'A Tale of Manchester Life'

84 Plymouth Grove 

Next April, a new exhibition will open at Mrs Gaskell's House. The exhibition will explore how Gaskell depicted Manchester and its workers in her novels and short stories. 

Gaskell's writing desk. 

'Mary Barton', her first published novel, was subtitled 'A Tale of Manchester Life', and the crisis it explored in contemporary relations between mill-owners and mill-workers, and the people's terrible living conditions, made a huge impact. It roused the conscience of a nation. 

I am very much looking forward to visiting the new exhibition at 84 Plymouth Road, Manchester, next year, with its recently-opened Bronte room. (All images courtesy Elizabeth Gaskell's House). 

I hope you all have a good Christmas and New Year!

A Spooky Premonition

Some very intriguing news for literary fans last week. Novelist Mrs Gaskell (author of Mary Barton , North and South) had a premonition some time in the months before her death in 1865 that she would not survive much longer. Gaskell was a prolific letter writer, and the story of her spooky premonition was discovered in a new collection of her correspondence recently acquired by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. It will be very interesting to see how the 'new' letters shed light on Gaskell's life and work.

Image: Mill design changes in fifty years. Reports of Factory Inspectors, October 1873. (Author’s collection.) Gaskell's novels 'Mary Barton' and 'North and South' were set in Victorian Manchester, home of the cotton industry. You can find out more about the cotton workers' lives in my book Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives.

A Classic Tale

Mary Barton caused a furore when first published in October 1848. Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Tale of Manchester Life,’ with its no-holds-barred depiction of the vast gulf between the cotton masters and their ‘clemmed’ (starving) mill workers, sparked a furious debate in Cottonopolis. Was Gaskell’s novel true to life? Did Mary Barton, as its detractors claimed, exacerbate tensions between the classes rather than promoting greater understanding?
You can find out more in my special feature on Mary Barton in the November issue of History Today.

My book Narrow Windows, Narrow Lives looks at the reality of everyday life for workers in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution in Lancashire. Remember to order early for Christmas!

Image: The Dinner Hour, Manchester. Engraving by R. Kent Thomas (1816-1884.) for Lancashire by Grindon, Leo H., (Seeley & Co., 1892.)

Mary Barton

This year is the 160th annniversary of a landmark novel by a woman writer: Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. Gaskell’s ‘Tale of Manchester Life,’ published in 1848, starkly depicted the mill-workers’ harsh living conditions. It was denounced as biased by mill-owners and Tory press. Mrs Gaskell herself insisted she wrote the truth. She had first-hand knowledge of the cotton workers' lives because of her husband William's work; he was a Unitarian minister whose work took him right into the mazy alleys and disgustingly filthy closed courts of central Manchester.
Gaskell also wrote the first major biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her first impressions of Howarth and Charlotte's father Patrick greatly coloured her descriptions of the Brontë household. At this time Charlotte and her father were at loggerheads over her courtship by Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she went on to marry. Gaskell's portrait of Patrick as a stern patriarch became part of the Brontë legend.

The importance of making a good first impression on an editor is the subject of my latest feature; you can read it in the March issue of the New Writer.

Image: Powerloom Room, 1844
Pictorial History of the County of Lancashire, 1844. Author's collection.