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

This paper explores the deterministic nature of the rapidly expanding urban area of Manchester in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction. Moretti’s thesis that ‘each space determines or at least encourages its own kind of story’ or, in other words, ‘what happens depends a lot on where it happens’ underpins the paper, the subject of which is the urban-industrial landscape of Manchester as portrayed in Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855).

Manchester was unfamiliar and alien to Elizabeth Gaskell when she married and arrived to live in Dover Street in 1832. Unfamiliarity with this intensely urban-industrial landscape resulted in its denial as she stressed the rurality of her homes and longed constantly for the peace and solitude of the countryside. Denial was replaced by ambivalence as her familiarity with the environment increased over the years and within its constraints she took control of her life and destiny and felt morally compelled to use her immediate surroundings as the framework for two of her major works of fiction.

The paper focuses upon the urban geography of Manchester in the 1830’s and 1840’s by relating her fictional portrait to models of urban structure in an original and interdisciplinary approach. It is argued that the urban-industrial landscape not only underpins the structure and narrative drive of the fiction but also determines the destiny of the characters. As Marroni stated, ‘topology (space organisation) plays a central role in Mrs Gaskell’s fiction.’