Elizabeth Gaskell's resurrection

Elizabeth Gaskell
THE WORKS OF ELIZABETH GASKELL
Edited by Joanne Shattock, et al
Part I
Volumes 1–3, 5, 7
2,376pp. 1 85196 777 X
Pickering and Chatto. £450
Part II
Volumes 4, 6, 8–10
2,704 pp. 1 85196 782 6
Pickering and Chatto. £450


Already Mrs Gaskell has fallen into that respectful oblivion which is the fate of a writer who reaches a sort of secondary classical rank, and survives, but not effectually, as the greater classics do”, wrote Margaret Oliphant, in 1887. For much of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Gaskell, once hailed as a major Victorian novelist, was the victim of various kinds of condescension. Lord David Cecil dismissed her, in an influential essay, as “very clever; but with a feminine cleverness, instinctive, rule-of-thumb; showing itself in illuminations of the particular, not in general intellectual structure . . . . She could not build a story around a central idea”. The politically committed criticism of the 1970s and 80s took her industrial novels seriously, but felt that she fudged the issues (as Raymond Williams put it) by proposing personal and romantic resolutions to the problems she exposed. Deconstructionist suspicion of the “classic realist text” meant that little attention was paid to her later works. She appeared to have found her place in literary history as an agreeable and accomplished but unremarkable writer, who, unlike her great contemporaries Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, never quite transcended the limitations imposed by the facts of her gender and class.

For Gaskell has neither Charlotte Brontë’s passionate individualism nor George Eliot’s intellectual strenuousness. She is emphatically not a “public moralist”. Her distinctive narrative voice is one not of Romantic assertion or moral authority but of sympathetic intimacy. Her fiction seems comfortably readable rather than challenging: an impression nicely captured in Matthew Arnold’s sister’s memorable description of her brother in 1850, “stretched out full length on a sofa, reading a Christmas tale of Mrs. Gaskell, which moves him to tears, and the tears to complacent admiration of his own sensibility”.

Yet Mrs Gaskell is slowly beginning to be revalued as a novelist. A century after Mrs Oliphant consigned her to secondary status, the Gaskell Society Journal was launched. In 1993 came Jenny Uglow’s outstanding biography. An incomplete Letters of Mrs Gaskell (edited by J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard) appeared in 1966, supplemented by further volumes of letters in 2000 and 2003. In the past twenty years there have been a number of good editions of individual works, and several critical monographs. Feminist critics have begun to explore the political seriousness of Gaskell’s concern with “sympathy”; cultural critics to trace her wide-ranging engagement with the issues of her day. A Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, edited by Jill Matus, is to appear early in 2007.

Now Pickering and Chatto, known for their collected editions of neglected or out-of-fashion authors, have produced the first comprehensive critical and textual edition of all Elizabeth Gaskell’s known works. These ten substantial volumes contain her five full-length novels and her Life of Charlotte Brontë, a diary and poems written during the early days of her motherhood, journalism and reviews, and shorter fictions of varying length and seriousness. The purpose of such an edition, amply fulfilled by this one, is to establish authoritative texts for future scholars to work with, to record variants scrupulously, and to contextualize the works it presents by providing explanatory footnotes and a clear account of the production and reception of each text. But it can also disclose, in a way that a series of disconnected works do not, the nature of a writer’s achievement and the shape of a writing life.

The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, under the General Editorhsip of Joanne Shattock, is not merely more comprehensive than any edition we have previously had, but rather differently arranged. It gives due weight to Gaskell’s shorter fictions, many of them written in the eight-year gap between North and South (1855) and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), and hitherto largely marginalized as “other tales”. It enables the reader to see her development as a writer, from her first three “social-problem” novels to her later fictions of middle-class provincial experience, her experiments in a variety of genres. The careful revisions recorded in the textual notes reveal that that fluent prose was much thought about and worked over. The explanatory endnotes indicate the range of her interests, her close attention to detail, her accuracy of reference. The Gaskell presented in these volumes is not a charming sentimentalist, but shrewd, observant, perceptive; a serious craftswoman, who laboured over her writing and explored the potentialities of different kinds and lengths of narrative, whose apparently transparent realism was not unconsidered, but a deeply pondered art.

