ABSTRACT
The University of Manchester Library houses the world's most important collection of literary manuscripts by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65). 1 Alongside some of her major works sits the manuscript of a short story which was first published in 1859 and has come to be known as ‘The Crooked Branch’. This chapter focuses on the pre-publication and subsequent textual history of this story and explores how the surviving, fragmentary, archival record can shed light on the significant role played by the story's first editor – Charles Dickens – in both shaping the text and influencing its transmission over time. The exploration will raise issues of authorial intention in relation to the piece, which went on to have an unusual ‘dual’ textual history. It also reveals Gaskell's increasing professionalism as an author throughout the 1850s and her attitude to short stories as a quick, convenient and lucrative form of writing. 2
