist Petition in July 1839 and the deepening effects of the Corn Laws, unrest and rioting escalated, and living and employment conditions worsened. The description of the Davenports’ cellar, filthy, malodorous and revealing the terrible poverty of its inhabitants, is markedly similar to the previously referred to descriptions of Manchester slums in Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England, suggesting the accuracy of Gaskell’s portrayal. The topographical specificity – Esther leaves the city by coach from Hulme Church, the Davenports live in Berry Street, off Store Street, and Oxford Road is mentioned – further authenticates the narrative as ‘real’. Actual people, such as Thomas Wright, the prison philanthropist whom Gaskell assisted, and Deborah Travis (Knyvett), the well-known local singer, are introduced into the novel, as is Samuel Bamford, the weaver poet and Chartist agitator whose poetry Job Legh quotes. Bamford, whom Gaskell knew and admired, was a particularly suggestive model for workingclass endeavour: his two-part autobiography, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1840–44) and Early Days (1849), which William borrowed from the Portico Library on several occasions, describes his involvement with protest movements as well as his labouring work as a weaver, and his experiences were exemplary in the context of the novel’s narrative.25 Gaskell herself, however, was careful to deny that her novel was based on any real people or events. With a certain disingenuity, she told Tottie Fox that ‘Nobody and nothing was real . . . in M. Barton, but the character of John Barton; the circumstances are different, but the character and some of the speeches, are exactly a poor man I know. . . . I told the story according to a fancy of my own; to really SEE the scenes I tried to describe, (and they WERE as real as my own life at the time)’ (Letters, p. 82). She was particularly distressed by the similarity between the key event of her plot and an actual occurrence some years earlier. On the night of 3 January 1831, Thomas Ashton, the young son of a Hyde millowner, was shot near his father’s house, presumably by disgruntled workers. In a letter of 1852 to Sir John Potter, whose father had married Thomas’s sister, Mary, Gaskell apologizes for the pain she had inadvertently caused the family by reviving old memories. She does not, though (as some critics have stated) actually deny that the idea was suggested to her by the real-life tragedy: while claiming no knowledge of the details,

36 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

she admits that the event itself, together with ‘one or two similar cases at Glasgow at the time of a strike, were, I have no doubt, suggestive of the plot, as having shown me to what lengths the animosity of irritated workmen would go’ (Letters, p. 196). These evasive and somewhat contradictory disavowals show the difficulties which Gaskell encountered in treating such a subject. Begun, on William’s suggestion, as an attempt to alleviate the continuing painful memories of Willie’s death, the novel was associated from the start with suffering, drawn from first-hand knowledge. As she explains in her Preface, she was impelled by the desire ‘to give some utterance to the agony which, from time to time convulses this dumb people’, known to her because sympathetic listening ‘had laid open to me the hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them [the work- people]’ (p. 3). As she supposedly told Travers Madge, a particular episode helped to inspire Mary Barton: during a visit to a labourer’s cottage when she was trying to comfort the poor family and reduce their bitterness against the rich, ‘the head of the family took hold of her arm, and grasping it tightly said, with tears in his eyes: “Ay, ma’am, but have ye ever seen a child clemmed to death?” ’.26 Encounters like these acted to reinforce Gaskell’s imaginative speculation about such people and their situations: I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me in the busy streets of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the care-worn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want; tossed to and fro by circumstances apparently in even a greater degree than other men. (p. 3) Her inspiration, then, is a mixture of imaginative voyeurism (in the best sense) and evangelical impulse, and in order to persuade her middle-class readers to hear her message she needed to convince them that her imagination was not building on mere fancy. The Appendix, William’s Two Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect, which she added to the fifth edition of the work (1854), together with glosses on puzzling dialect words, also contributed by William, were not only designed to add authenticity (a correspondent in the Manchester Guardian had complained about the inaccuracy of the local speech used) but also gave the novel something of the force of social documentary, encouraging readers to regard it as an illustrative and informative text. It is also clear that

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 37

despite Gaskell’s disavowals of knowledge of political economy, she was by no means ignorant of some of the theories and proposals circulating among economists and industrialists in Manchester at this time. Catherine Winkworth describes a visit which she and the Gaskells paid to their friends, the Darbishires, in November 1847, at which the ladies listened to heated discussion between Richard Cobden and other local employers ‘on the present state of the commercial world’;27 and certainly by April 1851, aware of the dangers of uninformed pronouncement, she was herself well-enough informed to advise Marianne to read an article on free trade in the Quarterly Review, Cobden’s speeches, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, before attempting to adopt any partisan political position (Letters, p. 148). This very urge to authenticate produced annoyance and anger on the part of some of the ‘masters’, who claimed that she had misrepresented them. Taking up their cause, an unsigned review in the British Quarterly Review challenged her views of the conditions of factory work, the spirit of the operatives and the attitudes and actions of the employers. A review in the Edinburgh Review of April 1849 by W. R. Greg, the brother of the philanthropic mill-owner Samuel, similarly accused her of falsely representing both inter-class hostility and the actual employment conditions, though his attack was more reasoned.28 Such criticisms called forth from Gaskell further assertions that ‘I believe I wrote truth’ (Letters, p. 66), and that ‘I wanted to represent the subject in the light in which some of the workmen certainly consider to be true, not that I dare to say it is the abstract absolute truth’ (Letters, p. 67). Again, personal evidence is used both as a tool of authentication and as a defence against charges of distortion.29 It also has a role in Gaskell’s awareness and treatment of ‘difference’, the source of which, she felt, was situated as much in the perception of her middle-class readers unfamiliar with working-class life as in the actuality; her main aim, therefore, was to defamiliarize otherness through stressing that the sameness of human suffering and emotions was the most important factor in harmonizing class relations. Gaskell’s realistic tale of strife between masters and men is shaped by a pattern which has literary and ideological, as well as personal, roots. It offers a resolution which replicates the conciliatory or romantic closure of so many Victorian novels. The final hand-clasping forgiveness between Mr Carson, father of the murdered young man, and John Barton, the murderer, and the reunion and subsequent move to a better life in Canada of Jem Wilson and Mary, together satisfy contemporary demands for a happy ending and accommodate a traditional love story to a more specific thematic purpose. Gaskell claimed that she had

38 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

always thought of John Barton as the ‘hero’ of her tale, and that Mary herself was never intended as the titular central figure (Letters nos 39 and 42), but the outline plan for the novel (now in the Brotherton Library, Leeds) gives some prominence to Mary and her love problems. The romantic resolution also links to the industrial theme in its emphasis on Christian love and forgiveness as the only viable sources of social healing, a belief of course stemming from Gaskell’s Unitarianism. Mary’s recognition of her real feelings for Jem is paralleled by Carson’s recognition that he is part of a wider world of suffering, and both are framed by Gaskell’s conviction that until men and women, masters and workers, understand and sympathize with each other there will never be resolution of strife. Her message here is subversive, too, in that it challenges the male hegemony of rationality and theory and seeks to empower the feminine (empathy, emotional understanding, nurturing), even though some modern commentators have criticized what they perceive as her compromising liberalism. More paradoxically, its sympathetic and admiring portrayals of the working-class culture of self-help and selfimprovement, while reinforcing the message of human worth, also give weight to the laissez-faire economic arguments of her opponents who believed that it was the men, not the masters, who must find the means to ameliorate conditions. Mary Barton is also important for its contribution to a particularly contemporary literary genre. The development of the so-called ‘industrial novel’ in the 1830s and 1840s is a phenomenon noted by many critics, and there are a number of antecedents to Gaskell’s work: Harriet Martineau’s ‘A Manchester Strike’ in her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832); Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1839–40) and Jessie Phillips (1843); Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1839–40) and The Wrongs of Women (1843–4); Elizabeth Stone’s William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842) and The Young Milliner (1843); and Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845). Poetry of the time also took up the theme of industrial suffering, seen in Caroline Bowles’s Tales of the Factories (1833), and Caroline Norton’s A Voice from the Factories (1836), The Dream (1840), and The Child of the Islands (1845). Other writers, like Dickens, Geraldine Jewsbury and Charles Kingsley, as well as Gaskell herself, continued this fictional preoccupation into the next decade. Two points are of particular importance here. First, it is notable that the majority of these texts are female-authored, suggesting that women writers not only felt that the topic had a special resonance for them but that, since they were politically disempowered, creative innovation had to be exploited as a platform for protest.

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 39

Second, although direct influence of the earlier texts on Mary Barton cannot be definitively posited, some connections can be suggested, and Gaskell’s work can be seen as part of a wider literary movement in which she was a conscious particpator. Details of Gaskell’s early reading are sparse, but it is possible that she read some of the texts named above both before and during the writing of Mary Barton. As well as Domestic Manners of the Americans, she may have read Michael Armstrong and Jessie Phillips, since William borrowed several of Frances Trollope’s novels from the Portico during the 1850s. Both these novels, the one concerned with the conditions of child labour in factories and the resistance of industrialists to government interference, the other treating the topic of the vulnerability of young sempstresses to male seducers, have similarities to Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Ruth, though they are more melodramatic in tone and plotting. Given her interest in contemporary women writers, it is also likely that Gaskell knew other female industrial literature of the time. Portico records of the 1850s, for instance, show that William borrowed several of Caroline Norton’s (non-industrial) novels, and Gaskell herself, who met Norton in the 1850s, may have read the latter’s poetic portrayals of industrial deprivation and the labouring poor. Stone’s William Langshawe is particularly interesting here. Despite notable parallels between this novel and Mary Barton, including the Manchester setting, the patriarchal relations between the ‘Cotton Lords’ and their employees, and the murder of the factory owner’s son, Gaskell disclaimed intimate acquaintance with Stone’s work. In a letter to Catherine Winkworth of 11 November 1848, less than three weeks after the anonymous publication of Mary Barton, she states that ‘Marianne Darbishire told me it [the novel] was ascertained to be the production of a Mrs Wheeler, a clergyman’s wife, who once upon a time was a Miss Stone, and wrote a book called “The Cotton Lord” ’ (Letters, p. 62); two days later, to Edward Chapman, with whom of course she did not have to keep up the pretence, she writes, ‘I find that everyone here has most convincing proofs that the authorship of Mary Barton should be attributed to a Mrs Wheeler, née Stone, and authoress of some book called the “Cotton Lord” ’ (Letters, p. 63). The somewhat throwaway tone (‘some book’), designed to indicate ignorance, combined with the name reversal – Wheeler was in fact Stone’s maiden name – may be a deliberate strategy of deception to cover what was actually an important influence on her own work. Indeed, Michael Wheeler argues that, on internal evidence alone, it can be proved conclusively that Gaskell had read William Langshawe and wished to hide her indebtedness.30 The

40 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

Portico Library catalogue of 1845 lists Stone’s novel among its holdings, and although borrowing records, available only from 1850, give no indication that William ever took it out, it is highly possible that he and his wife obtained it from this source. (Ironically, he did borrow a novel called The Cotton Lord in 1862, but this is most likely to have been a work by Herbert Glyn, first published that year). Mary Barton, then, is another of Gaskell’s works the sources for which are inextricably linked within the life/literature/imagination triangle.

Steps towards professionalism Mary Barton is an important milestone in Gaskell’s literary career, too, in that it initiated her professional dealings with publishers. Her earliest work, as has been noted, owed its publication to the direct encouragement and action of her friends and acquaintances: William Howitt printed her first three stories in his Journal; Travers Madge urged her to write for his Sunday School Penny Magazine; and Mary Howitt introduced her to Sartain’s Union Magazine as a source of publication. Mary Barton, however, initiated her into the world of large-scale publishers, and for the first time she had direct dealings with them. Gaskell still needed personal encouragement: she showed the manuscript to Katharine Thomson for approval, and then to William Howitt who, impressed with it, gave it to John Forster, reader for Chapman and Hall.31 When Forster recommended its publication, Howitt continued to act as Gaskell’s intermediary, negotiating an agreement with Edward Chapman for £100 for the novel. Thereafter, however, she took an increasingly active part in the subsequent business arrangements. Her sense of independence as an author is observable in her earliest dealings with Chapman. While clearly nervous about the whole undertaking (the novel might never have reached the publishers without the intervention of William and the Howitts), Gaskell betrays a note of irritation alongside her ostensibly apologetic and deferential tone in her letters questioning the delays in publication. On 21 March 1848, she writes ‘I think you led me to understand . . . I am naturally a little anxious . . . Perhaps you will favour this with an answer at your convenience (Letters, p. 54). Another letter, written a couple of weeks later, begins by disingenuously remarking that Chapman ‘probably’ never received her earlier communication, and ends by sharply requesting ‘an immediate answer’ (Letters, p. 55). By 13 April, fearing that Chapman was further going to delay publication, she was even more direct: ‘Allow me to remind you of the promise you kindly made of letting me know what

Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 41

decision you came to’ (Letters, p. 55). Moreover, although she acceded to Chapman’s various requests – that the title should be changed and a Preface be appended – this, her first experience of the possible conflict between author and publisher, made her aware of the need to stand her ground. Discomforted by Chapman’s insistence that the novel was too short for the required two-volume format, and forced against her will to insert extra pages, including the conversation between Job Legh, Mr Carson and Job Wilson in Chapter 37, she told Mrs Samuel Greg that she had ‘remonstrated over and over again’ with Chapman over the issue (Letters, p. 75). Several years later she complained to Forster – albeit in a slightly ironic tone – that Chapman had behaved ‘shabbily’ in not giving her any copies of the fifth edition (Letters, pp. 286–7). The complaints here about editorial management, and the swings in tone between concession and objection, were to become standard features of her later dealings with Dickens; Gaskell never found it easy to be her own woman in artistic terms while at the same time acceding to publishers’ demands. Gaskell’s negotiations also involved the question of payment, and here too her developing business sense is evident. By early December 1848, she had still received no payment for Mary Barton, and, perhaps urged by William, she reminded Chapman of this: ‘we are really beginning to think that you have never completed your part of the agreement respecting M.Barton. . . . I understood that it was to be paid for on publication, independently of the success, or otherwise, of the sale. Hitherto the whole affair of publication has been one of extreme annoyance to me’ (Letters, p. 64). Gaskell received her payment (the first half of the £100 due to her) two days later, on 7 December, but financial matters continued to be prominent in her relations with future publishers. Her joky and much-quoted account to Tottie Fox of how, after she had received £20 for ‘Lizzie Leigh’ in early 1850, ‘W[illia]m has composedly buttoned it up in his pocket’ (Letters, p. 113) is sometimes taken as an indication both of William’s patriarchal control over his wife and her willingness to give up her earnings to him. But in fact, quite apart from this misreading of marital relations, the incident shows the very sharp eye Gaskell kept on the financial side of her writing. By the mid-1850s, she was ready and able to be her own businesswoman, operating in a public, male-dominated sphere.

3 The 1850s: Growing Professionalism

Travel and contacts The 1850s were a period of intense activity for Gaskell, both socially and professionally. Although, with her daughters growing up, she had, notionally at least, more time for writing, the hectic life described in her letters makes it astonishing that she managed to produce as much as she did. A typical Manchester day, for example, included teaching at a nearby school, visiting a motherless family some distance away, and returning home to discuss another charity case, to say nothing of supervising household affairs and making arrangements for an endless stream of visitors. Her energy makes the reader breathless – and also shows her remarkable ability to interweave so many various strands of occupation. Furthermore, as she became increasingly successful, improved finances enabled more possibilities for travel. She spent more and more of each year away from Manchester, both in Britain and on the Continent, juggling visits to friends and relatives with business engagements and holiday trips. She was, for example, absent from home from September 1850 to January 1851, made two trips to France in the summer of 1853, and in 1858 was away for a period of more than six months. As has already been suggested, time away from Manchester was essential to her physical and mental well-being, and much of her travelling in this decade was for health reasons, as well as to give her a chance to write in peace, as the strain of trying to reconcile all the ‘warring members’ of the ‘Mes’ which she felt constituted her (Letters, p. 108) increasingly took its toll. The move to 42 (later 84) Plymouth Grove in midsummer 1850 in itself broadened Gaskell’s horizons. This was a larger house than their previous ones, and had the advantage – sometimes a disadvantage – 42

The 1850s: Growing Professionalism 43

that it could accommodate far more visitors. Albeit not so ‘desirable’ as those inhabited by their wealthier friends who could afford to live out of Manchester altogether, the area was of higher social standing than Dover or Upper Rumford Streets, in a semi-rural location, which enabled Gaskell to keep pigs and chickens and to rent a field next door for a cow. At the same time, it was on a carriage route into the city, permitting the residents, most of whom were of the professional or mercantile classes, easy access to their work places. The increased number of rooms allowed William to have his own study; Gaskell was not so fortunate, and anyway did not wish to cut herself off from household and family, but she had her own writing table and bookcase in the dining-room at which she could work. The larger house, too, not only became a centre for much of the Gaskells’ social and parish activities, but also welcomed a host of literary visitors, including Charlotte Brontë, the Carlyles, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mme Mohl, Ruskin and Dickens. In this decade, indeed, Manchester, according to Monkton Milnes, was ‘a possible place of residence for people of literary tastes’1 and the Gaskells increasingly found themselves at the heart of this cultural milieu. During these years, Gaskell’s social circle widened considerably. Her Unitarian democratic spirit ensured an egalitarianism which made her as easy with her servants as with dignitaries or the socially elite, but her awareness of class difference may have increased as she became acquainted with a greater range of people. Mrs Chadwick quotes her as saying, in reference to her social preferences, ‘I call mine a very comprehensive taste. I like all people whose occupations have to do with the land, and I like soldiers and sailors and the three learned professions’.2 But one might add to this list the upper gentry or aristocracy, since it is clear that Gaskell also enjoyed the refinement and good living associated with greater wealth and standing. Her relationship with her grand friend from Capesthorne, Mrs Davenport, who married Lord Hatherton in 1852, is a case in point. As has been indicated, her first visits to Capesthorne began in the 1830s, and continued throughout the next two decades. Her letters indicate pleasure at the company she met there (reference to a large house party in October 1851 notes that the guests include a Bishop, a Bishop’s widow, and a Lady). In April 1851, Gaskell invited Mrs Davenport to stay at Plymouth Grove, and wrote gleefully to Marianne, ‘don’t you think I’m bold to ask her?’ (Letters, p. 833). In what was perhaps an attempt to show her guest how the other half lived, Gaskell took her to the local schools at Swinton, to the Deaf and Dumb asylum, and to the Schwabes’ print works. The visit was clearly a great

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success (Mrs Davenport charmed everyone by her attention and concern for the children), but for Gaskell she seems to have continued as a standard of social superiority rather than as a philanthropic mentor. Mrs Davenport’s pronouncement that ‘It is only washerwomen who call Shifts “chemises” now’ (Letters, p. 181) is used to warn Marianne against vulgarity, and Meta is reminded that when she writes to the newly married Lady Hatherton (who, with her husband, is ‘going to spend the Easter holidays with the D. & Duchess of Sutherland!’ (Letters, p. 849)), she must remember to put ‘The Lord Hatherton’s’ in the address. Lady Hatherton was very kind to Meta and Marianne, on several occasions having them to stay with her, and clearly Gaskell felt that the advantages of such visits would outweigh any danger of the girls becoming snobs. Gaskell’s most notable encounter with the aristocracy occurred on her almost farcical visit to Chatsworth in the autumn of 1857, when, having assumed that she and Meta were merely going to look round the house, they found that they had been invited to dinner and to stay overnight. Awed and embarrassed as she was, Gaskell could yet find material for ironic amusement at the occasion, as she wrote to Marianne: ‘I sate next the Duke [of Devonshire] all the time of the Concert, as he can hear talking whenever music is going on, so he talked pretty incessantly’ (Letters, p. 472).3 It is also important to note that although Gaskell had increasing contact with the upper classes during this decade, her own growth in self-confidence which this may have encouraged co-existed with a heightened awareness of the inequities and anomalies of a hierarchical social system. The potential divisiveness of outmoded social distinctions is addressed in several of her narratives: the restraints of anachronistic gentility in Cranford; the rigidity of old aristocratic values in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ and My Lady Ludlow; and, in what is perhaps her fullest study of the interaction between classes, the dangers of social exclusiveness in both gentry and aristocracy in Wives and Daughters. The range and variety of Gaskell’s movements in these years, from Wales to Scotland, from Wiltshire to Northumberland, is astonishing, and each trip had some impact on her writing. But certain locations were particularly important in terms of her literary productiveness. Of most long-standing significance is Knutsford. Almost all her writing owes something to the town and its neighbourhood, in terms of social observation or environmental setting, but certain texts, from her letters of 1838 to Mary Howitt describing Cheshire customs and scenery, to her last fiction, Wives and Daughters, are clearly more directly dependent on her youthful recollections of the place. Gaskell continued to visit her old

The 1850s: Growing Professionalism 45

home throughout her married life, but the visit she made in October 1851 is perhaps particularly significant for its literary repercussions. On this visit, she picked up various threads, including staying at Heathfield, Aunt Lumb’s old house, and at Uncle Holland’s Sandlebridge, and catching up with old friends; on her return to Manchester, she told Annie Shaen, ‘I am so much better for Knutsford – partly air, partly quiet and partly being by myself a good piece of every day’ (Letters, p. 168). This time on her own may have allowed for nostalgic reminiscence and the recognition of its potential as fictional material, for in December 1851 she offered Dickens a piece entitled ‘Our Society at Cranford’ for Household Words. Although it was originally intended to stand on its own, it became the first part of a series which ran until May 1853, and was subsequently published in June 1853 by Chapman and Hall as a single volume called Cranford. Two earlier texts, ‘The Last Generation in England’ (Sartain’s Union Magazine, July 1849) and Mr Harrison’s Confessions (The Ladies’ Companion, February–April 1851) also draw substantially on Knutsford memories, but ‘Our Society’ introduces a new note into Gaskell’s imaginative recreation of her early years. The narrative voice of ‘The Last Generation’ is dry, almost clinical; the speaker introduces the old ladies of the town as ‘living hoards of family tradition and old custom’,4 and, apart from the very occasional slippage into ‘we’, writes in the third-person and past tense about people who are clearly Other. Mr Harrison’s Confessions is even more noticeably characterized by a dispassionate, often ironic approach, which tends to set up a distance between narrator and reader. The eponymous narrator is incontrovertibly male, and the story’s framing device, so common in much of Gaskell’s shorter fiction (here, Mr Harrison tells the story of his early experiences in Duncombe to his brother, Charles) permits an analytical, if not unsympathetic, retrospection. He tells Charles, for instance, that ‘the people here have a queer fashion of colouring the whitewash of some of the houses with a sort of pink blotting-paper tinge’,5 and creates much social comedy with his accounts of the behavioural absurdities of the Duncombe ladies, especially when it seems that he has engaged himself to three of them simultaneously. This essentially comic approach, undermined to some extent by the narrator’s growing recognition of the worth of provincial society as well as of its restrictiveness, does of course foreground the limitations of (young) masculine understanding of the situation of poor, single women; and it is particularly significant that the most moving scene in the novella, the death from croup of little Walter Hutton (Chapter 7), is the one place where a

46 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

distinctively female voice enters the text, clearly articulating Gaskell’s own ongoing painful memories of Willie’s death. The narrative voice of Cranford is both gentler and more concerned with feeling, and participates in the process of familiarization by which the implied (London) readers are made to understand Cranford. Renewing her acquaintance with Knutsford at this time probably refocused Gaskell’s memories and encouraged imaginative recall, even as she was currently writing Ruth. Importantly, too, though – as Gaskell told Ruskin – ‘The beginning of “Cranford” was one paper in “Household Words”; and I never meant to write more’ (Letters, p. 748), once started she found herself impelled to continue; she produced another seven instalments, plus the much later ‘In the Cage at Cranford’ (All the Year Round, November 1863). Knutsford as an artistic inspiration, was, then, an intrinsic element in Gaskell’s literary creativity, although in some ways this imaginative preoccupation has done her a disservice, encouraging type-casting of her as the recorder of quaint provincial life. Further afield, Silverdale and the Lake District, already noted as favourite haunts, remained the locations for family holidays throughout the 1850s. In July 1851, for example, worn out with visitors and her trip to the Great Exhibition, Gaskell arranged a holiday at Holborn Hill, near Millom in Cumberland, but the ugliness of the place itself made ‘the desire to be among the purple Lake Hills that we saw at a distance . . . too strong to be resisted’ (Further Letters, p. 57) and she retreated to the wellknown and well-loved Skelwith. She returned to the Lakes in the October of the following year, again exhausted with visitors and the Manchester social round, and stayed with her friends, the Davys, at Lesketh How, near Ambleside, then with Mrs Davy’s mother, Mrs Fletcher, at Lancrigg, Grasmere. Here she renewed acquaintance with the Arnolds, Mrs Wordsworth, and the Prestons at Mill Brow. She returned to the area again in July 1855 (when she gathered more information from Harriet Martineau for her Life of Charlotte Brontë), and Skelwith provided further retreat space for her in July 1857, when she was trying to complete the required revisions of the biography. As has been noted, Gaskell’s short piece, ‘Martha Preston’, published in Sartain’s Union Magazine in February 1851, draws on Lakeland material which she later re-worked several times. The narrator claims that it is a tale told her by a local resident, and frequently enters the text to establish its regional and historical authenticity. The story is set just west of Loughrigg Fell, about two miles north of Mill Brow (the topographical detail provided makes precise orientation possible), and although its

The 1850s: Growing Professionalism 47

eponymous heroine is obviously not the Skelwith famer’s wife, it would seem most likely that Gaskell first heard it from the real Mrs Preston.6 When Gaskell rewrote it for Household Words (6–20 October 1855), she re-titled it ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, changed the name of the heroine to Susan Dixon (she also changed the other characters’ names), and moved the location about three miles further south, to Oxenfell, between Skelwith and Coniston, the very precise locational details again indicating direct knowledge. If, however, as Uglow (p. 235) suggests, this was an attempt to avoid specific identification, it is still curious that Gaskell should initially have implied such an obvious association between the real and fictional women. Perhaps she thought that since the piece was to appear in America, the close connection did not matter. It is unlikely that Mrs Preston herself would have read the piece and been offended by it, but, even more curiously, when Gaskell finally revised the story in 1859, placing it as one of the interconnected stories in Round the Sofa, she re-established the linkage. Here, although the 1855 setting remains unchanged, Mrs Preston, described as the wife of a Westmoreland ‘statesman’ or squire, appears as one of the group of people who gather round Mrs Dawson’s sofa on Monday evenings; she, perhaps like the real Mrs Preston, narrates ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’ after another guest, Miss Duncan, has told ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’. In an extraordinary interplay of real and fictitious, the three versions illustrate not only the hold which the story had on Gaskell’s imagination, but also the way in which she used and reused her inspirational sources, adapting them to the appropriate context. Scenery and legends from the Silverdale area, as with the Lakes, enter into Gaskell’s work, especially in the earlier part of the decade. The marvellously evocative short descriptive piece, ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ (Household Words, 22 January 1853), with its autobiographic form and its re-creation of a hot July day in the Lakeland hills during the shearing festivities, is far too vivid to be mere invention.7 Gaskell also told William Whewell that ‘I wrote the Moorland Cottage [1850] at Silverdale, and I tried to convey the impressions made upon me by that wild moorland Scenery, with the Lake, and the Yorkshire hills girding it round’ (Further Letters, p. 53). Interspersed with these longer visits were trips to friends and relatives all over the country. Among the most significant of these was her October 1854 visit to Lea Hurst, Matlock, the home of the Nightingales, with whom she probably became acquainted through mutual connections such as her friends Ellen Tollett and Mme Mohl. Gaskell had gone to Lea Hurst, the Nightingale’s summer home, an idyllic residence

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surrounded by the Derbyshire hills, to get on with writing North and South, but a welcome interruption was provided by her meeting and subsequent conversations with Florence Nightingale. Nightingale’s extraordinary dedication and unworldliness impressed Gaskell greatly, and she wrote with enthusiasm to her correspondents of the younger woman’s utter selflessness and single-mindedness. Indeed, in some ways Nightingale could have provided a model for those of Gaskell’s heroines, such as Margaret Hale herself, or Miss Galindo in My Lady Ludlow (1858), who try to live by their own energies and enthusiasms. But ultimately, Gaskell found that Nightingale’s complete self-sufficiency and ‘want of love for individuals’ as opposed to humanity at large (Letters, pp. 320–21) were antipathetic to her own need for emotional commitment; and, as Uglow (p. 365) points out, the primacy of personal relationships over ideas and obsessions is something that many of her fictional characters have to learn. Another important trip in terms of her work was that to Glasgow and its environs in September 1855, partly to enable William to attend the British Association meeting. On this occasion, at her half-sister’s at Dunoon, Gaskell met William Scoresby, former vicar of Bradford. Not only did he give her information about the Brontës, but she used his substantial work on the whaling industry when, several years later, she was writing Sylvia’s Lovers. Scotland itself provided her with rather more relaxed experience in June 1859, when, anxious to show her girls something more of the country, she took them to Auchencairn on the Solway Firth. Though she exaggerated the remoteness of the area, telling both George Smith and Richard Monkton Milnes, for example, that they had to send for potatoes to Castle Douglas, nine miles away (Letters, p. 563; Further Letters, p. 199), the peace, seclusion and outdoor life were clearly most restful to her wearied spirits. Here, too, she was near a family connection, the Maxwells of Orchardston, whom she may have visited.8 Though none of this holiday infiltrated into her writing (she actually found it very hard to get down to literary activity here), she told Charles Eliot Norton that ‘I once thought of writing a paper for the Atlantic about our dear Scotch village (in Kirkudbrightshire)’ (Letters, p. 581). Later that year, however, her short stay in Whitby, in November 1859, was an escape which she did put to good literary advantage, gathering local material for Sylvia’s Lovers from both written and verbal sources. Gaskell’s trips to London, which occurred with increasing frequency during the 1850s and 1860s, are perhaps the most obviously significant element in her professional career. London of course was not wholly unfamiliar to her, from her adolescent visits to her father in Chelsea, but

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these were probably little associated with outings or wide-scale sightseeing. In December 1847, she and William visited the Howitts at Clapton and the Shaens at Crix, but there is no evidence that they spent any extended time in the city itself. Gaskell’s first major excursion to the capital occurred in April–May 1849, and since it had repercussions which resonated throughout the 1850s and beyond, it can usefully be considered in the context of this decade. In 1849, having written Mary Barton and received considerable critical attention because of it, Gaskell was already something of a celebrity, and despite her avowal that she hardly knew what ‘being “lionized” meant’, she was quite aware that her wish to see people ‘as well as things’ (Letters, p. 71) would undoubtedly have some personal impact. London, unlike Knutsford, Silverdale and the Lake District, was not so much a retreat as a stimulant, associated with greatly increased social and cultural activity, and, most importantly, with entry into the main literary circles of the day. This visit was important for a number of reasons. Gaskell renewed family connections with the Wedgwoods and Darwins, themselves connected with wellknown figures in and around London and thus able to introduce her to a new set of people. She also made a new and lasting friendship with Eliza (‘Tottie’) Fox, the daughter of William Johnson Fox, a well-known London Unitarian preacher and journalist who included Charles Dickens among his large circle of acquaintances. Tottie, the product of an artistic, Bohemian household, was herself a successful portrait painter, and must have given Gaskell insight into the possibilities of professional life for women (though, over ten years younger and unmarried, she had as yet no family entanglements). Tottie was also a committed feminist: she was friendly with women such as Barbara Bodichon (Leigh Smith) and Bessie Parkes, both educational reformers and radical journalists, and taught at the former’s experimental school together with Octavia Hill. Although Gaskell herself was cautious about women’s protest movements, only reluctantly agreeing to sign Bodichon’s petition for a Married Women’s Property Act in 1857, Tottie’s radicalism introduced her to a more vibrant scene of female activism than she had yet encountered. Bodichon and Parkes, indeed, were to become her friends as well. This London visit was memorable, too, for the cultural enrichment it provided. From their lodgings in Panton Square (subsequently changed for ones in Woburn Square), Gaskell and her cousin, Annie Holland, who was accompanying her, went to the Academy, heard lectures at the Athenaeum, attended the opera and Sadler’s Wells, saw the picture gallery at Stafford House, and went to hear eminent preachers like

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Frederick Maurice. More importantly, Gaskell made new literary connections and, from being the unknown ‘Author of Mary Barton’, started her ascent into the privileged circle of eminent and admired authors. Apart from renewing her acquaintance with the Howitts at this time, she met the feminist, author and art critic Anna Jameson; the Carlyles (on her first visit to Chelsea, Carlyle refused to come in from the garden to speak to her, but he made up for it on a later visit); and John Forster, the Chapman and Hall reader who had recommended Mary Barton to them. Forster knew most of the London literati, including Dickens; he took Gaskell round the city, introduced her to celebrities such as Samuel Rogers, the Macreadys, and Dickens himself, and dined her in his lodgings in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At Monkton Milnes’s, too, she met various well-known historians, scientists and theologians. The two highlights of Gaskell’s visit were probably her breakfast at Rogers’s, which was also attended by Forster, Catherine Dickens and Mrs Macready; and the dinner which Dickens gave on 12 May to celebrate the opening issue of David Copperfield. Guests at the latter included Rogers, Forster, Douglas Jerrold (editor of Punch), the Carlyles and Thackeray, further extending Gaskell’s introduction to eminent figures. On all of these occasions, the most exciting element was the interesting discussion. A great conversationalist herself, she delighted in listening to talk of all kinds, from the dialect idioms of Lancashire people to the most sophisticated exchanges between professionals, and her London experiences clearly provided a wealth of verbal enjoyment. Describing one particularly memorable evening, she wrote to Tottie: I am intoxicated with sparkling conversation heard tonight at Mrs Proctor’s. I keep smiling to myself and trying to remember things – all to no purpose, – the foam has faded from the Champagne. (Letters, p. 77) All these ‘treasures of our London campaign’ (Letters, p. 81) were to have considerable impact on Gaskell’s subsequent career. Dickens and Forster, of course, were to play a notable part in her literary production and publication, while, more generally, she was made aware of the kind of intellectual and cultural context in which her own writings could feature. Over the next decade, she went to London almost every year, often more than once, either on business or social visits, or as a starting point for trips to the Continent. In November 1850, for example, she was in the city looking for a suitable school for Marianne, and her social activities included dinner at the Dickens’s with the Carlyles and

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Catherine Crowe, the authoress of ghost stories, some of whose fiction Gaskell had read. In June 1851 she was there for the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace; in June 1854 she enjoyed another round of London socializing; in April 1856 she took Meta, Flossy and Julia for a sightseeing trip to the capital; and in June 1859 she was there again, this time meeting the Pre-Raphaelite painters Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. London was clearly a cultural Mecca for her: on several occasions, she expresses her envy of Tottie for having access to such a wealth of grand music and art, the kind of calming beauty which can ‘take the fretting pain out of one’s heart’ (Letters, p. 109). But the city was associated with stress and professional difficulties, as well as with mental and spiritual stimulation. Uglow (p. 226) suggests that Gaskell ‘had been dazzled . . . but not blinded’ by her 1849 visit to London, and she was certainly able subsequently to maintain a critical distance towards the great figures and occasions she encountered there. It is also curious that London hardly enters into her fiction at all, except as an incidental setting (the latter part of ‘The Manchester Marriage’, or the sections of North and South which provide contrast to the industrial life of MiltonNorthern) or as a place visited by characters like John Barton or Roger Hamley. Ultimately, perhaps, it represented experience which was imaginatively intransigent; symbolically it was an alluring ‘Babylon’ (Letters, p. 110), but it was too vast and varied, as well as finally too alien, to make up the stuff of fiction as it did for Dickens or Thackeray. Foreign experiences During this decade, Gaskell’s visits abroad also increased considerably, adding a further enriching dimension to her social and professional life. These visits divide into three groups: those to France, chiefly Paris; her extended trip to Italy in 1857, repeated in 1863; and a further visit to Heidelberg. In addition was her visit to Brussels in spring 1856, to research material for her biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her first trip to Paris was in May 1853 and was made, characteristically, in part to get away from the hostile criticisms of her latest novel, Ruth, which had upset her a great deal. She had never been there before, and, as she wrote to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth on 10 April, planned to enjoy the experience in the company of William and Marianne. The visit started a pattern which was to continue for the rest of her life: she returned to Paris in 1854, 1855, 1857 (twice, to and from Italy), 1858, 1862, 1863 and 1865. On this pioneering visit, apart from the sight-seeing which undoubtedly formed a large part of the itinerary, probably the most important feature was Gaskell’s introduction to French cultural life through Mary Clarke

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Mohl (‘Clarkey’), who was able to show her round and ‘lionise’ her for a fortnight because the Gaskells’s hostess, Julie Schwabe, was laid up with measles.9 Mme Mohl, of Irish/Scottish parentage, was born in Britain in 1793, but lived in France for most of her life after she and her mother moved there in 1801. Vivacious, unconventional and spontaneous, as well as irritable and hasty-tempered, she offered a model of triumphant independent womanhood. In Paris the Clarkes became the tenants of the well-known hostess, Mme de Récamier, and Mary started to attend her salon, becoming a favourite of Chateaubriand. In 1838, they moved to the rue du Bac, and Mary began to hold a salon of her own, including among her friends writers and scholars such as Stendhal, Merimée, Victor Hugo, de Toqueville, Renan, Guizot and Turgenev. She also befriended musicians and artists like Ary Scheffer. Her romantic life was both passionate and disengaged: for years she had been wildly in love with the medieval scholar, Claude Fauriel, but, distressed by his lack of reciprocity and the discovery that he had a long-standing mistress, she turned her attentions to Julius Mohl, a German Orientalist whom she had known for some time. She married Mohl in 1847, a liaison which seems to have been one of easy companionship rather than of sexual fulfilment, she continuing to hold her receptions while he read his books. Her connections with England as well as France – her English friends and visitors included Monkton Milnes, the Nightingales and their niece Hilary Bonham Carter, Arthur Stanley, Thackeray and his daughters, and Thomas Trollope – ensured that she was in touch with current ideas in both countries. An impressive conversationalist, she was also something of a scholar herself: in 1862, she published Mme de Récamier: with a sketch of the history of society in France, an account of the notable Frenchwoman in the seventeenth century who illustrated the superior position of women in France. It seems very likely that Gaskell knew Mary Mohl before the first visit to Paris in 1853, since they had common friends in the Salis Schwabes, and there were also links with Edinburgh and Gaskell’s old friend, Mrs Fletcher. But this and subsequent visits cemented the friendship between the two women, a relationship which Gaskell found particularly attractive perhaps because of both likeness (she too loved conversation and the verbal dissemination of ideas, as well as social gatherings), and unlikeness (in some ways, Mme Mohl’s childlessness and freespiritedness which permitted her so much more space than Gaskell enjoyed must have seemed highly enviable). The older woman became Gaskell’s champion, reading her works and helping to get them translat-

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ed into French. She also sought Gaskell’s help and advice about her book on Récamier, after her article on Mme Lénorment’s Souvenirs et Correspondance de Madame Récamier had been published in the Edinburgh Review in January 1860 (see Letters, p. 599). Importantly, too, she provided the inspiration for some of Gaskell’s writing. The unnamed Parisian friend who tells the narrator about the concluding marriages in ‘My French Master’, the tale which Gaskell published in Household Words in December 1853, is clearly based on Mohl, while the ‘French lady’ in ‘Company Manners’ who likes to emulate Mme Récamier in her entertaining is another Mohl recreation. It has also been suggested that there is something of her in Cynthia Gibson in Wives and Daughters.10 Apart from an undocumented trip to Normandy in July 1853,11 Gaskell’s next visit to France was the following year, to Paris in January/February 1854. As before, she stayed with the Schwabes, and met more French notables, including the writer Émile Souvestre. She also met the woman painter Rosa Bonheur, another model of female professional achievement prepared to defy convention: Gaskell writes admiringly to John Forster of how, in order to get access to the animals for one of her famous horse pictures, the young artist ‘dressed herself as a young man, & went & painted it in the greatest livery stables in Paris’ (Letters, p. 290). Spring 1855 saw Gaskell in Paris again, this time with Meta.12 They stayed with the Mohls, and enjoyed an exhausting round of social activities, among which were ‘a magnificent party’, a ‘very political’ evening at Amédée Thierry’s, ‘such a good dinner’ at the Scheffers’, a concert, a soirée, sight-seeing, a theatre trip, a dance given in honour of Meta, and a visit to Scheffer’s studio to see his pictures (Letters, pp. 322–4). Gaskell also did business with Hachette, visited the Maison des Diaconesses, and saw Mme de Stael’s granddaughter. As with her previous French visits, cultural enrichment (as well as more selfindulgent pleasures) went hand in hand with literary stimulation: seven of Gaskell’s subsequent compositions owed something to her experiences in the country. Her last one, Wives and Daughters, was partly written in Paris, while she was staying with the Mohls in March 1865. The influence of France on Gaskell’s writing in this decade is evident mainly in setting and literary or autobiographical reference, and in some cases relates to specific experiences. In 1853, after her earlier sojourns in Paris and Normandy, she produced four pieces with French connections for Dickens’s Household Words: ‘Bran’, 22 October; ‘Traits and Stories of the Huguenots’, 10 December; ‘My French Master’, 17 and 24 December; and ‘The Scholar’s Story’, Extra Christmas number. ‘Bran’ and ‘The Scholar’s Story’ are probably joint productions with William.

