Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel

W. A. Craik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135048624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First published in 1975, this book places Elizabeth Gaskell amongst the major novelists of the nineteenth-century. It considers how she has sometimes been overlooked, or admired for very few of her works, or for reasons that are not in fact central to her art. W. A. Craik looks at Gaskell's full-length novels with three main purposes: to analyse her development as a novelist, her achievements, and the nature of her very original work; to see what she owes to earlier novelists, what she learns from them, and how far she is an innovator; and to put her in relation to those other novelists who write on similar themes with comparable aims. This book establishes Elizabeth Gaskelll's excellence in comparison with her peers by demonstrating how far she extended the possibilities of the novel, both in materials and techniques.

1

Mary Barton

Mary Barton in 1848 is new ground for the English novel. It has new materials, presents new ways of seeing and handling both its own materials, the world in which any writer finds himself, and the human nature which it is an essential part of most writers’ task to reveal. Elizabeth Gaskell, by beginning her writing career in other forms than the novel, and by not seeing herself at first as a professional novelist – or even a professional writer – makes as nearly as can be a fresh beginning to the novel as a form. Like the primitive in other arts, she virtually unconsciously creates an unobtrusive, wholly invigorating and wholly beneficial revolution. That she is not aware she is an innovator is a great advantage both to herself and to the later novelists who in their own ways derive from and extend beyond her. She leaves herself always free to grow and to extend her powers; each of her novels is different in subject from the previous one, wider in range and more assured in its achievement. She never develops a mere formula for success, so, consequently, her influence is never that of a formula or doctrine. She points ways, and reveals means, so that novelists as widely different as Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy have the way to their own different kinds of greatness charted for them by the writer who began seven years before Trollope (The Warden, 1855), ten years before George Eliot (Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858), and twenty-three years before Hardy (Desperate Remedies, 1871). All these writers, like Elizabeth Gaskell herself, begin somewhat tentatively and develop rapidly. All, having discovered and established what it is in them to create, reveal her aid in their most mature, greatest, and most original novels. This is not to say they deliberately imitate her, or that they consciously model themselves on her; hers is the most vital and fruitful sort of help to those who come after her, in that the new areas and skills she herself develops offer further areas, and exploitable and extensible techniques, to those who, coming after her, explore the areas further, and develop and extend the techniques, not only for the purposes she herself has, but for other, sometimes more profound, ends of their own. Elizabeth Gaskell not only touches greatness herself; she enables others to reach their own kinds of greatness.

Elizabeth Gaskell is obviously well placed to write ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’ as she subtitles Mary Barton. She had been, when she wrote it, for fourteen years absorbed within that life in her role as the active wife of a Unitarian minister. Her childhood and upbringing were close to it, only a few miles away at Knutsford in Cheshire. She saw and experienced and was part of what she writes.

But situation cannot account for success. One needs only to recollect the innumerable other similar but unsubstantial ‘tales’ turned out in the course of the age – all too often by women – which faded and left not a rack behind. First-hand experience is per se very useful to a writer. So, also, is detachment. Elizabeth Gaskell has both. Mary Barton, her first novel, stands apart from her others in being, professedly, a novel of social reform, exploring injustice, abuse and inequity. Like Disraeli’s and Kingsley’s novels, it deals with industrial and poor provincial workers and their plights; like theirs, it is factually accurate in its account; like theirs, its author cares passionately about the conditions she reveals. As a novelist of social reform, Elizabeth Gaskell has the advantage over them of personal experience and personal contact, of having not only observed, but known, visited, and helped men like John Barton and the other mill-workers, or households like that of the Wilsons; as well as having visited and known socially mill-owners and industrialists like the nouveau riche Carsons. Elizabeth Gaskell has also the asset of being provided by circumstance with the right degree of dissociation. Her Knutsford background – the place she knew and loved and balanced against her feelings of commitment to and distaste for Manchester – gives her the detachment that even her own characters could achieve from their imprisoning circumstances, as they do in the opening of Mary Barton, where the Barton and Wilson families, parents and children together, can have a brief and idyllic walk in the modest south Lancashire countryside. Just as that idyll proportions and intensifies the troubles their town life inflicts upon them, so Elizabeth Gaskell’s own detaching awareness enables her to do justice to their miseries, never underestimating them, but never exaggerating with excessive pathos or melodramatizing past belief, as did, on occasion, the city-based Disraeli before her or the invincible Londoner Dickens after her. At intervals in her story – even at times of greatest misery, the urban cloud lifts for a while. Mary, desperately pursuing the sailor Will Wilson, whose evidence is to save Jem from being hanged for murder, goes by train from Manchester to Liverpool, and sees from her back seat ‘the cloud of smoke which hovers over Manchester’ and looks with unseeing eyes at ‘the cloud-shadows which give beauty to Chat-Moss, the picturesque old houses of Newton’; and then, being rowed down the Mersey in pursuit of Will Wilson’s ship, she sees Liverpool too become something distant and detached, from the ‘glassy and motionless [river], reflecting tint by tint of the Indian-ink sky above’ (XXVI).

