Volume 7, Number 11 · December 29, 1966
In Darkest Manchester
By John Gross
Mrs. Gaskell
by Arthur Pollard
Harvard, 268 pp., $5.50
Elizabeth Gaskell was the devoted wife of a Unitarian minister who lived and worked for over thirty years in Manchester—Cottonopolis, the grimy Manchester of wage-slavery, cholera, Chartism, Free Trade. Very little in her early background can have prepared her for such a role. Her father was Keeper of the Treasury Records, while on her mother's side she was related (as who, it increasingly seems, was not?) to the Darwins and Wedgwoods. Born in Chelsea, then a prosperous suburb of Regency London, in 1810, she grew up in a sleepy country town, and boarded for a few terms at an Establishment for Young Ladies near Stratford-on-Avon. A conventional ladylike future beckoned. So when she married Charles Gaskell it was rather like stepping out of the world of Jane Austen straight into the world of Friedrich Engels. The contrast, exceptionally stark even for that age of disruption, was the making of Mrs. Gaskell as a novelist.
Review, 2113 words
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