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Both are poetic renderings, in octosyllabic couplets, of Breton ballads which they may have heard or read about while they were in, or en route to Normandy, and each has the kind of romantic legendary quality which particularly appealed to Gaskell: ‘Bran’ is about a mother who arrives in France too late to prevent the death in despair of her imprisoned son whom she has come to ransom; ‘The Scholar’s Story’ (whose brief prose introduction was probably written by Gaskell) concerns a priest’s deceit towards his knight-cousin, causing the latter to kill his lady, believing that she has played him false. They were most likely quickly produced pieces, offered as fillers for Dickens’ periodical. ‘Traits and Stories of the Huguenots’ (which was collected with the My Lady Ludlow stories in 1855) is an example of the generic hybridity which characterizes many of Gaskell’s journal productions. Ostensibly a factual piece, detailing the historical background and traditions pertaining to the Huguenots in Europe and the New World, it features a narrator who personally introduces her material (‘some of the traditions which I have heard and collected’)13 and who uses devices more commonly associated with fiction. Implementing the kind of double or multiple narration common to many of Gaskell’s stories, it notes that some of the information has been given to the narrator by a friend, ‘a descendant from some of the Huguenots who succeeded in emigrating to England’.14 It also plays with the reader by not revealing until the end that this friend, the orphan girl brought up by two French-speaking maiden aunts, is actually descended from the Norman farmer mentioned in the first tale. These little tales, too, with their dramatic and emotional specificity, read more like fictional vignettes than factual episodes, although the impetus for the essay was probably Gaskell’s trip to Normandy. ‘My French Master’, published in Household Words on 17 and 24 December 1853, also has autobiographical resonances. It is a gentle tale about a French aristocratic emigré who, when his hopes of returning to his ancestral home in Normandy after the Bourbon Restoration are dashed, settles back in England, marrying the local farmer’s daughter and producing two daughters, who together effect a family restoration by marrying, respectively, the owner of the Normandy estate and his friend. Some of the material draws on Gaskell’s Knutsford experiences: the narrator’s happy rural childhood, her early reading of eighteenthcentury classics, the beginnings of her acquaintance with the French language.15 Some critics have suggested, too, that the eponymous central character, M de Chalabre, is based on the Knutsford dancing master, M Rogier, but this has been disputed.16 The idea of a forfeited Normandy

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estate may have been suggested to her by some of the châteaux she saw on her holiday (in the story there is mention of a little hand-drawn picture of the Château Chalabre). The tale also introduces a second narrator who, many years on, asks the teller to her house in Paris to meet one of the Chalabre daughters and launches into a long account of her. This narrator, an ‘English friend of mine . . . English by birth, but married to a German professor, and very French in manners and ways’,17 is clearly based on Mme Mohl, although she has a very slight part in the whole. As with her other French influenced stories, it is not so much the material itself as what Gaskell does with it that is significant. ‘My French Master’, unlike ‘Traits and Stories of the Huguenots’ and the later ‘An Accursed Race’ (1855), is cast as fiction, but its use of a narrator who is both extradiegetic and intradiegetic (at the end, she appears in the company of M de Chalabre as if observed by someone else), and its transmission of information through multiple viewpoints, is characteristic of her sophisticated treatment of apparently simple subjects. The two pieces which followed immediately on from Gaskell’s Paris visit of early 1854 again show a blending of individual recall of a particular place or subject with more scholarly or historical interest. ‘Modern Greek Songs’ (Household Words, 25 February 1854) is a review of Claude Fauriel’s Chants Populaire de la Grèce Moderne (1824–5), which Gaskell probably read via Mme Mohl, Fauriel’s ardent admirer. Even within this specific topic, Gaskell includes mention of her own experiences in England and local customs she has encountered. ‘Company Manners’ (Household Words, 20 May 1854) results from Gaskell’s reading of a series of articles on Mme de Sablé, the well-known sixteenth-century salonnière, in Revue des Deux Mondes, by Victor Cousin, whom she probably came across in Paris at this time (though on a visit a year later she mentions that she missed a dinner party arranged in order for her to meet him).18 Starting as a consideration of Cousin’s biographical studies of Sablé and other notable French salonnières, Gaskell’s piece goes on to ‘lay before the patient public’ the ‘thoughts and fancies’19 which his writing has suggested, and from there moves on to consider what makes the art of ‘Sableing’, how French social gatherings differ from the often ‘ineffably dull’ (p. 219) English ones, what constitutes good conversation and good entertaining, and how ‘the art of telling a story is born with some people, and these have it to perfection’ (p. 234). Once again, the antiquarian interest is enlivened, even subsumed, by the vitality of personal observation, effected by the interpolation of the narrator as a speaking voice in the account. The original French material, itself coloured by Gaskell’s own acquaintance with society in Paris, probably

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most lively at Mme Mohl’s, stimulates thoughts about the contrasts between French and English lifestyles, and even ways of writing: whereas Cousin ends his memoir with a burst of praise for Sablé and her salons, ‘we matter-of-fact English people are apt to put in praise of the morals and religion of the person whose life we have been writing’ (p. 218), a point which Gaskell had to consider when she herself became a biographer, three years later. National comparisons also lead to observations about particular British customs, and to recall of some of Gaskell’s most enjoyable experiences: as a young woman in rural Wales, and at a memorable storytelling session in the darkened school-room of an old rambling house. Fancy and fact are blended as Gaskell ‘imagines’ what Sablé might have done and reconstitutes her own experience in order to frame her meditations. The whole is polished and urbane, without losing the characteristic lightness of touch. Considerably less light-hearted, though still demonstrating Gaskell’s curiosity about the past and foreign customs, is ‘An Accursed Race’ (Household Words, 25 August 1855), an exploration of the facts and stories relating to the despised Cagots, many of whom lived in Brittany, and about whom Gaskell learnt from Émile Souvestre. Throughout, she maintains a slightly ironic tone towards the absurd ‘proofs’ used to confirm the vileness of the Cagots, reinforcing her concluding call for tolerance towards others, and articulating a moral message which underpins almost all her writing. France, and especially Paris, provided Gaskell with a constant source of relief and enjoyment, but the most memorable of her foreign trips was her visit to Italy in 1857. By the end of December 1856, exhausted by her work on her Life of Charlotte Brontë, she was desperate to get away. She told George Smith that she was planning to ‘go on the Continent’ for three months or so (Letters, p. 431), and in early January 1857 wrote to her friends the Storys in Rome to say that ‘I want just, if I can, to leave England on the day of publication of my book’ (Letters, p. 434) which she assumed would be about mid-February. Another letter to an unknown correspondent in early February, asking for information about how to prepare for the Italian trip (‘we are in most blissful ignorance of everything, and should be grateful for the smallest facts’ (Letters, p. 441)) confirms her intentions. Finally, after uncertainty and anxiety about the Life, she wrote to Emelyn Story on 9 February, ‘We are truly coming to Rome!!! . . . And are we really coming – and shall we truly see Rome? I don’t believe it. It is a dream! I shall never believe it, and shall have to keep pinching myself!’ (Letters, p. 445). As this letter suggests, Rome was a dream-wish of many years’ standing. Scattered among the numerous

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travel books and foreign histories of William’s Portico Library borrowings from 1850 onwards, there are many relating to Italy and Italian matters. In 1850, he borrowed George Head’s A Tour of Many Days in Rome (1849); in 1852, L. C. Farini’s The Roman State 1815–1850 (1850); in 1853, Edmund Spencer’s A Tour of Enquiry through France and Italy (1853). Gaskell herself probably read these, and as the trip became more and more a reality, the Italian borrowings increased. In 1856, William borrowed William Gell’s The Topography of Rome and its Vicinity (1834, new edition 1846), Thomas Arnold’s History of Rome (1838–43), and Lady Morgan’s Italy (1821); he also took out Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854) by ‘Grace Greenwood’, the pseudonym of Sarah Jane Clarke who was a friend of Charlotte Cushman in Rome.20 In early 1857, just before Gaskell left, William signed out a novel about the events of 1848–9, J. R. Beste’s Modern Society in Rome (1856), Henry Liddell’s A History of Rome from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Empire (1855), and James Spencer Northcote’s The Roman Catacombs (1856). While she was there, too, Gaskell read Edmond About’s recent novel Tolla (1856), perhaps, as Henry James did, as a guide book to the city,21 an instance of the way that she, like so many travellers, then as now, blurred generic distinctions between fiction and travel literature. She also confessedly ‘read’ Italy through Ruskin, particularly Modern Painters, as well as informing herself by more conventional means, such as the autographed Italian plan of Rome in 1843, listed in the 1914 sales catalogue of 84 Plymouth Grove.22 Gaskell’s assertion of her ‘blissful ignorance’ is, then, not wholly honest, except in the most mundane and mechanical sense, but it is probably true that the idea of Rome seemed particularly attractive at this time because both her friend Emily Shaen and the Storys were currently in residence there. Gaskell had been introduced to the Wetmore Storys in Paris by Mme Mohl, and had immediately struck up a friendship based on shared love of good company and entertaining, and the fun of storytelling (see Letters, p. 416). The Storys settled in Rome in 1856, and were an obvious focal point; Gaskell, Marianne and Meta stayed with them at their house, the Casa Cabrale, in the Via Sant’ Isidoro (Catherine Winkworth, who accompanied the Gaskells, stayed with her sister, Emily Shaen). The whole visit more than lived up to Gaskell’s expectations. As Jane Whitehill puts it: Italy, and Rome as the centre of Italy, contrasted infinitely with everything that she had left behind. Here in Rome, instead of Manchester’s smoky black, was a flood of glorious light and colour;

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here was the grace and zest of the South, a temper of people to bewilder and captivate the Northerner perpetually.23 Gaskell was fêted and admired here (for once she seems to have enjoyed being ‘lionised’) and met a variety of interesting people, including the young sculptress, Harriet Hosmer, whose social iconoclasm rivalled that of Rosa Bonheur. Possibly the most important element in the enjoyment was Gaskell’s renewed acquaintance with Charles Eliot Norton, the young American whom she had first met at Barry Cornwall’s in London in June 1850, and with whom she had subsequently corresponded about her books. His friendship, as he escorted them round Rome and introduced them to all its cultural treasures, came to symbolize for her the freedom, fun and romance of that time, a time in which a younger, more carefree and more self-indulgent self could come into play. It was an entirely different experience from any of her British holidays, when, although she could enjoy friendship and some relaxation, she was never wholly free from anxieties, even guilt, about her writing and other commitments. Norton acted as their art-guide, and at the conclusion of their visit travelled with them on their month-long journey home, via Florence (where they called on Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Venice (where they relished canal travel), Verona, Milan, Como, Bellagio, Arona, Genoa, Nice and Paris. The other Italian cities, too, increased Gaskell’s sense of dream-fulfilment, an unbelievably rich but transient experience. Such pleasure could not last: her return to England in May coincided with the ‘hornet’s nest’, or as James puts it the ‘crop of dragon’s teeth’24 consequent on the publication of the Life of Charlotte Brontë, the exhausting stream of visitors who came to see the Manchester Art Exhibition, and, in June, the announcement of Meta’s engagement to Captain Charles Hill, a widower in the Madras Engineers who was planning soon to return to India. Perhaps because of all this, it was several months before she was able to meditate on what the trip had meant to her. When she did, as her letters to Norton and the Storys in September show, it had become something to remember wistfully and nostalgically as a uniquely golden experience: ‘Italy & everything seems like a dream’ (Letters, p. 475); ‘It was in those charming Roman days that my life . . . culminated. I shall never be so happy again. I don’t think I was ever so happy before’ (Letters, p. 477). In May 1858, her recall stimulated by one of his letters, Gaskell tells Norton how much she wants to write to him

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‘of the old Roman days’ (Letters, p. 503); and two years later still, she writes to the Storys with poetic yearning: I think Rome grows almost more vivid in recollection as the time recedes. Only the other night I dreamed of a breakfast – not a past breakfast, but some mysterious breakfast which neither had been nor, alas! would be – in the Via Sant’ Isidoro dining-room, with the amber sunlight streaming on the gold-grey Roman roofs and the Sabine hills on one side and the Vatican on the other. I sometimes think that I would almost rather never have been there than have this ache of yearning for the great witch who sits there with you upon the seven hills. (Letters, p. 642) Gaskell must have hoped that she would return at some time. Back in Manchester, she and William continued to borrow and read books about Italy over the next few years: Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art (1848); Samuel Rogers’ long poem, Italy (1830); Italy: Remarks Made in Several Visits from the Year 1816 to 1854 (1859) by John Cam Hobhouse (Baron Broughton); T. A. Trollope’s A Decade of Italian Women (1859); Mrs Gretton’s travel book, The Englishwoman in Italy (1860); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Transformation (1860); Margaret Roberts’ novel, Mademoiselle Mori (1860), another fiction about Rome, which Gaskell probably read on Norton’s recommendation;25 M. Vicary’s Notes of a Residence in Rome in 1846 (1847); and other histories and discussions of Roman politics. At Story’s request, she also tried to get George Smith to accept the former’s Roba di Roma papers for the new Cornhill Magazine, which started in January 1860; though she was unsuccessful in this, Story did follow-up Smith’s ‘kind proposal’ (Letters, p. 586) and gathered them into a book, which Gaskell read in 1863.26 Both stimulating recall and offering new material, this literary journeying culminated in Gaskell’s second trip to Italy, this time with Meta, Julia and Florence, in May 1863. This trip covered some of the ground of the previous visit, but, as Uglow suggests, Gaskell ‘could not quite recapture the thrill of her first Italian visit’ (p. 534). Nevertheless, she was apparently planning yet another trip to Rome later that year, writing to Story on 2 October that ‘it must seem to you very inconsiderate of me to have proposed ourselves to you for a visit in the middle of what, as your letter reminds me, is in every way such a full, busy time for you’ (Letters, p. 714). The ‘ourselves’ were she and William, who she was most anxious should get a holiday, and who, she felt, would be lured by the prospect of the Storys’

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company in Rome. In the event, she decided that he would be better going on his own, ‘for I dare say that he would feel more independent in an hotel without me’ (Ibid.). William actually went the following February, but Gaskell herself never returned to the land of her dreams. Given that Italy played such a large part in Gaskell’s imaginative life, it is curious that it features so little in her writings. ‘French Life’ (Fraser’s Magazine, April–June 1864) ends with mention of a forthcoming voyage to Italy; and two events of the 1857 visit occur in her short story ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ (All The Year Round, 24 January–21 March 1863) though they are merely enhancements to the main story, rather than central to it. Unlike many of her contemporaries who were only too ready to exploit in print their familiarity with Italy, Gaskell probably felt that her Italian experience was too emotionally close to her to be imaginatively reproduced, preferring to retain it as treasured memory. Apart from her trip to Brussels on Brontë business, Gaskell’s other foreign travel in this period rehearsed earlier experience. In September 1858, and again in June 1860, she went to Heidelberg, reliving the trip she and William made in 1841. On the former, she took her three eldest daughters, and showed them some of the sights she had enjoyed seventeen years before. She also met up with old friends, including Mme Mohl’s brother-in-law and his family, Chevalier Bunsen, and Florence Nightingale’s sister, Parthenope, now Lady Verney, as well as making new acquaintances like Charles Bosanquet, a rather earnest young man staying in the city who clearly enjoyed the company of the lively Gaskell women. They remained here for nine weeks, during which time Gaskell wrote ‘The Sin of a Father’ (later entitled ‘Right at Last’) and ‘The Manchester Marriage’ for Dickens. They returned home via Paris again. The 1860 visit, with Marianne (who was convalescing from chicken-pox and who was recommended to try the water cures at Kreuznach), Florence and Julia, provided more socializing, entertainments and good meals, since ‘all the world’ (Letters, p. 626) seemed to be in Heidelberg at this time. As with Italy, however, the influence of Germany on Gaskell’s work, discussed in Chapter 5, is generally slighter than that of France, probably because she felt less at ease with the language (she talks of her ‘no-knowledge of German’ (Letters, p. 625)) and less familiar with the culture in general.

Writing and publishing These years encompassed Gaskell’s most extensive literary creativity, establishing her as a genuinely professional author in both circumstances

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and approach. From the beginning of the decade, when she was wooed by Dickens to write for Household Words and was still somewhat uncertain of her literary authority, she moved to the position of being able to choose her publishers, dictate her terms, and stand out for her own preferences about length and submission dates. She could also choose what she wrote and when. As her correspondence shows, anxieties about her abilities and status gave way to greater assertiveness and confidence in her own talents which she refused to be constrained or directed solely by the demands of commercial production. At the same time, her awareness of the complex relationship between writer and audience, and the way this inevitably impinged upon the text itself, was consolidated. At this time, too, although William continued to play a part in the business side of her writing, as the correspondence concerning Cranford reveals,27 she increasingly took charge of her own affairs, bargaining with her wouldbe publishers and objecting if she felt that financial agreements had been broken. As she more often entered what Carlyle termed the ‘cash-nexus’ of the commercial world, so the language and ideologies of the market place, while never dominating her conception of authorship, came to play a part in her professional discourse. Other elements in Gaskell’s developing professionalism also become evident in this decade. Her sense of being part of a literary community sharpened the focus of her own critical judgement and attitudes towards writing in general. As she became more well-known, her growing status helped to position her as a kind of authoritative figure whose critical opinions and advice were sought by and shared with others. Her literary evaluations and choices not only throw light on her wider views, but also reveal specific instances of intertextuality in her own work. This period is notable, too, for the widening range and generic diversity of her imaginative productions: in these years, she wrote three full-length novels; a number of short pieces which break down the boundaries between essay, autobiography and short story; and a major biography. Indeed, by the end of the 1850s Gaskell was accepted as one of the preeminent writers of the age. One of the dilemmas which Gaskell faced, like all aspiring authors, was how to reconcile her publishers’ demands with her desire to fulfil personal aims and imaginative impulses, unrestricted by externally imposed requirements. Increasingly aware that by entering the public sphere literary creation interacted with the outer world other than merely by drawing inspiration from it, Gaskell found that even her humanitarian desire to touch her readers’ hearts was imbricated with the conditions of publication. Not only did the means of production

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determine the organization and dissemination of material, but reader response complicated the relational linkage between authorial intention and reception. Moreover, as she found, one of the ironies of her position was that while functioning within the literary sphere empowered her as the independent creator, it also inevitably subjected her to the hegemony of the male-dominated publishing world. It has already been noted that Gaskell’s early dealings with Chapman and Hall, the first publishers with whom she negotiated directly, were characterized by a mixture of anxious compliance and more aggressive self-determination. In the 1850s, her relations with them continued to be uneven. While apparently cheered by Chapman’s reassurances over the unfavourable reviews of Mary Barton, Gaskell encountered further difficulties with the firm in the next few years. For one thing, as she complained to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, because in her naivety she had parted with the copyright of Mary Barton without attaching any conditions, now the publishers were issuing later editions with no reference to her – and no further payment. She also noted that Chapman had asked her to write ‘a Xmas Story, “recommending benevolence, charity etc” ’, a request to which she much regretted agreeing, now recognizing that ‘it is bad to make a bargain beforehand as to time or subject’ (Letters, p. 132). In an exchange which was to be replicated with several different publishers in the following years, she and Chapman disagreed over titles: her suggestions included ‘Rosemary’ and ‘December Days’, while he had proposed the most unpromising ‘The Fagot’ which she did ‘not at all like . . . I will disown that book if you call it The Fagot’ (Letters, pp. 140–1). Finally the novella was issued in December 1850 as The Moorland Cottage, Chapman’s title but one which Gaskell considered ‘poor’ if ‘pretty’ (Letters, p. 484). Despite these clashes, Gaskell continued her dealings with Chapman, who published Ruth in 1853 and was anxious to bring out in book form those works which had previously appeared as serials. In 1855 she was considering his proposal of cheap editions of Cranford and other short works. Initially unwilling for the firm to have the novel (though it was an obvious choice, since their literary adviser, John Forster, had previously recommended the publication of Mary Barton to them), she made the arrangement. But further difficulties over payment arose, and the tone of her letter to him in August 1856, complaining about the poor royalties for Cranford and Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, as well as for The Moorland Cottage (‘It is nearly four years since I have heard anything of that unfortunate tale; & you know that after the sale of 2000 copies, I was to have half profits’), is sharp and preremptory (Letters, pp. 406–7).

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Similar clashes continued on into the 1860s, with Gaskell’s complaints about lack of communication over possible reprintings of these works and payments involved. Difficulties arose, too, over later editions of North and South which Chapman and Hall had issued as a two-volume novel after its serialization in Household Words. It is obvious that Gaskell was sometimes over-hasty and jumped to false conclusions in her business negotiations with publishers. It is also significant that despite her increasing self-dependence, William was often involved in these negotiations, acting as ballast to his wife’s somewhat volatile reactions and adding his experience of dealing with the more public world of business and institutions to her more instinctive responses. He played a prominent part in matters of sale prices, amount and dates of royalties, and publishing rights: he, for example, was the one who had to terminate the agreement with Chapman and Hall when Smith, Elder wanted to republish Cranford; and when an American publisher made an offer for North and South, William himself conducted the business, writing directly to Dickens about the matter. Similarly, when all the trouble blew up over her Life of Charlotte Brontë while his wife was away, he bore the burden of immediate remedial action. Fully capable of speaking on her own behalf, Gaskell was probably astute enough to recognize the value of male reinforcement in certain circumstances. Gaskell’s relations with Dickens were both more intimate and more stressful than with Chapman. Interestingly, their professional links were initiated by an issue of social concern. Although Gaskell’s first meeting with Dickens was at his London dinner in May 1849 to which, inspired by admiration for Mary Barton, he had invited her, it is quite possible that it was only the conjunction of two subsequent events – her involvement in the plight of a young Manchester woman, and his plans for a new periodical – that brought them back into contact. In early January 1850, Gaskell wrote to Dickens about an apprentice dress-maker, Pasley, seduced and turned prostitute and thief, and now in prison in Manchester’s New Bailey, about whom she hoped Dickens’ philanthropic friend, Miss Coutts, might be able to advise. After a reply sending her the required information, on 31 January Dickens wrote again to tell her of his intention to start a ‘new cheap weekly journal of general literature’, dedicated to ‘the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition’. In the most alluring terms, he invited her to contribute: ‘as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist, in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me) I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope

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that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages’.28 The combination here of flattery and injunction (‘a short tale’) is prophetic of Dickens’ future dealings with Gaskell and also of the nature of the tensions which coloured their literary relationship. Dickens, for all his admiration for her talent, was to find her difficult and perhaps less pliable than he had expected, especially when she felt over-directed; she, on her part, though glad to be asked to write for him, and recognizing the value of his literary patronage, chafed at his demands, particularly at his insistence that her work be tailored to the requirements of his periodicals. Winifred Gérin suggests that Gaskell ‘was patently one of those independent, wayward spirits who did not like being caught, and she made the operation as difficult for Dickens as she could’; she argues that incompatibility of artistic standards, as well as Gaskell’s mistrust of Dickens’ ‘teasing gallantry’ towards her, was responsible for their uneasy relationship.29 Certainly in the next few years their negotiations were to be characterized by a series of actions, retractions and slightly awkward truces which prevented any continuous harmony between them. The result of Dickens’ initial overtures to Gaskell was three short pieces for the opening numbers of Household Words, his new journal: ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (March–April 1850), ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’ (November 1850), and ‘The Heart of John Middleton’ (December 1850). But from the start there was trouble over both endings and length, despite his bland assurance to her that he was ‘perfectly confident of your power in regard to short tales’.30 Problems of length immediately arose with reference to ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (he wanted it in three parts but she felt cramped by this), and their correspondence during the composition of the story, over the early months of 1850, are an indication of how much Dickens’ restrictions on wordage and Gaskell’s reluctance to be so constrained were to become a source of conflict between them. Disagreements – the first of many – also arose on the question of plot detail. After the first instalment of ‘Lizzie Leigh’, Dickens suggested that Lizzie might die at the end because this would provide a good moral lesson and allow the motherless child to be incorporated into Susan’s family. Although, in a much-to-be-repeated pattern, he immediately qualified this proposal with disarming humility (‘But again I earnestly conjure you not to let me interfere with any idea you may have formed’),31 these swings between giving and taking, insistence and flexibility, so characteristic of their subsequent business dealings, undoubtedly irritated Gaskell even while she was grateful for Dickens’ apparent eagerness to have her work. In this particular case, Dickens accepted that Lizzie was not to die, but

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did suggest that ‘she ought to put that child in Susan’s own arms, and not to lay it down at the door’,32 a suggestion which the published story indicates Gaskell acted on. Apart from supplying the title, Dickens seems not to have interfered with Gaskell’s next story for him, ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’, declaring himself delighted with it. But problems over plots and endings occurred again with the third story in this initial group for Household Words, ‘The Heart of John Middleton’. Again it was the tragic conclusion which Dickens objected to. Expressing his sentiments to his editor, Wills, rather more bluntly than he would have done to Gaskell herself, he noted that the wife’s death ‘will link itself painfully, with the girl who fell down the well, and the child who tumbled down stairs’, adding the now-famous quip, ‘I wish to Heaven, her people would keep a little firmer on their legs!’.33 Despite his reservations, he was too diplomatic to change anything without her consent, though reference to a letter she sent him makes it clear that had she known his wishes on the matter (she was away when Wills tried to reach her) she would have been willing to make the alteration. Gaskell showed less compliance, however, in the disagreements which surfaced over the ghost story she wrote for Dickens, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (Household Words, Christmas Number 1852). She had already charged him with stealing a ghost story which she had told him and which he published as ‘To Be Read At Dusk’ in Heath’s Keepsake earlier that year, and had probably not been entirely mollified by his somewhat joky apology: ‘Crows have plucked at the fleeces of other Ghosts of mine before now – but I have borne it meekly. Ghost-stories, illustrating particular states of mind and processes of the imagination, are commonproperty, I always think’.34 Despite the usual quibble about length, Dickens avowedly admired ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, but once more wanted to alter the conclusion, arguing that it would be more ‘awful’ and ‘a very terrific end’ if the child were the only one to see the ghosts.35 Building up the pressure on her, he offered to make the change himself, and actually sent his proposed alteration to her. But this time Gaskell was impervious to his wheedling coerciveness and stood her ground, returning her original conclusion without change. Dickens’ conciliatory acceptance of her version (‘there is no doubt of the story being admirable as it stands’)36 concealed his irritation as much as it probably failed wholly to convince her. Dickens had been generous from the start – £20 for the serial rights of ‘Lizzie Leigh’; £10 10s for ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’; £10 10s for ‘The Heart of John Middleton’; £10 for ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ – and finances were on the whole less of an issue between them than was the case with

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other of Gaskell’s publishers. The key cause of disagreement was the essential difference between their methods of composition and production: Dickens wanted the regularity of episodic structure in order to fit into his pattern of serialization; Gaskell worked less methodically and could not mechanically subdivide her creativity in this way. Hence it was inevitable that their working partnership of writer and editor would not be a smooth one. Cranford, its individual parts making up Gaskell’s longest-running serial for Household Words (December 1851–May 1853) produced some of the same old problems. Dickens’ most notable interference was his substitution of Hood’s Poems for Pickwick Papers as the book Captain Brown is reading when he is killed by the train, a change which seems reasonable enough given the locus of publication. Otherwise he had little to complain of except for having constantly to urge her to get the episodes in on time. Indeed, relations between them during the whole period of publication of the Cranford episodes seem to have been genial, and he made no difficulties later when she wanted to publish it as a book with Chapman and Hall. He was, however, capable of far more derogatory comments about her to Wills than to her face: he told the latter that ‘Company Manners’ (Household Words, April 1854) was conceited and heavy, for instance, and expressed his view that Wilkie Collins’ Hide and Seek was in skill much beyond anything she had written.37 The most serious clashes began with the serialization of North and South, a novel which probably should never have been serialized at all. Annette B. Hopkins sees the publication of North and South as the point marking the beginning of a real change in the Dickens/Gaskell relationship, when Gaskell moved from being the compliant contributor to the assured and competent novelist, unwilling to accept editorial interference and dictatorship.38 When Dickens wrote to her inviting her to publish her planned industrial novel in Household Words, Gaskell should perhaps have been wary of the disingenuously light-handed way in which he brushed aside possible problems: ‘When we come to get a little of it into type, I have no doubt of being able to make such little suggestions as to breaks of chapters, as will carry us over all that, easily’.39 She was more anxious about the fact that Dickens was currently serializing his own industrial fiction, Hard Times, in Household Words (it ran from April to August 1854) and that her work might seem too close in substance to his.40 Length and organization were quite different matters and, wholly predictably, proved the major sources of disagreement. The main bones of contention were the amount of space permitted by each weekly instalment, and the divisions of the text. Although Dickens

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himself felt crushed by the restrictions of space for his own Hard Times, he was deeply unwilling to allow Gaskell to go beyond the normal allocation of 12 columns of print for each episode. In the event, she overran with almost every instalment, the longest, chapters 42 to 44, extending to 22 columns. In despair, he told Wills on 20 August 1854 that if the sections lengthened every week, ‘we shall ruin Household Words. Therefore it [Gaskell’s novel] must at all hazards be kept down’.41 That it was not ‘kept down’ is indicated by the fact that although Dickens had offered Gaskell twenty weekly instalments, she found it impossible to contain her material within this plan; the whole work finally ran from 2 September 1854 to 27 January 1855 in twenty-two increasingly long parts. Apart from quibbles about length, Dickens wanted the breaks to be at important points in the story and himself offered to add suitable concluding sentences for the relevant sections. Sometimes Gaskell agreed with his opinion, but more often she seems either to have ignored his directions or directly refused to make the suggested changes. Even when he acceded to her wishes, Dickens was irritated, his annoyance compounded by the printers, who had misled him as to the amount of space each instalment would take up. Even the title of the work produced disagreement, Gaskell’s original suggestion of Margaret Hale being rejected by Dickens in favour of North and South, although she had wanted to substitute the somewhat gloomy alternative, Death and Variations. Gaskell herself felt that the novel had suffered from all these pressures, as she explained in a letter of January 1855 to her friend, Anna Jameson, asking the latter if she thought that the ‘bad & hurried-up’ ending should be rewritten (Letters, pp. 328–9). Jameson, noting how ‘huddled up’ the conclusion was, recognized this as a structural problem: ‘the rapidity of the incidents at the close destroys the proportions of your story as a work of art’. Interestingly, she also saw the weakness as a direct and deleterious result of the mode of production, advising her, ‘do not, with your powers, engage to write periodically; it has had a mischievous effect, I think on Dickens and Thackeray’.42 These clashes were of course partly due to conceptual differences about the nature and writing of fiction. Dickens’ highly dramatic imagination and interest in mystery and the sensational demanded structural and thematic emphasis on powerful effects – shock, strong emotion, suspense and memorable symbolism – all of which were designed to engage readers’ immediate attention and eminently suitable for the serial mode. Gaskell’s work is more meditative in approach, with cumulative rather than instantaneous effects; her crisis moments are rarely dependent on

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textual break points but are consequential stages in a wider chronology of linked past, present and future. It is, in fact, curious that Gaskell published so much of her fiction, including four of her seven full-length novels, as serials, though of course the popularity of the form at the time made this almost inevitable. After so many difficulties with Dickens, it is surprising that Gaskell continued to have dealings with him. But Dickens not only continued to soften her with conciliatory words – ‘You will not, I hope, allow that not-lucid interval of dissatisfaction with yourself (and me?) which beset you for a minute or two once upon a time, to linger in the shape of any disagreeable association with Household Words’43 – but was generous with payment. She therefore continued to write for his periodical, contributing ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’ (October 1855), ‘The Poor Clare’ (December 1856), My Lady Ludlow ( June–September 1858), ‘An Accursed Race’ (August 1858), ‘The Sin of a Father’ (November 1858) and ‘The Manchester Marriage’ (Christmas Number 1858) in the next few years. Dickens himself knew that it was in his own interest to keep Gaskell writing for him. She was worth a lot in commercial terms, even though he found her exasperating at times, as his well-known quip to Wills indicates: ‘Mrs Gaskell, fearful – fearful. If I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her!’.44 It seemed as if their professional partnership were doomed by the end of the decade. Mutual annoyance was exacerbated by Gaskell’s claim, similar to the earlier one about the ghost story, that Dickens had stolen material from her. Having printed her ‘Disappearances’, containing anecdotes about people who had disappeared in mysterious circumstances, in Household Words in June 1851, eight years later, in January 1859, Dickens published a piece called ‘Character Murder’ in the ‘Chips’ column of his periodical, which not only picked up one of Gaskell’s anecdotes about a vanished medical apprentice assumed to have been murdered, but actually quoted verbatim a substantial portion of her text. He also suggested that the slander from which the man’s family had suffered needed to be refuted. Gaskell, as she told Norton, was very angry, not least because she felt implicated (Letters, p. 534). She had, moreover, further reason for not wishing to deal further with Dickens, who in 1859 had founded a new periodical, All the Year Round, to replace Household Words, since she disapproved of his break-up with his wife and his rumoured affair with Ellen Ternan. Yet despite her resolve to write nothing more for him, she ended up by contributing seven pieces for his new journal: ‘Lois the Witch’ (October 1859) – which she really wanted the Atlantic Monthly to have; ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’

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(Extra Christmas Number 1859); ‘The Grey Woman’ ( January 1861); ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ ( January–March 1863); ‘An Italian Institution’ (March 1863); ‘The Cage at Cranford’ (November 1863); and ‘How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle’ (Extra Christmas Number 1863). Dickens’ hold on her was, however, loosening. Her move to other periodicals at the end of the decade and into the 1860s marked her realization that she need not be dependent upon him for publication but was quite popular enough to cast her net wider. The periodicals in which she now started to publish – Harper’s, the Cornhill, and Fraser’s – were a step above Dickens’, appealing to a more cultured, intellectually high-brow readership. Household Words’ moral earnestness, predicated on a desire to raise readers’ consciousnesses about social issues through instruction and entertainment, was very different from the kind of writing in the Cornhill, managed by George Smith and William Thackeray and including among its contributors George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. In addition, Smith could pay her more, a not insignificant consideration as her expenses proliferated. George Smith, of Smith, Elder, was, after Dickens, the man with whom Gaskell worked most closely over publication. Her literary relationship with him lasted from 1855 to her death, and was largely untroubled by the kinds of tensions and clashes she had experienced with Dickens. Judging by their correspondence, they seem to have been much easier and more intimate with each other, exchanging news about their respective families (she told him about the troublous engagement between Meta and Captain Hill, for example) and gossiping about mutual acquaintances. Gaskell probably found him a more engaging personality than Dickens; it is also undoubtedly the case that Smith, ten years her junior, was a less demanding editor and prepared to give more leeway to his authors, especially those who, like Gaskell, were established literary figures. And Gaskell also seemed to have the knack of attracting younger men – Charles Eliot Norton is an obvious example – who were anxious to cultivate and keep her friendship. Although Gaskell probably did not meet Smith until July 1856, she had come across him earlier through Charlotte Brontë, whose later work he had published and who recommended him professionally to her friend. It was, then, quite natural that Gaskell should write to him in May 1855, to ask him if he had a copy of the Richmond portrait of Brontë; and again in June, to recount something of her friendship with her, mentioning additionally her notion of ‘writ[ing] down my own personal recollections of her’ (Letters, p. 348). Once Gaskell had been asked by Patrick Brontë to write the official biography of his daughter, and

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Smith had agreed to publish it, she was in constant communication with him, seeking his advice about getting information and about what and what not to include. This essentially harmonious working relationship did not entirely preclude a certain sharpness on Gaskell’s part with regard to the business aspects of her authorship. This time she was much more positive about her rights in the marketplace, having learned from her mistakes with Chapman and Hall. On 20 December 1856, she explained that she was willing to give up the copyright of the biography to Smith, but that ‘I am also inclined to put a very high value upon it, because, naturally, I value it according to the anxiety thought & trouble it has given me’ (Letters, p. 427). And six days later, noting that Chapman gave her £600 for North and South, she declared: ‘I have a great dislike to bargaining, & I should not like to be (what the Lancashire people call) “having”; but if I must deal frankly with you, as I wish, the terms proposed for the Biography are below what I thought I might reasonably expect’ (Letters, p. 430). Smith was characteristically generous; he increased his offer to £800, and added £200 more in March 1858. He was similarly generous in 1859 over her proposed new novel (Sylvia’s Lovers), offering her £1,000 after she had told him of an identical offer from Sampson Low. Smith was also amazingly patient over Gaskell’s disastrously rash accusations in the biography. He had tried gently to warn her over her vigorous desire to libel Lady Scott, Newby and Lady Eastlake, all of whom she saw as gravely culpable, but she casually brushed off his warnings: ‘I don’t promise to alter what you do not like. I only promise to consider of it’ (Letters, p. 432). When in fact she was threatened with a libel case, and she accused him of not alerting her to the possible dangers of this, Smith did not attempt self-justification but ‘simply made the best excuse I could . . . and took my scolding, in short, “lying down” ’.45 Gaskell apologized for all the annoyance and trouble she had caused Smith, as she penitently set about making the required revisions, but it would not have been strange had Smith decided he no longer wanted to deal with her. But in fact relations between them continued genial. They were, too, more seriously literary than they had been with Dickens. Smith sent her books which they discussed, and they also corresponded over contemporary authors, including George Eliot (Smith sent her a copy of The Mill on the Floss when it first appeared). She also recommended aspiring authors and their works to him. Her contributions to the Cornhill in the 1860s, which included her last two novels, Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters, as well as some short stories, indicate the seriousness with which she regarded her writing for Smith.

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Critical and literary concerns Growing fame and professional status also made Gaskell increasingly aware of literary standards and contemporary trends. This is evident not only in her attitudes towards her own work but in her literary opinions in general. She was sharply critical of her own weaknesses: she recognized, for example, how writing to order, as with The Moorland Cottage, could produce, at best, a mediocre piece, and, at worst, as with ‘Bessy’s Troubles at Home’, ‘complete rubbish’ (Letters, p. 845). She reveals herself as an astute critic of others’ work, as well as a loyal supporter of fellow writers. Her letters of this decade debate subjects such as the difference between speaking as an author in a book and speaking as a private individual; the inhibiting pressure on writers to make concessions to readers’ susceptibilities; and the temptations of writing for financial gain. Particularly, her confidence in her own perceptions and abilities is evident in her advice to aspiring authors. Assessing her own role as creator, her difficulties with publication, and the criteria for successful fiction enabled her to foreground for others the conditions and problems of professional authorship. In a very interesting letter to Herbert Grey, the author of a two-volume novel called The Three Paths (1859), she offers her requested opinions on novel-writing on the grounds that ‘the experience of any one who has gone before on the path you are following must always have some value in it’. She discusses the generic specificity of fiction (what distinguishes it from the essay form, for example), and warns him that too much introspection ‘is not a safe training for a novelist’, offering Defoe’s ‘healthy’ works as admirable models. She also, in a manner which, in its insistence on organic structure, is almost Jamesian, defines what makes a good plot: The plot must grow, and culminate in a crisis; not a character must be introduced who does not conduce to this growth & progress of events. The plot is like the anatomical drawing of an artist; he must have an idea of his skeleton, before he can clothe it with muscle & flesh, much more before he can drape it. The novelist must also, she claims, ‘imagine [him or herself ] a spectator & auditor of every scene and event’ (Letters, pp. 541–2). This analytical perceptiveness characterizes other of her critical judgements, in which a keen eye for technical considerations is combined with a constant awareness of moral tendencies in their widest sense. A good indication of Gaskell’s literary acumen is to be found in a fascinating series of letters of March 1855 to the Parisian publisher and

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bookseller, Louis Hachette. As has already been noted,46 Hachette had not only expressed interest in getting her own works translated into French but had also asked for recommendations of contemporary British novelists. Along with her recommendations, Gaskell sent brief comments, which reveal her own literary tastes, as well as ‘the place which the different novelists hold in England’ (Further Letters, p. 126). She writes that ‘I have told you very frankly what I think of their books’, adding that, in the case of her two personal friends, Charlotte Brontë and Geraldine Jewsbury, ‘I believe I have been quite impartial about them’ (p. 126). This desire for impartiality perhaps accounts for the degree of coolness with which she refers to Brontë’s works: Jane Eyre is ‘very remarkable’, Shirley is ‘not so good, but better than the best of most other authors’, and Villette is considered ‘fully equal to “Jane Eyre” as to talent, but the story is not so interesting’ (p. 126). Her comments on Jewsbury – whom she places ‘in the second rank of novelists’ – on the other hand, betray an acute, albeit guarded, recognition of the latter’s creative limitations: Her books are valued not so much for the story, as for the remarks and observations of the author contained in them. She is daring, shrewd, and amusing, and would write essays perhaps better than stories. But her books are very clever (p. 128). This compares with her generously uncritical evaluation of the works of a destitute Knutsford writer, Selina Davenport, whose novels ‘seem to me not without merit, and may in some instances, (as I happen to know they have done in some), have afforded innocent amusement in hours when works of a higher pretension, requiring greater exertion of mind, may have failed to do it’ (Further Letters, p. 49). Gaskell’s analyses of others of her contemporaries indicate the importance she placed on artistic integrity and craftsmanship. Anne Marsh ‘has written about thirty novels, one or two of which are very good; three or four tolerable, and the rest forgotten as soon as read. She writes for money and writes far too quickly’ (Further Letters, p. 127). This last comment echoes Gaskell’s earlier concerns about the effects of financially driven writing on the fiction of Dinah Mulock, whose obligation to write to support herself and her brothers Gaskell considered ‘bad in it’s [sic] effect upon her writing, which must be pumped up instead of bubbling out; and very bad for her health’ (Letters, p. 167). She also notes to Hachette: ‘[Mulock] has written six or seven pretty sentimental novels, with not much power displayed in them, but with a good

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deal of grace and delicacy. Her . . . books are great favourites with English ladies; but I note that men get tired of them’ (Further Letters, p. 128). It is hard to catch the tone of that last remark, but it seems to suggest that Gaskell had reservations about specifically gendered writing. Certainly, it is notable that with the exception of Emily Brontë (whose Wuthering Heights is remarked as being probably too wild in subject for French taste), the women novelists who make up the larger portion of Gaskell’s recommendations generally get a cooler treatment than the men. So the ‘principal interest (for those who read them)’ of Catherine Gore’s numerous novels is their ‘lively, spirited epigrammatic description of the manners of lords and ladies’ (p. 127), and the chief virtue of Margaret Oliphant’s fiction is its quietly humorous portrayal of Scottish domestic life. The male-authored works she mentions, however, are foregrounded for their striking qualities: Charles Reade’s Christie Johnstone (1853) is, despite its faults of construction, a work of ‘glorious power’ (p. 126) which she would love to emulate; and Edward Hamley’s Lady Lee’s Widowhood (1854) is ‘very brilliant, and clever’ (p. 127). Interestingly, Gaskell is less than enthusiastic about the upcoming Wilkie Collins, one of Dickens’ protegées, whose Basil (1852), a tale of sexual intrigue, she finds ‘detestable’ (p. 129). Her evidently moral bias here also coloured her response to Rita, an Autobiography (1858), by Hamilton Aidé, a young novelist of her acquaintance. Having recommended him to Smith, she tried reading Rita for herself, but was forced to admit her disapproval: ‘It introduces one just exactly into the kind of disrepuble [sic] society one keeps clear of with such scrupulous care in real life . . . I don’t think it is “corrupting”, but it is disagreeable, – a sort of dragging one’s petticoats through mud’ (Letters, p. 528).47 Such awareness of the moral influence of fiction, from one who had herself ventured into risky territory with Ruth, is especially telling. Conversely, however, while she demanded a degree of moral goodness in what she read and saw it as a standard for her own work,48 she disliked the kind of severely evangelical didacticism of tales like Fanny Mayne’s Jane Rutherford, who both here and in her pieces in the True Briton ‘wrote about good working-class heroines who cooked their fathers’ dinners and did needlework for ladies and clung tenaciously to their Bibles’.49 Gaskell seems particularly to have enjoyed ‘dramatic’ or ‘clever’ fiction, especially that which had exciting plots like Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll (1855), a skilfully worked-out tale of a man who has murdered his wife, or Anthony Smith’s Martha (1855), about a woman who screens a criminal, both of which she recommends to Hachette (Further Letters, p. 145). She is also full of admiration for George Lawrence’s Guy

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Livingstone (1857), the ‘cleverest novel that has appeared during the last six months . . . a very brilliant clever book . . . rather melodramatic; but every scene is highly interesting in itself’ (Further Letters, p. 188). The influence of such fiction can be seen in several of her short stories, which in some ways can be considered examples of the popular genre of sensationalism. At the same time, however, Gaskell clearly had time for the quieter productions of some of her female contemporaries. Another letter to Hachette, as well as objecting to an abridged translation of Jane Eyre (whose pseudonymous translator, Émile- Daurand Forgues, most offensively named himself ‘Old Nick’), includes a somewhat muted recommendation of Charlotte Yonge’s novels, which are ‘like delicate miniature-paintings of domestic life, with very little event or story beyond the progress of character . . . they are considered “safe” books, which any mother may place in the hands of her children, down to the very youngest, sure that they will receive no new ideas from them, but those relating to religion’ (Further Letters, p. 131). Gaskell also mentions by name the novelists Julia Kavanagh and Elizabeth Sewell, many of whose works she borrowed from the Portico Library. Such essentially domestic fiction also has echoes in her own writing. She borrowed Sewell’s Ursula (1858) the year of its publication, for example, and its story of a motherless young girl, struggling against her upbringing by well-meaning but unperceptive brothers, both of whom marry wives who threaten to usurp fraternal affection for her, resonances which were to be recalled in Wives and Daughters. Despite her ever-increasing family and professional commitments during this decade, Gaskell found time for prolific reading, which kept her in touch with the literary trends of the day. Details of books borrowed from the Portico Library by William provide some information about what Gaskell herself probably read (as a woman, she could not borrow books in her own name); she in fact makes several direct references in her letters to Portico books, and clearly some of the borrowings were for her and her two elder daughters.50 As well as reading books from the Portico, Gaskell may have had some input into the acquisition of its stock. On 29 September 1853, for example, she wrote to the publisher, Bentley, asking him if he was the publisher of Charles Reade’s Christie Johnstone (1853) – which he in fact was – and if so, to include the price of the novel in his advertisements for it: ‘Libraries will not order it without knowing the price, which has hitherto been omitted in all advertisements’ (Letters, p. 251). On 5 October she repeated the request (Letters, p. 251). The Portico seems to have taken note of her interest, probably via

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William as Chairman, since the Library Committee minutes of 6 October 1853 list Christie Johnstone among the books ordered at that time. Once available, it was clearly popular with the Gaskells: William is recorded as having borrowed the novel first on 3 November 1853, and then twice more, in 1854 and 1856. The wide range of Portico texts that William read or consulted gives an indication of the literary tastes of the Gaskell household at this time. The number is itself large: in 1859, for example, William is recorded as having borrowed 101 books, and most of these are single issues, not repeated borrowings. These include all the major periodicals of the day, including the North American Review, the Dublin University Magazine, and the Revue des Deux Mondes; a large variety of fiction, including new publications, as well as old favourites by Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney; much non-fiction which clearly relates to William’s teaching and parochial activities, such as Latham’s The English Language (1850), Joseph Kay’s The Education of the Poor in England and Europe (1846), accounts of criminal trials, essays on grammar and philology, and historical and social studies by contemporaries such as Newman, Carlyle, Sterling, Froude, Macaulay and Ruskin; and a good range of poetry, including In Memoriam, The Prelude, Aurora Leigh, Marmion, and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. Two other categories of borrowings during this decade are also of particular interest. Even before Gaskell started work on her Life of Charlotte Brontë, she and William both seemed to have been particularly fond of biography, and the records show many such items. The other significant feature is the number of travel books (with which the Portico was and still is especially well stocked): William took out books on America, Italy, Greece and Turkey, Iceland, the Middle East, Switzerland, Japan and New Zealand, as well as, nearer to home, guides to Scotland, Cornwall and Yorkshire. As will be shown, some of these texts were clearly for Gaskell’s specific use – Thomas Wright’s Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (1851) for her short story, ‘Lois the Witch’ (1859), and William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions (1821) for Sylvia’s Lovers, for example. Wiliiam’s borrowings of contemporary fiction in this decade are especially illuminating in terms of their possible influence on Gaskell’s own work. These borrowings range from the then somewhat old-fashioned ‘silver-fork’ or society novels of Catherine Gore and Caroline Norton; to historical novels by Wilkie Collins, G. P. R. James and Bulwer Lytton; to works by other popular contemporaries such as Charles Lever, Frank Smedley, Charles Reade and Charles Kingsley, as well as, of course, Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope. Particularly noticeable is the number

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of novels by women writers: in 1851, for example, out of a total of twenty-four (identified) fictional borrowings, seventeen are female-authored. Many of these writers have already been referred to and include Anne Manning, Anne Marsh, Margaret Oliphant, Frances Trollope, Harriet Parr, Elizabeth Sewell, Charlotte Yonge, Julia Wedgewood, Geraldine Jewsbury, Dinah Mulock Craik and Julia Kavanagh; later in the decade and into the next one, the Gaskells picked up on the newer women novelists such as Mrs Henry Wood, Mary Braddon and Annie Keary.51 Some of the recurring themes to be found in this fiction – unhappy female romance, mysteries of birth and family relationships, disputes over inheritances, and revenge and restoration – also appear in Gaskell’s work, without any evidence of direct intertextuality. But there is also evidence of more specific influence. Gaskell’s preoccupation with the theme of disappeance and reappearance, for example, seems to have been particularly stimulated by her reading at this time. Crabbe’s poem, ‘Ruth’, in his Tales of the Hall (1819), is often cited as a likely source for her exploration of the topic in ‘Disappearances’ (1851), ‘The Manchester Marriage’ (1858) and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). Another, more contemporary, possible source of inspiration is, however, Caroline Norton’s Stuart of Dunleath (1851), which William borrowed the year of its publication and again in November 1859. Norton’s novel – most obviously special pleading for redress of the iniquitous divorce laws as they affected women – contains a heroine who, believing that her first lover has drowned himself, marries another man whom she does not love, for the sake of her feeble and impecunious mother; after a disastrous and tragic period, her former lover returns and asks her to divorce and leave her husband and marry him; she, however, sees that her duty is to stay with the man whose children she has borne, and she rejects his proposal. The strong probability that Gaskell read this novel twice, first soon after ‘Disappearances’, and then eight years later, after the publication of ‘The Manchester Marriage’ and almost immediately after her researches in Whitby for Sylvia’s Lovers, not only indicates influence but also shows how her imagination, already fascinated by a particular theme, could be kindled by an especially suggestive literary text. Ravenscliffe (1851), by Anne Marsh Caldwell, the sister-in-law of Gaskell’s cousin, Dr Henry Holland, may have similarly stimulated her inspiration. This novel is another exploration of romantic misunderstandings: a woman’s former lover, who she mistakenly believes jilted her, returns and declares his continuing love; though she still feels attracted to him, she is persuaded to marry another man, and even when the lover appears on her wedding-day she refuses to abandon her formal vows of commitment. As

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with Stuart of Dunleath, the parallels between the plot of this novel and that of Sylvia’s Lovers seem too marked to be coincidental, even though there is no evidence that Gaskell ever re-read it at a later date. As has been noted, Gaskell shared critical opinions with other women writers of the day, encouraged their efforts, and also looked to some of them for advice or encouragement in her own writing. During these years, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson and George Eliot all offered her useful commentary on her books. Of these, one of the most significant in artistic terms was Eliot. Apart from finding it hard to square Eliot’s dubious lifestyle with the moral fineness of her writing (after reading Adam Bede, she wrote to Smith, ‘Miss Evans’ life taken at the best construction, does so jar against the beautiful book . . . do say Miss Evans did not write it’ (Letters, pp. 566–7) ), Gaskell was always conscious of the inferiority of her work in comparison to that of the younger woman. Despairing of matching the latter’s artistry, she wrote to Norton in October 1859, ‘I think I have a feeling that it is not worth while trying to write, while there are such books as Adam Bede & Scenes from Clerical Life’ (Letters, p. 581), and she told Harriet Martineau that ‘one gets into a desponding state of mind about writing at all, after “Adam Bede”, and “Janet’s Repentance” ’ (Letters, p. 903). She also wrote to Eliot herself, stressing how ‘humbly’ she admired her novels (Letters, p. 592). Despite – or perhaps because of – this apparent sense of inferiority, there are echoes of Eliot in her own fiction: in Sylvia’s Lovers, for example, the relationship between the wayward Sylvia and the loving, self-disregarding Hester certainly owes something to that between Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. Conversely, Eliot herself may have been influenced by Gaskell’s work, which she claimed to admire. Replying to Gaskell’s letter of admiration for Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life, she wrote: ‘I was conscious, while the question of my power was still undecided for me, that my feeling towards Life and Art had some affinity with the feeling which had inspired “Cranford” and the earlier chapters of “Mary Barton” ’.52 Similarities between The Moorland Cottage and The Mill on the Floss (see Chapter 4), and between Wives and Daughters and Middlemarch, both novels of provincial life, suggest indeed that Eliot may have read the earlier work.

