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

Studies of setting and history in Elizabeth Gaskell’s work have generally concerned themselves chiefly with the novels, especially Mary Barton; North and South; and Sylvia’s Lovers. Yet it can be plausibly argued that Gaskell’s upbringing and residence in Cheshire and Lancashire as well as her knowledge of local traditions and dialect powerfully inform her representation of the landscape of West Yorkshire in the biography. It seems probable as well that the research into the condition of the textile workers undertaken for Mary Barton influenced the way in which Gaskell portrayed the transformation of the West Yorkshire landscape by the industrialization of the textile industry.

In The Life, we can observe the future writer of the historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers using the patterning of the landscape detail to convey how an ancient past shapes the lives of people living in the present. The landscape is presented as a frozen temporal sequence, archaeological strata that testify to the ‘centuries’ brought into ‘strange, close contact’. Frequently in single passages, Gaskell shifts rapidly between historical periods, the recent and more ancient past. The accumulation of detail works to convey the paradox that ‘wild’, ‘remote’ and ‘provincial’ as West Yorkshire is, it nevertheless has been affected by the major historical movements of the Civil War, the Evangelical Awakening, the Evangelical Revival, and the Industrial Revolution.

Believing that the Brontes’ creativity both originates and manifests itself in the concrete physical detail of West Yorkshire, Gaskell constructed the landscape both factually and metaphorically, as a ‘boundless sphere of feeling and intellect’, as Anna Jameson wrote. The moorland landscape metonymically voices the ‘silent existence’ described by Jameson, filling the gaps and ‘silences’ that Gaskell’s biographer, Jenny Uglow, has noticed. At once a formal and structural principle, the tension between infinite space and detail, silence and plenitude shapes the biography into an artistic whole.

California State University
Dominguez Hills
Carson CA