Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (22 page)

My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief.

Despite enlightened attempts to rebrand her as ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’, she remains, obdurately, ‘Mrs’. To call her anything else jars as painfully on the ear attuned to the Victorian world as would ‘the eminent author of
Jane Eyre
, Mrs Arthur Bell Nicholls’. There is a good reason for the title: wifeliness burns at the heart of Gaskell’s creativity. To console herself in the mourning period when her only son Willie died of scarlet fever in 1845, she wrote a story of industrial life, strife, suffering
and death (no Victorian novelist, incidentally, introduces more deathbeds into her fiction),
Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life
(1848). Her art was forged in the furnace of maternal grief.

Elizabeth Stevenson was born in Chelsea, London, of Unitarian parents. After quitting the Unitarian ministry her father took up the comfortable official position of Keeper of Records to the Treasury. Mr Stevenson’s ‘doubts’, and their impact on the females in his family, form the initial plot of
North and South
(1855). Her mother came from Cheshire, thus setting up from birth the cultural clash between North and South which was to preoccupy the future novelist. Mrs Stevenson died when her daughter was just over a year old, and the very young Elizabeth was effectively adopted by her aunt, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire – the original of ‘Cranford’. She grew up in the small country town, with its outlying farms, whose life she was later to chronicle. It was, however, only sixteen miles from Manchester, the most advanced industrial city in the world. Polarities were everywhere: factory chimneys and tea-cosies.

Like other Unitarian girls, Elizabeth was well educated at school, leaving at the age of seventeen with a working knowledge of modern and classical languages. In 1828 her brother, John Stevenson, a lieutenant in the merchant marine, disappeared at sea. His loss affected her strongly and the brother thought dead who returns to life appears as a motif frequently in her subsequent fiction. Around the same period her father married a woman whom Elizabeth – insofar as she was capable of ungenerous feelings – did not much like, a situation which is recalled as the central plot element in her last novel,
Wives and Daughters
. She nevertheless lived with her father until his death in 1829, after which she returned to Knutsford.

In 1832 Elizabeth married the Revd William Gaskell, a Unitarian assistant minister – and scholar – at the Cross Street Chapel in Manchester. The union was to be very happy. The first dozen years of her life were occupied in family and parochial matters, but she found time to write the odd piece of prose and verse. In 1837, for example, she embarked on a descriptive poem, in the style of Crabbe, called
Sketches Among the Poor
. But her first successful venture in authorship was
Mary Barton
. Initially it was to be called ‘John Barton’, with the intention of focusing on the miseries of textile mill workers in the trade depression of ‘the hungry forties’, and the near-revolutionary protest mobilised as Chartism, which demanded a total reform of England’s parliamentary system. It was an uncomfortable subject and Gaskell had difficulty finding a publisher for it. She was induced to sweeten the pill with a more romantic central plot and title and the revised novel was accepted in 1848 by Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s publishers, who paid her £100.

It was a canny purchase:
Mary Barton
was a hit. Carlyle (prominently quoted on the novel’s title-page – and not usually an admirer of the ‘novelwright’) approved
and only the mill owners objected to the anonymous author’s depiction of the Lancashire working man’s hardships and superior nobility to those who exploited their labour and seduced their daughters. Gaskell’s identity was soon known and overnight she became a celebrity. Dickens, another admirer, invited her to contribute to his new weekly magazine,
Household Words
, and it was in its pages that
Cranford
– the saga of the genteel spinster ‘Amazons’ of Knutsford – first appeared. Gaskell’s second full-length novel,
Ruth
(1853), renewed her assault on the middle-class conscience by exposing another ‘social problem’ of the Victorian era – bastardy and the persecution of the ‘fallen woman’. Dickens, it may be noted, paid her considerably less than his star male serialists.

North and South
(1855) marked a new level of maturity in Gaskell’s art. The story of the complicated love affair of a well-bred Home Counties girl and a northern mill owner reflected many of the tensions of the author’s own life and her double cultural inheritance. Following hard on the Preston cotton strike – which Dickens was dealing with, simultaneously, in
Hard Times
– the novel was highly topical, if sentimental in its social recommendations (essentially that masters and men should behave in a more Christian way to each other – foregoing the capitalistic doctrines of ‘Political Economy’). Dickens’s analysis was sharper.

In the same year, 1855, Gaskell’s friend, Charlotte Brontë died. Charlotte’s father and her husband invited Gaskell to undertake a biography, so as to put down the wild rumours circulating about the Haworth sisters. The resulting
Life of Charlotte Brontë
is the best of Victorian literary biographies, although it aggrieved living acquaintances of the novelist and a retraction of parts of the book had to be published in
The Times
.

By the late 1850s Gaskell was earning up to £1,000 for her novels. Her next major work,
Sylvia’s Lovers
, was begun in 1859, with extensive research into eighteenth-century Whitby. But domestic worries distracted her from this historical tale of love, smuggling and press-gangs which eventually came out in 1863. It was followed by
Cousin Phillis
(1864), a gentler, idyllic (and shorter) work which is Gaskell’s masterpiece.
Wives and Daughters
was being serialised at the time of the author’s death, and is unfinished. An ‘everyday story’, it recapitulates in the experiences of its heroine Molly Gibson much of the author’s own early life. A mother to the end Mrs Gaskell died of a sudden heart attack while visiting the house she had just bought at Holybourne with the £1,600 proceeds from
Wives and Daughters
, surrounded by three of her daughters. She is buried at Knutsford.

