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First published serialized in Household Words 1854–1855
First published in two volumes 1855
This edition published 1995

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-90772-7

Bibliographical Note

Further Reading

Reference

Jeffrey Welch, Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Bibliography 1929–1975, New York and London, Garland, 1977.

Robert L. Selig, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Reference Guide, Boston, Mass., G.K. Hall, 1977.

Letters and Biography

J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (eds.), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Manchester University Press, 1966. The best introduction to Gaskell’s life.

J.A.V. Chapple and J.G. Sharps, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Portrait in Letters, Manchester University Press, 1980. A biographical narrative of an unstructured kind, linking a selection of letters.

Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, London, Faber and Faber, 1993. Authoritative and detailed.

Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography (Oxford paperback, 1976). Less reliable and less detailed than Uglow.

Literary and Historical Background

David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England, London, Croom Helm, 1979.

Sheila M. Smith, The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840’s and 1850’s, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980.

Joseph Kestner, Protest and Reform: The British Social Narrative by Women 1827–1867, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, Chicago University Press, 1985.

Barbara Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1988.

Contemporary Reviews

Angus Easson (ed.), Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge, 1991.

Recent Criticism

W.A. Clark, Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel, London, Methuen, 1975.

Deirdre David, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: North and South, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda, London, Macmillan, 1981.

David Craig, ‘Fiction and the Rising Industrial Classes’, Essays in Criticism 17 (1967), pp.64–74.

Dorothy Collin, ‘The Composition of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 54 (1971), pp.67–93.

John Pikoulis, ‘North and South: Varieties of Love and Power’, Yearbook of English Studies 6 (1976), pp.176–95.

Stephen Gill, ‘Price’s Patent Candles: New Light on North and South’, Review of English Studies 27 (1976), pp.313–21.

Nancy F. Cott, ‘Passionlessness: A Reinterpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology’, Signs 4 (1978), pp.219–36.

Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘North and South: a Permanent State of Change’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 34 (1979), pp. 281–301.

Angus Easson, ‘Mr Hale’s Doubts in North and South’, Review of English Studies 81 (1980), pp.30–40.

Ian Campbell, ‘Mrs Gaskell’s North and South and the Art of the Possible’, Dickens’ Studies Annual 8 (1980), pp.231–50.

Monica C. Fryckstedt, ‘The Early Industrial Novel and its Predecessors’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 63 (1980), pp.11–30.

Carol A. Martin, ‘No Angel in the House: Victorian Mothers and Daughters in George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell’, Midwest Quarterly 2 (1983), pp.297–314.

Carol A. Martin, ‘Gaskell, Darwin and North and South’, Studies in the Novel 15 (1983), pp.91–107.

Carol A. Martin, ‘Gaskell’s Ghosts: Truth in Disguise’, Studies in the Novel 21 (Spring 1988), pp. 27–40.

Chronology

Glossary

Abbreviations

Notes

New readers are advised that the Notes make details of the plot explicit.

Introduction

1. G. Storey, K. Tillotson and A. Easson, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Oxford, vol.7 (1993), p.378.

2. P J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, p.33.

3. G. Melcher, ‘Mrs Gaskell and Dialect’, Studies in English Philology, Linguistics and Literature Presented to Alorik Rynell, ed. M. Ryden and L.A. Björk (Stockholm Studies in English, vol.46, 1978), pp.112–24.

7. C. Gallagher, ‘Hard Times and North and South: the Family and Society in two Industrial Novels’, Arizona Quarterly, vol.36, 1980, pp.70–96.

8. J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, bk.4, chapter 6, section 2.

9. J. Pikoulis, ‘North and South: Varieties of Love and Power’, Yearbook of English Studies, vol.6, 1976, p.184.

11. B.L. Harman, ‘In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Gaskell’s North and South’, Victorian Studies, 1988, vol.31, pp.351–74.

13. G. Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art, London and New York, Routledge, 1988, p.69.

CHAPTER I

1. Wooed and married and a’ An ironic reference to a poem by Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) in which a bride laments that her husband is poor. Edith’s is only very relatively so.

2. Titania Edith’s ‘Queen of the Fairies’ prettiness contrasts with Margaret’s more irregular beauty – an example of the increasing practice in nineteenth-century novels of pairing two women to the advantage of the unconventional looking one. See J. Fahnestock, ‘The Heroine of Irregular Features’, Victorian Studies, 24 (1981), 3, pp.325–40.

3. Corfu There was a garrison at Corfu, a British Protectorate from 1815 to 1864.

4. staid down stairs i.e. in the dining-room to drink – while the women gossiped in the first floor drawing-room.

5. Belgravia A rich and fashionable district, south of Knightsbridge and west of the Houses of Parliament.

6. laden with shawls The first of several instances culminating in her intervention in the strike when Margaret is on public display (see chapter III, Note 4; chapter VIII, Note 5; chapter XXII, Note 3). In an unpublished letter (1852) Gaskell describes such Indian shawls that formed part of a friend’s trousseau: ‘O dear, they were so soft and delicate and went into such beautiful folds’ (Biography, pp.299–300).

7. are all these quite necessary troubles? The first sign of Margaret’s scepticism over ‘feminine’ activities and projects thought proper to middle-class women.

