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Elizabeth Gaskell

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A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (September 29 1810 – November 12 1865) was a British fiction-writer and biographer who witnessed and recorded the transformation of northern England by the Industrial Revolution. She was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson; her married name is often given in the form Mrs. Gaskell.

Quotes

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  • Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.
  • Were all men equal to-night, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow.
    • Mary Barton, ch. 37.
  • A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease.
  • That kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations.

Wives and Daughters

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  • It is odd enough to see how the entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women calms down the little discordances and the disturbance of mood.
  • Thinking more of others’ happiness than of her own was very fine; but did it not mean giving up her very individuality, quenching all the warm love, the true desires, that made her herself? Yet in this deadness lay her only comfort; so it seemed.
  • It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt.
  • I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent.
  • People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

Cranford (1851–3)

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  • Economy was always "elegant", and money-spending always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied.
    • Ch. 1
  • A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.
    • Ch. 11
  • I'll not listen to reason…Reason always means what someone else has got to say.
    • Ch. 14

Quotes about Elizabeth Gaskell

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  • I finished reading Mary Barton last night, my feelings having become so interested in the narrative that I could not lay the book down until I had read to the end.
    You have drawn a fearfully true picture: a mournfully beautiful one also have you placed on the tables of the drawing rooms of the great, and good it must there effect; good for themselves, and good also I hope for the poor of every occupation.
    You are a genius, of no ordinary rank; I care not what the critics say, nor will I flatter you, if I know it, but truth, such as it appears to me will I dare to express, with whomsoever I may differ about it. It seems to me that you have begun a great work and I do hope you will not be discouraged from going on with it. You have opened and adventured into a noble apartment of a fine old dwelling house and on one of the English oaken pannels [sic] you have worked a picture from which the eyes cannot be averted nor the hearts best feelings withdrawn. A sorrowfully beautiful production it is, few being able to contemplate it with tearless eyes—I could not, I know.
    • Samuel Bamford to Elizabeth Gaskell (9 March 1849), quoted in Ross D. Waller, 'Letters Addressed to Mrs. Gaskell by Celebrated Contemporaries', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January 1935), pp. 106-107
  • Some errors may certainly be detected in the details of your work [Mary Barton], but the wonder is that they are so few in number and so trifling in effect. The dialect I think might, have been given better, and some few incidents set forth with greater effect, but in describing the dwellings of the poor, their manners, their kindliness to each other, their feelings towards their superiors in wealth and station their faults, their literary tastes, and their scientific pursuits, as old Job Legh for example, you have been very faithful; of John Bartons, I have known hundreds, his very self in all things except his fatal crime, whilst of his daughter Mary, who has ever seen a group of our Lancashire factory girls or dress makers either, and could not have counted Mary? Nor is Jem Wilson, and I [am] proud to say it, a solitary character in the young fellows of our working population, noble as he is, but my heart fills as I write, and I cannot go on.
    • Samuel Bamford to Elizabeth Gaskell (9 March 1849), quoted in Ross D. Waller, 'Letters Addressed to Mrs. Gaskell by Celebrated Contemporaries', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January 1935), p. 107
  • She is a very kind cheery woman in her own house; but there is an atmosphere of moral dulness about her, as about all Socinian women.
    • Jane Welsh Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle (12 September 1851), quoted in New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Vol. II, ed. Alexander Carlyle (1903), p. 29
  • I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages... I should set a value on your help which your modesty can hardly imagine; and I am perfectly sure that the least result of your reflection or observation in respect of the life around you, would attract attention and do good.
    • Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Gaskell (31 January 1850), quoted in The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. I. 1833 to 1856 (1880), pp. 216-217
  • Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story [North and South]; not because it is the end of a task to which you had conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me that you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that MUST now give you pleasure.
    • Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Gaskell (27 January 1855), quoted in The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. I. 1833 to 1856 (1880), p. 381
  • In truth there is no bodily or mental evil to which flesh is heir which this author cannot describe most feelingly—The evils consequent upon ever manufacturing or over population or both conjoined and acting as cause and effect—the misery and the hateful passions engendered by the love of gain and the accumulation of riches, and the selfishness and want of thought and want of feeling in master manufacturers are most admirably described and the consequences produced on the inferior class of employed or unemployed workmen are most ably shewn in action.
    • Maria Edgeworth to Mary Holland after reading Mary Barton (27 December 1848), quoted in Ross D. Waller, 'Letters Addressed to Mrs. Gaskell by Celebrated Contemporaries', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January 1935), p. 108
  • [P]eople on Turkey carpets, with their three meat meals a-day, are wondering, forsooth, why working men turn Chartists and Communists.
    Do they want to know why? Then let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to know why poor men, kind and sympathising as women to each other, learn to hate law and order, Queen, Lords and Commons, country-party, and corn-law leaguer, all alike—to hate the rich, in short? Then let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to know what can madden brave, honest, industrious North-country hearts, into self-imposed suicidal strikes, into conspiracy, vitriol-throwing, and midnight murder? Then let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to know what drives men to gin and opium, that they may drink and forget their sorrow, though it be in madness? Let them read Mary Barton. Do they want to get a detailed insight into the whole ‘science of starving,’—‘clemming,’ as the poor Manchester men call it? Why people ‘clem,’ and how much they can ‘clem’ on; what people look like while they are ‘clemming’ to death, and what they look like after they are ‘clemmed’ to death, and in what sort of places they lie while they are ‘clemming;’ and who looks after them, and who—oh, shame unspeakable!—do not look after them while they are ‘clemming;’ and what they feel while they are ‘clemming,’ and what they feel while they see their wives and their little ones ‘clemming’ to death round them; and what they feel, and must feel, unless they are more or less than men, after all are ‘clemmed’ and gone, and buried safe out of sight, never to hunger, and wail, and pine, and pray for death any more forever? Let them read Mary Barton. Lastly, if they want to know why men learn to hate the Church and the Gospel, why they turn sceptics, Atheists, blasphemers, and cry out in the blackness of despair and doubt, ‘Let us curse God and die,’ let them read Mary Barton.
  • Madame George Sand said, some months ago, in conversation with an English friend, "Mrs. Gaskell has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish—she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and which every girl will be the better for reading."
    • 'Mrs. Gaskell', The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review, New Series (February 1866), pp. 279-280
  • In private life Mrs. Gaskell was distinguished for a large-hearted but unobtrusive benevolence, which secured her sympathy for any good cause, and led her to devote much time and strength to personal and helpful intercourse with her poorer neighbours. It was doubtless in this manner that she acquired the intimate acquaintance with the life of the lower, middle, and working classes, which gave much of their peculiar interest to her writings. Her conversational powers were very remarkable, and her society was much sought in some of the highest and most cultivated circles of London and Paris. Few persons could leave behind them a larger number of attached friends.
    • 'Mrs. Gaskell', The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review, New Series (February 1866), p. 280
  • Mrs. Gaskell...may be claimed as belonging to this town, during her infancy and early life up to the time of her marriage. There is one work of hers, Cranford, which in my judgment, while depicting life in almost any country town, is especially descriptive of some of the past and present social characteristics of Knutsford. I know that the work was not intended to delineate this place chiefly or specially, but a little incident within my own experience will show the accuracy of the pictures as applied to our town. A woman of advanced age, who was confined to her house through illness, about three years ago, asked me to lend her an amusing or cheerful book. I lent her Cranford, without telling her to what it was supposed to relate; she read the tale of Life in a Country Town; and when I called again, she was full of eagerness to say:—"Why, Sir! that Cranford is all about Knutsford; my old mistress, Miss Harker, is mentioned in it; and our poor cow, she did go to the field in a large flannel waistcoat, because she had burned herself in a lime pit." For myself I must say that I consider Cranford to be full of good-natured humour and kindliness of spirit.
    • Henry Green, Knutsford, Its Traditions and History: With Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Notices of the Neighbourhood (1859), p. 114
