Gaskell’s Manchester

Grimble, Simon

Abstract

This short essay argues that in her writings on Manchester, the Victorian novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, retained a position of ambivalence: she was both dependent on the development of industrial Manchester as a new kind of urban space which she could help make her career by addressing while remaining very conflicted about the actual city, a place of poverty, disease, and industrial strife; in later life Gaskell, unlike her husband, William Gaskell, the Unitarian minister and central figure in Manchester public life, appears to have avoided the city as much as possible. The essay plots some of the sources of this ambivalence in wider contemporary discussions about Manchester, showing the conflicted feelings of writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Engels on this place of great wealth and great poverty that seemed to augur the future. In particular, the essay focuses on the question of what kind of urban space Manchester was: was it a “manufacturing town,” fractured along class lines, or was it, at least potentially, a city of equal citizens? In conclusion, the essay shows how Gaskell’s ambivalence about Manchester was realized in her plots: Gaskell’s novels do not end in Manchester but instead in more distant, less fully imagined locations such as London or Canada.

Citation

Grimble, S. (2022). Gaskell’s Manchester. In J. Tambling (Ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies (736-741). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_174-1

• Acceptance Date: Sep 24, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Mar 22, 2022
• Publication Date: Nov 21, 2022
• Deposit Date: Nov 20, 2024
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Pages: 736-741
• Book Title: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies
• ISBN: 9783319625928
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_174-1
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3102139