1851 Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stevenson)
often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature
Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson on September 29, 1810, at 93 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, which was then on the outskirts of London. Gaskell was the eighth, and last, of her parents' children, the only one except the first-born, John (born 1806), to survive infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, was a Scottish Unitarian minister at Failsworth, near Manchester, but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds, moving his family in 1806 to London with intentions of going to India after he had been named private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor-General of India. This position did not materialise and Stevenson was instead nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records. Stevenson's wife, Elizabeth Holland, came from a prominent Midlands family that was well-connected with other Unitarian and prominent families like the Wedgwoods, the Turners and the Darwins, and when she died three months after giving birth to Gaskell she left a bewildered husband who saw no other alternative for young Elizabeth but to be sent away to live with her mother's sister Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire.<2>
Gaskell's future situation while growing up was very uncertain as she had no personal wealth, and no firm home, even though she was a permanent guest at her aunt and grandparents' house. Her father had married again to Catherine Thomson in 1814 and by 1815 the couple already had a male heir, William (born 1815) and a daughter, Catherine (born 1816). Although Gaskell would sometimes spend several years without seeing her father and his new family, her older brother John would often visit her in Knutsford. John had been early destined for the Royal Navy, like his grandfathers and uncles, but he had no entry and had to go into the Merchant Navy with the East India Company's fleet of ships.<3>
John would go missing in 1827 during an expedition to India. Gaskell's father remained in London where he married and fathered other children.
Much of Elizabeth's childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, a town she would later immortalise as Cranford. They lived in a large red brick house, Heathwaite, on Heathside (now Gaskell Avenue), which faces the large open area of Knutsford Heath.
She also spent some time in Newcastle upon Tyne (with Rev. William Turner's family) and in Edinburgh. Her stepmother was a sister of the Scottish miniature artist, William John Thomson, who painted the famous 1832 portrait of Gaskell in Manchester. Also during this period, Gaskell met and married William Gaskell, the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, who had a literary career of his own. They honeymooned in North Wales, staying with Elizabeth's uncle, Samuel Holland, who lived near Porthmadog.
Married life and Plymouth GroveThe Gaskells settled in Manchester, where the industrial surroundings would offer inspiration for her novels (in the industrial genre). They had several children: a stillborn daughter in 1833, followed by Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily (1837), known as Meta, Florence Elizabeth (1842), William (1844-1845), and Julia Bradford (1846). Her daughter Florence married a barrister, Charles Crompton, in 1862.
They rented a villa in Plymouth Grove in 1850, after the publication of Gaskell's first novel, and Gaskell lived in the house with her family until her death 15 years later.<4> All of Gaskell's books, bar one, were written at Plymouth Grove, while her husband held welfare committees and tutored the poor in his study. The circles in which the Gaskells moved included literary greats, religious dissenters, and social reformers, including William and Mary Howitt. Visitors to Plymouth Grove included Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and American writer Charles Eliot Norton, while conductor Charles Hallé lived close by and taught the piano to one of Gaskell's four daughters. Close friend Charlotte Brontë is known to have stayed there three times, and on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet Gaskell's visitors.<5>
Gaskell died in Holybourne, Hampshire in 1865 aged 55. The house on Plymouth Grove remained in the Gaskell family until 1913.
Literary style and themesGaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1854), and Wives and Daughters (1865). She became popular for her writing, especially her ghost story writing, aided by her friend Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her ghost stories are quite distinct in style from her industrial fiction and belong to the Gothic fiction genre.
Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions (including signing her name "Mrs. Gaskell"), Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes, particularly those toward women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters.<6>
In addition to her fiction, Gaskell also wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë, which played a significant role in developing her fellow writer's reputation.
