Cranford’s mistress drove Dickens to talk of spanking
Thanks to the hit TV drama, a pioneering author of social upheaval is finally getting the recognition she deserves
Elizabeth Gaskell
Nothing much happens in Cranford, the BBC’s lush series that has become one of the most watched costume dramas in recent years. But like the outwardly placid life of its Victorian author, Elizabeth Gaskell, below the tale’s surface swirl dark undercurrents that hint at tragedy, scandal and what might have been.
It is odd to think that Gaskell’s desperate act of escapism – writing stories to forget painful memories of being a virtual orphan who later lost three of her own children – led to her being hailed as a feminist icon, a pioneer of the reality novel and creator of the first working-class heroine.
Stranger still that after years of being overshadowed by Jane Austen and the Brontës, Gaskell’s chronicle of a Cheshire market town in the throes of social change has utterly beguiled television critics who habitually gargle with vitriol. AA Gill confessed in The Sunday Times last weekend that he was “hooked, gaffed, netted and filleted” in the first minute.
The five-part adaptation revolves around a group of women, beautifully and minutely observed by a dazzling cast that includes Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Imelda Staunton and Francesca Annis. These are the “Amazons”, introduced at the outset of the novel, who dominate the town. Their preoccupation with hats, cake and tea is played out against the backdrop of social change and an imminent railway that threaten the patterns of a previous age.
Gaskell’s model for Cranford was Knutsford, where she had spent her early childhood and become fascinated with the lives of “11 widows of respectability, besides spinsters innumerable”. With their card games and strict visiting hours, these matrons were “living hoards of family tradition and old custom”, Gaskell recalled.
Twenty miles away lay Drumble, her pseudonym for Manchester, where she was to launch her literary career with 10 books and dozens of short stories. Her social circle included Florence Nightingale and Charlotte Brontë, who on one occasion hid behind the drawing room curtains as she was too shy to meet Gaskell’s guests. Gaskell wrote a biography of her friend which played a significant role in developing Brontë’s reputation.
Her most crucial ally and collaborator was Charles Dickens, who took the fledgling writer under his wing only to exclaim later to a subeditor: “If I were Mr G, oh heaven how I would beat her.”
As the wife of a Unitarian minister, she was well placed to describe the plight of the poor in such powerful terms that her first book, Mary Barton, caused outrage.
So why have we been so late to wake up to Mrs Gaskell, as she signed herself? The question perplexes John Carey, the Sunday Times literary critic. “There’s no 19th-century novelist you can think of with such real knowledge of wealth, the industrial north and the poor. She was more experienced in the things we consider important than George Eliot, let alone Dickens, who couldn’t write at all about women, really.”
The Gaskell Society is currently recording an “absolutely incredible” number of hits on its web page, but the delight of Joan Leach, its secretary, is tempered by the fact that the BBC decided not to name the series The Cranford Chronicles. “It would have alerted people to the fact that Cranford has been interwoven with two other novels. Cranford only started as a short story. Dickens published it in his literary magazine Household Words and liked it so much he kept saying, ‘Let’s have a bit more of that’. The episodes were gathered together in a book.”
Two years before the first episode appeared in 1851, Gaskell had written a prototype essay for an American magazine. “She said she wished to put on record some of the scenes of everyday life that were rapidly passing away,” Leach said. “She wrote about ladies being beaten up by thugs on their way home from card parties. It’s a side of Cranford she edited out.”
Jenny Uglow, whose biography is credited with bringing the author back into fashion, said that different generations have seized on particular themes: “In the 1960s and 1970s, people were reading Mary Barton as a social protest novel. Her novel Ruth featured the first working-class heroine – a young seamstress who had an illegitimate child at 15. As the women’s movement came to the fore, people recognised these extraordinary novels about ordinary life.”
She was born in 1810 in Chelsea. Her father, William Stevenson, was an austere and bookish man who worked for the Treasury in Whitehall. She was the family’s eighth child in 13 years, six of whom died. A year after Gaskell was born, her mother Elizabeth was also dead.
Rejected by her unloving father, who remarried, she was farmed out to her mother’s kindly sister, Aunt Hannah Lumb – “my more than mother” – in Knutsford.
This experience made her “unusually interested and sensitive to extended families”, said Uglow. A friend described her aunt’s parties where “we were very unconstrained and merry”.
She made notes and kept journals recording the local hierarchy, from the landed gentry, genteel widows and “respectable poor” down to the dogs that wore house shoes, the cat that swallowed lace and the cow in flannel drawers. It was a mother lode from which she drew for her gentle satire and often hilarious narrative.
“Shall I tell you a Cranfordism?” she wrote to the critic John Forster in 1854. “An old lady, a Mrs Frances Wright, said to one of my cousins, ‘I have never been able to spell since I lost my teeth’.”
The teenage Gaskell received a good education at a boarding school in Warwickshire, where her passion for collecting stories was revealed in letters imploring family and friends to send “more details, more details” of spicy gossip. When Gaskell was 18 tragedy struck once more: her beloved brother John disappeared at sea and was never heard of again, although he was to return in her fiction as the lost brother or sailor who unexpectedly returned.
Although she hankered for London balls and romance, she was to marry a bookish classicist like her father. William Gaskell was attractive, tall and five years older than her. As the junior minister of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester, his parish included the poorest slums, where his wife began to develop a fierce social conscience.
After losing two children at birth, Gaskell turned to writing ghost stories full of tragedy. Further traumatised by the loss of her 10-month-old son William to scarlet fever, she was persuaded to attempt a bigger writing project. Mary Barton, with its harsh depiction of mill owners, scandalised parishioners when they discovered she was the author, but the book was a sensation and she was lionised in London.
Dickens invited her to dinner and, recognising her storytelling gift, called her “my dear Scheherazade”, because “I am sure your powers of narrative can never be exhausted in a single night, but must be good for at least a thousand nights and one.” However, they furiously disagreed over the extent of his editing.
On the profits of her writing, the Gaskells moved to a larger house in Manchester and took their holidays on the Continent. Bored with Manchester and its “large, vulgar and overdressed parties”, the successful author gravitated increasingly to London until the couple were leading virtually separate lives.
They remained devoted despite Gaskell’s flirtation with Charles Norton, a 30-year-old American she encountered on a visit to Rome. Their friendship endured although nothing came of it. “It was in those charming Roman days that my life culminated,” she reminisced. “I shall never be so happy again.”
The pressure of being a working mother began to tell. “When you consider that she brought up four daughters and lived a very busy life, often writing on the kitchen table in a great hurry, she’s a good multi-tasking model for the current age,” said Leach.
Headaches and fainting fits left her “so tired of spinning my brain”, she wrote. Hatching a secret plan to persuade her reluctant husband to move south with her, she bought a large home in Hampshire. While refurnishing the new home, she was also rushing to finish the last episode of her book Wives and Daughters, which was due to appear in Cornhill magazine.
On Sunday, November 12, 1865, she walked to church with her daughters, impressing the vicar with her healthy appearance. Later that afternoon she was relating a conversation with a judge when she stopped in mid-sentence, gasped and died of a heart attack. She was 55. By then, the railway had reached Knutsford and another page of history had turned.