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

Many early and mid-nineteenth century American visitors to Britain brought with them preconceptions of an Old World characterised by romance and literary allusion, a world of castles, stately houses and picturesque landscapes. Those who came to Manchester, sometimes as passing travellers (many landed in Liverpool and Manchester was often a point in their subsequent itineraries), sometimes as more committed visitors, confronted a very different ‘homeland’, a place where the power of industrialisation not only belied images of a predominantly rural England but also insistently reminded observers of Britain’s technological superiority, The New World visitor, buoyed by republican idealism and egalitarian principles, faced here an arena in which industrial supremacy and ‘progress’ co-existed with human suffering and the loss of spiritual values. American responses to Manchester are, therefore, paradigmatic of the ways in which travellers’ visions of the Old World had to be adjusted, often resulting in unease and uncertainty.

In my paper I should like to look at some of these visitors to Manchester, and see how they responded to Britain’s most technologically advanced city. Many well-known figures came in this period, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and W.D. Howells, some of whom met Elizabeth Gaskell as well as other important local figures. I will concentrate on the writings of Hawthorne, Emerson and Howells, all of whom had to negotiate between their admiration of achievement in terms of material wealth and scientific progress, and their sense of disturbance at the signs of poverty and injustice – features which put a very different gloss on the traditions of a hierarchical society. Examination of their apprehensions of difference, and its impact on their visions of ‘Old England’ will also reveal how their own sense of national identity was challenged, and how they attempted to deal with this.

Shirley Foster is Reader in English and American Literature, University of Sheffield.