‘An Incident at Niagara Falls’

315This short story was first published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in June 1858 (97, pp. 80–2). It was signed ‘By Mrs. Gaskell’. EG’s association with Harper & Brothers, prolific publishers of English fiction, is likely to have been through Sampson Low, their English agent, for whose publishing house she had edited and revised Maria S. Cummins’s novel Mabel Vaughan in 1857 (see p. 311). To EG, Low was ‘rather a “tricky man”’ (Letters, p. 488), who had brokered the publication of her story ‘The Doom of the Griffiths’ in the magazine in January 1858.