Elizabeth Gaskell : Author

Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson in a suburb of London, the daughter of Unitarians, a couple who didn't enforce belief in a creed or dogmatic formula. She had a sad childhood, losing her mother at a very early age and was consequently farmed off to relatives.

She followed the guidelines of her parents in her religious worldview and took the Unitarian principles as her own, eventually marrying a devout Unitarian Minister, William Gaskell, a man also interested in literature and the plight of the poor.

The Gaskells moved to Manchester and, after her first novel, Mary Barton, was published, they could afford to live in a house which Elizabeth described as 'a beauty'. Gaskell wrote her later novels from here while her husband held welfare committee meetings and tutored the poor in his study.

They entertained many visitors, among them Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton.

Here, in her beautiful house, Elizabeth lived with her family until her death 15 years later.

My favourite Elizabeth Gaskell reading is the handful of short books, or long stories, known collectively as the Cranford Chronicles, domestic gems of small-town manners.

The BBC mini series which incorporates them is delightful, warm and clever on the small screen.

Gaskell based her novellas about Cranford in the town of Knutsford on the Cheshire Plain, an area famed for its beautiful countryside and pretty towns and villages.

Knutsford is a popular destination during May Day celebrations, in particular for an old custom called "sanding the streets" in which the streets are decorated with coloured sands in patterns and pictures.

Tradition has it that King Canute, (Knut), while fording the River Lily, threw sand from his shoes into the path of a wedding party, wishing the newly-wed as many children as the grains of sand at their feet

Queen Victoria, in her journal of 1832 recorded: "... we arrived at Knutsford, where we were most civilly received, the streets being sanded in shapes which is peculiar to this town".

Depressed by the death of her child ,William, Gaskell began writing the novel Mary Barton, in which she describes the lives of Manchester's poor. The novel was an immediate popular success and inaugurated her career as a novelist.

With an entirely working-class cast of characters, the background is Manchester in the 'hungry forties' and the acute poverty of the mill-hands. Mary Barton is the daughter of an active and embittered worker and trade unionist John Barton.

The plot turns on Mary's romantic choice between the son of a rich industrialist and a working-class lover.

Yes, there will be murder.

Mary Barton appeared the same year (1848) as Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto.

Although Gaskell's politics are quite different - her book nevertheless illustrates many of the characterisations of capitalism which are found in theoretical texts, and in a very human way.

What thoughtful heart can look into this gulf
That darkly yawns 'twixt rich and poor,
And not find food for saddest meditation!

Chartists' Meeting, 1848


Gaskell wrote in her Preface to Mary Barton :

"I know nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade. I have tried to write truthfully; and if my accounts agree or clash with any system, the agreement or disagreement is unintentional.

To myself the idea which I have formed of the state of feeling among too many of the factory-people in Manchester, has received some confirmation from the events which have so recently occurred among a similar class on the Continent." .

The 'events' she refers to are the Revolutions of 1848, a series of political upheavals throughout the European continent beginning in Sicily and, further propelled by the French Revolution, soon spreading to the rest of Europe.

While the immediate political effects of the revolutions were reversed, the long-term reverberations of the events were far-reaching .From1848 we inherited our expectations for basic freedom and justice.

(For more on 1848, see Spring of Nations on wikipedia)

Gaskell also wrote a number of short stories, as well as the biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte.

The 1980s saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form and Gaskell used the genre for a number of brooding stories which were published mainly by Charles Dickens in his popular magazine.

We can now read Gaskell's work online as, happily for us, all her works are out of copyright.

An exemplary Victorian ghost story, this tale was first published anonymously in the 1852 Christmas issue of Dickens' Household Words.

The Old Nurse's Story

You can read it here - etexts from Mitsuharu Mitsuoka

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