For that eminently readable prose is more precise and more quietly subversive in what it notices and registers than might at first appear.Thus, the opening scene of Mary Barton portrays the factory workers taking a day’s holiday in the fields near Manchester. “The book opens charmingly”, pronounced one contemporary review. Yet what one finds in these pages is not a charming pastoral idyll, but writing alert to the actualities of its time and place. “There are some fields near Manchester, well known to the inhabitants as ‘Green Heys Fields’, through which runs a public footpath” are the opening words of the novel. There is an echo of Wordsworth in the long description that follows – “near this stile . . . there runs a tale that primroses may often be found, and occasionally the blue sweet violet on the grassy hedge bank”. But the poignantly singular “eye” of Wordsworth’s Lucy poem – “A violet on a mossy bank / Half hidden from the eye” – is here replaced by the “tale” of local knowledge, “a violet” by “the blue sweet violet”, the shift to the definite article signalling not a slide into sentimentality but a deliberate invocation of the adjectival language of popular sentiment. This is emphatically not a space of individual memory, but a place “well known” to many, with a familiar local name. The stress is on shared and customary rather than solitary experience: a stress that in 1847 had resonances now lost to us.

Those who are to be individualized in the novel appear here first as “the population of the neighbourhood”: this is a “crowded” place. These are the uprooted, the new proletariat, many recently come from the country to the city, for whom the availability of rural space for recreation was a charged political issue. For the “public footpath” mentioned in the opening sentence was, in 1847, more controversial than might today appear. In the early 1840s, as Gaskell would have known, a “Foot-Path Protection Society” existed in Manchester; “the necessity for such an institution establishes not merely the want of sympathy for the pleasures of the poor, but a determination to deprive them of their pleasures by robbery and usurpation”, one contemporary observer wrote. These fields just outside the city appear from the beginning as a potentially contested space: a suggestion that becomes more explicit in the description that follows of plants growing in “most republican and indiscriminate order” in the old-fashioned farmhouse garden beside the workers’ path. Gaskell (whose interest in etymology is evident throughout the novel) here seems to be invoking the old meaning of “republican” – belonging to the commonwealth or community: within her description lurks that commonplace of contemporary radical rhetoric in the period, the Chartist claim for the land as “the people’s farm”.

“I do not know whether it was on a holiday granted by the masters, or a holiday seized in right of Nature and her beautiful spring time by the workers”, the narrating voice goes on; and its easy informality does not quite smooth over the more threatening political undertones of the language of rights and Nature, the seizure of popular power. The new breed of employers of the Industrial Revolution were seeking to impose work-discipline on a workforce to whom traditional recreations and the irregular work patterns and rhythms of country customs were a recent memory. In practice, they often had to accept some compromise with tradition, and allow their workers more than the eight unpaid half-holidays a year to which they were entitled under the 1833 Factory Act. Indeed, the word repeated here conveys a more specific suggestion of the controversy that in this period surrounded the notion of the workers’ “holiday”. For “holiday” became a political catchword at the moment that is the subject of Mary Barton, when, in anticipation of the Charter’s rejection by Parliament, there began to be widespread agitation for a general strike, to be known (after the title of William Benbow’s well-known radical pamphlet) as “the Grand National Holiday”.

Gaskell’s social novels have been criticized for their sentimental appeal to common feeling, their too easy invocation of Wordsworth’s “we have all of us one human heart”. But what we find in these “charming” pages is not a sentimental blurring but a registering of difference, a sense of conflict and division inscribed in the very texture of the prose. This apparently common language is charged with conflicting meanings: the perspective of those whom John Forster, reviewing the novel, called “our dangerous classes” is unobtrusively made part of the depicted actuality. What for the Dickens of Hard Times was to be emphatic contrast, in George Eliot an explicit weighing up of different viewpoints, here remains unstressed, unremarked on by the narrator, not perhaps noticed by many of her readers, except in their sense of what one reviewer called the “thorough reality” of her art.