4 The 1850s: the Established Author

The shorter pieces In the 1850s – her most productive period – Gaskell published an astonishing range and diversity of work. As well as three major novels and a substantial biography, she wrote over thirty shorter pieces. Of these last, three could be considered novella (The Moorland Cottage, Mr Harrison’s Confessions and My Lady Ludlow); two are poems; eight are generically hybrid, combining recall of legends or tales and social observation; and the rest are short stories. Almost all (like two of her novels of this decade) were published initially in periodicals, American as well as English, but in most cases were reissued in later collections, confirming Gaskell’s ongoing popularity as well as her publishers’ conviction of her appeal to a wider audience than merely those who read journals such as Dickens’ Household Words. These reissues often contained changes in their book form, usually initiated by Gaskell herself and including different titles and altered or added narrative contextualization. Some of these stories, too, have origins in an earlier period, indicating her habit of returning to the inspiration of many years before. The variety of these short pieces is both generic and thematic. Formally, as has been suggested, they embody constant slippage or negotiation between the more formal categories of fiction and essay: short stories may contain elements of sociological or historical commentary, and essays recount tales claimed to have been heard elsewhere. They also embrace a range of types: folk tale, ghost story, legend or documentary, Gothic melodrama, domestic realism, ethnography, fantasy. Importantly, too, they draw on a multiplicity of sources and influences linked to Gaskell’s own experiences, including her family background and youthful memories, her British and foreign travel, and 78

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her literary recall. Within this variety, however, certain thematic preoccupations recur. The emphasis on betrayal, violence, suffering and loss is noteworthy – an aspect of Gaskell’s writing which has been generally neglected in favour of her more comic or social-domestic realism. In particular, many of these stories seem obsessed with female suffering, its moral linkage with duty and self-sacrifice, and its consequences on the individual and those around her. Indeed, it can be suggested that in such texts Gaskell is being more subversive than in her longer fiction: while she was taking an obvious risk with a work like Ruth, here she offers more oblique, but no less radical questioning of conventional ideas and ideologies. Men as betrayers and victimizers of women, family bonds as a curse rather than a blessing, the anarchically liberating – but also destructive – power of sexual desire are only some of the charged or contentious issues explored in the stories. The first three years of the decade are particularly notable for the number of stories dealing with exploited and suffering womanhood: ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (1850), ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’ (1850), ‘Martha Preston’ (1850), The Moorland Cottage (1850), ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ (1852) and ‘Morton Hall’ (1853) all directly treat the theme; and two other stories of this period, ‘The Heart of John Middleton’ (1850) and ‘The Squire’s Story’ (1853), while not overtly imaging their female characters as victims of men’s cruelty, show how male deceit or brutal vengefulness impacts on the women with whom they are connected. Gaskell’s fascination with ghost stories or suggestions of the supernatural is also evident in these productions. A late Victorian article on her observes how she was known as ‘an excellent narrator of stories . . . A gentleman in Manchester, who was a frequent visitor at the house, told me how Mrs Gaskell had kept him up through many a night while she told ghost-stories, of which she possessed a goodly store’.1 Many of her friends, including Mary Howitt, Tottie Fox and Anne Thackerary Ritchie, testified to her enthusiasm for telling and listening to such stories, especially as a Christmas recreation (a very popular Victorian custom). Her skill in this genre is indicated in her own account of how, when Charlotte Brontë was visiting Plymouth Grove in April 1853, Gaskell started one evening to tell ‘some dismal ghost story’ and her guest ‘shrank from hearing it’ from fear that it would cause her a sleepless night.2 Although Gaskell wrote only one actual ghost story, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’3 (her tale for the 1859 Christmas number of All the Year Round, ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’, did not in fact contain a ghost, and was more appropriately retitled ‘The Crooked Branch’ when it was reprinted in 1860), the elements of

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mystery and suspense innate in the genre are intrinsic to many of her short fictions. Story-telling in general as a contemporary cultural practice, enjoyed by Gaskell herself, is figured, too, in the narrative form of her productions. Uglow has noted how important this activity was to Gaskell and how much it formed part of her daily life (pp. 237–9 and 605); a letter of 1859 to her from William Wetmore Story, reminiscing about their happy days together in Rome, confirms this: Some autumn and winter evening will you come up our stairs again . . . and let us see your face and hear your voice again . . . Will you not tell us more of your charming stories – and give us some more living sketches of character . . . Our fireside is ever haunted by the ghosts of those pleasant days.4 The device of one or more narrators telling tales to a group of listeners is a common feature of many of Gaskell’s stories. Many of them use a double or multiple narrative voice, creating a series of stories within stories. In the purportedly non-fiction, this works as a mode of authentification, with the central ‘I’ functioning as both speaker and scriptor. In stories such as ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, ‘My Lady Ludlow’, ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’ and Mr Harrison’s Confessions, it provides a contextualizing frame for the material in which the respective narrators tell their or others’ tales to a variety of listeners. The delight in gossip or curious happenings, so characteristic of Gaskell herself, is thus transferred to her imaginative creations, where it becomes an empowering narrative strategy. All these features become evident when the writings themselves are examined in more detail. The first three years of the decade were extraordinarily prolific, especially given that Gaskell’s family and social commitments were ever-increasing and that this period included the production of two full-length novels, of which Ruth was conceived and written as a single entity and not, like Cranford, in instalments. The nonfictional pieces, as has been pointed out, cover a range of topics: discussion of foreign customs, nostalgic recall of personal experience, historical anecdotes and legends, all illustrating Gaskell’s enormously wide interests. The stories further exploit these interests in more clearly fictional form, placing their material in contexts which often recognizably draw on their author’s own background. As with the non-fiction, however, the central narrating voice is often diegetically elusive, moving in and out of the story as both participant and recorder.

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Although certain themes recur in the stories, in contrast with the novels of this decade there are few which deal with obvious ‘social’ topics in a contemporary setting. Of these, ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (1850), as has already been noted, treats the subject of the fallen woman who redeems herself by helping others, and ‘Bessy’s Troubles at Home’ (1852) is a slight moralizing tale for children dealing with the problems of family life in an urban, working-class environment. While both these pieces obviously draw on Gaskell’s Manchester experiences, others are more closely connected with her Knutsford days. Mr Harrison’s Confessions (1851), part of the oeuvre which re-casts Gaskell’s memories of life in the small Cheshire town in fictional form, and a precursor of Cranford, looks somewhat ironically at provincial foibles and oddities; its increasingly fractured structure (towards the end, the chapters become shorter and shorter, and the conclusion is very abrupt) suggests that Gaskell was less at ease with her material here than with the Household Words instalments which became Cranford. She also seems not to have rated very highly its site of publication, the Ladies’ Companion, since in a letter of 1857 to Louis Hachette she refers to ‘a story nearly as long as the Moorland Cottage, which appeared in 1851 in numbers in a periodical, the title of which I forget’ (Further Letters, p. 169). ‘The Squire’s Story’ (Household Words, Extra Christmas Number 1853) deals with a more exciting aspect of Knutsford life, although, interestingly, Gaskell actually uses a name associated with a different area of her past in order to ‘place’ it. Barford, the town in which the story is ostensibly set, was the second location of the Misses Byerleys’ school, which moved from Warwick in 1817 and to which Gaskell went in 1821. In the text, the town is mentioned as being near both Derby and Kegworth. But if Gaskell was being deliberately vague about place, the tale of Higgins himself is uncontrovertibly Knutsford material. Edward Higgins, a notorious highwayman, lived in the house next to Aunt Lumb’s from 1757–65 (thus predating the temporal specificity of the story, which opens in 1769), and was a respected citizen, married with five children (the story depicts him as childless). He was eventually found out, captured, and hanged at Carmarthen in November 1767 (and not at Derby in 1775, as we are told).5 Gaskell, who probably heard some of the legends about him and his supposedly haunted house in her youth, and who may later have got additional information from written sources such as De Quincey’s Autobiographic Sketches (1834–53) and the Universal Magazine of 1767, turns a fascinating piece of local history into a story which moves between genres and narrative focuses. In a pattern typical of so many of her short works which inhabit the fact/fiction

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borders, the narrator (supposedly the squire of the title, though his identity has little relevance and seems merely a device to accord with Dickens’ desire for a ‘named’ Christmas story) first establishes his authenticity as one who is familiar with the place and its society: ‘To appreciate this circumstance of pleasant recollection, you should have lived for some years in a little country town’.6 He then moves on into a more clearly creative mode in which visual description and psychological speculation play a part, with his descriptions of Higgins’ cruel teasing of children, his over-easy manner, and his seemingly bottomless purse hinting at something darker beneath. The narrative slips in and out of free indirect discourse in a tantalizing way, so as to arouse suspicion without confirming it. The climax of the story occurs when Higgins exhibits a manic desire to describe in detail the terrible murder of an old woman in Bath, thus revealing to the reader, if not to his naive listener, Mr Davis, that he in fact is the murderer. The elements of Gothic horror, related to sensation or detective fiction here, are heightened and made more daring by the foregrounding of the act of story-telling itself, as Gaskell’s fascination with the legendary figure is passed to her narrator and then to Higgins himself, horrifically trapped in his own guilty recollections of the violent act which he has to rehearse. The story returns to its opening historical objectivity, as the narrator challenges readers to try to find the supposed hidden wealth in the ‘real’ Higgins’ house, which ‘I saw . . . not a month ago’.7 While not wholly successful in artistic terms, it is a good illustration of Gaskell’s constant experimentation with different modes and angles of narration. The other tales of this decade show Gaskell’s ever-widening range of psychological and historical interest. ‘Martha Preston’ (1850), rewritten as ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’ in 1855, is one of the first which depicts female suffering caused by male betrayal or cruelty, from which the woman emerges, having created a new life out of her despair. Such stories show the way in which Gaskell deftly subverts a popular Victorian icon: that of the saintly woman, who, herself denied romantic fulfilment, finds compensation through serving others in self-forgetful and sacrificial acts. Gaskell skews the trope by suggesting how sorrow and willed isolation can produce a fierce kind of female independence; though the heroines’ sense of loss is foregrounded it is not sentimentalized as a necessary redemptive experience. Apart from the already-discussed topographical changes between the different versions of this story, other changes8 emphasize Gaskell’s preoccupation with the psychological effect of the enforced deconstruction of female self-identity. ‘Martha Preston’, cast as an extended reminis-

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cence in which the intradiegetic narrator, recalling lovingly the area around Loughrigg where Martha lives and retelling what she has been told by local people, foregrounds the distance between the events described and the narrational present. It is altogether more hopeful than the later version. The agonies of conscience suffered by Susan Dixon in ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, when she has to choose between accepting her lover on his terms (that her idiot brother go into an asylum before they marry) and renouncing him, are underplayed in ‘Martha Preston’: Martha’s choice is mentioned only briefly and the account of her subsequent single life of service and emotional impoverishment is factual and objective. The ending, too, reconstitutes a putative past with Martha as a substitute grandmother, happily nursing the children of her former lover’s son – the son whom she rescued from the snow, whose marriage she financed, and who, with his family, now lives with her. In contrast, the later, more overtly fictional version offers a more dramatic and harsher representation of human suffering and cruelty. Not only does it dwell in greater detail on Will’s betrayal of Susan’s love and the subsequent shrinkage of her physical and spiritual being, but, by substituting the lover himself as the one she rescues from the snow-drift but fails to revive, the narrative foregrounds her lost past and uncompromisingly empty present. And the altered ending, with Susan, having herself been nursed to health by her lover’s widow, taking the bereaved woman and her children to live with her, offers little suggestion of vicarious consolation or happiness. The somewhat grim and lonely figure, masculine in her strength and agricultural knowledge, who appears at the beginning of the story, remains the dominant image even in the concluding hope that her act of charity will ‘fill up the haunted hearth with living forms that should banish the ghosts’.9 The two other stories of 1850 also draw on personal sources and mixed genres to explore the theme of female exploitation and suffering. ‘The Well of Pen-Morfa’ derives in part from Gaskell’s time spent in Wales, listening to the stories told her by her friends and relatives there. Specific and carefully observed details of landscape combine with an interest in local customs, such as keeping oat-cake under the bed, to create the context for a tale which tells of wronged womanhood. Formally, it meshes exterior and interior narration. It opens – somewhat misleadingly – as if it were a travel essay, with the extradiegetic ‘I’ giving historical and sociological details about the region of North Wales she is describing. Then, moving almost imperceptibly from generality to specificity, by inserting herself into the text as inquiring observer she proceeds to relate two stories which she heard when visiting Pen-Morfa, a

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village near Tremadoc, both concerning women who have been victims of male cruelty and selfishness. The first, merely brief reportage, gives the history of the stern and mournful-looking woman noted by the narrator, who, once ‘the beauty of Pen-Morfa’, went into service, was seduced in London and returned pregnant, eventually giving birth to a deformed child, to whom she has dedicated her whole lonely life. The second, the tale of Nest Gwynn, is a far more extended narrative, which, it is suggested, has attained the status of folklore: ‘[a]nother story which I heard of these old primitive dwellings I mean to tell at somewhat greater length’.10 Again, factual detail, such as the topographical features of the area and the exact position of the Gwynns’ cottage,11 co-exists with the narrator’s imaginative reconstruction of the main characters’ actions and emotions, with continuing inserted reminders of her status as recorder, not inventor (‘there the old house stands, and will stand for many a year’).12 Thus, typically of her methodology, Gaskell continually moves between the borders of fact and fiction, and past and present, ‘story’ thereby becoming a more effective means of entry into human history than mere reportage. Nest, a pretty and rather vain girl, sustains a serious injury when she slips on the ice at the well, encumbered by the fine clothes which, against her mother’s advice, she has put on to impress her lover; though physical, her fall has sexual undertones. Like the first heroine of the story, she suffers at the hands of male treachery: learning that she will be a cripple for life, her lover rejects her and finds another young woman to marry. The rest of the story records how gradually Nest’s hardness and bitterness are softened by the teachings of an old Methodist preacher who tells her that she must reject her former passion and ‘love like Christ; without thought of self, or wish for return’.13 As a kind of perpetual penance, then, Nest takes a crazy, half-witted woman, Mary Williams, to live with her, until she herself dies many years later beside the well where her dreams were smashed. In a pattern which recalls ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ and is echoed in ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, the single, wronged or neglected woman finds a new holy purpose in a selfless act of devotion to one worse off than she. In one respect, this is a familiar trope of Victorian sentimental literature, morally didactic and uplifting. But in another, it expresses a refusal to accede to the notion of female uselessness or impotence against the norms (and abuses) of patriarchal society. All these women establish an independent, off-centre unit which is both protective and spiritually enlarging; Gaskell rejects images of wasted womanhood, and, through the mode of sympathetic recall, aggrandizes them as heroines whose stories must be told.

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‘The Heart of John Middleton’, told by the central character himself, portrays another area known to Gaskell – Pendle Hill, on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border. Here, the story’s regional specificity, seen in dialect and topographical detail, is paralleled by a kind of Gothic supernaturalism, such as when the raging storm seems to equate with the ravings of the hero’s tormented mind. As with ‘The Well of PenMorfa’, familiar Victorian tropes of male vengefulness and female redemptive love are rewritten to give a less conventional portrayal of gender types. The heroine, Nelly, is injured not by male betrayal or treachery, but because she uses her own ‘sweet body’14 as a shield for that of her lover, John Middleton, who is being attacked by his rival, Dick Jackson. Thus, like Margaret Hale in North and South (where a similar incident is developed), Nelly is both the victim of generic male violence and herself takes on an active masculine role. Later, when she becomes the angelic influence which manages to turn John, now her husband, from his vengeful desire to give Dick, now a returned convict, over to the law, he is the one who becomes feminized into forgiveness and charitable love. Gaskell’s last 1850 publication adds other concerns to the theme of women’s roles. The Moorland Cottage, the ‘Xmas’ story which she considered ‘a very foolish engagement’ made to Chapman (Letters, p. 130) and over the title of which she had so much trouble, is set in an undefined rural region; Gaskell called it ‘simply a little country love-story’ (Letters, p. 132), though she did indicate that it drew on the northern landscape between Lancashire and Yorkshire (Further Letters, p. 53). In many respects, Gaskell was right to be dissatisfied with it; as a story it is unconvincing, and the highly melodramatic ending which brings all to a happy conclusion (a fire followed by a shipwreck in which the villainous brother is drowned and the honourable lover appears in order to rescue the heroine) is particularly unsatisfactory. Its main interest, however, lies in its treatment of gender, here in childhood and adolescence rather than adulthood. Ned, Maggie’s morally weak brother, is favoured over his sister by their widowed mother who adheres to conventional ideologies of masculine superiority. Maggie’s prototypically feminine qualities – affection, love of the countryside, self-sacrifice – are recognized only by the angelic invalid wife of their neighbour, Mr Buxton, and later by her son, Frank, who eventually falls in love with the young girl.15 Within this paradigmatic framework, Gaskell challenges assumptions about gendered behaviour. Maggie, who, while internalizing the notions of female inferiority she has been fed, wishes she were a man, is taught the meaning of true

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female courage and usefulness by Mrs Buxton, lessons she puts to good use when she refuses to give up her lover as a means of saving her dishonest, criminal brother from disgrace. This is not a radically feminist text: in an act of selflessness, Maggie agrees to help Frank make a new life in America, instead of immediately marrying Frank. But its recognition of the damage done not only to women, but also to the male psyche itself, by doctrines of masculine superiority links it with others of Gaskell’s stories which take a more probingly critical look at male–female relations. Suggestions of intertextuality are also interesting here. The interaction of class and wealth in a moorland setting recalls similar concerns in Wuthering Heights (1847); Maggie’s awed vision of the Buxtons’ house as of something out of The Arabian Nights, with its ‘[d]eep blue, crimson red, warm brown draperies’ and ‘the apartments seem[ing] to melt away into vague distance, like the dim endings of the arched aisles in church’16 echoes Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s wonder at the splendour of the Lintons’ abode, seen through its windows. Conversely, the story’s oftennoted similarities to George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) suggest that the latter novelist had read and enjoyed it (as did Charlotte Brontë and Matthew Arnold).17 Its portraiture of selfish brother and cleverer but suppressed sister (Maggie in both texts), its juxtaposition of the fairy-like golden girl (Erminia Buxton/Lucy Dean) with the brown, less welldressed and socially accomplished one, and its treatment of paternal resistance to a socially unequal marriage are all important elements in the later novel. ‘Morton Hall’ (Household Words, 19 and 26 November 1853), a more ambitious piece, is one of several examples of the hybridity of Gaskell’s shorter works. Set largely in Lancashire in an unidentified location, it also clearly draws on Knutsford reminiscence; the mention of the nearby manufacturing town, Drumble, relates it to Cranford, serialized in Household Words not long before, and in both cases the reference is obviously to Manchester. Its treatment of small-town life, affected by social and environmental change, also links it to the earlier text. At the same time, it explores putative historical events (further fictionalized through speculation) of an earlier past, dealing with a period of seventeenthcentury history which especially fascinated Gaskell. The Knutsford material employs a mode of socio-domestic realism, associated most notably with Cranford, comic in places but also treating quasi-tragic matter; the historical material is more akin to the kind of dramatic Gothicism used in other of the short pieces, and includes a curse, an abandoned house containing a rotting feast, and a mad woman.

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Using a double narration, ‘Morton Hall’ is actually three stories. The first, the story of the Cavalier Sir John Morton and his marriage to the Puritan Alice Carr, whose father became the incumbent of the Hall during the Interregnum, is told by Mrs Dawson, the Hall housekeeper, to the Sidebotham sisters and their mother, and is analeptically reported by Bridget Sidebotham. The other two – the story of the gradual demise of the family over twenty years, ending in the premature deaths through poverty of Miss Phillis and John Marmaduke Morton, and that of the last incumbents, the three eccentric Morton sisters and their little niece, whom they are crushing with their conflicting theories of education – are told by Bridget herself, now an elderly woman.18 Her narrative frames the whole, reinforcing the temporal circularity of the story which begins by mentioning that the old Hall is to be pulled down and ends by noting that part of it has already been demolished in order to build a new road. Although the work may seem slightly piecemeal, there are various unifying threads running through it, most importantly the emphasis on change and progress, and, again, the sufferings caused to women by male tyranny or egocentricity. The latter theme is illustrated by the depiction not only of overt cruelty (Sir John Morton abandons his wife, takes a mistress, and then returns to seize Alice by force, pretending she is mad and locking her up until she becomes genuinely deranged), but also of the power of gendered cultural conditioning. Phillis Morton relinquishes her chances of a glittering social future in order to give her life (literally) to a broken-spirited brother and a wastrel nephew who gambles away what little there is left of the family money; Annabella Morton, the prettiest of the three spinster sisters, has to give up the poor curate she loves because her mother and sisters, having assimilated patriarchal ideals of family status, think he is not good enough for her. Here, female self-sacrifice is not its own reward. The theme of historicity, portrayed as both circular and progressive, is effected through the two marriages of opposites, the second echoing the first but also undoing its fatal disunity. Where the relationship between Sir John and Alice is characterized from the beginning by conflict of wills and refusal to make concessions, that between the Morton niece, Cordelia Mannisty, and the Drumble mill-owner, Marmaduke Carr, provides a fruitful, harmonious unification of families, now in social rather than political/religious terms. Both the seventeenth- and the nineteenth-century material is mediated through a somewhat ironized female consciousness, thus providing an additional, extradiegetic gloss on the main themes. Mrs Dawson and Bridget have internalized some of the class snobbery and patriarchal

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ideologies illustrated in the stories they tell. Mrs Dawson, for example, talks of Alice’s ‘obstinate refusal’19 in refusing to obey her peremptory husband, and observes that he must have known best how to deal with her; and Bridget, who is prepared to lie to protect the Mortons’ position in the community, and is insistent on the importance of keeping one’s place, cannot believe that the fine young man, John, could be guilty of gambling. Both sisters’ determined adherence to the traditional pieties (like the Cranford ladies’ and Lady Ludlow’s) is a source of humour: on hearing Cordelia’s protestation that her fiancé has locally connected ancestors, for instance, Ethelinda Sidebotham exclaims, ‘His ancestors? . . . Has he got ancestors? . . . I didn’t know cotton-spinners had ancestors’.20 But, again like Miss Matty and Lady Ludlow, they have to learn to accommodate the new. The two narrators, too, despite their myopia and superstition, are empowered as tellers, revisioning historical meaning through their linked explorations of social and religious change. In the Christmas number of Household Words for 1852, Gaskell published her only ghost story, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’. This one has familiar features: a North country setting, overladen with Gothic atmosphere; concern with female pride and jealousy, and male cruelty; and multiple narration, with the central events narrated analeptically by an involved observer. The main narrator, the old nurse herself, Hester, tells the tale to the children of the little girl, Rosamond, to whom the ghost appears (presumably their mother never mentioned it to them); in her homely, servant role, she recalls Nelly Dean as she too narrates strange happenings and wild passions to the sceptical Mr Lockwood. Hester’s narration predominates; the only secondary, interpolated narration is the history of the Furnival family and the events which are responsible for the ghostly phenomena, told by the housekeeper, Dorothy, and reported by Hester. Again as with Wuthering Heights, the chronological fragmentation created by this mode – Hester, for example, hears the mysterious organ music in the hall before she learns what it signifies – adds to the sense of disorder or abnormality in the story’s microcosmic world. The setting of an isolated house, surrounded by overgrown trees and neglected gardens and with numerous unused rooms and a locked east wing, in the middle of the wild, Northern fells, draws on familiar tropes of the genre, but the fact that Hester describes herself as a Westmoreland woman might suggest that this is another instance of Gaskell’s being inspired by the stories she heard from Mrs Preston at Mill Brow earlier that year.21 Gothic and macabre details are exploited effectively: the portrait of Maude Furnivall turned to the wall in a disused room; the organ

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music coming from a decayed and unplayable instrument, increasing in volume as the storm increases; the Phantom Child, with the dark wound on its shoulder, which lures the young Rosamond out into the snow, replicating the past tragic events; the struggle of wills between the ghost and Hester for the possession of Rosamund, as the former taps at the window (again an echo of Wuthering Heights?). The final climactic scene is a masterly piece of dramatic writing, with its spectre-child, the apparition of the younger sister, and the ghostly figure of the old lord ‘with grey hair and gleaming eyes’,22 driving before him the defiant young mother and her child, and striking the latter with his crutch, before forcing them both outside into the snow. Despite Dickens’ insistence that it would be a better ending if only the child saw these ghosts, Gaskell was probably right to refuse to make the change; the horror is increased as the helpless spectators watch the violent event from the past re-enacted before them. Accomplished ghost story as it is, ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ also treats several of the themes which dominate the other short pieces of this decade.23 Paternal hostility to an unequal marriage and the ensuing cruelty to the daughter and her child; the tragedy of a disfunctional family unit, wrecked by distrust and jealousy; and the loneliness of a single woman’s childless old age are all explored in other texts. Gaskell’s most substantial shorter piece of this decade, My Lady Ludlow (Household Words, June–September 1858) deals with some of these within a variety of contexts. Its framing setting, the small town of Hanbury and its Hall, links Gaskell’s memories of Avonbank and Warwickshire with those of Knutsford; recall of the last would have been much in her mind at this time since she was helping Henry Green with his history of the Cheshire town (published in 1859); the peculiarities and preoccupations of local society make up much of the fabric of the story. Details of an aristocratic lifestyle, represented by Lady Ludlow herself, might also have been supplied through Gaskell’s increasing acquaintance with titled families. The long inserted story about Clément and Virginie reflects her alreadynoted interest in France and French history, especially the plight of emigrés, treated earlier in ‘My French Master (1853). Overall, the novella explores familiar themes of parental relations, unequal and secret marriages, female loneliness and independence, social and environmental change, and reconciliation through the uniting of old and new. Its extended length also foregrounds the way in which Gaskell’s writing so skilfully – and often disturbingly – juxtaposes lightness of social satire and domestic realism with a curiously obsessive interest in violent or uncontrollable passions, usually self-destructive.

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In 1859, having been issued in a pirated edition in 1858 by the American publishers, Harpers, the novella was reprinted by the ‘rascally’ Sampson Low,24 together with five other stories of the decade – all except one of which had previously been published elsewhere – in a collection called Round the Sofa. For this collection, an initial framing opening describing how each guest at Mrs Dawson’s Edinburgh evenings was to tell a story to the assembled company, plus brief linking passages between each story, were added, thus emphasizing the act of narration itself and attempting – not entirely successfully – to unify the whole. Even without this contextualization, however, in its original form My Lady Ludlow calls attention to itself as an exploration of and experimentation with telling. It is a multivocal text, whose voices are co-existent rather than competing. The bulk of the story is narrated by Margaret Dawson herself, recalling her early memories of life with Lady Ludlow, but within this there are other interpolated stories: most important is Lady Ludlow’s tragic account of the fated love between Clément and Virginie, analeptically inserted in the middle of Margaret’s narration and itself containing secondhand recall, as the Lady explains – ‘now I must take up the story as it was told to the Intendant Fléchier by the old gardener Jacques’.25 In its constantly shifting perspectives and interweaving voices, the work is reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, but its originality lies in its emphasis on the vagaries and randomness of memory, replicating the inconsequentiality of narrative recall; this not only resists the formal shaping of history as ‘story’ but also seems to represent a feminine mode of writing, expressing a Kristevan female cyclical temporality.26 In this way, recurring themes link past and present in a pattern of constant forward and backward movement. At the same time, the ending of the story in which the narrator says that she never saw Lady Ludlow or the Hall again after she had left Hanbury to live with her brother, is a final reminder that the whole is resourced from memories.27 The work definitely suffers to some extent from its looseness of structure, as Gaskell herself was aware.28 In particular, the interpolated French story, ostensibly offered by Lady Ludlow to illustrate the dangers of educating the working classes, seems somewhat detached from the rest of the Hanbury narrative; and anyway, the incident upon which this moral hangs (the aristocratic lovers are betrayed because a young proletariat, who has learnt to read, is able to decipher the messages concealed in the bouquets which Clément sends to Virginie) is subordinate to its much more powerful themes of jealousy and thwarted love. But, as has already been suggested, it does link to the rest of the piece in its

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exploration of the clashes between the new and old orders and its prioritization of reconciliation and adaptation. As Louise Henson argues, Gaskell here displays contemporary awareness of developmentalism, the idea of nature as a dynamic entity whose hidden laws are opposed or resisted at peril; only by acknowledging this slowly evolving biological law as part of a continuously improving natural order can progress be effected.29 So Lady Ludlow’s reactionary principles, which include rigid adherence to class divisions, the idea of ‘woman’s place’, unwavering loyalty to the Established Church, and traditional methods of estate management, gradually give way to more liberal and forward-looking views. She comes to accept the marriage between her cousin-steward and the daughter of a Dissenting baker from Birmingham, as well as that between the curate, Mr Gray, and the illegitimate daughter of Miss Galindo’s childhood sweetheart; she permits the establishment of limited schooling for the poor; she agrees to experimental methods of landcultivation. Different elements of the work are also linked through their examination of gender roles, and here too Gaskell combines nostalgic conservatism and more subversive radicalism. Not only are the female characters empowered as narrators (the male characters are represented only by reportage), but the two main figures, Lady Ludlow and Miss Galindo, show how independence can be asserted even within traditional behaviour patterns. Thus, despite her aristocratic inflexibility, Lady Ludlow challenges patriarchy with her own strength of authority; and the eccentric spinster, Miss Galindo, while appearing to share many of her Lady’s reactionary views, enters the male sphere of clerkship, defeating the resistance of steward and lawyer and creating her own identity as a writer. The latter, indeed, metaphorically speaks for female authorship as a gender-empowering activity when she says, ‘I read the man. And, I am thankful to say, he cannot read me. At least only one side of me’.30 Tougher and more acerbic than most of the Cranford ladies, she seems a proto-feminist in a world which she largely accepts because she does not see it as restricting. The next generation, it is implied, represented by the two cross-class marriages, will carry her spirit into the future. The collection of stories which, in addition to My Lady Ludlow, make up Round the Sofa, embody an eclecticism which seems to owe more to commercial expediency than to artistic criteria alone. As has been noted, Gaskell was particularly in need of extra money at this time, and Sampson Low’s offer was probably too good to be turned down, thus she was willing for the collection to be made from available texts.31 This reusage demonstrates, on the one hand, the flexibility and adaptability of

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Gaskell’s shorter pieces, whose cross-generic range enables them to fit into a variety of narrative contexts. On the other hand, the unifying strategy of Round the Sofa is not wholly convincing. Apart from the fact that there is no obvious matching between teller and tale in each case, the pieces form a heterogeneous mix, ranging from ‘pure’ story, such as the already-adapted ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, to the socio-historical ‘An Accursed Race’; between these, generically speaking, lie the kind of hybrid tales which are Gaskell’s hallmark, in which personal recall elides with fictional narration. Of these, ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ draws on Gaskell’s own knowledge of Wales, ‘The Poor Clare’ is cast as the journal reminiscences of an old man but clearly reflects Gaskell’s own interest in eighteenth-century history, and ‘The Half-Brothers’, another Lake District tale, has an intradiegetic male narrator recounting his own childhood experiences. Despite this narrative eclecticism, however, familiar recurring themes provide links which draw in even the most obviously different ‘An Accursed Race’. These pieces, too, contain some of Gaskell’s most psychologically disturbing and subversive writing, again revealing her as a writer whose textual self was often very different from her public persona. This, indeed, may account for the comparative neglect of these shorter pieces, especially in early twentieth-century criticism: the dark side of her personality expressed in these stories seems incompatible with the popular image of her charming domesticity. ‘The Poor Clare’ (Household Words, December 1856) is one of the most powerful stories in the collection. This historical tale, dated 1747 but set earlier in the eighteenth century, explores further Gaskell’s concern with female victimization, taking it into the realms of the uncanny. Here, a familiar pattern – the beautiful and spirited Mary Fitzgerald is lured away by the wealthy Mr Gisborne and has a child, Lucy, by him (though the latter bears his surname, the text never makes it entirely clear whether or not Gisborne actually married her mother) – has a new twist: betrayed by her lover, Mary drowns herself instead of enduring a life of redemptive self-sacrifice. Even more importantly, revenge for the betrayal is enacted unwittingly and with terrible consequences, when Mary’s old mother, Bridget, crazed by the disappearance and loss of her daughter, curses the hot-tempered squire who shoots Mary’s little dog, predicting that the creature he loves best will come to be ‘a terror and loathing to all’.32 In a melodramatic but powerful plot dénouement, the squire turns out to be Gisborne and the creature he loves the best, his daughter, Lucy, who is tormented by a frightful double self which haunts her and causes all who come into contact with her to shrink from her. Thus the curse, the full implications of which are made more

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effective by the piecemeal way in which the narrator (eventually Lucy’s husband) discovers the full story, crushes three people: the guilty Gisborne, the long-suffering but innocent Lucy, and the perpetrator, Bridget. The story concludes with the conventional trope of female penitence through angelic acts, as Bridget’s self-annihilating charity as a Poor Clare in revolution-torn Antwerp finally lifts the curse, freeing Lucy and allowing Bridget herself to die in peace. But as well as its interest in witchcraft (foreshadowing ‘Lois the Witch’), and the suggestion of the denaturing effects of female revenge, it is particularly fascinating for its exploration of the dual demon/angel female iconography of the period. In some respects it belongs to the genres of Gothic and sensation fiction. Its concern with madness, the notion of doubles (there are foreshadowings of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White here), and a sense of the mysteriousness, albeit unthreatening, of Roman Catholicism are overlaid with a disturbing awareness of the corrupt, demonic sexuality which may co-exist with angelic womanhood. Just as Charlotte Brontë implements the polarized Jane/Bertha configuration in Jane Eyre, so here the narrator looks in horror at the hideous figure lurking behind the mild, saintly Lucy, ‘a ghastly resemblance . . . with a loathsome demon soul looking out of the grey eyes, that were in turns mocking and voluptuous’33 which he sees as both alluring and repellent. This vision of double womanhood represents what Felicia Bonaparte has argued is a split in Gaskell’s own personality, evident in the tension in her works between conformism and a more demonic element, transposed on to ‘villainized’ characters.34 Here, certainly, the idea of woman as alien other, with an evil eroticized and hypnotic power, seems to express some of Gaskell’s unease about the complexities of female psychology and the darker elements which lie below the civilized surface. It also, of course, enacts a pre-Freudian suggestion of the split between the conscious and unconscious self, as well as representing the destructive force of self-alienation, since Lucy becomes hideous to herself as well as to others. Unlike the similar pre-occupation in Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), however, this story contextualizes the split within a Christian context of patient suffering and final redemption. ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1858) also centres on a curse, but here it is an old family prophecy, stemming from a historical event of long ago. The opening tells how an early member of the Griffith family collaborated with a traitor in a plot to murder Owen Glendower, but because this Griffith had been a supposed friend of Glendower, the latter curses him: ‘when nine generations have

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passed from the face of the earth, thy blood shall no longer flow in the veins of any human being. In those days the last male of thy race shall avenge me. The son shall slay the father’.35 This curse, then, has in itself less psychological resonance than that in ‘The Poor Clare’, since cause and effect is linked to a fatalistic sequence of events rather than to clear personal motivation. As a tale which Gaskell probably heard during one of her stays in Wales (she begins by giving the Welsh spelling of the names of her characters, as if to guarantee authenticity), it also seems primarily to derive from her own interest in historical legend. As with all her pieces of this nature, however, within its legendary context it explores themes of fraternal jealousy, parental obstinacy and cruelty, and female vulnerability. The curse is worked out through a family riven by passionate love and equally passionate hatred, as well as betrayed affections; the son’s Oedipal vengefulness towards his father is central to the story. The victims of the curse are caught up in events beyond their control, though provoked by individual feelings. The young Owen, alienated from the family by his father’s remarriage, secretly marries a pretty Welsh farmer’s daughter, Nest, from Pen-Morfa (shades of the earlier tale here); when his father finds out, he is enraged, and, in one of the most shocking acts of violence in all of Gaskell’s fiction, he throws their baby at its mother who fails to catch the child, allowing it to strike its head on the dresser and crash to the floor. The terrible incident, like Owen’s subsequent ‘murder’ of his father, which occurs in a tussle in which the older man loses his balance and falls from a loose rock over the edge of the cliff, is inadvertent, albeit precipitated by ungovernable emotions. The story ends not with redemption via Christian forgiveness but in unresolved tragedy: Owen, his wife, and her father sail away and are never seen again, while ‘[t]he house of Bodowen has sunk into damp, dark ruins; and a Saxon stranger holds the lands of the Griffiths’.36 Its gloom and melodrama make it an uneven, though arresting, production, which, again, reveals the darker side of Gaskell’s imagination. The final story in the Round the Sofa collection is a slighter and more sentimental piece, which, unlike the others, was written specifically for it. ‘The Half-Brothers’, as the title indicates, is about the relationship between two sons, one the favoured child of his father, the other the despised offspring of his mother’s previous husband. When their mother dies, the privileged younger, the narrator of the story, is allowed to lord it over his morose and apparently stupid half-brother. But when, one winter’s night, he gets lost on the Fells in a raging snow-storm, this despised brother, Gregory, rescues him, and they are reconciled in the

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few minutes before Gregory succumbs to cold and exhaustion and dies. Once again, redemption through forgiveness is foregrounded as the suffering father repents for his callous treatment of his elder son. The story is not remarkable and though it touches on some of Gaskell’s favourite themes, it may have been written fairly hastily to complete the collection; of more periphal moment are the Cumberland setting, another instance of the inspiration which this region afforded Gaskell, and the use of the name William Preston, which reproduces that of the real Mrs Preston’s eldest son. The last stories of this decade confirm Gaskell’s interest in dramatic and violent acts, and also in dark histories and deceit. Together with ‘The Manchester Marriage’, ‘The Sin of a Father’ (Household Words, November 1858), ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’ (All the Year Round, Extra Christmas Number, 1859) and ‘Lois the Witch’ (All the Year Round, October, 1859) were reprinted by Sampson Low in 1860 in a collection called Right at Last, and Other Tales, the titles of the second and third stories having been changed, respectively, to ‘Right at Last’ and ‘The Crooked Branch’. ‘Lois the Witch’ is the most unusual in the set, but because it relates to Gaskell’s interest in America, which will be examined in the next chapter, discussion of it will be reserved until then. ‘The Sin of a Father’/‘Right at Last’ is another fairly slight story, again perhaps composed rather hastily. An Edinburgh girl marries a young doctor who apparently has no relatives and about whom nothing is known. Settled in London, they have money stolen out of their bureau and their manservant is accused. The doctor becomes increasingly gloomy and agitated so his wife, Margaret, determines ‘to try an experiment to see if she could not probe, and find out the nature of the sore that he hid with such constant care’.37 She tells him an allegorical tale about two young lovers, the father of one of whom was a transported criminal, and at once her husband confesses that this is his dark secret: his father was an exiled convict, and because the manservant knows this he dare not press charges against him. Persuaded by his wife, justice is done, and though the secret is revealed and the couple are temporarily ostracized, they eventually overcome prejudice and live prosperously and happily. The plotting is clumsy – if Margaret has known his secret all along, why is the pretence of mystery maintained? – and the characters make little impact. One noteworthy feature, however, is the reappearance of the strong woman figure, who both supports and shows more moral courage than the weaker man. ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’ (as has already been noted, a pointless title, since it contains no ghost and no garden room) was, according

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to Gaskell, a true story told to her in 1849 by Justice Erle and Tom Taylor (Letters, p. 596). For all its long-standing historicity, however, it clearly derives in part from her visit to Whitby from 31 October to around 12 November 1859. The story is set in North Yorkshire, not, like several of her shorter pieces of this decade, in the Lake District (though it uses the name Preston yet again); it attempts to reproduce the dialect of the region,38 and it consciously uses local terminolgy such as ‘shippon’ for cow-shed and ‘creepie-stool’ for a little backless chair. In other ways, too, it foreshadows Sylvia’s Lovers, her other North Yorkshire fiction: the farmer’s wife is called Hester Rose, the name of a character in the later work; it deals with a criminal case in which an old couple have to go to York Assizes to testify (in Sylvia’s Lovers, Sylvia and her mother go to the Assizes to see Daniel who has been convicted of leading the attack on the press-gang); and the very detailed description of the farm reminds of similar details of Haytersbank Farm in the novel. Its main themes also look back to some of Gaskell’s earlier works, particularly the spoilt son who disgraces his family by his criminal acts (The Moorland Cottage), and the girl betrayed by a young man who has an ‘understanding’ with her. Gaskell was determined to have the story published as a single piece, not in sections, as Dickens would have preferred, so was obviously concerned that it should make a powerful and immediate impact. It is in fact a very carefully engineered story which builds up to a shocking ending, all the more disturbing because it is narrated by a controlling and ordering external voice which not only provides historical and moral commentary but also gives information unknown to the characters; the old couple, for example, while deeply anxious about their son (ironically, named Benjamin), have no idea that he has become a criminal. The account of the adored only child born to elderly parents, who leaves them, gets into bad company in London, and betrays them, has echoes of Wordsworth’s Michael, but this story has no pastoral transcendent vision. Crooked from the start, as the later title indicates, Benjamin has no redeeming qualities, and the full horror of his heartlessness is shown in his willingness for his mother to be murdered when he leads the ruffians to the farm to steal his father’s last few savings. Gaskell shows her mastery of dramatic action in the scene in which the young woman, Bessy, alone in the dark with her injured uncle while the farm-hands struggle with the robbers upstairs, becomes conscious that there is someone else with her in the kitchen. But the most moving scene, to which the drama leads, is the final climactic scene in court, in which the old father identifies Benjamin as the one who calls for his mother to be killed: ‘It were my son, my only child, as called out for us t’ open door,

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and who shouted out for to hold th’ oud woman’s throat if she did na stop her noise, when hoo’d fain ha’ cried for her neice to help’.39 The bleak restraint of this ending, with the old couple left with only death ahead of them, and no reconcilation or redemption through loving selfsacrifice, makes this one of Gaskell’s most pessimistic pieces, a ghastly revisioning of child–parent relationships.

