Mrs Gaskell Novelist Part II

Mrs Gaskell had 4 daughters by her husband, and a son who died in infancy.  She began to write to distract herself from her grief, and she had several different kinds of writing that she enjoyed.  She had a romantic streak which led her to write ghost stories, but from her work as a minister's wife in Manchester, she learned about the casualties of the Industrial Revolution, the ill fed, ill-housed working classes and she wanted to use her writing to help them. 

She did not know the working class from “inside” but she was an intelligent imaginative woman who was able to understand them better than many middle class writers. Her portrayals of the factory workers were sympathetic and well observed.  However she got a lot of criticism from the middle class manufacturers and business people, who felt that she was showing too much sympathy to the working classes and their trade unions, and demands for workers’ rights.  The well to do classes felt that as a middle class lady and a Christian, she should be supporting the status quo and not encouraging radical ideas.

She tried to write about the working class with feeling and charity, though she was, as a middle class woman, a little afraid of the dangerous ideas about unions, and “against property”, that some of them propounded. 

She knew however that they were right in their belief that they were the ones who suffered and were harshly treated, and that they had a right to a better life than they were having.  When she tried to “bring the classes together” and ask working men to understand the viewpoint of the middle class owners, she was shaken by a response from a working man “have you ever seen a child clemmed (starved) to death?”

William “backed” his wife, when she was criticised by the owning class, even if it made his life as a minister difficult.

Her earlier novels, such as Mary Barton, North and South and some of her stories, tend to veer between real sympathy and excellent observation of working class life, yet also an attempt to portray the mill owners fairly, or even, some felt, too generously.

Her most controversial novel was “Ruth” which was the story of an unmarried mother.  However, she didn’t want her young daughters to read it, and many people thought that it was scandalous to portray an unwed mother as a victim of male selfishness and an innocent girl... But Charlotte Bronte felt angry that Gaskell had to kill Ruth off... that she had to expiate her sin by death. Her Victorianism and her sense of Christian propriety warred with her generous nature and her instincts as a writer.