Abstract
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) is the story of Margaret Hale who leaves the village of Helstone for the grim industrial city of Milton-Northern. Memorable episodes include Margaret’s encounters with the working people, her relationship with a mill-owner, John Thornton, and her confrontation with a mob of strikers. On the opening page of the novel, however, we are introduced to Margaret and her cousin Edith in the genteel setting of London’s Harley Street. Edith is about to be married to an army officer, Captain Lennox, and they will then take up residence in Corfu, where his regiment is stationed. This is the kind of detail that we discard in our reading of the text; Edith and Lennox will disappear from the novel, and can apparently be forgotten. But the insignificance of the detail actually tells us a lot about some of Gaskell’s informing assumptions in North and South. Most strikingly, whereas the reader is told basic facts about life in Milton-Northern, as if it is a foreign country, the fact that the army has a regiment at Corfu — something that is likely to surprise the modern reader — is presented without explanation. Some things, it seems, such as the living conditions of the people of England, require Gaskell’s active mediation, while others can be taken for granted.
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Notes
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 38.
For a consideration of how the ‘Liberal optimism and pacificism of the nineteenth century … were made possible by victory over Napoleon’, see Correlli Barnett, Britain and Her Army (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. xviii.
See, for example, J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987)
Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
Donald Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
There is a useful descriptive account of Lever’s career as a writer in John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longman, 1988), pp. 372–4.
Throughout this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, I have made extensive use of Sutherland’s guide, which to my mind is the indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the Victorian novel. Terry Eagleton writes about Lever in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 214, 224 and 254–6.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 7.
On the idea of an aristomilitary culture, see in particular Andrew Rutherford’s ‘Introduction’ to The Literature of War: Five Studies in Heroic Virtue (London: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 1–10.
James M. Cahalan, in The Irish Novel: A Critical History (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988), discusses the way in which Lever ‘made fun of Irishmen’ (p. 65), but also suggests that the accusation is rather unfair.
Sheila Smith and Peter Denman, ‘Mid-Victorian Novelists’, in Arthur Pollard (ed.), The Penguin History of Literature: Vol. 6: The Victorians (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 281.
Charles Lever, Jack Hinton, The Guardsman (London, Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1903), p. 23. All references are to this edition.
See John Sutherland’s ‘Introduction to Ouida’, Under Two Flags (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) for a discussion of a ’kind of Wildean sexual ambiguity’ (p. xx) about her officer hero.
See Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 (London: Constable, 1983).
For an account of the changes in patterns of discipline and punishment in the Victorian army, see Alan Ramsay Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home: The Recruitment and Terms and Conditions of the British Regular, 1859–1899 (London: Croom Helm, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977), pp. 125–79.
Charles Lever, Lord Kilgobbin (Belfast: Appletree, 1992; first published 1872), p. 77.
Patricia Morton, ‘Army’, in Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (Chicago and London: St James, 1988), p. 39.
See Neville Thompson, ‘The Uses of Adversity’, in Norman Gash (ed.), Wellington: Studies in the Military and Political Career of the First Duke of Wellington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), for an account of Wellington’s conservative views, including his fear that ’the Crystal Palace Exhibition would provide the signal for a general insurrection’ (p. 3). On the ’cult of heroism’, see Colley, op. cit., pp. 257–8.
Hew Strachan, in Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–54 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), takes a different line, arguing that the army did change substantially in the years before the Crimean War, and that there has been too great a readiness to accept the Victorian middle-class view of aristocratic incompetence.
Brian Bond (ed.), Victorian Military Campaigns (London: Tom Donovan, 1994; first published 1967), p. 11.
See Peter Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868’, in David Chandler (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 161.
On invasion scares, see Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 23–4.
Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 1.
On the Maori Wars, see James Belich, The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict: The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989).
Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 60.
One of the complications of Jingoism, apparent in Kipling’s works, is that the middle-classes might seem to be putting words and thoughts into the mouths and minds of working-class people. It is a problem addressed in Richard Price’s An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War 1899–1902 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).
Colin Ford and Brian Harrison, A Hundred Years Ago: Britain in the 1880s in Words and Photographs (London: Bloomsbury, 1994), p. 243.
Arthur Waugh, Tradition and Change (London: Chapman & Hall, 1919), p. 150.
Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, in M.H. Abrams (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Vol. 2 (New York and London: Norton, 1986), p. 1913.
Christopher Ricks (ed.), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p. 511.
M. van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 12.
For a discussion of a number of Crimean War poems, see Joseph Bristow, ‘Nation, Class and Gender: Tennyson s Maud and War’, in Genders, no. 9 (1990), 93–111.
W.E. Henley, ‘Invictus’, in in M.H. Abrams (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Vol. 2 (New York and London: Norton, 1986), p. 1657.
Isobel Armstrong, ‘Victorian Poetry’, in Martin Coyle, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall and John Peck (eds), Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 286.
Adelaide Anne Procter, ‘The Lesson of War’, The Complete Works of Adelaide Anne Procter (London: Bell, 1905), pp. 141–3. The poem was originally published in Dickens’s Household Words in February 1855.
Bristow, op. cit., p. 104. The Crimean War also saw a wave of patriotic plays, discussed by J.S. Bratton in ‘Theatre of War: The Crimea on the London Stage’, in David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (eds), Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 119–37.
Christopher Ricks (ed.), Tennyson: A Selected Edition (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p. 518.
Olive Anderson in A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s, 1967), suggests that initially Tennyson’s sentiments were widely shared, the war being welcomed ‘as an opportunity for the nation to purge itself of sordid utilitarianism… the war was held to offer tremendous moral opportunities only because it was believed to be a just war and an event of profound significance in the divine scheme of things’ (p. 20).
Chris R. Vanden Bossche, ‘Realism Versus Romance: The War of Cultural Codes in Tennyson’s Maud’, Victorian Poetry, XXIV (1986), p. 70.
Goldwin Smith, ‘The War Passages in Maud’, Saturday Review, November 1855
John D. Jump, Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 189.
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Peck, J. (1998). The Army in Victorian Literature and Life. In: War, the Army and Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378803_1
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