Dictionary of
Literary Biography 21
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Edgar Wright
Laurentian University
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
* This is a Web version of Professor
Edgar Wright's DLB article on Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell reproduced by his
special permission.
BIRTH
London, 29 September 1810, to William and Elizabeth Holland Stevenson.
MARRIAGE
30 August 1832 to the Reverend William Gaskell; children: Marianne, Margaret
Emily ("Meta"), Florence, William, Julia.
DEATH
Holybourne, Hampshire, 12 November 1865.
A recent review of Mrs. Gaskell's
critical reputation divided her critics into three camps. One group, now
fading, still treats her mainly as the author of Cranford (1853). A
second emphasizes her "social-problem" novels but insists that they
be regarded as literature and not just as social history. The third and
dominant one regards her as "a maturing artist, and considers each of her
works in relation to the others and her general views, preferring the late
fiction but giving all her writing respectful, and perhaps even admiring
attention." To this summary should be added a recent special focus on her
role and influence as a woman writer, and studies of her as a provincial
novelist, relating her work to that of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in its
presentation of life in a regional community. It is also probably true to say
that the reputation of her late fiction -- the "nouvelle" Cousin
Phillis (1864) and the novel Wives and Daughters (1866) -- is still
growing.
She won instant recognition with her
first novel, Mary Barton (1848), which shocked readers with its revelations
about the grim living conditions of Manchester factory workers and antagonized
some influential critics because of its open sympathy for the workers in their
relations with the masters; but the high quality of the writing and the
characterization were undeniable. (Its accuracy as social observation has been
compared to the work of Friedrich Engels and other contemporaries by critics
such as John Lucas.) At the same time it presented a new world, the world of
Lancashire factory people, making them the main characters and using their
dialect (judiciously modified) for the dialogue. In so doing Mrs. Gaskell, with
the Brontės, opened a path for George Eliot and later novelists. Yet her next
success was with Cranford, stories that drew on memories of her
childhood in the small Cheshire town of Knutsford to present an affectionate
picture of a class and customs already becoming anachronisms. Cranford
has charm, humor, and pathos without sentimentality, and no purpose other than
to present and regret the passing of a community whose values are worth
recalling. The two elements of Mrs. Gaskell's fiction responded to different
elements in her nature: as her Cranford narrator says, "I had
vibrated all my life between Drumble [Manchester] and Cranford [Knutsford]."
After her biography of Charlotte Brontė (1857), it was the Knutsford side that
predominated, providing the setting and the main themes for her later work.
Although she began by creating
controversy with social-problem novels and by suggesting the adoption of
genuine Christian conduct as a solution, it can be seen now that her real
interests always lay with individuals and the underlying moral standards by
which they act and are to be judged. Along with this went an appreciation of
the changes in attitudes being created by the rapid social and industrial
changes of the period. Knutsford and Manchester came to symbolize contrasting
values and ways of life; she worked toward reconciling tradition and change,
depicting traditional values while recognizing the necessity and desirability
of new ideas and a new society. As a result, the direct role of religion drops
away rapidly even in her social-problem novels; in the Cranford novels it
appears rarely, and then only as a natural element of custom or behavior.
Her attention was also focused from
her earliest work on the social and emotional problems of her women characters.
She was capable of drawing fine and intelligent portraits of men, but it is the
women who receive her closest and most sympathetic attention. Along with
Charlotte Brontė, she gave a depth and credibility to her women characters that
influenced succeeding novelists such as George Eliot.
Mrs. Gaskell achieved popular and
critical esteem in her lifetime, with Cranford easily her most popular
work. Although her reputation suffered along with those of all other Victorian
writers during the period of critical reaction in the early twentieth century,
some of her books were always in print; and A. W. Ward's Knutsford edition of
her work (1906-1911), still essential reading for its introductions, was
reprinted in 1920. (One can get an idea of the quality of critical estimates at
that time by noting that the Cambridge History of English Literature
gathered George Eliot along with Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, and Mrs. Gaskell
into a chapter on the political and social novel.)
Besides novels, Mrs. Gaskell wrote
short stories, essays, and articles for periodicals. Some of the essays deserve
to be better known (for example, "French Life"), for she was a
natural essayist. Her most famous work of nonfiction is The Life of
Charlotte Brontė, still recognized as among the finest biographies in
English. Her letters reveal her alert, intelligent curiosity about people and
events matched by an eager eye and ear for describing everyday matters. As she
says when concluding an early letter to her sister-in-law "Lizzy"
Gaskell, "Now mind you write again, and none of your nimini-pimini notes
but a sensible nonsensical crossed letter as I do. . . ."
