Looking at secular books: Mrs. Gaskell

NORTH AND SOUTH

WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

CRANFORD

By Mrs. Gaskell

Penguin Classics

I only managed to see a couple of episodes of Cranford, but they were enough to send me back to my old Penguin Classics of Elizabeth Gaskell’s other works, North and South and Wives and Daughters.

If you were impressed by the series, do look at the books! Though Cranford itself is much more episodic and more subdued in written form (the BBC had to import characters from some of her shorter works to spice up the plot!), these longer and more serious works are worth a read.

Mrs. Gaskell suffered in the past by comparison with her more famous friends, the Bronte sisters, the much more elegant and witty Austen, or the prodigious Dickens, and it is true that her prose is more laboured and her subjects more prosaic. Dispensing with Gothic themes or romantic comedy, Gaskell’s presentation of life is sensible, solid and very real. In North and South, industrial growth, pollution and strikes are intermingled with a romantic plot. Poverty and social embarrassment are a constant threat, not only to the working class, but also to the educated and settled middle classes. And then we find death and illness occurring and recurring through the plots. From these observations of all kinds of people in distress and need it comes as no surprise that these books were written in a manse, to eke out her husband’s income!

Gaskell’s theology

The particular theology of Elizabeth Gaskell is interesting. She was the daughter of a prominent Unitarian and married to another. The idealism and social concern of Victorian Unitarianism, which dispensed with the Trinity, and thereby threw away the Bible and the cross, are everywhere evident in her stories. There are really very few wicked characters! Kindness and education transform the gruffest, hard drinking fellow into a spiritually sensitive worker, while the heroes and heroines, with their small faults, are all open hearted, working together for social concerns.

No grace required

In Gaskell’s world, heaven is wide open, and often talked about, but grace is not needed. It was good to read books which have such a heightened and even didactic concern for goodness, after a pile of cynical contemporary novels, but I’m so glad I don’t have to live in that good religious world — I’d never measure up!

Sarah Allen