8. I am trying to describe Helstone as it really is Lennox’s remark draws attention to her over-idealized picture but he later (pp.29–30) does the same himself. She painfully revises her view on a return visit there (chapter XLVI) after her parents’ death.

CHAPTER II

1. By the soft green light From ‘The Spells of Home’ which according to Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835) are never broken. The cliché proves untrue.

2. Helstone Taken from the name of Charlotte Brontë’s heroine in Shirley (1849), Caroline Helstone. At first it serves as an idyllic contrast to Milton but later is found by Margaret to have changed for the worse, or perhaps never have been as she perceived it.

3. Figaro As merely adoptive daughter, she is made use of by everyone, like Figaro in Rossini’s opera, The Barber of Seville. The reference is to his complaint in ‘Largo al Factotum’ that everybody wants him at once.

5. shoppy people shoppy – a pejorative term originating in the nineteenth century for those engaged in retail trade. In this first of many discussions of social class she relies on a conventional definition of gentleman depending on birth, property and appropriate (or no) occupation. Milton tests and changes this. See chapter IX, Note 3 and chapter XX, Note 6 for later discussions.

6. Thomson’s Seasons, Hayley’s Cowper, Middleton’s Cicero James Thomson (1700–1748), The Seasons; William Hayley (1745– 1820), The Life of William Cowper; Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), The Life of Cicero. The objection to these works is that they symbolize the absence of access to more recently published reading matter that Margaret had in her London life. Later in Milton-Northern the Hales’ books are favourably compared with the Thorntons’ by John Thornton himself (chapter X).

CHAPTER III

1. Learn to win a lady’s faith From ‘The Lady’s Yes’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61), a monologue contrasting a lightly won ‘yes’ (revoked the next day) with the one hard-won by a true lover. Lennox proposes in what he feels as a weak moment. His proposal serves as a foil to John Thornton’s (chapter XXIV) which she also rejects.

2. parler du soleil To talk of the sun (like the devil) is to cause it to appear. Lennox’s sun soon sets as Margaret’s relief at a change in her life fades when he turns into a lover.

3. Paradiso The ‘dull list of words’ impresses Lennox because it shows that Margaret is really reading Dante, anticipating Thornton’s lessons on the classics with her father. She thinks of herself later as a figure in the Inferno (see chapter XLVI, Note 9).

4. Mr Lennox … introduced the two figures into his sketch The sketch including Margaret, later shown to her father, is the second instance of her as a public spectacle (see chapter I, Note 6).

5. ‘Mine be a cot’ … and that sort of thing Lennox’s etcetera is apt. He quotes from ‘A Wish’ by Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), four stanzas of cliché about an idyllic country life. Lennox does not know the life and would not like it if he did.

6. the story of the eastern king The tale, put to telling use to express the effect of intense feeling on awareness of time, was a familiar folk motif. Also referred to in Hard Times (II ch. I) to indicate Mrs Sparsit’s rapid power of observation. A possible source is Addison, The Spectator, 18 June 1711.

CHAPTER IV

1. Cast me upon some naked shore From ‘Show me O Lord your paths’, in Castara, Third Part by William Habington (1605–64). The poem’s wish for exile rather than acceptance of sin in a familiar place relates to Hale’s dilemma of conscience about keeping his Helstone living when he has religious doubts.

2. Margaret felt guilty and ashamed Guilt at finding herself a sexual being captures the Victorian model of the unmarried girl ‘untainted’ by sexual knowledge.

3. you could not understand … my efforts to quench my smouldering doubts He never fully explains these ‘doubts’. A. Easson in ‘Mr Hale’s Doubt’s’ (Review of English Studies 31 (1980), pp.30–40) argues that they are about accepting the rigid doctrines of the Church of England embodied in the Thirty-Nine Articles – to which those who take Orders must subscribe. Gaskell herself was a Unitarian who did not accept a tripartite God, nor Christ as God, as the Articles required. This is hinted at as Hale’s position. Uglow (1993) suggests that the model for Hale was J.A. Froude, whose doubts caused him to resign his fellowship at Oxford and settle for some time with his wife near Manchester (pp.228–9).

4. the two thousand who were ejected On St Bartholomew’s Day 1662, many Anglican ministers were expelled from their livings because they could not accept everything in the Book of Common Prayer. Easson (1980) argues that similarly Hale finds the compulsion of conscience repugnant.

5. the soliloquy … written by a Mr Oldfield Hale supports his resignation by referring to John Oldfield (?1627–82), ejected from his living for rejecting Anglican doctrines. The soliloquy had been so used in ‘The Apology of Theophilus Lindsey’ (1774) when Lindsey left the Anglican church after a crisis of faith and became a Unitarian minister. This is presumably Gaskell’s source and supports Easson’s interpretation as to what Mr Hale’s ‘doubts’ were. Dickens objected to this part of the novel as ‘a difficult and dangerous subject’ that should be cut (G. Storey, K. Tillotson and A. Easson, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 7, p.356).

6. Sodom apples ‘Dead sea fruit’, something which looks fine but turns to ashes or smoke at the touch, according to Josephus, the Jewish historian (AD 37–?93).