Themes
Unitarianism urged comprehension and tolerance upon its members and upon all fellow Christians and, even though Gaskell tried to keep her own beliefs hidden, these were values Gaskell felt very strongly about and tried to include in her works, like in North and South where "Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm".<7><8>
Dialect usageGaskell's style is notable for putting local dialect words into the voice of middle-class characters and of the narrator; for example in North and South, Margaret Hale suggests redding up (tidying) the Bouchers' house and even offers jokingly to teach her mother words such as knobstick (strike-breaker).<9> Her husband collected Lancashire dialect, and Gaskell defended her use of dialect as expressing otherwise inexpressible concepts in an 1854 letter to Walter Savage Landor:<9>
:'...you will remember the country people's use of the word "unked". I can't find any other word to express the exact feeling of strange unusual desolate discomfort, and I sometimes "potter" and "mither" people by using it.'<10>
She used the dialect word "nesh" (soft), which goes back to Old English, in Mary Barton:
"Sit you down here: the grass is well nigh dry by this time; and you're neither of you nesh folk about taking cold."<11>
and later in 'The Manchester Marriage' <1858>:
"Now, I'm not above being nesh for other folks myself. I can stand a good blow, and never change colour; but, set me in the operating-room in the Infirmary, and I turn as sick as a girl." "At Mrs Wilson's death, Norah came back to them, as nurse to the newly-born little Edwin; into which post she was not installed without a pretty strong oration on the part of the proud and happy father; who declared that if he found out that Norah ever tried to screen the boy by a falsehood, or to make him nesh either in body or mind, she should go that very day."<12>
Publications
Novels
? Mary Barton (1848)
? Cranford (1851–3)
? Ruth (1853)
? North and South (1854–5)
? Sylvia's Lovers (1863)
? Cousin Phillis (1864)
? Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1865)
Novellas and collections
? The Moorland Cottage (1850)
? The Old Nurse's Story (1852)
? Lizzie Leigh (1855)
? My Lady Ludlow (1859)
? Round the Sofa (1859)
? Lois the Witch (1861)
? A Dark Night's Work (1863)
Short stories (partial)
? Libbie Marsh's Three Eras (1847)
? Christmas Storms and Sunshine (1848)
? The Squire's Story (1853)
? Half a Life-time Ago (1855)
? An Accursed Race (1855)
? The Poor Clare (1856)
? "The Manchester Marriage" (1858), a chapter of A House to Let, co-written with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Adelaide Anne Procter
? The Half-brothers (1859)
? The Grey Woman (1861)
Non-fiction? The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857)
References
1. ^ <1> "Children in Early Victorian England: Infant Feeding in Literature and Society 1837-1857." Tropical Pediatrics and Environmental Child Health August 1978
2. ^ Pollard, Arthur (1965). Mrs Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer. Manchester University Press, 12. ISBN 0674577507.
3. ^ Gérin, Winifred (1976). Elizabeth Gaskell. Oxford University Press, 10-17. ISBN 0-19-281296-3.
4. ^ Uglow J. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (Faber and Faber; 1993) (ISBN 0-571-20359-0)
5. ^ Nurden, Robert. 'An ending Dickens would have liked' Independent (26 March 2006)
6. ^ Excluding Reference to Gaskell's Ghost Stories, Abrams, M.H., et al. (Eds.) "Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810-1865". The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Major Authors: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century, 7th ed., Vol. B. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. ISBN 0-393-97304-2. DDC 820.8--dc21. LC PR1109.N6.
7. ^ Gaskell, Elizabeth (1854-5). North and South. Penguin Popular Classics, 277. ISBN 978-0-140-62019-1.
8. ^ Easson, Angus (1979). Elizabeth Gaskell. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 12-17. ISBN 0-7100-0099-5.
9. ^ a b Ingham P. (1995) Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of North and South
10. ^ Chapple JAV, Pollard A, eds. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Mandolin (Manchester University Press), 1997
11. ^ Gaskell E. (1848) Mary Barton, chapter 1
12. ^ Victorian Short Stories, Stories Of Successful Marriages, The Project Gutenberg
themes? Christian Service and Female Servitude in North and South
? Working Class Anti-Religion and Atheism
? Religious Doubt in North and South
? Rev. Hale's Crisis of Faith in North and South
Genres
? The Industrial Novel
? Novels of Religious Crisis
? The Bildungsroman, or novel of growth and discovery
? North and South as Bildungsroman: A Select Bibliography
? Fantasy Writing and Geographic Location in Gaskell’s North and South
Style
? Gaskell's Style: Is it "charming," "delicate," and "exquisite"?
