Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell

Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367880132
• eBook ISBN: 9781317080701
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Critical assessments of Elizabeth Gaskell have tended to emphasise the regional and provincial aspects of her writing, but the scope of her influence extended across the globe. Building on theories of space and place, the contributors to this collection bring a variety of geographical, industrial, psychological, and spatial perspectives to bear on the vast range of Gaskell's literary output and on her place within the narrative of British letters and national identity. The advent of the railway and the increasing predominance of manufactory machinery reoriented the nation's physical and social countenance, but alongside the excitement of progress and industry was a sense of fear and loss manifested through an idealization of the country home, the pastoral retreat, and the agricultural south. In keeping with the theme of progress and change, the essays follow parallel narratives that acknowledge both the angst and nostalgia produced by industrial progress and the excitement and awe occasioned by the potential of the empire. Finally, the volume engages with adaptation and cultural performance, in keeping with the continuing importance of Gaskell in contemporary popular culture far beyond the historical and cultural environs of nineteenth-century Manchester.

PART I
Home Geographies

Chapter 1
Gaskell on the Waterfront: Leisure, Labor, and Maritime Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Robert Burroughs

As a writer of place, Elizabeth Gaskell’s critical and popular reputation is based on her fictions of the city, provincial town, and countryside. Coastal settings and seafaring characters nonetheless recur, albeit often in the margins, in both her novels and shorter fiction, and in Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) the maritime sphere is central. Recent studies have examined Sylvia’s Lovers and the mutiny subplot of North and South (1854–1855) in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naval history (d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions 103–36; Peck 131–9; Morse; Lewis). On the whole, though, when critics note Gaskell’s interest in sailors and the sea, they tend to do so in biographical terms of the nautical careers of male members of her immediate family—above all her elder brother, John Stevenson, a merchant seaman apparently lost at sea when she was 18. Whereas Gaskell is routinely credited with deliberate and conscientious examination of urban society and history, critics associate her writing of the maritime sphere with the realm of the personal, even the unconscious. Deirdre d’Albertis, for instance, writes that through the mysterious disappearance and remarkable return of sea voyagers “Gaskell sought to repair imaginatively a rupture in her own family that could never be healed, or—if the letters we possess are any indication—directly spoken of again” (“Life and Letters” 18; see also Bonaparte 29–30, 195–6; Hyde; Uglow 54).

The biographical line of criticism is helpful in identifying some of the personal reasons for Gaskell’s literary preoccupation with mariners and their environs. It furthermore begins to detect Gaskell’s understanding of the sea as liminal space, enabling deep, reflective thought away from the material transience of industrialized places. Even the sailor, as a figure of disappearance and return, is transitory in contrast to the waters on which he travels. Of course, such an understanding of the sea was not Gaskell’s alone. Nor did it stem purely from her private, intuitive grief. It was rather informed by various long-standing cultural constructions of the sea, as well as more recent cultural and material developments. In this chapter I situate Gaskell’s writing on the waterfront in the cultural history of seaside tourism in the mid-nineteenth century, of which Gaskell’s own holiday experiences provide valuable illumination. I recall the social debates that attended the rise of the beach holiday and examine their particular significance for women. Turning the spotlight away from the sailor-heroes, and onto the waterfront peoples and individuals they leave behind, I argue that in Gaskell’s writing the waterfront shapes not only men’s but also women’s lives, its construction as liminal space enabling the latter to experience to some extent moments of self-contemplation, and even self-assertion, which are limited in other locales.