7. Milton-Northern Manchester, where Gaskell lived from 1832. The city was well established as a controversial symbol of northern industrialism. Fictions using it include Harriet Martineau’s A Manchester Strike (1832), Elizabeth Wheeler Stone’s William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842), Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). In 1844 Friedrich Engels based his German version of The Condition of the Working Class in England on his two-year stay there.

8. a hundred and seventy pounds a year The £100 that remains from this after Frederick’s share may be compared with Mr Quiverful in Trollope’s The Warden (1855), scraping a living for a wife and fourteen children on £400 per annum. Also see chapter XLIX, Note 2.

CHAPTER V

1. I ask Thee … From ‘Father I know that all my life’ in Hymns and Meditations by Anna Laetitia Waring (1823–1910). It is a poem on the value of renunciation such as Margaret’s here.

2. and yet no sign of God! Margaret’s brief crisis of faith goes further than that of her father, who has no doubts on that score. This is one of the many instances when she becomes the crucible for every painful and disturbing experience in the narrative.

3. Mr Lennox … haunted her dreams A rare use of the dream to reveal a disturbance of the unconscious mind. The significance of her feeling responsible for Lennox’s death remains unclear. Perhaps the implication is that she knows she could have ‘saved’ him from a materialistic life. Mrs Hale’s dreams (chapter XIV) are by contrast a transparent reliving of traumatic experience.

4. ‘Church and King, and down with the Rump’ The ‘loyal’ toast alluding to the anti-monarchical anti-Anglican rump of the Long Parliament of 1648. Mrs Hale refers to it out of snobbish allegiance to her upper-class past, equating monarchy and church as typifying the group she belongs to.

5. Heston Perhaps a reshaping of the name Helstone; possibly based on the Lancashire seaside towns of Morecambe or Southport.

CHAPTER VI

1. Unwatch’d the garden bough … From Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), when the family leave home and countryside associated with the dead man. Anticipatory reference to the death of Margaret’s parents.

3. Margaret knew it was some poacher Her identification with the outsider and lawbreaker looks forward to her role in Milton.

4. Camilla As well as being renowned for her speed, she is known (from the Aeneid) as a warrior-princess – an apt figure for the future Margaret.

5. London life is too whirling Her London friends, unlike the friends of Job (Book of Job 2:13), would be too embarrassed to sympathize with distress.

CHAPTER VII

1. Mist clogs the sunshine From ‘Consolation’ by Matthew Arnold (1822–88), which contrasts his own desolation with other scenes (even of joy) experienced simultaneously elsewhere – a recurrent idea in Gaskell (cf. chapter III, Note 6).

2. ‘unparliamentary’ smoke The Town Improvement Act of 1847 decreed that every fireplace or furnace should ‘consume the smoke arising from the combustibles used’. The law was often disregarded: Thornton expresses contempt for it (chapter X, Note 8) and Dickens refers to the outrage of Coketown manufacturers when ‘it was hinted that they perhaps need not make quite so much smoke’ (Hard Times, II, ch.1).

3. not quite a gentleman Margaret still used her conventional yardstick (see chapter II, Note 5).

CHAPTER VIII

1. And it’s hame, hame, hame From ‘Hame, Hame, Hame’, Jacobite Relics (printed in 1819) by James Hogg (1770–1835). The poem ends with a hope of return home – another ironic reference to Margaret’s later disillusionment with Helstone (pp.377ff.).

2. most of the manufacturers placed their sons in sucking situations To be suckled by industry and turned into manufacturers rather than ‘gentlemen’.

3. Aristides … the Just An Athenian general so named for his rectitude, patriotism and moderation. Plutarch tells of an illiterate voter, who wished to vote for his exile though he did not know Aristides but was sick of hearing him called ‘the Just’.

4. his courtiers shading their eyes A story recounted by Gaskell in her French Life in Works, ed. A.W. Ward (1906), VII, p.630 (cf. chapter III, Note 2).

5. these outspoken men Margaret is again a public figure here. See chapter I, Note 6.

6. amaranths Everlasting flowers. Bessy’s brand of religion is presented as escapist: the outcome of privation and disease. It relies almost entirely on the Book of Revelation, a fact which Margaret criticizes in chapter XVII.

CHAPTER IX

1. Let China’s earth … From ‘The Groans of the Tankard’ (1825) by Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1824), mildly mock heroic verses on its social downfall. A satirical dig at Mrs Hale’s social pretensions.

2. Pythias to your Damon Damon, a philosopher proverbial for his friendship with Pythias, for whom he was prepared to surrender his life.

4. Matthew Henry’s Bible Commentaries The only obvious reading matter at the Thorntons’ is a non-conformist commentary on the Bible by Matthew Henry (1662–1714). A contrast is made with the Hales’ books noticed by Thornton (chapter X).

CHAPTER X

1. We are the trees whom shaking fastens more From ‘Affliction V’ by George Herbert (1593–1633), in which God gives peace to those who trust Him in their affliction. The seriousness of the poem fits oddly with the Hales’ tea party, even though it is their first attempt at a new social life.

