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

By the late nineteenth-century, literary tourism flourished throughout Britain. With the rapid growth of international print culture in the nineteenth century, British women writers were increasingly defined as literary icons, and their homes became popular destinations for a rising number of British and American visitors. Literary pilgrims from around the world invested the British landscape with a literary significance that publishing, transportation, and related travel industries were only too happy to exploit. Popular print media published portable memoirs, guidebooks, periodicals, postcards, and maps to an increasingly literate and mobile reading public.
This presentation locates Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford within the history of literary tourism. Knutsford, Gaskell’s girlhood home and resting place, exemplifies the way literary topographies overwrite the literal geography of British locations and participate in literary myth-making. Almost immediately upon its serialized publication in Dickens’ Household Words in 1851, contemporary readers began to ask, “Is Knutsford the original of Cranford?”

Throughout her works, Gaskell’s narratives are shaped by her intimate knowledge of the rural and urban landscapes of Northern England. These specific geographical contexts prompted readers to conflate her life with her fiction. For example, Mrs. Ellis Chadwick’s 1913 biography, Mrs. Gaskell: Haunts, Homes, and Stories, argues, “This small country town supplied [Gaskell] with most of the material for her writing, and it was in those novels which portray Knutsford scenes and characters that she put her best work, and these are her most popular stories”(22). In other words, Cranford and subsequent para-literary texts such as Chadwick’s feature Knutsford as both a literary construction and a specific location, just as the details of Gaskell life become both metaphorical and actual.
Elizabeth Gaskell played a significant role in producing and promoting Knutsford as a site of literary and cultural significance. She acquired a regional identity through her choice of settings and her engagement with popular print media, particularly travel guides. Gaskell’s writing career began not with the serious-minded social problem novel, Mary Barton, but with journalistic fare steeped in the discourse of rural nostalgia and provincial travel writing. As early as 1840, she contributed to William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places and provided “Notes on Cheshire Customs” for his Rural Life of England. Howitt’s most commercially successful work, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (1846) popularized the bio-geographical criticism proliferating throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a trend Gaskell later extends in The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857). Gaskell’s professional apprenticeship also emerges in later publications like “The Last Generation of England” (1849) and “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions” (1851), both based in Knutsford-like settings that rehearse the preservationist rhetoric underlying Cranford.

While these texts were formative to her literary career, they also impart a heightened sense of her role as a historian and ethnographer of England’s cultural remnants. Her subsequent work bears their discursive imprints, providing vivid travelogues of the geographies and inhabitants of England’s northern villages and cities. Significantly, The Life of Charlotte Bronte legitimated literary tourism as a respectable middle-class activity and prompted thousands of visitors to experience Knutsford, Manchester, Haworth, and other northern locations as monuments to English literary history.

Cranford provides a case study of geographical and textual slippage vital to our understanding of the development of women writers as literary icons. Throughout the essay, I maintain that literary fame is constructed not only through conventional literary sources such as novels and biographies, but also through the “non-literary” ephemera of popular print culture, such as illustrations, guidebooks, walking maps, postcards, dramatic adaptations, periodicals, and literary society publications. I will include some of these fascinating cultural artifacts as evidence of the efforts of British publishing and tourism industries to recreate Knutsford as a memorial to provincial Britain, British literature, and Elizabeth Gaskell herself.