Abstract
The experience of exile, of course, does not belong solely to people who leave their native land; it also touches the lives of those who suffer displacement at home. Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction addresses this form of exclusion, for her narratives inhabit a landscape of change that disorients the location of the self and affects the familiar understanding of time and place.1 Until they bump into Gaskell’s impatience with their naiveté, the nostalgic moments that her characters experience in her writing journey among these shifting contours.
It was a pleasant place that early home! The brook went singing by, leaving its foam Among the flags and blue forget-me-not; And in a nook, above that shelter’d spot, For ages stood a gnarled hawthorne-tree
And if you pass’d in spring-time, you might see The knotted trunk all coronal’d with flowers
That every breeze shook down in fragrant showers.
E. Gaskell, ‘Sketches Among the Poor’, lines 47–54
a large railway hotel has driven away the orchard and gooseberry bushes which two years before flourished in its place. ‘Dumbledown deary’, Household Words (19 June 1852)
The landscape is never inert, people engage with it, re-work it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as individual, group, or nation—state.B. Bender, Landscape: Politics and Perspectives
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
In her biography of Elizabeth Gaskell, Jenny Uglow speaks of Gaskell as someone ‘preoccupied with the pressure of change’. See J. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993) p. 4. She is among many critics (for instance, W. A. Craik, Angus Easson, Shelagh Hunter, John Lucas, Pam Morris, Mary Poovey, and Andrew Sanders) who remark upon this sensitivity. The critics, however, tend to emphasize and explore the nature of social, technological, and scientific changes recorded in Gaskell’s fiction. Although I acknowledge these realities, I concentrate on the ways in which acts of remembrance and modes of perception are related to these changes.
E. Gaskell, The Moorland Cottage and Other Stories, introd. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 ) p. 220.
E. Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, introd. A. Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 ) p. 135.
E. Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, introd. P Morris (London: Penguin Books, 1996 ) p. 252.
E. Gaskell, Cranford, introd. E. P. Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 ) p. 13.
When Paul Connerton comments on the collective memory, he writes, ‘the past and recollected knowledge of the past... are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances’. Later he refers to ‘those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible’. See P Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ) pp. 4, 39.
David Lowenthal points out that ‘The past validates present attitudes and action by affirming their resemblance to former ones. Previous usage seals with approval what is now done.’ See D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 ) p. 40.
John Lucas introduces his discussion of the nineteenth-century provincial novel by remarking that he is ‘concerned with the nature of social change ... and ... its effects on individual lives, on patterns of living, on communities. Above all I am concerned with the processes of separation: what it means for a person to find himself... struggling to retain an undivided sense of selfhood. And failing. For a sense of self isn’t finally separable from a sense of community or family, and yet change enforces separation from both.’ See J. Lucas, Literature of Change: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Novel (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1977) p. ix.
Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, p. 98. E. Holly Pike comments upon Gaskell’s belief in progress and states that in her fiction, ‘the religiously reformed and better educated modern world offers greater stability than a hierarchy uninformed by those values’. See E. H. Pike, Family and Society in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell ( New York: Peter Lang, 1995 ) pp. 128–9.
J. A. V. Chapple and A. Pollard, eds, The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967 ) p. 21.
Ibid., p. 14. See also E. L. Duthie, The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell ( Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980 ) pp. 14–24.
E. Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, introd. A. Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981 ) p. 354.
See R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973 ).
For an excellent discussion of the web of illusions that surround Alice Wilson’s memories of her childhood experience, see C. Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social Crisis ( New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975 ) p. 25.
For a series of essays on the subject of nostalgia and gender, see J. Pickering and S. Kehde, eds, Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism ( New York: New York University Press, 1997 ).
Cottages and farmhouses remain a focal point for people’s nostalgia in twentieth-century culture. It is, therefore, not unusual in 1997 to find a mail-order company like Past Times selling Paradise Lost: Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape: 1850–1914 a book that chronicles through paintings the romantic Arcadian idyll of Victorian country life. This nostalgia continues a sentiment already felt at the beginning of this century. See S. Dick, The Cottage Homes of England (New York: British Heritage, 1984) pp. 2, 22. Dick looks at Helen Allingham’s pretty watercolors of picturesque cottages and remarks that in these shifting and transitory times it is lovely to be reminded of the dignified English cottages which reflect the true spirit of England and the ‘toil simple and healthy under the open sky’.
For an article on this co-existence, see E L. Brown, ‘The Pastoral and Anti-Pastoral in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis’, The Victorian Newsletter (fall 1992) 22–8.
E. Gaskell, North and South, introd. M. Dodsworth (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970 ) pp. 60, 182.
For idyllic descriptions of cottages and farmhouses, see E. Gaskell, Mary Barton, introd. S. Gill (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970) p. 40 and Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, pp. 269, 298.
R. Heath, The Victorian Peasant, ed. K. Dockray ( Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989 ) p. 42.
I. Taylor, Helen Allingham’s England: An Idyllic View of Rural Life ( Exeter, Devon: Webb & Bower, 1990 ) p. 72.
E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, eds, The Works of John Ruskin, XIV (London: George Allen, 1904 ) p. 409.
E. S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study ( Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987 ) p. 198.
A. Paterson, The Homes of Tennyson ( New York: Haskell House, 1973 ) p. 50.
The phrase is from E. K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representations: Britain, 1815–1850 ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 ) p. 7.
The myth of an unchanging rural landscape is a tenacious one. Recent books on the history of the British landscape are still having to refute it. See, for instance, A. Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London: The Humbledon Press, 1985)
E M. L. Thompson, ‘Towns, Industry, and the Victorian Landscape’, The English Landscape: Past, Present, and Future, ed. S. R. J. Woodell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), and
Christopher Taylor, Village and Farmstead: A History of Rural Settlement in England ( London: George Taylor, 1983 ).
E. Gaskell, Ruth, introd. A. Shelston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 ) p. 143.
B. Bender, ed. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives ( Oxford: Berg, 1993 ) p. 11.
Kathleen M. Kirby suggests, ‘A space persists only as long as the boundary creating it is deliberately maintained, and the spaces these boundaries encircle are subject to continual remodeling.’ See K. M. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity ( New York: The Guilford Press, 1996 ) p. 18.
E. Gaskell, A Dark Night’s Work and Other Stories, introd. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ) p. 183.
E. Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, introd. A. Easson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 ) p. 257.
In the following discussion on how trains alter people’s perception of time and space, I am indebted to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and to
James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’: 1800–1918 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 ).
L. Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass ( London: Academy Editions, 1977 ), p. 30.
R. Bodenheimer, ‘Private Griefs and Public Acts in Mary Barton’, Dickens Studies Annual, IX (1981) 213–14.
Copyright information
© 1998 Ann C. Colley
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Colley, A.C. (1998). The ‘shaking, uncertain ground’ of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Narratives. In: Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373112_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230373112_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40620-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37311-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)