  • Men and women could always claim her sympathy; but her gentle heart went out to the underfed, overworked girls. Them she received at her home, always ready to listen to their troubles, advise, or teach the rudiments of education to such as could be persuaded to devote the time necessary for the acquisition of such elementary knowledge. To the end of her life she was always ready to assist, and when the great cotton famine of 1862 caused such endless misery, it was she who thought of the plan, afterwards publicly adopted, of sewing-schools to give relief and employment to the women mill-hands.
  • In Manchester, of course, it [Mary Barton] was the topic of the hour, and practically all the readers in that city were divided into two camps: those who thought the book realistic, and those who regarded it as unfairly exaggerated. The employers of labour complained of the way in which they were portrayed in its pages; and it cannot be denied that they had a grievance, for the sympathies of the authoress were so obviously with the workmen. She looked at the social problem entirely from the point of view of the poor; and, while she did not omit to indicate the faults of the lower class, she could not bring herself to depict the merits of the other. It was heart against head with her, and at this time, if she saw life largely, she did not yet see it whole. The employers seemed well-to-do and happy, and she did not endeavour to penetrate beneath the surface. The employés were poor, discontented, uncertain of work, poorly paid; they had miserable lives and terrible dwellings. What wonder she wrote with bitterness? What wonder that the woman who accompanied some real Barton and Wilson to the "home" of the miserable Davenports lost, temporarily, the sense of proportion?
  • If in Mary Barton the bias is in favour of the working classes, it must be conceded that in North and South (published seven years later) the other side of the picture is shown. Mrs. Gaskell was still as full of sympathy with the labourer, but experience had taught her much. Still puzzled by seeing "two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own," she realised that the manufacturers, as a class, were not mere bloated capitalists, but level-headed, hard-working men, fighting against heavy odds for their livelihood. Also, she saw more clearly that the misery of the labourers was sometimes brought about by improvidence, and that much unhappiness was caused by the tyranny of the trades-unions of that day.
  • All the other novels were written with the consciousness of power, and it is easy to see that the authoress had no misgivings. They will all live long, but Cranford will never be allowed to die. Admirable as are all the rest, Cranford stands out unique, individual, not only as the masterpiece of the writer, but as an acknowledged masterpiece of English literature.
  • You have contributed to our literature one of the best of Biographies, and have proved the membership of your friend to the divine family, of which such as Burns, Chatterton, and Keats are representatives.
    • Richard Monckton Milnes to Elizabeth Gaskell on The Life of Charlotte Brontë (16 September [1857]), quoted in Ross D. Waller, 'Letters Addressed to Mrs. Gaskell by Celebrated Contemporaries', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library Manchester, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January 1935), p. 157
  • I like Mrs. Gaskell. Why do we always call her Mrs? Elizabeth. She wrote Mary Barton. I think people are very familiar with that book. But North and South is really a very fine piece of work. A lot of North and South has that whole awful industrial growth in it, and she does naturally a lot better by her ladies than Dickens does, so it's really worth reading for that. There's a funny book called Cranford that has a lot of short things in it, but one of them is this scene where everybody is rushing down to get the paper which the next serial of either Hard Times or Bleak House is in. I felt like she must have felt a little annoyed about all that. But I like her an awful lot, and if you haven't read North and South, do.
  • I have just been reading Cranford out to my mother. She has read it about five times; but, the first time I tried, I flew into a passion at Captain Brown's being killed and wouldn’t go any further—but this time my mother coaxed me past it, and then I enjoyed it mightily. I do not know when I have read a more finished little piece of study of human nature (a very great and good thing when it is not spoiled). Nor was I ever more sorry to come to a book's end.
    • John Ruskin to Elizabeth Gaskell (21 February 1865), quoted in The Letters of John Ruskin, Volume I 1827–1869 (1909), pp. 479-480
  • Both Carlyle and Charles Dickens were admirers of Mrs Gaskell and Mary Barton. For although there had been "social realist" novels before, there had been nothing quite like this... Nothing escapes her steely attentiveness: the gin palaces, the open sewers, even the sad little patches of wild flowers hanging on to scraps of dirt amidst the smoke and grime. For the first time, too, in the pages of Mary Barton the polite middle-class reader in Herne Hill or Bath could hear the voice of working-class Manchester... "Clemmed" – starved – is the word that strikes like a hammer blow over and over again in Mary Barton.
    • Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire, 1776–2000 (2002), p. 184
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