Gaskell’s Sailors

Sailors abound in Gaskell’s fiction. Yet whether it is Will Wilson in Mary Barton (1848), “Poor Peter” in Cranford (1853), Frederick Hale in North and South, Frank Wilson in “The Manchester Marriage” (1858), or Charley Kinraid in Sylvia’s Lovers, they make sudden exits. They furthermore often make ill-fated or incomplete returns: Peter comes home late in life; Hale must live in exile; Frank and Kinraid return to find their lovers have seemingly abandoned them, and their former homes are alien to them. Suicide proves the only release for Frank. Seamen’s romantic dispositions and melodramatic forms of self-expression push them to the margins of narratives in which more cerebral characterization takes precedence: Wilson’s yarn-spinning and salt-water colloquialisms leave him humorously at odds with Job Legh (but give melodramatic eloquence to his testimony at his cousin’s trial); the Byronic portrait of the mutineer Hale contrasts with his sober, pragmatic sister; Kinraid’s melodramatic heroism is pitched against the tragic, self-abnegating emergence of Philip Hepburn as the hero in the final volume of Sylvia’s Lovers. Seafaring exploits, moreover, are generally described in sailors’ yarns or in textual fragments that lack the authority attributable to other characters’ reported speeches, or the words of a narrator: Hale’s mutiny, for example, recorded in biased newspaper reports that are glossed by his grieving mother, or Frank’s account of his shipwreck. For all their magnetism, then, Gaskell’s sailors are illusory heroes. Painted in romantic and melodramatic hues, they feel “unrealistic and outmoded,” as Stefanie Markovits has said of Hale (480). If, as Patsy Stoneman argues, the domestic sphere is crucial to the formation of positive, nurturing masculine identity in Gaskell (esp. 50–53), then the mobility and consequent lack of belonging of these characters explains their peripheral status, stalling characterization, and fragmented narratives. The sailor returns home and experiences the uncanny, only to become an embodiment of the uncanny.

The focus of Gaskell’s maritime writing is the coastal society from which the traveler departs. As sailors disappear beyond the representational horizon, their communities and loved ones remain in narrative focus. It is significant, for example, that in a novel so concerned with labor exploitation as Mary Barton the reader learns almost nothing about maritime work. Rather, the emotional travails of seafarers’ mothers such as Alice Wilson and Mrs. Sturgis receive attention. To some degree the absent mariner finds his way into the home and the main plot through the reminiscences of loved ones, but his function there is to highlight a lack or absence in the domestic realm. The upshot is that Gaskell, especially in her “condition-of-England” fictions, contributes to what Allan Sekula describes as “the forgetting of the sea” as a space of ongoing capitalist exchange in mid-nineteenth-century literature and art as the “condition of England” was defined in terrestrial terms (45–54).

Perhaps this concern with sailors’ families and waterfront communities, rather than sailors’ deep-sea journeys, explains why, with the exception of John Peck’s Maritime Fiction: Sailors and the Sea in British and American Novels, 1719–1917 (2001), studies of maritime literature and culture have said next to nothing about Gaskell. Research in this field continues to overlook cultural production at the water’s edge. Indeed, in her efforts to read maritime literature on its own terms, not as allegories of society on dry-land, Margaret Cohen arguably under-emphasizes the importance of the littoral in many of the texts examined in The Novel and the Sea (2010). Concentrating upon the representation of seafaring “craft,” Cohen’s work and other new Oceanic studies of literature tend to recycle and expand upon long-established definitions and canons of “maritime literature,” in which firsthand experiences of deep-sea voyaging are privileged. Inevitably the focus of this field is upon masculine perspectives, traditions, and societies. To comprehend what Gaskell offers to this field entails drawing upon the work of cultural historians such as Isaac Land and Paul A. Gilje that highlights the primacy of the waterfront as a space in which not only men but also women lived and worked with, and wrote about, the sea.

