ABSTRACT
As with ‘Clopton Hall’, this piece originated in a letter, from EG to Mary Howitt on 18 August 1838 (Letters, pp. 28–33) in which she described various customs in and around the Knutsford of her childhood. She was responding to the first edition of William Howitt’s The Rural Life of England (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1838). In the Preface to the second edition of the book in 1840, Howitt acknowledged that he had incorporated suggestions from ‘my English readers known and unknown’, who supplied ‘most valuable corrections and novel information, [which] will become apparent in the progress of perusal’ (pp. vii–viii). EG’s material was incorporated into the chapter on ‘Lingering Customs’, pp. 589–90. Howitt extracted relevant passages from EG’s letter, reordering the material and providing links with his original text. Carol Martin was the first to note the connections between the letter and second edition of Howitt’s book, and to analyze Howitt’s editorial decisions. 1 His interventions render the material less specific, and in some cases he provided answers to Gaskell’s rhetorical questions. The elimination of EG’s personal references distances the speaker from the subject, Martin suggests, and lends an air of condescension to this portion of Howitt’s text. The piece has not been reprinted until now.
