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

The purpose of this paper is to consider urban labour disputes as represented in Gaskell’s two industrial novels; “Manchester” in Mary Barton and “Milton-Northern” in North and South. Both cities, for the main part modeled on the real Manchester of the early and mid-19th century, serve as sites for disputes between “men and masters.” Industrial relations is one of the main themes of the two works.
My paper focuses on materials Gaskell drew from to illustrate strikes and trade unionism. The two fictitious cities are a strange mixture of Gaskell’s first-hand observation and the real Manchester, and various middle-class reactions to “The Other Nation.” Much as she declares, in the Preface of Mary Barton, that she tried to write “truthfully,” she actually depends on other materials than her own observation.

I am interested in analyzing these source materials in three ways. First, some of her materials come from articles in the press and deal with real incidents in industrial city/towns other than Manchester. For example, we see the trade-union members who draw lots in the dark for who will assassinate Harry Carson in Mary Barton. We have a very similar scene described in articles dealing with the murder of John Smith of Glasgow in 1834. Other material comes from other like-minded novels. In this genre, one work was often written in order to protest its predecessor. This is true of Mary Barton and North and South. Most scholars recognize the influence of Shirley by Charlotte Brontë on North and South, but it is not the only novel against which Gaskell protest. Gaskell has left clues in her novels as to predecessors from which she made borrowings. A third idea lies in factory paternalism. Arthur Helps, who advocate what is called factory paternalism, used a metaphor of the flood to explore class conflict -a metaphor which seems to have been borrowed by Gaskell to picture the climactic riot scene in North and South. This paper looks to how these factors operates in the fictional Manchester and Milton-Northern as sites of dispute.