‘The Chimneyed City’: Imagining the North in Victorian Literature

Abstract

The best-known mid-nineteenth-century literary depictions of the north of England, and more specifically of the industrial North, which at the time was most closely identified with the south-eastern part of Manchester and neighbouring areas of Cheshire, are to be found in the subgenre of social-problem or industrial novels. This group of works includes Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1839), set in the fictional town of Ashleigh and based on Trollope’s fact-finding visit to Manchester, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841), which centres on the industrial town of ‘M.’, Elizabeth Stone’s William Langshawe, The Cotton Lord (1842), based on the murder by striking workers in 1831 of the young mill-owner Thomas Ashton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, subtitled ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’ (1848), and her North and South (1854–55), which takes place mainly in ‘Milton-Northern’ in the evocatively named ‘Darkshire’, Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ trilogy (especially Sybil (1845)) and Geraldine Jewsbury’s Marian Withers (1851) which was first published in the Manchester Examiner and Times.¹