Cranford
Sexual Imagery in Gaskell "Margaret could not help her looks;" Gaskell writes in describing the young woman's physical appearance, "but the short curled upper lip, the round massive up-turned chin, the manner of carrying her head, her movements, full of a soft feminine defiance, always gave strangers the impression of haughtiness" (ch. 7, p.62). When John Thornton comes to take tea with the Hales in chapter 10, he is distinctly aware of the arrogance and indifference that Margaret shows him, and yet he cannot help his extreme attraction to her. For a man who exudes power and control in all other facets of his life, this is a difficult experience for Thornton to deal with. He wants to be able to demonstrate the same indifference, and yet he is drawn to Margaret's every move:
She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr. Thornton watched the replacing of this troublesome ornament with far more attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently until it tightened her soft flesh; and then to mark the loosening — the fall. He could almost have exclaimed — "There it goes again!"... and he almost longed to ask her to do for him what he saw her compelled to do for her father, who took her little finger and thumb in his masculine hand, and made them serve as sugar tongs. Mr. Thornton saw her beautiful eyes lifted to her father, full of light, half-laughter, and half-love, as this bit of pantomime went on between the two, unobserved, as they thought. (ch.10, p.79)
As William A. Cohen writes on The Victorian Web, nineteenth-century "Britain is mainly remembered for two things: sexual prudishness and long novels. Through the combined effects of newspapers and novels, sexuality in the nineteenth century became the subject routinely and paradoxically signaled by its ineffability — a subject that consequently produces volatile effects at the moments when it approaches explicit articulation" ("Sex, Scandal, and the Novel"). Clearly, it would have been taboo as well as uncouth for Gaskell to blatantly express Thornton's sexual passion for Margaret. Instead, the author uses the technique of imagery in order to convey Thornton's feelings. The simile used in comparing Margaret's fingers to a pair of sugar tongs, for example, can be simultaneously viewed as both sweet and seductive. Indeed, every one of Margaret's movements in the above passage becomes sexually charged, and yet the subtlety of the description allows the scene to remain more or less innocent.
The Rose Image in North and South Gaskell provides the final summation of attitudes about the agricultural and urban sectors that had been investigated by Stone, Kingsley, and Cooke Taylor, integrating these into the consciousness of a middle-class woman. Margaret realizes that if "I live in a factory town, I must speak factory language when I want it" (281). When she goes to London after the death of her parents, she finds it deadening, "a strange unsatisfied vacuum" (445). With her experience of both the northern and the southern counties, Margaret Hale functions as a reader surrogate in evaluating cultural differences. By this strategy, Gaskell locates such comparisons in her character's consciousness rather than in the narrator's, as had been the case in Mary Barton with the narrator evaluating the diverse social positions.
Gaskell registers these changes by a unifying image of the rose. She remarks early that the roses grow all over the cottages. Margaret is shown picking roses, but the change comes when Margaret sees the cheap paper on the walls in Milton: "You must prepare yourself for our drawing-room paper. Pink and blue roses, with yellow leaves!" (73). That these roses are associated with Margaret is apparent in Mrs. Thornton's hostility to her for snubbing her son: "Her sharp Damascus blade seemed out of place and useless among rose-leaves" (374). When Margaret visits Helstone again she sees "the garden, the grass-plat, formerly so daintily trim that even a stray rose-leaf seemed like a fleck on its exquisite arrangement and propriety, was strewed with children's things; a bag of marbles here, a hoop there; a straw hat forced down upon a rose-tree as on a peg, to the destruction of a long, beautiful, tender branch laden with flowers" (469). At the novel's conclusion Thornton gives her a dead rose from Helstone, marking her assimilation to a new order, the dominance of agriculture by industry.
From Joseph Kestner, Protest & Reform: The British Social Narrative by Women, 1827-1867.>
Infection and Feeling in Mrs. Gaskell's Ruth In the novel, the term "infection" and the idea of infectiousness are frequently used to refer to feeling: Ruth is "infected" by Bellingham 's amusement (15); Mr. Davis suggests that his wife has "infected" him with a desire for children (437). Leonard, Ruth's son, at one point develops a tendency to lie, the implication being that he has caught duplicity from his mother; he also "catches" her bravery later on (427). Gaskell's use of the infection metaphor suggests the way fallenness in the novel is everyone's problem. Literalizing the metaphor, later, as disease, Gaskell paradoxically isolates the infection: since only Ruth has been infected by Bellingham, only for her is fallenness the cause of death.