2. all these graceful cares were … of a piece with Margaret For the significance of this interior compared with that of the Thorntons’, see Introduction, pp.ix–x.

3. a peculiar languid beauty … almost feminine For other references to Mr Hale’s femininity, see chapter XXV, Note 4; chapter XXX, Note 6; chapter XLI, Note 4; chapter L, Note 4; and Introduction, pp.x–xi.

4. her mother’s worsted-work Needlework using fine coloured wool. Women’s ‘work’, when unspecified, referred to sewing, always to hand in a middle-class house. It was already referred to in fiction as one among other domestic impositions e.g. Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), chapter VII: ‘she tried to sew – every stitch she put in was an ennui – the occupation was insufferably tedious.’

5. wonderful stories Thornton is unique among fictional manufacturers in his grandiose descriptions (echoed by his mother) of his class as merchant princes and of factories as magnificent. Such speeches are perhaps Gaskell’s response to the criticism that her earlier novel Mary Barton took a one-sided and unfair view of employers. (See Introduction, p.viii.)

6. the old lines The lines quoted are words of defiance spoken in the ‘Ballad of Chevy Chase’ by King Henry on the death of Lord Percy.

7. in the South we have our poor, but there is not that terrible expression … of a sullen sense of injustice She gives a more adverse picture of the southern poor later to Higgins when he thinks of seeking work there (chapter XXXVII).

9. that rude model of Sir Richard Arkwright’s Arkwright (1732–93) patented the first mechanical spinning frame in July 1769.

10. a working-man may raise himself into the … position of a master The familiar excuse of the capitalist that with self-help and self-reliance any man can rise to the top in most spheres. Famously expressed in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859): ‘Rising above the heads of the mass, there were always to be found a series of individuals distinguished beyond others’ (chapter 1).

11. I was even considered a pretty fair classic This interest in learning facilitates Margaret’s ultimate acceptance of him as a gentleman.

CHAPTER XI

1. the land o’ Beulah The name to be given to Jerusalem when it is saved (Isaiah 62:4).

CHAPTER XII

1. Well – I suppose we must From Prose Works of Arthur Helps, author of The Claims of Labour (1844), in which he pressed for the kind of paternalist approach that Margaret Hale imposes on Thornton.

2. ‘killed off’ Mrs Thornton’s idea of social life is to repay hospitality by metaphorically ‘killing off’ her debt by large parties. Her perception is that the Hales belong to a lower social class than herself. The hierarchy to which the Hales see themselves belonging is not recognized in Milton. (See Introduction, pp.ix–x.)

3. ‘Flimsy, useless work’ Mrs Thornton naturally judges Margaret by her ‘work’. (See chapter X, Note 4.) She thinks it decorative, not useful, symptomatic of ‘fine ladyism’.

4. Tales of the Alhambra Again the individual’s reading or lack of it is to be decoded as character revealing (see chapter III, Note 3, chapter IX, Note 4, and chapter X, Note 11). Legends of the Alhambra (1832) by Washington Irving (1783–1859) intersperses tales of medieval Moorish Spain with anecdotes of contemporary life and architectural description.

CHAPTER XIII

1. That doubt and trouble … From ‘The Kingdom of God’ by Richard Chevenix Trench (1807–86). It ends with the assertion that, taking this view, life is a blessing. It may be a naïve statement about Bessy or, given the implicit criticism of her religion as escapism, a more ironic reference.

2. the fluff … poisoned me A rare use in Gaskell of Blue Book detail to make a point. The disease byssinosis was first medically described in 1860.

CHAPTER XIV

1. I was used To sleep at nights … From ‘The Sailor’s Mother’ by Robert Southey (1774–1843). The ‘little fault’ in the original poem is not mutiny like Frederick’s but ‘wiring (snaring) hares’, for which the poacher was deported and so drowned at sea.

2. I dream of him cf. Margaret’s dream and chapter V, Note 3. Biography (pp.53–4) connects this dream with Gaskell’s elder sailor brother John, who was either lost at sea or disappeared after arriving in India in 1828.

3. it is still finer to defy arbitrary power Some critics have related Margaret’s defence of the workers to her feelings about her outcast brother. (See Introduction, pp.xi–xii.)

CHAPTER XV

1. Thought fights with thought … From ‘Epigram 23’ in The Last Fruit off an Old Tree (1853) by Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864). A characteristically belligerent epigraph prefacing Margaret and Thornton’s first discussion of class relations.

2. Classics may do very well Biography (pp.9–10) points out that Gaskell’s father wrote the forceful Remarks on the Very Inferior Utility of Classical Learning (1796).

3. ‘the pride that apes humility’ Possibly from ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’ (1799) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), where the devil views generic examples of sin with satisfaction. This instance illustrating pride is a ‘cottage with a double coach-house’, a reference to the Thorntons’ lavish interior set close to the grime of the mill.

4. Many a missy young lady Missy ‘affected, prim’ – Mrs Thornton discards her first illusion about Margaret.

5. What are they going to strike for? The beginning of the lengthy controversy, central to the narrative, about the significance of a strike. (See Introduction, pp.xivff.) Harriet Martineau in A Manchester Strike (1832) had used it as a parable for the workers’ folly.

