Gaskell wrote seven novels (as well as numerous short stories) over her remaining lifetime, as well as her famous biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë:
Mary Barton
(1848),
Cranford
(1853),
Ruth
(1853),
North and South
(1855),
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
(1857),
Sylvia’s Lovers
(1863),
Cousin Phillis
(1864), and
Wives and Daughters
(1866).
Wives and Daughters
belongs to the other kind of writing for which Gaskell has been known and celebrated: the novel of provincial life. It would be mistaken, however, to believe that only Gaskell’s social-protest fiction is historically and politically engaged, for whether her novels are set against an urban or rural landscape, Gaskell is most interested in the individual and how individual lives play out against a broader social and historical background. The historical context for
Wives and Daughters
bears going into, for even though the setting is a small town, the characters’ actions and feelings are to some degree informed by the circumstances of their historical moment. First and foremost, the novel is set back in time to a near-historical past; its main action can be pinpointed as taking place between 1827 through to the early 1830s. Gaskell wrote and published the novel between 1864 and 1866.This choice to deliberately hearken back to a time some thirty-five years before is one that George Eliot also made in her great novel of provincial life,
Middlemarch
(1872).
On the second page of
Wives and Daughters,
the narrator invokes a twelve-year-old girl named Molly, and a time “five-and-forty years ago” when she was born; moreover, we learn that “it was before the passing of the Reform Bill,” and “in those days before railways” (pp. 6-7). These are clear references not only to dates but to social conditions, which leads one to believe that Gaskell had a deliberate purpose in mind in setting her novel not back into a distant past but into a specific near-historical moment. This could be understood as a nostalgic energy, one that sought a time and place that was perceived to be better than the current moment. Although Gaskell’s work does in many ways admire and, in some sense, regret the loss of small-town life, her recollection is neither hazy nor romanticizing as it might be were it the result of nostalgia. Another way of understanding Gaskell’s choice to write in a near-historical moment is to see it as having given her a lens through which to evaluate the positive as well as the negative features of the social and political changes that had been wrought during her lifetime. In many ways, the retrospective energies of
Wives and Daughters
are those of a historically minded documenter, driven in a sense to capture that which has faded or is fading, to better understand the present. Hence, many of the topics that come up in the course of the novel—including the education of girls, marriage, exploration, evolutionary science, and medicine—had undergone change by the time Gaskell was writing about them in the 1860s. As difficult as it is from our twenty-first-century perch, it is important to realize that Gaskell’s novel is not just part of a seamless historical past known as the “Victorian era,” but is itself in historical dialogue with an earlier moment in the century.
Wives and Daughters
is engaged with the enormous changes that had taken place from the 1830s to the 1860s, and to fail to grasp that Gaskell is writing about a near but distinctly different past is to miss much of the novel’s nuance and import.
What did this near-historical past encompass? This is a broad question, but generally it encompasses a moment prior to the “Hungry Forties” and just before the political changes of the First Reform Act of 1832. When Gaskell wrote
Wives and Daughters,
England was enjoying a period of deep prosperity; moreover, higher standards of living for the working classes were now in place, and some of the early nineteenth century’s worst injustices had been moderated. Mid-century brought much “progress” (the byword of the time) to England, including a feverish pace of building railroads, factories, middle-class housing, churches, canals, and ships. It was a significant period of growth, matched only by England’s imperial energies, which included dominion over the vast wealth and population of India. In contrast, the late twenties in which Gaskell sets Wives and Daughters is a time “betwixt and between” England’s rural past and the coming agitations for social and political change. In 1801 most people in England lived in villages or on farms, while by 1851 more than half the population of England was centered in the cities.
Wives and Daughters
is set prior to the railroad, which came on the scene in 1830, a technological advance in transportation that would visibly transform not only the landscape but also—even more meaningfully, one might argue—a population’s consciousness about such basic concepts as mobility, distance, speed, and even home. The 1832 Reform Act was the first bit of legislative reform that was passed in response to the (then radical) demands of the reformists who petitioned Parliament for comprehensive change. The 1832 Act gave a wider share of power to the middle classes, primarily by partially redistributing parliamentary representation from small electoral boroughs to England’s new cities. It also extended the vote by lowering the property requirement, although the radicals’ call for universal male suffrage was not met; still, after the reform, enfranchised men in England almost doubled to 813,000—a number that seems reasonable only until one considers that the adult male population was close to 6 million, and that women were not part of the equation. Still, the 1832 Reform Act was a significant piece of legislation because it started the process of moving away from the traditional bases of power (landownership, birth, and rank). Perhaps most important, it began the process that would be continued in the century’s later Reform Acts (1867 and 1884) and that would result in the spirit of change that would give rise to various legislative acts that would improve the lives of the lower classes—including laws limiting the hours a child could work in a factory, public health laws, and reformations in the poor laws. Perhaps most important, the “Corn Laws” were repealed; these protectionist tariffs had kept the price of bread artificially high—indeed out of the reach of a laborer’s wages—and had contributed to the tragedy of Ireland’s famine in 1845 and after.