“How equivocal her voice is, even at its most charming”, Charlotte Mitchell observes, in her excellent introduction to Volume Three of this edition. Yet “multivocal” might be a better word. Mary Barton was written, said Gaskell, “to give utterance to the agony . . . which convulses the dumb people”; but inscribed throughout her first novel is her intimate awareness that the people were not dumb. This is signalled by the inclusion, in the fifth edition of the novel, of her husband, William Gaskell’s lectures on the Lancashire dialect; and it is writ large in its adoption of the forms of popular Chartist fiction – the epigraphs, quotations, songs that characteristically punctuated such fiction, its politicized reworking of melodramatic and romantic plots. The successive volumes of this edition reveal Gaskell’s lifelong interest in the history of the English language and in the varieties of spoken English, her sharply particular sense of its accents and resonances. Her writings are throughout informed by a sense of the medium she works in as freighted with social meanings, the register of political and regional and individual difference, as well as of community. She worked over Sylvia’s Lovers, changing the speech of her characters from the Lancashire she knew best to a Yorkshire dialect. Her last, not quite finished novel, Wives and Daughters (1864–6) – which contemporaries hailed as her masterpiece – is alert to the subtle variations and clashes of mainly middle class speech; its narrative method that of the verbal give and take of gossip rather than of controlling overview.

For Gaskell does not adjudicate. If her narrating voice is heard, sometimes uneasily, especially in her earlier fictions, she is not primarily a moralist or an ironist. From her first “social problem” novels to her later narratives of provincial middle-class life, her essential method is less a symbolic or analytic charting of significances than a delicate, flexible, precisely observant registering of the changing and contending perspectives at play in her fictional world. “She appears to us as a woman who, probably of strong opinions herself, yet viewed the opinions of all kindly and without judgment”, wrote The English Women’s Domestic Magazine after her death. What the writer is pointing to is not an undiscriminating softness, but the intelligent disinterestedness found throughout Gaskell’s work: that attentiveness and responsiveness to the multifacetedness of reality that Michael Wood has called “the kindness of novels” and that Gaskell’s contemporaries described, in a term too easily confused with sentimentalism, as “sympathy”.

Characteristically, in Gaskell’s fictions – and in her Life of Charlotte Brontë – a shape emerges gradually, through the delineation of shifting and contending feelings, the accumulation of detail, rather than by any more marked authorial assertiveness. Henry James praised Wives and Daughters for its denseness of realization, its delicate artistry – “the gentle skill with which the reader is slowly involved in the tissue of the story” . . . “so that the hours given to its perusal seems like hours actually spent . . . among the scenes and people described, in the atmosphere of their motives, feelings, traditions, associations”. But he noted too what he saw as a weakness:

“not in the general management of the story, nor yet in the details, most of which are as good as perfect, but in the way in which, as the tale progresses, the author loses herself in its current very much as we have seen she causes the reader to do.”

The twenty-two-year-old James called this “a want of judgment”, and ascribed it to Gaskell’s feminine “minimum of head”. But he was also, not imperceptively, pointing to an essential difference between her fictions and those of her great contemporaries. For there is nothing in Gaskell’s writings of Charlotte Brontë’s shaping vision, nothing like Thackeray’s strong, sardonic narrating voice. She has no powerful structuring images, like Dickens’s great metaphors of circulation and stoppage, or the web of Middlemarch. If hers is an assured it is also, as I have suggested, an unobtrusive art.

But is it a lesser one? Forty years after his review of Wives and Daughters, James was still pondering the aesthetic of the Victorian multiplot novel. “What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” he famously asks in his preface to The Tragic Muse (1907). The question is not merely rhetorical. For he goes on, with characteristic honesty, to puzzle over an experience that seems to contradict his “mortal horror of two stories, two pictures in one”:

“. . . It was a fact, apparently, that one had on occasion seen two pictures in one; were there not for instance certain sublime Tintorettos at Venice, a measureless Crucifixion in especial, which showed without loss of authority half a dozen actions separately taking place? Yes, that might be, but there had surely been nevertheless a mighty pictorial fusion, so that the virtue of composition had somehow thereby come all mysteriously to its own.”

The possibility of a “mighty pictorial fusion” to be made out of the multifariousness of a faithfully registered reality had fascinated Ruskin, of whose account of this painting, in Modern Painters III, James is surely thinking here. It also seems to have fascinated Gaskell, who treasured Modern Painters, and whose effort to “write truthfully” was of a piece with the conviction that Ruskin expressed in that work that a true sense of the “beautiful” could be arrived at “only by the habit of representing faithfully all things”. She early spoke of her efforts to portray common life in a “seeing beauty spirit”, by which she seems to have meant not a sentimental selectiveness of vision but a particular kind of attention: a mode of “seeing” different from moral or philosophical reflection, in which the ordinary takes on the resonance of art.

