ABSTRACT
Migration is a crucial, yet often overlooked, theme in Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction. Her most famous—and most contentious—use of the motif is at the end of Mary Barton (1848), where Jem and Mary move away from Manchester to settle in Canada. Given that the novel grapples with the condition-of-England question, its resolution has been seen as a failure on Gaskell's part to provide an effective solution to the problems of industrialization that she raises. Despite her subsequent, recurrent use of emigration in her literary work, contemporary critical scholarship has remained fixated on the ending of Mary Barton. This refusal to situate the novel within the broader context of her work and life has prevented the development of a subtler, more nuanced understanding of Gaskell's stance on emigration. To this end, in this chapter I bring the ending of Mary Barton into conversation with “My French Master” (1853) and Lois the Witch (1859). The 1850s was one of the peak periods of emigration in the nineteenth century. Eric Richards calculates that in 1852 alone, over 365,000 people left to settle elsewhere (11). Although we do not have an exact figure for the decade, the increasing popularity of emigration is attested to by the numerous schemes that sprang up around this period. While the majority of emigrants were self-financed (11), a large number also emigrated on government-supported schemes, while still others emigrated through philanthropic endeavors that were run by keen supporters of emigration. Caroline Chisholm, for example, founded the Family Colonization Loan Society in 1849, which lent money to families emigrating to Australia on an interest-free basis for two years or longer. In the same year, Sidney Herbert founded the scheme “Emigration of Distressed Needlewomen” and advertised it in Sharpe's London Magazine, noting “[h]ow easy it would be for two or three ladies to subscribe the necessary sum for sending out one emigrant” (103). 1
