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

Elizabeth Gaskell’s life in Manchester (1832-65) coincided almost exactly with the development of the railway system in Great Britain. Furthermore, her continental travel in the 1850s and 1860s came at a time when the European countries were developing systems of their own. In particular, her two visits to Italy (1857, 1863) came at the exact point of the birth of a national system there.

These developments are reflected in her correspondence and in her novels. She was a frequent passenger on the Liverpool-Manchester railway from its inception as a regular passenger service, and this experience is reflected in Mary Barton’s journey from Manchester to Liverpool to save her lover. This is a journey of opportunity for the working-class heroine, who has never previously been away from her home city. At the conclusion of the novel, it must be assumed that she makes the journey again, when she emigrates to her new life in Canada. In North and South, the railway settings feature on several occasions but with different effect. Margaret Hale’s first view of Milton-Northern is from the railway carriage; it is one that emphasises the threat embodied in her new surroundings. Later in the novel, a deserted suburban station is the scene of her fugitive brother’s departure after their mother’s death; here the railway environment is used to heighten the melodrama of the situation. This anticipates the frequent use of the railway settings in sensation novels, e.g., Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret.

References are made to the Italian railway system in Cousin Phillis, where the young railway engineer, Holdsworth, has learned his trade working in Italy, and in A Dark Night’s Work, where Gaskell’s own travel experiences in Italy are replicated.

The paper will conclude with more general reference to a) the use of railway references in sensation fiction, and b) to the wider political implications of the development of the railways in Britain and in Italy.