6. We see the storm on the horizon and draw in our sails … we don’t explain our reason This refusal on principle to be accountable is offered as part of the description of entrepreneurial spirit. Cf. his attitude to unparliamentary smoke in chapter VII, Note 2 and chapter X, Note 8.

7. I had better not talk to a political economist like you Gaskell, in her Introduction to Mary Barton, disclaimed all knowledge of political economy. A letter of 1851 (Letters, p.148) shows that she was not uninformed but had certainly read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). Her father, William Stevenson, wrote articles on ‘The Political Economist’ in Blackwood’s Magazine 15–17 (1824–5). In popular forms economic ideas had spread to most classes. See chapter XXVIII, where Higgins speaks of an employer thrusting a book on the subject at him.

8. My theory is, that my interests are identical with those of my workpeople Not what Engels, for example, thought. The idea was often used by those who thought paternalism a remedy for industrial unrest. A. Ure, in The Philosophy of Manufacturers (1835), claims that British industry ‘beset by the industry of rival nations … can only maintain its place in the van of improvement by the hearty co-operation among us of head and hand, of employers and employed’ (p.363).

9. the Platonic year A learned reference to the imaginary cycle in which all heavenly bodies were supposed to pass through all possible movements and return to their original positions. An ironic reference to Margaret’s view of class relations as Utopian.

10. the time is not come for the hands to have any independent action during business hours … [but] I do not see that we have any right to impose leading-strings upon them for the rest of their time The contradiction in this argument was familiar. It is countered by J.S. Mill’s assertion that ‘paternal authority’ is connected at least to ‘paternal care’ (Edinburgh Review 80 (1845), p.507).

11. he is a little ignorant of that spirit which suffereth long Charity (1 Cor. 13:4, 5).

12. Rose-water [surgery] ‘Mild, gentle’; Carlyle uses the epithet to describe a feeble revolution.

13. Cromwell Uglow (1993), p.371, suggests an allusion here to Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845).

CHAPTER XVI

1. the spirit of the Elder Brother If this is a reference to Luke 15:11ff. it means ‘in a state of pique at having been ousted from a rightful position’, like the brother of the Prodigal Son.

CHAPTER XVII

1. There are briars … Also from the poem referred to in chapter V, Note 1. It is again used to stress the value of renunciation.

2. ‘Why do you strike?’ Speaking as the South to the North, she continues the debate on the significance of the strike. See chapter XV, Note 5.

3. none on ’em factory age In 1833 the minimum age for children to work in factories was fixed at nine. The Factory Act of 1844 laid down six and a half hours as the maximum working day for children under twelve.

4. to go drink To get drunk. Compare John Barton’s use of opium (Mary Barton, chapter 10). Both are unusually direct references to the few means of blotting out working-class privation. Carlyle speaks of the labourer in times of poverty as given ‘to acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking and gradual ruin’ (Chartism (1839), chapter 2).

5. the star is called Wormwood A burning star that falls from Heaven signalling disaster (Rev. 8:11). Margaret here criticizes Bessy’s focus on the apocalyptic part of the Bible.

6. the verses in the seventh chapter They refer to the white-clad elect (Rev. 7:1–17). Bessy now changes uncharacteristically to optimism.

7. fustian-cutting The job of cutting the surface threads of a coarse cloth into a pile.

CHAPTER XVIII

1. My heart revolts within me … From Schiller’s Wallenstein, adapted into English (1800) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). The speaker (2.9.11–12), Max, is divided between his love for Wallenstein’s daughter and the wish of his father that he fight against Wallenstein. The divided thoughts may refer to Margaret’s feeling about telling her father of Mrs Hale’s illness; to Hale’s refusal to take it in; to Thornton’s ambivalence about Margaret; or to his mother’s wish to please him, struggling with her dislike of the girl.

2. Lyceum A literary institution of a type that grew up in towns in the early nineteenth century, offering a library and lectures.

3. the Americans are getting their yarns so into the general market This was criticized as an example of Gaskell’s ignorance by the Leader reviewer (14 April 1855), who claimed that American competition was ‘altogether a bagatelle’ (CH, pp.335–6). In fact Gaskell seems to be right.

4. the old combination-laws These (1799–1800) forbade workers to combine for purposes such as fixing wages. They were repealed in 1824 but combination was again restricted by an Act of 1825. It generally met with disapproval whether legal or not.

CHAPTER XIX

1. As angels in some brighter dreams From the ‘Ascension Hymn’ – ‘They are all gone into the world of light’ by Henry Vaughan (1621–95). Bessy equates the next world’s glory with what is to her Margaret’s wondrous beauty.

2. I never thought yo’d be dining with Thorntons Like Mrs Thornton (chapter XII, Note 2), Bessy is unaware of the rank to which the Hales themselves feel they belong.

3. Lazarus A reference to the popular tale of the beggar and the rich man, Dives, found in contemporary ballads and in narratives, including Mary Barton (chapter 9). The source is Luke 16:21. See S. Smith, The Other Nation (1980), pp.15ff.

4. th’great battle o’ Armageddon Again Bessy transposes her experience into terms of the Apocalypse (Rev. 16:16). Armageddon is the scene of the Day of Judgement.

