The Complete Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell

      Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

       Table of Contents

      GASKELL, ELIZABETH CLEGHORN (1810–1865), English novelist and biographer, was born on the 29th of September 1810 in Lindsay Row, Chelsea, London, since destroyed to make way for Cheyne Walk. Her father, William Stevenson (1772–1829), came from Berwick-on-Tweed, and had been successively Unitarian minister, farmer, boarding-house keeper for students at Edinburgh, editor of the Scots Magazine, and contributor to the Edinburgh Review, before he received the post of Keeper of the Records to the Treasury, which he held until his death. His first wife, Elizabeth Holland, was Mrs Gaskell's mother. She was a Holland of Sandiebridge, Knutsford, Cheshire, in which county the family name had long been and is still of great account. Mrs Stevenson died a month after her daughter was born, and the babe was carried into Cheshire to Knutsford to be adopted by her aunt, Mrs Lumb. Thus her childhood was spent in the pleasant environment that she has idealized in Cranford. At fifteen years of age she went to a boarding-school at Stratford-on-Avon, kept by Miss Byerley, where she.remained until her seventeenth year. Then came occasional visits to London to see her father and his second wife, and after her father's death in 1829 to her uncle, Swinton Holland. Two winters seem to have been spent in Newcastle-on-Tyne in the family of William Turner, a Unitarian minister, and a third in Edinburgh. On the 30th of August 1832 she was married in the parish church of Knutsford to William Gaskeil, minister of the Unitarian chapel in Cross Street, Manchester, and the author of many treatises and sermons in support of his own religious denomination. Mr Gaskell held the chair of English history and literature in Manchester New College.

      Henceforth Mrs Gaskell's life belonged to Manchester. She and her husband lived first in Dover Street, then in Rumford Street, and finally in 1850 at 84 Plymouth Grove. Her literary life began with poetry, She and her husband aspired to emulate George Crabbe and write the annals of the Manchester poor, One poetic "Sketch," which appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for January 1837, seems to have been the only outcome of' this ambition. Henceforth, while in perfect union in all else, husband and wife were to go their separate literary ways, Mrs Gaskell to become a successful novelist, whose books were to live side by side with those of greater masters, Mr Gaskell to be a distinguished Unitarian divine, whose sermons, lectures and hymns are now all but forgotten. In her earlier married life Mrs Gaskell was mainly occupied with domestic duties--she had seven children--and philanthropic work among the poor. Her first published prose effort was probably a letter that she addressed to William Howitt on hearing that he contemplated a volume entitled Visits to Remarkable Places. She then told the legend of Clopton Hall, Warwickshire, as she had heard it in schooldays, and Howitt incorporated the letter in that book, which was published in 1840. Serious authorship, however, does not seem to have been commenced until four or five years later. In 1844 Mr and Mrs Gaskell visited North Wales, where their only son "Willie" died of scarlet fever at the age of ten months, and it was, it is said, to distract Mrs Gaskell from her sorrow that her husband suggested a long work of fiction, and Mary Barton was begun. There were earlier short .stories in Howitt's Journal, where "Libbie Marsh's Three Eras" and "The Sexton's Hero" appeared in 1847. But it was Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life that laid the foundation of Mrs Gaskell's literary career. It was completed in 1847 and offered to a publisher who returned it unread. It was then sent to Chapman & Hall, who retained the manuscript for a year without reading it or communicating with the author. A reminder, however, led to its being sought for, considered and accepted, the publishers agreeing to pay the author £100 for the copyright. It was published anonymously in two volumes in 1848. This story had a wide popularity, and its author secured first the praise and then the friendship of Carlyle, Landor and Dickens. Dickens indeed asked her in o to become a Contributor to his new magazine Household Words, and here the whole of Cranford appeared at intervals from December 1851 to May 1853, exclusive of One sketch, reprinted in the "World's Classics" edition (1907), that was published in All the Year Round for November 1863. Earlier than this, indeed, for the very first number of Household Words she had written "Lizzie Leigh." Mrs Gaskell's second book,however, was The Moorland Cottage, a dainty little volume that appeared at Christmas 1850 with illustrations by Birket Foster. In the Christmas number of Household Words for 1853 appeared "The Squire's Story," reprinted in Lizzie Leigh and other Tales in I865. In 1853 appeared another long novel, Ruth, and the incomparable Cranford. This last--now the most popular of her books--is an idyll of village life, largely inspired by girlish memories of Knutsford and its people. In Ruth, which first appeared in three volumes, Mrs Gaskell turned to a delicate treatment of a girl's betrayal and her subsequent rescue. Once more we are introduced to Knutsford, thinly disguised, and to the little Unitarian chapel in that town where the author had worshipped in early years. In 1855 North and South was published. It had previously appeared.serially in Household Words. Then came--in 1857-- the Life