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

Because of Gaskell's treatment of masters and workers, Mary Barton and North and South have long been considered as the so-called industrial novel. What I wonder is if this reading truly mirrors her meaning. One of the most effective methods to make objective inference about it would be a statistical investigation into such key structural elements as characters, time, and places, since they are principally unchanging once books were published. The statistical analysis reveals an intriguing fact that industrial factors are only partial in both novels. For instance, John Barton's appearance rate (61.2%) is lower than Mary's (88.4%), which implies less focus is placed on his fight for justice than on his daughter's romance. In case of North and South, the protagonist who comes after Margaret (96.4%) in the appearance rate is not John Thornton (55.1%), the mill owner, but her father Richard Hale (70.1%). The outcome spotlights his role as a mediator of dual functions--between Thornton and Higgins, the trade-unionist, and between the master and Margaret. Based on these objective data, I shall inquire whether Gaskell's meanings for these novels are truly to highlight the social conditions of Manchester.

University of Kumamoto, Japan