Elizabeth Gaskell

Wikipedia Biographical Summary:

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson (29 September 1810 – 12 November 1865), often referred to simply as Mrs Gaskell, was a British novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. 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.[1]

Early life

Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on 29 September 1810, at 93 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. She was the youngest of eight children; only she and her brother John survived infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, was a Scottish Unitarian minister at Failsworth, Lancashire but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds and moved to London in 1806 with intention of going to India after he was appointed private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor-General of India. This position did not materialise, and Stevenson was nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records. His wife, Elizabeth Holland, came from a family from the English Midlands that was well connected with other Unitarian and prominent families like the Wedgwoods, the Turners and the Darwins, and when she died 13[2] months after giving birth to her youngest daughter, she left a bewildered husband who saw no alternative for Elizabeth but to be sent to live with her mother's sister Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire.[3]

While she was growing up her future was 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 married Catherine Thomson in 1814 and they had a son, William (born 1815) and a daughter, Catherine (born 1816). Although Elizabeth spent several years without seeing her father and his new family, her older brother John often visited her in Knutsford. John was destined for the Royal Navy from an early age like his grandfathers and uncles, but he had no entry and had to join the Merchant Navy with the East India Company's fleet.[4] John went missing in 1827 during an expedition to India.

Much of Elizabeth's childhood was spent in Cheshire, where she lived with her aunt Hannah Lumb in Knutsford, a town she immortalised 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. From 1821 to 1826 she attended a school run by the Miss Byerlys at Barford House, and after that Avonbank in Stratford-on-Avon[2] where she received a traditional education in arts, the classics, decorum and propriety given to young ladies at the time. Her aunts gave her the classics to read, and she was encouraged by her father in her studies and writing. Her brother John sent her modern books and descriptions of his life at sea and his experiences abroad.[5]

After leaving school aged 16, she travelled to London to spend time with her Holland cousins.[5] She spent some time in Newcastle upon Tyne (with the Rev William Turner's family) and in Edinburgh. Her stepmother's brother was the miniature artist, William John Thomson, who painted the 1832 portrait of Gaskell in Manchester. A bust of Gaskell was sculpted by David Dunbar at the same time.[5]

Married life and writing career

On 30 August 1832 Elizabeth married minister, William Gaskell in Knutsford. They spent their honeymoon in North Wales, staying with Elizabeth's uncle, Samuel Holland near Porthmadog. The Gaskells settled in Manchester, where William was the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. Manchester's industrial surroundings influenced Elizabeth's writing in the industrial genre. Their first child, a daughter, was stillborn in 1833. A son, William, (1844–45), died in infancy, and this tragedy was the catalyst for Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton. Their other children were Marianne (1834), Margaret Emily, known as Meta (1837), Florence Elizabeth (1842), and Julia Bradford (1846). Florence married Charles Crompton, a barrister and Liberal politician, in 1863.[2]

In March 1835 Gaskell began a diary, documenting the development of her daughter Marianne, her views of herself and William as parents, the value she gave to her role as a mother, her religious faith, and later the relationship between Marianne and her sister Meta. In 1836 with her husband, she co-authored the cycle of poems Sketches among the Poor which was published in Blackwood's Magazine in January 1837. In March 1837 her Aunt Lumb had a stroke, and died less than a month later. In 1840 William Howitt published Visits to Remarkable Places containing a contribution entitled Clopton Hall by "a lady", the first work written and published solely by Gaskell. In April 1840 Howitt published The Rural Life of England which included her second work Notes on Cheshire Customs.[2]

In July 1841 the Gaskells travelled to Belgium and Germany. German literature had a strong influence on her short story writing in regard to theme and structure. In 1847 she published her first work of fiction Libbie Marsh's Three Eras in Howitt's Journal, using the pseudonym, "Cotton Mather Mills". Her next work The Sexton's Hero was published with the same name. She made her last use of the pseudonym in 1848 with the publication of her story Christmas Storms and Sunshine. Her first novel Mary Barton was published in October, 1848.[2]