To the Seaside

In the years that Gaskell wrote, many of the British waterfront spaces to which she traveled were undergoing economic, social, and cultural change, as parts of the coast were transformed into places of recreation par excellence.¹ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the main reason, besides work, for travel to the seaside had been curative, but while the health benefits of a beach holiday continued to be claimed in resort advertising in the middle of the 1800s, increasingly the coast was identified as a place for pleasure. The spread of the railways made the shore accessible to the growing number of urban dwellers, enabling the increase in middle-class tourism from around the 1840s.² The beach then promised release and refreshment to self-consciously industrious Victorians jaded by urban living. This recreational mobility was conceived of as an antidote to bounded, responsible, sometimes even dreary, existence in the home, yet the extent to which it genuinely afforded such a release is debatable. That the railway allowed holidaymakers to travel in greater numbers, more often, and for shorter spells—even day trips—is a clue that the coastal “getaway” was not immune to those forces of industrialization (massification, acceleration, standardization, routinization) that it was intended to evade. Moreover, the kinds of recreational escape that the beach offered were carefully delimited. Mid-nineteenth-century writings about coastal recreation warn against indolence by promoting amateur-scientific, antiquarian, and sporting activities alongside aesthetic appreciation of the sublime natural environment. Such pastimes were envisaged not only to keep middle-class minds healthily busy, but also to enable continuing spiritual development: beach-combing guides by Charles Kingsley and Phillip H. Gosse promoted “themes dear to contemporaries, such as the way the natural world revealed close connections between religion, science and art” (Hassan 32). They maintained the identification of the sea as a profound space, “as close an approximation of the infinite as the visible, physical world can provide,” which Christopher Connery traces back to ancient times (508). Religious and aesthetic contemplation allowed for restfulness while nonetheless meeting the demand for self-improving activity.

John K. Walton finds, however, that while “improving” commentators stressed the need for robust and educative activity, “[m]ost middle-class holidaymakers in most mid-Victorian resorts spent their time on the beach, promenade and pier, surrounded by their children … [M]ost of the time was devoted to the idleness which was deplored by the serious-minded” (166–7). On the typical middle-class family seaside holiday of the mid-nineteenth century, the mother and children would take extended leave at the coast with the paterfamilias joining them at weekends. Children would spend much of their time in the company of nannies (Walton 24). Domestic arrangements tended to be upheld. Walton comments that “perhaps the most important function of the seaside holiday was to display the stability and affluence of the Victorian middle-class family” (41). Even so, if Gaskell’s experiences are at all representative, holidaying at the seaside afforded middle-class women some degree of remedial distance from the strictures of domesticity and thus a space for contemplation. Gaskell’s personal correspondence offers glimpses of her particular balance of responsibilities, work, and amusement at the seaside. The Gaskells took several family holidays on the British coast, above all at Morecambe Bay on England’s North-West shores. Gaskell writes anxiously on occasion of the need for a coastal holiday to replenish the health of her husband or one of her daughters. Of one trip, Gaskell states to her daughter, Marianne: “one object of our summer change is health.”³ Elsewhere, she writes of her forthcoming holiday with her daughters: “we shall remain for six weeks, and all get as strong as horses.”⁴ But the beach also was sought for pleasure. In personal correspondence she describes the fishing village of Silverdale—“a little dale running down to Morecambe Bay, with grey limestone rocks on all sides, which in the sun or moonlight, glisten like silver,”⁵ which became the Gaskells’ “regular holiday home” (Uglow 146)—fondly, if condescendingly, as a primitive departure from modernity. Silverdale is described as “so wild a place” and “a charming primitive desert” that catered only for “the rudest and most primitive life you ever met with.”⁶ It provided chances for the children “to learn country interests, and ways of living and thinking.”⁷ It was furthermore a place in which her straight-laced husband was able to unwind.⁸

The Gaskells partook of typical Victorian seaside pastimes such as sightseeing, sketching, and walking. The company of one or more of her children, and sometimes their nannies, her husband, extended family, or friends, not to mention correspondence with absent loved ones and acquaintances, meant that for Elizabeth Gaskell domestic obligations were always in tow. Correspondence by Gaskell and her circle suggests the writer experienced similar struggles to find free time on holiday as at home (see Uglow, 164, 301–2). Nevertheless, the waterfront proved highly productive for Gaskell’s writing. The early works “The Sexton’s Hero” (1847) and “The Moorland Cottage” (1850) took inspiration from Silverdale. As its coastal settings and sea symbolism testify, much of Ruth was written, in the summer of 1852, in a Silverdale top-level drawing room with “views all round, of the coast and bays to the south, the open sea to the west and the hazy Lakeland mountains to the north and east” (Uglow 302). Famously, Gaskell undertook primary research in Whitby in late 1859 while conceiving of the work that would become Sylvia’s Lovers. With the holiday-making industriousness often advised in Victorian guidebooks, she combined pleasure with work, taking her daughters on fact-finding and sight-seeing trips. When Gaskell faltered two-thirds of the way into writing Sylvia’s Lovers, a trip to Silverdale got the book back on course (Uglow 481–5; 498).

