2. THE GREAT HUNGER
A depiction of starvation in Ireland during the Great Famine. Scholars have argued that The Poor Clare serves as an allegorical comment on the British government’s complacence at the time. Gaskell clearly stated her aim to help the poor through fiction; “Evils being once recognized are half way on towards their remedy,” she wrote of her own Mary Barton in 1849.
An editorial published in The Guardian in 1821 calls for action, but understates the scale of the Great Hunger.
The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 1845
3. LANCASHIRE
Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire, England, built by the Shuttleworths in the fourteenth century as a defense against invading Scots, bears a resemblance to the description of Starkey Manor-house.
Starkey Manor-house
“Starkey Manor-house is rather like a number of rooms clustered round a gray, massive, old keep than a regularly-built hall. Indeed, I suppose that the house only consisted of a great tower in the centre, in the days when the Scots made their raids terrible as far south as this; and that after the Stuarts came in, and there was a little more security of property in those parts, the Starkeys of that time added the lower building, which runs, two stories high, all round the base of the keep. There has been a grand garden laid out in my days, on the southern slope near the house; but when I first knew the place, the kitchen-garden at the farm was the only piece of cultivated ground belonging to it.”
—From The Poor Clare.
Barnoldswick to Weets Hill in Lancashire, England, today. The spire of the holy Trinity is in the middle of the photograph. Photograph by Dr. Neil Clifton.
4. ELIZABETH GASKELL’S FAMILY LIFE
1851 portrait by George Richmond.
On Visiting the Grave of My Stillborn Little Girl
I made a vow within my soul, O child,
When thou wert laid beside my weary heart,
With marks of Death on every tender part,
That, if in time a living infant smiled,
Winning my ear with gentle sounds of love
In sunshine of such joy, I still would save
A green rest for thy memory, O Dove!
And oft times visit thy small, nameless grave.
Thee have I not forgot, my firstborn, thou
Whose eyes ne’er opened to my wistful gaze,
Whose suff’ rings stamped with pain thy little brow;
I think of thee in these far happier days,
And thou, my child, from thy bright heaven see
How well I keep my faithful vow to thee.
—Gaskell wrote this poem to her first daughter, who was stillborn, in 1836. She soon bore a healthy daughter, Marianne, and began a diary of her new child’s life, in case she or the child died. The next two girls were named Meta and Florence. Gaskell’s mother died thirteen days after Elizabeth’s birth, in October 1811. Her father, William Stevenson, had a busy life in London and sent the baby to live with her aunt, whom Elizabeth called her “more than mother,” in Knutsford. She married William Gaskell at Knutsford on August 30, 1832. Her dear friend Eliza married cousin Charles Holland. (Charles Darwin was also a cousin of the Gaskells), and was a lifelong correspondent. Reverend William Gaskell was a serious scholar, writer, and poet. He was an English Unitarian minister and, like Elizabeth, highly interested in educating the working class. They had four children together.
“Refuge in invention”
Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more fully alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction. Living in Manchester, but with a deep relish and fond admiration for the country, my first thought was to find a frame-work for my story in some rural scene; and I had already made a little progress in a tale, the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire, when I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily 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. A little manifestation of this sympathy and a little attention to the expression of feelings on the part of some of the workpeople with whom I was acquainted, had laid open to me the hearts of one or two of the more thoughtful among them; I saw that they were sore and irritable against the rich, the even tenor of whose seemingly happy lives appeared to increase the anguish caused by the lottery-like nature of their own. Whether the bitter complaints made by them, of the neglect which they experienced from the prosperous—especially from the masters whose fortunes they had helped to build up—were well-founded or no, it is not for me to judge. It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures, taints what might be resignation to God’s will, and turns it to revenge in too many of the poor uneducated factory-workers of Manchester.
—From Gaskell’s preface to Mary Barton. It is believed that Reverend Gaskell encouraged Elizabeth Gaskell to write, particularly in the dark months after their infant son William died in 1845. Her beloved Aunt Lumb died at this time as well, and Elizabeth took to writing more tragic stories in the wake of these losses. Gaskell was almost forty when her first novel, a bleak love story set in the slums of Manchester, was published. She was paid £200 for the book, and admirers included John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Thomas Carlyle. Though it was a commercial hit, the reception was not entirely positive.
42 Plymouth Grove interior
“And we’ve got a house.”