In 1850 the family moved to a villa at 84 Plymouth Grove.[6] where Elizabeth wrote her remaining literary works while her husband held welfare committees and tutored the poor in his study. The Gaskells' social circle included literary greats, religious dissenters, and social reformers, including William and Mary Howitt. Charles Dickens and John Ruskin visited Plymouth Grove, as did American writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton, while conductor Charles Hallé, who lived close by, taught piano to one of their daughters. Her close friend Charlotte Brontë stayed there three times, and on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet Gaskell's visitors.[7]

In early 1850 Gaskell wrote to Charles Dickens, asking advice about assisting a girl named Pasley whom she had visited in prison. Pasley provided Gaskell with a model for the title character of Ruth in 1853. Lizzie Leigh was published in March and April, 1850, in the first numbers of Dickens's journal Household Words where many of her works were published including Cranford and, in 1854-55, North and South, her novella My Lady Ludlow, and short stories. In June, 1855 Patrick Brontë asked her to write a biography of his daughter, Charlotte and The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857.[2]

In 1859 Gaskell travelled to Whitby to gather material for Sylvia's Lovers which was published in 1863. Her novella Cousin Phyllis was serialized in The Cornhill Magazine from November 1863 to February 1864. The serialization of her last novel Wives and Daughters began in August 1864 in The Cornhill.[2] She died of a heart attack in 1865, while visiting a house she had purchased in Holybourne, Hampshire. Wives and Daughters was published in book form in early 1866, first in America, and then, ten days later, in England.[2]

The house on Plymouth Grove remained in the Gaskell family until 1913, after which it stood empty and fell into disrepair. The University of Manchester acquired it in 1969 and in 2004 it was acquired by the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust. The trust raised money to restore it. Exterior renovations were completed in 2011, and the house is open for monthly tours while renovations continue.[8][9]

On 25 September 2010 a memorial to Gaskell was dedicated in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. It takes the form of a panel in the Hubbard memorial window, above the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer. The panel was dedicated by her great-great-granddaughter Rosemary Dabbs and a wreath was laid.[10]

Literary style and themes

Gaskell'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 stories, aided by Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her ghost stories are quite distinct, in the "Gothic" vein, from her industrial fiction.

Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions (including signing her name "Mrs. Gaskell"), Gaskell usually frames her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes: her early works focused on factory work in the Midlands. She always emphasised the role of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters.[11]

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 urges comprehension and tolerance toward all religions and, even though Gaskell tried to keep her own beliefs hidden, she felt strongly about these values, which permeated her works—as in North and South, where "Margaret the Churchwoman, her father the Dissenter, Higgins the Infidel, knelt down together. It did them no harm".[12][13]

Dialect usage

Gaskell'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).[14] 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:

   ... 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.[14][15]

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."[16]

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.[17]
Publications

Novels

• Mary Barton (1848)
• Cranford (1851–3)
• Ruth (1853)
• North and South (1854–5)
• Sylvia's Lovers (1863)
• Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1865)

Novellas and collections

• The Moorland Cottage (1850)
• Mr. Harrison's Confessions, 1851
• 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)
• Cousin Phillis (1864)

Short stories

• Libbie Marsh's Three Eras (1847)
• The Sexton's Hero (1847)
• Christmas Storms and Sunshine (1848)
• Hand and Heart (1849)
• The Well of Pen-Morfa (1850)
• The Heart of John Middleton (1850)
• Disappearances (1851)
• Bessy's Troubles at Home (1852)
• The Old Nurse's Story (1852)
• Cumberland Sheep-Shearers (1853)
• Morton Hall (1853)
• Traits and Stories of the Huguenots (1853)
• My French Master (1853)
• The Squire's Story (1853)
• Half a Life-time Ago (1855)
• Company Manners (1854)
• The Poor Clare (1856)
• The Doom of the Griffiths (1858)
• Right at Last (1858)
• "The Manchester Marriage" (1858)[18]
• The Haunted House (1859)[19]
• The Crooked Branch (1859)
• The Half-brothers (1859)
• Curious If True (1860)
• The Grey Woman (1861)
• The Cage at Cranford (1863)
• Crowley Castle (1863)

Non-fiction

• Sketches Among the Poor (poems 1837)
• An Accursed Race (1855)
• The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857)
• French Life (1864)

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gaskell

Other References

• "Elizabeth Gaskell", Westminster Abbey