These advantages of personal situation are perhaps even less important than her approach as a writer. Her first steps in writing were not novels. She began¹ with a poem in the manner of Crabbe called ‘Sketches Among the Poor’,² written jointly with her husband; next came a little descriptive essay, an account of a visit to Clopton Hall in Warwickshire;³ then ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’⁴ (a short tale of a lonely young sewing woman’s brief friendship with a crippled boy, and her final coming together with the boy’s mother when he dies), published in Howitfs Journal along with another short tale ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, which in the following year brought out her ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’.

Mary Barton however is both more than the customary novel of social reform, and different from it. Though its overt aim may be didactic, its fundamental ones are neither didactic nor reformatory; its author is not a clergyman or political figure who elects to use the novel to further his beliefs. She is a novelist first, an artist whose aims are wider than those of the reformer. She is concerned with one of the ultimate subjects of all literature – the predicament of men within their mortal span of life. So her novel has not ‘dated’ as social reformers’ novels do, losing all but their historical interest when the conditions they deal with no longer survive. She is paradoxically less cynical, artistically speaking, than the novelist with a purpose, who exploits the medium as a means to non-artistic ends. She is, naturally, not a mere documenter of facts. Her religion is at the heart of her and of all she writes, and her social concern for those of whom she writes is a practical manifestation of that religion. In this way she is a novelist with a moral purpose in the same sense that Jane Austen is, and in this way is perhaps the last voice speaking from that position of securely-held belief that ends somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. The fact is perhaps not so evident in Mary Barton as in Ruth, North and South or Sylvia’s Lovers, whose themes and characters question orthodox belief, but its truth is proved by the absence of doubt, contrasted with later writers. George Eliot in Adam Bede (1859), writing of an age and society in which Christian belief is secure, is neither secure herself, nor depends on that security in her readers. She is detached not only from the extreme Wesleyanism of Dinah, but from the orthodox inert Christianity of the clergyman Mr Irvine. Trollope, who would seem committed to handling creed by choosing to write of clerics, avoids in his Barchester novels all but the most rudimentary morality, and has virtually no dealings with Christian belief.

When Elizabeth Gaskell does have a specific social aim in writing, as here and in Ruth (and somewhat in North and South), it is rather to inform than to reform. She acts on the faith that if facts are known, then improvement may follow, and so feels no obligation to exaggerate, or dramatize or heighten. One can often feel indeed that Elizabeth Gaskell needs the social aim only to justify writing at all; that it arises as much from personal diffidence as from social zeal. Her turning away from vexed social questions in her later novels reinforces the feeling.

Elizabeth Gaskell is apart from novelists of her time, as well as social reformers. She is a ‘primitive’, working out her own art and craft of the novel for herself, enlarging and perfecting it in the course of her career, very much independently of novelists before her, and those around her. Naturally, therefore, she blunders, she sometimes

Mary Barton lacks assurance, she sometimes over-emphasizes. These faults of a beginner are most visible in Mary Barton, as is another fault of a very interesting kind. Elizabeth Gaskell shows she is aware that she is learning her craft, by the way that in some parts of this novel she depends on and uses the traditional material of the novel, such as the love story of a young heroine, the subject of seduction, sensational and improbable happenings, and a test of heroism for her central characters. Mary Barton suffers from being an amalgam of what can be seen as two distinct novels, one of them a quite original tragic novel, the other a much more conventional one which, though in many ways congenial and suited to her, is yet a sign of her depending on what she knows will be acceptable to a novel-reading public. The tragic novel concerns John Barton, driven by his sense of justice, his loyalties to his fellow mill-workers and to his Trade Union, into the extreme act of murdering his employer’s son; through it Elizabeth Gaskell explores his social problem of the struggles between masters and men. It has its end in the superb reconciliation between the broken and dying Barton, and the father of the murdered man. The theme is great enough for a novel and gives enough scope on its own, as the wiser Elizabeth Gaskell of Sylvia’s Lovers – her great and achieved tragic novel – would have known. Her second story is that of John’s daughter Mary, the much more orthodox heroine, who hesitates between her real love, the workman Jem Wilson, and the dazzling wealthy lover Harry Carson; who, rejecting the one, on the murder of the other suffers the terrible dilemma of having to save Jem from being hanged, without revealing her father’s guilt. This exciting plot, with the capacity for a (qualified) happy ending, is both more conventional and more sensational. Providing a study of the moral and spiritual growth of a young girl, it suits its author, and it provides some of the novel’s finest scenes. Yet undoubtedly the two stories are too much for a single work, and account for many of its incidental failures in emphasis and proportion. Yet Mary Barton is an exciting whole, for its originality of subject matter, of character, and of methods, and impressive for the unobtrusive assurance of its writer, not least when she appears quite unaware that what she is doing is wholly new.