("Crossed" means the double use of space by writing vertically across
a section written horizontally.) She is not an "intellectual" writer,
though a bright and very well-read one; any comparison would relate her to Jane
Austen rather than to George Eliot in terms of erudition, though she stands
somewhere between them in approach and outlook. There is no longer any question
about whether or not she is a major novelist; she qualifies both as an artist
and in relation to the development of the English novel. The publication of the
letters (1966), of the information in J. G. Sharps's invaluable Mrs.
Gaskell's Observation and Invention (1970), and of Winifred Gérin's
biography Elizabeth Gaskell (1976) has provided scholars and critics
with the material for further interpretation and reassessment.
Elizabeth Stevenson was born of
Unitarian parents in London, where her father, William, was keeper of the
treasury records. He was a man of parts who had trained as a minister, tried
being a farmer, and developed into a respected writer for the major journals, a
career he continued until his death. His marriage to Elizabeth Holland would
bring the future novelist into the Holland family of Knutsford in Cheshire, a
relationship that was to dominate her life. Mrs. Stevenson died when Elizabeth
was only thirteen months old; the child was immediately "adopted" by
her mother's sister, Aunt Lumb, and removed to Knutsford, where she grew up in
the quiet and tranquil atmosphere of an old-fashioned country town, close to
Sandlebridge Farm where her grandfather lived and her other Holland relatives
visited. There seems to have been little further contact with her father until
she returned to London about a year before he died.
Dissenters, and especially
Unitarians, believed in education for girls as well as boys. After lessons at
home that included French and dancing instruction from an émigré, she was sent
at the age of twelve to the Byerley sisters' school at Barford; the school was
moved in 1824 to Stratford-on-Avon. The education was of high quality, broad in
range (Latin, French, and Italian were standard in the curriculum), and liberal
in outlook. She spent five years in surroundings that admirably suited her
tastes, intelligence, and love of the country, leaving the school in 1827 an
accomplished and -- according to the evidence of friends and artists -- a
vivacious and attractive young woman. She returned to Knutsford, but the
disappearance of her only brother brought her back to London in 1828. John
Stevenson sailed for the East India Company; nothing is known of how he
disappeared, but the sense of loss can be felt in the account of young Peter in
Cranford and the Frederick episodes in North and South (1855).
Her father had married again, and when Elizabeth met her stepmother there was
antipathy rather than sympathy. (The portrait of Molly's stepmother, the
incomparable Mrs. Gibson, in Wives and Daughters, is said to reflect
Mrs. Gaskell's impressions.) She stayed with her father until his death in
1829, when, after visits to a banker uncle, Swinton Holland, and a doctor
uncle, Henry Holland (later Sir Henry and physician to Queen Victoria) --
visits recollected in the opening of North and South -- she returned to
live in Knutsford until her marriage.
Elizabeth Gaskell Stevenson
shortly before her marriage in 1832 (Manchester University Library)
During a visit to Manchester she met
the Reverend William Gaskell, newly appointed as assistant minister at the
Cross Street Chapel; they were married on 30 August 1832. Manchester's
Unitarian community was prominent in both commercial and cultural life; Cross
Street Chapel was an important Unitarian center, and her husband became a
leading figure in the community. Some early biographers have suggested that
tensions developed in the marriage, but the evidence does not support this
view. The Gaskells seem to have been two intelligent and sensitive people who
respected each other's independence and temperament without denying the basic
roles of husband and paterfamilias, wife and mother; the letters show that they
cared about and supported each other's work and habits throughout the marriage.
The obvious loss to Mrs. Gaskell was in exchanging Knutsford for Manchester.
Knutsford is only sixteen miles from Manchester and is now a commuter suburb,
but in the early nineteenth century it was an old-fashioned, sleepy little
country town. Although the Gaskells lived on the country edge of Manchester,
she was affected physically and mentally by its atmosphere; at the same time,
she admired and respected its people and its leading place in the world. The
love-hate attitude to "dear old dull ugly smoky grim grey Manchester"
is reflected in the earlier social-problem fiction and in her later emphasis on
the world of "Cranford."