Sally's anxiety about the infectiousness of Ruth's feeling evokes the fear of contamination conventionally associated with fallen women; it also amplifies an anxiety about the power of the sympathetic object that suggests, again, the potential fluidity of class identity in the novel. These scenes dramatize not Adam Smith's general idea of sympathy — the imagining of the self if the other's place — but rather a fear of sympathy's reversibility, as if the other's identity might too easily become one's own. When, in an effort to assist in her disguise, Sally abruptly cuts Ruth's hair, what is ostensibly done to make her resemble a widow is in effect a test of submissiveness and an insistence on difference: a dramatization of the giving up of identity in exchange for sympathy. And the novel as a whole, like this scene, dramatizes sympathy's transformation — and, ultimately, complete appropriation — of its object.
Ruth's disguise — the covering of one identity by another-functions as an attempt to transform one kind of feeling into another, and as the novel progresses, Ruth becomes an instrument for allaying the disruptive feelings her "fallen" self represents. After Sally's warning, Ruth's potential to "infect" others is transformed into an "unconscious power of enchantment" (179), an unwilled communication of serene and harmonious feeling. (Significantly, the warning is delivered by a female servant who has undergone a similar transformation, learning to discipline resentful feelings and accept her "station" <176>.) With this transformation, Gaskell implicitly defines as the novel's task not so much the alteration of characters' and readers' feelings about Ruth but rather Ruth's ability to alter their feelings about themselves and each other, an ability reminiscent of the kind of reparation for past transgressions one of Gaskell's early critics described as necessary for the fallen woman. . . . . . .Ruth radiates feelings of serenity and cheerfulness without intention, "with no thought of self tainting it" (366), she disseminates familial harmony. <pp. 83-84>
Related Materials
? Growing Heorines: Ruth
? Review of Audrey Jaffe's Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction
? Sympathy and the Embodiment of Culture in Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray
? Sympathy and Representation in Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne
? Sympathy and the Spirit of Capitalism in Dickens's A Christmas Carrol
References
Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Industrial Imagery in North and South Midway through Chapter 31 in The Pickwick Papers, Sam Weller and Pickwick happen upon a "celebrated Sassage factory," whereupon Sam narrates an urban legend involving the "mysterious disappearance of a respectable tradesman . . . the inwenter o' the patent-never-leavin-off sassage steam 'ingine'" that would "swaller up a pavin' stone . . . and grind it into sassages as easy as if it was a tender young babby." A contented man in most other respects, this hapless tradesman takes a most "ow-dacious wixin" as his wife, and the morning after a particular bought of their "screamin' and kickin," the husband turns up "missin." Two months later, Sam reports, the following interview occurred.
One Saturday night, a little thin old gen'lm'n comes into the shop in a great passion and says, 'Are you the missis o' this here shop?' 'Yes I am,' says she. "Well Ma'am,' says he, 'then I've just looked in to say, that me and my family ain't a goin' to be choaked for nothin'; and more than that Ma'am,' he says, 'you'll allow me to observe that as you don't use the primest parts of the meat in the manfacter o' sassages, I think you'd find beef come nearly as cheap as buttons.' 'Buttons, Sir!' says she. 'Buttons, Ma'am,' says the little old gentleman, unfolding a bit of paper, and shewin' twenty or thirty halves o' buttons. "Nice seasonin' for sassages, is trousers' buttons, Ma'am.' "They're my husband's buttons,' says the widder, beginnin to fain. "What!' screams the little old gen'lm'n, turnin' wery pale. 'I see it all,' says the widder; 'in a fit of temporary insanity he rashly converted hisself into sassages!" (Pickwick Papers, 465, Ch. 31).
The abject working-conditions resulting from nineteenth-century industrial expansion in England were well known to both Gaskell and Dickens. "The conditions under which women and children toiled in mines and factories were unimaginably brutal" (Norton II 894), and involved among other things low wages, excessive working hours, the exploitation of children laborers, and dangerous machinery. In terms of the food industry, Anthony S. Wohl's research suggests that Dickens' comical portrayal of "'those odds and ends of meat, the by-products of the butchering business'" is perhaps not far from truth. "The Privy Council estimated in 1862 that one-fifth of butcher's meat in England and Wales came from animals which were 'considerably diseased' or had died of pleuro-pneumonia, and anthacid or anthracoid diseases" (Wohl, "Adulteration and Contamination of Food"). Laura Del Col has similarly researched the textile industry against which Gaskell inveighs, citing Michael Sadler's parliamentary investigation into the condition of textile mills in 1832. This is one of the "great reports on the life of the industrial class" that led ultimately to the passage of the Act of 1833 limiting hours of employment for women and children in textile. Del Col also draws upon Elizabeth. Gaskell's observations of the "physical deterioration of textile workers." work (Del Col, "The Life of the Industrial Worker")
Gaskell writes in The Manufacturing Population of England — a deterioration physically manifest in the "spiritless and dejected air," the "sallow and pallid" complexions, and "flat feet" of "great numbers of girls and women walking lamely or awkwardly."
