Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

Writing on Manchester in a series on Great Towns and Their Public Influence in The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1874, A ‘Sexagenarian’, quoted Macaulay on this ‘metropolis...which was regarded as one that was emerging from barbarism, the inhabitants of which still used an uncouth dialect which provoked the derision of their southern countrymen’. In Gaskell’s Mary Barton, published two years after Macaulay’s description, the Lancashire dialect is treated with considerable complexity as an important aspect of working class culture, not simply as a mark of barbarism. In this paper I propose to consider some aspects of the way dialect featured in Manchester publications during the decades from the 1850s to the 1880s. My argument is that dialect became an important literary device in establishing and extolling a regional identity and culture. Indeed Manchester could be described in 1874 as ‘a nest of singing birds’ because of its dialect poets. Yet the local celebration of Lancashire dialect writing was often shot through with anxieties about its barbarism.

Manchester Metropolitan University