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


Alison Twells
Mary Barton (1848) and the challenge to the missionary philanthropic paradigm in the 1830s and 1840s

 Writing of the condition of the Manchester poor in the 1840s, Elizabeth Gaskell suggested in Mary Barton that ‘Even philanthropists who had studied the subject, were forced to own themselves perplexed in the endeavour to ascertain the real causes of the misery’ (p. 78). Gaskell points to a crisis in the philanthropic paradigm in this decade. The missionary philanthropic approach, established at the turn of the nineteenth century, had located the impetus for social reform in individual moral change. Drawing on Enlightenment and evangelical beliefs about the capacity of all peoples for change and for receiving God’s grace, this model had successfully informed a range of social organisations, beginning with the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (1796), through the Lancasterian and National Schools (1810s), and to the new Town and Domestic Missions of the 1830s. By the 1830s, however, missionary philanthropy was being dislodged from its dominant position by a range of competing models, which variously emphasised the importance of environmental conditions, the detrimental nature of the practices of employers and, beginning in relation to the immigrant Irish, developed a new focus on biology. James Kay-Shuttleworth and the work of the medical men, the Statistical Societies and the missionaries and visitors of (rather than subscribers to) the new Unitarian Missions of the 1830s and 1840s all contributed to this process.

This paper explores Elizabeth Gaskell’s intervention in Mary Barton in the debates concerning the missionary philanthropic paradigm. Gaskell was both a supporter of the Manchester Domestic Mission and a visitor to the poor, and had read the reflective and eloquent reports of John Ashworth, George Buckland and John Layhe, domestic missionaries between 1833 and 1856. These men, as John Seed has pointed out, were increasingly radicalised through their work and, by the 1840s, were challenging the conceptions of the poor held by the subscribers themselves, many of whom were members of Manchester’s manufacturing elite (and also of William Gaskell’s Cross Street congregation). Focusing on the interplay in Mary Barton between models of moral reform, environmental change and biological fixity, this paper explores Elizabeth Gaskell’s contribution to that challenge.

Sheffield Hallam University