Mrs. Gaskell spent the next fifteen years
mainly in domestic and humanitarian activity. A particular grief was the death
in 1837 of Aunt Lumb, who left her an annuity of £80. There were small signs of
creativity: a sonnet to her stillborn child (1836), and a narrative poem (1837)
in the style of George Crabbe written in collaboration with her husband and
meant to be the first of a number of Sketches among the Poor. A
friendship with the well-known writers and editors William and Mary Howitt led
to a recollection of her schooldays, "Clopton Hall," appearing in
their Visits to Remarkable Places (1840). These scattered creative
impulses were brought into sharper focus after the death of her nine-month-old
son in 1845. Ward states that her husband advised her to turn to writing as a
relief from sorrow and encouraged her to begin her first novel, which was
completed in 1847 and eventually taken by Chapman and Hall for £ 100. Mary
Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life was published anonymously on 25 October
1848. It created a sensation.
The tale is developed around a
standard romantic plot. Mary Barton, the motherless daughter of a mill hand, is
nearly seduced by young Carson, the mill owner's son. At the same time, a
depression hits Manchester, and in the growing labor troubles John Barton,
Mary's father, is selected by lot to kill young Carson as an act of union
protest. He carries out the murder, but suspicion falls on Jem Wilson, who
loves Mary. After complications and difficulties the truth is revealed with the
aid of John Barton's outcast sister, Esther. Barton, dying, is reconciled with
Carson; Mary and Jem move away. But a summary of the plot gives little hint of
the real force of the novel: the presentation of Manchester life and the
pressures that turn John Barton into a murderer. A few attempts had been made
to portray factory life in fiction, notably Disraeli's Sybil (1845),
mainly with a reform intent. But Mary Barton is the first realistic
portrayal of the phenomenon of the new major industrial city and its people,
just as it is a new development in the use of regional dialect and detail.
Manchester and its social context were to most readers an eye-opening
revelation, whether it was to "hear of folk lying down to die i' th'
streets, or hiding their want i' some hole 0' a cellar till death come to set
'em free"; or to learn about self-taught operatives with scientific
reputations such as Job Legh (based on a real person); or to realize how the
drive for profit and jobs was creating a type of society based, not on human
relationships, but on what Carlyle -- an influence on Mrs. Gaskell -- called
the "Cash Nexus." (Carlyle wrote a letter of praise to the
still-anonymous author.) At the heart of the novel is her bitter comment:
"Are ye worshippers of Christ? or of Alecto? Oh, Orestes! you would have
made a very tolerable Christian of the nineteenth century!"
Yet the novel is not ponderous,
though at this stage Mrs. Gaskell's faith in the Christian ethic as a solution
is too facilely displayed. Although critics such as W. R. Greg protested that
the novel was unfair to the masters, they recognized the high quality of the
writing, the humor that laced its observations and episodes, and the
genuineness of the sentiment. Within a year -- for the anonymity was quickly
broken -- Mrs. Gaskell was being lionized in literary London and pressed by
Dickens to contribute to his new journal, Household Words. Her rather
Wordsworthian tale of guilt, remorse, and repentance, 'Lizzie Leigh"
(1850), led off the opening number and was the beginning of a long association,
often with exasperation on both sides, between Dickens as editor and Mrs.
Gaskell as contributor. Some minor stories had already appeared in other
periodicals before Mary Barton came out; by the end of 1851 ten more
items were published. They included a Christmas book, The Moorland Cottage
(1850), the first in her long short story or "nouvelle" form. Then
came a story that was to become one of her finest novels as well as her most
popular: Cranford.
"Our Society at Cranford,"
now the first two chapters of Cranford, appeared in Household Words
on 13 December 1851 and was itself a fictional version of an earlier essay,
"The Last Generation in England," first published in America in 1849.
Further episodes were written at irregular intervals until 1853, when the book
was published. In the process of writing it, Mrs. Gaskell's natural talent
developed a rudimentary plot around Miss Matty's problems and the search for
her missing brother, but the attractiveness of Cranford lies in the way
in which she recreates with humor and affection a way of life that was already
old-fashioned when she was a young girl growing up among the little group of
ladies of good birth but small income who constituted Cranford society and
maintained traditions of social behavior and dress by practicing "elegant
economy." While their eccentricities are noted, the essential humanity of
the characters is never forgotten.
An 1851 portrait of Mrs. Gaskell by George Richmond
(National Portrait Gallery)
The original episode was created
around the formidable Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her softhearted younger sister,
Miss Matty. With the Cranford setting established, the story chronicles the
arrival of an elderly widower, Captain Brown, and his two daughters as
newcomers to Cranford and their reception by the "Amazons," who are
won over by his honest frankness even though he is a man. The sickly elder
daughter finally dies; as she is dying the captain is killed by a train while
rescuing a young child. A faithful admirer returns to marry the younger
daughter. Dickens, as editor of Household Words, pressed Mrs. Gaskell
for more; at irregular intervals between January 1852 and May 1853 eight more
episodes appeared (there was a hiatus in the middle while she concentrated on Ruth).
In the process there was a shift of interest and a structural change. As Mrs.