In this sense both Gaskell and Dickens comment upon the material reality of nineteenth-century factory workers; however, where Dickens satirises these conditions, Gaskell renders the conditions of northern textile work through Bessy's realistic monologue. That is, Bessy's description of "fluff" bears a striking similarity to the well-documented conditions of nineteenth-century textile mills. In terms of theme, Bessy, herself a teenager (and ostensibly the only woman Gaskell describes as a worker), decries the mutability of life. Having "been bornäjust to work my heart and life away," she foresees the "end of it all." It seems Gaskell aligns her sympathies with Bessy by simultaneously lamenting the futility of Bessy's situation and finding genuine value in Bessy's northern ethos of enterprise, self-sufficiency, and agency. So rigorous are these textile mills that the "mill noises" resonate against Bessy's mental and physical health. She "could go mad," but also suffers from the "fluff filling my lungs." A theme of mutability is brought about largely, because of Gaskell's technique or style of realism. That is, Gaskell participates in the "nineteenth-century movement that believed novelists and painters should concentrate on describing the physical, material details of life" ("Realism" Victorian Web).
If Gaskell is concerned with accurately portraying these factories, Dickens attempts the same social reform through satire. Satire emphasises humanity's ridiculousness by means of humour in an attempt to reform or correct these follies and improve the human condition. Whereas Gaskell conflates Bessy's body and spirit, her mental anguish and physical deterioration, Dickens literally casts the body of his tragic protagonist headlong into the "sausage" machine — turning him ironically into "sausage" himself. Sam's urban legend provides Pickwick with much-needed insights into the horrors of industrial life. No matter how cynical and fantastic the tragic protagonist's "mysterious disappearance" may be, Sam's embedded tale cleverly suggests the same social reform that Gaskell desires. Notice, too, that whereas Gaskell's Bessy occupies an important space in the novel's narrative, Dicken's depiction of industry appears in an ancillary embedded tale.
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), English author, wrote Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848);
The eyes of John Barton grew dim with tears.
Rich and poor, masters and men, were then brothers in the deep suffering of the heart; for was not this the very anguish he had felt for little Tom, in years so long gone by, that they seemed like another life!
The mourner before him was no longer the employer; a being of another race, eternally placed in antagonistic attitude; going through the world glittering like gold, with a stony heart within, which knew no sorrow but through the accidents of Trade; no longer the enemy, the oppressor, but a very poor and desolate old man.
The sympathy for suffering, formerly so prevalent a feeling with him, again filled John Barton's heart, and almost impelled him to speak (as best he could) some earnest, tender words to the stern man, shaking in his agony.
But who was he, that he should utter sympathy or consolation? The cause of all this woe.
Oh, blasting thought! Oh, miserable remembrance! He had forfeited all right to bind up his brother's wounds.--Ch. 35
As a Unitarian dissenter living in the industrial town of Manchester, Gaskell wrote with compassion but at-times bold frankness about controversial issues of the day including the general poverty of the working classes, the hardships of men working in mines and factories, and women working in mills. After enjoying an idyllic middle class childhood in the country, she was shocked and saddened to see families living in slums eking out a miserable existence. Time and again she would cause controversy among her privileged Victorian readership with her characters and themes. While trying to balance her domestic duties with burgeoning literary pursuits, Gaskell inevitably drew upon her own experiences with various charitable organisations in assisting the poor to create her now famous fictitious works. She also wrote numerous essays and short stories, and for her efforts earned the respect of such esteemed authors of her day as Thomas Carlyle and Charles Kingsley. She was friends with and maintained correspondence with Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among other fellow authors who praised her works and shared her values and morals. Today Gaskell's works continue to be inspiration to other authors, have been the subject of film adaptations, and many are still in print today.