5. there must always be a waxing and waning of … prosperity Thornton’s defence of manufacturers as caught up in a necessary ‘struggle for existence’ is common. This latter phrase is the title of the third chapter of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). The idea provoked scorn from a few such as John Stuart Mill, who wrote: ‘I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on … trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels’ (Principles of Political Economy, 4.6.1).

6. isn’t wise … some one to love, and be loved by, just as good as Solomon One of Bessy’s few non-apocalyptic references. It means that, though not as wise as Solomon proverbially was (1 Kings 4:29), the poor show the love expressed in the Song of Solomon.

CHAPTER XX

1. Old and young, boy, let ’em all eat … From The Bloody Brother (?I6I6), possibly by John Fletcher (1579–1625). The implication is that the Thorntons’ ‘feast’ is vulgar and excessive.

3. an Infirmary order A paper giving access for the poor to hospital treatment. It had to be signed by either a Poor Law Guardian or a District Medical Officer.

4. a weariness to the eye For other adverse comments on the Thorntons’ ostentatious vulgarity, see the description in chapter XV.

5. rascally set of paid delegates Thornton’s view that trade union officials are political agitators is usual in industrial novels, e.g. H. Martineau’s A Manchester Strike (1832), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Combination (1844), Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).

6. to decide on another’s gentletnanliness This denial of any wish to define or to be a gentleman means Thornton knows that Margaret and others like her would not regard him as one. Like other rising men he wishes to substitute success and wealth for birth and property as a measure of status. For related discussions see chapter II, Note 5, and chapter IX, Note 3.

7. Robinson Crusoe The castaway in Daniel Defoe’s novel (1719). Significantly, Thornton chooses a hero now widely seen as a figure for the rising bourgeoisie.

8. a saint in Patmos St John the Divine, who was on the Isle of Patmos in the Aegean when he saw the vision of the Apocalypse (Rev. 1:9).

CHAPTER XXI

1. On earth is known to none … From ‘The Exile’ by Ebenezer Elliott, ‘The Corn Law Rhymer’ (1781–1849), a master founder in Sheffield who wrote simple popular poems on social injustice. See also epigraphs to chapters XXII and XLIII.

2. like Leezie Lindsay’s gown The ballad tells of the well-born Leezie’s faithful love for a man below her in rank who turns out to be a great landowner. An anticipatory reference to Margaret and Thornton’s marriage and to her changing perception of his class.

3. he is my first olive Pithily put, but probably not an original comparison. See Emerson (1856): ‘I found the sea life an acquired taste like that for tomatoes and olives.’

4. a water-bed An early reference to a water-tight mattress partly filled with water, used for the comfort of invalids.

CHAPTER XXII

1. But work grew scarce … From ‘The Death Feast’ by Ebenezer Elliott. See chapter XXI, Note 1.

2. has imported hands from Ireland Cheap Irish labour was a frequent resource for manufacturers faced with strikes, e.g. it is used by Robert Moore in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). The Irish were denigrated on all sides, even by Engels (1844): ‘These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England … insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them … shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages?’ (ed. V. Kiernan, The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1987), pp. 124–5).

3. in face of that angry sea of men Margaret’s climactic appearance as a public figure or on stage. See chapter 1, Note 6.

CHAPTER XXIII

1. Which when his mother saw … From The Faerie Queene (4.12.21) by Edmund Spenser (?1552–99). Cymodoce is bewildered by her son Marinell’s decline, which turns out to be caused by his love for the beautiful Florimell. The reference is to Mrs Thornton.

2. ‘stiller than chiselled marble’ From a passage in ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ by Alfred Tennyson (1809–92) which describes Helen of Troy.

CHAPTER XXIV

1. Your beauty was the first … The last lines of sonnet 9 in ‘The Tarantula of Love’ by William Fowler (1560–1612), summarizing Thornton’s state of mind towards Margaret.

2. We all feel the sanctity of our sex as a high privilege when we see danger It was supposed unthinkable for a man to strike a middle-class woman. Consequently such acts have a powerful impact on their rare occurrences in Victorian novels (e.g. Dombey striking Florence in Dombey and Son (1847–8), chapter 47). Violence against working-class women is not similarly regarded (see the abuse of the brickmaker’s wife in Bleak House, chapter 8).

CHAPTER XXV

1. Revenge may have her own From ‘The Island’ by Byron (1788–1824), a poem about the mutiny on HMS Bounty.

2. To parody a line out of Fairfax’s Tasso Gaskell alters an original line from the translation (1600) of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) by Edward Fairfax: ‘Her sweet idea wandred through his thought’ (Godfrey of Bulloigne or Jerusalem Delivered, I.48.6). The beautiful image that haunts the mind of the Christian hero, Tancred, is that of a ‘pagan damsell’ with whom he has fallen in love. Gaskell again tries to capture the ambivalence of Margaret’s feelings about Thornton by equating her with Tancred.

3. New Heavens, and the New Earth Bessy alludes again to Revelation (21:1), the final chapters of which predict a New Jerusalem.