The longer works While the short stories and novellas of this decade cross generic boundaries and draw on a variety of narrative types, the three major novels are all grounded substantially in the familiar mid-Victorian genre of realism. Ruth and North and South can be considered ‘purpose fiction’ in that they examine contentious contemporary issues with the aim of awakening readers’ consciousnesses to the need for ideological and practical change; Cranford, while less message driven, within its depiction of a recognizably regional environment offers a sharply observed portrait of a society threatened by external forces which necessitate adaptation and development. The realistic mode is not restrictive, and each novel illustrates Gaskell’s narrative and thematic complexity. But their temporal and regional specificity contrast with the historical settings and curiously distanced quality of many of the shorter pieces. Cranford Until relatively recently, Cranford has represented the literary type which defined Gaskell’s reputation as a creative artist. Even now, it is the novel by which she is most widely known, pigeon-holing her as the arch-exponent of provincial social realism, gently comic and with a slight aroma of moth-balls. This is of course not an accurate picture: with its delicate but sure touch, Cranford is considerably more complex than this, as later twentieth-century criticism – Marxist, psychological, feminist40 – has more rigorously demonstrated. It was very popular with Gaskell’s contemporaries, including Dickens, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot; and it is the most frequently re-issued of all her writings.41 It is also the only one of her works which Gaskell said she ever re-read: as she told John Ruskin, another of the book’s admirers, ‘whenever I am ailing or ill, I take “Cranford” and – I was going to say, enjoy it! (but that would not be pretty!) laugh over it afresh!’ (Letters, p. 747). As is well known, the novel is based on Gaskell’s early experiences of Knutsford, memories of which were stimulated when in adulthood she retreated there from the strains of life in Manchester. When Dickens

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pressed her for more contributions to Household Words, after her initial successful writing for his periodical, she offered him ‘Our Society at Cranford’. This was published in December 1851, and formed the first two chapters of the book version. Gaskell told Ruskin that she had not intended to write any more episodes, but her admission that she ‘killed Capt Brown very much against my will’ (Letters, p. 748) suggests that even then the story had claimed a hold on her. She actually wrote another seven episodes over the next sixteen months, breaking off in the middle to complete Ruth. As Uglow has pointed out (pp. 295–6), the second half of Cranford (appearing in January, April and May 1853) moves away from the closer realism of recall into a more fanciful and wide-reaching arena, perhaps reflecting Gaskell’s re-focused imaginative vitality after the more traumatic and stressful experience of writing Ruth. Cranford’s real-life basis is verified by the attested actuality of events such as the cow wearing a flannel waistcoat and drawers after falling into a lime-pit, and the cat who swallowed the lace; the slightly crude and vulgar reference to underwear and emetics here shows that this early nineteenth-century provincial society, for all its insistence on propriety, is far from the prudery of mid-Victorian England. The love of gossip, the curious domestic customs, and the skilful reproduction of the vernacular itself, also give strong proof of personal knowledge. Originals have been proposed for many of the characters, most plausibly Mary and Lucy Holland, the daughters of Gaskell’s Uncle Peter, for Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty; others are more questionable. Cranford’s literary heritage is eclectic rather than specific. Critics and readers have seen in its shrewd observations of social and domestic life some echoes of Jane Austen. Other suggested predecessors include Mary Mitford’s Our Village (1819), a lightly humorous set of essays depicting a rural community, which the Gaskells enjoyed; Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1820–23); Maria Edgeworth’s domestic fiction; and Crabbe’s poetic tales of local people and communities. Gaskell’s novel, however, while undoubtedly indebted to these earlier writings, is no mere amalgam of them. Wider-reaching than Austen (the industrial world of Manchester, alias Drumble, is a consistent, if unseen presence) and more concerned with the complexities of character than either Mitford or Crabbe, it unmistakably reflects Gaskell’s particular preoccupations and stylistic features. Like much of her work, Cranford is concerned with social and economic change. The realities of the ‘elegant economy’ practised by the Cranford ladies – the little strategies of saved candles, sparse suppers and re-fashioned garments – are acute signifiers of the growing gap

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between new urban wealth, created by industrial development, and genteel poverty in rural areas; while the collapse of the bank, with the subsequent loss of Miss Matty’s savings, is a reminder of the fragility of capitalism, Cranford still has to come to terms with new economic forces in order to survive. Miss Matty struggles to run a shop, and poverty has to be admitted and confronted. More importantly, Cranford also has to come to terms with social change. The old hierarchies, within which ranks and protocol are strictly observed, can no longer continue; without development, Cranford society, already on the edges of the wider world, will become extinct. So divisions and rigid groupings gradually collapse: Lady Glenmires marries the muddy-booted and plebeian Mr Hoggins; new social and familial alliances are formed; and the old patriarchal values, represented by Deborah Jenkyns, give way to a more feminized humanitarianism, which influences both men and women. Another important aspect of Cranford, central to Gaskell’s work, is its concern with personal and family relationships. As has been shown, many of her short stories deal with thwarted or destroyed romance, often caused by parental hostility, and the subsequent loneliness of the single woman. Miss Matty’s aborted love for Mr Holbrook (touchingly, but not sentimentally, recalled by the visit to his home), because of her father’s opposition, and her wistful regret at her own childlessness, articulate Gaskell’s own ambiguity about women’s roles, expressed in a letter of January 1860 to Norton: ‘I think an unmarried life may be to the full as happy, in process of time but I think there is a time of trial to be gone through with women, who naturally yearn after children’ (Letters, p. 598). Matty, like the other single heroines, manages her sorrow with a mixture of self-restraint and vicarious maternal love – she eventually supports the marriage of Martha and Jem and becomes godmother to their daughter. Young Peter’s parodic representation of motherhood, early on in the book, is thus enacted in reality at the end, his own return home signifying the final overthrow of paternal tyranny. His boyhood prank in itself embodies another of the novel’s characteristic concerns – the interest in transformation and disguise. The melodrama of disguise in ‘The Grey Woman’ and ‘The Squire’s Story’, the secret guilt of ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, and the destructiveness of hysterical belief in the supernatural in ‘Lois the Witch’ are here given more measured and humorous treatment: Signor Brunoni’s magic transforms hearts rather than events; Mary Smith’s fear of ‘seeing eyes behind me looking out of the darkness’,42 an interesting precursor of the ghostly double in ‘The Poor Clare’, is linked to the false panic over the robbers; and true (and more

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humane) identities emerge from the false ones created by custom and prejudice. Cranford is also characteristic of much of Gaskell’s work in its narrative structure. Its advance in this respect on both ‘The Last Generation’ and Mr Harrison’s Confessions has already been noted, with Mary Smith the narrator who, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, is both ‘within and without’43 the story. Like so many of Gaskell’s shorter pieces, it is a framed narrative; within the main frame – Mary’s account of her involvement with Cranford society – there are a series of analeptic narratives, going back as far as the previous century and impinging on the present in their gradual accumulation of memoried history which has created the town’s contemporaneity. Mary Smith is both the listener to nostalgic recall (rather as Gaskell herself was listening to her own ancestral voices) and a participant in the action; she is an invited member of the society but can also focalize it more dispassionately because she, like Gaskell, has knowledge of other systems and cultures. Thus she joins in the superstitious and conventional beliefs, and is part of the ‘we’ who, invited by the formidable Mrs Jamieson to meet Lady Glenmires, nervously seek to propitiate the former’s austere manservant, Mr Mulliner: ‘We all smiled, in order to seem as if we felt at our ease, and timidly looked for Mr Mulliner’s sympathy’.44 On other occasions, however, her voice is used to articulate her ironic awareness of the stultifying proprieties which, though understandable, have created stasis and decay. Ultimately, this is not a text of competing voices, setting Utopian nostalgia against contemporary social hegemonies, but an interweaving of visions which looks forward as well as backward. If it is centred on Gaskell’s memories, it is also part of her overall critique of the society which was so influential on her but to which she knew she would never return. Ruth The writing of Ruth stirred up a milder version of the ‘hornet’s nest’ which, a few years later, succeeded the publication of The Life of Charlotte Brontë. There were several reasons for this. Gaskell’s earlier ‘protest’ novel, Mary Barton, caused offence to a specific class of readers – the factory owners – whose objections were based largely on the grounds of its inaccuracy or bias. Moreover, in dealing with the topic of urban poverty and industrial unrest, Gaskell had aimed to enlighten ignorance about a very particular social and regional matter. Ruth, on the other hand, not only addressed issues which were of wider significance and application – religious hypocrisy, the double sexual standard, marital

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disharmony – but also foregrounded a subject which most people knew about but preferred not to acknowledge. Gaskell was convinced that the prejudice and inequities surrounding the issue of the fallen woman must be brought to public attention; even though she realized she was treading a perilous path, she refused to ‘hide [my] head like an ostrich and try by doing so to forget that the evil exists’ (Letters, p. 227). In a long letter of late January 1853, the month of Ruth’s publication, to her sister-in-law, Anne Robson, she explains how much she dreads the great pain and distress which outraged responses to the novel will cause her; nevertheless, she adds, despite knowing that her theme will be called ‘ “[a]n unfit subject for fiction” . . . I determined notwithstanding to speak my mind out about it . . . I wd do every jot of it over again tomorrow’ (Letters, p. 220). She repeated these missionary sentiments two months later to Mrs Mary Rich: ‘if I have but got the smallest edge of the wedge in, any how, I will be thankful to God’ (Further Letters, p. 84). In particular, she knew that the work would offend against one of the most sacred Victorian ideologies – the purity and sanctity of family life. She told Mary Green, the wife of Knutsford’s Unitarian minister and one of her oldest friends, that ‘I doubt if it is a book that you will like to have in your family’ (Further Letters, p. 74) and that ‘I am sure I should have been repelled by hearing that a “tale of seduction” was chosen as a subject for fiction’ (Further Letters, p. 79). Interestingly, she banned it from the Gaskell household, although she planned to read it through with Marianne at some later date. The novel grew out of both personal experience and contemporary discussion of the problem. Gaskell had been engaged with the issue, not only in the case of Pasley, the young dressmaker turned prostitute, but also in her own household; in addition to her maid Anne’s illegitimate pregnancy, the young sister of her cook, Margaret Preston, was in danger of being carried off by a ‘bad man’ in London (Letters, p. 271). She was also well aware of how young working girls in Manchester were exposed to sexual temptation. On a wider level, the topic was gradually entering the public consciousness. By mid-century, Victorian attitudes towards fallen women and prostitution (taken as synonymous, since the first step was perceived as inevitably leading into the abyss) were shifting from moral outrage to a new sympathy for the victimized and redeemable woman. Henry Mayhew’s 1849 Morning Chronicle interviews with London seamstresses, quoted in W. R. Greg’s article on ‘Prostitution’ in the Westminster Review of July 1850, helped to create this change by showing just how vulnerable poor working girls were. Greg’s article also pleaded for the prostitute as victim, and, even more

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challengingly, attacked the double standard in sexual morality: ‘that harsh, savage, unjust, unchristian public opinion which has resolved to regard a whole life of indulgence on the part of one sex as venial and natural, and a single false step on the part of the other as irretrievable and unpardonable’.45 Whether or not Gaskell herself read the article, the views expressed in Ruth are remarkably coincident with Greg’s. Her novel was thus both participatory in a contemporary social discourse and an agent in altering that discourse’s emphases. It also participated in a cultural discourse of the day, drawing on an already established literary and artistic heritage. By 1853, as contemporary critics pointed out, the fallen seamstress was a familiar trope in art and literature, representing a pattern of moral narrative. As Michael Wheeler has shown, the ‘needlewoman’ theme was a widespread literary topic in the 1840s, partly inspired by Edwin Chadwick’s Report of the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population (1842) which revealed the sexual and physical perils faced by seamstresses.46 Imaginative texts of the period which deal with the needlewoman include Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s The Wrongs of Women (1843–4), Part I; Thomas Hood’s well-known poem, ‘The Song of the Shirt’ (1843); and ‘The Orphan Milliners’ (1844) by Camilla Toulmin, a writer known to Gaskell. Wheeler argues that one of the specific sources for Ruth was probably Elizabeth Stone’s The Young Milliner (1843), claiming that, as with Stone’s William Langshawe (which he posits as a source for Mary Barton), the work of this author was influential on Gaskell’s own writing. The novel’s depiction of a young apprenticed milliner, seduced by the father of the household in which she works, who later becomes a prostitute, certainly has echoes in Ruth. Even more pertinent, however, are its parallels with Fanny Trollope’s Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day, published serially by Henry Colburn from December 1842 to November 1843 and issued as a book immediately afterwards. Trollope’s novel is primarily an attack on the New Poor Laws of 1834 which condemned ‘outdoor relief’ and forced applicants into the workhouse; it is particularly concerned with the Bastardy Clause, which prevented a seduced woman from seeking assistance from the father of her illegitimate child and exonerated him from all legal responsibility. Although it cannot be proved that Gaskell had read Jessie Phillips, her previous acquaintance with Trollope’s work makes it quite possible that she had some knowledge of the earlier fiction. There are notable similarities between Trollope’s novel and Ruth. In both, the heroine/victim is a beautiful young girl, aware of her attractiveness but not vain or self-regarding: Ruth, directed by

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Bellingham to view her reflection in the pond, ‘knew that she was beautiful; but that seemed abstract, and removed from herself’;47 Jessie has a ‘lovely, gentle innocent face’,48 and, though used to admiration, is not corrupted by it. Both women are seamstresses, and each meets her seducer through her employment: Ruth first encounters Henry Bellingham at the assize ball, when she mends his partner’s torn dress; Jessie’s seducer, Frederic Dalton, ostensibly cements their developing relationship when he kisses her in the cloakroom during a dinner party at which, as a dressmaker, she is in attendance. Each relationship is based on illusory hopes for the future, in which the woman believes her lover will marry or continue to protect her, and after their rejection, both women similarly contemplate suicide. When Mr Benson falls trying to help her, Ruth gets water for him from ‘the little mountain stream, the dashing sound of whose waters had been tempting her, but a moment before, to seek forgetfulness in the deep pool into which they fell’ (p. 97); and Jessie ‘remembered on a sudden, and as if, as it seemed to her, by inspiration, a lovely and remote nook beside the bright capricious stream . . . where a deeper bottom than it found elsewhere hushed its noisy gambols . . . into a level smoothness, that seemed the very emblem of rest’ (pp. 169–70). Gaskell and Trollope also both engage with the contentious issue of the degree of their heroines’ moral responsibility, on the one hand stressing their innocence which makes them vulnerable to romantic dreams, and on the other giving them moral and spiritual agency by foregrounding their sense of guilt and penitent desire for redemption. Most importantly, Ruth and Jessie are both used to challenge double sexual standards. Each young woman ultimately defies her seducer, refusing his money and offer of marriage, and pointing to the part he has played in her degradation. Trollope’s text is much more melodramatic than Gaskell’s; with its scheming and heartless lover – who is from the first intent on ruining Jessie and who murders her child in an extraordinarily brutal way by stamping on it – and its heroine who temporarily succumbs to madness, it is in many ways a precursor of the sensation fiction of the 1860s. The counter-effectiveness of such writing may indeed have been in Gaskell’s mind when she wrote her own story: she told Anne Robson that ‘I wanted to keep it [Ruth] quiet in tone, lest by the slightest exaggeration, or over-strained sentiment I might weaken the force of what I had to say’ (Letters, p. 221). Yet Trollope’s challenging conclusion to her novel – ‘some may feel it a thing to wonder at that she [Jessie], and the terribly tempted class of which she is the type, should seem so very decidedly to be selected by the Solons of our day as a

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sacrifice for all the sins of their sex’ (p. 349) – clearly proclaimed her iconoclasm, and her novel, like Ruth, elicited hostile responses. Gaskell’s departure from both this literary heritage and her earlier treatment of the topic, however, shows her awareness of veracity as her most powerful weapon. Ruth – unlike Lizzie Leigh or the wretched outcast, Esther, in Mary Barton, and in contrast to many earlier fallen heroines, including Jessie Phillips – neither endures a subsequent life of misery, nor loses her child. Rather than being an exploited victim, she is initially in love with Bellingham and enjoys his company; as a mother rejoicing in and strengthened by her love for her illegitimate child, she is able to attain moral salvation, a message approved by the reviewers G. H. Lewes in the Westminster Review of April 1853 and J. M. Ludlow in the North British Review of May 1853. As with all Gaskell’s ‘problem’ fiction, too, the novel’s social and topographical contexts are authenticated by personal knowledge and experience. The chapel at Eccleston is based on that at Knutsford; the household of the Dissenting minister, Thurstan Benson, probably replicates that of William Turner’s in Newcastle, where the young Gaskell stayed after leaving school; details of the region of Snowdonia where Ruth fleetingly enjoys her idyllic sojourn with Bellingham are drawn from Gaskell’s experiences of Ffestiniog, the poignancy of the descriptions of scenery articulating her own painful memories of the tragic loss she suffered here (‘I have seen – but I shall see no more’ (p. 63)); Abermouth, where Ruth re-encounters Bellingham, combines topographical features of both the Silverdale/Morecambe Bay area and North Wales, two of Gaskell’s favourite holiday locations. Yet, as Gaskell well knew, simple realism could be a double-edged sword, and in a novel dealing with such a risky subject, she could not go too far in establishing her heroine’s real-life typicality.49 So, despite her avoidance of one kind of literary stereotype, she stresses Ruth’s exceptionality rather than her normality. Ruth is represented as a kind of romantic figure, associated with flowers and nature. From the beginning she is marked out from the other needlewomen at Mrs Mason’s by her sensitive response to the natural environment – here, the snow on the town buildings; later, in Snowdonia, when she gazes at the magnificent scenery, ‘vast ideas of beauty and grandeur filled her mind at the sight of the mountains, now first beheld in full majesty’ (p. 64). With the water lilies placed by Bellingham in her ‘long waving glossy’ (p. 143) chestnut hair, she seems an image of virginal purity, and indeed recalls the icons of sanctified womanhood in some Pre-Raphaelite paintings (with which Gaskell was certainly familiar). There are also Keatsian echoes in the early pages of the novel when, as she passes under an old window of

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stained glass, ‘the moonlight fell on her with a glory of many colours’ (p. 3).50 Paradoxically, these characteristics work both to mediate the representation of the ‘unfit subject’ (Ruth is special, so cannot be typed simply as a fallen woman) and to challenge received ideologies on the subject (her heightened spiritual sensibility makes her more than simply a symbol of exploitation). Entering into a poetic/mythological arena, however, was in some ways to prove counterproductive. In presenting Ruth as both guiltless victim and self-accusing sinner, Gaskell is caught between the contrary impulses of social iconoclasm and adherence to a more conventional – albeit sincerely held – moral position. Ruth has to be shown as pure and innocent, yet her social and psychological restoration is predicated on guilt, repentance and redemptive self-sacrifice, all of which deny her empowerment as an awakened sexual being – and Gaskell is quite clear about the sexual attraction Ruth feels for Bellingham, even at their reunion when she feels she must reject him.51 Uglow calls the novel a text of ‘tensions, evasions, suppressions and allusions’ (p. 327); and Patsy Stoneman also notes its unresolved ambiguities: ‘the novel demonstrates that it is the Christian definition of sexuality as sin which constitutes Ruth’s fall and prevents her rehabilitation’.52 While some aspects of this moral and ideological ambiguity may be more evident to twentieth-century than to Victorian eyes, many of Gaskell’s contemporaries noted the discordance between its realism and its idealism. Several reviewers pointed to the unreality of Ruth’s portrayal. Sharpes’s London Magazine, for example, commented that ‘[the] portrait is untrue to the daily experience of actual life . . . Ruth, in her childlike purity and innocence, is not a veritable type of her class’.53 The Spectator also felt that the moral lesson was confused because Ruth’s was ‘an extreme and exceptional case’, and that indeed ‘[i]n the tale of Ruth herself everything is rare’.54 Several of Gaskell’s readers, too, objected to the ending of the novel, in which Ruth, having re-established herself in society and redeemed herself in their eyes, catches fever while nursing Bellingham and dies a beautiful and saintly death. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an admirer of the novel, questioned ‘Was it quite impossible but that your Ruth should die?’,55 an almost exact echo of Charlotte Brontë’s earlier protest, after hearing of Gaskell’s outline plan: ‘Why should she die? Why are we to shut up the book weeping? My heart fails me already at the thought of the pang it will have to undergo’.56 Even more pervasive were the objections to Benson’s questionable morality in lying about Ruth’s circumstances and passing her off as a widow. Gaskell’s own position on this deceit is quite clear. She points to

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Eccleston’s small-town respectability which necessitates it, and shows how in Mr Bradshaw, a pillar of Benson’s congregation who employs Ruth as a governess until he discovers the truth about her, is embodied the kind of self-righteous and ‘pharisaical rigour’57 which actually drives fallen women further into the depths. The narrative voice also clearly indicates her own position on Benson’s morally sophistical decision: ‘It was . . . the pivot, on which the fate of years moved; and he turned it the wrong way’ (p. 121). Nevertheless, several reviewers attacked her on this ground. Henry Chorley in the Athanaeum argues from a naturalistic viewpoint that ‘[a] good man such as Mr Benson is shown to be . . . could not, we apprehend, so easily have connived at an actual lie, such as is set down for him’;58 other critics also expressed their unease with what they saw as an unconvincing and inartistic narrative strategy. Gaskell’s apprehensions about the novel’s reception were to some extent realized. Members of William’s own Cross Street congregation burnt the book, and one forbade his wife to read it; librarians withdrew it from circulation as being unfit for family reading (though its popularity is attested by the fact that the Portico bought two copies, presumably for its male borrowers); and there were a number of hostile reviews. For all this, Ruth was neither as widely nor as harshly attacked as Gaskell’s somewhat melodramatic image of herself as ‘St Sebastian tied to a tree to be shot at with arrows’ (Letters, pp. 220–1) implies. Many of her friends and acquaintances, including Florence Nightingale, Dickens, Anna Jameson and Charles Kingsley, liked it and supported her over it. She also received more favourable reviews than her tearful complaints of ‘abuse’ (Letters, p. 223) would suggest: apart from the already-noted criticisms, in fact, there was considerable praise for the delicacy and humanity of her treatment of the subject, and recognition that the novel would do much good. There was also almost universal delight in Sally, the Bensons’ comically blunt and good-hearted servant. Gaskell, of course, had reason to be nervous about what she had attempted, as well as suffering from chronic sensitivity about the critical reception of her writing. Today, when the issue seems altogether less contentious, the book can be read as a pioneering, albeit cautious, deconstruction of contemporary sexual hypocrisy and a vindication of women’s right to challenge patriarchal hegemonies which shape and define their actions. North and South North and South caused Gaskell less anguish than Ruth, with regard both to writing and reception, but presented her with problems of a different kind due to its mode of publication. Her somewhat fraught relations with

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Dickens over her contributions to Household Words have already been discussed, and, as noted, the difficulties in this particular case were both substantive and editorial. As Gaskell explained in a long letter of 16 July [1850] to her friend, Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, after criticism of Mary Barton for giving an unfair portrayal of the masters in favour of the workers, several people suggested that she should write another novel redressing the balance; she herself, however, felt unable to do this, partly because she considered that both sides of the question could not be represented in a single work of fiction, and partly because she did not know enough about good mill-owners and their benevolent schemes (apart from Samuel Greg, whose humanitarian efforts to benefit his employees had ended in financial failure). Interestingly, she adds that ‘I should like some man, who had a man’s correct knowledge, to write on this subject’ (Letters, p. 120) – another somewhat disingenuous disclaimer of her capabilities. Nearly five years later, though, a letter to Anna Jameson makes clear that she had in fact contemplated such a novel: ‘I had the plot and characters in my head long ago’ (Letters, p. 328). The subject certainly appealed to Dickens, who commissioned the work for Household Words, but quite apart from the ensuing problems over its serialization, another potential difficulty arose when he started serializing his own Hard Times in his periodical (it ran from 1 April to 12 August 1854). Having either read the first few instalments or heard about them from Forster, and alarmed at what seemed a close similarity in subject matter, Gaskell, already well on with her novel, wrote to Dickens, and was reassured to learn from him on 21 April that he had ‘no intention of striking’.59 Her fears of replication were anyway groundless: although concerned with industrial conditions and labouring class suffering, Hard Times is essentially an exploration of economic and ideological systems, into which the largely formulaic characters, satirically or one-sidedly presented (the demonised industrialist, the downtrodden worker, the bad father, the oppressed daughter) fit appropriately. Its mode of self-referential signification – Dickens’ stylistic extravagances in themselves challenge the heartless abstractions of Utilitarianism – separates it from the kind of topographical and social immediacy that characterizes Gaskell’s work, which, although dealing with its subject from a wider viewpoint than Mary Barton, foregrounds psychological credibility in the working out of its moral and social vision. Part of this difference of approach, of course, stems from Gaskell’s closer and more immediate links with her material. Although containing less of the environmental/contextual specificity which is such a feature of Mary Barton,60 North and South still draws heavily on Gaskell’s

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own experience. The London scenes are probably based on her visits to her Holland cousins in Park Lane and Lower Brook Street, and Helstone embodies aspects of the Cheshire countryside, Avonbank and the New Forest. More centrally, the Milton/Manchester sections incorporate not only Gaskell’s own reactions to settling in a large manufacturing city after a mainly rural childhood and adolescence, but also her familiarity with the multiple facets of the urban-industrial environment. Margaret Hale’s initial horror at the dirt and dreariness of Milton-Northern probably replicates her creator’s similar discomfiture: For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep leadcoloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay . . . Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke . . . Quick they were whirled over long straight hopeless streets of regularly-built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black ‘unparliamentary’ smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain.61 Margaret, like Gaskell, also has to get used to the fogs, evidence of poverty and suffering, and the outspokenness of the workpeople; her perambulations through the less salubrious areas of the city, and her developing acquaintance with and understanding of the realities of working-class life, through personal contact with the people themselves, all undoubtedly reflect Gaskell’s growing involvement in Manchester’s underside. The more muted portrayal of industrial deprivation, in contrast with Mary Barton – the main examples here are Bessy’s death from fluff on the lungs, and Boucher’s despairing suicide consequent on the failed strike and his inability to provide for his starving family – is due to the fact that on the whole the 1850s were a decade of greater workingclass prosperity than the Hungry Forties. Gaskell, as earlier, was using factual evidence here: details of Bessie’s lung disease were either from personal knowledge or perhaps from statistics about diseases of cotton workers supplied by James Kay, Lady Kay-Shuttleworth’s husband; the workman, Higgins, may have been modelled on George Cowell, a prominent figure in the Preston strike of 1853 (Dickens also used this strike as background material in Hard Times); and, as in Mary Barton, the careful replication of dialect authenticates both her regionalism and the ‘truth’ which she sought to represent. In a deliberate development from Mary Barton, too – despite her earlier disclaimers – Gaskell includes a much more extensive and considered

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portrayal of the ‘masters’. It has been suggested that Thornton may have been based on James Nasmyth, a local engineer and friend of the Gaskells, whose works at nearby Patricroft were one of the industrial ‘sights’ to which they took their visitors. It is also possible that Gaskell had Samuel Greg in mind when she created him: in the already-quoted letter to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, she refers to Greg and notes, ‘I think he, or such as he, might also be made the hero of a fiction on the other side of the question [-] the trials of the conscientious rich man, in his dealings with the poor’ (Letters. p. 120). Thornton is not rich, but his projected schemes for kitchens and dining-rooms for his employees may have been suggested by Greg’s humanitarian schemes. In this novel, the masters are given a much larger voice through Thornton, who debates the questions of labour relations and conditions of trade with both Margaret and Higgins. In attempting a more balanced portrayal than Mary Barton, North and South also shows a surer grasp of political economy and its ramifications, despite Gaskell’s avowals of ignorance in this area. The three-pronged discussions between Margaret and Higgins, Margaret and Thornton, and Higgins and Thornton (with Mr Hale occasionally entering as a subsidiary contributor), especially in Chapters XV, XVII, XIX, XXVIII and XXXVI, engage with questions of free and fixed prices, relations between profits and loss and wages and production, and the mutual responsibilities of employers and employed, albeit within the framework of a personal and individual discourse. The novel, too, takes a maturer look at the unions than Mary Barton: although the narrative’s essentially middle-class, conservative stance ultimately rejects them as a political tool for change or reform, Margaret’s naive inquiries elucidate not only their iniquities but also their usefulness in offering some kind of mutual support where none else seems forthcoming. The riot of factory workers, in which Margaret is injured trying to protect Thornton from their fury, is, as Bessie explains, in defiance of union recommendations: ‘there was to be no going against the law of the land . . . They would try and get speech o’ th’ knobsticks, and coax ‘em, and reason wi’ ‘em, and m’appen warn ‘em off; but whatever came, the Committee charged all members o’ th’ Union to lie down and die, if need were, without striking a blow; and then they were sure o’ carrying th’ public with them’ (pp. 197–8). Not only does Higgins separate himself from such violence, but his ability to debate the issues cogently and sensibly (and Gaskell knew working men quite as intelligent and articulate as he) is an advance on the depiction of the passionate anger of ‘this dumb people’ (Preface to Mary Barton) in her earlier industrial novel.

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North and South is an altogether more measured and discursive novel than Mary Barton, its dialogic structure indicated by individual chapter titles (which were not added until it was issued in book form) – ‘Roses and Thorns’, ‘Masters and Men’, ‘Likes and Dislikes’, ‘Men and Gentlemen’, ‘False and True’, ‘Once and Now’ – as well as by its overall title. While this somewhat schematic alignment of topics does not undermine the essentially human and personal focus of the work, its structural patterning was to some extent certainly due to its method of publication. Serialization, as has been noted, necessitated definitive textual units and breaks, which Gaskell found hard to accommodate; she also felt that the pressure to make the novel shorter than she had intended had been detrimental to the final product: ‘If the story had been poured just warm out of the mind, it would have taken a much larger mould. It was the cruel necessity of compressing it that hampered me’ (Letters, pp. 330–31). The uneasiness she felt is indicated by the changes she made when it was published as a two-volume novel at the end of March 1855. There were fairly extensive revisions to the end of the work: the serial chapter XLIV was broken up and given a new ending; part of this chapter became a new chapter XLV, with some expansion; a new chapter XLVI was created; the serial chapter XLV was broken in half and turned into a new chapter L; and the last two Household Words chapters, XLVI and XLVII, became chapters LI and LII in the book version.62 The second edition of the book form, published later in 1855, added material to chapter XLVIII and removed a paragraph which had appeared twice in the earlier edition. These rearrangements and expansions, which included more details about Margaret’s consultations with Mr Bell, her revisitation of Helstone and her resistance to her Aunt Shaw’s plans for her, enabled Gaskell to develop more fully Margaret’s growing emotional and social independence, as well as her recognition of her true feelings for Thornton and her realization that she now belongs in the industrial North, not in the pretty but decadent and backward South. They also confirm Gaskell’s conviction that the more theoretical or ideological aspects of the novel could make an impact only through the personal, a conviction which derives not only from the conventions of the genre itself at this time and the demands of its readership, but also from her own belief in the supreme importance of human contact and individual compassion as instruments of change. In putting the romance between Margaret and Thornton at the centre of the conflict-and-resolution plot, however, Gaskell is arguing – radically for her time – against rigid public/private dichotomies, and, moreover, positioning gender as an essential element

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in her resolution. Margaret’s feminine qualities of understanding and conciliation, expressed in an emotional commitment to Thornton which is based on reason and financial empowerment, as well as romantic and sexual desire, challenges the rigidity and narrow-sightedness of patriarchal systems. The French critic, Émile Montégut, noted this link between gender and social themes, in commenting on Margaret’s place in the master/workers conflicts of the novel: ‘leaning on the privilege of her sex’s immunity . . . she plays the role of arbitrator in calling upon . . . her rights as woman’.63 Gaskell’s possible debt to other fictional treatments of the ‘industrial’ theme has already been noted, and while North and South grows most directly out of Mary Barton, a particular instance of intertextuality is worth noting here. In 1851, Gaskell’s Manchester friend Geraldine Jewsbury published Marian Withers, a novel about the cotton industry in Lancashire (Accrington) in the early nineteenth century, which in several ways prefigures Gaskell’s 1855 novel. The eponymous heroine, sent away to boarding school by her mill-owning father to gain polish, returns dissatisfied with the local society of spinners and mill-owners: ‘[she] did not like them . . . she felt their shortcomings, and could not appreciate the many sterling qualities that were imbedded in the midst of their narrow prejudices and censorious ways’.64 Like Margaret, she gradually comes to appreciate the local industrialists, and takes part in schemes for educating and civilizing the working-classes by helping in a female school. Eventually she marries a wealthy factory owner, Cunningham, after being temporarily attracted to a glamorous but worthless younger man. The novel also presents various philanthropic schemes: another factory-owner, Wilcox, establishes a wash-house for his employees; and Cunningham founds a working-men’s Lyceum, for their instruction and amusement. Like North and South, too, it explores its socio-economic themes through dialogue and realistic depiction: at a dinner at the Wilcoxes’ (whose house is carefully described in terms of its materiality), discussion focuses on topics such as self-reliance versus combination, capital versus labour, and joint-stock companies; and a subsequent visit to a mill foregrounds the contrast between an employer who cares for his workers and one who exploits them (the hazards of fluff on the shopfloor are also mentioned). While Jewsbury takes a more positive view of antagonism as the source of new growth, the similarities between her and Gaskell’s works certainly suggests some kind of influence, all the more plausible because of the personal contact between the two women. They also show how intertextuality functions as a symbiotic process: Jewsbury, probably responding to earlier industrial fiction

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(including Mary Barton?), introduces a new emphasis on employers and their schemes to improve working conditions in factories in her novel; this emphasis then, directly or indirectly, feeds into Gaskell’s representation, enacting an ongoing cross-fertilization. North and South was on the whole received generously by the critics, with the notable exception of the Leader, which criticized it on two counts. First, it posited that subjects such as ‘the vexed questions of corn and cotton, of masters and men’ were incompatible with the more dramatic treatment of character which the novel form demands: ‘the Cotton Trade presents ample field for the philanthropist, the practical reformer, the political economist, and the general writer, [but] . . . it affords no proper material for the veracious delineator of human life in a harmonious, interesting whole; in a word, for the writer of fiction’.65 Second, it argued that it was untrue to the types it was depicting: stating that ‘so much of the book as related to Lancashire is full of errors which it is inconceivable for a resident in Manchester to have made, and which none but a lady could have so made’, it proceeds to list a large number of factual errors, and concludes damningly, ‘our authoress knows too little of the Cotton Trade to be entitled to increase the confusion by writing about it’.66 Not surprisingly, most reviewers focused on the novel as ‘special interest’ fiction: the Guardian, for example, declared that ‘the true purpose of the book is to throw light on difficult social questions’.67 As Gaskell’s original title (Margaret Hale) shows, however, she herself did not conceive it as an essentially documentary work and incorporated several subsidiary, though interconnected, plots and themes. The relation between individual freedom and authority, for instance, is pertinent not only to the complex issue of employers and employees and their mutual responsibilities towards each other; it also links the subplot of Margaret’s brother, Frederick, court-martialled for inciting rebellion against tyranny on his ship, and Mr Hale’s refusal to stay within a church which demands adherence to doctrines he can no longer accept. This theme has particular application to women and their roles. In negotiating demands on her as a daughter, a niece, a sister and a potential wife, Margaret faces the clash between duty and the expression of individual selfhood. This selfhood is most under threat from an oppressive male sexuality when Thornton proposes to her the first time: ‘She disliked him the more for having mastered her inner will . . . The deep impression made by the interview, was like that of a horror in a dream; that will not leave the room although we waken up, and rub our eyes, and force a stiff rigid smile upon our lips’ (p. 196). Gender and autobiography mesh here, too. When Margaret is at her aunt’s, recovering from

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the series of shocks she has experienced, at the end of the novel, she comes to the realization that ‘she herself must one day answer for her own life, and what she had done with it; and she tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working’ (p. 406). This almost exactly replicates Gaskell’s own dilemma, as expressed in letters of February and April 1850 to her friend, Tottie Fox: ‘I could say so much about . . . home duties and individual life; it is just my puzzle; and I don’t think I can get nearer to a solution than you have done’ (Letters, p. 106); ‘that discovery of one’s exact work in the world is the puzzle . . . I am sometimes coward enough to wish that we were back in the darkness where obedience was the only seen duty of women’ (Letters, p. 109). North and South may be Gaskell’s last extensive reflection on Manchester life, but it is also part of her wider ongoing debate about roles and relationships. The Life of Charlotte Brontë The Life of Charlotte Brontë is a milestone in Gaskell’s literary career for several reasons. It was her one and only venture into biography (though she considered writing a life of Madame de Sévigné, and in October 1855 actually asked the Parisian publisher, Hachette, to send her a copy of Charles Athanase’s ongoing Mémoires of the Frenchwoman, she never actually wrote it).68 It enabled her to record her feelings for the writer about whose identity she was so curious after the publication of Jane Eyre and who became a dear friend. And it helped her to clarify her own ideas about the position and difficulties of women writers, trying to negotiate the conflicting demands of private and professional life. It was also to prove the work which caused her the most distress as well as the greatest professional upheaval of her career. Like most Victorian readers of Jane Eyre, Gaskell was fascinated by the ‘uncommon’ aspect of the novel (Letters, p. 57) and curious to know who had written it. By November 1849, she had made contact with Brontë, who sent her Shirley just after it was published, but she had not yet met her. She was nevertheless able to pass on to Annie Shaen details of Harriet Martineau’s first meeting with the novelist, giving the famous description of her as ‘a little bright-haired sprite, looking not above 15’ (Letters, p. 96). Gaskell’s own meeting with Brontë did not occur until late August 1850, but turned out to be one of the most significant events of the decade for her. This meeting was engineered by Sir James and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, who, having had Brontë to stay with them at their home, Gawthorpe Hall, near Burnley, in March 1850, subsequently

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invited Gaskell to come to their Lake District residence, Briery Close, Windermere, where Brontë was again staying with them. The two women were immediately attracted to each other, though Gaskell from the beginning was aware of the great differences between them, not only in tastes and opinions, but also in personality and background. In letters describing this meeting, Gaskell stressed ‘the very peculiar circumstances in which she has been placed’ (Letters, p. 128), and later commented to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, ‘I am sure I could not have borne, (even with my inferior vehemence of power & nature) her life of monotony and privation of anyone to love’ (Letters, p. 229). The image set up here (supplemented by various – often somewhat distorted – accounts provided by other friends and acquaintances) became that on which the Life was based, with unforeseeably distressing repercussions. During the next few years, various mutual visits were arranged. Brontë visited Plymouth Grove in June 1851, April 1853 and May 1854, and, despite her crippling shyness which made her unwilling to meet any of Gaskell’s friends, their intimacy deepened in both social and literary aspects. In September 1853, after a series of postponements, Gaskell finally stayed at Haworth, the impact of which was probably even greater than that for Brontë of visiting Manchester. Her experience here reinforced the ‘Brontë story’ which she had already begun to build up in her mind: the severe and eccentric father; the wild and dreary West Yorkshire landscape; the extraordinarily enclosed and intense domestic environment; the emotional deprivation endured by Brontë herself, combined with ‘depths in her mind, aye, and in her heart too which I doubt if any one has ever fathomed’ (Letters, p. 229). The vividness of Gaskell’s impressions here were conveyed in letters to Forster and others, some of which were included verbatim in the Life itself. Brontë’s Manchester visit in May 1854 was the last time that Gaskell saw her, though they continued to correspond. She always hoped to be able to meet Brontë again, but her own increasingly hectic social and literary life, plus the fact that in June 1854, after a protracted courtship, Arthur Nicholls, Patrick Brontë’s curate, married the latter’s sole surviving daughter, prevented this. Both anxious not to intrude upon Brontë’s married life, and aware that Nicholls would not welcome intimacy with ‘heretics’ (Letters, p. 280) – that is to say, Unitarians – Gaskell kept her distance, and was therefore deeply shocked when, on return from France in April 1855, she received a letter from John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer and friend of the Brontës, telling her that Charlotte had died on 31 March. Unprepared as she was for the death, Gaskell seems almost immediately to have conceived the idea of commemorat-

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ing her friend in some way: at the end of May, she wrote to George Smith, ‘if I live long enough . . . I will publish what I know of her, and make the world . . . honour the woman as much as they have admired the writer’ (Letters, p. 345); and a week later, she repeated her intention to ‘put down everything I remembered about this dear friend and noble woman, before its vividness faded from my mind . . . I thought I would simply write down my own personal recollections of her’ (Letters, pp. 347–8). Because of this, she was less disconcerted than she might otherwise have been when, on 16 June, she received a letter from Patrick Brontë asking her to write the life of his daughter and offering to give her any information she needed. Although realizing that it would be a ‘serious task’ (Letters, p. 349), Gaskell had the necessary space (she had just finished revising North and South as a book) and inclination; for her, such an undertaking would be both a public tribute and personally therapeutic. She was also to find a supportive and sympathetic publisher for the work in George Smith. Her task, the details of which are well known, proved more formidable than she had anticipated. Brontë’s old school friend, Ellen Nussey, lent her three hundred and fifty letters, but turned out to be exacting about how they should be used. Nicholls was reluctant to allow her to see material relating to his late wife, including the manuscript of The Professor. Just tracking down information was tiring and time-consuming. For the next six months, Gaskell was constantly on the move, visiting Haworth, Ellen in Birstall, Harriet Martineau in the Lake District, and the Kay-Shuttleworths at Gawthorpe. She also made trips to places associated with Brontë, including Cowan Bridge, Roe Head, and the Chapter Coffee House in London where Charlotte and Anne had stayed on their famous identity-revealing visit to George Smith. Some material came accidentally: while she was visiting her half-sister in Dunoon later that summer, she met Dr William Scoresby, the vicar of Bradford, who told her ‘many curious anecdotes about the extraordinary character of the people round Haworth’ (Letters, p. 872). Most importantly, Gaskell also went to Brussels in May 1856, where she talked to Brontë’s former employer, Constantin Heger, and, after reading the letters which the lonely young woman had written to him, realized the passionate and despairing love she had felt for the man who was clearly the model for M Paul in Villette. Another difficulty was that Gaskell was breaking new ground with her work, in that the only models of biography available to her were male-authored ones. Significantly, reporting on her progress to Smith in late October 1855, she declared ‘I almost fancy that I have material enough, or nearly enough, gathered together to enable me to

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make a vol: about the size of Carlyle’s Life of Sterling’ (Letters, p. 372), an example readily to hand since William had borrowed it from the Portico the year it appeared (1851) and she herself had probably looked at it.69 The Gaskells’ enthusiasm for biography has already been noted, and during 1855–6, William’s Portico borrowings included Gilchrist’s Life of Etty; Boswell’s Life of Johnson (twice); G. H. Lewes’ Life of Goethe; and lives of Milton, Burns, Southey, Gainsborough and Beau Brummel. Quite apart from authorship, the only female subjects in the list of borrowings are Lady Blessington, Hannah More and Lady Stanhope. In some ways, then, Gaskell was disadvantaged by having no suitable generic prototype to follow; in others, she was fortunate in that she had an open field before her. Gaskell expresses her own sense of the difficulties to her old friend, Harriet Anderson (Carr): ‘I never did write a biography, and I don’t exactly know how to set about it; you see I have to be accurate and keep to fact; a most difficult thing for a writer of fiction’ (Further Letters, p. 155). As will be shown, it can be argued that Gaskell did in fact ‘fictionalize’ her subject, in an imaginatively fruitful way. But, equally, her determination to ‘keep to fact’ and give an accurate picture led her into great trouble. The main problem was the quintessentially Victorian dichotomy of public/private; Brontë’s life must be conveyed in all its peculiarity and hardship, but, at the same time, both her privacy and that of those connected with her had to be respected. As Gaskell told Smith, ‘I am most careful to put nothing in from Miss Brontë’s letters that can in any way implicate others. I conceal in some cases the names of the persons she is writing to’ (Letters, p. 421).70 Examination of the manuscript of the Life71 succinctly reveals these difficulties. Material is added on separate pages or on the reverse. Insertions and corrections are made, apparently to ensure accuracy – for instance in volume one, chapter 6, the specific ‘blanket weavers’ replaces the more general ‘people’, and misspellings of names, such as ‘Row Head’ for ‘Roe Head’, are rectified. Many personal names, including Ellen’s, are changed to one letter and a dash. Where the matter is potentially inflammatory or offensive, such as the Brontë girls’ time at Cowan Bridge, Branwell’s relationship with his employer’s wife, Mrs Robinson, and Brontë’s somewhat unwilling visits to the Kay-Shuttleworths, frequent deletions and alterations suggest that, in contrast to other parts where the script is fluent and unmarked, Gaskell was struggling to present a picture which was both authentic and tactful. Deleted passages in the manuscript, including more extensive details of Brontë’s anti-Catholicism and her discussions with Ellen about being old maids, also indicate a careful editorial hand.

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For all this care, however, Gaskell created the hornets’ nest she had been warned about and which she had tried to avoid. After the usual struggle to complete the work, with literary activity interrupted by social and family life, and further problematized by the difficulty of getting hold of all the relevant material, Gaskell told Smith in late December 1856 that she was planning to go abroad as soon as it was finished, since ‘[I] am extremely anxious to be out of the country at the time of its publication’ (Letters, p. 431). Proofs were available in January 1857, and finally, on 7 February, she wrote to her friend, Laetitia Wheelwright, ‘I have today finished my Life of Miss Brontë; and next week we set out for Rome’ (Letters, p. 443). Gaskell’s desire to escape the immediate response to her books was characteristic; what she did not anticipate in this case were the severe consequences of that response, which broke on her when she returned from Rome on 28 May. The main source of the trouble was her desire, expressed to Smith in October 1856, to ‘libel’ three people whom she considered part of the hostile world which had victimized Brontë. The first was Mrs Robinson (later Lady Scott) who had supposedly seduced Branwell, the tutor of her children; the second was the unscrupulous publisher, Newby, who had tried to pass off the separate Brontë novels as the work of one writer; the third was Elizabeth Eastlake, the author of the vituperative review of Jane Eyre in the Quarterly Review of December 1848. In addition to her eagerness to condemn without checking the accuracy of her sources (certainly dubious with regard to the supposed exploitation of Branwell), Gaskell had been too ready to believe and reproduce misleading or wrong information about household management at the parsonage and conditions at Cowan Bridge, under the management of the Reverend Mr Carus Wilson. Despite a few hasty pre-publication alterations to the text, following objections from Smith,72 the Life still contained much of this inflammatory material when it appeared on 25 March 1857, with a second unchanged edition following quickly in April. Then Lady Scott threatened libel action, and other offended parties, including Carus Wilson, similarly threatened to seek legal redress. All unsold copies of the book were recalled on 26 May, and apologies and retractions regarding the Scott material were printed in the Times and the Athenaeum. Gaskell, deeply distressed, since, as with Ruth, she ‘did so try to tell the truth’ (Letters, p. 454), had to spend the following months revising the work, mainly excising objectionable material, but also incidentally adding a long letter from Mary Taylor in New Zealand which had arrived too late to be included in the original version. At the end of August 1857, a third, ‘Revised and Corrected’, edition was published, but by this

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time Gaskell was completely disenchanted with the whole project: ‘for the future I intend to confine myself to lies (i.e. fiction). It is safer’ (Letters, p. 458), she wrote bitterly to William Fairburn. The textual history of the Life is interesting not only because it illuminates the relations between writer, subject and editor/publisher at this time, but even more for what it reveals about Gaskell’s own approach to biography as a genre and this work in particular. As has been noted, her warm feelings towards Brontë included awareness of the artistic and personality differences between them, and this sense of difference made her particularly anxious to present a true picture of her friend. At the same time, she wanted to play down some of the strangeness, even ‘coarseness’, which she found in Brontë’s work, and which made her uncertain about whether or not she liked Jane Eyre, fascinated by the unfathomable depths of heart hinted at in Villette, and uncomfortable with the imaginative excesses of the juvenilia, which seemed to her ‘creative power carried to the verge of insanity’ (Letters, p. 398). For her, the biography was essentially a process of recovery, a means of commemorating a woman who, although widely known as a writer, needed, in Gaskell’s eyes, to be re-presented as a member of her own sex, not an iconoclastic oddity. As she explained to Smith, in undertaking the work she had believed that ‘the more she was known the more people would honour her as a woman, separate from her character of authoress’ (Letters, p. 347); and she reiterated this in a later letter to Ellen Nussey – ‘I am sure the more fully she – Charlotte Brontë – the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife, is known . . . the more highly will she be appreciated’ (Letters, p. 376). In writing the work, then, she looked out for what she considered a feminine sense in Brontë, whether it were the latter’s pleasure in having someone to protect her, or her taste in dress, satisfying ‘her love for modest, dainty, neat attire’,73 and proving her ‘womanliness (as opposed to the common ideas of her being a “strong-minded emancipated” woman)’ (Letters, p. 430). She also emphasized Brontë’s nervousness and sense of her own insignificance. Twentieth-century critics have argued that Gaskell was responsible for creating a distorted image of Brontë, one which, in stressing her womanhood (her domestic capabilities, her dutiful behaviour to her father, her long overdue marital happiness) and her triumph over a hostile environment, obscures the uniqueness of the younger novelist’s imaginative invention.74 One reason for Gaskell’s desire to subject Brontë to a process of familiarization may have been her growing sense of the latter as an enigma whom she could hope to understand only by accommodating her to recognizable social and gender patterns. While collecting

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material, she told Maria Martineau, ‘her character . . . grows more extraordinary & more incomprehensible, i.e. beyond my comprehension, – every day’ (Further Letters, p. 139). Another reason was undoubtedly her recognition that, as women novelists, she and Brontë both had to negotiate the same public/private dichotomy imposed by their profession, justifying their art against the claims of domestic duty. This conflict was a topic of discussion between them, and an important passage in the Life foregrounds this in terms not only of Brontë but of all women writers: Henceforward Charlotte Brontë’s existence becomes divided into two parallel currents – her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were separate duties belonging to each character – not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled. When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change of employment to him. . . . But no other can take up the quiet, regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. (pp. 258–9) Gaskell’s insistence on Brontë’s sacrifice of self-interest and prioritization of household tasks (‘how orderly and fully she accomplished her duties, even at those times when the “possession” was upon her’ (p. 234)) in part, then, articulates her own questioning and guilt about the exercise of creative talents within a family context, a matter which she debates frequently in her letters. Gaskell’s creation of Brontë as a ‘figure’, contextualized within a ‘story’ with its own dramatic stages of struggle, misfortune, romantic fulfilment and tragic conclusion, also relates to her previously cited remark about the ‘lies’ of fiction, as opposed to the ‘truth’ of biography. The Life shows many novelistic features. Like the later Sylvia’s Lovers, it opens with a broad survey of historical and topographical specificity, gradually drawing the reader into the region which will be the work’s primary setting: ‘The Leeds and Bradford railway runs along a deep valley of the Aire . . . Keighley station is on this line of railway, about a quarter of a mile from the town of the same name’ (p. 11). The narrative itinerary then leads on to Haworth and the parsonage, and the characters are introduced against this backdrop. Subsidiary figures, such as

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Brontë’s two early friends, Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey, are placed alongside the central one of Brontë herself. The phases of Brontë’s life, too, are dramatized in a fictional way. For example, Patrick Brontë’s reaction to the news that Charlotte has written a novel is presented as a dialogue between the old man and his daughter, which though avowedly authentic is also an instance of careful imaginative construction. Even more notably, Smith’s first encounter with Anne and Charlotte, when they went to London to reveal their identities to him, is cast as a story in itself, with narrative build-up, suspense and imaginative speculation: Smith looks at the sisters ‘as if he could not believe that the two young ladies dressed in black, of slight figures and diminutive stature, looking pleased yet agitated, could be the embodied Currer and Acton Bell, for whom curiosity had been hunting so eagerly in vain’ (p. 269).75 Brontë as the central figure is a heroine in the traditional mould, embodying virtue and moral strength, the victim of unbelievable misfortune, whose deep emotional suffering after the death of her sisters is presented by an extradiagetic narrator as a kind of poetic elegy: She stopped up, – it was very tempting, – late and later; striving to beguile the lonely night with some employment, till her weak eyes failed to read or sew, and could only weep in solitude over the dead that were not. No one on earth can even imagine what those hours were to her. (p. 318) She is also shown as having to endure, as her biographer had, hostile and abusive critical reception, as well as experiencing admiration. Thus, like many of Gaskell’s own fictional heroines, Brontë becomes the victim of circumstances, whose life is iconic in its powers of endurance and personal resolution. As with all biographies, the question of authenticity is foregrounded here. Angus Easson has argued that the elements of ‘collaboration’ in the Life make it impossible to assess the degree of absolute truth in the portrayal.76 The work certainly caused Gaskell much emotional trauma, not least because of the personal sorrow involved; even while she was still engaged on it, she told Smith, ‘Oh! if once I have finished this biography, catch me writing another!’ (Letters, p. 421). Apart from the outraged subjects of libel, most readers gave the book a warm reception. G. H. Lewes praised its portraiture as ‘a lesson in duty and self-reliance’ and also noted that ‘it paints for us at once the psychological drama and the scenic accessories with so much vividness – that fiction has nothing

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more wild, touching and heart-strengthening to place above it’.77 Many critics praised the moving picture of Brontë, within the context of her everyday life, testifying to its vividness of description and imaginative power, in which sympathy outweighed all indelicate prying. Even where there were some doubts about the propriety of writing such an intimate (and feminine) biography, there was no such hostile criticism as Gaskell had had to face with some of her earlier work. While this did not encourage her to attempt more in this genre, suggesting that the Life really was a special labour of love, it is certainly possible that the exploration of Brontë’s experiences, and the unusual womanhood which she represented may have fed into Gaskell’s later depictions of young women struggling to reconcile duty and desire. If the work was a milestone, it was also a catalyst, re-stimulating some of Gaskell’s earlier preoccupations and inspiring her to develop them.