Gaskell told Ruskin, "The beginning of 'Cranford' was one paper in
'Household Words'; and I never meant to write more, so killed Capt. Brown very
much against my will." In expanding the episode into a series she quickly
"killed off" Deborah, making. the gentler Miss Matty the central
figure and developing a rudimentary plot around a long-lost brother who finally
returns from India. (This recollection of her own lost brother, John, has
already been noted.) The novelist in Mrs. Gaskell was taking over. The interest
remains fixed, however, on feelings, relationships, and social conduct. As
Winifred Gérin says, It is a tale told without apparent effort in a style of
intimate confidence, like gossip exchanged with a friend" -- like Mrs.
Gaskell's letters, in fact, only with the vital difference that the gossip is
being shaped by the imagination and control of a developing novelist. A few
months before she died, Mrs. Gaskell confided to Ruskin that "It is the
only one of my own books that I can read again; but 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. And it is true too, for I have seen the
cow that wore the grey flannel jacket. . . ." The freshness of the telling
mirrors the fresh delight in recollection. She would return to the Knutsford
world to produce greater work, but not again anything so delightful. (In 1863
she did write one further episode, "The Cage at Cranford," now
usually published as an "appendix" to the volume.)
During 1851 and 1852 Mrs. Gaskell
was also at work on Ruth, published in January 1853, for which Chapman
paid £500. Charlotte Brontė, to whom Mrs. Gaskell had sent an early sketch of
the plot, admired it sufficiently to make her own publishers delay the
publication of Villette for a few days so that critics could concentrate
on Ruth. Its subject was again controversial, this time prompted by
anger at the moral conventions that condemned a "fallen woman" to
ostracism and almost inevitable prostitution. Dickens's work on behalf of such
women may have influenced her choice of subject, but she had already touched on
it in the character of Esther in Mary Barton. As before, she drew on
background and people she knew: the Reverend Mr. Turner, an old family friend,
and his home town of Newcastle provided some of the personality and the setting
for the unworldly Dissenting minister Thurston Benson, who befriends the
abandoned Ruth, helps her to bring up her child, then stands by her when the
deception that she is a widow is revealed. The melodramatic ending, with Ruth
redeeming herself as a nurse in a cholera epidemic and dying as she cares for
her old lover, while grounded in medical realities of the time, still shows a
somewhat desperate reliance on the dramatic conclusion for a plot. The strength
of the novel lies in its presentation of social conduct within a small
Dissenting community when tolerance and rigid morality clash -- Mr. Bradshaw is
a finely conceived study of self-righteousness that clearly influenced
Dickens's caricature of Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times a year later.
Although some element of the "novel with a purpose is present, Mrs.
Gaskell's sensitivity in portrayal of character and, even more, her feel for
relationships within families and small communities, show a developing sense of
direction as a novelist. At the same time, the range of character and the
naturalness of the dialogue show increasing command of her material. Sally, the
blunt and loyal housekeeper to the Thurstons, is the first of a line of
domestic portraits that are a notable feature of Mrs. Gaskell's fiction. Mrs.
Gaskell knew the Nightingale family; A. W. Ward, in the introduction to his
collection of Mrs. Gaskell's works, quotes a report that Florence Nightingale
not only thought Ruth to be "a beautiful work" but approved of
the fact that Mrs. Gaskell "had not made Ruth start at once as a hospital
nurse, but arrive at it after much other nursing experience." Mrs.
Gaskell knew the situations she wrote about; her experience as a minister's
wife in Manchester during cholera outbreaks comes through in the novel.
Ruth touched off an immediate reaction from shocked
moralists, though many critics and readers praised it for its courage and its
quality. But Mrs. Gaskell, though such attacks made her physically ill, stood
by her work." 'An unfit subject for fiction' is the thing to say
about it; I knew all this before; but I determined notwithstanding to speak my
mind out about it...," she said, though she admitted it was a prohibited
book to her own daughters.
She now, somewhat unwillingly, gave
in to Dickens's request for a full-length novel for Household Words.
This would be her final "problem-novel," North and South; but
before getting down to it she traveled and visited friends. A notable visit was
to Haworth: she had met Charlotte Brontė in 1850, and a friendship had
developed. Another new friend was Mme Mohl, whose Paris home would be a regular
base for future visits abroad. But finally, early in 1854, she began work on
the as-yet-untitled novel and was soon anxiously inquiring from Dickens, who
was publishing Hard Times, if he was going to "strike," a
reference to the central episode of her own book. This is a scene in which a
crowd of angry strikers attempts to storm the cotton mill run by John Thornton,
who is employing Irish immigrants as knobsticks" (strikebreakers). Dickens
assured Mrs. Gaskell, who was concerned about apparent plagiarism, that such a
detailed strike scene would not appear in Hard Times. The basic plot of
the novel is straightforward. The setting is once again Manchester (here called
Milton). Margaret Hale is a well-bred girl from Helstone in the rural south of
England who is suddenly pitchforked with little money or status into the harsh
world of the industrialized north. A leading manufacturer, John Thornton, falls
in love with her. They finally learn to understand each other's worth, and in the
process to appreciate the qualities of social background each had initially
despised in the other.
