Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 – 1865): Weaving Stories of Society and Spirit
The celebrated author Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell lived at 84 Plymouth Grove, Manchester with her husband the Reverend William Gaskell and their family from 1850 until her death in 1865. Plymouth Grove is a large house, which at that time was set amongst beautiful rolling fields. It is now open to the public and home to the Elizabeth Gaskell Society.
Born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson in London in 1810, a year later, on the death of her mother, Elizabeth was taken to live in Knutsford, Cheshire, with her aunt, Hannah Lumb. The arrangement was a happy one – she was to refer to her aunt as ‘my more than mother’ and was to use Knutsford as the inspiration for her fictitious town of Cranford. Knutsford also became ‘Hollingford’ in her novel Wives and Daughters. After leaving school in 1826, the young Elizabeth returned to Chelsea to live with her father and his second wife. Her father died in 1829, and the network of Unitarians provided her with a new base, at the home of the Reverend William Turner in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. In 1831 she met the Reverend William Gaskell, then a junior minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester and the following year they were married.
So it was that, in 1832, Elizabeth Gaskell found herself newly married and living in the great industrial city of Manchester, also known as ‘Cottonopolis’ after the trade that created its wealth. Like her husband, she was a Unitarian through and through, and her religion was direct, scripture based and, above all, practical. She believed in doing any good that was possible in her immediate environment, and she was possessed of a strong sense of duty. This was one of the common bonds that made her a friend to another famous writer of the period, Charlotte Bronte, whose biography she was to write in 1857, at the request of Charlotte’s father, Patrick.
For the first 16 years of her married life, Elizabeth Gaskell bore several children: while four daughters survived, her first child was still born and her only son, William, died at ten months of scarlet fever. As a distraction from her grief, her husband suggested that she write a novel. It was out of this sorrow that her first novel Mary Barton was born. The novel scandalised much of Victorian society, partly through its unflinching account of the grim realities of life in the newly industrialised cities, but also because its sympathies lay so squarely with the workers in relation to their employers.
Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848, as was common for many novels of the time, particularly by women authors. Mary Barton had a great impact on the reading public and was widely reviewed and discussed. The anonymity of the author was not to last however, and once her name was known she found herself courted by London’s literary elite becoming friendly with Carlyle and Dickens – who pressed her into writing for his periodical Household Words – and meeting Charlotte Bronte for the first time. She later published as Mrs Gaskell.
Despite the success of Mary Barton, it was not until 1855 that she produced the companion volume North and South. In between publishing these two novels, she contributed many stories to Household Words, including episodes of one of her best-known novels, Cranford. After the death of Charlotte Bronte in 1855 Elizabeth Gaskell wrote what has been described as the first modern biography, The Life of Charlotte Bronte.
She continued with her stories for Dickens, and other works include Ruth (1853) My Lady Ludlow (1858), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866).
Elizabeth’s diary and her many wonderful letters, show her as a conscientious mother, deeply concerned about her family. She and her husband worked amongst the poor of Manchester during a period of great social change. They also enjoyed a thriving professional circle of friends. William co-founded the Unitarian College in Manchester, was Chairman of the Portico Library, Manchester and on the committee of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.
She was a prolific writer, a volunteer teacher and charity worker, a traveller at home and abroad (usually with a daughter, but without William) and a very sociable woman. She would mix happily with people of all types, and she used her experiences in her writing. She seems to have been a charming, but independent-minded woman. Her enterprise is shown in the fact that she bought a large house in Hampshire, without William’s knowledge, as a surprise present for him and as security for her daughters.
Elizabeth’s writing is remarkably varied and includes almost forty short stories, ranging from social realism to ghost stories. Her novel Cranford has never been out of print. Her final novel Wives and Daughters was left unfinished when she died suddenly of heart failure on 12th November 1865 aged just 55.
Although described by the press after her death as ‘one of the greatest female novelists of all time’, Elizabeth Gaskell’s literary fame faded in the early twentieth century and for some she still remains in the shadow of her contemporaries, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens.
Over the last 30 years we have thankfully seen a resurgence in her popularity as new readers discover and enjoy her stories. She is now read and studied across the world with her novels and short stories translated into many languages.
Many people have also been introduced to Elizabeth Gaskell via the different television adaptations of her works, which continue to entertain and enthral us!
The John Ryland’s Library in Manchester holds the world’s most important collection of literary manuscripts by Elizabeth Gaskell, including the only complete manuscript of Wives and Daughters and her celebrated biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë.
Debbie Pine, member of Manchester Lit & Phil