And we’ve got a house. Yes! We really have. And if I had neither conscience nor prudence I should be delighted, for it certainly is a beauty. It is not very far from here, in Plymouth Grove … You must come and see us in it, dearest Tottie, and try and make me see ‘the wrong the better cause,” and that it is right to spend so much ourselves on so purely selfish a thing as a house is, while so many are wanting—that’s the haunting thought to me; at least to my ‘Mes,’ for I have a great number, and that’s the plague. One of my mes is, I do believe, a true Christian—(only people call her a socialist and a communist), another of my mes is a wife and a mother, and highly delighted at the delight of everyone else in the house, Meta and William most especially who are in full extasy. Now that’s my ‘social’ self, I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience who is pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members? I try to drown myself (my first self,) by saying it’s Wm who is to decide on all these things, and his feeling it right out to be my rule, And so it is—only that does not quite do.
—Letter from Gaskell to Eliza Fox, April 1850.
The drawing room at 42 Plymouth Grove.
“I’ve been sick of writing”
I’ve been sick of writing, and everything connected with literature or improvement of the mind; to say nothing of deep hatred to my species about whom I was obliged to write as if I loved ’em. Moreover I have had to write so hard that I have spoilt my hand, and forgotten all my spelling. Seriously it has been a terrible weight on me and has made me have some of the most felling headaches I ever had in my life, so having growled my growl I’ll go on to something else. We are all well that’s the first unspeakable comfort.… Altogether everything looks very sad this Xmas. The war accounts make one’s blood run cold at the rotting away of those noble glorious men.
—Letter to Eliza Fox, December 1854. Gaskell’s correspondence with Fox is deeply personal. Manchester wore on Gaskell; in the height of “the Distress,” she describes her family as being “too worn out to eat or do anything but go to bed.” In more prosperous times, she described Manchester parties as “large, vulgar and over-dressed.”
One of the last known photos of Elizabeth Gaskell, taken in 1864, one year before her death.
5. GASKELL’S LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS
/> The publication of Gaskell’s first book, Mary Barton, caused a stir. “My poor Mary Barton is stirring up all sorts of angry feelings for me in Manchester,” she wrote to her friend Edward Holland in January 1849, “but those best acquainted with the way of thinking & feeling among the poor acknowledge its truth; which is the acknowledgement I most of all desire, because evils being once recognized are half way on towards their remedy.”
Gaskell received a fan letter from Thomas Carlyle about Mary Barton dated November 8, 1848. The book was highly controversial and thus published under a pen name. Carlyle guessed that the author was female, beginning the letter, “Dear Madam.” He praised the book highly, calling it “deserving to take its place far above the ordinary garbage of Novels.” Gaskell wrote to Edward Chapman on December 5 to complain about the “impertinent and unjustifiable curiosity of people” about the authorship of Mary Barton, but added, “in the midst of all my deep and great annoyance, Carlyle’s letter has been the most valuable; and has given me almost the only unmixed pleasure I have yet received from the publication of MB.”
Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, an American author and social critic, met in London in 1850; they remained close friends until her death. Norton was twenty years younger than Gaskell.
“We reached Rome”
We reached Rome late at night on February 23, 1857, and drove through the dark strange streets to the Casa Cabrale, where the Storys were living, who had so kindly invited us [to visit them]. Next morning it was all brilliant sunshine and colour and wild gaiety. We were taken down by the Storys to a balcony in the Corso, from which we were to see the great day of the Carnival—Shrove Tuesday. The narrow street was filled with a boisterous crowd of Romans, half mad with excitement at the confetti-throwing and horse-racing. Suddenly against this turbulent background there stood out the figure of a young man just below the balcony, smiling up at my mother, whom he knew he was to see there, and whom he easily distinguished from the others. It is fifty-three years since that day, and yet even now I can vividly recall the sweet, welcoming expression on the radiant face. He was brought on to the balcony, but how little he and my mother thought, as they greeted one another, that until her death they were to be most true and intimate friends. During the seven weeks that we were in Rome, we saw him constantly. He came to the famous breakfasts at the Casa Cabrale, where Manning and Aubrey de Vere were nearly always to be found. Every time he came he brought a beautiful bouquet of flowers, with the true American generosity and courtesy. He constantly joined us in our sight-seeing, and we learned from him, more vividly than any book on art could teach, all the principles of painting and sculpture.
—Letter by Gaskell’s daughter describing an 1857 visit to Rome, where the Gaskell and Norton families met at the Storys. Though Gaskell always remained loyal to her husband, she describes her visits with Norton as some of the happiest times of her life, and they maintained a regular correspondence. “It was in those charming Roman days that my life, at any rate, culminated. I shall never be so happy again. I don’t think I was ever so happy before. My eyes fill with tears when I think of those days, and it is the same with all of us. They were the tip-top point of our lives. The girls may see happier ones—I never shall,” Gaskell wrote to Norton.
Ache of Yearning
“I sometimes think that I would almost rather never have been there than have this ache of yearning for the great witch who sits with you upon her seven hills.”