Perhaps the most vital difference between the 1820s and 1860s for a novel entitled
Wives and Daughters
was the change in the social and legal status of women. England in the 1820s and 1830s was still firmly in the grip of what has become known as “domestic ideology,” a theory about separate spheres of activity for men and women (although it is important to recognize that it would have not meaningfully considered or encompassed the lives of working-class people, who had to work regardless of their gender). Sarah Ellis, in her best-selling
The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
(1839), articulated a set of widely accepted beliefs about the “natural” roles of men and women; in this formulation, men are “naturally” suited to striving in the public world to advance themselves and their families, while the “innate” moral beauty and selflessness of women make them ideally suited to the vocation of the home and raising children. The emphasis on women’s moral greatness simultaneously idealized them and deprived them of access to a host of legal, political, and even economic rights. By the 1840s and into the 1850s there was liberal reaction against this perception of natural gender roles, but it remained the case for middle-class women that work outside the home was considered unrespectable; those middle-class women who did work—estimated at mid-century at some 7 percent—were mostly governesses or writers. Before the parliamentary actions of the 1850s, the legal status of women in England was defined by the doctrine of “coverture,” which for the purposes of the law treated a woman as an object under the control (and responsibility) of her husband or father. Women were not subjects with rights and responsibilities, but can best be described as dependents. A husband or a father was responsible for his wife’s or daughter’s actions, and he controlled her property; the fact that women could not enter into contracts was but one of the inequities that women still suffered in the first half of the nineteenth century. Feminist agitation by women writers was instrumental in bringing issues such as child custody and the right to inherit property to the forefront. Elizabeth Gaskell was one of the most prominent signatories of the petition to Parliament (with some 25,000 signatures) that ultimately resulted in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which enabled women to inherit, own, and bequeath property, as well as to enter into contracts and bring a suit in court (or be sued).
Gaskell’s novel registers the difference for women between the 1860s and the late 1820s in several ways, but most deeply in the father’s error in judgment that drives the novel: Mr. Gibson’s decision to acquire a second wife (and, as a result, a step-daughter) in order to provide a female presence for his then seventeen-year-old daughter. The notion that Molly needs to be protected from her emerging sexuality (and the resulting attention) through the propriety of a female chaperone/mother figure is subtly but persistently derogated by the novel, which determines that Molly’s character is in fact the strongest among the three women of the Gibson household, rather than one in need of protection. In other words, the concept that the father knows best how to protect his daughter—and that she needed to be protected, rather than consulted—is subtly critiqued, although never to the extent that the narrator intervenes to discourse upon the subject. On the contrary, the reader is left to figure out what to make of the combination that Dr. Gibson personifies: a generous and loving father who also calls his daughter “Goosey” and tells her suitor (but not her) that she has her own money The discussion of Molly’s education that takes place in the novel’s third chapter also provides some insight into the educational norms for (middle-class) women early in the century, which Gaskell subtly deprecates by making Molly’s later success dependent upon knowing a good deal more than her father—an informed and gentle man—thought necessary: “ ‘Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums; but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself. After all, I’m not sure that reading or writing is necessary. Many a good woman gets married with only a cross instead of her name; it’s rather a diluting of mother-wit, to my fancy, but, however, we must yield to the prejudices of society, Miss Eyre, and so you may teach the child to read’ ” (p. 34). Molly’s insistence that she be educated—eventually the father yields and allows her also to study French, dance, and drawing—and her later studies in natural history are ways in which the novelist subtly discriminates between the ideas of the older and newer generations.
Other differences that Gaskell registers about the changed status of women include the difference in education of the working classes. In the first chapter, the narrator alludes to a school for the working-class girls of the village: “She and the ladies, her daughters, had set up a school; not a school after the manner of schools nowadays, where far better intellectual teaching is given to the boys and girls of labourers and work-people than often falls to the lot of their betters in worldly estate; but a school of the kind we should call ‘industrial’” (p. 7). Gaskell is clearly marking a distinction between “then” and “now,” though her sense of the improvement in education for the poor “nowadays” is perhaps somewhat idealistic, considering that state-sponsored education was not established until the 1870s. The novel’s period of the late twenties was a threshold: a moment just prior to such things as the railway age, the penny post, Catholic emancipation, the extension of the vote, and the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria in 1837. It was, moreover, the real remembered world of Gaskell’s childhood, for even though the novel is set in the Midlands, Hollingford is clearly based on her childhood home in Knutsford, Cheshire, for which she retained an affection throughout her life.
Wives and Daughters
attempts to capture pre-Victorian country society at multiple levels, including the upper, middle, and working classes, and to capture the internal hierarchies within each of those class positions. Gaskell’s capacity for the detail makes her exceptionally capable of rendering the texture of the everyday and the nuances of social life. The subtitle of
Wives and Daughters
is “An Every-Day Story,” which at once announces the novel’s ambition and strategically asserts its verisimilitude. After all, if it is a story about the “everyday” rather than the “exceptional,” then it is a story about the real rather than the fantastic; of course, the novel is simply a fully imagined fictional world, but one in which the reader is encouraged to believe as “real” and eventually cannot help but do so. The subject matter—Holling—ford, Molly Gibson—is deliberately restricted, which makes it possible for a slowly unfolding narrative procedure to enact the world under consideration, effectively bodying forth a sense of its realness in its sheer dedication to details and commonplace (rather than exceptional) moments. As such, you will notice that the narrator is not particularly intrusive, and especially not declarative. You might contrast this narrative style with Jane Austen’s; Austen’s narrative voice has a considerably more authoritative tact, and her arguments are achieved via narrative assertions or Socratic-like debates between characters. The ideas that the reader takes in when reading Gaskell are unfolded rather than stated, as they are more likely to be in (for instance) the novels of George Eliot. Gaskell’s narrative style is subtle, one in which important facts unfold quietly in the form of self-reflexive analysis by characters. The “every-day story” of Molly Gibson’s coming of age in Hollingford in the late 1820s is, of course, a narrative ruse. By making Molly—a character at the center of the ordinary and the everyday whose subjectivity as a young woman on the threshold of the marrying age makes her interesting and even worthy of a story—the focus of the narrative, the novelist is able to dramatize that which is essentially unnarratable: everyday life.