4. I durst not have done it myself Another reference to Hale’s feminine qualities. See chapter X, Note 3.

CHAPTER XXVI

1. I have found that holy place … A reference to the mother’s breast in ‘The Bride’s Farewell’, from ‘The Bride of the Greek Isle’ by Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793–1835).

CHAPTER XXVII

1. For never any thing can be amiss From Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream (5.i.82–3), alluding to Thornton’s kindness to Mrs Hale. The speaker in the play is Theseus, condescending to watch the artisans’ play.

2. the song of the miller Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1962), p.308.

3. Thornton had no general benevolence Gaskell, in practice, found benevolence combined with the ‘want of love for individuals’ hard to take when she met it in Florence Nightingale. However, she convinced herself then that ‘this want … becomes a gift … if one takes it in conjunction with the intense love for the race’ (Letters, p.320).

CHAPTER XXVIII

1. Through cross to crown! … From ‘Via crucis, via lucis’ by Ludwig Gotthard Rosegarten (1758–1818).

2. Ay sooth, we feel too strong in weal … Part of the speech of the dying Onora to her mother and brother in ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary’ (Fourth Part) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61).

5. like Daniel O’Rourke A popular folk hero. The story has been traced to R.H. Cunningham, Amusing Prose Chapbooks (1889, pp. 15off.). Its popular nature helps to associate Margaret and the narrator with the working class.

6. ‘What shall I do to get hold on eternal life?’ A colloquial and satirical use of Matthew 19:16; Mark 10:17; and Luke 18:18.

7. the fourteenth chapter of Job Part of the Burial Service read at the graveside: ‘Man born of woman is of few days/And full of trouble./He cometh forth as a flower and is cut down.’

8. wages find their own level The argument is that interference by legislation or by strikes for high wages cannot prevent the operation of economic laws which determine the prevailing wage level at a particular time.

9. them’s fined who speaks to him In Dickens’s Hard Times (II.14) Stephen Blackpool is ostracized in this way.

10. ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes and th’ children’s teeth are set on edge’ In Ezekiel 18:2 the saying is treated as an unjust proverb but Higgins accepts it as true.

CHAPTER XXIX

1. Some wishes crossed my mind From ‘Notebook 2, Fragment 34’ by Coleridge (1772–1834). Margaret’s faint hopes seem to be focused on Edith and Corfu.

Letters:	The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, Manchester University Press, 1966.
Biography:	Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, London, Faber and Faber, 1993.
CH:	Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Angus Easson, London, Routledge, 1991.

1810	29 September: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson born to William and Elizabeth Stevenson in Chelsea
1811	October: Mother, Elizabeth Stevenson, dies; Elizabeth moves to Knutsford, Cheshire, to live with her mother’s sister Hannah Lumb
1814	William Stevenson marries Catherine Thomson
1821–6	Elizabeth attends Byerley sisters’ boarding school (school near Warwick, but moves to Avonbank, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1824)
1822	Brother, John Stevenson (b. 1799), joins Merchant Navy
1828	John Stevenson disappears on a voyage to India; no definitive information about his fate
1829	March: William Stevenson dies Elizabeth stays with uncle in Park Lane, London and visits relations, the Turners, at Newcastle upon Tyne
1831	Visits Edinburgh with Ann Turner; has bust sculpted by David Dunbar, and her miniature painted by stepmother’s brother, William John Thomson; visits Ann Turner’s sister and brother-in-law, Unitarian minister John Robberds, in Manchester, where she meets Revd William Gaskell (1805–84)
1832	30 August: Elizabeth and William marry at St John’s Parish Church, Knutsford; they honeymoon in North Wales, and move to 14 Dover Street, Manchester
1833	10 July: Gives birth to stillborn daughter
1834	12 September: Gives birth to Marianne
1835	Starts My Diary for Marianne
1837	January: ‘Sketches Among the Poor’, No. I, written with William, in Blackwood’s Magazine
	7 February: Gives birth to Margaret Emily (Meta)
	1 May: Hannah Lumb dies
1840	‘Clopton Hall’ in William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places
1841	July: Gaskells visit Heidelberg
1842	7 October: Gives birth to Florence Elizabeth Family moves to 121 Upper Rumford Road, Manchester
1844	23 October: Gives birth to William
1845	10 August: William (son) dies of scarlet fever at Porthmadog, Wales, during family holiday
1846	3 September: Gives birth to Julia Bradford
1848	October: Mary Barton published anonymously; Elizabeth is paid £100 for the copyright by Chapman and Hall
1849	April—May: Visits London, meets Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle
	June—August: Visits the Lake District, meets William Wordsworth
1850	June. Family moves to 42 (later 84) Plymouth Grove, Manchester
	19 August: Meets Charlotte Brontë in Windermere
1851	June: ‘Disappearances’ in Household Words; visited by Charlotte Brontë
	July: Visits London and the Great Exhibition
	October: Visits Knutsford
	December–May 1853: Cranford in nine instalments in Household Words
1852	December: ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words
1853	January: Ruth published
	April: Charlotte Brontë visits Manchester
	May: Visits Paris
	June: Cranford published
	September: Visits Charlotte Brontë at Haworth
	December: ‘The Squire’s Story’ in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words
1854	January: Visits Paris with Marianne, meets Madame Mohl
	September–January 1855: North and South in Household Words
1855	February–March: Visits Madame Mohl in Paris with Meta
	June: Asked to write a biography of Charlotte Brontë by Patrick Brontë; North and South published
	September: Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales published
1856	1 January: Signs petition to amend the law on married women’s property
	May: Visits Brussels to conduct research on biography of Brontë
	December: ‘The Poor Clare’ in Household Words
1857	February–May: Visits Rome, where she meets Charles Norton
	March: The Life of Charlotte Brontë published, the first book to carry Elizabeth Gaskell’s name on the title-page; it was soon followed by a heavily altered third edition.
1858	January: ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
	September–December: Visits Heidelberg with Meta and Florence, and visits the Mohls in Paris
1859	March: Round the Sofa and Other Tales published
	Summer: Visits Scotland
	October: ‘Lois the Witch’ in All the Year Round
	November: Visits Whitby, which provides the setting for Sylvia’s Lovers
	December: ‘The Crooked Branch’ published in the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round, as ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’
1860	February: ‘Curious, if True’ in Cornhill Magazine
	May: Right at Last and Other Tales published
	July–August: Visits Heidelberg
1861	January: ‘The Grey Woman’ in All the Year Round
1862	Visits Paris, Brittany and Normandy to conduct research for articles on French life
1863	February: Sylvia’s Lovers published; Elizabeth is paid £1,000 by Smith, Elder
	March–August: Visits France and Italy
1864	Cousin Phillis published
	August: Visits Switzerland
	August–January 1866: Wives and Daughters in Cornhill Magazine
1865	March–April: Visits Paris
	June: Buys The Lawns, Holybourne, Hampshire, as a surprise for William
	October: Visits Dieppe; The Grey Woman and Other Tales published
	12 November: Dies at Holybourne
	16 November: Buried at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford Cousin Phillis, and Other Tales published
1866	February: Wives and Daughters: An Every-day Story published (Elizabeth died without quite completing it)