I am convinced that there are times in everybody’s experience when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

‘Fanny Fern’ was a bestselling novelist, serial wife and newspaper columnist (some accounts say the first columnist in the country, others merely the highest paid). Born Sarah Payson Willis in Portland, Maine, she was the fifth of nine children of a minister who himself doubled as a journalist. Pert from birth, her family nickname was ‘Sal Volatile’ – no fainting when Fanny was around. New England, with its advanced views on female education, was a lucky place for her to have been brought up. Like her better known brother, N. P. Willis, with whom her subsequent relations were to be vexed, Sarah learned about journalism early, helping her father edit his periodical
The Youth’s Companion
.

In 1837 Sarah Willis married the dashing young banker (some accounts demote him to ‘bank cashier’), Charles Eldredge. The happy couple had three daughters, but in 1846 Charles died of typhoid fever, leaving his wife and two surviving children destitute. The Willises proved unhelpful. Sarah went on to make a hasty second marriage with a widowed Boston merchant, Samuel Farrington, but they separated within two years. Sarah found herself once more without support and lost custody of her children. She turned to teaching and, in 1851, to her pen.

Under the pseudonym ‘Fanny Fern’ she began to publish ‘fun’ sketches in the papers, which proved hugely successful. Her first book,
Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio
, came out in 1853, when the author was a mature forty-two. She went on to write two novels, notably the autobiographical
Ruth Hall
(1856), which reportedly earned her the then massive sum of $8,000. ‘A domestic tale of the present time,’ the novel ponders the intertwining pressures of wifehood and female authorship in the form of Ruth Ellet’s happy marriage (evoking the author’s years with Eldredge), her early widowing, and her struggle for fame in the cut-throat, wholly masculine, world of New York journalism. It ends, inevitably, on the happiest and most pious of notes:

As the carriage rolled from under the old stone gate-way, a little bird, startled from out its leafy nest, trilled forth a song as sweet and clear as the lark’s at heaven’s own blessed gate.

‘Accept the omen, dear Ruth,’ said Mr. Walter. ‘Life has much of harmony yet in store for you.’

Ruth Hall
is
Jane Eyre
Americanised, modernised and smartened up. As with Brontë’s novel, the fact that living figures (not least Sarah’s infuriated brother,
Nathaniel) could identify themselves portrayed in its pages led to furore, which led to higher sales.

In 1856 Sarah married the biographer James Parton, a husband eleven years her junior. Now experienced in the matter of such vows, a pre-nuptial agreement ensured that she would keep her substantial earnings. In the same year as her marriage she made a contract with the editor Robert Bonner to write her ‘Fanny Fern’ columns exclusively for his
New York Ledger
. He paid her a huge salary of $100 a week – an expenditure which he shrewdly made common knowledge. However, it was not all wispy fern leaves, blowing airily in the prints. A ‘Whitmanite’ (when affiliation with the ‘deviant’ poet was risky), Willis was also a feminist – if a passive one. The best strategy for women, she believed, was to play possum. Not all her co-ideologues agreed. A daughter born to Willis’s last marriage died and she herself died, prematurely, of cancer.

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world?

He was, said the historian G. M. Young, a man travelling through life in a first-class carriage, fearing that he was carrying a second-class ticket. The great ‘snobographer’ (‘snob’, incidentally, was a word Thackeray invented in its current sense) was himself, if not quite one of the
genus snobiensis
, unsure of his social status, and constitutionally irritable. His background was upper enough. The Thackerays were Yorkshire gentry, going back generations. William was born in India, where his father was a senior colonial administrator, before dying, prematurely, in 1816 – leaving, in addition to his only legitimate child, a by-blow sibling by his Indian concubine. Thackeray was never stable on the subject of race; nor did he ever acknowledge the existence of his half-sister.

His mother remarried. Her second husband, Major Carmichael Smyth, was a man she had loved as a girl, but whom, she had been told, was dead – to forestall what her guardians saw as an imprudent match. It was a common ruse in that class, at that time. Thackeray loved his stepfather, and immortalised him as his Quixote
de nos jours
, Colonel Newcome, in
The Newcomes
. His mother – sternly evangelical
– he had a much harder time with. Psycho-biographers, who have been attracted to Thackeray like bees to a honeypot, see strains running through all his subsequent emotional life. His mother is depicted in the person of ‘virtuous’ characters such as Amelia Sedley, or Mrs Arthur Pendennis (to whom, mischievously, Thackeray gave as maiden name that of the most famous courtesan of the time, Laura Bell: both Mrs Pendennis and Mrs Carmichael Smyth were very severe on sexual immorality).

Young William was returned to England, aged seven, to receive the education of a gentleman at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge. On the way back, the ship touched at St Helena, where he caught a glimpse of the Corsican monster – sowing the seed of a lifetime fascination with the Napoleonic Wars. He went on to let his family down – an idler at school, he left the university ‘plucked’ (without a degree), having lost most of his sizeable patrimony gambling. And, it is likely, having picked up the gonorrhea which would curtail his life and cause him lifelong urethral difficulties. On being introduced to a Mr Peawell in later years, he sighed ‘I wish I could’. On the plus side, his early errors supplied the raw material for his fine
Bildungsroman, The History of Pendennis
(1850). Novelists waste nothing – even their own wastefulness.

After false starts in law in England, and drawing and journalism in Paris, the prodigiously gifted – but still wayward – young man embarked on a ten-year-long stint, ‘writing for his life’ with anonymous or pseudonymous ‘magazinery’. It was an apprenticeship but, at a penny-a-line, a tough one. By 1836 he had squandered what remained of his personal fortune and had married, improvidently, an Irish girl with no dowry. Having borne him two surviving daughters, Isabella developed incurable insanity. After 1840 they lived apart and by the time of the publication of
Jane Eyre
in 1847, his situation was exactly that of Mr Rochester – although Thackeray did not keep his wife in the attic, but in a comfortable asylum in Camberwell. It cost him three guineas a week.