The novel is far from naive in its
development, however, or in the complex structure of plot and subplots used to
identify various themes and sets of social or personal relationships. North
and South develops by stages. It begins in the south, where Margaret's
father is a country clergyman who resigns his living and moves north after his
conscience rejects traditional articles of faith. It is a misleading beginning
since it appears to anticipate, in the popular fashion of the period, a novel
of religious doubt. Once the shift north is achieved, on the advice of a
wealthy friend from Milton, the novel moves with force and purpose. Layers of
social tension are revealed as men are opposed to masters, unionists to
nonunionists, wealth to poverty, preconceptions to preconceptions. Mr. Hale
becomes a private tutor of classics; Mrs. Hale, clinging desperately to
gentility, slowly fades and dies. Nicholas Higgins, the workers' leader, is led
from atheism to at least a respect for religion through Margaret's friendship
with his daughter Bessie, who is dying from consumption brought on by mill
conditions. Mrs. Gaskell even uses a subplot that recalls once again her own vanished
brother: Margaret's brother is a naval officer forced to live abroad after
standing up to a sadistic captain and being accused of mutiny; Frederick
returns incognito to see his dying mother and is suspected by Thornton of being
Margaret's secret lover. The various levels of the complicated plot move to
resolution through reconciliation and understanding, always Mrs. Gaskell's
method and point of view. Thornton gives work to the unemployed Higgins after
the strike. Margaret inherits a fortune and saves Thornton from ruin which
threatens not only his mill but his experiments with Higgins in improved
working conditions. Finally Margaret and Thornton marry.
The contrasts and themes are presented
with far more power and subtlety than a plot summary can suggest. For example,
the beauty of Helstone contrasts with the ugliness of Milton, but the beauty is
a surface for ignorance and cruelty, while the ugliness conceals intelligence
and vigor. Furthermore, the values of both Helstone and Milton are laid
alongside the idleness and luxury of fashionable London. North and South
upset preconceived ideas to create an understanding of the new industrial power
that had emerged, whose reality was little known and less appreciated. At the
same time, with some deliberateness, it balanced the one-sided workingman's
view of factory life that Mrs. Gaskell had been criticized for after Mary
Barton.
North and South, for which she received £
North and South was completed by January 1855, and
as usual Mrs. Gaskell recuperated by going visiting, this time to Paris and
London. She was still away when she heard that Charlotte Brontė had died on 31
March. She had already begun to think of a memoir of her friend when, to her
surprise, Brontė's father and husband both asked her to write an official
biography. On l8 June she wrote to George Smith, Brontė's publisher, agreeing
to undertake it. It was to occupy her fully for the next two years; the result
was The Life of Charlotte Brontė; published on 25 March 1857, for which
Smith paid her £ 800.
The Life of Charlotte Brontė was an immediate success and has
established itself as one of the great biographies. Within the conventions of
the period (she did not, for example, feel free to deal with Brontė's feelings
for Constantin Heger) it is remarkably frank and full in its search for truth.
Later biographies have modified but not replaced it; The Life of Charlotte
Brontė still stands as a portrait of a remarkable family and its
background, as well as being a detailed study of the development and motivation
of its exceptional heroine.
For Mrs. Gaskell personally,
however, the immediate result of the biography was disastrous. An initial wave
of praise was quickly followed by angry protests from some of the people dealt
with. In a couple of cases legal action was threatened; she had in fact allowed
her sympathies in these cases to color her judgment and had accepted a
one-sided view. With the help of her husband and George Smith the problems were
resolved without recourse to law, although in the case of Lady Scott, where Mrs.
Gaskell had accepted Branwell's version of his dismissal from his tutoring job
and laid the blame on his refusal to be seduced by his employer's wife, a
public retraction in the Times was needed. As she wrote ruefully to
Ellen Nussey, Charlotte's old friend: "I am in a hornet's nest with a
vengeance. A second edition had to be withdrawn and a revised third edition
published on 22 August 1857; this became the standard text.
The Life of Charlotte Brontė is successful because Mrs. Gaskell
could treat it as she did her novels. There is perceptive self-criticism in a
comment she made that same year to George Smith when rejecting a request to do
another biography, one with a political background: "I like to write about
character, and the manners of a particular period -- for the life of a great
Yorkshire Squire of the last century I think I could have done pretty well; but
I cannot manage politics." Character, manners, a given period, and a
specific community constituted her natural territory. The reference to
Yorkshire and the last century has, however, a particular interest, for this
would be the background of her next novel, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), which
owes something of its tone and its heightened psychological insight to the work
on the biography.