The fiction itself most eloquently testifies to the importance of the sea and seaside in developing Gaskell’s ideas about not only place, but also character, fate and circumstance, history, and indeed the novel form. As Hughes and Lund argue, the narrative structure of Sylvia’s Lovers observes the rhythms of nature, including those of the sea. Kinraid’s movements between presence and absence, life and death, reflect the ebb and flow of existence, the sea’s cruelty as well as its power to renew (51–2; 64). I will proceed to demonstrate that besides upholding the Victorian view of the sea as contemplative space, Sylvia’s Lovers and other novels further resonate with the Victorian debates on appropriately industrious and self-improving forms of seaside leisure, and with notions of respite from city living. They do so in part by reflecting Gaskell’s regard of coastal settlements such as Silverdale as rustic throwbacks to bygone days (a view that continues to inform tourist advertising of seaside holidays in northern England).

Besides representing the coast as a place apart from industrial development, this rustic depiction of the maritime sphere is also determined by, or perhaps informs, the historical setting of Sylvia’s Lovers. The novel is set in the 1790s. Its historical perspective is made apparent throughout by the narrator’s interjections, often to comment on cultural and social differences between the present from which the tale is narrated and the past that it describes. Finally, in the epilogue, the narrator is identified as a holidaymaker with antiquarian interests in the present-day Monkshaven, a fictional substitute for Whitby. Sylvia’s Lovers thus revisits a narrative form first adopted by Gaskell in one of her earliest short stories, “The Sexton’s Hero,” in which a tale of Christian self-sacrifice on “the Sands” of Morecambe Bay is heard by two male tourists. In contrast to the narrator of Sylvia’s Lovers, the framing interlocutors of “The Sexton’s Hero” seem unmoved by the sexton’s memories. The story ends abruptly as the tourists, “having rested sufficiently, rose up, and came away” (110). The reader learns little about the narrator of Sylvia’s Lovers other than that her time on vacation has been spent (in comparable fashion to Gaskell’s spell in Whitby) learning from locals the story of Sylvia, Philip and Kinraid. The narrator notes Sylvia’s tale has been warped by “popular feeling” in such a way as to misrepresent the former as the typically unfaithful sailor’s wife of melodramatic lore (502). As Marion Shaw argues in her authoritative studies of this novel, the narrator thus identifies her role as the realist chronicler of an otherwise forgotten woman’s history (“Elizabeth Gaskell, Tennyson and the Fatal Return” 52–3; “Sylvia’s Lovers”).

While the novel seeks to recover the truth about Sylvia beyond “popular feeling,” part of the complexity of Sylvia’s Lovers arises from Gaskell’s, or the narrator’s, refusal simply to discredit the songs and chanteys, yarns, supernatural beliefs, dreams, and other cultural fabric through which Sylvia’s story has been transformed. Instead, lore is understood as the means by which the people of Monkshaven reassert their values in spite of the broader imperialist and capitalist forces that endanger them, namely the Napoleonic Wars and the transformation of the Monkshaven economy. As a holiday-maker, the narrator of Sylvia’s Lovers would appear to exist at an end-point in the economic developments that have transformed Monkshaven into “a rising bath place” (502). She potentially encapsulates the modernity that threatens to sever these coastal peoples from their history and culture. This narrator, however, embodies the conscientious mid-Victorian tourist, and this informs her narrative style. Rather than simply correcting the historical record, she converses with the locals, recovers fragments of the local culture, and weaves them into the narrative. Famously, in the refrain, “And the waves kept lapping on the shelving shore,” which repeats (with small variations) throughout the final chapter, Gaskell knowingly returns the fiction of Phillip, Sylvia, and Kinraid to its roots in the psalms, hymns,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Placing Gaskell
• Part I Home Geographies
• Part II Mobility and Boundaries
• Part III Literary and Imagined Spaces
• Part IV Cultural Performance and Visual Spaces
• Index