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

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.

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Alison L. LaCroix

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-127
Author(s):  
Fang Li ◽  
David Kellogg

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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Engelhardt

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (12) ◽  
pp. 117-120
Author(s):  
Latifa Karam Ahmadova ◽  

In England, realism was formed very quickly, because it appeared immediately after the Enlightenment, and its formation occurred almost simultaneously with the development of Romanticism, which did not hinder the success of the new literary movement. The peculiarity of English literature is that in it romanticism and realism coexisted and enriched each other. Examples include the works of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. However, the discovery and confirmation of realism in English literature is primarily associated with the legacy of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). The works of Charles Dickens differ not only in the strengthening of the real social moment, but also in the previous realist literature. Dickens has a profoundly negative effect on bourgeois reality. Key words: England, realism, literary trend, bourgeois society, utopia, unjust life, artistic description


Author(s):  
Andrew Mangham

This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), North and South (1854–5), and Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). These works confirm Kingsley’s suspicion that a material view of starvation—and poverty more generally—offers a reasonable and reasoning interpretation of the Condition-of-England question. Starvation, or ‘clemming’, as it was known among the industrial working classes, refuses to be integrated, in Gaskell’s fictional world, into a catch-all economic or demographic theory. Instead, it is a phenomenon that paradoxically demands confrontation while evading perception through the anatomies of the workers and their surroundings. In line with the interlinking findings of biological scientists and Unitarian thinkers, Gaskell broaches the intricate questions of reform by recasting them as flesh-and-blood issues experienced through the eyes of her heroines; her novels thus ask for the sort of careful consideration advocated by science, whereby the strengths and weaknesses of subjective interpretation are tested and interpreted through the material.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Saman Ali Mohammed

One of the heated discussions of the Victorian era is female emancipation. In the heart of an industrial period when materialism, economic competition and public domain were dominated by men, women had the domestic sphere. The apparent difference between these two spheres was not tolerable for Elizabeth Gaskell and she critiqued it. Her novel North and South discusses the perceptions on women, the idea of industrialization, and class distinction in Victorian Era. Developing her main character Margaret Hale, Gaskell critiques her society and the mentality behind a perception of patriarchal and materialistic society. Gaskell develops her character on many different levels by giving her various roles especially in the industrial north. Valuing certain qualities women possess in the domestic level, Gaskell brings Margaret to the debates, businesses, factories, riots and public sphere of Milton. Gaskell presents the contemporary and Victorian readers with a different perception of women, their roles, and significance in the private and public spheres. 


Author(s):  
Audrey Murfin

Abstract By considering the multiple frames in and around My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell and “The Yellow Mask” by Wilkie Collins, this paper examines the tradition of British short stories that were structurally, but not thematically, modeled on the folktales known in England as the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Use of the Nights makes Victorian short fiction coherent by providing an alternative to the linear structure of the novel. This common structure is notable for the following characteristics: a deferral of knowledge and endings, repeated thematic elements across frames and stories, and embedded metafictional narratives that gesture towards oral traditions.


Author(s):  
Catherine Delafield

In this essay, Catherine Delafield highlights the importance of the literary periodical and the practice of serial publication for the form and content of women’s novels. By revisiting the original periodical publishing contexts of two novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854–5), first published in Household Words (1850–9), and Wives and Daughters (1864–6), first serialised in the Cornhill Magazine (1860–1970), Delafield demonstrates Gaskell’s incisive understanding of the publishing conventions of the serial novel, even if she struggled with the artistic limitations of that form. A careful comparison of the periodical and volume versions of the novels yields the conclusion that the ‘structure and style of her novels’ were ‘formed in response to their periodical contexts,’ with Gaskell shown to not only be a diligent student of the serial but also an innovator of that form (p.429). Gaskell’s prominent place within the genealogy of the Victorian serial was not entirely without friction, however. As Delafield demonstrates, she actively challenged the interventions of her male editors, including Charles Dickens (1812–70), though not always successfully. In this sense, Gaskell’s ‘habit of serialisation’ was flavoured with both ‘conformity and instruction,’ given her willingness to work within and push the boundaries of the artistic and material constraints of the serial form (p.440).


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document