ABSTRACT
After her marriage in 1832, Gaskell was to live for the rest of her life, except for holidays and visits, in Manchester, a city already rnade great by the Industrial Revolution, yet expanding immensely throughout her lifetime. That city and the reflection of its growth in the social novel is the concern of this chapter. When William Gaskell attempted to divert his wife's grief at the death of their son by suggesting she write a story, Gaskell began a historical tale, set in eighteenth-century Yorkshire, but, as she herself said, the everyday insisted: 'I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets.'1 In the novel she produced, Mary Barton (1848), she writes both of the workmen 'who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want' (p. lxxiii) and of the tragic individual, John Barton. She wrote from what she knew and had seen, and could feel the individual gripped in a historical process that threatened England with the upheavals of the 1840s that culminated in 1848 with Europe's year of revolutions If it were 'an error that the woes, which come with ever returning tide-like flood to overwhelm the workmen in our manufacturing towns, pass unregarded by all but the sufferers' (p. lxxiv), still the error was so bitter that ·anything that made people aware of the truth was for
Mary Barton and North and South
Cotton was king in Manchester and the focus of the city's splendours and miseries. The city of the 1840s was the product of a rapid growth that continued throughout the century. The main action of Mary Barton is set about 1838 or 1840: there was a commercial crisis in 1841 and the mood of the Hungry Forties and the demands of Chartism colour, as they provided the impulse for, the writing. North and South ( 1855) is more or less contemporary in setting and the difference between the two novels is partly in Gaskell's developing skill (she wrote Ruth and Cranford between the two industrial novels and advanced rapidly artistically), partly in changing personal attitudes, and partly in the changes that took place in Manchester between the 1840s and 1850s. Revolution at least seemed to be averted and issues could be discussed more dispassionately because there seemed time in which to find solutions.