adj.	adjective
neg.	negative
pa.t.	past tense
p.p	past participle
sb.	substantive
vb.	verb
advb.	adverb
pr.p.	present participle
pron.	pronoun
sb.pl.	substantive plural

ax, vb.	to ask
babby, sb.	baby
bate, vb.	to reduce
blench, vb.	to blanch, wince
bolus, sb.	pill (metaph.)
brass, sb.	money
brosses, p.p.	broken
butty, sb.	slice of bread and butter
bug-a-boo, sb.	bogyman
childer, sb.pl.	children
clem, vb.	to starve
cotched, pa.t.	caught
cranching, adj.	crunching
cranky, adj.	ill
craddy, sb.	puzzle, mystery
dang, vb.	to beat, overcome violently
dazed, pa.t.	stupefie, benumbed
deave, vb.	to deafen, bother
deaved, p.p.	deafened
din, vb.	to deafen
doesna, vb.+neg.	does not
dree, vb.	to suffer, endure
dree, adj.	wretched, hateful, cheerless
dunna, vb.imp.+neg.	do not
dunno, vb.+neg.	I do not know
dunnot, vb.+neg.	do not
dwam, sb.	faint, swoon
exoteric, sb.	the uninitiated
farred, p.p	be farred, be damned
fettling, sb.	putting in order
four-pounder, sb.	four pound loaf
gait, sb.	way
gradely, adj.	fine, pleasing, handsome
his’n, pron.	his
hissel’, pron.	himself
hoo, pron.	she
hou’d, vb.	to hold
ill redd-up, adj.	untidy, slovenly
knobstick, sb.	strikebreaker, blackleg
larn, vb.	to teach
liefer, advb.	rather
likely, adj.	capable
lile, adj.	little
lurry, sb.	four-wheeled wagon
main, advb.	very
m’appen, advb.	perhaps
methodie, sb.	Methodist
mithering, pr.p.	bothersome, worrying
moil, vb.	to toil
moped, p.p.	dejected
mun, vb.	must
nesh, adj.	spueamish, oversensitive; feeble
nobbut, advb.	nothing but, only
nout, sb.	nothing
oss, vb.	to offer
oud, adj.	old
ourn, pron.	ours
peach, vb.	to inform
pottered, p.p.	disturbed, confused
purr, vb.	to kick
purring, sb.	kicking
rating, pr.p.	chiding, rebuking
redding up, sb.	tidying up, putting in order
redd-up, vb.	to tidy up, put in order
roughstoning, sb.	scouring with a rubbing stone
rucks, sb.pl.	heaps
seed, pa.t.	saw
slack, adj. in phrase slack of work:	short of work
swound, vb.	to faint
thatens, advb.	in that way
tugged, vb, in phrase tugged at:	tussled with
turn-out, sb.	(1) striker, (2) a strike
turn-out, vb.	to go on strike
wait, vb. In phrase wait him:	wait for him
waur, adj.	worse
welly, advb.	almost
whatten, pron.	what
whist, vb.	to hush
whoam, sb.	home
wunnot, vb.+neg.	will not
yo, pron.	you
yourn, pron.	yours

Contents

THE BEGINNING