In discussing this novel, like Ruth, and unlike her other three full-length works – North and South, Sylvia’s Lovers and Wives and Daughters – one must examine, account for, and assess the signs of unsureness, as well as the originality, initiative and success. One must look backwards to the novel as it existed as a tradition and a model before her, as well as forwards to the novelists after her, who developed in their own ways and for their own purposes the new ground she opened up for them and herself, and the new means she created of handling it.

Manchester is not only the setting for Mary Barton, it is its world. Elizabeth Gaskell herself, all her characters, the experiences that shape them and rule their lives, the present world from which they view life, religion, eternity, are within it. It is the life and time from which they view the rest of the universe, and from which we, the readers, view it during our reading. This is its great strength and its main originality. Earlier novels had often taken regional settings; Maria Edgeworth wrote of Ireland, Disraeli and Kingsley had deliberately chosen their areas of the English provinces; but with all these there is the authorial remoteness that comes from writing with the feeling of a metropolitan audience, and from a standpoint that accepts metropolitan standards as a norm, from which those of the novel are departures and regional aberrations.⁵ Almost all of Elizabeth Gaskell’s innovations as a provincial novelist rise from her unconscious acceptance of the world she chooses as a valid norm in itself, from which to understand and interpret the great issues of human life. She ignores social and geographical detachment, recognizing and revealing, not the ‘otherness’ of Manchester compared with London, but of London and elsewhere compared with Manchester; and feeling the present time often or a dozen years ago’ (1838) of the opening of Mary Barton, from which all other times – even the 1848 of its publication – are past or future. She is not, naturally, devoid of artistic or moral detachment, but her judgements rise from and get their worth from her ability to participate, at the same time as she assesses. This stance in relation to her setting and subject is the most obvious gift she bestows on the nineteenth-century novelist-bestowed in the way of most such gifts, so that the beneficiaries are unaware of receiving it. George Eliot, writing her first fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, ten years later, is in no sense an imitator of Elizabeth Gaskell; nor is Trollope in his first Barchester novel The Warden in 1854; Thomas Hardy creating Wessex still later, is even less so; but all three have the way to their own separate, and original, areas of greatness made smooth by her opening of the road. Charlotte Brontë, bringing out Shirley only a year later, was aware of the similarity between her own subject and her friend’s, but the two novels are separated by their different aims: Charlotte’s, despite its Yorkshire West Riding cotton-mill milieu, is, like all her novels, more a progress of the soul of its main character than a view of the world, quite apart from being also a study of the Napoleonic period.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s assumptions about the novel are clear from the beginning, her main one being that its material must be the actual present world of everyday observation. Hence, though in later novels she may move in time (Sylvia’s Lovers is historical) or disguise place (Milton instead of Manchester, or Cranford or Hollingford instead of Knutsford), no conventionalizing to fit a literary mode takes place. Hence, naturally, she presents herself enormous problems. Her method must be one rather of comprehensiveness than selection, of total understanding rather than detachment, allowing judgements to emerge by a multitude of juxtapositions and comparisons, rather than by heightenings, or sharp changes of tone and mood.

Therefore, she is closest among her great precursors to Scott at his best, who can in Old Mortality present with equal fairness the fanatical Balfour of Burley and the aristocratic cavalier Marquis of Claver-house; and range socially, in Heart of Midlothian, from the humble Deans family to the illustrious Duke of Argyll. Elizabeth Gaskell’s range in Mary Barton is less great, because Manchester offers less spread: the factory-owning Carsons are her highest; Alice Wilson, living by dispensing herb-medicines from her one-room damp cellar, and the prostitute Esther, who lives nowhere at all, are her lowest. But Elizabeth Gaskell’s richness and fullness of creation is accordingly much greater. Resembling Scott, however, does not mean literary influence by Scott. It is as hard to detect any definite literary borrowing or learning from him as it is from any other previous novelist. The very signs of insecurity in this first novels are signs of her courage, and reveal her lack of dependence on those before and around her.

The relation between author and reader is one of any novelist’s most powerful assets, and most personal traits, as well as perhaps one of his greatest problems. It is...