ABSTRACT
The equation of visiting with learning (and knowing) saturates the social literature of nineteenth-century Manchester, and indeed of the condition of England fiction. Elizabeth Gaskell’s famous rejection of political economy in her preface to Mary Barton, represented not just a gambit of gendered positioning, but a repudiation of the whole epistemological regime of the statistical movement and its anti-clerical overtones. The literature of the visiting associations produced powerfully stylised texts which employed a range of conventional tropes and stock characters, but often offered little in the way of direct social description. Indeed, there was some tension between its purported realism and the extent to which its substance was often borrowed, reworked or perhaps even entirely imaginary. In fact, most Victorian social and philanthropic activity was territorial, its operations were focused on particular districts, or its city-wide presence was sought through district organisation. Territorial possessiveness was often just below the surface, especially among the Anglican clergy.
