Commerce, Law, and Revolution in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Alison L. LaCroix
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
The World ◽  
Commerce Law ◽  
North And South

The 1840s and 1850s witnessed the publication of three great “condition of England” novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855). All three novels examine the consequences of the Industrial Revolution in England, and all are critical in their appraisal of its effects on individuals, society, and the national—and even the international—realm. All three focus on the world of commerce and manufacturing, but the realm of law is never far away. Yet there are differences: in Shirley, Brontë delves into the interior lives of two very different female protagonists, while Gaskell’s narratives are more concerned with economic and social injustice. Brontë set Shirley during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800s, a period of British imperial struggle and ultimate triumph. Gaskell placed the action of Mary Barton a decade prior to its writing, but in North and South she depicted her current moment, with a consequent sharpening of her critique. This essay examines the novels’ treatment of a set of interconnected themes: commerce, law, and revolution, with reference to related questions of politics, gender, and time.

scholarly journals So you've heard of the Gaskell medal: but who was Gaskell?

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-188
Author(s):  
Digby Tantam
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Social Club ◽  
North And South

The benefaction for the award of an annual medal and prize to a member of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association was made by Mrs Elizabeth Holland, in memory of her brother, Samuel. She was herself a remarkable woman, who married a banker, had ten children, translated poetry from the German, began a social club for unemployed men, founded a cottage hospital, and was well-known for her wit, conversation and unflappability. However, she came from a remarkable family. Her older brother, William, was a noted Unitarian minister, philanthropist, and writer. Her sister-in-law, William's wife, was Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, author of North and South, Wives and Daughters, and a celebrated, and for a season notorious, Life of Charlotte Brontë, as well as several other novels and short stories. Two of Elizabeth and William's children, Meta and Julia, were so well-loved in Manchester that flags flew at half-mast on their deaths.

“SUCH A STRONG WISH FOR WINGS”:THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTËAND ELIZABETH GASKELL’S FALLEN ANGELS

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 671-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan Burke Hattaway
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
The World

Elizabeth Gaskell undertook the writingofThe Life of Charlotte Brontëwith a highly specific purpose in mind: it was meant, first and foremost, as a defense. Spurred by the urgings of longtime family friend Ellen Nussey, who was despairing over “the misrepresentations and the malignant spirit” at work in recent commentaries about the late author ofJane Eyre, Patrick Brontë had written to Gaskell only three months after his daughter's untimely death in 1855 and expressed the hope that an “established Author” like herself might produce a biography of Charlotte Brontë immediately. Gaskell was thus charged with the work of presenting to the world a definitive account of the celebrated, if enigmatic, writer's life, in defiance of the inflammatory and rumor-filled posthumous reports that were circulating.

Anatolia and Egypt during the Nineteenth Century: A Comparison of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment

1992 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 37-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Şevket Pamuk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Export Orientation ◽  
The World

For the economies of the Middle East, the nineteenth century was a period of rapid integration into the world economy. Some of the forces behind this process came from Europe. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain and later the Continental economies began to turn towards areas beyond Europe in order to establish markets for their manufactures and also secure inexpensive sources of foodstuffs and raw materials. As a result, European commercial penetration into the Middle East gained new momentum in the 1820s after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Later, starting around mid-century, commercial penetration began to be accompanied by European investments in the Middle East in the forms of lending to governments and direct investment in railways, ports, banks, trading companies, and even agricultural land. A large part of this investment served to increase the export orientation of the Middle Eastern economies.

“HARMLESS PLEASURE”: GENDER, SUSPENSE, AND JANE EYRE

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-286
Author(s):  
Caroline Levine
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
The World ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Three Sisters

“[I]T IS TIME THE OBSCURITY . . . WAS done away,” writes Charlotte Brontë in 1850. “The little mystery, which formerly yielded some harmless pleasure, has lost its interest. Circumstances have changed” (“Biographical Notice” 134). The “little mystery” she coyly invokes here was not so trivial in the eyes of the literary world. From the moment that Jane Eyre appeared, reviewers speculated wildly about the identity of the authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. “[T]he whole reading-world of London was in a ferment to discover the unknown author,” writes Elizabeth Gaskell (271). When the identities of the three sisters emerged, it was something of a shock to most of the London literati to discover that the writers of these “coarse” and “repulsive” novels were young, sheltered Yorkshire women, daughters of a curate, who had seen little of the world.1 Although the secret had been slowly coming out, bit by bit, it was in 1850 that Charlotte Brontë put the speculations to rest with her “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” written for a new edition of Wuthering Heights.

