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

The British census, first taken in 1801, played a crucial role in helping British people to visualize their national economy and their national social body during the nineteenth century. The census was the only technology available that could describe the nation as a whole, and as such it was thought to have the power to unite people during a time of social and political conflict. But even as the census promoted social harmony, it also provided evidence of struggle and disunity, particularly in the cities. To observers, one of the most interesting aspects of the nineteenth-century censuses was the evidence they provided of astounding urban growth. Contemporaries were both fascinated and appalled by this urban growth and the urban conditions that went with it. The centrality of the city to Victorians’ understandings of their nation tied the national to the local and helped make the census a matter of interest to the entire reading public.

The many statisticians, doctors and others who were involved in local projects of investigation and improvement, particularly in cities such as Manchester, often had ties to and influence over the civil servants in charge of the census. These people tended to be political liberals with an interest in improving the lot of the poor, and many of them traveled in the same social circle as Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell herself, as well as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and other literary figures of the day, were interested in the census yet at the same time skeptical of its powers. While they agreed with the statisticians and census-takers on the importance of social harmony, they also believed that the census was not as successful as it ought to be in representing either the city or the nation. In different ways, these novelists all believed that in order for those from different walks of life to sympathize with one another, people had to be understood not as members of an aggregate, but as individuals. It was only through novels that individuals could be represented. Through an examination of Manchester’s circle of liberal intellectuals, as well as the views of Gaskell and some of her contemporary novelists on census-taking and social harmony, my paper will examine the relationship between statistical description and literature as it related to the urgent problem of the industrial city.

University of Chicago