5 The 1860s: Achievements and Endings

People and places In December 1860, Gaskell told Norton that the year had been for her ‘[a]lmost as bad as the famous Exhibition year [1857] for people coming & going, unexpectedly, – a sort of household “But men may come, & men may go, but I (i.e. bustle) go on for ever”’ (Letters, p. 638). The frenetic movement and social activity described here, combined with a writing programme of two full-length novels, a novella, short stories and articles, characterize the last five years of Gaskell’s life. Putting everincreasing strain on her health, she continued to organize the family, engage in charitable work in Manchester – which during the Distress years of the Cotton Famine in the early 1860s was particularly demanding and exhausting – and undertake her customary round of visits, travelling in England and abroad, and receiving guests at Plymouth Grove. Her letters of this period are almost breathless in their accounts of her activities as she attempts to hold together all the diverse strands of her life. Family commitments continued to play an important part in all this. The ‘girls’, as she still called them, were growing up, but intermittently presenting her with real or imagined causes for anxiety. In 1860, Marianne was twenty-six and, even in Victorian terms, a fully fledged young woman (Dinah Craik, one of the novelists in whom Gaskell took an interest, had been living independently and supporting herself by her writing since she was twenty-two), but, as with all her daughters, Gaskell was reluctant to acknowledge her status as an individual. Although Gaskell often used her – as well as Meta – as secretary and housekeeper, she still sought to control her emotional and spiritual life. In the summer of 1862, Marianne became secretly engaged to her 122

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second cousin, Thurstan Holland, a match disapproved of by his father because of the kinship and lack of supporting Holland finances. The couple finally announced their engagement in 1864, but Gaskell was considerably upset by it; she in fact never lived to see the wedding, which took place after her death. Marianne had already given cause for concern in June 1860 when, alone in London, she was diagnosed with suspected smallpox and Gaskell had to rush south to nurse her; the smallpox turned out to be chickenpox, but her slow recovery necessitated recuperation in Germany and constant care. Marianne’s spiritual health, too, seemed threatened after a winter in Rome, during which she had been deeply influenced by Cardinal Manning. Early in 1862, she declared her intention of converting to Roman Catholicism, to the horror of both her parents. Gaskell and William responded with nearhysteria, prescribing courses of reading and lengthy theological discussions between father and daughter; in view of their liberalism on so many issues, their reaction, as Uglow notes, ‘indicates how strongly they clung to their authority over their now adult daughter’.1 Gaskell also found reasons for worrying about the other girls, though to a somewhat lesser extent. Meta’s termination of her engagement to Captain Hill in 1858, after he had proved himself morally unreliable, had resulted in continuing fragility and migraines. Gaskell was probably right to be anxious about her daughter’s health, but, again, failed to realize the importance of allowing the elder girls to develop lives of their own. Meta was a talented painter, but her mother’s agonies over the implementation of her own talents fed into her doubts about an artistic career for her daughter. With Florence and Julia, too, both of whom had left school by 1863, Gaskell was reluctant to acknowledge the move into adulthood. When, in March 1863, Florence – who had never really taken to her post-school lessons in French, German and Music at home – became engaged to a distant cousin, Charles Crompton, without telling her parents and while her mother was in Paris waiting for her and Meta to join her, Gaskell was again deeply agitated. This time it was easier to persist in the notion that her ‘child’ was too young and immature to contemplate marriage and still needed maternal protection; Gaskell also initially considered that Charles himself did not seem intellectual or spiritual enough (Letters, pp. 705–6). The crisis passed, and after the marriage Gaskell came to acknowledge her son-in-law’s worth, but she still found it hard to look on Florence other than as a vulnerable girl. It is not coincidental that her next three works of fiction all explore parent–child relationships, actual or adoptive; and that, in particular, they address the question of a daughter’s

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autonomy or self-development beyond parental influence and control. Clearly the issue was much in her mind at this time, and in her fiction at least she was able to recognize the destructiveness of an over-possessive or dependent relationship. If worrying about the family was a form of self-justification for Gaskell, a means of assuring herself and others of her dedication to ‘natural’ duties, William had to be included in her topics of concern. During the 1860s, William’s amazingly varied activities equalled – if not exceeded – her own: he taught at the Home Mission Board, Owen’s College and Working Men’s Clubs; he was a member of numerous committees, literary, educational and philanthropic; and he had his parish and ministerial work. Gaskell was anxious about his health, and organized holidays for him, the most notable a trip to Rome in February 1864. In this decade, in fact, husband and wife nearly always took separate holidays, and although this in no way indicates a breakdown of the marriage, it does perhaps suggest how their lives had diverged. Significantly, the most important independent action Gaskell ever took was the purchase of ‘The Lawn’, a house at Holybourne, near Alton in Hampshire. Ostensibly, she bought it as a retirement home for William and the two unmarried daughters, the transaction being kept secret from William so that it could be a surprise. As has often been pointed out, however, she must have realized – as turned out to be the case – that he would never leave Manchester. It seems far more likely that she saw the house as a symbol of her financial autonomy, a final concrete signifier of her artistic identity, as well as of her purchasing power. It also permitted her to substitute a much-longed-for rural environment for smoky city life. Gaskell’s geographical movements were as wide and frequent as ever in the 1860s. She returned to Oxford twice in 1860 and again in 1864, each time relishing the ceremonies and lavish entertainments – what she called the ‘charming Oxford dissipation’ (Further Letters, p. 217)2 – and responding eagerly to a way of life so different from her own Manchester one. Between streams of visitors to Plymouth Grove (many for the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Manchester in September 1861), she herself paid visits to London, Winchester, Worthing, Eastbourne and Cambridge, as well as to favourite haunts such as Silverdale and Edinburgh, plus further north in Scotland, in the Dunkeld area. Many of these trips were in order to recover from ill-health or over-work, but they were also essential for her writing; only by getting away from her normal duties and commitments could she hope to complete the many pieces she had promised her publishers – from single stories for All the Year Round, to the three volumes of

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Sylvia’s Lovers for Smith, to the ongoing instalments of Wives and Daughters for the latter’s Cornhill Magazine. On top of all this, she began her explorations for the new house, she and the two elder daughters looking at properties throughout the south of England. Even after they had found ‘The Lawn’, activity did not cease. It cost £2,600, and she had to ask Smith to advance her £1,000 on her future writings – yet further commitment – in order to complete the purchase. The last few months of her life were dominated by arrangements for alterations to the house and frantic trips to London to buy furnishings, in all of which Marianne and Meta were given a large part to play. It was both fitting and tragically ironic that after all this work, Gaskell was to die in the house soon after, on 12 November 1865, just as the final touches had been made prior to finally letting William into the secret, and as she and the girls were preparing to welcome him into the new home. In the 1860s, Gaskell also found the energy to make further frequent visits abroad, often to places she had been to before and which lured her again. In July 1860, she, Marianne, Julia and Florence went for the third time to Germany; while Marianne took the waters at Kreuznach to recover from the effects of chickenpox, the others enjoyed themselves in Heidelberg. They saw the famous actress, Adelaide Ristori, on a day trip to Mannheim, went on boat trips, and partook of the summer festivities in the city; typically, Gaskell’s account of the visit includes references to the people they met (often old friends), their constant need for bodily sustenance, and the marvellously picturesque environment – for example, the beautiful rainbow they saw from the river, and the colourful student bands in torchlight procession (Letters, pp. 627–8). In May 1862, Gaskell took Meta and her friend, Isabel Thompson, to Brittany and Normandy, via Paris, partly to enable her to do research for her projected Memoirs of Madame de Sévigné. They visited Chartres, the French writer’s house at Les Rochers, near Vitré, Avranches, St Lo, Caen and Rouen, gathering material and memories which she subsequently incorporated into her three 1864 articles for Fraser’s, ‘French Life’. In March 1863, Gaskell was in Paris again, this time with Julia, Florence and Meta, on their way to Italy. As of old, she took up Madame Mohl’s offer of hospitality, enjoying the usual cosmopolitan society at the Rue du Bac. Further south, they were delayed at Avignon for twelve days because bad weather prevented sailings from Marseilles, but they were in Rome by the beginning of April. From Rome, they went to Perugia, Assisi, Orvieto and Siena, ending up with a longer stay in Florence in May, where they met old friends such as Mrs Stanley, Isa Blagden, Lady Charlotte Locker, Charlotte Cushman and Thomas and Theodosia Trollope, resident in

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the Villino Trollope in the Piazza della Indipendenza.3 The party continued to Venice, to see the tourist sights there, and then gradually made their way back via Verona, Milan, Lucerne and Basle to Paris, where Charles met them and they made purchases for Florence’s trousseau (she was married on 8 September). Reliving her previous golden Italian experiences with her younger daughters must have been rewarding for Gaskell, but, as has been suggested, she could not wholly recapture the glamour of her earlier visit, partly because Norton was not with them this time.4 The following August, the whole family (minus William but with the addition of the prospective son-in-law, Thurstan, and the actual one, Charles) went for a Swiss holiday to the area around Pontresina, above Lake Geneva, a visit marked by its being a complete respite from energetic activity. Gaskell’s last two trips to France were in 1865, when her health was already showing signs of deterioration. On the first, in March, she stayed again with the Mohls, and determinedly worked at Wives and Daughters. But her attempts to avoid distractions were of little avail in Mary’s sociable household, and her spells of writing were punctuated by a series of interesting visitors, including Guizot and Montalembert, and evening soirées and concerts. Altogether, the late nights, the close rooms and the inadequate diet (Gaskell never felt she got enough to eat at the Mohls’) were too much for her, and she returned to London after three weeks to recover. The second French visit of the year was in September, when, amazingly, despite claiming to be completely ‘dead’ after all the worry over the Alton house (Letters, p. 773), she set off for a short stay in Dieppe. As always, however, once she was in new and foreign surroundings, she rallied, telling Marianne, left in charge at home, ‘the air & sky are splendid, & I feel like a different creature’ (Letters, p. 778). Here she could relax, as well as talk to another guest at the hotel, her fellow authoress, Catherine Crowe, several of whose works she had read, including the latter’s ghost stories. The literary impact of these foreign travels is piecemeal. They form part of the background to some of her short stories, such as ‘The Grey Woman’ (1861), ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ (1862) and ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ (1863). In the last of these, the delay caused to the heroine on her way back to England from Civitavecchia by the burst ship’s boiler replicates Gaskell’s own experience in 1857, though here it is in reverse, since the mishap occurred to her on the second night out from Marseilles. Ellinor Wilkins’ glimpse of the face of her old friend, Canon Livingstone, in the Carnival crowd below her balcony, also rehearses the way in which Gaskell first saw Norton in Rome, as she too was looking at

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the crowds below her. With regard to the possible influence of her German visits on her fiction, Peter Skrine notes that the action of ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ (Cornhill Magazine, May 1862) takes place in 1858, the year of Gaskell’s second visit to Heidelberg; he also claims that the story itself is an attempt to write in the German manner of the novelle.5 ‘The Grey Woman’ (All The Year Round, January 1861), written almost immediately after Gaskell’s third and last visit to Heidelberg, also shows the possible influence of these German trips and is probably based on a tale which Gaskell actually heard there. Sharps (pp. 335–6) suggests that the mention in the text of ‘184-’ and a ‘summer storm’ makes it most likely that the narrator’s learning the details through the miller replicates Gaskell’s own experience on her first visit, though it is possible that she merely invented this frame. The effects of Gaskell’s European travel are more obvious in her nonfiction of this decade. Though she does not focus on Italian scenery in her writing, she clearly became much interested in Italian politics of the time, with its struggles against tyrannical foreign rulers and bids for independence. In March 1863, Dickens published in his All the Year Round her ‘An Italian Institution’, an article about ‘La Camorra’, a powerful Neapolitan secret society which for some years held almost total sway over local politics and life there. Gaskell is fascinated by the fact that, though an agent of oppression, it also acted as a kind of protection for the working classes when the Bourbon government reneged on its responsibilities. She also focuses on Garibaldi as a heroic figure supported by and supporting the Camorra, a man ‘whose greatest triumph ever was to evoke from popular masses whatever was good, or great, or hopeful, in their natures’.6 Her admiration for this glamorous figure, shared by so many of her contemporaries, probably also led to her writing the Preface to Colonel Vecchi’s Garibaldi on Caprera (1862). The narrative opening of ‘An Italian Institution’ (‘When the traveller, only a few years ago, entered Naples from the sea, he was struck by the circumstance . . . ’(p. 341)) gives immediacy to the text, although of course Gaskell had never actually been to Naples or wandered around its streets, and was relying on her own imaginative reconstruction of second-hand sources. Its main subjects, though – the ‘wild justice’ of lawless rebellion, the power of organized groups, and the degree to which anarchic action can be countenanced – were ones which she had already treated in Sylvia’s Lovers, and she had more to say about them. In a letter of May 1863 to Marianne, she asks her to look for another article on the Camorra in the June Cornhill, ‘but don’t breathe to anyone that the said article is mine’ (Letters, pp. 933–4). Having found the material so fascinating, she had

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produced another piece on it. This time, however, Smith found it too well-worn a topic, and a potential row between him and Gaskell threatened to erupt when he sent the article to Froude, the editor of Fraser’s, without her permission. Froude did not, as she had feared, feel obliged to publish ‘La Camorra’ ‘for old friendship’s sake’ (Letters, p. 703), and the ‘unlucky piece of work’ (Letters, p. 712) never appeared in print. The most substantial piece of writing of this decade which shows the influence of Gaskell’s French travels is her group of three articles, ‘French Life’, published in Fraser’s in April, May and June 1864. The work is another instance of her remarkable generic inventiveness: formulated as a series of purported journal entries, it incorporates historical anecdote, French and English social history, travel writing, Gothic melodrama and personal reminiscence, making up a richly diverse whole. It is avowedly based on actual experience: in late September 1863, Gaskell told Smith, ‘I have ever so many things begun . . . “Notes of a Wanderer” – all sorts of odd bits, scenes, conversations with rather famous people in Paris, small adventures, descriptions &c &c met with during our two last journeys abroad in Brittany Paris, Rome, Florence – 50 pages written’. She adds that she plans to send this to Froude to make up for the misunderstanding over ‘La Camorra’ (Letters, p. 712). The work centres on the trip which Gaskell, Meta, and Isabel Thompson took in mid-May 1862 (the girls’ names are changed to Mary and Irene), but adds material from Gaskell’s earlier visits, focusing especially on her sojourns with Mme Mohl and her introduction to French social life through her friend. It also includes reference to the French and Italian trip of spring 1863, describing the bad weather which held up the travellers at Avignon, but includes no further Italian material. The dates heading each journal entry roughly correspond with the actual events. For instance, the visit to Normandy and Brittany, dated in ‘French Life’ between 10 and ?14 May 1862,7 took place in mid-May of that year, and the delay at Avignon, dated between 5 and 17 March 1863, also took place around this time; a letter from Gaskell to Mary Green, written from Avignon on 18 March, notes that ‘We are detained here for a few days by the Mistral, a violent wind which is preventing the boats from leaving Marseilles’ (Further Letters, p. 251). As in other of her multi-generic pieces, Gaskell achieves immediacy not only by the variety of material but also by her shifts in tense, establishing the narrator as both the textual subject and the commentator on it. The whole opens like a journal entry, using the past tense from a present perspective: ‘We went today along the Boulevard Sévastapol, Rive Gauche, to pay a call’.8 It then switches into the historic past with com-

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parisons between memories of six years ago and present conditions. Then, in the descriptions of Madame A–’s house, the narrative slips into the present tense – ‘we pass on into the bed-room, which . . . is bright and home-like’ (p. 605). Such shifts, occurring throughout the text, set up a balance between the recreative discourse of travelogue and the kind of guidebook specificity which illuminates the would-be visitor by positioning him or her in the actual scene. The latter is authenticated by comparisons between English and French customs – relations between domestic servants and employers, or eating habits, for example: ‘If we were French we should have a cup of café-au-lait and piece of bread brought into our bedrooms every morning; but, in deference to us as strangers, a tray (without a napkin) with sugar, a copper pan containing the boiling milk just taken off the kitchen fire, and the white covered jug of bright strong coffee, is put on the dining-room table’ (p. 611). The ‘Madame’ with whom the travellers are staying is clearly based on Mme Mohl, and the descriptions of middle-class Parisian life, with its receptions and notable French hostesses, derive from Gaskell’s experiences with her friend. The two most interesting sections of ‘French Life’ are the account of the Mme de Sévigné researches in Brittany, in Part II, and the story of the Marquise de Gange, a purported re-telling of an event described in the book the narrator is reading, in Part III. With regard to the former, an interesting comparison can be made between the published version and a letter which Gaskell wrote to Catherine Winkworth in July 1863, describing the trip. The letter is topographically precise, as for instance in its description of the buildings at Les Rochers, Mme de Sévigné’s country residence: ‘you have the house itself at the farthest part of the left hand, the old garden coming from it towards you, – the farmbuildings on yr right [&] the green right before you & opposite’ (Letters, p. 926). But the account is also characterized by a typically Gaskellian breathlessness and deluge of different objects of focus, listing flowers, farm birds, picturesque stone walls and fine views all in one paragraph. The Fraser’s version is more measured, though no less vivid. The first sight of Les Rochers is built up to by an account of the journey there, and the topographical specificity is more carefully controlled. The descriptions, too, are mediated through a more contemplative voice: There were larks up above, right in the depth of the blue sky, singing as if they would crack their throats for joy . . . I never saw a place so suggestive of the ideas of peace and plenty. (p. 639)

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Possibly a diary entry made at the time lies behind both the letter and the essay. The story of the Marquise de Gange is a grim tale of the period of Louis XIV, telling of a beautiful and wealthy young woman married to a cruel husband who tries to poison her, and from whom she tries to escape. Though he avoids criminal sentence after her eventual death, he is said to be haunted by her face ever afterwards. Gaskell exploits the story for its full Gothic effectiveness, and her obvious fascination with its gory and suspenseful detail reminds of similar emphases in ‘The Grey Woman’, three years before. After ‘French Life’, Gaskell published one further literary rendering of her French experiences. Three pieces in the Pall Mall Gazette – ‘Columns of Gossip from Paris’, 25 and 28 March 1865, and ‘A Letter of Gossip from Paris’, 25 April 1865 – are similar to her other writings on this topic, consisting of shrewd observations on the Paris social, political and literary scene of the day, and were undoubtedly written while Gaskell was staying with Madame Mohl. They are usually taken to be by Gaskell, although they have only recently been attributed to her.9

Gaskell and America Gaskell’s links with and interest in America cover several areas – social, political, literary – and began as early as the 1830s. On a personal level, she had many American friends, the earliest probably Julia and Samuel Dexter Bradford, wealthy Manchester inhabitants whom Gaskell and her husband met while they were living in Dover Street and after whom they named their youngest daughter.10 Unitarian connections were important in this respect: Gaskell’s Holland cousins in Liverpool had shipping links with the United States as well as religious connections with American Unitarians, and came into contact with various American visitors here; of these Gaskell herself knew Orlando Wight and William Henry Channing, both Unitarian ministers at chapels in the city. Other American links were forged in Manchester, always full of American visitors because of its importance as a centre of Unitarianism and its cotton industry.11 Yet others were forged in London, and some in Paris, at the Mohls’. Particularly significant are the Americans Gaskell either met for the first time, or with whom she re-established acquaintance, on her memorable trip to Rome in spring 1857: the William Wetmore Storys, Charles Eliot Norton, Hamilton Wilde, John Fields and his wife. Rome was full of expatriot American artists at this time, and it is quite likely that Gaskell met some of the more radical and independent women among these, including the sculptress Harriet Hosmer, the

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actress Charlotte Cushman, and the writer ‘Grace Greenwood’ (Sarah Jane Clarke). In a letter of 1857 to Edward Everett Hale, Boston Unitarian minister and prominent abolitionist with whom she became very friendly, Gaskell tells him the names of all the Americans she knows, a (much underestimated) total of fifteen, which include the Unitarian anti-slavery campaigner, Theodore Parker; Maria Weston Chapman, who later edited Harriet Martineau’s autobiography; and Mrs Shaw, the mother of Colonel Robert Shaw, famous for leading a black Northern regiment in the Civil War and the subject of Gaskell’s obituary article in Macmillan’s, December 1863. Correspondence with many of these eminent American figures also encouraged an interest in American politics and social issues, such as schemes to alleviate urban poverty. This interest became most acute in the early 1860s during the Civil War, when the Northern blockade of Southern ports drastically curtailed the export of cotton to Europe; the effects were particularly sharply felt in the textile-manufacturing areas of Manchester and South Lancashire. Gaskell’s views on and questions about America occur mainly in the correspondence with Norton and Hale in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and therefore can most appropriately be treated in the context of the latter decade. Like so many of her generation, Gaskell received her first literary impression of the United States from Fanny Trollope’s notorious Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), which she read the year of its publication. Writing to her friend, Harriet Carr, in May 1832, she asks, ‘have you read Mrs Trollope’s account of the Americans? It is so very amusing, and by abusing the Americans has won my heart. I don’t mean abusing their more solid moral qualities but their manners, which I have always disliked’ (Further Letters, p. 18). Though this naive prejudice soon disappeared, she still retained a degree of national chauvinism, albeit ironical, with regard to Americans: thanking Norton for a gift of some American cookery books, she adds teasingly ‘We can’t understand all the words used – because, you see, we speak English’ (Letters, p. 536). For an ardent traveller like Gaskell, the United States was a place she longed to visit, but family and professional commitments and lack of finances made it impossible. As early as 1841, she writes to John Pierpont, Unitarian minister of Hollis Street, Boston, who had visited Manchester in 1835, ‘We dare not hope ever to be sufficiently people at large with regard to time and money to go to America, easy and rapid as the passage has become’ (Further Letters, p. 25) – a prediction which proved unfortunately to be only too correct. Instead, she substituted a mental picture, half reality, half fantasy. In 1831, she paints a charmingly

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fanciful picture of Prince Achille Murat, Napoleon’s exiled nephew who had settled in the States, foregrounding the primitive living conditions in the ‘Back-settlements’, ‘the very coarsest sort of manual labour’ there, and the unsophisticated nature of the legal profession which Murat had taken up, ‘rid[ing] some hundreds of miles with his green bag before him, as a practising barrister in Florida’ (Further Letters, p. 4). Later, frustrated by her sense of America’s unreachable otherness, she writes to Norton: I have no notion what America looks like, either in her cities, or her country, or most of all mysterious, her forests. Sometimes I dream I am in America, but it always looks like home, whh I know it is not. (Letters, p. 597)12 The best idea she has got of America is, she claims, from a painting of the artist and feminist, Barbara Bodichon (neé Leigh-Smith) on her ‘honey-year . . . in some wild terrific part of Virginia? in a gorge full of rich rank vegetation, – her husband keeping watch over her with loaded pistols because of the alligators infesting the stream’. ‘Well!’, she adds cheerfully, ‘that picture did look like my idea of America’ (Letters, p. 607). It is certainly the ‘idea’ rather than the actuality that inspires Gaskell, like many of her fellow novelists, to use North America as a narrative device, a place where bad characters like Edward Brown in The Moorland Cottage can (perhaps) be redeemed and good ones like Mary, Jem and Job Legh in Mary Barton make better. Borrowings from the Portico Library in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as her correspondence, however, indicate the Gaskells’ desire to familiarize themselves with American history, life and letters. As well as works by Stowe and Hawthorne, Gaskell and/or William read the writings of Washington Irving, including his Life and Letters (1862–4); Longfellow’s poetry; novels by Cooper, including The Spy and The Pathfinder; James Russell Lowell’s Bigelow Papers and Fireside Travels; Oliver Wendell Holmes’ The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860) and Elsie Venner (1861); and Margaret Fuller’s Memoirs.13 In 1857, Gaskell herself wrote a Preface to Mabel Vaughan, a novel by the popular sentimental writer Maria Cummins, author of The Lamplighter. Historical and biographical works complement this list, with the addition of travel accounts by English visitors: Matilda Houston’s Hesperos: or, Travels in the West (1850); Alexander Mackay’s The Western World; or Travels in the United States in 1846–7 (1850); Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush (1852); Lord Curzon’s America.

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In addition, she may have read Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), Dickens’ American Notes (1842), and Frederick Marryat’s Diary in America (1839), since although they are not listed as borrowings the Portico Library had purchased all of them. As well as being readers of the North American Review and the Atlantic, the Gaskells read American accounts of England such as Emerson’s English Traits (1856) and Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854) by ‘Grace Greenwood’, the pseudonym of Sarah Jane Clarke, ex-patriot American writer whom Gaskell may have met in Rome. Gaskell’s interest in America was, as has been noted, greatly stimulated by her friendship with Charles Eliot Norton, and as this interest became more political with the growing threat of Civil War in the States, it was mainly to him and Edward Everett Hale that she turned to address her questions and express her views. Although she claimed to find American politics ‘the most complicated things I know’ (Further Letters, p. 223), her correspondence with both these men show her intelligent grasp of the situation as well as her divided sympathies. Firmly antislavery in her outlook, she nevertheless deplored the suffering which the war caused for the Manchester mill-workers: as she writes to Smith in September 1862, ‘I wish North & South would make friends, & let us have cotton, & then our poor people would get work’ (Letters, p. 698). At the beginning of the hostilities, in June 1861, she lays out to Norton the main issues as she understands them, and, not without reason, questions the desirability of preventing the South from seceding: I understood ‘the Union’ to be an expansive, or contractive contract . . . the time was sure to come when you could not act together as a nation; the only wonder to me is that you have cohered so long . . . So that altogether I (average English) cannot understand how you (American) did not look forward to ‘secession’ at some time not very far distant. (Letters, pp. 654–5) She imagines separation from the South as amputation, ‘getting rid of a diseased member’ (Letters, p. 653), an idea she articulates a couple of months later to Hale: ‘I should think (to use a country phrase here) “it was good riddance of bad rubbish”’ (Further Letters, p. 222). Significantly, too, she recognizes that compelling the South to abolish slavery ‘implies the means of compulsion’ (Letters, p. 656), involving considerable practical difficulty. As she struggled to grasp the facts in order to refute charges of Northern aggression among many of her

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acquaintances in Manchester, where sympathies were generally with the South, America became a very different kind of ‘idea’ for Gaskell: the tragedies of the Civil War, compounded by Lincoln’s assassination on 14 April 1865, turned the New World into a personal site of struggle between an ideological humanitarianism and a more immediate practical one. She felt this even more urgently because of her own experiences of the effects felt in the ‘Cottonopolis’ of Manchester. As well as being involved with the District Provident Society and negotiating with Florence Nightingale to send her some out-of-work women to be nurses, she – with Marianne and Meta – wore herself out trying to alleviate the suffering at a local level. The reality now seemed rather different from the fantasy. As an educated middle-class Victorian, Gaskell was not unusual in her interest in the New World. Her links with the world of American publishing and with contemporary American authors, however, are of particular relevance to this study. As has been noted, she had published in American periodicals as early as 1849–50, when, through the recommendation of Mary Howitt, she offered ‘The Last Generation in England’ and ‘Martha Preston’ to Sartain’s Union Magazine. In the 1850s, she was approached by the New York publisher, Harper’s, but her dealings with this firm were not entirely satisfactory. As a letter written to Norton on her behalf by Marianne makes clear, Harper’s London agent, the ‘rascally’ Sampson Low, had passed her short story, ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ to the American publisher before she had had time to check on rumours of the firm’s precarious finances. The letter notes that ‘[Low] has done one or two “dodgy” things of the kind before. She [Gaskell] is afraid that her story will be lost altogether, having got into Harper’s hands’ (Further Letters, p. 178). In the event, the story was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in January 1850, but Gaskell’s displeasure increased when Harper’s reprinted My Lady Ludlow without seeking her permission, thus preventing her from offering it to Ticknor and Fields, who had also asked for it. Another proxy letter to Norton, this time by Meta, states that: ‘Of course . . . it brings her dealings with the Harper-firm to an end – for ever’ (Further Letters, p. 194). Gaskell was too good a businesswoman to refuse a favourable offer; her dealings with Harper’s did not cease here, and, indeed, she wanted to widen her contributions to the American periodical market by publishing in the Atlantic. At the same time, however, she was not prepared to alter her mode of writing to suit the American market. Reporting to Norton that the editor of the Atlantic, a Mr Underwood, had suggested that the different manners and culture in America demanded a different

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literary approach, she states, ‘I quite understand an Editor’s desire to please his readers, but . . . I can not (it is not will not) write at all if I ever think of my readers, & what impression I am making on them’ (Letters, p. 503). Even so, she did not consider that ‘Lois’ was ‘too good for the American taste, as represented by Mr Underwood’ (Letters, p. 536). Gaskell’s work was published widely in America, many of her texts appearing almost simultaneously there and in England. Mary Barton, for example, was published six weeks after the Chapman and Hall edition, by Harper, which also issued The Moorland Cottage two months after its English publication. Cranford and Ruth both appeared rapidly in the States; Right at Last’ and Other Tales, published by Sampson Low in May 1860, was issued by Harper the following month, and, again, only a month intervened between Smith, Elder’s edition of Sylvia’s Lovers in February 1863 and Harper’s edition in March. Several of Gaskell’s journal publications appeared in book form first in America: North and South, having been serialized in Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855, was issued as a single (unrevised) book by Harper in February 1855, a month earlier than Chapman and Hall’s book version; the Harper’s edition of Wives and Daughters, originally serialized in the Cornhill, beat the Smith, Elder English edition by ten days. Many of her short stories, too, appeared in American periodicals such as Littel’s Living Age and Harper’s Weekly, again almost simultaneously with their English publication. Because of her popularity in the States, Gaskell, like Dickens, was very vulnerable to piracy. The unauthorized issue of My Lady Ludlow by Harper has already been mentioned. More serious was the publication of ‘Lizzie Leigh’ by Dewitt and Davenport in May 1850, under Dickens’ name, a (probably) deliberate falsehood which was maintained through several subsequent American editions of the story, right into the 1870s. Several of these editions were published by T. B. Peterson of Philadelphia, who also pirated ‘A Manchester Marriage’ and ‘The Crooked Branch’ from Household Words and All the Year Round respectively. Interestingly, Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë was issued in America from the first edition, thus circulating the misrepresentations and offensive passages which were removed in England in the third edition.14 The most important of Gaskell’s American literary connections are those with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She met the former at a luncheon party in London in early June 1853, the year of Stowe’s first visit to Europe, in which she delivered a number of antislavery addresses throughout the British Isles. In Stowe’s record of this visit, her Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854) – which the Gaskells

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read the year of its publication – she describes this meeting: ‘Mrs Gaskell, authoress of Mary Barton and Ruth . . . has a very lovely, gentle face, and looks capable of all the pathos that her writings show’, adding that ‘I promised her a visit when I go to Manchester’.15 Gaskell’s initial impresssion of Stowe was equally – though perhaps more guardedly – favourable, as she reported to Julie Schwabe: I saw her twice [in London]; but only once to have a good long talk to her; then I was 4 or 5 hours with her, and liked her very much indeed. She is short and American in her manner, but very true & simple & thoroughly unspoiled & unspoilable. She promised (almost offered) to stay with us the two days she is allowing herself in Manchester; early in September; but I don’t know if she will, for she is not famous for keeping her engagements, as we know. (Letters, p. 237)16 On 5 July, the projected visit was still uncertain, and since there is no record of this Manchester visit in either Sunny Memories or Gaskell’s extant letters, it may in fact not have taken place.17 The two writers did, however, meet up again twice in 1857, first in Rome in spring 1857, then in Manchester in June when Stowe finally came to the city and Gaskell took her American visitor to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. Gaskell does not record her later impressions of Stowe, but, interestingly, her friend Katie Winkworth, who accompanied her to Rome, offers a less flattering portrait of the American novelist: describing the Roman meeting, she writes that ‘she [Stowe] looks much more ladylike than I expected, but commonplace’, amplifying this somewhat dismissive description with the comment that she is ‘very abrupt, and distraite, not popular here any more than in England’.18 Although there are no records of her opinions of Stowe’s literary achievements, Gaskell would certainly have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and may have discussed it, as well as its author, with Brontë on the Haworth visit. William borrowed the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853) the year after it appeared, which would suggest familiarity with the original. They knew Sunny Memories, and in March 1859, Gaskell expresses a wish to read Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing, just published. Likewise, literary influence can be only speculative. Stowe’s fiction, while more in the generic tradition of nineteenth-century domestic realism than of maleauthored American Romanticism, may have been too dissimilar in background to have inspired direct intertextuality. Yet North and South (1855), one of Gaskell’s overtly ‘purpose’ novels, is structured on the

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same scheme of regional difference as Stowe’s famous book, and – albeit in a wholly other context – sets up a similar contrast between the pragmatics of benevolent paternalism and the ideological rights of individuals (both novels have masters and men, controllers and controlled); both works, too, seek to reconcile an abhorrence of bodily and psychological enslavement with a belief in the importance of Christian hierarchies. Gaskell stops short of Stowe’s creed of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice, with its attendant sentimental evangelism, but she does similarly articulate the importance of feminine values in the processes of spiritual and social amelioration. More potentially fascinating is Gaskell’s literary relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Paradoxically, though there are several links between them, they never actually met, though they were often near to doing so. Hawthorne resided in England during and after his consulship at Liverpool, from 1853–8 and again from June 1859 to July 1860, and during that time he became friendly with several of Gaskell’s own friends and family. In Liverpool, he met Henry Bright, one of the leading Unitarians in the city, whose sister was a friend of Marianne Gaskell and with whom Hawthorne spent much time. Hawthorne also became friendly with Charles Holland,19 the eldest son of Gaskell’s Uncle Samuel Holland, of Liverpool and Plas Yn Penrhyn, North Wales, an acquaintance perhaps initiated through Bright. He appears never to have met Gaskell in Liverpool,20 though, nor in Manchester, where he stayed in July 1857, to visit the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. In London, Hawthorne stayed with Gaskell’s friends the Howitts, but not when she was there. He was also lodging briefly at Redcar in November 1859, in order to finish his novel Transformation, at almost the same time as Gaskell was not far down the coast in Whitby, researching for what was to become Sylvia’s Lovers, but though Bright wrote to him to alert him of this fact and suggested a mutual meeting between the three of them, this never happened.21 And although both of them stayed with the Wetmore Storys in Rome, Hawthorne’s visit occurred in 1858, the year after Gaskell’s, so again they failed to meet. Gaskell must, however, have heard much about Hawthorne through these various connections. She had certainly read The Scarlet Letter; a somewhat curious reference in a letter to Edward Chapman suggests that she had sent a copy of it to him for re-binding (Letters, p. 142). She was particularly interested in Transformation (the title under which the novel originally appeared in England, before the American one, The Marble Faun, was substituted), about which she had considerable knowledge prior to its publication. In September 1859, she is teasing her

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publisher, George Smith, by asking him if he knows what the novel is about; she does, she boasts, and adds her opinion that ‘it will perplex the British public pretty considerably’ (Letters, p. 575).22 The work particularly appealed to her because it brought back memories of her happy weeks in Rome in 1857, and she was delighted to be able to tell her friends that she knew the statue sculpted by Story and described in the ‘Cleopatra’ chapter: ‘I come in crowing over my having seen the thing even in the clay and describing more fully what every one is asking about’ (Letters, p. 674).23 Curiously, this enthusiasm had not prevented her earlier that year from telling Bright that she had ‘not the least wish to join in a testimonial to Mr Hawthorne’ and declined to sign the subscription list (Further Letters, p. 193). Evidence of direct literary influences with regard to Hawthorne are as unquantifiable as with Stowe, but more suggestive. Various critics have posited that Gaskell’s novel, Ruth (1853), may owe something to The Scarlet Letter: both deal with a fallen woman who is, or becomes, skilled in needlework; in both, the illegitimate child becomes a form of blessing to the mother; and Bellingham, the name of the Governor in Hawthorne’s novel, is the name of Ruth’s seducer. Interestingly, G. H. Lewes, in his review of Ruth in the Westminster Review of April 1853, uses implicit reference to The Scarlet Letter in contrasting Gaskell’s treatment of her heroine with the heavy punishment meted out to fallen women by some contemporary novelists: ‘[the heroine’s repentance is] like a badge of infamy perpetuating the memory of her shame: a scarlet letter flaming upon her breast, attracting every eye . . . As the world goes, a woman’s fault is always painted irretrievable; and she is, in consequence, nailed up as a scare-crow on the barn-door of society, to protect the interests of female virtue!’.24 Angus Easson suggests further links between Hawthorne and Ruth in pointing to similarities between Gaskell’s heroine and the Lady of the May in Hawthorne’s short story, ‘The May Pole of Merrymount’, although he does not imply that Gaskell knew Hawthorne’s short fiction.25 There may also be intertextual links between The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Cranford (1853), in the figures of the elderly woman shopkeeper and the theme of decaying and faded gentility.26 Perhaps more importantly, central to Hawthorne’s narrative is the (male) witch’s curse on the Pyncheon family. Echoing this plot topic, two of Gaskell’s short stories of the 1850s, ‘The Poor Clare’ (1856) and ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ (1858) also explore the disastrous workings out of a curse; in the former, moreover, the curse is associated with supposed witchcraft. Elements of The Marble Faun, too, including the description of the Roman Carnival and the short story about the

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ghostly face in Chapter XLIII (the story which Gaskell told to Emelyn Story who then passed it on to Hawthorne) provide an interface between the two writers.27 In the widest sense, however, the Hawthorne connection seems clearest in its stimulation of an interest which first attracted Gaskell in the 1840s and which is most evident in her short story of 1859, ‘Lois the Witch’. Gaskell’s concern with Puritan New England actually pre-dates the Hawthorne connection by some years. Her earliest publications, the three short stories which appeared in Howitt’s Journal between June 1847 and January 1848, were issued under the pseudonym of ‘Cotton Mather Mills’, and there was some possibility that Mary Barton might be issued similarly. The choice of this name – quite apart from its punning suitability for a writer dealing with industrial Lancashire – implies familiarity with the New England writer’s name, if not with his works. Mather was, of course almost inevitably referred to in histories of New England, especially those of Massachusetts and the Salem witch-trials. So Gaskell could have read about him in, say, George Bancroft’s History of the Colonization of the United States (1846–66), held in the Portico, which discusses New England witchcraft in Volume III, and quotes copiously from Mather’s Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1689).28 She was certainly familiar with some of Mather’s writings, parts of which she quotes verbatim in ‘Lois’. Mather himself forms a point of the triangle which links him, Hawthorne and Gaskell via the topic of witchcraft. Already stimulated by accounts of the Salem witch-trials by, or including mention of, Mather, Gaskell would have found additional imaginative fuel in her reading of The Scarlet Letter, which, while it does not focus centrally on witchcraft, notes the hold that witches had upon the Puritan consciousness as a sign of the community’s social and moral vulnerability to the anarchy of otherness. In Hawthorne’s Custom-House Introductory, he refers to his earliest American ancestor, William Hathorne, who came to Salem in 1630 and was a ‘bitter persecutor’ of Quakers. He also describes William’s son, John, one of the judges in the Salem witch-trials: ‘[he], too, inherited the persecuting spirit and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him’ (p. 9). Hawthorne’s focus on inherited family guilt, here and in The House of the Seven Gables, may have sharpened Gaskell’s interest in the subject of long-worked-out curses. Recall of Hawthorne’s novel, combined with her later reading in American history, probably stimulated an idea which had lain dormant for some years, inspiring Gaskell to write her story which she offered, somewhat

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reluctantly, to Dickens in 1859 for his new periodical, All the Year Round.29 Other sources for ‘Lois’ have also been suggested: A. W. Ward, the editor of the Knutsford edition of Gaskell’s works, refers to a real-life incident in which a local community had to be prevented from killing an old woman said to be a witch, and which ‘made a deep impression upon Mrs Gaskell, who frequently made mention of it in her family’.30 She may have consulted historical works, such as Thomas Wright’s Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (1851) which William borrowed in 1851 and which contains a chapter on ‘The Days of Satan in New England’; and Joseph Ennermoser’s History of Magic, translated by Gaskell’s friend, William Howitt, which William borrowed in 1854 and which also deals with ‘the frenzy which raged at the time in New England, and is familiar to all readers of American History as the Salem witchcraft’.31 This work also contains an account of the trials themselves, mentioning Mather and other prominent figures. It is, however, generally agreed that the closest and most likely literary source is Charles Upham’s Lectures on Witchcraft, Comprising a History of the Delusions in Salem (Boston, 1831),32 a work which she probably encountered through the American historian, John Gorham Palfrey, who was in London in June 1856, researching for his own History of New England (1859). A letter from him to Gaskell at this time informs her that ‘I am told that there is only one copy in London of the contemporaneous book on the Salem Witchcraft Trials, which I mentioned to you – Calef’s “More Wonders of the Invisible World”’. He then continues: When I go back to America, I will see whether I can lay hands on any thing important in relation to the subject, if you continue to feel an interest in it; and should anything be within my search, I will send it to you.33 Ehrenpreis suggests that Upham’s work was the text which Palfrey found for Gaskell, who had clearly been searching for source material. There are certainly many echoes of it in ‘Lois’: background details such as mention of pirates off the coast of Massuchusetts and reference to the Devil’s red book which the witches have to sign; almost verbatim transcription of some passages with a few changes, the result either of carelessness or of the desire not to copy exactly; use of the same primary sources employed by Upham, including Judge Sewall’s diary, Mather’s writings, the Salem jurors’ declaration, and Jonathan Cary’s submission. The similarities are too close for coincidence; for example, Upham

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writes of Judge Sewall’s repentance, ‘[he] handed up to the pulpit a written confession, acknowledging the error into which he had been led, praying for the forgiveness of God and his people, and concluding with a request to all the congregation to unite with him in devout supplication, that it might not bring down the displeasure of the Most High, upon his country, his family, or himself’.34 ‘Lois’, describing the same event (though not naming Sewall, merely calling him ‘an old, old man’) has: ‘handed up to the pulpit a written confession, which he had once or twice essayed to read for himself, acknowledging his great and grievance error in the matter of the witches of Salem, and praying for the forgiveness of God and of His people, ending with an entreaty that all then present would join with him in prayer that his past conduct might not bring down the displeasure of the Most High upon his country, his family, or himself’.35 Sewall was not so old at the time, but the stress on his aged weakness adds a pathos absent from Upham’s text. Historical characters also become fictional ones, in identical pieces of text: Ann Putnam’s repentance becomes Prudence Hickson’s, and Judge Hathorne’s cruel refusal to let Jonathan Cary’s wife be physically supported during her trial is applied to Lois in the story. Gaskell’s story, which opens in 1691, deals with a young orphaned English girl, Lois Barclay, who comes to New England to find a home with her cousins, the Hicksons, in Salem. Her relatives’ household turns out to be one of extreme Puritanism: her aunt is cold and severe; her uncle is well-meaning but too ill to give much love to Lois; the son, Manesseh, is a religious fanatic who becomes convinced that it is his destiny to marry Lois; and the two daughters, Faith and Prudence, are unwelcoming and unknowable. As the drama develops, and two local girls apparently become ‘possessed’ through the machinations of witchcraft, Lois herself is caught up in the hysteria and is accused of being a witch, the cause of Prudence’s later fits and hallucinations. As has already been suggested, Gaskell almost exactly reproduces the events of the outbreak of witchcraft in Salem in 1692. So Tappau, the minister whose daughters are the first girls to be bewitched, is based on Parris, whose daughter’s and niece’s afflictions began the hysteria (Gaskell even uses the same Christian name, Abigail, for one of the girls); Tappau’s Indian servant, Hota, is charged with having bewitched the girls, as was Parris’s Indian servant, Tituba, and both women are tortured to make them confess. Both Mather and Hathorne enter the story: the latter condemns Lois to death, and part of the former’s actual address to the Salem community, as printed in his 1689 Memorable Providences, is quoted in the text. What is important, however, is the way

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that, characteristically, Gaskell has shifted the emphasis from the specific historicity to the more emblematic personal and sexual elements. Thus the story says more about her concern with obsession and betrayal than about her interest in the early history of the United States per se. Moreover, while contemporary accounts of the events in Salem foreground the real fear of the Devil’s presence as a driving force behind the hysteria, the nineteenth-century accounts which Gaskell consulted offer an alternative reading in which quarrels over land ownership or business transactions, as well as religious rivalries, were as much a cause of the outbreak as were superstition and spiritual anxiety. They also stress their authors’ convictions that both the accusations and the claimed sufferings were false, invented to promote personal interest. Gaskell, figuring the events in the context of nineteenth-century scientific rationalism, resituates the quarrels in the spheres of dysfunctional family relationships and sexual jealousy; the personal is still political, but, as in so many of her short stories, it operates within a more psychologically complex arena. Already tormented by her mad cousin’s pursuit of her, Lois is finally trapped in the net of accusation when Faith thinks she is trying to attract the attentions of Nolan, the minister whom she loves but who has no interest in her. Prudence, in an apparent fit of ‘possession’, calls out Lois’ name, Faith makes no effort to save her cousin, and Lois is charged, arrested, and finally hanged. The build-up of family resentments, exacerbated by the repressive nature of Puritan society and fuelled by religious mania and distrust of otherness, are, Gaskell makes clear, the indicators of a fatal breakdown in normal relationships between desire and love, spirituality and humanity. The references to witchcraft are cast as the production of suffering and diseased minds (Faith conjures with the old Indian woman, Nattee, to try to make Nolan love her), and show how psychological obsessions can easily be translated into action, with disastrous consequences. As Louise Henson has pointed out, ‘Lois’ is underpinned by Victorian anxieties about the controlling influence of superstition and its direct links to madness, manifested as possession by a dominant idea.36 Gaskell’s rationalist interpretation is thus an articulation of this anxiety as well as an attempt to discountenance it from a modern perspective: We read about it [witchcraft], we look on it from the outside; but we can hardly realise the terror it induced . . . the very dread of what might happen, and the constant dwelling of the thoughts, even with horror, upon certain possibilities, or what were esteemed such, really

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brought about the corruption of imagination at last, which at first they had shuddered at. (p. 162) At the same time, she still wishes to offer a mediating and redemptive vision: the final scene in the prison, in which Lois comforts Nattee, ‘dirty . . . mud-pelted, stone-bruised, beaten, and all astray in her wits with the treatment she had received from the mob outside’, and is herself comforted and strengthened by ‘the sense of the presence of a Heavenly friend’ (pp. 204–5), foregrounds, with a delicate emotionalism which manages to avoid sentimentality, the power of individual beneficence. Of the specific similarities between ‘Lois’ and The Scarlet Letter, most noticeable are the characters of Prudence and Nolan. Prudence in many ways seems to replicate Pearl, Hester’s illegitimate daughter. Both children are described as ‘elfish’ or ‘impish’ (Pearl is an ‘imp of evil’ (p. 93) and Prudence is an ‘impish child’ (p. 135)). Both are also represented as, in some moods, ‘possessed’: when Hester looks into Pearl’s eyes, she sees something freakish, fiend-like, malicious, ‘as if an evil spirit possessed the child’ (p. 97); and when Prudence is tormenting Nattee, Lois calls her cousin ‘one possessed’ (p. 135). Moreover, in their changeability and sudden moods of perversity, both young girls are described as being somehow alien or other: Pearl, seemingly insensible to her mother’s distress, laughs ‘like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow’ (p. 93); and Prudence can be ‘deceitful, mocking and so indifferent to the pains or sorrows of others that you could call her almost inhuman’ (p. 137). There are textual links also between Dimmesdale and Nolan. Both men are concealing secret sexual passion, conscious of the disparity between their outward godliness and unblemished status and their inner carnality. Like Dimmesdale who addresses his congregation aware that he is as sinful as they, Nolan, attracted at first glance by Lois, ‘prays in earnest, prays so heartily for himself, with such a sense of his own spiritual need and spiritual failings, that each one of his hearers feels as if a prayer and a supplication had gone up for each of them’ (p. 153). Later, when Faith sees the meeting between Lois and Nolan, which she herself has engineered, Nolan, embarassed and confused, ‘felt the veil rent off the unconscious secret of his heart’ (p. 178). These echoes of Hawthorne’s text, with its emphasis on the disparity between hidden and seen, inner and outer, and its questioning of the nature of sinfulness, strongly suggest influence, even though Gaskell’s approach to the nature of evil is less epistemological than Hawthorne’s: whereas he is

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fascinated by the predominance of the mysterious and the ambiguous, Gaskell has a secure belief in an ultimately knowable universe, in which cause and effect, deed and result are visibly linked.