Mrs. Gaskell had left England on 13
February 1857, before The Life of Charlotte Brontė was published, to be
the guest of the American sculptor William Whetmore Story in Rome, where she
arrived while the carnival was in progress. The holiday was ever afterward
recalled as a high point in her life, not only for the impression made by Rome
itself but also as the start of a lifelong friendship with the young Charles
Eliot Norton (later professor of fine arts at Harvard), a friendship well
described by Germ as "half maternal, half platonic." The letters
between them are a major source of information about Mrs. Gaskell's later
years. She returned refreshed to find the "hornet's nest" and to pick
up once again her life in Manchester and her work as a novelist.
During 1858-1859 she wrote rapidly,
mainly items for Dickens, of which two are of more than passing interest. My
Lady Ludlow (1858) is a short novel cut in two by a long digressive tale.
But the basic narrative has something of the Cranford touch in its
setting of a remembered past with its society and characters; it is the first
evidence of a shift back to a Cranford approach as the vehicle for the
novelist's imagination. On this occasion, however, the basis is not Knutsford,
though similar; the setting of the great house and its wide-ranging domain
introduces a social breadth that anticipates Wives and Daughters, though
the period is the late eighteenth century rather than the early nineteenth. The
second item, Lois the Witch (1861), is a powerfully somber nouvelle
about the Salem witch trials whose manner prefigures, by its interest in morbid
psychology, her treatment of Philip's relationship with Sylvia in her next
novel. This work for Dickens provided money for travel for Mrs. Gaskell and her
daughters. Meta, in particular, because of a broken engagement as well as her
health in general, was of continuing concern to the anxious mother. Gérin
argues that this broken engagement was one of the sources for the central
episode of Sylvia's love for Kincaid in Sylvia's Lovers; the plot of the
return of a "dead" husband had already been anticipated in a story
for Dickens, "The Manchester Marriage" (1858).
Mrs. Gaskell's relationship with
George Smith, begun with the biography, had by now developed on friendly as
well as business terms. She was already in contact with him over "The
Specksioneer" (an early title suggestion for Sylvia's Lovers) by
the end of 1859. The appearance of his new periodical, the Cornhill
magazine, in 1860 would provide an outlet for her later work more congenial
than All the Year Round (Dickens's successor to Household Words);
the longer sections and monthly publication were better suited to her type of
fiction, and she hoped to reserve her better work for it. In a revealing letter
to Smith she says of a one-volume-length story (probably "A Dark Night's
Work") that it "is not good enough for the CM -- I am the best
judge of that please -- but might be good enough for HW." Sylvia's
Lovers was not, however, for serial publication.
The period between the publication
of My Lady Ludlow and the completion of Sylvia's Lovers was
particularly strenuous. At home, on top of the demands on the wife of a busy
minister and mother of four daughters whose futures were a source of concern,
there were the calls on her time as a hostess and a celebrity. (A good example
is the occasion when Manchester was host to the annual meeting of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1861, and her house was full of
visitors.) Yet the effects of Manchester on her health and spirits made
holidays a necessity -- even if they were usually working holidays -- whether
at her favorite seaside at Silverdale, or in Heidelberg or Paris. Her travels
frequently supplied her with material for minor stories or articles that she
could write quickly and send off, mainly to Dickens, to pay for the trips. A
special visit was one to Whitby in November 1859 to research the background for
Sylvia's Lovers.
The writing moved quickly at first,
but by the end of 1860 the novel was only a quarter finished. It progressed fitfully,
now provisionally named "Phillip's Idol," through 1861 and 1862, much
of it written when Mrs. Gaskell was away from home. Before it was finished, she
was caught up in the relief efforts to deal with the depression caused by the
cotton shortage in the last month of 1862, when the American Civil War cut off
supplies. Her feelings come out in a letter to Smith written during a September
visit to the south coast: "I believe we ought to be going back to
Manchester (and very hard work, I fear, which exhausts one both bodily and
mentally with depressing atmosphere of both kinds)." The depression and
exhaustion can be sensed in the final volume of Sylvia's Lovers, where
both imagination and vitality flag. The novel was finished by the end of the
year, and on 31 December she received payment of £1000 from Smith. Sylvia's
Lovers was published in three volumes in February 1863, dedicated to
"My Dear Husband, By Her Who Best Knows His Value."