Revoicings and devoicings

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-127
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
David Kellogg
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Physical Activities ◽  
Thought Processes ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Direct Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
Verbal Processes ◽  
North And South ◽  
Verbal Thinking

In this paper, we take up three novels: Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell (1848/2008), Shirley, published just afterwards by Charlotte Brontë, and North and South, published six years later by Gaskell. Each novel is a revoicing of previous works, and we shall present evidence that the last two directly and consciously revoice the first two. We argue that a form of revoicing we call “exaptation”, or the borrowing of formal devices for very different functions than those for which they initially evolved, can be observed on at least four different timescales: the genre, the author’s career, the novel’s characters and plot, and the exchanges of dialogue. With each book, we examine each timescale and then we look both quantitatively and qualitatively at the wordings of a request, a confession, and an act of violence. In this way, we hope to demonstrate how the early social realist novel developed devices for showing thought processes alongside the verbal processes and the physical activities of characters by devoicing speech, first as indirect discourse, then as quasi-direct discourse, and finally as unspoken understandings. It is, we argue, a way that is not very different from the way that the Russian psychologist Vygotsky hypothesized that children develop verbal thinking and inner speech from dialogue.

The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Knowledge Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Knowledge Age

The language of flowers is typically dismissed as a subgenre of botany books that, while popular, had little if any influence on the material culture of Victorian life. This article challenges this assumption by situating the genre within the context of the professionalisation of botany at mid-century to show how efforts to change attitudes towards botany from a fashionable pastime for the gentler sex to a utilitarian practice in service of humanity contributed to the revitalisation and popularity of the language of flowers. While scientific botanists sought to know flowers physiologically and morphologically in the spirit of progress and truth, practitioners of the language of flowers – written primarily for and by women – celebrated uncertainty and relied on floral codes to curtail knowing in order to extend the realm of play. The struggle for floral authority was centred in botanical discourses – both scientific and amateur – but extended as well into narrative fiction. Turning to works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, I show how Victorian writers expected a certain degree of floral literacy from their readers and used floral codes strategically in their fiction as subtexts for practitioners of the language of flowers. These three writers, I argue, took a stand in the gender struggle over floral authority by creating scientific botanists who are so obsessed with dissecting plants to reveal their secrets and know their ‘life truths’ that they become farsighted in matters of romantic love and unable to read the most obvious and surface of floral codes. The consequences of the dismissal of the superficial are in some cases quite disastrous.

Coal's Persistence in the Capitalist World-Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul K. Gellert ◽  
Paul S. Ciccantell
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Coal Consumption ◽  
The World ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World

Predominant analyses of energy offer insufficient theoretical and political-economic insight into the persistence of coal and other fossil fuels. The dominant narrative of coal powering the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain's world dominance in the nineteenth century giving way to a U.S.- and oil-dominated twentieth century, is marred by teleological assumptions. The key assumption that a complete energy “transition” will occur leads some to conceive of a renewable-energy-dominated twenty-first century led by China. After critiquing the teleological assumptions of modernization, ecological modernization, energetics, and even world-systems analysis of energy “transition,” this paper offers a world-systems perspective on the “raw” materialism of coal. Examining the material characteristics of coal and the unequal structure of the world-economy, the paper uses long-term data from governmental and private sources to reveal the lack of transition as new sources of energy are added. The increases in coal consumption in China and India as they have ascended in the capitalist world-economy have more than offset the leveling-off and decline in some core nations. A true global peak and decline (let alone full substitution) in energy generally and coal specifically has never happened. The future need not repeat the past, but technical, policy, and movement approaches will not get far without addressing the structural imperatives of capitalist growth and the uneven power structures and processes of long-term change of the world-system.

MANAGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY APPLICATION IN TEACHING AT HIGH SCHOOLS IN VINH YEN CITY, VINH PHUC PROVINCE MEETS INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vu Kha Thap
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
Surface Strength ◽  
Technology Application ◽  
Management Measures ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Information Technology Application

Entering the XXI century and especially in the period of the industrial revolution has entered the era of IT with the knowledge economy in the trend of globalization. The 4.0 mankind development of ICT, especially the Internet has had a strong impact and make changes to all activities profound social life of every country in the world. Through surveys in six high School, interviewed 85 managers and teachers on the status of the management of information technology application in teaching, author of the article used the SWOT method to distribute surface strength, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges from which to export 7 management measures consistent with reality. 7 measures have been conducting trials and the results showed that 07 measures of necessary and feasible.

Desserts With Oasis—SkillGap Analysis Into Dubai’s Labour Intensive Market

2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (11) ◽  
pp. 533-541
Author(s):  
Dr. Premila Koppalakrishnan
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
Fourth Industrial Revolution ◽  
The World ◽  
Basic Level ◽  
The Revolution

The world stands on the precarious edge of an innovative transformation that will on a very basic level modify the manner in which we live, work, and identify with each other. In its scale, degree, and unpredictability, the change will be not normal for anything mankind has encountered previously. We don't yet know exactly how it will unfurl, however one thing is clear: the reaction to it should be incorporated and exhaustive, including all partners of the worldwide nation, from the general population and private segments to the scholarly community and common society. It is The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution. The digital revolution has opened way for many impacts. All of the emirates are experiencing the effects of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” This revolution reflects the velocity, scope, and systems impact of a digital transformation that is changing economies, jobs, and work as it is currently known. Characteristics of the revolution include a fusion of technologies across the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

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