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

In June 1847 the short-lived and radical Howitt’s Journal published Elizabeth Gaskell’s first piece of fiction, a short story in three parts entitled Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras. Although now largely neglected, this early story introduces several themes that later come to dominate Gaskell’s industrial fiction: the importance of women’s work, both in and outside the home; the peculiar loneliness of a crowded city; the interdependence of public and private spheres; the vexed relationship between political economy and Christian morality; and the psychological influence of urban architecture on its inhabitants. Surprisingly little has been done to explore the last of these. Although Martin Hewitt’s call "to uncover the dynamics of working-class domesticity” has been answered with several studies of urban domestic interiors, his attendant request for closer enquiry to "fill out the divergences allowed by different forms of housing and within different sections of the working class” has met with less success.1 What I am interested in here is the house itself: its exterior, construction materials, room configuration, and its setting within the larger city. I investigate the architectonics of Gaskell’s earliest Manchester fiction—in particular, her representation of working-class courtyards—and read that literary space within the context of the mid-nineteenth-century debate about working-class housing. I also read the built environment itself—regionally specific, u-shaped, back-to-back court housing—through the lens of recent urban and space theory.

Gaskell’s Libbie Marsh both reflects and critiques the intense reformist interest in working-class housing and everyday life that characterized the 1830s and 1840s. Like the housing and sanitation reformers, Gaskell recognizes that architectural structures shape personal development. But whereas Duncan, Engels, Kay, Chadwick, and others saw the built environment as deterministic—bad sanitation leading ineluctably to bad morals—Gaskell regards these spaces as potentially (although not necessarily) transformative: a slight, but significant, shift in meaning. In Libbie Marsh’s case, court housing transforms her from working-class girl to middle-class woman, from a “little sewing body” to a district visitor, from an orphan to a surrogate mother and daughter. This is building as bildung—the urban landscape shaping and defining the urban consciousness. Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras is, in fact, a parable of awakening individual and class consciousness?an awakening that takes place within the architectural space of the working-class courts, a space which is both private and public (or what Henri Lefebvre has called “social space”), both enclosed and open, both central and peripheral to the urban topography and the industrial economy.

University of Virginia