Abstract
This chapter focuses upon what a reading of Pride and Prejudice via Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South can illuminate in our understanding of Jane Austen’s novel, with particular reference to what seems to distinguish them: the later novel’s industrial context. In reworking so many of its elements, Gaskell asks us to consider what it takes to imagine Pride and Prejudice in a factory setting, and therefore reflect upon social changes that have occurred between the times of the two novels. But this investigation can also return us to the earlier novel with a new insight into its own representation of trade and warehouses, and those engaged with them. It is my contention that, instead of reading Austen’s novel as a conservative recoil from the onset of the industrial society that North and South and its genteel prejudiced heroine comes to embrace, we can see that Pride and Prejudice is likewise open to considering those who live ‘within view of [their] own warehouses’ as a moral voice and a force for positive change in society.
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Notes
- 1.
See Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber & Faber, 1993) and J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Polland, eds. The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966).
- 2.
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 336–38. Brontë’s comments include the famous response, quoted in full by Gaskell: ‘I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate, daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses’ (337).
- 3.
See, for example, Janine Barchas, ‘Mrs. Gaskell’s North and South: Austen’s Early Legacy’, Persuasions 30 (2008): 53–60; Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); Deirdre David, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: North and South, Our Mutual Friend, and Daniel Deronda (New York: Colombia University Press, 1981). In The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England, Barbara Leah Harmon in her discussion of North and South, compares Darcy’s sudden proposal to Henry Lennox’s (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1998), 57. The tradition of seeing North and South in the context of Pride and Prejudice is also noted by Rosemarie Bodenheimer in The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 53, n. 27.
Austen’s influence on the Victorian novelists that succeeded her has been a subject of critical interest in recent years. The reprint history of her works suggests that she fell out of favour in the decades after her death in 1817 (despite the endorsement of Sir Walter Scott) until the relatively inexpensive 1833 edition of her novels by Richard Bentley. After this, her popularity and also her renown increased, making possible Lewes’ recommendation of Austen to Brontë as a model novelist in the late 1840s. Lewes’ 1859 Blackwood’s article ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’ starts by noting that although among ‘cultivated readers’ she is well-known and appreciated, her name is more broadly unfamiliar; however, ‘That her novels are very extensively read, is not an opinion, but a demonstrated fact; and with this fact we couple the paradoxical fact, of a fine artist, whose works are widely known and enjoyed, being all but unknown to the English public, and quite unknown abroad.’ The goal of his article is to rectify this, and have Austen’s status as ‘an artist of high rank’ recognised (‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 86 (1859): 99).
- 4.
Janine Barchas gives a more detailed list in her comparison between the two novels. This is useful in making the point that Gaskell closely follows the model provided by Pride and Prejudice, which provides the context for my particular argument.
- 5.
A.B. Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell: her life and work (London: Lehmann, 1952). Quoted in Susan Johnson, Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction (Greenwood Press: Westport, Conn., 2001), 133.
- 6.
As Ashley Harbours notes, while ‘Reading Gaskell in the context of Austen is not new…[f]ew have read Austen in the context of Gaskell’ (‘The Sympathetic Impulse: Duty and Morality in Emma and North and South’, Persuasions 38:1, 2017), 1. Evidently, Harbours applies this to Emma.
- 7.
See Margaret Oliphant, ‘Miss Mitford and Miss Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 107 (1870): 290–331, and G.H. Lewes, ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 86 (1859), 99–113. The latter connects Austen’s works’ ‘truth’ to their lack of descriptive detail and concludes that ‘Such art as hers can never grow old, never be superseded’ (113). But earlier critics like John William Ward, a reviewer in the Quarterly Review, also felt that it was in the absence specifically of references to the public realm of contemporary life that her works excelled, commenting in a letter of 1814 that she ‘never plagues you with any chemistry, mechanics, or political economy’ which he calls ‘vile, cold-hearted stuff in a novel’ (quoted in Mitzi Myer, ‘“Shot from the Canons”: or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the late Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer’, in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, edited by Ann Bermingham and John Brewer [London: Routledge, 1995], p. 198). This is an implicit comparison to his review of Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage in which Ward objects to Edgeworth’s overly evident didacticism and lecturing, noting that her virtuous characters all have a ‘tincture of science’ and are ‘fond of chemistry and mechanics’; he sees this as a sign that Edgeworth’s morality derives too much from the head and too little from the heart (‘Miss Edgeworth’s Patronage’, Quarterly Review 10 (1814): 308).
- 8.
Jason Solinger, ‘Jane Austen and the Gentrification of Commerce’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 38 (2005): 287.
- 9.
Though critics variously use the terms ‘Social problem Novel’, ‘Industrial Novel’, or ‘Condition of England Novel’, they agree that North and South belongs to a form of novel that is defined by its social commitment and its connection to a particular set of debates, deriving from a specific political moment. See Bodenheimer, Politics of Story; Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: Chicago University Press), 1995; Josephine Guy, The Victorian Social-problem Novel: The Market, the Individual, and Communal Life (London: St Martin’s Press), 1996.
- 10.
Gaskell, ‘Preface’ to Mary Barton, edited by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 37.
- 11.
Tamara Wagner, Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010): 58.
- 12.
Margaret Oliphant, ‘Miss Austen and Miss Mitford’, 290.
- 13.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973): 165–66.
- 14.
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1994): 2.
- 15.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Tony Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 392.
- 16.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994): 75.
- 17.
Melissa Sodeman, ‘Domestic Mobility in Persuasion and Sanditon’, Studies in English Literature 45:4 (2005): 790.
- 18.
See John Feltham’s A Picture of London for 1802 for a rich description. The section on ‘Retail Trade’ mentions Gracechurch Street and talks about the great wealth earned by those in trade and retail. (London: Lewis and Roden, 1802): 33–34. https://archive.org/stream/b22028262/b22028262_djvu.txt (accessed March 28, 2018).
- 19.
‘cheap’. OED Online. January 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/31046?rskey=TifKHy&result=1 (accessed March 28, 2018).
- 20.
‘Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it’ (163).
- 21.
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Dorothy Collin. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 164. Thornton later proves that he does think of his workers’ welfare rather than individual gain when he refuses a risky speculation with the money put aside for the wage bill (516).
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Dredge, S. (2018). ‘Within View of His Own Warehouses’: Sites of Change in Pride and Prejudice and North and South. In: Hopkins, L. (eds) After Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95894-1_3
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