And her writings are punctuated by arresting moments of such “seeing”. In the opening pages of Ruth, the heroine, one of a group of seamstresses working through the night in an airless room to finish a “beautiful ball-gown”, presses her face against the window, and gazes “at the deep snow which had been falling silently ever since the evening before”. In North and South, a girl worn out with making plans for her wedding lies asleep in a cloud of white muslin and blue ribbons on a crimson damask sofa in a comfortable back drawing-room. The Life of Charlotte Brontë patiently details every word of the inscriptions on a memorial tablet, where as one name succeeds another “the lines are pressed together, and the letters become small and cramped”. The narrator of Cousin Phillis reads aloud to two women darning stockings in a farmhouse kitchen:

“The tranquil monotony of that hour made me feel as if I had lived for ever, and should live for ever droning out paragraphs in that warm sunny room, with my two quiet hearers, and the curled-up pussy cat sleeping on the hearth-rug, and the clock on the house-stairs perpetually clicking out the passage of the moments.”

These (chosen almost at random) are quite unlike Thackeray’s pictorial set-pieces – Becky brilliant with diamonds, Beatrix Esmond descending the stair; or the symbolically charged interiors and landscapes of Jane Eyre. They are equally remote from that moralized attention to the ordinary which George Eliot – who acknowledged her debt to Gaskell in this – attempts far more self-consciously in Adam Bede. In their rich but resolutely unsymbolic detail they are closer to that focus on sharply seen particulars that we associate with Pre- Raphaelitism. (Ruth, in a moment that pre- figures “The Woodspurge” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is unconscious of any thought save that her lover is gone: “yet afterwards, long afterwards, she remembered the exact motion of a bright green beetle busily meandering among the wild thyme near her”). Yet Gaskell’s calm cumulative suggestiveness is quite different from Rossetti’s “insanity of realism” (as Walter Pater called it), and her effects are not merely, or even mainly, pictorial. For central to each of these scenes – and indeed a hallmark of all her writing – is a sense of time passing: things being amassed for the coming wedding, the names filling up the tablet, the clock ticking, the falling snow.

Consideration of the aesthetic of realism in this period tended to be expressed in visual terms. One thinks of Charlotte Brontë’s imagery of drawing and painting; the importance for their first readers of the illustrations to Dickens and Thackeray; Eliot’s references to Dutch painting in Adam Bede. But Gaskell’s interest is less in “picture” than in “story”. Her sophisticated sense of the distinctive potentialities of narrative is evident in her varied experiments with fictions of different lengths, the stories within stories that appear throughout her writings, in her constant, sharp awareness of the aesthetic significance of narrative’s extension in time. She felt that Dickens had “deformed” North and South by insisting on compressing some episodes for serial publication: she expanded the last few chapters when the novel appeared in volume form. In her Life of Charlotte Brontë (as Christopher Ricks has brilliantly shown), Gaskell uses retrospection and prolepsis to powerful and moving effect. Her sense of the importance of the slow, expansive movement that James noted in Wives and Daughters is signalled in the novel’s references to the Heptateuch and to evolutionary time, and registered at a microlevel by the prominence within it of the past imperfect tense. “Don’t hurry it up at the last”, Madame Mohl wrote to her, as it was appearing in parts in the Cornhill. “At the last”, as it happened, Gaskell never brought it to a close. But it is suggestive that this, her final, unfinished novel opens by drawing attention to the primitive yet sophisticated pleasure of story, the shape and pattern it gives to the randomness of events:

“To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in the shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up . . . . ”

The rhythmic repetition lays an unexpected stress on those “easy-going connectives” that are noted by Josie Billington, in her thoughtful introduction to Wives and Daughters, as a staple of this novel’s prose. By her “charming” invocation of the formula of nursery rhyme, Gaskell signals the artfulness of her seemingly artless method, and also her sense of her difference from those novelists of overview.

“This is a novel to read slowly, as one reads a poem”, wrote one perceptive contemporary reviewer of Sylvia’s Lovers. Gaskell’s writing requires – and repays – a careful reading. This edition points toward such a reading, and it is much to be welcomed for this reason. Beautifully printed, produced in fine bindings on long-lasting paper, it appears, however, at a price that only a few well-endowed libraries will be able to afford. It is to be hoped that like other Pickering and Chatto editions it will eventually be digitized and made more widely available, so that in the twenty-first century Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing can receive the kind of attention that it deserves.
------------------------------------------------------------
Heather Glen is a Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Last Tales of Angria was published earlier this year.