ABSTRACT
The polarization of rich and poor, these epigraphs suggest, was at its maximum when Elizabeth Gaskell set out to depict the abyss of present misery in which the poor consoled themselves with thoughts of that future gulf between Dives and Lazarus. Her solution involved the creation of a dual narrative voice capable of addressing a deeply polarized audience, but at the cost of a highly unstable text, as famously exemplified in chapter3. Here Gaskell gives a vivid and persuasive sketch of the process of capital accumulation, showing how the poor weaver sees 'his employer removing from house to house, each
one grander than the last', while the weaver and his fellows struggle to feed their children, yet immediately enters the now infamous caveat: 'I know that this is not really the case ... I know what is the truth in such matters'. 1 In this textual crux, what requires negotiation, however, is less whether Gaskell is right to undermine her hero's views, than whether the first' I' and the second' I' are the same, and whether either is Elizabeth Gaskell.