—Letter to Norton in 1860. Gaskell included a version of her first meeting with Norton in ‘A Dark Night’s Work,’ as he smiles at her in a turbulent carnival crowd. Norton named his second daughter after Gaskell. In Norton’s letters to his mother, full of the details of his daily life, there are constant references to Mrs. Gaskell. He speaks of her “uncommon sweetness of voice and animation of expression,” and describes her as “a wonderful story-teller, never exaggerating and always dramatic.”
What I Did Believe
At first [Charles Bosanquet] could hardly understand it—he had evidently had some unknown horror of Unitarians,—& gravely & seriously asked me ‘if we believed in the Bible’—However I told him what I did believe—(more I suppose what would be called Arian than Humanitarian,)—and among other things said I had only one antipathy—and that was to the Calvinistic or Low Church creed,—to which he replied he was sorry[,] for his father & all his friends were what was called Low or Evangelical Church, & gave me quite a different (&most beautiful) account of what he considered their belief;—he said if the Bible taught him anything different from what he believed to be the doctrines of the Church he should immediately become a Dissenter. That ‘Love & Truth’ were the two qualities that formed the Essence of the Xtian religion, & that the Spirit in which actions were performed was of far higher consequence that the actions themselves. Much more was said,—he all the time getting over the ‘shock’ of coming in contact for the first time with Unitarians.
—Letter to Norton, April 16, 1861, about meeting young Anglican Charles Bosanquet, who spoke “always on the supposition” that the Gaskells were church people. Gaskell corrected him, and this letter sheds a little light on her personal beliefs.
Relationship with George Eliot
Well! if I had written Amos Barton, Janet’s Repentence [sic] & Adam Bede I should nether be to have or to hold with pride & delight in myself—so think it is very well I have not. And please do take notice I knew what was coming up the horizon from the dawn of the first number of Amos Barton in Blackwood.—After all it is such a pity so much hearty admiration should go unappropriated throughout the world. So, although to my friends I am known under the name of Mrs Gaskell, to you I will confess that I am the author of Adam Bede, and remain very respectfully & gratefully
Yours,
Gilbert Elliot
—From a letter to a friend. Gaskell also wrote a straightforward letter to George Eliot, saying she had read the books once again and wanted to say “how earnestly, fully and humbly I admire them. I never read anything so complete, and beautiful in fiction, in my whole life before.”
Only yesterday I was wondering that artists, knowing each other’s pains so well, did not help each other more, and as usual, when I have been talking complainingly or suspiciously, something has come which serves me as a reproof. That “something” is your letter, which has brought me the only sort of help I care to have—an assurance of fellow-feeling, of thorough truthful recognition from one of the minds which are capable of judging as well as being moved. You know, without my telling you, how much the help is heightened by its coming to me afresh, now that I have ceased to be a mystery and am known as a mere daylight face. I shall always love to think that one woman wrote to another such sweet encouraging words—still more to think that you were the writer and I the receiver.
—From a letter to Gaskell by Eliot. Eliot had long admired Gaskell’s writing, having compared her to Harriet Martineau and Currer Bell (that is, Charlotte Bronte) in 1856.
Wordsworth Walked
We dined quietly and early with Mrs Wordsworth on Monday. She is charming. She told us some homely tender details of her early married days, how Miss Wordsworth made the bread, and got dinner ready, and Mrs W. nursed all the morning, and, leaving the servant to wash up after dinner, the three set out on their long walks, carrying all the babes amongst them; and certain spots are memorial places to Mrs W. in her old age, because there she sat, and nursed this or that darling. The walks they took were something surprising to our own degenerate minds. To get news of the French Revolution they used to walk up the Raise for miles, in stormy winter evenings to meet the mail. One day when they were living at Grasemere (no post-office there) Wordsworth walked over to Ambleside (more than four miles) to post some poem that was to be included in a volume just being printed. After dinner as he sat meditating, he became dissatisfied with one line, and grew so restless over the thought that towards bedtime he declared he must go to Ambleside and alter it; for ‘in th
ose days postage was very heavy, and we were obliged to be very prudent.’ So he and Miss Wordsworth set off after nine o’clock, walked to Ambleside, knocked up the post-office people, asked for a candle, got the letter out of the box, sent the good people to bed again, and sat in the little parlour, ‘puzzling and puzzling till they got the line right’; when they replaced the letter, put out the candle, and softly stole forth, and walked home in the winter midnight.
—Gaskell recalls a visit with the Wordsworths to her correspondent John Forster in October 1852.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s friendship with Charlotte Bronte
Read Jane Eyre. It is an uncommon book. I don’t know if I like or dislike it. I take the opposite side to the person I am talking with always in order to hear some convincing arguments to clear up my opinions.