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

As is well known, in 1854-5 both Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South) and Charles Dickens (Hard Times) wrote about the Preston cotton strike. What is less well known is that so did the Lancashire radical Samuel Bamford. Three episodes of a “Scene in North Lancashire” by Bamford appeared anonymously in Cassells Illustrated Family Paper in early 1854 – before either Gaskell or Dickens put pen to paper. All three authors placed a well-intentioned but abused working-class moderate at the centre of events, but from different perspectives. Gaskell wrote as a sympathetic social neighbour, reaching down into the working class. Bamford wrote as a member of the working class, reaching up to the middle classes.

Bamford, a radical of the Peterloo era, rose to literary prominence in the Manchester of the early 1840s, thanks to his membership of the Sun Inn “Poets’ Corner” and his autobiographical memoirs Passages in the Life of a Radical. This gave him an entry into the Manchester literary scene. He got to know Elizabeth Gaskell as a writer concerned with social issues and working-class culture, and William Gaskell as an exponent and scholar of the Lancashire dialect.

Around these contacts, an intricate social and literary drama unfolded. Elizabeth included Bamford’s poem, naming the author, in a key scene in Mary Barton (1848). Bamford wrote praising her recognition of the true plight of working people. He then went on to write a second volume of autobiography, Early Days (1848-9), which mirrored some of Elizabeth’s fondness for accounts of village life, history, and ghost stories. Bamford was one of those authors whom William admired, and consulted, in his investigation of working-class writing and dialect. Both men were involved in an early project to compile a dictionary of the Lancashire dialect; the dictionary never appeared as such, but Bamford’s published his own Dialect of South Lancashire (1850). There was also a sub-plot involving both writers’ different relationships with Dickens, whom Elizabeth wrote for and Bamford both imitated and resented.

Bamford’s obsession with dialect and Dickens contributed to his leaving Lancashire for London in 1851. There, as a Lancashire outsider himself, he anticipated both Gaskell and Dickens in writing a dialect sketch of the Preston strike in which the central role was taken by an idealised moderate working man – in effect, Bamford himself – whose exhortations achieved a success which had always eluded Bamford. While Gaskell the social explorer sought to make her fictions accord with fact, Bamford the social climber sought to reshape fact according to his fictions. In the end it is hard to distinguish the two.