Literary fulfilment: the shorter pieces The last years of Gaskell’s life were marked by the widening of outlets for her writing, as well as by the characteristic variety of her output. As has been noted, her relationship with George Smith, begun with the publication of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, also opened up for her the opportunity to publish in the Cornhill Magazine, which was founded by Smith in January 1860 and had William Thackeray as its first editor. This journal was more intellectually weighty than either of Dickens’ periodicals to which Gaskell contributed, and, because it was a monthly, rather than a weekly, made her feel under less pressure. As well as her two short stories, ‘Curious if True’ (February 1860) and ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ (May 1862), the Cornhill published serially Gaskell’s two last novels, Cousin Phillis (November 1863–February 1864) and Wives and Daughters (August 1864–January 1866). She maintained her connections with Smith, too, by publishing her ‘Columns of Gossip from Paris’ and ‘A Parson’s Holiday’ in the early numbers of his new evening newspaper and review, edited by Frederick Greenwood, the Pall Mall Gazette, founded in February 1865. At the same time, she did not sever her literary links with Dickens, even though she was reluctant to go on writing for him, in his replacement for Household Words, All the Year Round, the first issue of which appeared on 30 April 1859. In the last six years of her life, she gave him seven pieces for All the Year Round: ‘Lois the Witch’ and ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’ in 1859; ‘The Grey Woman’ in 1861;37 ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, ‘An Italian Institution’, ‘The Cage at Cranford’ and ‘How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle’ in 1863. A letter to an unknown correspondent in December 1862, indicating her reasons for declining to write for a new weekly publication, explains that she has made an exception in the case of Dickens because of her personal regard for him: ‘I am not in the habit of writing for periodicals . . . I choose my own subjects when I write, and treat them in the style that I myself prefer . . . I dislike & disapprove of such writing for myself as a general thing’ (Letters, p. 699). No doubt old ties were hard to break, quite apart from the fact that it was always flattering to be asked for contributions. Gaskell’s other new source of publication in this decade was Fraser’s Magazine, to which she contributed ‘Shams’ in 1863 and ‘French Life’ in 1864. Fraser’s, founded in 1830 by William Maginn, was a competitor of

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the Cornhill – though the latter had a wider circulation and offered higher payment – and, under its second editor, J. W. Parker Jr, attracted contributors such as J. A. Froude, Charles Kingsley, G. H. Lewes, John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. Always of Liberal-Conservative leanings, when Froude took over the editorship in 1860 it became essentially Unitarian in its ethical and social views. Quite apart from the fact that this would have attracted the Gaskells, Froude was a friend of theirs and it seems likely that this connection was in part responsible for Gaskell’s contributions to it. By the 1860s, Gaskell had clear preferences for where she wished to publish. In this respect, her opinions of the relative standing of the Cornhill and Dickens’ periodicals is perhaps a little anomalous in view of what she actually offered each of them in this period. She made her opinion clear to Smith in a letter of December 1859, in which she tells him that she has a story already begun, ‘120 pages of which are written & have been this year & a half; not very good, & that would not be above a 1 vol. in length. It is not good enough for the C. M. [Cornhill] – I am the best judge of that, please, – but might be good enough for the H. W.38 This was the story I once thought of furnishing for Mr C.D [Dickens]’ (Letters, p. 595). She wrote again to Smith four days later to say that she had told Dickens that she did not want to cut up her one-volume story ‘into pieces’ (Letters, p. 596), presumably a rejection of the latter’s offer to publish it. If this story – as Sharps thinks – is ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, and not, as some critics have assumed, ‘Lois the Witch’,39 then she must have overcome her objections to the new periodical and decided that Dickens could have it after all. Nevertheless, despite the evaluative distinctions she makes, it is hard to see the relative distinction between the pieces she offered to All the Year Round and those she offered to the Cornhill. ‘The Cage at Cranford’ is certainly a fairly slight comic piece, in contrast to the more literary humour of ‘Curious if True’ (which also demands a knowledge of French for full appreciation). But ‘The Grey Woman’, ‘A Dark’s Night Work’ and ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’ are all serious and complex stories, with interesting psychological and gender dimensions, certainly appealing to a thinking readership and not obvious candidates for one periodical or the other. Gaskell’s first contribution to the Cornhill, ‘Curious if True’, is a lighthearted, fanciful piece, whose setting – a mysterious French château, full of ghostly suggestions of past inhabitants – has the kind of Gothic aura of ‘Clopton House’ and ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’. This time, however, there is just fun, not threat or horror, and the narrator’s naive bewilderment is made the subject of sly irony. Purporting to be an extract from a letter by

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Richard Whittingham (the name itself gives a clue to what will follow), the story tells how the weary and benighted young man, trying to trace his ancestry in France, seeks shelter in the château, which turns out to be inhabited by a very strange company of people dressed oddly and having a party. As the names, appearance and histories of the guests are mentioned – the dwarfish little man, Monsieur Poucet; the man in huge boots who reminds Whittingham of a cat; the beautiful princess who is in deep slumber; the fat old lady who has ruined her feet by forcing them into little slippers; and the hostess who explains that her first husband, killed by her brothers, had a beard of a curious bluish hue – it becomes obvious that the narrator has strayed into the world of Perrault’s fairy-tales, characters from which are reincarnated in the halfmagical, half-realistic setting. This is not just pure fantasy, though. Rather like Angela Carter in our time, Gaskell reinvents the magic and legendary partly as a means of making ironic commentary on her own society. So, like the story’s title, the narrator’s naivety and inability to locate himself in the odd setting question the stability of the relationship between truth and fiction. Is he just stupid or are these people really part of an alien world? Does his failure to recognize them indicate modern society’s self-preoccupation which fails to see what lies around it? For the reader, at least, the magical is delightfully subverted: the princess is finally awakened by an irritated husband, the cynical M. Poucet (Tom Thumb) sneers at aristocratic privilege and defends selfpromotion, and Puss-in-Boots, though ostensibly a servant, has inflated social ambitions and lords it over his master. Neither pure satire nor pure fancy, ‘Curious if True’ is yet another instance of Gaskell’s imaginative variety, something quite unexpectedly different from any of her other writing. ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, on the other hand, both echoes and foreshadows others of Gaskell’s writings. Its use of a narrator who tells a story not his own, but with which he is closely involved, is a familiar feature of her fiction; its particular examination of an unhappy love affair through the eyes of a sympathetic male observer is developed more fully in Cousin Phillis, two years later. It also treats a theme in common with several of the pieces of this decade: male betrayal, not – as in several previous stories and novels – just as the exploitation of a trusting woman, but with the added perspective of the female’s own doubts about the validity of her romantic commitment. The story functions on several levels. On one, it functions as a kind of travel documentary, drawing on Gaskell’s memories of her German holidays. The narrator, confined to his sick bed in the inn at Heppenheim, describes his sur-

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roundings in some detail; he notes the bedroom furnishings and the particular arrangement of the living apartments, for example. He is also given information by the innkeeper about various local traditions. So he learns about marriage customs in the region; and he is told that the local people are allowed to pick grapes only on certain days in the week, their entry to the vineyards at other times being barred by a rope with a piece of straw tied to it. He also finds out that the Government fixes the date on which the grape-gathering may take place. After this has taken place, he observes that the wine made from these local grapes ‘was far from pleasant to my taste; for the best Rhine-wine is made from a smaller grape, growing in closer, harder clusters’.40 Detailed and specific as the setting is, it has little interaction with the main thematic focus of the story, which raises the wider contemporary issue of gender roles and romantic self-determination. It is particularly significant for its challenge to a popular Victorian icon – that of the angelic woman who acts as a redemptive force for an erring man. When, having seen his nurse, Thekla, crying over a letter, the narrator persuades her to tell him her history, he finds out that she has been rejected by her old lover, Franz, who has just returned and is asking her now to marry him. Her sense that he is changed for the worse is confirmed by the innkeeper, who loves Thekla himself, and who sees that Franz is shiftless and untrustworthy. Thekla’s belief that it may be her selfsacrificial duty to marry Franz is countered by the narrator’s view that ‘as she owned that she did not love him any longer, now his real self had come to displace his remembrance, she would be sinning in marrying him – doing evil that possible good might come.’41 Thekla is finally convinced by this argument, and through the near-tragedy of a sick child (there is a similar device in Mr Harrison’s Confessions) is brought to an understanding with the landlord. The story thus ends happily with the couple’s marriage. The study of the romantic complexities is fairly superficial here (Franz himself never actually appears, for instance), but Gaskell was to explore further how far duty is a valid justification for emotional commitment in her next novel, Sylvia’s Lovers. ‘The Cage at Cranford’ (All the Year Round, 28 November 1863) appeared ten years after Cranford itself, but returns wholly to the world of the earlier text, featuring the same characters, and the same social eccentricities, such as the ladies’ horror at Mr Hoggins eating bread and cheese in the drawing-room. Comedy, as before, centres on topics such as discussions about the most appropriate colour for items of clothing, and absurd verbal misunderstandings. Hopkins, commenting on Gaskell’s ability to recreate so perfectly something written long before,

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states that this story ‘might be slipped between the last two chapters [of Cranford ] without betraying a sign of its late origin’.42 Since Gaskell herself claimed to like best to reread Cranford, of all her books, she had probably familiarized herself with the earlier text in the intervening years. Her accuracy of recall here (except for the opening sentence which implies that she last wrote about the town in 1856) is certainly notable, in view of her notorious inconsistency over the names of and details about her characters. But, according to Chadwick, Gaskell herself did not like the story, and it was ‘by her daughters’ desires’43 that Ward did not include it in his Knutsford edition. Gaskell’s judgement was probably right. ‘The Cage at Cranford’ is a rather laboured joke about a ‘new and fashionable’44 present which the narrator, Mary Smith, asks Jessie Gordon to send Miss Pole from France. Jessie says she will send a cage, ‘as cages were so much better made in Paris than anywhere else’ (p. 174); Mary’s reaction sets up the misunderstanding which fuels the narrative: ‘I was rather dismayed . . . for however pretty a cage it might be, it was something for Miss Pole’s own self, and not for her parrot, that I had intended to get’ (p. 174). Although the reader is early on aware that the present is not going to be a bird-cage,45 the characters have no suspicion of the truth, even when the topless and bottomless structure, made up of calico and hoops, actually appears. Scorning the suggestion of the little maidservant, Fanny, that it is a petticoat, it is only when Mr Hoggins points them to designs in his wife’s fashion book that they realize their misapprehension. The vignette is mildly amusing, but reads rather like an afterthought. Knutsford, perhaps, could no longer furnish Gaskell with self-standing material, although of course memories of the town fed into her last novel, Wives and Daughters. ‘Crowley Castle’ first appeared in the 1863 Christmas number of All the Year Round (3 December), entitled ‘How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle’.46 Its curious title derives from the fact that it forms one in the series of stories collected as ‘Mrs Lirriper’s Lodgings’ in which each tale is linked to the part of the house occupied by the teller. It is a curious amalgam of romantic interest and melodrama. The latter feature is particularly noticeable in much of Gaskell’s fiction of the 1860s, and may in part derive from her interest in the sensation novel, just then appearing on the literary scene. Her recommendations of examples of this genre to Hachette in the late 1850s suggest direct knowledge; and in the last five years of her life, William borrowed from the Portico several works which could be classified as sensational: Caroline Clive’s Why Paul Ferrol Killed His Wife (1860); Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel

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(1863); Mary Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1863); J. S. LeFanu’s The House by the Churchyard (1863); and novels by Mrs Henry Wood. Certain elements of these – murder, mystery, revenge – form the narrative focus of Gaskell’s last stories. ‘Crowley Castle’ portrays passionate emotions and criminal action, in the more familiar context of romantic traumas and unhappy marriages. Beginning as a recall, stimulated by the narrator’s visit to the Castle and learning about the history of its past inhabitants, it moves into a detailed, but dispassionate account of family relationships and ensuing tragedy. In its perceptive contrasting of character – the unpredictable and wayward Theresa and the more solid and reliable Bessy – as well as its depiction of a conniving, social-climbing mother, it both looks back to The Moorland Cottage and foreshadows Wives and Daughters, as Sharps points out (pp. 449–54). But the inclusion of Victorine, the passionate Frenchwoman, so devoted to Theresa, her childhood charge, that she seeks to poison the latter’s first husband (who, having become wholly dissolute is killed in a duel) and actually poisons Bessy, now married to Theresa’s first love, Duke, is unconvincing and discordant. Victorine’s rages, her sinister knowledge of drugs, and her ‘deadly smile’ and ‘furtive eyes’47 are reminiscent of Dickens’ Mademoiselle Hortense, in Bleak House, an altogether more Gothic fiction. The story ends bleakly, with Theresa left alone, abandoned by Duke, to whom she is now married, and subsequently dying of a broken heart; but this conclusion fails to redeem the general lack of narrative vibrancy in the piece as a whole. Gaskell’s final All the Year Round story for Dickens in 1863 was ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, and if it is the one-volume story referred to in her letter to Smith, length was indeed one of the problems it presented. Publishing it in a weekly periodical inevitably meant cutting it up, despite Gaskell’s demurs, and once more it was the number and divisions of the instalments which caused problems. Dickens wanted it to appear in no more than six parts, whereas Gaskell thought it should stretch to between ten and twelve; it finally appeared in nine instalments, with varying breaks between the sixteen chapters. When it was issued individually, however, it seemed rather slight, as Gaskell noted in a letter of April 1863 to the publisher, Verlag Tauchnitz, who was proposing to bring it out as a single book: ‘I am very glad that A Dark Night’s Work has reached you safely. I am afraid it is rather short for one volume. I am very sorry, but alas! I had no more to say about them, having at last married Elinor [sic] happily’ (Further Letters, p. 254). There were also difficulties over the title: Dickens added ‘Dark’ to Gaskell’s original title (‘A Night’s Work’), and this adjective was retained, against

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her wishes, by Smith when he published the story in book form. Gaskell was duly annoyed with both men, but whereas Smith seems not to have been troubled by her quibbles, Dickens remarked of his dealings with her over the story that he wished ‘the fair Ellinor were not so horribly like Mrs Gaskell’,48 a reference perhaps to her firmness (obstinacy?) rather than to any other of the heroine’s qualities. The leisurely opening of ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ belies its later acute concentration on internal dilemma and psychological breakdown, and the first five chapters delude the reader into thinking that this will be merely another exploration of adolescent romantic involvement, destroyed by parental opposition, financial problems, and the lover’s weakness and betrayal of his fiancée’s trust. Future troubles are hinted at in the description of Ralph Corbett as one in whom ‘the intellect was superior in strength to either affections or passions’49 and in the mention of his ambitious nature, as well as in Edward Wilkins’ loss of control over his business, but the central and melodramatic event of the story unexpectedly alters both the direction and tenor of the narrative.50 Mr Wilkins’ unpremeditated murder of his partner, Dunster, an act which is revealed to his daughter, Ellinor, and his coachman, Dixon, immediately afterwards, precipitates the mental anguish of secret guilt and conflicting loyalties which is the story’s main focus. Mr Wilkins slips into alcoholism and economic ruin, altogether losing control of his life. Ralph is unprepared to live with a mystery hanging over his marriage which his fiancée will not reveal to him, and breaks off the engagement. Ellinor herself, already torn apart by ‘the usual struggle between the father and the lover for the possession of love’ and bearing ‘the suffering for no fault of her own’ (p. 449), faces the dilemma of deciding between loyalty to her father and revealing the truth; having chosen the former, she has to endure the consequences – a lost marriage and a life of illhealth and mental oppression. ‘A Dark Night’s Work’ contains several echoes of Gaskell’s earlier fiction. Ellinor’s suffering parallels Margaret Hale’s after she has lied about Frederick and thinks she has thereby lost Thornton forever; and her bravery in finally going to Ralph, now a famous judge, to confess all when Dixon is falsely accused of the murder is reminiscent of Mary Barton’s mad dash to Liverpool to gain Jem’s acquittal. The later story, however, shows greater psychological penetration in its depiction of the corroding effects of collusive and guilty deception: personal estrangement, breakdown of trust, and the perversion of natural feelings. Coincidentally or not, these are ideas which are explored, though more extensively, in George Eliot’s portrayal of Tito Melema in Romola, serialized in the Cornhill the year

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before and published as a separate work in July 1863. Gaskell’s story flags somewhat at the end; the scenes in Rome, though more lively and clearly echoing her own Roman experiences, seem peripheral to the whole, and the conclusion, in which Ellinor, faded and middle-aged, finally marries the clergyman who has loved her all along, is a limp coda to the earlier intensity. As Gaskell herself realized, having worked out her main idea, there was little else she could add. Of the four All the Year Round pieces of this decade, ‘The Grey Woman’ (5–19 January 1861) seems most suited to serial publication. In three parts, each ending at an important moment in the story, it is also the most appropriate for Dickens’ periodical. The previous year, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, a classic example of sensation fiction, had been serialized there, and Gaskell’s story, with its treacherous husband, mystery, and exciting escapes, is in very similar mode. It more successfully exploits her predilection for melodrama than some of her other pieces, too, containing psychological interest as well as horror, and using suspense to vitalize the narrative. It in fact, like much sensation fiction, links with the earlier Gothic genre; in many respects it is reminiscent of the novels of Ann Radcliffe. Anna Scherer’s virtual imprisonment in her husband’s gloomy château, whose two parts ‘were joined into a whole by means of intricate passages and unexpected doors, the exact positions of which I never fully understood’,51 her wanderings through its dark passages at night with her maid, her discovery of the terrible secret that her husband is a member of a ruthless gang of outlaws, and her escape in disguise are all the kinds of experiences undergone by Radcliffe’s heroines. Its setting in the late eighteenth-century Europe of unscrupulous aristocrats and obsequious peasants also suits its subject. As so often with Gaskell’s stories, the tale is framed by metafictional narrative: the narrator describes obtaining a manuscript from the miller who shelters them during a storm on a holiday near Heidelberg; the manuscript contains the Grey Woman’s story, told by herself. Starting innocuously enough, with an account of Anna’s early life at the mill, it gathers momentum as it describes how she is drawn almost passively into marriage with the charming and attentive Monsieur de la Tourelle – ‘I had got into a net through my own timidity and weakness, and I did not see how to get out of it’ (p. 312). The narrative excitement of Portion II, with Anna’s entrapment in her husband’s study alongside the corpse of the man he has murdered, her flight with her maid, Amante, and their narrow avoidance of capture by De Tourelle and his accomplices, is heightened by the portrayal of the characters’ emotional states of

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horror, fear and desperate courage. Even more interesting are the gender configurations of the story. Anna’s husband is described as almost effeminate, with his features ‘as delicate as a girl’s’ and his dress of ‘blue and silver’ (p. 309), and his bedroom filled with perfume from ‘the scent-bottles of silver that decked his toilet-table . . . more luxurious even than those which he had provided for me’ (p. 325). His femaleness, though, conceals a male ruthlessness, all the more sinister because it is so belied by his outward appearance and behaviour. Conversely, Amante, gaunt, middle-aged and strong in spirit, who disguises herself successfully as a man by removing all traces of her femininity, proves herself cleverer than the villains until the very end. At the same time, she supports Anna through her qualities of sisterly love and complete devotion. The cross-dressing not only destabilizes the characters’ own sense of identities, but also highlights false constructs of gendered behaviour, sharply contrasted in the melodramatic context. After so much dramatic engagement, the story comes to a disappointingly flat conclusion: Anna, in hiding in Frankfurt with her newly born daughter and Amante, disguised as a tailor, collapses into a ghost-like state – ‘my yellow hair was grey, my complexion was ashen-coloured; no creature could have recognised the fresh-coloured, bright-haired young woman of eighteen months before’ (p. 359). After Amante is killed, Anna marries the doctor who has secretly treated her, her life virtually over. Terrible psychological suffering is not mediated or triumphed over here; either Gaskell could conceive of no real healing process for her heroine, or, as with ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, she could think of nowhere else for her story to go. Endings seem to have presented her with particular problems in these stories. Gaskell’s two contributions to Fraser’s in this decade are strongly contrasting. ‘French Life’, already discussed, is an extensive and varied recreation of her experiences abroad. ‘Shams’ (February 1863) is a short piece, probably deriving from her experiences in Knutsford and with English provincial life in general. The opening statement about the impossibility of defining the word ‘shams’52 – ‘I really do not think we have any term of identical signification’ – immediately establishes a narrative voice which is male, humourless and stylistically pretentious. ‘He’ proceeds to attack, with cumbersome irony, what he conceives as the hypocrisies of the society around him, claiming that he has ‘a weakness for “shams”’ (p. 265). These include young men who give themselves airs, ostentatious dress, and ‘fast’ girls, ‘who are no more than sham gents’ (p. 267). Of course, he himself is the real object of the satire. As Uglow notes, ‘his own language is the greatest sham, pompous, patron-

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izing, and self-congratulatory, and dotted with foreign clichés to show what a cultured soul he is’ (p. 593). And yet one of the disconcerting aspects of the piece is that sometimes he seems to articulate what Gaskell herself might endorse: Even bonâ fide ladies might with advantage, I think, devote a little more attention to household matters, learn to order a good dinner, and understand how it should be served, nay cooked. They would then, I can answer for it, know less about nerves or faintings, and would be too busy and sensible to indulge in rough gallops and skating, sham dress or undress, flirtings, jiggetings, and fast manners. (p. 270) While this is partly the voice of complacent male assumptions about women, it may also represent Gaskell’s own sly approbation of her own domestic efficiency, as well as of the good sense which she has instilled in her daughters, who certainly do not flirt or jigget. ‘Shams’ is, like ‘Curious if True’, quite unlike Gaskell’s other writing. It was in fact only recently attributed to her (it is signed E.C.G.), and its stylistic difference perhaps still makes its authorship slightly questionable. The Wellesley Index argues that it is likely to be hers because it ‘deals with life in a country town in a manner reminiscent of Cranford’,53 but its satirical style is nothing like that of the novel. A letter of 20 October 1863 to her from Froude, who had just taken over the editorship of Fraser’s, offering her more money than Parker, suggests that the periodical had already considered an article by her; and another of 20 March 1864, asking her if she wants her name to appear with ‘French Life’, further suggests an earlier, anonymous article by her. If it is hers, it is yet another instance of her extraordinary diversity and inventiveness. Gaskell’s two pieces for the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘Columns of Gossip from Paris’ and ‘A Parson’s Holiday’, the first of which has already been discussed, were fitted in between the writing of Wives and Daughters. ‘A Parson’s Holiday’, issued in five parts between 11 August and 5 September 1865, though essentially non-fictional, has a fictional framework, purporting to be the story of a Dissenting minister, Mark N., who is trying to escape from his congregation for a month’s holiday. Each of his experiences is described in a separate part, as he visits different areas of England and Europe. In detailing these experiences, Gaskell draws on autobiographical material from as long as forty years previously: her Knutsford years, her holidays in Silverdale and Auchencairn, and her

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visits to the Continent over two decades. The assumption of a clerical male persona is especially appropriate for the journal, since, as Smith himself explained, his firm not only borrowed the name from Thackeray’s fiction (a thus named periodical appears in The History of Pendennis (1849–50) and The Adventures of Philip (1862) ), but ‘to a very unusual extent our contributors were not professional writers in the ordinary sense and were in a higher social class than most newspaper men’.54 As with ‘Shams’, Gaskell probably found delight in taking on the voice of a male alter ego, even though this one is far less ironized than the former’s narrator.

Literary fulfilment: the novels Sylvia’s Lovers In April 1863, Norton wrote to Gaskell: Since I last wrote to you I have read Sylvia’s Lovers. Had I taken up the book by chance, not knowing who wrote it, I should have read it with deep interest, and with tender, respectful admiration. But having had the happiness of knowing & loving you, and you having given me the book in a way that makes it very dear to me, – I have read it with such feeling as few other books have ever called out in me.55 Until recently, critical response to the novel has not echoed Norton’s enthusiasm and Sylvia’s Lovers has tended to be neglected in favour of Gaskell’s other better-known fiction. Contemporary reviews in general were moderate in their praise: though some admired Gaskell’s treatment of lower-class life, others felt that the subject matter was too dreary and uninteresting. Yet it represents one of her greatest fictional achievements, her only full-length historical fiction which, at the same time, has a modernity transcending its period and regional specificity. Although when Gaskell visited Whitby with Meta and Julia in early November 1859, she probably had no direct intention of basing a novel on the place, the idea of writing a story about Yorkshire appears to have been in her mind for some time. The Preface to Mary Barton refers to a tale, ‘the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire’,56 which she had begun earlier. More immediately, her researches for the Life of Charlotte Brontë had impressed upon her the crucial influence of the environment on isolated and close-knit

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moorland communities. The visit to Whitby must have reawakened her earlier ideas, conjoined with her preoccupation with themes explored in previous works. Most relevant here are those of disappearance or loss, which she had focused on especially in ‘Disappearances’ (1851) and ‘The Manchester Marriage’ (1858), both of which deal with sudden absence and equally sudden return.57 The novel, too, treats vengeance, betrayal, guilt and unhappy romance, all familiar topics to readers of her earlier work. Sylvia’s Lovers is a memorable text for a variety of reasons, but perhaps its greatest achievement is its melding of topographical vividness, historical interest and psychological perception. Each element impacts on the other in a totally consequential way, creating a whole of perfectly interrelating parts. The first of these, place and movement between places, is an important feature of all Gaskell’s work, and is especially crucial here. She was fascinated, too, by the link between environment and behaviour, in particular the psychic effect of geographical changes and the empowerment conferred by physical mobility. Sylvia’s Lovers is a supreme example of a novel in which topographical location is of vital significance to the plot, not merely as background but as an active agent in determining events and shaping character. As with the historical material, discussed below, Gaskell took immense care to ensure the accuracy of her representation. Justifying herself against charges of failure in this respect, in November 1863, nine months after the first edition of the novel, Gaskell wrote to James Dixon, who had pointed out mistakes in her text: ‘I was only there [Whitby] once for a fortnight . . . in such cloudy November weather that I might very easily be ignorant of the points of the compass if I did not look at the map’ (Letters, p. 717). Among other things, Dixon had pointed out that she had given the compass alignment of Monkshaven (Whitby) as north/south, whereas it is west/east. He had also indicated that the North Riding village, Kirby Moorside, several times referred to, was actually a real place. In response, though claiming that ‘I had forgotten that there was such a town as Kirby Moorside’ (Letters, p. 718), Gaskell changed the name in the fourth edition, issued in late 1863, albeit not consistently: in Chapters VI, VII and XXIX, it becomes ‘Kirk Moorside’, and in Chapter XXXI it appears as ‘Scarby Moorside’. She also altered the compass directions. Her exchange with Dixon shows how importantly she regarded geographical specificity in her conception of the novel. It also belies the care with which she noted details of Whitby and its environs, textually reproduced as Monkshaven.58 There were of course differences between the town as she found it and as it was in the

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1790s, in which the novel is set. But she made good use of its main features (many still recognizable today) and these become central points of reference in the plot: the Fosters’ shop, the Butter Cross, and the church high up above the town. At these locations, as well as at Haytersbank Farm,59 where Sylvia lives with her parents, most of the main events of the story occur, and Gaskell takes pains to make their positional relationships clear to the reader. In addition, as Frances Twinn points out, the coastline and beach are crucial environmental features in the narrative, constituting the site of key moments such as Kinraid’s capture by the press-gang and Bella’s near-drowning. This, she argues, makes the structural foundation of the novel not only historical but also ‘spatial, topographical and geographical’.60 The skilful use of environmental detail is well illustrated by the first two chapters, which contain passages of almost camera-like shifts between close-up and panoramic vision, a technique later developed by Thomas Hardy. Chapter I opens with a detailed description of Monkshaven, including its history and social constituents, then describes the countryside around in vividly pictorial terms, the product of acute observation. Chapter II introduces the heroine, Sylvia Robson, and her friend, Molly Corney, as figures in this landscape, on their way to sell butter in the market. Each stage of their jouney, from hilltop farm to Monkshaven itself, is focused on; the view of the sea which they gain just before dropping down into the town brilliantly encapsulates the novel’s core thematic juxtapositions of movement and stasis, time and timelessness, a specific present and an imagined future: Beyond lay the sea, like a flat pavement of sapphire, scarcely a ripple varying its sunny surface, that stretched out leagues away till it blended with the softened azure of the sky. On this blue trackless water floated scores of white-sailed fishing boats, apparently motionless, unless you measured their progress by some land-mark; but still, and silent, and distant as they seemed, the consciousness that there were men on board, each going forth into the great deep, added unspeakably to the interest felt in watching them.61 This chapter, too, sets up a contrast between wide open spaces and closer confinement, freedom and constraint, symbolized by the girls’ putting on their shoes before getting into the town. It foreshadows Sylvia’s later restrictive existence when, unhappily married to Philip Hepburn, she longs to be able to escape from her home in the shop to the cliff tops, where she can breathe freely and think sadly of the past.

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The three main historical elements of the novel, which is set in the 1790s, are the activities of the press-gang and the subsequent riot; the whaling industry; and the battle at the Siege of Acre which, in May 1799, drove Napoleon out of the Middle East. For all these, as for the topographical details, Gaskell made thorough and extensive researches. She obtained much local information about Whitby from her landlady during her visit, a Mrs Rose, whose surname was to reappear as that of one of the characters of the novel (Gaskell also used the name ‘Hester Rose’ in ‘The Crooked Branch’, published the month after her Whitby trip). Conversations with Mrs Rose and other residents enlightened her about local speech, customs and superstitions, as well as about the town’s past. Another resident, John Corney, probably told Gaskell about the Whitby press-gang riots of 1793, in which a public house was burned down, and he may have lent her George Young’s History of Whitby (1817) which provided extensive information about the area and its history. An additional source of information was the Annual Register, which listed the major events of each year: William borrowed Volume 35 (1793) on 28 January 1860, and Volumes 38 and 39 (1796/7) on 19 June 1861 from the Portico Library, for his wife’s use, as a letter from her to Marianne of March 1860 makes clear (Letters, p. 603). Gaskell also looked at Admiralty Records and other printed sources. In a further attempt to obtain as many facts as possible, Gaskell consulted General Perronet Thompson, MP for Hull and the uncle of Isabel Thompson who accompanied Gaskell and Meta on the trip to France in 1862; he gave her more information about the Yorkshire press-gang riots, as well as enlightening her about some other regional particularities. Gaskell’s careful authentification of her material is evident throughout the novel, and, as with Mary Barton, she drew on an actual event for one of the pivotal happenings. Daniel Robson’s incitement of the attack on the ‘Randyvowse’ is based on the actions of a William Atkinson, hanged for his part in the attack on press-officers in the Whitby riot of 1793. Gaskell took similar trouble to search out facts about the whaling industry, flourishing in Whitby in the 1790s but defunct by the time she went there. Her chief source here was An Account of the Arctic Regions with a history and description of the Northern Whale-Fishery (2 vols, 1820) by William Scoresby, whom she had met previously in Dunoon in 1855, and who may well have told her then of his own earlier whaling exploits as well as stories about Haworth. William Gaskell borrowed Scoresby’s book from the Portico twice, once at the end of 1859 and again in May 1860, and Gaskell’s careful perusal of it is proved not only by the novel’s technical details about whaling but also by the almost exact replication

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of Scoresby’s text in Robson’s and Charley Kinraid’s accounts of their dramatic sea adventures. Again, she used literary sources for her depiction of the Siege of Acre – largely a plotting device to enable Philip Hepburn to make reparation for his previous betrayal of Kinraid. For this piece of history, she may have read Edward Howard’s Memoirs of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith KCB (1839) and John Barrow’s The Life and Correspondence of Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith GCB (1848); there are especially close parallels between the latter and her text. The other area in which Gaskell was anxious to establish authenticity was that of dialect. Having taken pains over the Lancashire dialect in her Manchester fiction, she wanted to be equally correct in her representation of North Yorkshire speech, making a clear differentiation between the two. She again consulted Perronet Thompson, submitting the manuscript to him for his approval in this regard. Changes between manuscript and first edition, and between first and second editions, indicate her concern for linguistic accuracy.62 The success of her final version is illustrated by the fact that in his English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905) Joseph Wright cites many examples from Sylvia’s Lovers as instances of first written usage. Such specific historical and regional authenticity could have made the novel a ‘period piece’, but it is a tribute to Gaskell’s art that this was never the case. Sylvia’s Lovers depicts a period whose anteriority is stressed, but whose particular circumstances and ideological conflicts are shown to have equal resonance for Gaskell’s contemporaries. Thus the narrator’s ironic observation that, ‘looking back to the last century, it appears curious to see how little our ancestors had the power of putting two things together, and perceiving either the discord or harmony thus produced’ (p. 66) foregrounds not only the fallacy of contemporary assertions of superiority but also the novel’s psychological and social concerns, emanating from, but moving beyond, the specific historical context. This particular context is wholly appropriate to the problems and conflicts faced by the central characters: the background of disruptive events – nationally the Napoleonic Wars, locally the pressgang activities and resistance to them – images the individual dilemmas, in which tensions between duty and desire, and adherence to predetermined conditions and unrestrained autonomy, are played out on an individual level. The setting in a period where lawlessness is part of the hegemonic structures enables a wider exploration of the relation between social constraint and individual freedom. For example, the ideological questions raised by the operations of the press-gang – when personal liberty is threatened, are individuals justified in taking the law

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into their own hands? has anyone the right to impose his or her will upon others? – as well as specifically relating to the seizure of the Monkshaven sailors by the press-gang and Robson’s subsequent incitement of the riot, also relate to Philip’s moral predicament. The degree of his culpability in deciding to ignore Kinraid’s request to tell Sylvia of his capture, thus permitting him to marry her himself, is never clear-cut. As in the case of the local outrage against the seizure of the whalemen, Gaskell examines all sides of the issue. She deplores injustice and unwarranted suffering, but (as in Mary Barton) opposes violence, physical and psychological. So Daniel Robson’s actions, while understandable, cannot be condoned; and the misery which Philip causes Sylvia has to be atoned for, through the agonies of a guilty conscience and, later, bodily anguish. These issues are especially crucial in the arena of personal relationships, within the context of gender roles. Initially, the novel sets up a conventional dualism of ‘male’ and ‘female’. Maleness is defined as ‘doing’, and the men are involved in the linear temporality of history, through participation in war, politics, and public events. They seek to effect change by challenging the authority of the press-gang; and they can access the enabling power of discourse, through oratory (Robson inciting the mob, Sir Sidney Smith urging on his troops at Acre) and through the written word (Sylvia is illiterate at first, and Philip has to read and write letters for her and her mother). Charley Kinraid turns misfortune into fortune and becomes a captain in the Royal Navy. Even the shopman, Philip, dismissed by Robson as ‘little better nor a woman . . . bein’ mainly acquaint wi’ ribbons’ (p. 192), makes a success of the business. Conversely, femaleness is defined as ‘being’, instanced as passivity, and, often unvoiced, suffering. Mrs Robson and Sylvia merely listen to the whalemen’s exploits, and later wait helplessly for news of Robson’s fate, powerless against the determinations of the law. Hester Rose, already disadvantaged as a woman by being denied a partnership in the Fosters’ business, cannot speak her love for Philip, and is merely a spectator to his marriage to Sylvia. Sylvia herself, believing that Kinraid is lost, passively and almost volitionlessly accepts Philip’s urgent courtship. The narrative does not, however, wholly validate this simplified and paradigmatic duality, even while showing it as one of ‘the bars of inflexible circumstance’ (p. 201) against which the characters have to struggle. In its deeply perceptive and sympathetic portrayal of relationships, it both explores and challenges gender-essentialist constructions of behaviour, as well as foregrounding the moral complexities which such

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constructions set up. Thus Daniel Robson’s irrational violence is shown to be physically and spiritually life-destroying, breaking up his household and crushing his wife and daughter, as well as leading to his own death. The power of the male will is most devastating in its effects on female emotional life, and here Gaskell’s writing foreshadows the psychological perspicuity of George Eliot’s later novels. Sylvia, captivated by the glamorous and sexually vibrant harpooner (‘specksioneer’), Kinraid, is subsequently worn down by the far less attractive Philip, when it seems that the former is lost forever. Her wishes are overcome by the superior force of male desire; her helplessness is well imaged in a scene just before her marriage, when, miserable and confused, wishing ‘that Charley was once more here; that she had not repeated the solemn words by which she had promised herself to Philip only the very evening before’, she sees ‘her lover and affianced husband, leaning on the gate, and gazing into the field with passionate eyes, devouring the fair face and figure of her, his future wife’ (p. 298). The language of consumption here clearly symbolizes how Philip has destroyed her power of choice and objectified her into immobility. Reconciliation and moral illumination are nevertheless always possible in Gaskell’s scale of beliefs. Through the principles of forgiveness and understanding – which, though female in orientation, are not gender specific – characters learn to accommodate both circumstances and those around them. Influenced by the peace-loving Quaker, Jeremiah Foster, Sylvia begins to temper her bitter vengefulness towards the husband who has so wronged her. Her final loving unification with the dying man – one of the most moving scenes in the book – re-establishes a harmony between them in which both acknowledge their failures of compassion. Philip himself, released from his agonies of conscience and ineffectual sophistries, finds peace at last. This is not mere easy optimism on Gaskell’s part. Sylvia is left a widow, Hester Rose’s hopeless love for Philip can never be fulfilled, and, in the inevitable processes of history, Haytersbank Farm passes to another tenant. At the end, the female spirit prevails only in the memorial alms-houses ‘for poor disabled sailors and soldiers’ (p. 455) founded by Hester, and in the bathing woman’s recollection of the ‘pale, sad woman, always dressed in black’ (p. 454). There is no record of the personal anguish suffered by so many in the story. Gaskell experienced the usual problems with the writing of the novel, especially in the latter stages. Family and other commitments hindered rapid completion, and she struggled to find an appropriate title, considering ‘Philip’s Idol’ and ‘The Specksioneer’ before finally settling on the current one. But Smith was an easier task-master than Dickens had

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been, and her deep commitment to the work drove her on. She felt especially committed to it; in February 1862, anxious to know what her publishers thought of it so far, she wrote to W. S. Williams, ‘I cannot help liking it myself, but that may be because firstly I have taken great pains with it, and secondly I know the end’ (Letters, p. 675). In his introduction to the Knutsford edition of the novel, Ward argues that the work must have meant a great deal to her: ‘In what measure Mrs Gaskell had given her heart as well as her mind to this story is shown by an expression in a letter written by her about the time of its completion. “It is,” she says, “the saddest story I ever wrote”’.63 This often quoted remark sums up the quality of Gaskell’s most compelling longer fiction, which, in its mood of sombre resignation, yet avoids the tragic note on which so much of Hardy’s fiction concludes. Cousin Phillis Gaskell’s last two novels return to memories of her childhood and youth, unlike Sylvia’s Lovers which, although it draws on recent experience, is unusual in Gaskell’s oeuvre in that it does not contain any directly autobiographical material in terms either of people or events. Cousin Phillis, serialized in the Cornhill from November 1863 to February 1864, looks back to Gaskell’s years in Knutsford, and, in particular, time spent at Sandlebridge, the farm owned by her maternal grandfather, Samuel Holland. Details of the farmhouse and the Cheshire countryside are lovingly recreated; of all her works, this short novel is most coloured by a nostalgic representation of the cycles of farm activity and seasonal changes, incorporating an intensely vivid sense of the physical environment. As has often been noted, it is an essentially pastoral text – references to Virgil, Dante and Wordsworth place it both in a classical and a more modern generic context – which, at one level, mythologizes its material. Thus the first view of Phillis presented by Paul Manning, the narrator, encapsulates her iconic qualities: I see her now – cousin Phillis. The westering sun shone full upon her, and made a slanting stream of light into the room within. She was dressed in dark blue cotton of some kind; up to her throat, down to her wrists, with a little frill of the same kind wherever it touched her white skin. And such white skin as it was!64 Later in the novel, artistically objectified – as is so often the case – by Paul’s observation, enacted through retrospection, she is represented as a kind of woodland goddess:

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I can see her now, standing under the budding branches of the gray trees, over which a tinge of green seemed to be deepening day after day, her sun-bonnet fallen back on her neck, her hands full of delicate wood-flowers, quite unconscious of my gaze, but intent on sweet mockery of some bird in neighbouring bush or tree. (p. 289) Tonally, this is very different from Mary Smith’s affectionately ironic portrayal of the Cranford ladies, a difference dependent partly on gender: here, the male narrator is both an actor in the story (his foolish assurances to Phillis that Holdsworth loves her and will return to marry her precipitate the crisis) and a creator who can transform it into the emblematic. The ironic possibilities of intradiegetic narration are also exploited through him: as with Pip in Great Expectations, the reader bridges the gap between his naive interpretations (that Holdsworth is ‘a fine fellow’ (p. 221), for example) and a more complex reality (that Phillis is emotionally vulnerable and powerless to resist Holdsworth’s only half-serious flirtations). It is perhaps tempting to read the novel wholly in terms of the pastoral and mythological. Within the stasis of this apparently tranquil and mellowed world, the scenes of which ‘rise like pictures’ (p. 267) to Paul’s memory, Phillis is, as Uglow puts it, Eve in the Eden of Hope Farm, ‘who reaches for the apple of knowledge and discovers desire’ (p. 541). Holdsworth is the devil who breaks into and destroys this idyll, the male talker whose fascinating conversation seduces not only Phillis but also her father who finds it irresistible, ‘like dram-drinking’ (p. 266). But as Uglow also reminds us, Gaskell was well aware of the impact of the modern world on a place like Sandlebridge, and the confrontation between a classical or Romantic ethos and modernity is foregrounded in Cousin Phillis. Holdsworth, the ‘new’ man of scientific qualifications and foreign experience, works on the railways; and even though the line is temporarily halted by the uneven ground at Heathbridge, there is no doubt that it will soon link the rural area to the outside world of Birmingham and beyond (the railway actually came to Knutsford in 1862). Paul’s father, too, a self-educated workman ‘making a scientific name for himself’ (p. 254), is an inventor, bringing new technologies to willing farmers like Holman, as well as to industry.65 As in Wives and Daughters, Gaskell acknowledges the inevitable pace of progress, and just as agriculture and engineering must move with it, so Phillis – a child in spirit, albeit intellectually advanced – must leave her innocence and situate herself in the harsher world of adulthood.