Many of the themes and influences in
Sylvia's Lovers can be traced in earlier works. The wild countryside and
crude habits of its people owe something to the Brontės. Several of Mrs.
Gaskell's shorter pieces had used historical episodes as their bases; the
background for Whitby ("Monkshaven"), its whaling industry, and the
riot against the press-gang were in the sources she had used for these pieces.
The story of the return of the "dead" husband, which is the climax of
the plot, was taken from Crabbe's poem "Ruth" in Tales of the Hall
(1819). What is new is the general tone and power of what Easson calls a
"tragical history."
Sylvia Robson is the center of a
powerful, if somewhat melodramatic, story. Mrs. Gaskell created in Sylvia a
portrait of passionate intensity without parallel in her work, which for three
quarters of the novel it is difficult to fault. The author had watched her own
daughters mature, rejoice, and suffer; she had pondered over the details of
Charlotte Brontė's life. All her experience is imaginatively applied to the
history of Sylvia. Sylvia's early scorn for her cousin Philip, her love for the
harpooner (specksioneer) Kincaid, Kincaid's removal by the press-gang and
Philip's false report that presumes his death, her weary acceptance of Philip
as husband after her father's execution following the riot -- these episodes
are welded into a tightly structured narrative that holds the interest. As
always, Mrs. Gaskell excels in presenting the setting and community life of the
locality. But it is Sylvia's emotional vitality and intensity that give the
book its force.
Sylvia's Lovers is a fine work that has been given
a tragic ending by a novelist whose temperament and approach are not really
tragic. Mrs. Gaskell's view of life accepted the tragic, but was basically
melioristic. The first two volumes are full of energy; they sparkle and have
humor, as does Sylvia's own character. The ending shows forced invention rather
than true tragedy. Philip vanishes, returns unrecognized, and rescues his
daughter from drowning before he dies, reconciled with his wife.
The novel's strength lies in the
characters and in the insight into relationships between those characters in
their setting. Critics vary in their views of it as tragedy but there is wide
agreement on the power of the presentation. The tone was not, however, one that
was finally congenial to Mrs. Gaskell. In her last works, without losing this
new maturity of insight into character, she revisited and reinterpreted the
Knutsford world and the changes in attitude that had overtaken society since
she was a child there.
By 1863 Mrs. Gaskell seemed to be
moving into a calmer, less strenuous way of life, so that when she returned
from a Paris holiday to find an appeal from George Smith for a Cornhill
story, she was able to offer him Cousin Phillis, a long short story that
she had already started writing. Along with some other pieces, she sold the
copyright of the story for £ 250. Cousin Phillis ran from November 1863
to February 1864.
The world of the communities created
by Mrs. Gaskell in Cousin Phillis, and later in Wives and Daughters,
while based on the Cranford world, is experiencing change. The card from
the man she secretly loves that shatters Phillis's hope and health is brought
by the penny post (created in 1840). The railway, though not physically
destructive as it is in Dickens's Dombey and Son (1846-1848), brings
industrial progress and its new breed of men to the pastoral setting of Hope
Farm, an evocation of her grandfather's Sandlebridge Farm (as Minister Holman
is based on Samuel Holland himself). This is still a stable world, based on
work and sound moral values. The story is an uncomplicated one; its virtues are
in the manner of its development and telling. When Paul Manning, an engineer
trainee on a railway development nearby, first visits his cousin, his narrative
reflects the sense of having stumbled into some idyllic retreat: "I
fancied that my Sunday coat was scented for days afterwards by the bushes of
sweetbriar and the fraxinella that perfumed the air." Change comes from
contact between the two worlds; Phillis's love for Paul's employer, Holdsworth,
changes her from quiet girl to suffering woman. Holdsworth himself never quite
succumbs to the idyll.. His work moves him on beyond Phillis and Hope Farm: his
implied failure is a lack of sensitivity, of moral discrimination. Phillis will
eventually recover; but the ending has, perhaps, overtones of irony, as she
agrees to a change of scene and convalescence. 'Only for a short time, Paul!
Then -- we will go back to the peace of the old days. I know we shall; I can,
and I will!"
Most critics would agree with Arthur
Pollard's assessment of Cousin Phillis as the author's crowning
achievement in the short novel; the praise is virtually unanimous. It is also
recognized as a fitting prelude to her final novel, Wives and Daughters,
the idea for which had developed in such detail that she was able to offer it
to George Smith with a full synopsis on 3 May 1864. Mrs. Gaskell's wish to
carry out a personal plan was also an incentive to writing it. For some time
she had been considering the purchase of a house in the country which would be
ready for her husband's retirement (be never did retire; he died in Manchester
in 1884), and would at the same time be a retreat from Manchester. She bad
finally found one about fifty miles from London; the £ 2,000 that Smith paid
her for the novel enabled her to make the purchase. Wives and Daughters: An
Every-Day Story ran in the Cornhill from August 1864 to January
1866; the final installment was never written, yet the ending was known, and
the novel as it exists is virtually complete.
