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Elizabeth Gaskell was born in London but she grew up in Cheshire. She married the Rev. William Gaskell in 1832 when she was 22. William Gaskell was the Minister for Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester. He was also a tutor to Rupert Potter, the father of the internationally acclaimed children's writer Beatrix Potter. William Gaskell became a lifelong friend of the Potter family and through him Elizabeth met the handsome and charismatic Edmund Potter, Rupert's father. She began writing in the late 1840s and her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. The Manchester suburb of Green Heys, featured in the beginning of the book, actually existed, and it was here that Edmund Potter first lived after his marriage and where his eldest son was born. The village 'about two miles distant' along the footpath from Green Heys was Moss Side, and the farm (next to the pond) with the garden, which was described in detail, was Pepperhill Farm in Moss Side. Elizabeth Gaskell's novels brought her friendship with Charles Dickens, who also chronicled the dreadful hardships of the workers in Victorian England, and Charlotte Bronte. It was however her friendship with Edmund Potter which was responsible for one of her most valuable contributions to literature. He is the mill owner on whom she closely based the character of the hero, John Thornton, in her most successful novel, 'North and South' published in 1855. Edmund Potter owned Dinting Printworks, the largest calico printing business in the world which was situated in Glossop, a small northern mill town in the Dark Peak district of Derbyshire, the 'Darkshire' of 'North and South'. John Thornton represents the 'rough, hardworking "mercantile" North' while the heroine, Margaret Hale (with more than a smattering of Elizabeth Gaskell in her character, especially in the way that she learns to champion the suffering workers), represents the 'cultured, genteel "unmercantile" South'. There is, never-the-less, a smouldering sensuality between the two of them throughout the book, which paints a bleak picture of the North, as both of them struggle to understand the other. Their marriage at the end of the novel is a symbolic bridging of what is known as the 'north-south divide'. North and South (first published 1855; Penguin Classics 1995) '.. for several miles before they reached Milton-Northern, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon [where] it lay all the darker for the contrast with the pale grey-blue of the wintry sky nearer the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black smoke here every van, every wagon and truck, bore cotton, either in the raw shape in bags, or the woven shape in bales of calico.' '...it's no use...her cannot stand th' sight o' the little ones clemming [starving]...five shillings a week may do well enough for thee, wi' but two mouths to fill...but it's clemming to us...if her dies...afore we've getten th' five per cent, I'll fling th' money back i' th' master's face...there's our lile [little] Jack lying a-bed, too weak to cry, but just every now and then sobbing up his heart for want o' food...' The strike in Milton-Northern is based on the Preston Lockout of 1853-1854 when workers were locked out of the mills after striking over the millowners' refusal to restore wage levels following cuts during the 1840s. Most millowners held the notion that if the working class were poor it was due to some deficiency of character, not to poor wages or working conditions. Robert Southey (1774-1843) wrote scathingly in his letters of 1808 '...let us leave to England the boast of supplying all Europe with her wares; let us leave these lords of the sea the distinction of which they are so tenacious, that of being the white slaves of the rest of the world, and doing for it all its dirty work...' Mary Barton (first published 1848; Penguin Classics 1996) is a powerful novel set in the 19th century millscapes of Manchester, and based on actual places, which exposes the cruelty of the factory system and the terrible price paid by the workers for cotton to become king. When it was first published it attracted much controversy in society and hostility from the mill owners. Mary Barton (Ch VI) Manchester Song How little can the rich man know Of what the poor man feels, When want, like some dark demon foe, Nearer and nearer steals! He never tramp'd the weary ground A stroke of work to gain, And sicken'd at the dreaded sound Which tells he seeks in vain. Foot-sore, heart sore, he never came Back through the winter's wind, To a dank cellar, there no flame, No light, no food, to find. He never saw his darlings lie Shivering, the flags their bed; He never heard that maddening cry. 'Daddy, a bit of bread!' The story of Mary Barton includes Carson's Factory, a cotton mill in the Ancoats area of Manchester, which burns down so all the hands have no work. Times are hard and people are starving. '...there was no breakfast...their lounge was taken in bed, to try and keep warmth in them...many a penny that would have gone little way enough in oatmeal or potatoes, brought opium to still the little ones, and make them forget their uneasiness in heavy troubled sleep...' One of the former Carson workers, Ben Davenport, has a fever and his family are starving. He and his family live in a cellar in Berry Street off Store Street in Manchester. 'it was very dark inside...the window-panes, many of them, were broken and stuffed with rags...the smell was so foetid as to almost knock the two men down...they began to penetrate the thick darkness of the place, and to see three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet brick floor through which the stagnant, filthy moisture of the street oozed up; the fireplace was empty and black; the wife sat on her husband's lair and cried in the dank loneliness...' Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks The Manchester Man (first published in 1876; E.J.Morten 1991) A novel of an orphan boy rescued from the flooded River Irk in 1799. Jabez Clegg becomes a blue-coat boy scholar at Chethams College in Manchester before being apprenticed in a cotton mill. The book chronicles the rise of the factory system as Jabez works his way up through the mill to become a wealthy man of influence and a member of the Manchester Royal Cotton Exchange. He falls in love with Augusta Ashton, a local mill owner's daughter and he is wounded at Peterloo, saving Augusta's life and protecting her uncle... Mrs Bank's story is also full of historical and social details which form a vivid backdrop to this unique period of history. '...Mr Ashton was what is known as a small-ware manufacturer...that is he was a weaver of tapes, inkles, filletings, silk, cotton, and worsted laces; carpet bindings, brace-webs, and fringes...he manufactured braces and umbrellas for which his brother-in-law supplied the ginghams...the bulk of his work-people - winders, warpers, brace, fringe, and umbrella-makers - carried away materials to their own homes, and brought back their work in a finished state...' '... a cordon of military and yeomanry had been drawn round St Peter's Field, like a horde of wolves round a flock of sheep...soldiery hardened in the battlefield, yeomanry fired with drink were let loose like barbarians on a closely wedged mass of unarmed people and one of the most atrocious massacres in history was the result [Peterloo]...they were sabred, stabbed, shot, pressed down, trampled...men and maidens, mothers and babes...butchered by their own countrymen for no crime...' '...Whitsuntide is the great annual festival of Manchester...the race week [held on Kersal Moor]...when the Sunday-school children dress in their best to walk in procession and have excursional treats into the country...when the hawthorn scented the air, and cherry-blossom snowed...Monday was the day set aside for the children to assemble at the Collegiate Church [cathedral], sing anthems, and...file in long procession, six abreast,...until they reached the Green... the girls in their white caps and frocks...the boys forming a dark cordon around them...' Louisa (Eliza) Kay Louisa Kay was the great aunt of children's writer Beatrix Potter. She was born and grew up in Lancashire but moved to Manchester after her marriage to Sidney Potter. Her book, Lancashire Memories (published by Macmillan in 1879) is a delightfully nostalgic memoir of Lancashire rural life in the early 1800s before the dark Satanic mills altered the Lancashire landscape forever. She talks of her childhood, spent with a horde of cousins, playing games under the willows by a stream or in the orchard of cherry and apple trees; and of her excitement and childish pleasure in buying currant cakes and peppermint drops from the basket of a young travelling woman who is wearing curl papers and a coral necklace. Friedrich Engels In1844 Friedrich Engels met Karl Marx in Paris. The two men shared common ideals and spent much time working together. In July1845 Karl Marx stayed with Engels in Manchester for six weeks. They spent part of this time working in Chetham's Library in Manchester, researching material for their book 'Das Kapital'. Engels spent a good deal of time in England during the 1840s and 1850s. He had come to England to manage his father's cotton mill in Manchester. Shocked by the appalling poverty in the city he walked round the 'millscape' suburbs (Ancoats, Ardwick, Beswick, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Hulme, Openshaw etc) of Manchester, noting what he saw. Condition of the Working Class in England (published in 1845) 'South Lancashire with its central city Manchester... the most densely populated strip of country in England in Lancashire, and especially in Manchester, English manufacture finds at once its starting-point and its centre the Manchester Exchange is the thermometer for all the fluctuations of trade the modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection in Manchester in the cotton industry of South Lancashire, the application of the forces of Nature, the superseding of hand-labour by machinery (especially by the power-loom and the self-acting mule), and the division of labour, are seen at the highest point the degradation to which the application of steam-power, machinery and the division of labour reduce the working-man, and the attempts to rise above this abasement, must likewise be carried to the highest point.' 'Bolton, Preston, Wigan, Bury, Rochdale, Middleton, Heywood, Oldham, Ashton, Stalybridge, Stockport, etc., nearly all towns of thirty, fifty, seventy to ninety thousand inhabitants, are almost wholly working-people's districts, interspersed only with factories, a few thoroughfares lined with shops, and a few lanes along which the gardens and houses of the manufacturers are scattered like villas the towns themselves are badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes, and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy from the originally bright red brick, turned black with time, which is here the universal building material cellar dwellings are general here; wherever it is in any way possible, these subterranean dens are constructed, and a very considerable portion of the population dwells in them.' 'Manchester proper lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. On the right bank of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river, lies Salford, and farther westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell lie Upper and Lower Broughton; northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther east Chorlton on Medlock; still farther, pretty well to the east of Manchester, Ardwick. Manchester contains, at its heart, a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad, and consisting almost wholly of offices and warehouses. Nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night.' Engels visited other manufacturing areas of Britain as well and came to the conclusion that working people in cities all over the country suffered the same deprivations and degradations. '.....the houses are often so close together, that persons may step from the window of one house to that of the house opposite -- so high, piled story after story, that the light can scarcely penetrate to the court beneath. In this part of the town there are neither sewers nor any private conveniences whatever belonging to the dwellings; and hence the excrementitious and other refuse of at least 50,000 persons is, during the night, thrown into the gutters, causing (in spite of the scavengers' daily labours) an amount of solid filth and foetid exhalation disgusting to both sight and smell, as well as exceedingly prejudicial to health. Can it be wondered that, in such localities, health, morals, and common decency should be at once neglected? No; all who know the private condition of the inhabitants will bear testimony to the immense amount of their disease, misery, and demoralisation. Society in these quarters has sunk to a state indescribably vile and wretched.... The dwellings of the poorer classes are generally very filthy, apparently never subjected to any cleaning process whatever, consisting, in most cases, of a single room, ill-ventilated and yet cold, owing to broken, ill-fitting windows, sometimes damp and partially underground, and always scantily furnished and altogether comfortless, heaps of straw often serving for beds, in which a whole family -- male and female, young and old, are huddled together in revolting confusion. The supplies of water are obtained only from the public pumps, and the trouble of procuring it of course favours the accumulation of all kinds of abominations." GG View the Literature collection to find out more > |
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