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

Elizabeth Gaskell was not the first to publish works which drew to the attention of a wider public the condition of the lower classes in Manchester. There was a catalogue of writings preceding hers by a century and more. This article will concentrate on four specific texts: A Serious Dissuasive from an intended subscription for continuing the races upon Kersal Moore (1733), attributed to Edward Byrom, and the rejoinder Remarks upon the Serious Dissuasive (1733), attributed to the cleric Thomas Cattel; and the cleric John Clayton’s Friendly Advice to the Poor (1755); and the rejoinder ‘Joseph Stot’s’ A Sequel to the Friendly Advice (1756).

Very few materials remain for the historian to get a good handle on social relations for this period, a crucial one as the time when conditions were ‘put’ in place for the ‘industrial revolution’, and for Manchester to ‘take off’ and become the ‘shock city’ with which Elizabeth Gaskell was fully familiar. These texts are therefore all the more valuable for what they can suggest about social relations and paternal values in Manchester in the first half and middle of the eighteenth century, and how they may offer insights into how the society that Gaskell understood was being shaped.

This paper will consider reasons why the texts were published. It will discuss the context of their appearance, both in terms of subject matter compared with other known materials published in Manchester at the time, and in terms of social conditions and relations as I perceive them. It will also consider their readership and impact.

Manchester Metropolitan University