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Within this context, Cousin Phillis also treats familiar themes: disappointed love, betrayal, paternal oppression. With regard to the last, Holman’s almost obsessive love for his daughter and desire to keep her a child are shown to be as destructive as the more violent tyranny of some of the other fathers in Gaskell’s fiction. Wholly trustful of Holdsworth’s intentions, Phillis is broken not only by the news that he has married someone else but also by her father’s inability to accept her emotional independence, as his despairing cry makes clear: ‘Phillis! Did we not make you happy here? Have we not loved you enough?’ (p. 308). Finally, after a near-fatal brain fever, she is roused out of her passive misery by the brisk, outspoken servant, Betty (a familiar type in Gaskell’s work), and the novel closes on a note of open-ended and uncertain optimism, with Phillis’s words: ‘we will go back to the peace of the old days. I know we shall; I can, and I will!’ (p. 317). This conclusion is effective in its questioning – going back to ‘the old days’ is neither desirable nor possible, and regression, not progression, may be the result of Phillis’ experiences, after all. Unlike the experience of some of the earlier heroines, female suffering here is not turned unequivocally into a source of strength, perhaps reflecting Gaskell’s growing sense that there is no simple answer to pain and disappointment. Interestingly, she had an alternative ending in her mind. Uncertain as to how many more numbers Smith wanted, she wrote to him in December 1863, offering him either a few extra lines to the existing text (which she actually felt was ‘such a complete fragment’) or two additional numbers. She outlined to him the whole story, which concludes very differently from the version which was published: . . . last scene long years after. The Minister dead, I [Paul] married – we hear of the typhus fever in the village where Phillis lives, & I go to persuade her & her bedridden mother to come to us. I find her making practical use of the knowledge she had learnt from Holdsworth and, with the help of common labourers, levelling & draining the undrained village – a child (orphaned by the fever) in her arms another plucking at her gown – we hear afterwards that she has adopted these to be her own. (Further Letters, pp. 259–60) This picture of the disappointed woman, finding consolation in work and others’ children, is much more reminiscent of the kind of story represented by ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’. The conclusion of Cousin Phillis, as it

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stands, is more ambiguous, if less positive about women’s capacity to survive, and perhaps also more honest. Wives and Daughters If Gaskell had lived longer, undoubtedly she would have produced more creative work of yet greater variety and technical sophistication. But it is hard to envisage how she could have built on Wives and Daughters, which, though cut short at the very end by her sudden death, seems the culmination of all her artistic effort, the supreme example of her imaginative talents. It is not, though, extraordinary in the context of her entire output, representing the perfection of skills exhibited in her earlier work and brought together here in a unified whole. While it does not shock or disturb, like some of Gaskell’s shorter pieces, and is less obviously experimental than some of her other writing, it is an enormously rich work, covering a wide range of thematic and generic material. Its subtitle, ‘An Every-day Story’, in fact underplays its most notable achievement, the exploration of social, psychological and gender issues within a narrative of considerable subtlety and complexity; like Middlemarch, with which it is sometimes compared, it can be considered the English provincial novel at its finest. The germ of the novel seems to have developed quickly in Gaskell’s mind. In early May 1864, she told Smith that she had ‘made up a story in my mind, – of country-town life 40 years ago’ (Letters, p. 731). She then proceeded to outline the plot, which is almost identical with the finished product: a widowed doctor, with a daughter, Molly, gets remarried to a widow who has a daughter called Cynthia; both girls are rivals for the affections of a young man, Roger Newton, whose brother has formed a clandestine union at Cambridge with a socially inferior woman; Roger sets off round the world on a voyage of naturalist exploration, having made ‘a sort of fast & loose engagement to Cynthia’ (p. 732), but Cynthia fancies someone else. Unusually for Gaskell, very few of these details, including the names, are changed in the published text. Even her grumble to Smith that ‘you may find a title for yourself, for I can not’ (p. 732) was soon resolved, for by 25 July she had settled on ‘Wives and Daughters’. The composition also proceeded relatively quickly, even though some of it was done while Gaskell was staying in Paris with Mme Mohl and writing in the same room in which her hostess was gossiping and receiving visitors. She suffered a temporary ‘low’ over its progress in January 1865, calling it ‘the wretched story’ and worrying about the division and length of the instalments – ‘I wish it was ended & done with’ (Further Letters, p. 267). In May 1865,

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she told her sister-in-law, Anne Robson, that she had just four numbers to go, ‘& such a quantity of story to get in’ (Letters, p. 761), but by August, harassed by all the business concerning the purchase of the Alton house and trying at the same time to complete articles for the Pall Mall Gazette, she was complaining that she was behind with the novel. As is well known, she died before completing the final instalment, but by then the outcome seemed so clear that the then editor of the Cornhill, Frederick Greenwood, was able to publish a speculative conclusion.66 Wives and Daughters is unusual in Gaskell’s oeuvre in that it begins with the childhood of the main character. While not implementing first-person narration, it has affinities in this respect with the Victorian Bildungsroman as exemplified by Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. It opens by depicting a significant episode in the young heroine’s life, which is to prove formative and influential; it traces her development to adolescence and beyond, through her social, moral and emotional experiences, thus enabling examination not only of the individual but also of the surrounding society. As with Brontë’s and Dickens’ novels, too, it has a fairy-tale or Gothic subtext, which is introduced by the first two chapters. The first paragraph of the novel uses the discourse of a children’s story: In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room.67 Little Molly Gibson’s visit to the annual school-visitors’ party at the Towers continues the fantasy analogy. She travels in a carriage to the grand event, and enters an enchanted world, the magical atmosphere of which is conveyed through a narrative which combines free indirect discourse and a maturer, more evaluative, voice: Green velvet lawns, bathed in sunshine, stretched away on every side into the finely wooded park; if there were divisions and ha-has between the soft sunny sweeps of grass, and the dark gloom of the forest-trees beyond, Molly did not see them; and the melting away of exquisite cultivation into the wilderness had an inexplicable charm to her. Near the house there were walls and fences; but they were covered with climbing roses, and rare honeysuckles and other creepers

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just bursting into bloom. There were flower-beds, too, scarlet, crimson, blue, orange; masses of blossom lying on the greensward. (pp. 14–15) Molly falls asleep, and is taken up by Lady Cuxhaven and Clare, the putative fairy-godmother; she is put to bed in the great castle (the Towers), where she sleeps forgotten. Discovered at last, she is terrified by the fearsome Lord Cumnor who, in asking her if she is the little girl who has been sleeping in his bed, actually plays out his fairy-tale role: ‘He imitated the deep voice of the fabulous bear, who asks this question of the little child in the story; but Molly had never read the “Three Bears” and fancied that his anger was real’ (p. 22). He also compares her to the Sleeping Beauty. The magnificence of the room furnishings and the ‘groups of ladies and gentlemen, all dressed in gorgeous attire’ (p. 24) further dazzle the young girl (we are here in the world of the enchanted château of ‘Curious if True’). Finally, she is rescued by her father and carried back to a life of normality. This episode, isolated from the rest of the novel (the main story begins some years later, when Molly is nearly seventeen), establishes an ongoing discourse of Gothic fantasy. When Clare marries Mr Gibson, the fairy-godmother becomes the stepmother who, although not exactly wicked, manages to create discord between father and child and threatens her stepdaughter’s emotional happiness; the rival princess, Clare’s daughter Cynthia, threatens to steal the Prince’s affections from Molly; the plot includes a secret marriage, clandestine meetings, and a villainous suitor (Mr Preston) who exerts a sinister hold over his prey. Later references to fairy-tale and fantasy – Cinderella and The Arabian Nights, for example – maintain this framing context. But the novel works to deconstruct this frame, especially with regard to its gender implications. As we shall see, whereas the opening suggests that Molly’s growth to adulthood will still be controlled by the authoritative and patriarchal Big Bear who will never allow her to be awakened to full consciousness, the narrative later proposes alternative visions of womanhood, a new version of romantic fiction. These early chapters also introduce other important themes. Skilfully interwoven into the narrative’s fairy-tale texture are foreshadowings of later events and preoccupations. For example, although Molly can barely reason about Clare’s behaviour, the innocent observation that she ‘could not help wishing that her pretty companion would have told Lady Cuxhaven that she herself had helped to finish up the ample luncheon’ (p. 18) not only foregrounds the latter’s intrinsic selfishness

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and deviousness, but also anticipates her future behaviour, which is always driven by self-interest. The opening also introduces the topic of class interrelations, and, again, offers a microcosm of the novel’s wider concerns, developed throughout the narrative. Through the depiction of Molly’s visit to the Towers, the reader is alerted to the complexities of the Hollingford class structures, emblematic of early nineteenth-century society. There are the all-powerful landowners, Lord and Lady Cumnor, revered by the lower orders, but differing in their attitudes towards them, Lord Cumnor’s instinctive benevolence contrasting with his wife’s condescending and organized charity. The arrogance of the upper class towards their inferiors is also revealed in Lady Cuxhaven’s remark about the people to whom they have offered hospitality: ‘Why not have both carriages out, mamma, and get rid of them all at once?’ (p. 19). The country surgeon, Mr Gibson, enjoys an intermediate social position, on good terms with both the aristocracy and the townspeople, whereas the spinster Browning sisters, respectable but faintly ridiculous, lead a much more precarious existence. Clare, too, as an ex-governess patronized by her former employees, has no real footing in society, much as she tries hard to obtain one. Wives and Daughters, in fact, covers a much wider social spectrum than others of Gaskell’s works. It contains her most extended portrayal of the aristocracy (Lady Ludlow is the other, less amplified, example, and belongs to the previous century), a section of society which she omitted from Cranford, although both novels draw on her experiences of Knutsford with its neighbouring Tatton, usually assumed to be the model for the Towers. It also focuses closely on a class with which Gaskell herself was probably familiar from her childhood days – the old gentry, families represented here by the Hamleys who consider themselves above the Cumnors. Squire Hamley, old-fashioned, obdurate, conservative and honest, boasts that he is ‘of as good and as old a descent as any man in England’ (p. 73), and asserts that ‘all those Cumnor people, you make such ado of in Hollingford, are mere muck of yesterday’ (p. 74). His obstinate family pride, however, threatens to destroy the people he cares about; he insists on envisaging a distinguished career for his elder son, Osborne, who is crushed by his father’s obsessiveness; and he considers that the younger one, Roger, is too unassuming and eccentric in his scientific interests to be taken seriously. Framing these two class-representative families are the townspeople of Hollingford and the surrounding area. These range from the ‘county families’ whom the newly married Mrs Gibson is so anxious to propitiate

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– ‘Her husband was much respected; and many ladies from various halls, courts and houses, who had profited by his services towards themselves and their families, thought it right to pay his new wife the attention of a call when they drove into Hollingford to shop’ (p. 177) – to the lesser residents, shopkeepers and labourers, as well as the middle-class ‘Cranford’ ladies. Interconnections – and tensions – between the classes are a source of humour in the novel, especially Mrs Gibson’s snobbery and anxiety that her girls should move in the best circles. But the gradual breaking down of rigid social distinctions is one of the major themes, driving the narrative to its progressive conclusion. Molly is central here. She is a physical link between her father’s house, The Towers and Hamley Hall; and she also helps to promote understanding between different social groups. For example, she alerts Lady Harriet to the arrogant prejudice of the latter’s attitudes towards those below her – ‘your ladyship keeps speaking of the sort of – the class of people to which I belong as if it was a kind of strange animal you were talking about’ (p. 161) – and she persuades her to refrain from referring to the Misses Browning as ‘Pecksy’ and ‘Flapsy’. At the same time, Lady Harriet makes Molly see the absurdity of ‘the worship paid by the good people of Hollingford to their liege lords’ (p. 164). The theme of mutual misunderstanding and prejudice is developed further in Chapter 26, ‘The Charity-Ball’, in which the excesses of social protocol and local deference to the aristocratic visitors (depicted with considerable satire) are countered by the unpardonable rudeness of the Towers party which arrives very late and makes little attempt to disguise its condescension towards the occasion. Again, it is Lady Harriet and Molly who act as agents of mediation, the latter telling the Earl’s daughter that ‘I think many people were sorry you did not come sooner’ (p. 293), the former persuading her brother to be less exclusive and to dance with the townspeople – ‘we’re a show and a spectacle – it’s like having a pantomime with harlequin and columbine in plain clothes’ (p. 295). This thematic emphasis on the gradual intermingling of classes is closely connected to ideas of evolutionary development, current at the time Gaskell was writing the novel. It is important to note that, as her letter of 3 May indicates, she set the novel in the 1820s and early 1830s (‘40 years ago’). As Pam Morris points out, she is careful to be accurate in her references; for instance, Roger’s African voyage replicates those of explorers like Mungo Park, accounts of whose travels were published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Geographical Society was founded in 1830, and the best medical education at that time was to be

The 1860s: Achievements and Endings 169

found in Edinburgh.68 But again like Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters places these concerns within the context of contemporary, later nineteenth-century ideas. In the letter referred to above, Gaskell mentions that her hero makes his name in natural science, and sets off round the world ‘(like Charles Darwin) as naturalist’ (Letters, p. 732). Darwin was Gaskell’s cousin on her mother’s side, and quite apart from her friendship with the family, she and William certainly knew his work. Moreover, Unitarians were particularly sympathetic to evolutionary theory, in terms of both its scientific and social application. In this novel, then, as in My Lady Ludlow, survival depends on social change and integration, occurring partly through the natural selection of sexual attraction and ‘unequal’ marriage. Squire Hamley’s obsession that his sons should marry into families as ‘good’ as his own is defeated, but the result is a new generation of inter-class unions: Osborne’s widow, Aimée, turns out, for all her servant class origins, to be an admirable mother, and produces a healthy, sturdy son (to whom the Squire himself rapidly becomes devoted); Molly, through her (putative) marriage to Roger, will bring a strong female independence and resoluteness to the Hamley line. Patsy Stoneman also argues for Darwinian influence in the novel in its refusal of rigid divisions between irrational or instinctive thinking (feeling/female) and scientific, rational thinking (fact/male), and its substitute vision of these as ‘different stages in an ongoing process’.69 Once more, Molly is a medium of integration here, being able to learn scientific facts from Roger, but also to ‘read’ people and their emotional states. Gaskell thus places the socio-political conditions of her early womanhood under the microscope of the 1860s, suggesting that change is both desirable and inevitable. The novel is also innovative – if not quite revolutionary – in its treatment of gender issues, and here too the fairy-tale frame is subverted. To some extent, the narrative seems to uphold the traditional male/female dichotomies. Men care for and protect women: Osborne cherishes Aimée, the Squire becomes gentle in the presence of his sick wife, Mr Gibson is a loyal and considerate father. They also have the authority conferred by knowledge, which, as in the case of Roger and Molly, can be passed to women. But, at the same time, the way in which women are subject to male constructs of femininity is made quite clear. Roger conceives Cynthia in a succession of fanciful images, none of which touches the real woman: ‘he called her a star, a flower, a nymph, a witch, an angel, or a mermaid, a nightingale, a siren, as one or other of her attributes rose up before him’ (p. 370). Similarly, he fails to see Molly properly until right at the end. More seriously, men confer on women

170 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

behavioural structures which are damaging and stultifying. For all his paternal care, Mr Gibson, like Farmer Holman, wants to keep his daughter in a state of childhood. His pet name for her, ‘Goosey’, signifies a mode of infantilization, and his much-quoted injunction to Molly’s governess, Miss Eyre, thwarts her potential intellectual development: ‘Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself’ (p. 34). Similarly, Squire Hamley’s tender concern for his wife conceals an inability to accept her other than as a helpless invalid; it is even suggested that illness is Mrs Hamley’s only possible response to her husband’s lack of sympathy for her very different tastes (p. 42). Men also exploit women, consciously or unconsciously. Osborne imposes the burden of his secret on Molly, regardless of the distress it causes her; Preston, who, interestingly in evolutionary terms is described as ‘tigerish, with his beautiful striped skin and relentless heart’ (p. 473), has Cynthia in his power, pressurizing her to keep to the engagement agreement made when she was sixteen. Such patriarchal determination makes women complicit with the images created of them; gender traits are, it is suggested, socially constructed, and women are thus encouraged to become devious and manipulative. The prime example here is Mrs Gibson, who, realizing that her only means of survival is pleasing men, strives continually to accommodate herself to their view of her. She is also, not unlike Preston, ruthless in the fulfilling of her desires, however much she conceals this beneath a benign surface. Cynthia, too, shares much of her mother’s readiness to accommodate a socially constructed self, but she is not unaware of her own part in the construction, as she tells Molly: ‘Oh, how good you are Molly. I wonder, if I had been brought up like you, if I should have been as good’ (p. 328). She also regrets that she, unlike Molly, has not had the strength of will to keep an untarnished selfidentity. As Stoneman argues, the novel shows that even apparently morally healthful gender constructs can be damaging to women. So while what she calls Roger’s ‘maternal’ instincts (warmth, consideration, protection of the vulnerable, whether in the natural or the human world) help to soothe the distraught Molly, who has just learnt that her father is to remarry, they also represent the very female codes which deny women a separate selfhood.70 He tells Molly, ‘One has always to try to think more of others than of oneself’ (p. 117), the classic creed of female self-denial, which Molly resists: ‘It will be very dull when I shall have killed myself, as it were, and live only in trying to do, and to be, as other people like. I don’t see any end to it’ (p. 135). Moreover, while

The 1860s: Achievements and Endings 171

Roger can both be self-disinterested and fulfil his ambitions in the wider world, Molly is threatened with entrapment in the world of female silence and deceit, her models either saintly, self-abnegating women (Mrs Hamley, the Misses Browning) or self-concerned, manipulative ones (Mrs Gibson, Cynthia). The novel, however, challenges gender essentialism, as it does the stasis of class divisions. It offers a newer, more progressive vision of sexual roles, most notably in the union between Molly and Roger (though Gaskell would probably not have gone so far as the BBC in envisaging Molly in breeches striding across the desert with her husband). Molly herself, too, although she is not portrayed out of the domestic sphere, is empowered as a champion and supporter of others, compelling (albeit unwillingly) Preston to give up the letters which Cynthia has written him, and holding the Hamley household together after the death of Osborne and the return of Aimée and her child. In terms of a female Bildungsroman, she has reached maturity and is recognized by those around her as an individual in her own right. As has already been noted, although Gaskell died before completing the novel, the ending that she had in mind seemed so obvious that Frederick Greenwood published an outline conclusion in the Cornhill of January 1866. As he explains there, ‘if the work is not quite complete, little remains to be added to it, and that little has been distinctly reflected into our minds’.71 He then proceeds to reconstruct the final scenes – Roger’s return from Africa, having forgotten all about Cynthia and thinking only of Molly, his showing her the flower he had plucked from her nosegay, the inevitable romantic consequence. The association of the novel with the tragedy of Gaskell’s untimely death was probably one reason for the kindly notices it received. Most reviews were highly complimentary, in particular of its presentation of deep emotion in an unobtrusive way. It was compared with Jane Austen, but seen as superior in its more sensitive portrayal of women; it was also compared advantageously with George Eliot. In concluding his praise of Wives and Daughters, Greenwood sums up what most readers would have brought away from the novel: ‘Mrs Gaskell was gifted with some of the choicest faculties bestowed upon mankind . . . these grew into greater strength and ripened into greater beauty in the decline of her days’.72

Subsequent reputation: the nineteenth century and beyond As Alison Chapman noted a few years ago, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell has been, more than most of her contemporary novelists, at the mercy of

172 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

the fashions of literary criticism’.73 Widely popular – though not always uncontentiously so – in her own day, she passed into relative obscurity in the early years of the twentieth century; significant revival of interest in her work did not occur until the 1950s, stimulated by Annette B. Hopkins’ 1952 study. Subsequently, Gaskell began to receive serious critical attention, ranging from the sociological/Marxist and feminist criticism of the 1960s and 1970s (although, interestingly, she was not included in Gilbert and Gubar’s pioneering feminist text of 1979, The Madwoman in the Attic), to the new historicist and psychological approaches of more recent decades. In the last few years, she has, albeit belatedly, re-entered the popular arena, evidenced by the huge enthusiasm for recent BBC adaptations of her fiction, and by the extensive reissue of her work in affordable paperbacks. These shifts in critical appreciation reflect the way in which Gaskell’s literary image has changed, from radical commentator on her age, to charming entertainer, and back to radical. Obituaries and early evaluations of her work reveal two main emphases: one, recognition of her engagement with the enduring traits of human nature, offering truthful pictures ‘beyond the accidents of class and fashion’;74 the other, the view that while her works have created a reputation ‘which will live long after her’,75 her achievements are still slighter than those of some of her contemporaries. So in Macmillan’s Magazine of December 1865, David Masson argues that her future position among the English writers of the day ‘will be a high one, if not amongst the highest’;76 and, thirteen years later, William Minto gives her a noteworthy place ‘among those who are comparatively unambitious in their efforts’.77 Despite the somewhat qualified admiration displayed here, responses to Gaskell’s work in the half-century after her death are generally enthusiastic, praising her ‘purity’, ‘simplicity’, acuteness of observation and story-telling skills. Yet the foregrounding of these qualities itself signifies the trend which was to dominate Gaskell criticism (where indeed it existed) until well into the twentieth century. Already by 1865, though her ‘purpose’ novels such as Mary Barton and North and South are still praised for their usefulness in the context of social-industrial relations, such works are also perceived as being too temporally specific to have lasting appeal. In contrast, the domestic-oriented novels like Cranford, Sylvia’s Lovers and Wives and Daughters, which deal with recognizable English life and exhibit a warm and nostalgic humanity, are seen as the ones which will endure, as well as most accurately reflecting her talents. Such critical prioritization led to an increasing emphasis on Gaskell as a single-book author: her ‘classic’ was considered to be Cranford,

The 1860s: Achievements and Endings 173

applauded constantly for its charm, grace and wholesomeness. This marginalization of her achievement, compounded by insistence on her morality (‘it is hardly possible to read a page of her writing without getting some good from it’)78, canonized Gaskell as a domestic, charming writer scarcely worthy of serious critical attention. Biographical criticism of the 1920s, unable to accommodate the more Gothic and melodramatic elements of her work, emphasized the maternal, private woman; as late as 1934, Lord David Cecil could assert that ‘[t]he outstanding fact about Mrs Gaskell is her femininity’.79 A. B. Hopkins was one of the first modern critics to point out how far Gaskell had slipped in critical status by the 1950s: Although new and excellent editions of Mrs Gaskell’s books indicate that she has emerged from obscurity on the tide of present interest in the Victorian scene, she has not yet been generally accorded the position among her fellow writers that her work entitles her to occupy. Certainly her contemporaries set a much higher value on her books than later generations have done.80 Hopkins takes Gaskell out of the second rank and places her in the first. While stressing that her studies of country life ‘have a peculiar authenticity because they are vitalized by affection . . . a spiritual aura that could come only from her long and loving communion with the beauty of natural objects’,81 Hopkins also notes the variety of genres with which Gaskell engaged, and indeed sees her as superior to George Eliot in her less laboured and heavily philosophical psychological realism. Furthermore, Gaskell’s social outlook, progressive in her day, ‘is still progressive’.82 Significantly, Hopkins was American, and, as Jo Pryke points out, in the United States, in contrast to the critical perspective current in Britain, interest in Gaskell as a socially radical writer flourished in the 1920s.83 As has been suggested, the recent Gaskell revival was long overdue. Even if some would see media adaptation as an artistically compromising mode of popularization, there is no doubt that the excellent BBC television version of Wives and Daughters in 1999 (and to a lesser extent the radio presentation of Cranford in 2001) introduced Gaskell to an audience who would otherwise never have discovered her. These productions, too, showed that those contemporary critics who predicted her literary endurance were right. Constantly accessible to new and revisionary critical readings, her work continues to have wide appeal. As A. W. Ward wrote in his centenary tribute of 1910, ‘Whether or not, in

174 Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life

the coming centuries, she may suddenly be in the mode or, for the moment, out of it . . . we feel assured that the hundredth anniversary of her birthday marks only a stage in the history of her fame and in . . . the history of her influence’.84

Notes

Introduction 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

Letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, 9 July 1853, in T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (eds), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932), IV, 76. Gaskell reproduced this letter in the Life, Vol. II, Chapter XIII. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Preface to Cranford (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. xxi. Margaret J. Shaen (ed.), Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (London: Longman, 1908), p. 24. She uses the term in her ‘Modern Novelists – Great and Small’, Blackwoods, LXXVII, No. CCCCLXXV, May 1855. [George Henry Lewes], ‘A Gentle Hint to Writing Women’, Leader, 18 May 1850, p. 189. Lewes wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Vivian’ in this article. George Henry Lewes, ‘The Lady Novelists’, Westminster Review, LVIII, No. CXIII, July 1852, p. 131. Bessie Raynor Parkes, Essays on Women’s Work (London, 1865), p. 121. Quoted in E. K. Helsinger, R. L. Sheets and W. Veeder (eds), The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, 3 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), III, 3. Standard, 14 October 1887. Wise and Symington op. cit., III, 68. Eliza Lynn Linton, My Literary Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1899), p. 93. Julia Kavanagh to George Smith, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Margaret Oliphant to Alexander Macmillan, Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

1 The Early Years 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

J. A. V. Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 283 and 287. Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Homes, Haunts and Stories (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, new and revised edition, 1913), p. 94. Chapple, p. 452. Anne Thackerary Ritchie, Preface to Cranford (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. x. Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1913), p. 203. Chapple, p. 332. Letter of 2 July 1827, Chapple, p. 287.

175

176 Notes 8 Chadwick, p. 3. The author reveals her gender bias, however, in her late claim that, while Gaskell inherited the ‘intellectual side of her character’ from her father, ‘her genius as a housekeeper, cook, and general home manager, proved her to be a worthy daughter of her mother’ (p. 15). 9 Chapple, p. 285. 10 J. A. V. Chapple and Anita Wilson (eds), Private Voices: the Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996). 11 Diary entry, 9 December 1837, Ibid., p. 63. 12 See Rev. George A. Payne, Mrs Gaskell and Knutsford, second edition, (Manchester: Clarkson & Griffiths, and London: Mackie & Co, 1905). It should also be noted, however, that there may well be elements drawn from Gaskell’s schoolday experiences in Warwickshire in these portrayals. 13 Letter to John Ruskin, ?late February 1865, Letters, pp. 747–8. 14 James Martineau became the new professor of mental and moral philosophy at Manchester New College in 1840, when the institution reopened in Manchester. William was clerical secretary and lecturer at the College, and he and his wife were friends of the Martineaus. 15 Memorials, pp. 25–6. 16 The young man, Charles Bosanquet, whom Gaskell and her daughters met in Heidelberg in 1858 found that his Anglican parents disapproved of his acquaintance with Unitarians and refused to meet them. See letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 16 April 1861 (Letters, pp. 647–51). 17 These texts are mentioned as used in the lessons received from her mother by the narrator of ‘My French Master’, and could well have been in Aunt Lumb’s collection of books. 18 Chapple, p. 236. 19 See Eleanor L. Sewell (ed.), The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell, (London: Longman’s, 1907). 20 See G. E. Maxim, ‘Libraries and Reading in the context of the economic, political and social changes taking place in Manchester and the neighbouring mill towns, 1750–1850’, unpublished thesis, University of Sheffield, 1979. The MS of the diary is held at Manchester Public Library. 21 Elizabeth Sewell, for example, describes the misery of the first school she attended, where the teachers were strict to the point of cruelty; and Charlotte Brontë’s sufferings at Cowan Bridge, rehearsed in Jane Eyre, became known to a wider public when Gaskell foregrounded them in her Life of Brontë. Gaskell clearly considered that good schooling was an important element in a girl’s upbringing; she took a lot of trouble over choosing a school for Marianne, rejecting one that taught only ‘accomplishments’ (see Letter to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, 12 December (1850), Letters, pp. 137–8). 22 This description, written by Jane Whitehill, the editor of the Gaskell/Norton letters, is reproduced in Chapple, pp. 450–2. 23 Chapple, pp. 450–1. 24 Chapple, p. 451. 25 The book is held at the Harry Ransom Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, and makes fascinating reading. It also contains many engravings and pictorial illustrations.

Notes 177 26 For details of Constance, see Chapple, pp. 252–4. Chapple notes the similarities between the tale of the girl in Thomson’s work and that in ‘Clopton House’, and also discusses Thomson’s literary career and output. 27 Although Gaskell says she has not managed to finish this text, it must have made an impact, since many years later she herself contemplated writing a biography of de Sévigné. See Letter to W. S. Williams, 1 February [?1862], Letters, pp. 675–6; and letter to George Smith, 18 March [?1862], Letters, p. 679.

2 The 1830s and 1840s: Marriage, Manchester and Literary Beginnings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

17

See, for instance, Letters, pp. 34 and 45–6. Letters and Memorials, II, 23. Ibid., II, 391. See letter to Lizzie Gaskell, July 1838, Letters, p. 20; and to Mary Howitt, 18 August 1838, Letters, p. 33. See Terry Wyke, ‘The Culture of Self-Improvement: Real People in Mary Barton’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 13, 1999, pp. 91–2. For a history of the Portico, see Ann Brooks and Bryan Haworth, Portico Library: a History, (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2000). For details of this and other Victorian buildings in the city, see J. J. ParkinsonBailey, Manchester: an Architectural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). An article on ‘Emerson’s Lectures’ in Howitt’s Journal, 11 December 1847, has been attributed to Gaskell, but has never been verified. Obituary in the Unitarian Herald. Quoted in J. A. V. Chapple and Anita Wilson (eds), Private Voices: the Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), p. 107. Mat Hompes, ‘Mrs E. C. Gaskell’, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. CCLXXIX, No. 1976, 1895, p. 128. This article is a valuable source of information about Gaskell, but much of its material, being somewhat anecdotal and unauthenticated, cannot be considered wholly reliable. Memorials, pp. 24–5. Uglow, pp. 85–6. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844–5), in Alasdair Clayre (ed.), Nature and Industrialization (Oxford: Oxford University Press and Open University, 1977), p. 123. Jo Pryke, ‘Wales and the Welsh in Gaskell’s fiction: sex, sorrow and sense’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 13, 1999, pp. 69–84. Chapple, pp. 321–2. The place itself and Gaskell’s account of it are variously referred to as ‘Clopton Hall’ and ‘Clopton House’. Ward, however, discussing Howitt’s publication of the piece, speaks of ‘ “Clopton Hall” – more properly Clopton House’, and entitles his reprint of the account ‘Clopton House’ (Knutsford, I, p. 502). Mrs Chadwick (p. 84) claims that the discovery of bones in a chest and the mention of a lost bride in this piece have some reference to Samuel Rogers’

178 Notes

18

19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27

28 29

30

Ginevra, but there is no indication that Gaskell had ever read Rogers’ work. Edgar Allen Poe’s Gothic tales also come to mind here, but since his ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ did not appear in England until August 1840, it cannot be a direct source. Gaskell, however, probably knew Jane Austen’s parodic version of a similar incident in Northangar Abbey (1818). ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ was published as a separate booklet in 1850, and ‘The Sexton’s Hero’ and ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’ were reissued the same year as a contribution to a fete organized by Gaskell’s friend Mrs Davenport for the benefit of Macclesfield Public Baths and Wash-houses. Elizabeth Gaskell, Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1913), p. 369. All other references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. This good-natured frankness was noted by Gaskell herself as well as (less tolerantly) by Margaret Hale in North and South. As well as suggesting personal observation, this is also a consciously pictorial image, akin to contemporary engravings of the city seen from afar, as Alan Shelston has pointed out (Alan Shelston, ‘ “I would fain be in the country”: Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester’, Portico Monograph No. 4, March 1996). It is in fact not possible to see Manchester from Dunham Park. Interestingly, too, the language used to describe the city here is almost identical to that used in Gaskell’s 1857 letter to Norton (Letters, p. 489). Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1972), p. 161. Gaskell had quite a lot of trouble with the title. Having first wanted to call it ‘John Barton’, she then suggested ‘A Manchester Love Story’, which was also rejected by her publisher. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 9. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. Bamford himself much admired the novel (see Uglow, p. 218). Mat Hompes, op. cit., pp. 130–131. These words are replicated almost exactly in Chapter 6 of the novel, in Barton’s question, ‘Han they [the factory owners] ever seen a child o’ their’n die for want o’ food?’ (p. 66). Memorials, pp. 26–7. Gaskell’s father, William Stevenson, had written on political economy, and she may well have have read some of his publications on this topic. See Angus Easson (ed.), Elizabeth Gaskell: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1991). In a letter to Mrs Greg, the wife of W. R. Greg’s brother, Samuel, who had tried to treat his workforce more generously (though resulting in financial failure and broken health), Gaskell reiterates that she had had no intention of representing ‘a part as the whole’ and thus inciting class against class (Letters, p. 73). Michael Wheeler, ‘Two Tales of Manchester Life’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 3, 1989, pp. 6–28. He also discusses the influence of this and other texts on Mary Barton in his unpublished PhD thesis, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of literary sources in Mary Barton and Ruth’, University of London, 1975. Joseph Kestner discusses Stone’s work in ‘Elizabeth Stone’s William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord and The Young Milliner as Condition-of-England Novels’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 67, No. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 736–65. Kestner is prepared to accept Gaskell’s disclaimer of having read

Notes 179 Stone’s novel, though he acknowledges some similarities between it and Mary Barton. 31 Most biographies refute Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s assertion that the manuscript was offered to ‘nearly all the publishers in London and rejected’ (Uglow, p. 182), though Gaskell herself does mention that it was refused by Moxon ‘as a gift’ (Letters, p. 250).

3 The 1850s: Growing Professionalism 1

Quoted in Marion Leslie, ‘Mrs Gaskell’s House and Its Memories’, The Woman at Home, June 1897, pp. 761–69. This article provides details about Plymouth Grove, some of which may have been used by Mrs Chadwick in her Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, new and revised edition, 1913). 2 Chadwick, op. cit., p. 302. 3 This appears not to have been her first visit to Chatsworth, since in a letter of 11 February 1852 to Agnes Sandars, Gaskell describes the ‘beautiful conservatory’ at Capesthorne as ‘almost as large as that at Chatsworth’ (Further Letters, p. 63). 4 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1972), p. 166. 5 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and Mr Harrison’s Confessions (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 189. 6 Gaskell frequently used and reused the names of people she knew for her fictional characters. Mrs Preston’s Christian name, however, was not Martha but Jane. 7 Chadwick refers to a family holiday spent near Keswick in the summer of 1852, and says that ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ emanates from this, but there is evidence only of Gaskell’s trips to Silverdale and Ambleside/Grasmere for that year. Sharps (p. 170) suggests that she may have crossed over into Cumberland while visiting Mrs Fletcher or the Davys in 1849. Certainly the topographical specificity of the piece – it mentions views of Derwentwater and Watendlath, and describes the farmhouse as being on a level with Cat Bell[s] – is strong evidence that Gaskell had actually been there. 8 Her stepmother’s brother, Anthony Todd Thomson, had first married a Christine Maxwell, a relative of the Sir John Maxwell who lived at Dunoon. The Auchencairn Maxwells lived at Orchardston House, now used as flats and a plant nursery; the last family resident was a Miss Maxwell. 9 Uglow, pp. 348–9. Chapple and Shelston’s Further Letters (p. 307) notes that Mrs Schwabe’s Christian name was Julie, not Grace, as has up to now been assumed. In her Elizabeth Gaskell (1976), Winifred Gérin claims that Gaskell’s ‘introduction to Mme Mohl . . . did not occur until the next visit in February 1854’ (p. 145), but as Uglow’s sources show, this was not the case. 10 See Margaret Lesser, ‘Madame Mohl and Mrs Gaskell’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 13, 1999, pp. 36–53. 11 In a letter of 19 June? 1853 to Mrs Schwabe, Gaskell mentions ‘our plan of making a little tour in Normandy during Meta’s holidays’ (Letters, p. 238) and on 18 July she describes herself as just about to set off, but there is no extant information about the trip itself.

180 Notes 12 The dating of this visit is somewhat problematic. A letter to Maria James of late January suggests that Gaskell left London for Paris on 13 February, planning to return in early March (Further Letters, pp. 121–4), and another letter to Tauchnitz, written from the Mohls’ house on 20 February, confirms that she was here at this time. But other letters written to the publisher Hachette in mid-March, still from the Rue du Bac, suggest that now she is not planning to return to England until the end of the month. She was definitely back in London on 4 April, when she wrote to John Greenwood expressing her shocked sorrow at the news of Charlotte Brontë’s death. The most likely reason for the change of dates is that her business with Hachette necessitated a longer stay than was originally intended. 13 Elizabeth Gaskell, A Dark Night’s Work and Other Tales (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1890), p. 337. 14 Ibid., p. 337. 15 The setting is, however, a ‘forest’, and since, between staying with the Schwabes in North Wales and her little tour of Normandy, Gaskell visited her friends the Duckworths near Southampton, it is quite possible that for this story, as for North and South, ‘the New Forest glades inspired [her]’ (Uglow, p. 351). 16 See Philip Yarrow, ‘Mrs Gaskell and France’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 7, 1993, pp. 16–36. 17 Elizabeth Gaskell, Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1913), p. 210. 18 See letter to Marianne, [February 1855], Letters, p. 332. 19 Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1911), p. 217. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 20 For an account of these ‘emancipated females’, see Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1903), I, 254–63. It is possible that Gaskell met Clarke in Rome, since the novel was taken out again in 1859, perhaps as a reminder of the acquaintance. 21 Ibid., I, 356 passim. 22 This catalogue of the sale of the contents of 84 Plymouth Grove, which took place on 16 February, four months after Meta’s death, lists the books still in the house at that time. Although a useful source of information, many details are not specified and it is not clear which are Gaskell’s own books and which those added later by her daughters or William. 23 Jane Whitehill (ed.), Letters of Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton: 1855–1865 (1932, reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973), p. xxi. 24 Henry James, op. cit., I, 356. James also notes that her time in Rome was ‘a season the perfect felicity of which was to feed all her later time with fond memories, with renewed regrets and dreams’ (I, 354). 25 In March 1860, Gaskell was asking Chapman and Smith who had written ‘Mlle Mori’ (Letters, pp. 604, 605) which she had clearly heard about. In a letter of 2 June, Norton asked her if she had read The Marble Faun (‘I know nothing that has ever been written about Italy so admirably true not only to the reality of the country but also to all that it suggests to the imagination’), and added: ‘have you read “Mademoiselle Mori” a book that seems to me in its way as good as Hawthorne’s, & which is full of such pictures of Rome and

Notes 181

26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

of the Romans as represent the city and the people with vivid fidelity . . . Pray tell me if you know who wrote it’ (Whitehill, op. cit., p. 59). The two-volume work, consisting of essays dealing with the society, customs and historical features of contemporary Rome, two of which had already been published in the Atlantic Monthly, appeared in book form in 1862, published by Chapman and Hall, not by Smith. See Dorothy Collins, ‘The Composition and publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, Vol. 69, 1986–7, pp. 59–95. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (eds), The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 22. Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: a Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 119–21. Storey et al., op. cit., VI, p. 29. Ibid., VI, p. 48. Ibid., VI, p. 65. Ibid., VI, p. 231. Ibid., VI, p. 546. Ibid., VI, p. 800. Ibid., VI, p. 823. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (eds) The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol. VII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 376. Annette B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: John Lehmann, 1952). The material on the Gaskell/Dickens relationship expands on Hopkins’ article on ‘Dickens and Mrs Gaskell’ in the Huntingdon Library Quarterly, IX, 1946, pp. 357–85. Storey et al., op. cit., VII, pp. 278–9. Although she may merely have heard about the novel, not read it as it appeared, her concern does seem to belie her earlier claim that ‘I seldom see the Household Words’ (Letter to Forster, 3 May 1853, Further Letters, p. 87), echoing the first sentence of her ‘Disappearances’ in Household Words, 7 June 1851: ‘I am not in the habit of seeing the “Household Words” regularly’ (p. 246). Storey et al., op. cit., VII, p. 403. Quoted in Elizabeth Haldane, Mrs Gaskell and her Friends (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), p. 113. Storey et al., op. cit., VII, pp. 513–14. Ibid., VII, p. 700. Quoted in Uglow, p. 405. See Introduction, p. 4. For a fuller discussion of Gaskell and Aidé, see Shirley Foster, ‘ “We Sit and Read and Dream our Time Away”: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Portico Library’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 14, 2000, pp. 17–18. See, however, her well-known remark to Lady Kay-Shuttleworth that ‘[t]he difference between Miss Brontë and me is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness . . . my books are so far better than I am that I often feel ashamed of having written them and as if I were a hypocrite’ (Letters, p. 228), which suggests a degree of conscious artistic expediency. She also told Tottie Fox, half humorously, that she was sick of writing about ‘my species . . . as if I loved ‘em’ (Letters, p. 325).

182 Notes 49 Margaret Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), p. 111. 50 Gaskell must also have had access to the substantial libraries of her wealthier friends, and these would have offered her more valuable sources of information and inspiration. Unfortunately, research in this area is a problematic task, as yet little undertaken. 51 The Sales Catalogue of 84 Plymouth Grove includes much female-authored fiction (by Jewsbury, Frederika Bremer, Julia Wedgewood, Norton, Martineau, Fanny Burney, Susan Ferrier, the Brontës, and Eliot). Of course some of these may have belonged to Meta or Julia, rather than to their mother, but they confirm the Gaskells’ interest in women writers. 52 Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, 7 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954–5), III, p. 198.

4 The 1850s: the Established Author 1 Mat Hompes, ‘Mrs E. C. Gaskell’, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. CCLXXIX, No. 1976, 1895, pp. 129–30. 2 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 406. Gaskell herself claimed to have seen a ghost: see letter to Eliza Fox, 29 May 1849 (Letters, p. 81). 3 The Knutsford edition Vol. VII publishes ‘Two Fragments of Ghost Stories’ by Gaskell, but they are too brief to judge how artistically successful they would have been. One actually introduces the ghost, the other merely sets the scene for the forthcoming ghostly appearance, whatever form it would have taken. 4 William Wetmore Story to Elizabeth Gaskell, c. September/October 1859. Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The reference here to ‘ghosts’ is interesting; the metaphor may have been suggested by some of the actual tales Gaskell told the Storys. 5 Mrs Ellis Chadwick gives details about Higgins in her Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Houses and Stories, new and revised edition (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1913), pp. 38–40. She probably got some of her information from the book about Knutsford by the local Unitarian minister, the Rev Henry Green, whose daughters, she notes, became tenants of Higgins’ house when they opened a school there. Florence Gaskell became a pupil in 1859. 6 Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1913), p. 217. 7 Ibid., p. 234. 8 The version in the collected Round the Sofa is not significantly different from that in Household Words except for the attribution of a narrator in the former. 9 My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales (London: Smith, Elder & Co, n.d.), pp. 286–7. 10 Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 43. 11 In his article on the story, Dewi Williams discusses the historical and topographical details which might link it to actual places and people. He concludes that the tale has not survived in the ‘folk memory’ of the region, and therefore may emanate from elsewhere, but adds that the well itself may be identified with a now-vanished water source in a field at Ty Cerrig, on the outskirts of Penmorfa village (Gaskell Society Newsletter, No. 24, September 1997, pp. 3–5).

Notes 183 12 13 14 15

16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26

27

28

29 30 31

Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 45. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 79. When Frank thinks of Maggie, he remembers some ‘mysteriously beautiful lines from Wordsworth’ (from Poems of the Imagination, X, ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’, vs 5, quoted in the text), thus placing a Romantic aura over the girl. Novels and Tales by Mrs Gaskell (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1890), IV, p. 289. Ibid., p. 275. Arnold was apparently reduced to tears by it (see Uglow, p. 252). Brontë thought it opened like a daisy and closed, ‘in pathos’, like a healing herb; she told Gaskell that it was ‘fresh, natural, religious. No more need be said’, a perhaps slightly patronizing compliment (Wise and Symington, The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships & Correspondence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932, reprint 1980), III, p. 204). Both responses do, however, point to the novella’s quality of sentimental moralizing. The structural division of the work into two chapters is awkward, since the break comes in the middle of the second story, but this was probably to accommodate Dickens’ desire for two instalments for Household Words. The division is maintained in later published versions. Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 149. Ibid., p. 185. As often in Gaskell’s works, there are inconsistencies in detail here. Hester is told that she and the child are going to the family house in Northumberland, but this is later described as being at the foot of the Cumberland Fells. Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 119. This is not, however, as Jenny Uglow claims (p. 307), a story of illegitimacy, since Maude and her music-master lover have actually married in secret, and their child is their legal offspring. Gaskell explains in a letter to Anne Robson of February 1859 that Sampson Low ‘is trying to pass it [Round the Sofa] off as new. I sold the right of publication to him in a hurry to get 100£ to take Meta abroad out of the clatter of tongues consequent on her breaking off her engagement’ (Letters, p. 531). My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 103. In her ‘Woman’s Time’, Julia Kristeva suggests that, unlike men, women see time as cyclical and renewing, rather than linear and death-oriented. See Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 187–213. Although the tale itself is the same in both periodical and book versions, whereas Margaret Dawson says that her brother is a Westmoreland curate, in Round the Sofa he has become an Edinburgh surgeon. The discrepancy is undoubtedly due to Gaskell’s customary carelessness over names and places. As Sharps points out (p. 276), Gaskell seems to have written the piece in sections and sent each straight off to Dickens, without aiming for an overall unity. Louise Henson, ‘Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Victorian Science’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2000. My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 155. As Uglow points out (p. 448), Gaskell got her money three times over with the collection: the payment for the Household Words contributions, Sampson

184 Notes

32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48

49

50

Low’s payment of £150, and the payment for the Smith, Elder edition which also appeared in 1859. My Lady Ludlow and Other Tales, op. cit., p. 298. Ibid., p. 316. See Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: the Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992). My Lady Ludlow, op. cit., p. 211. Ibid., p. 244. Knutsford, VII, p. 295. When she was writing Sylvia’s Lovers, Gaskell took care to make sure that she had reproduced the dialect accurately and distinguished it from Lancashire speech, but here the distinction is not specific enough (for example, ‘hoo’ is Lancashire, not North Yorkshire, for ‘she’). Knutsford, VII, p. 258. Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978) offers one of the first feminist analyses, reading the novel not as a story of ineffectual and slightly ridiculous old maids and widows in a rural backwater, but as a vindication of a female community which empowers itself by excluding men from its arena. For a detailed study of its publishing history, see Dorothy Collins, ‘The composition and publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, Vol. 69, 1986–7, pp. 59–95. Cranford and Mr Harrison’s Confessions (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 105. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 36. Cranford, p. 81. Quoted in E. K. Helsinger, R. L Sheets and W. Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883, (Manchester: Manchester University Press), II, 155. See Michael Wheeler, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of literary sources in Mary Barton and Ruth’, unpublished thesis, University of London, 1975. Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (London: Everyman, 1982), p. 73. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. Frances Trollope, Jessie Phillips: A Tale of the Present Day (London: Henry Colburn, 1844), p. 33. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. G. H. Lewes, in his Leader review of the novel, noted how it was a move away from Gaskell’s Manchester fiction – ‘Ruth is not a “social” novel, but a moral problem novel worked out in fiction’ – and, while much admiring it, felt that Gaskell was more successful when using her own experience for her materials, ‘rather than draw[ing] them with facile acquaintance from the library’ (Leader, 22 January 1853). Quoted in Angus Easson (ed.), Elizabeth Gaskell: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 217. See Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, stanza XXV, which describes Madeleine illuminated by the moonlight shining through the stained glass windows: ‘Full on this casement shone the wintry moon/ And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s fair breast’. There are also some similarities between Gaskell’s work and Wordsworth’s ‘Ruth’, although the latter is a poem about an aban-

Notes 185

51

52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60

61

62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69

doned wife, not a seduced girl. The essentially poetic conception of Ruth as a character was noted by several critics, including John Forster in the Examiner and the reviewer in the Prospective Review. The passionate conflict between Ruth’s desire and her moral awareness is depicted powerfully, if a little melodramatically, in Chapters XXIII (pp. 270–2) and XXIV (pp. 293–302). Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 116. Sharpe’s London Magazine, 15 January 1853. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 208. Spectator, 15 January 1853. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., pp. 212–3. W. R. Greg, in his ‘The False Morality of Lady Novelists’, National Review, January 1859, makes the same point: Ruth cannot be both a representative of the ordinary class of betrayed and deserted Magdalenes and a saint. Letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, 15 July 1853. Quoted in Uglow, p. 340. Letter to Mrs Gaskell, 26 April 1852, in T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (eds), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), iii, p. 332. Prospective Review, May 1853. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 292. Athanaeum, 15 January 1853. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 205. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (eds) The Letters of Charles Dickens Vol. VII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 320. It is interesting that the real names in the earlier novel are replaced here by fictional designations. Thus Lancashire becomes Darkshire and Manchester becomes Milton-Northern. This may have been a strategic attempt to prevent direct identification, and thus possible offence, though it is hard to imagine how any readers could have failed to recognize the setting. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 60. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. The animal imagery used to describe the factories here has some similarities to the descriptions of Coketown in Hard Times, Chapter 5. Consecutive numbering has been given, since modern paperback versions follow this pattern. The original two-volume edition renumbered the chapters in each volume. Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 October 1855, p. xii. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 364. Geraldine Jewsbury, Marian Withers [1851] (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), p. 35. Leader, 14 April 1855. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., pp. 333 and 335. Ibid., pp. 335 and 336. Ibid., p. 349. Gaskell’s interest in de Sévigné stems from as early as 1831, though, as she told her friend Harriet Carr in late August of that year, she had begun the Letters many times, but had never been able to finish them (Further Letters, p. 8). Later letters indicate that Gaskell had started to plan a Memoir of de Sévigné, after her French trip of 1862, but the work never appeared (Letters, pp. 676 and 925–6). Although this is a biography of a man by a man, Angus Easson suggests that ‘as a life of a friend essentially obscure in worldly terms, it may have contributed in its intentions to Gaskell’s own commemoration’ (Easson, op. cit., p. 136).