Henry James, "testifying . . .
to the fact of her genius" in the year the novel appeared, noted "the
gentle skill with which the reader is slowly involved in the tissue of the
story" and the way in which its new world presents "this seeming
accession of social and moral knowledge." A comparison to Jane Austen for
its combination of humor and moral judgment in the observation of character and
conduct is often made, not unjustly, though Mrs. Gaskell's canvas is larger
than Austen's bit of ivory.
The plot of Wives and Daughters
is complex, since it relies far more on a series of relationships between
family groups in Hollingford than it does on the dramatic structure, which
nevertheless is well controlled and integrated with the themes. The novel is
set in the same general period as Cranford and Cousin Phillis,
but the Knutsford of Mrs. Gaskell's youth is now reinterpreted as a much wider
community. The novelist's matured art and judgments combine with her natural
interests, particularly in the portraits of her heroine and what may be called
her "anti-heroine." For in Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Gaskell created
a personality less tragic, yet more intriguing and sophisticated than Sylvia
Robson, possessing in W. A. Craik's words "qualities that any novelist
before her would find reprehensible." While this perhaps overstates the
pioneering element, it does aptly recognize a character of the complexity of
Thackeray's Beatrix Esmond within the "every-day story" of
Hollingford. Cynthia's less complex but equally well-observed stepsister, Molly
Gibson, will marry Roger Hamley, whose career and character draw in part on
Mrs. Gaskell's distant relative, Charles Darwin to present a conjunction of
traditional values and new conceptions. But without doubt the finest creation
is the doctor's second wife and Molly's stepmother, Mrs. Gibson. Through speech
and conduct she presents, as Margaret Ganz points out, "the humorous and
ironical appraisal of a vain and hopelessly petty nature" that is yet
"not wholly ill-natured." It may be noted that the world Mrs. Gaskell
sees is one without villains in the accepted sense; trouble and suffering are
caused by life itself, by selfishness, by a failure of sensitivity to human
feelings, by a lack of deeply felt moral standards. The reader is left with the
feeling that even Mr. Preston, whose machinations cause the main trouble for
Molly, is as much sinned against as sinning.
Hollingford is a community where
society, from the great house to the tradespeople, has to grapple with a
changing world, whether in technology or conduct or ideas. The length and the
leisurely pace of serialization allowed the novelist to move, as James
appreciated, with details of daily life and psychology; Gérin points out that
Molly Gibson is distinguished from the author's previous heroines not only by
her class -- "she is a lady -- but [by] the gradualness and naturalness of
her growth." Throughout Wives and Daughters the humorous, ironical,
and sometimes satirical view of the Knutsford generation, along with serious
undertones, is developed with a heightened sense of artistic self-confidence
and maturity.
The Gaskell's grave in the Unitarian cemetery,
Knutsford
As already mentioned, the novel was
not completed. Mrs. Gaskell's health was poor, and she felt fatigue at the
pressure of regular stints of work. She was on a visit to her new house when,
on Sunday, 12 November 1865, she suddenly collapsed and died.
Mrs. Gaskell once wrote to a friend
about the contradictory elements in her own nature -- her "Mes," as
she called them. "One of my Mes is, I do believe, a true Christian --
(only people call her socialist and communist), another of my mes is a wife and
mother. . . . Now that's my 'social self' I suppose. Then again I've another
self with a full taste for beauty and convenience which is pleased on its own
account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members?" This self-analysis
helps to explain the variety as well as the common themes to be found in her
work, just as it helps to explain how she earned the respect and friendship of
people from all ranks and religions. She was intensely interested in all types
of human behavior and activity; it was an interest that provided her with
material for essays and short stories as well as for her major fiction.
Critical awareness of her as a social historian is now more than balanced by
awareness of her innovativeness and artistic development as a novelist. James
Donald Barry summed up recent criticism in 1978 with the comment that "she
is surely among the best of the second rank of Victorian novelists and perhaps
has joined the first." Since that time a number of editions of individual
works and collections of shorter pieces, properly edited, have become
available; they are helping to consolidate her reputation as undoubtedly major.
Edgar Wright, Elizabeth Gaskell
Cleghorn Gaskell (DBL) Windows Internet Explorer
20 Octubre de 2008, 16: 45
URL: http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/EG-DLB.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Natalia Quintana Morįn
naquinmo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
Ž MORE BIOGRAPHIES: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]