186 Notes 70 When, by an oversight, an unedited transcript of some letters copied out by Marianne reached Smith, Gaskell was anxious to rectify the mistake: ‘I should certainly have scored out, so that no one could have read it through my marks all that related to any one’s appearance, style of living &c, in whose character as indicated by these things the public were not directly interested’ (Letters, p. 429). 71 Held in the John Rylands University Library, Deansgate, Manchester. 72 In defending herself against Smith’s objections, Gaskell sets herself up as a moral arbitor, claiming that she had included the questionable material in order to teach various lessons: to point the contrast between Lady Scott’s guilt and poor Branwell’s suffering; and to warn others about trusting Newby (Letter of 26 December 1856). Her moral zeal had got her into trouble before, but here it had blinded her to both facts and consequences. 73 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 356. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 74 For discussion of Gaskell’s contribution to the ‘myth’ of the Brontës, see Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: the cultural dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), and Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). Miller notes Gaskell’s emphasis on Charlotte Brontë as a victim of isolation and emotional deprivation, as well as an icon of ‘womanliness’. 75 For this episode, Gaskell drew upon both Brontë’s own account in her letter to Mary Taylor, and George Smith’s memories, later published as ‘Charlotte Brontë’, Cornhill Magazine December 1900, pp. 778–95. Interestingly, the account is longer and even more dramatized in the MS, stressing the contrast between the diminutive Charlotte and the substantial Smith, and the former’s sly delight in prolonging his bewilderment about them. For possible reasons for the shortened printed version, see article by Alison Kershaw, Brontë Society Transactions, Vol. 20, 1990, pp. 11–24. 76 See the Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 11, 1997, pp. 1–14. 77 Letter to Gaskell, 15 April 1857, held in John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester, MS 731/61.

5 The 1860s: Achievements and Endings 1 Uglow, p. 501. 2 In the same letter, to Edward Everett Hale, she states that ‘I like the society in Paris very best of all; & then Oxford, and then comes London’ (p. 217). 3 At this time, Mrs Trollope, now eighty-four, was still living with her son and daughter-in-law, but since her health was precarious and she was suffering from senility and memory loss, it is unlikely that Gaskell would have met her. Mrs Trollope died in Florence on 6 October 1863. 4 She did, however, take Norton’s Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (Boston, 1859) with her, and used it in Orvieto, as she tells him in a letter of 13 July 1863 (Letters, p. 708).

Notes 187 5 See Peter Skrine, ‘Mrs Gaskell and Germany’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 7, 1993, pp. 37–49; and ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and her German Stories’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 12, 1998, pp. 1–13. 6 Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘An Italian Institution’, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1911), p. 350. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 7 The section which ends the account of the trip to Vitré in May 1862, in Part II, is in the original Fraser’s text dated 4 May. This date, which is reproduced in the Knutsford edition, must be an error for 14th, since the expedition to escape from hot and noisy Paris – ‘we determined to go off to Brittany for our few remaining days’ (Knutsford, VII, p. 632) – begins with a 10 May journal entry and lasts for the following few days. 8 ‘French Life’, The Works of Mrs Gaskell, ed. A. W. Ward (London: Smith, Elder, 1906), VII, p. 604. All subsequent references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 9 For a discussion of these pieces, see Sharps, pp. 527–9. He argues that on internal evidence all three are by Gaskell, but Uglow (p. 668) thinks it unlikely that the third one is by her. 10 Bradford was a friend of the poet William Culler Bryant, and also knew Washington Irving and Van Buren. 11 It is worth pointing out that most of these visitors, certainly the ones Gaskell met, were New Englanders. 12 The Chapple and Pollard reproduction of this letter actually reads ‘Rome’ instead of ‘home’, but the latter reading is the one found in Jane Whitehill (ed.), Letters of Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton (London: Oxford University Press, 1932, 1973 reprint) p. 43, and would seem preferable. 13 One notable omission from these works by well-known nineteenth-century American writers is anything by Melville. 14 Details of Gaskell’s American publications can be found in Walter E. Smith, Elizabeth Gaskell: a Bibliographical Catalogue of First and Early Editions 1848–1866 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1998). 15 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands [1854] (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856) II, p. 141. 16 It would be interesting to know what Gaskell is hinting at by her last remark. Had she or someone she knew already been let down by Mrs Stowe? 17 Gaskell’s biographer, Mrs Ellis Chadwick, confidently assumes that the visit occurred, basing her evidence on remarks made by Charlotte Brontë. In a letter of 9 July 1853, Brontë writes to Gaskell, ‘Your account of Mrs Stowe was stimulatingly interesting’, but this almost certainly refers to the London meeting, not to a Plymouth Grove visitation, as Chadwick asserts (Gaskell’s letter to Brontë is not extant). The subsequent discussion of Gaskell’s impression of Stowe, at Haworth in late September 1853, recorded in Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë – ‘She [Brontë] made many inquiries as to Mrs Stowe’s personal appearance; and it evidently harmonised well with some theory of hers to learn that the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was small and slight’ (p. 413) – is just as likely to have been based on the London meeting as on a Manchester one, which would anyway have taken place very close to Gaskell’s Haworth visit, 19–23 September. 18 Letters and Memorials, 1883–86, II, pp. 112 and 122.

188 Notes 19 In his Notebooks, Hawthorne records attending a dinner party at Charles Holland’s on the 22 October 1853, a dinner which is described in more detail by Sophia Hawthorne in Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923). See also Hawthorne letters nos 677 and 680. Holland, a Liverpool merchant like his father, lived in Liscard, near Birkenhead, and was married to Gaskell’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth. 20 A ‘near miss’ occurred when, in December 1853, Mr and Mrs James Martineau asked Hawthorne to a Liverpool party at which Gaskell was to be, but Sophia Hawthorne decided that the weather was too bad for evening visits. The Martineaus also called four days later, with Gaskell, but the Hawthornes were out. See Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and Nathaniel Hawthorne’, Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, 1973, pp. 93ff. 21 In her article, Ehrenpreis proves fairly conclusively that Hawthorne had just left Redcar before Gaskell arrived in Whitby. Ehrenpreis, op. cit., p. 107. 22 William borrowed the novel from the Portico in July 1860. Ehrenpreis suggests that Gaskell had heard details of the novel from Bright, to whom Hawthorne had read the draft of it before its publication. 23 Story’s famous statue was exhibited in the London Exhibition in the summer of 1862. 24 ‘Ruth and Villette’, Westminster Review, ns iii, 1 April 1853, p. 476. Lewes also notes that Ruth, which, in its honest and delicate treatment of the subject, is unlike the other novels he criticizes, has as one of its central morals that ‘however dark and difficult our course may seem, the straight path of truth is the only one to lead us through it into the light’ (p. 270), an echo of Hawthorne’s stated moral at the end of his novel: ‘Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!’. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1998), p. 260. Other references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 25 Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 124. 26 For further details on this, see Alan Shelston’s article, ‘Alligators infesting the stream: Elizabeth Gaskell and the USA’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 15, 2001, pp. 53–63. 27 See Ehrenpreis, op. cit., pp. 105–112. 28 This particular volume was not obtained by the Portico until 1847, which would have just given Gaskell time to choose the name for her Howitt’s Journal publications. 29 In early March 1859, Gaskell told Norton about a new story of hers (‘not very good; too melodramatic a plot’) which, she said, she would have preferred publishing in America, either alone or in the Atlantic, but which she fears will go anyway into Dickens’ new periodical. It is generally assumed that this story is ‘Lois the Witch’ which appeared in All the Year Round in October 1859 and was reprinted in Right at Last and Other Tales (London: Sampson Low, 1860). 30 A. W. Ward (ed.), The Works of Mrs Gaskell, (London: Smith, Elder, 1906), VII, p. xxiii. Details of this incident vary between sources: Ward says it occurred while Gaskell was staying at the home of a county magistrate in Essex who had to prevent the killing; Chadwick gives the place as Sussex; Hopkins says

Notes 189

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46

47 48 49

the authority figure was a clergyman. Mary Howitt’s father actually consulted a witch when he was young (see her Autobiography) and this, too, may have been relayed to Gaskell and stimulated her interest. Joseph Ennermoser, History of Magic, trans. William Howitt, 2 vols (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), ii, 510. It is interesting that Upham was one of those responsible for Hawthorne’s losing his position in the Salem Custom House in 1849, accusing him of corruption when the Whigs gained ascendancy over the Democrats. Harriet Martineau, also very interested in spiritualism and mesmeric phenomena, claimed to know Upham well, and reviewed his later work, Salem Witchcraft (1867), in the Edinburgh Review, CXXVIII, July 1868, pp. 1–47. Letter to Mrs Gaskell from John G. Palfrey, ?21 June 1856, MS 731/81, John Rylands University Library, Deansgate, Manchester. Charles W. Upham, Lectures on Witchcraft, Comprising a History of the Delusion in Salem (Boston: Carter, Hendee and Babcock, 1831), p. 129. ‘Lois the Witch’, Knutsford, VII, p. 208. All other references will be from this edition and will be included in the text. Louise Henson, ‘Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Victorian Science’, unpublished PhD, University of Sheffield, 2000, Chapter 3, passim. Dickens had asked her for a full-length novel, offering her £400, but she gave him this story instead, which ran from 5–19 January. By the time this letter was written, Household Words had been superseded by All the Year Round, a fact which Gaskell seems to have forgotten here. See Sharps, pp. 353–4. ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, Knutsford, VII, p. 395. Ibid., p. 387. A. B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: John Lehmann, 1952), p. 111. Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Homes, Haunts and Stories, new and revised edition (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1913), p. 296. Cranford and Mr Harrison’s Confessions (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 173. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. The joke would, of course, have been more immediately evident to contemporary readers: the ‘cage-crinoline’ dominated women’s fashions in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and in centring her story on it, Gaskell is acknowledging the social changes which have taken place since her first introduction of the town, even though in this text the Cranford ladies still exist in a timewarp. The first two-thirds of this story is contained in a manuscript in Manchester Central Reference Library. Ward, having already seen a complete transcription, published a composite of the story in his Knutsford edition, Vol. VII, as ‘Crowley Castle’. As he explains, there are slight differences between the MS and the periodical version in the opening; otherwise the texts are identical up to the point where the former ends. Knutsford, VII, pp. 702 and 708. Quoted in Sharps, p. 365. Knutsford, VII, p. 428. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text.

190 Notes 50 Given that Gaskell said that she had had the story by her, part-written, for some time, it is just possible that the murder was not in her initial plan, but occurred to her as an effective plot device after she had decided to finish the work for publication. 51 Knutsford, VII, 315. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 52 ‘Shams’, Fraser’s Magazine, Vol. LXVII (February 1863), p. 265. All further references will be included in the text. 53 The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, ed. Walter E. Houghton, Vol. II (London and Toronto: Routledge & Kegan Paul and University of Toronto, 1972), p. 457. 54 Quoted in J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 126. 55 Whitehill, p. 100. Gaskell dedicated the American edition of the novel to Norton. The first edition was dedicated to ‘MY DEAR HUSBAND by her who best knows his value’. 56 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 3. 57 A likely literary source for this theme is the story of ‘Ruth’ in Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall (1819), which tells of a girl whose sailor love is torn from her by the press-gang just before their wedding day. 58 The verisimilitude of her portrayal is attested to by the fact that when the illustrator, George du Maurier, was asked to provide some pictures for the fourth edition, he drew on some sketches of Whitby because these seemed to capture so well the town as described in the novel. Only later did he discover that Monkshaven and Whitby were one and the same. 59 The exact location of this building is debatable, some commentators placing it west of the town, others east. The most likely model is Straggleton Farm, about a mile and a half northwest of Whitby, and now a caravan site. 60 Frances Twinn, ‘Navigational pitfalls and topographical constraints in Sylvia’s Lovers’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 15, 2001, p. 51. 61 Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 18. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 62 For details of these dialect and other changes, as well as more about Gaskell’s sources, see editions of the novel by Andrew Sanders (World’s Classics, 1982) and Shirley Foster (Penguin, 1996). 63 Knutsford, Vol. VI, p. xii. Existing editions of Gaskell’s letters include nothing containing this remark, so Ward’s source remains unidentifiable. The remark was repeated by Mrs Chadwick – ‘Mrs Gaskell said that Sylvia’s Lovers was the saddest story she had ever written’ (p. 247) – but she too fails to supply a source. 64 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford and Cousin Phillis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 226. All references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. 65 Like John Thornton in North and South, John Manning is probably based on Gaskell’s Manchester friend, James Nasmyth, whose Patricroft works were an object of interest to her and her visitors. Clement Shorter suggests that Farmer Holman ‘may well be in part a portrait of the writer’s own father, William Stevenson . . . but it is only right to say that Mrs Gaskell’s daughter

Notes 191

66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

denies this attempt at identification’ (Cousin Phillis and Other Tales (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1911), p. x). This was published in the Knutsford edition of the novel (Vol. VIII) and is reprinted in the Penguin Classics edition, edited by Pam Morris (1996). Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 5. All further references will be to this edition and will be included in the text. See her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), p. 183. Ibid., pp. 177–9. Wives and Daughters, Penguin edition, p. 648. Ibid., p. 652. Alison Chapman, Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton and North and South (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999), p. 7. Lord Houghton [Richard Monkton Milnes], Pall Mall Gazette, 14 November 1865. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 506. Saturday Review, 18 November 1865. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 509. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 517. Fortnightly Review, 1 September 1878. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 562. Harriet Parr, British Quarterly Review, 1 April 1867. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 529. David Cecil, Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London: Constable, 1934). Quoted in Chapman, op. cit., p. 38. Hopkins, op. cit., p. 332. Ibid., p. 323. Ibid., p. 332. Jo Pryke, ‘Gaskell scholars re-discovered: (1) Annette B. Hopkins’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. 15, 2001, pp. 64–7. Cornhill Magazine, October 1910. Quoted in Easson, op. cit., p. 572.

Select Bibliography Primary texts The standard edition of Gaskell’s works is A. W. Ward’s The Works of Mrs Gaskell, 8 vols (London: John Murray, 1906), The Knutsford Edition. Gaskell’s novels, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and much of the shorter fiction are available in recently issued paperback editions (most inclusively in World’s Classics, Penguin and Everyman). Many of these have excellent critical introductions and useful annotations and bibliographies. The first collection of her letters, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966) was reissued in a Mandolin paperback edition in 1997. This has been supplemented by Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Jane Whitehill’s Letters of Mrs Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton [1932] (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1973) provides, in addition to the letters, a useful introduction.

Secondary texts Bibliography and biography Chadwick, Mrs Ellis H., Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories, new and revised edition (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1913). Chapple, J. A. V., Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980). Chapple, John, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). Gérin, Winifred, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Haldane, Elizabeth, Mrs Gaskell and her Friends (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930). Payne, Rev George A., Mrs Gaskell and Knutsford, second edition (Manchester: Clarkson & Griffiths, and London: Mackie & Co, 1905). Shaen, Margaret J. (ed.), Memorials of Two Sisters: Susanna and Catherine Winkworth (London: Longman, 1908). Sharps, John Geoffrey, Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention: A Study of her NonBiographic Works (Fontwell: Linden Press, 1970). Smith, Walter E., Elizabeth Gaskell: A Bibliographical Catalogue of First and Early Editions 1848–1866 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Uglow, Jenny, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993).

192

Select Bibliography 193 Weyant, Nancy S., Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources 1976–1991 (Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1994). Winkworth, Susanna and Shaen, Margaret J. (eds), Letters and Memorials of Catherine Winkworth, 2 vols (Clifton: privately printed, 1883–86).

Critical Books in this section include only those which focus solely on Gaskell. There are, however, many other recent studies of Victorian fiction, which examine Gaskell in relation to other writers and concerns of the period, but which space does not permit to be listed here. Bonaparte, Felicia, The Gypsy Bachelor of Manchester: the Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992). Colby, Robin B., ‘Some appointed work to do’: Women and Vocation in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Contribution to Women’s Studies, no. 150 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1998). Craik, Wendy, Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (London: Methuen, 1975). D’Albertis, Deidre, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). Easson, Angus, Elizabeth Gaskell (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979). Easson, Angus (ed.), Elizabeth Gaskell: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1991). Flint, Kate, Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘Writers and Their Work’ (London: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1995). Hopkins, A. B., Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: John Lehmann, 1952). Hughes, Linda K. and Lund, Michael, Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999). Pollard, Arthur, Mrs Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965). Rubenius, Aina, The Woman Question in Mrs Gaskell’s Life and Works, University of Upsala: Essays and Studies on English Language and Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950). Sanders, Gerald DeWitt, Elizabeth Gaskell, with a Bibliography by Clark Sutherland Northup (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929). Schor, Hilary M., Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Spencer, Jane, Elizabeth Gaskell (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). Stoneman, Patsy, Elizabeth Gaskell (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). Whitfield, A. C., Mrs Gaskell: Her Life and Work (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1929). Wright, Edgar, Mrs Gaskell: the Basis for Reassessment (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965). Wright, Terence, Elizabeth Gaskell ‘We Are Not Angels’: Realism, Gender, Values (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press – now Palgrave, 1995).

Index About, Edmond Tolla, 57 Aidé, Hamilton Rita, 73 All the Year Round, 46, 60, 68, 79, 95, 124, 127, 135, 140, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 189n.38 Alton (‘The Lawn’), 124, 125, 126, 165 America, 22, 130–44 Annual Register, 8, 157 Arabian Nights, The, 86, 166 Arnold (family), 27, 46 Arnold, Matthew, 69, 86, 183n.17 Ashton, Thomas, 35 Athenaeum, 106, 117 Atlantic Monthly, 48, 68, 133, 134 Austen, Jane, 75, 98, 171 Northanger Abbey, 178n.17 Bacon, Francis, 14 Bamford, Samuel, 35 Passages in the Life of a Radical, 35 Early Days, 35 Bancroft, George History of the Colonization of the United States, 139 Barbauld, Anna, 13, 14, 15 Barrow, John Life and Correspondence of Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith, 158 Belgium, 27 Brussels, 51, 60, 115 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 8, 28 Blair, Hugh, 14 Sermons, 14 Bonaparte, Felicia, 93 Bonheur, Rosa, 53, 58 Bosanquet, Charles, 60, 176n.16 Boswell, James Life of Johnson, 116 Bowles, Caroline, 38 Tales of the Factories, 38 Braddon, Mary, 76

Aurora Floyd, 149 Bradford, Mrs Julia, 21, 130 Bradford, Samuel Dexter, 21, 130 Bright, Henry, 137, 138, 188n.22 British Quarterly Review, 37 Brontë, Anne (`Acton Bell’), 115, 120 Brontë, Branwell, 116, 117, 186n.72 Brontë, Charlotte (‘Currer Bell’) 2, 3, 4, 27, 43, 51, 69, 72, 77, 79, 86, 97, 105, 113–21, 136, 181n.48, 183n.17, 187n.17 Jane Eyre, 72, 74, 93, 113, 117, 118, 176 n.21 Shirley, 3, 72, 113 Professor, The, 115 Villette, 72, 115, 118, 165 Brontë, Emily, 4, 73 Wuthering Heights, 73, 86, 88, 89, 90 Brontë, Patrick, 69, 114, 115, 120 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 3, 58, 105, 179n.31 Aurora Leigh, 75 Bryant, William Culler, 187n.10 Bunyan, John, 13 Burney, Fanny, 75 Burns, Robert, 14, 15, 116 Byerley, Fanny (Mrs William Parkes), 15 Domestic Duties, 15 Byerley, Katharine (Mrs Todd Thomson), 15, 16, 40 Memoirs of the Court of Henry VIII, 16 Constance, 16, 177n.26 Byerley, the Misses, 7, 14, 15 Byron, Lord George Gordon Noel, 9, 14, 15 Caldwell, Anne Marsh, 4, 72, 76 Ravenscliffe, 76 Carlyle, Jane, 43, 50 Carlyle, Thomas, 43, 50, 61, 75 Life of Sterling, 116 Carpenter, William Benjamin, 13

194

Index 195 Carr, Harriet (later Anderson), 17, 18, 26, 116, 131 Carter, Angela, 146 Cecil, Lord David, 173 Chadwick, Edwin Report of the Sanitary Conditions, 102 Chadwick, Mrs Ellis H., 6, 8, 43, 148, 177n.17, 187n.17, 188n.30, 190n.63 Channing, William Henry, 130 Chapman, Alison, 171 Chapman and Hall (publishers), 40, 50, 62, 63, 66, 70, 135 Chapman, Edward, 3, 4, 39, 40–1, 62–3, 70, 85, 137 Chapman, Maria Weston, 131 Chapple, John, 13 Chorley, Henry, 106 Clarke, Sarah Jane (‘Grace Greenwood’), 57, 131, 180n.20 Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe, 57, 133 Clive, Caroline, 3 Paul Ferrol, 73 Why Paul Ferrol Killed His Wife, 148 Cobden, Richard, 37 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 15, 28 Collins, Wilkie, 73, 75 Basil, 73 Hide and Seek, 66 Woman in White, The, 93, 151 Cooper, James Fenimore Pathfinder, The, 132 Spy, The, 132 ‘Cornwall, Barry’, see Proctor, Bryan Waller Cornhill Magazine, 59, 69, 70, 125, 127, 135, 144, 145, 150, 161, 165, 171 Cousin, Victor, 55, 56 Cowper, William, 13, 14 Crabbe, George, 28, 30, 98 ‘Ruth’, 76 Craik, Dinah Mulock, 2, 4, 15, 72, 76, 122 Crompton, Charles, 123, 126 Cummins, Maria

Mabel Vaughan, 132 Lamplighter, The, 132 Cushman, Charlotte, 57, 125 131 Crowe, Catherine, 51, 126 Dante, 161 Darwin, Charles, 169 Darwin (family), 11, 15, 49 Davenport, Caroline Anne (later Lady Hatherton), 21, 43–4, 178n.18 Davenport, Selina, 4, 72 Davy, John, 27, 46 Davy, Mrs Margaret, 27, 46 Day, Thomas Sandford and Merton, 13 Defoe, Daniel, 71 De Quincey, Thomas Autobiographic Sketches, 81 Devonshire, Duke of, 44 Dickens, Catherine, 50 Dickens, Charles, 23, 32, 33, 38, 41, 43, 49, 50, 51, 54, 60, 61, 63–9, 75, 82, 89, 96, 97, 106, 107, 108, 135, 140, 144, 145, 149, 150, 160 American Notes, 133 Bleak House, 149 ‘Character Murder’, 68 David Copperfield, 50 Great Expectations, 162, 165 Hard Times, 66–7, 107, 108, 185n.61 Pickwick Papers, 66 Disraeli, Benjamin Coningsby, 38 Sybil, 38 Dublin University Magazine, 75 du Maurier, George, 190n.58 Easson, Angus, 120, 138, 186n.69 Eastlake, Elizabeth, 70, 117 Edgeworth, Maria, 13, 14, 32, 75, 98 Edinburgh Review, 8, 37, 53 Ehrenpreis, Anne Henry, 140, 188n.22 Eliot, George, 3, 69, 77, 97, 145, 160, 171, 173 Adam Bede, 77 Middlemarch, 14, 77, 164, 169 Mill on the Floss, 70, 77, 86

196 Index Eliot, George (Continued) Romola, 150 Scenes from Clerical Life, 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21 English Traits, 133 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8 Engels, Friedrich, 21, 23–4 Condition of the Working Classes, 23, 35 Ennermoser, Joseph History of Magic, 140 Examiner, 185n.50 Fauriel, Claude, 52 Chants Populaire de la Grèce Moderne, 55 Female Mentor, The, 14 Fergusson, Barbara, 10 Ferrier, Susan Destiny, 17 Marriage, 14 Fields, John, 130 Fields, Mrs Annie, 130 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 100 Fletcher, Mrs Elizabeth, 27, 46, 52 Forgues, Emile-Daurand, 74 Forster, John, 40, 41, 50, 53, 62, 107, 185n.50 Forster, William E., 27 Fox, Eliza (‘Tottie’), 23, 35, 41, 49, 50, 51, 79, 113 Fox, William Johnson, 49 France, 53–6, 126 Brittany, 125, 128, 129 Normandy, 53, 54, 125, 128, 179n.11 Paris, 51, 53, 55, 57, 125, 126, 180n.12 Fraser’s Magazine, 60, 69, 125, 128, 129, 144, 152, 153 Froude, James Anthony, 75, 128, 145, 153 Fuller, Margaret, 132 Garibaldi, Guiseppe, 127 Gaskell, Elizabeth (Lizzie: sister-in-law, later Holland), 25, 27 Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn

Novels Cousin Phillis, 11, 70, 144, 146, 161–4 Cranford, 9, 16, 32, 44, 45, 46, 61, 62, 63, 66, 77, 80, 81, 86, 97–100, 135, 138, 147, 148, 153, 167, 172, 173 Mary Barton, 3, 19, 22, 24, 25, 29, 32, 34–40, 49, 50, 62, 63, 77, 100, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 131, 1335, 136, 139, 154, 157, 159, 172 North and South, 9, 48, 51, 63, 66–7, 70, 85, 97, 106–13, 115, 135, 136, 172 Ruth, 25, 26, 40, 46, 51, 62, 73, 79, 80, 97, 98, 100–6, 117, 135, 136, 138, 184n.49 Wives and Daughters, 7, 11, 44, 53, 70, 74, 77, 125, 126, 135, 144, 148, 149, 153, 162, 164–71, 172, 173 Shorter fiction ‘Bessy’s Troubles at Home’, 71, 81 ‘Cage at Cranford, The’, 69, 144, 145, 147–8 ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’, 30, 311–2 ‘Curious If True’, 144, 145–6, 153, 166 ‘A Dark Night’s Work’, 10, 11, 60, 69, 99, 126, 144, 145, 149–51, 152 ‘Doom of the Griffiths, The’, 26, 47, 92, 93–4, 134, 138 ‘Ghost in the Garden Room, The’ (‘The Crooked Branch’), 68, 79, 95–6, 135, 144, 157 ‘Grey Woman, The’, 28, 69, 99, 126, 127, 130, 144, 145, 151–2 ‘Half a Lifetime Ago’, 10, 47, 68, 82–3, 84, 92, 163 ‘Half-Brothers, The’, 92, 94–5 ‘Hand and Heart’, 32 ‘Heart of John Middleton, The’, 64, 65, 79, 85 ‘How the First Floor Went to Crowley Castle’, 69, 144, 148–9 ‘Last Generation in England, The’, 32, 45, 100, 134

Index 197 ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, 30–1, 33, 84 ‘Lizzie Leigh’, 32–4, 41, 62, 64, 65, 79, 81, 135 ‘Lois the Witch’, 68, 75, 93, 95, 99, 135, 139–44, 145, 188n.29 ‘Manchester Marriage, The’, 9, 34, 51, 60, 68, 76, 95, 135, 155 Moorland Cottage, The, 47, 62, 71, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85–6, 96, 131, 135, 149 ‘Morton Hall’, 79, 86–8 Mr Harrison’s Confessions, 11, 45–6, 78, 80, 81, 100, 147 ‘My French Master’, 7, 53, 54–5, 89 My Lady Ludlow, 15, 44, 48, 68, 78, 80, 89–91, 134, 135, 167, 169 ‘Old Nurse’s Story, The’, 10, 44, 65, 79, 88–9, 145 ‘Our Society at Cranford’, 45, 98 ‘Poor Clare, The’, 68, 92–3, 94, 99, 138 Round the Sofa, 47, 90, 91–2, 94 ‘Sexton’s Hero, The’, 25, 30, 80, 178n.18 ‘Sin of a Father, The’ (‘Right at Last’), 60, 68, 95 ‘Six Weeks at Heppenheim’, 10, 28, 126, 127, 144, 145, 149–51, 152 ‘Squire’s Story, The’, 11, 79, 81–2, 99 ‘Two Fragments of Ghost Stories’, 182n.3 ‘Well of Pen-Morfa, The’, 26, 64, 65, 79, 80, 83–4, 85, 182 n.11 Non-fiction ‘An Accursed Race’, 55, 56, 68, 92 ‘Bran’, 53–4 ‘Clopton House’, 16, 29, 30, 145, 177 n.16 ‘Columns of Gossip from Paris’, 130, 144, 153 ‘Company Manners’, 53, 55–6, 66 ‘Cumberland Sheep Shearers’, 47, 179n.7 ‘Emerson’s Lectures’, 177 n.8 ‘Disappearances’, 9, 68, 76, 155, 181n.40 ‘French Life’, 60, 125, 128–30, 144, 152, 153

‘An Italian Institution’, 69, 127, 144 ‘La Camorra’, 127–8 ‘Letter of Gossip from Paris’, 130 Life of Charlotte Brontë, 1, 3, 46, 56, 58, 63, 75, 100, 113–21, 135, 144, 154, 176n.21 ‘Martha Preston’, 26, 46, 79, 82–3, 134 ‘Modern Greek Songs’, 55 ‘Parson’s Holiday, A’, 144, 153–4 ‘Scholar’s Story, The’, 53–4 ‘Shams’, 144, 152–3, 154 ‘Sketches Among the Poor No.1’, 19, 28 ‘Traits and Stories of the Huguenots’, 53, 54, 55 Gaskell, Florence (‘Flossy’), 24, 51, 59, 60, 123, 125, 126 Gaskell, Julia Bradford, 24, 51, 59, 60, 123, 125, 154 Gaskell, Margaret Emily (‘Meta’), 24, 44, 51, 53, 57, 58, 59, 69, 122, 123, 125, 128, 133, 154, 157 Gaskell, Marianne, 10, 24, 25, 28, 37, 43, 44, 50, 51, 57, 60, 101, 122–3, 125, 126, 127, 133, 137, 157 Gaskell, William, 12, 18–19, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 35, 39, 40, 51, 53, 59–60, 61, 63, 74–5, 116, 123, 124, 125, 126, 148, 157, 169, 190n.55 ‘Poets of Humble Life’, 19, 28 Temperance Rhymes, 33 Two Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect, 36 Gentleman’s Magazine, 22 Gérin, Winifred, 64, 179n.9 Germany, 27, 60, 125, 127, 146 Heidelberg, 27, 51, 60, 125, 127 Mannheim, 125 Glyn, Herbert The Cotton Lord, 40 Goldsmith, Oliver History of England, 13 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 14 Gore, Catherine, 4, 73, 75 Gray, Thomas, 13, 14, 15, 25 Green, Henry, 89, 182 n.5 Green, Mrs Mary, 101, 128 Greenwood, Frederick, 144, 165, 171

198 Index Greenwood, John, 114, 180n.12 Greg, Samuel, 11, 37, 107, 109, 178n.29 Greg, Mrs Samuel, 41 Greg, William Rathbone, 12, 37, 101–2 Grey, Herbert The Three Paths, 71 Guardian, 112 Hachette, Louis, 4, 53, 72, 73, 74, 81, 113, 148 Hale, Edward Everett, 131, 133 Halle, Sir Charles, 20 Hamley, Edward Lady Lee’s Widowhood, 73 Hardy, Thomas, 156, 161 Harper’s (publishers), 90, 134, 135 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 69, 93, 134 Harper’s Weekly, 135 Haworth, 114, 115, 119, 157 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 132, 135, 137–44, 188n.19,n.20 House of the Seven Gables, The, 138, 139 ‘Maypole of Merrymount, The’, 138 Scarlet Letter, The, 137, 138, 139, 143–4 Transformation (The Marble Faun), 59, 137–8, 180n.25 Hawthorne, Sophia, 188n.19, n.20 Heath’s Keepsake, 65 Heger, Constantin, 115 Hemans, Felicia, 15 Henson, Louise, 91, 142 Herbert, George, 15 Hill, Captain Charles, 58, 69, 123 Hill, Octavia, 49 Holland, Annie (cousin), 49 Holland, Charles (cousin), 137 Holland, Elizabeth (mother), 6, 8, 9–10 Holland, Fanny (cousin), 10 Holland, Henry (Dr, later Sir, cousin), 11, 13, 76 Holland, Lucy (cousin), 10, 98 Holland, Mary (cousin), 10, 98 Holland, Peter (uncle), 10, 11, 45, 98 Holland, Samuel (grandfather), 11, 161 Holland, Samuel (uncle), 11, 25, 26, 130, 137

Holland, Swinton (uncle), 11 Holland, Thurstan, 123, 126 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Professor at the Breakfast Table, The, 132 Elsie Venner, 32 Hood, Thomas Poems, 66 ‘Song of the Shirt’, 102 Hopkins, Annette B., 66, 147, 172, 173, 189n.30 Hosmer, Harriet, 58, 130 Household Words, 4, 7, 9, 32, 34, 45, 46, 47, 53, 54, 55, 61, 63–6, 68–9, 78, 81, 86, 88, 89, 95, 98, 107, 135, 144, 181n.40, 184n.31, 189n.38 Houston, Matilda Hesperos, 132 Howard, Edward Memories of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, 158 Howitt, Mary, 6, 15, 20, 28, 29, 32, 40, 44, 49, 50, 79, 134, 137, 189n.30 Howitt, William, 20, 28, 30, 40, 49, 50, 53, 137, 140 Rural Life, 29 Visits to Remarkable Places, 29 Howitt’s Journal, 30, 40, 139, 177n.8 Hunt, Holman, 51 Italy, 51, 56–60, 125–6, 127, 130 Florence, 58, 125 Rome, 25, 56–9, 80, 125, 136, 138, 180n.20, 180–1n.25 Venice, 58, 126 Irving, Washington, 187n.10 Life and Letters, 132 James, George Payne Rainsford, 75 James, Henry, 57, 58 William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 180n.20, n.24 Jameson, Anna, 3, 50, 67, 77, 106, 107 Sacred and Legendary Art, 59 Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, 133 Jenkin, Henrietta Camilla Cousin Stella, 4

Index 199 Jerrold, Douglas, 50 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 3, 4, 38, 72, 76 Marian Withers, 111–12 Johnson, Samuel, 14 Jonson, Ben, 15 Kavanagh, Julia, 5, 74, 76 Kay, James (later Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir), 24, 27, 108, 113, 115, 116 Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, 24 Kay-Shuttleworth, Lady Janet, 27, 51, 62, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116 Keary, Annie, 76 Keats, John, 104, 184n.50 Kestner, Joseph, 178n.30 Kingsley, Charles, 38, 75, 106, 145 Knutsford, 6, 10–11, 20, 29, 32, 44–6, 72, 81, 86, 89, 97, 104, 152, 153, 161, 162, 167, 182n.5 Ladies’ Companion, 45, 81 Lake District (Cumbria), 26–7, 46–7 Ambleside (Briery Close), 27, 114 Ambleside (Lesketh How), 27, 46 Grasmere (Lancrigg), 27, 46 Skelwith (Mill Brow), 26, 46, 88 Lamb, Charles, 14 Essays of Elia, 98 Lawrence, George Guy Livingstone, 74 Leader, 112, 184n.49 Lea Hurst (Matlock), 47 Lee, Holme, see Parr, Harriet LeFanu, Joseph Sheridan House by the Churchyard, The, 149 Leigh Smith, Barbara (Mme Bodichon), 49, 132 Lennox, Charlotte Female Quixote, The, 14 Lever, Charles, 75 Lewes, George Henry, 2, 3, 104, 120, 138, 145, 184n.49 Life of Goethe, 116 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 4 Literary Gazette, 7 Littel’s Living Age, 135 London, 48–51, 108 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 132

Low, Sampson, 70, 90, 91, 95, 134, 135, 183–84n.24, n.31 Lowell, James Russell Fireside Travels, 132 Bigelow Papers, 132 Ludlow, John Malcolm, 104 Lumb, Hannah (Aunt Lumb), 6, 7, 10, 11, 24, 25, 45 Lumb, Marianne, 6 Lushington, Vernon, 22 Lytton, Edward Bulwer, 17, 75 Eugene Aram, 17 Paul Clifford, 17 Mackay, Alexander Western World, The, 132 Mackenzie, Alexander A Year in Spain, 17 Macmillan, Alexander, 5 Macmillan’s Magazine, 131, 172 Macready, William and Mrs, 50 Madge, Travers, 22, 36, 40 Maginn, William, 144 Manchester, 12, 18, 19–24, 28, 32, 34, 35, 42–3, 59, 86, 101, 108, 114, 122, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137 Manchester Guardian, 36 Manning, Anne, 76 Manning, Cardinal, 123 Marryat, Frederick Diary in America, 133 Marsh, Anne, see Caldwell, Anne Marsh Martineau, Harriet, 3, 12, 27, 46, 77, 113, 115, 189n.30 ‘A Manchester Strike’, 38 Martineau, James, 12, 176n.14, 188n.20 Martineau, Maria, 119 Massie, William Sydenham, 17 Alice Paulet, 17 Masson, David, 172 Mather, Cotton, 139, 140, 141 Memorable Providences, 139, 141 Maurice, Frederick, 50 Mayne, Fanny Jane Rutherford, 73 Melville, Herman, 187n.13 Mill, John Stuart, 145

200 Index Milnes, Richard Monkton (Lord Houghton), 43, 48, 50, 52 Milton, John, 15, 116 Minto, William, 172 Mitford, Mary Our Village, 98 Mohl, Mary (‘Clarkey’), 43, 47, 52–3, 55, 56, 57, 126, 128, 129, 130, 164, 179n.9 Mohl, Julius, 52 Montégut, Emile, 111 Moodie, Susanna Roughing it in the Bush, 132 Moore, Thomas, 7, 15 Epicurean, The, 7 Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, 17 More, Hannah, 14, 116 Morris, Pam, 168 Mozley, Harriet, 32 Nasmyth, James, 23, 109, 190n.65 Newby, Thomas Cautley, 70, 117, 186n.72 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 16–17, 18, 104 Nicholls, Arthur, 114, 115 Nightingale (family), 47, 52 Nightingale, Florence, 48, 106, 134 Nightingale, Parthenope (Lady Verney), 60 North American Review, 75, 133 North British Review, 104 Norton, Caroline, 38, 39, 75 Child of the Islands, The, 38 Dream, The, 38 Stuart of Dunleath, 76, 77 A Voice from the Factories, 38 Norton, Charles Eliot, 1, 24, 48, 58, 68, 69, 77, 99, 122, 126, 130, 131, 133, 134, 154, 190n.55 Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, 187n.4 Nussey, Ellen, 115, 116, 118, 120 Oliphant, Margaret, 2, 4, 73, 76 Agnes, 5 Mrs Margaret Maitland, 4 Salem Chapel, 148 Palfrey, John Gorham, 140 History of New England, 140

Pall Mall Gazette, 130, 144, 153, 165 Parker, Theodore, 131 Parkes, Bessie Raynor, 2, 49 Parr, Harriet (‘Holme Lee’), 3, 76 Pasley, 33, 63, 101 Payne, George, 10 Pierpont, John, 131 Portico Library, 14, 16, 19, 20, 35, 40, 57, 74–6, 106, 116, 131, 139, 148, 157, 188n.28 Potter, Sir John, 35 Preston, Margaret, 101 Preston, Mrs Jane, 26, 46, 47, 179 n.6 Preston, William, 95 Priestley, Joseph, 12 Proctor, Bryan Waller (‘Barry Cornwall’), 58 Proctor, Mrs Adelaide, 50 Prospective Review, 185n.50 Pryke, Jo, 25, 173 Punch, 50 Quarterly Review, 37, 117 Quillinan, Edward, 27 Radcliffe, Ann, 29, 151 Rambler, 14 Reade, Charles, 75 Christie Johnstone, 73, 74–5 Récamier, Mme de, 52, 53 Revue des Deux Mondes, 55, 75 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 1, 7, 79 Robberds, John Gooch, 18 Robberds, Mary (later Herford), 22 Roberts, Margaret Mademoiselle Mori, 59, 180–1n.25 Robinson, Crabbe, 27 Robinson, Mrs Lydia (Lady Scott), 70, 116, 117, 186n.72 Robson, Anne (sister-in-law), 101, 103, 65 Rogers, Samuel, 50 Ginevra, 177–8n.17 Italy, 59 Rossetti, Christine ‘Goblin Market’, 75 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 51 Ruskin, John, 11, 27, 43, 46, 57, 69, 75, 97, 98 Modern Painters, 57

Index 201 Sablé, Mme de, 55, 56 Saint-Pierre, Bernadin Paul and Virginia, 9 Sartain’s Union Magazine, 26, 32, 40, 45, 46, 134 Scheffer, Ary, 52, 53 Schwabe, Adolphe, 21, 43 Schwabe, Julie (Mrs Salis), 52, 53, 136, 179n.9 Schwabe, Salis, 21, 43, 53 Scoresby, William, 48, 115, 157 An Account of the Arctic Regions, 75, 157 Scott, Lady, see Robinson, Mrs Lydia Scott, Sir Walter, 7, 14, 15 Life of Napoleon, 7 Marmion, 75 Scotland Auchencairn, 48, 153, 179 n.8 Dunoon, 48, 115, 157 Edinburgh, 17, 18, 124 Glasgow, 48 Sévigné, Mme de, 17, 113, 125, 129, 185n.68 Sewell, Elizabeth, 14, 74, 76, 176n.21 Autobiography, 14 Ursula, 74 Shaen, Annie, 45, 113 Shaen, Emily, 57 Shakespeare, William, 14, 15 Sharpe’s London Magazine, 105 Sharps, John Geoffrey, 127, 145, 149, 183n.28, 187n.9 Shaw, Colonel Robert, 131 Shaw, Mrs, 131 Shelston, Alan, 178n.21, 188n.26 Sherwood, Martha Mary, 14 Silverdale (Morecambe Bay), 24–5, 26, 30, 46, 47, 104, 124, 153 Skrine, Peter, 127 Smedley, Frank, 75 Smith, Adam Wealth of Nations, 37 Smith, Anthony Martha, 73 Smith, George, 3,4,5, 48, 56, 59, 69–70, 73, 77, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 128, 133, 138, 144, 145, 149, 150, 154, 160, 163, 164, 186n.75

Smith, Elder (publishers), 63, 69, 135, 184n.31 Southey, Robert, 15, 116 The Doctor, 32 Souvestre, Emile, 53, 56 Spectator, 105 Spenser, Edmund, 13 Standard, 2 Stevenson, Elizabeth (mother), see Holland, Elizabeth Stevenson, John (brother), 6, 8–9, 26 Stevenson, Robert Louis Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 93 Stevenson, William (father), 6–8, 14, 178n.27, 190n.65 Stone, Elizabeth (Mrs Wheeler), William Langshawe, The Cotton Lord, 38, 39–40, 102 The Young Milliner, 38, 102 Stoneman, Patsy, 105, 169, 170 Story, Mrs Emelyn, 56, 57, 58–9, 130, 137, 139 Story, William Wetmore, 56, 57, 58–9, 80, 130, 137, 138 Roba di Roma, 59, 181n.26 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 3, 43, 132, 135–7, 187n.17 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 136 Minister’s Wooing, The, 136 Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 135, 136 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 136 Sunday School Penny Magazine, 32, 40 Switzerland, 126 Tasso, Torquato, 15 Tauchnitz, Verlag, 149 Taylor, Mary, 117, 120 Tennyson, Alfred Lord In Memoriam, 75 Ternan, Ellen, 68 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 50, 51, 52, 67, 69, 75, 144 Adventures of Philip, 154 Pendennis, 154 Thompson, General Perronet, 157, 158 Thompson, Isabel, 125, 128, 157 Thomson, Anthony Todd, 14, 179n.8

202 Index Thomson, Mrs Todd, see Byerley, Katharine Thomson, Catherine (Mrs Stevenson, step-mother), 6, 7 Thomson, James, 14 Ticknor and Fields (publishers), 134 Times, 117 Tollett, Ellen, 47 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth Helen Fleetwood, 38 Wrongs of Women, The, 38, 102 Toulmin, Camilla ‘Orphan Milliners, The’, 102 Travis, Deborah (Knyvett), 35 Trimmer, Sarah, 13, 32 History of the Robins, 13 Trollope, Anthony, 75 Trollope, Frances, 17, 76, 186n.3 Domestic Manners of the Americans, 17, 39, 131 Jessie Phillips, 38, 39, 102–4 Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, 38, 39 Trollope, Mrs Theodosia, 125 Trollope, Thomas Adolphus, 52, 125 True Briton, 73 Turner, Ann, 17 Turner, Mary (Mrs Gooch Robberds), 18 Turner, William, 16, 18 Twinn, Frances, 156 Uglow, Jenny, 23, 47, 48, 51, 59, 80, 98, 105, 123, 152, 161, 183n.23, 183n.31, 187n.9 Unitarians (and Unitarianism), 12–13, 20, 38, 43, 130, 145 Universal Magazine, 81 Upham, Charles Lectures on Witchcraft, 140–1 Salem Witchcraft, 189n.30 Vaughan, Henry, 15 Vecchi, Colonel

Garibaldi on Caprera, 127 Virgil, 161 Wales, 25–6, 104 Ffestiniog, 11, 25, 104 Plas yn Penrhyn, 11, 25 Ward, Adolphus William, 140, 148, 161, 173, 189n.30, 189–90n.46 Wedgwood (family), 11, 15, 49 Wedgwood, Julia, 76 Wellesley Index, 153 Westminster Review, 8, 101, 104, 138 Wheeler, Michael, 39, 102 Wheelright, Laetitia, 117 Whewell, William, 21, 47 Whitby (‘Monkshaven’), 48, 76, 96, 137, 154–7, 190n.58 Whitehill, Jane, 7, 57 Wight, Orlando, 130 Wilde, Hamilton, 130 Williams, William Smith, 161 Wills, William Henry, 65, 66, 67, 68 Wilson, Reverend Carus, 117 Winkworth, Alice, 19 Winkworth, Catherine (‘Katie’), 3, 19, 37, 39, 57, 129, 136 Winkworth, Emily, 19, 25 Winkworth, Susanna, 1, 12, 19 women writers, 3–4, 38, 74, 76–7, 182n.51 Wood, Mrs Henry, 76, 149 Wordsworth, Mrs Mary, 46 Wordsworth, William, 15, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 161, 183n.15 Michael, 33, 96 Prelude, The, 75 Wright, Thomas, 35 Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, 75, 140 Yonge, Charlotte, 74, 76 Yonge, George History of Whitby, 157