Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/114

Rh —prison philanthropist. 104 (l ..'.  1'] I1 IA of the Records to the Treasury, and was living in Chelsea, I publication, and offering the authoress £100 for the copy- still a diligent contributor to various periodicals of the day. Mrs Stevenson, Mrs Gaskell’s mother, was a Miss lloll-and, of Sandlebridge in Cheshire, an aunt of the late Sir Henry Holland. She died at the birth of her daughter, who was in a manner adopted, when she was only a month old, by her 1nother's sister, Mrs Lumb. This lady had married a wealthy Yorkshire gentleman, but a few months after her marriage, and before the birth of her child, discovered that ' her husband was insane, and ﬂed from him to her old home in the little market town of Knutsford, in Cheshire. Mrs Lumb’s own daughter having died, she transferred all her affection to the little Elizabeth, between whom and her there existed through life the strongest bond of affection. During Elizabeth's childhood at Knutsford she was visited now and then by her sailor-brother ; but while she was still a girl he went to India, where he somewhat mysteriously, and without any apparent motive, disappeared, and all further trace of him was lost. She was afterwards sent for about two years to a school kept by a Miss Byerley at Stratford-on-Avon, and on leaving school went for a time to live with her father, who had married again. Under his guidance she continued her studies, reading with him in history and literature, and working, chieﬂy by herself, at Latin, Italian, and French, in all of which she was in later life proﬁcient. Having tenderly nursed her father in his last illness, she returned to her aunt at his death in 1829 ; and, with the exception of one or two visits to Newcastle, London, and Edinburgh, she continued to live at Knutsford till her marriage. She had at this time a reputation for great beauty; and even in later life her exquisitely-shaped soft eyes retained their light, and her smile its wonderful sweetness. Her marriage to the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., of Cross Street Chapel, Manchester, took place August 30, 1832, at Knutsford church; and during the earlier years of her married life Mrs Gaskell lived very quietly in Manchester, surrounded by a few intimate and cultured friends, and devoting all her time and abilities to the cares of a necessarily frugal household. Among these friendships, that with Miss Catherine Vinkworth and her sisters was perhaps the longest and most cherished. From the ﬁrst, although she never visited the poor as a member of any organized society, she sought by all means in her power to relieve the misery which, in a town like Manchester, she was constantly witnessing. She gave the most devoted help and tender sympathy to such cases of individual distress as came under her notice. She assisted Mr Travers Madge in his missionary work amongst the poor, and was the friend and helper of Thomas Wright, the She also made several individual friendships among poor people, and knew personally one or two types of the Chartist working-man. She was specially interested in the young working-women of Manchester, and for some years held a weekly evening class at her own house for talking with them and teaching them. Of Mrs Gaskell’s seven children, two were still—born, and another, her only son, born between the third and fourth of her four living daughters, died at the age often months. The death of this baby is said to have been the cause of Mrs Gaskell’s beginning to write, when she was urged by her husband to do so, in order to turn her thoughts from her own grief. She began by writing a short paper called “ An Account of Clopton Hall,” for William Howitt’s Visits to Ii’emar-hable Places. This was followed by one or two short stories, such as the “ Sexton’s Hero,” for the People’s Journal ; and then she wrote ﬂlary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life. On its completion, she sent it to one publisher in London who rejected it unread, and then to Messrs Chapman and Hall, who, after keeping the manuscript for a year without acknowledgment, wrote to her accepting the novel for I right. The appearance of Jfary Ba-rton in 1848 caused great excitement in Manchester, and a strong partisanship was felt for and against its anonymous author. After its publication Mrs Gaskell paid several visits in London, where she made many friends, among whom we may men- tion Dickens, Forster, Mrs Jameson, Lord Houghton, Mrs Stowe, Ruskin, and Florence Nightingale. Her friendship with Charlotte Bronte also dates from about this time, when the two authoresses met at the house of Sir James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth, near Bowness, in Westmore- land, and Mrs Gaskell received her first impressions of the shy “little lady in a black silk gown,” who afterwards be- came personally her dear friend,-—although, from a literary point of view, they could hardly help being rivals,—and the story of whose life, when it was ended, Mrs Gaskell was destined to write with such consummate care and tender appreciation. But xllary Barton was to prove only the first of a series of scarcely less popular publications. which appeared either independently or in periodicals such as Ilousehold Words. It was followed in 1850 by The .l[0or- land Cottage. Crawford and Ruth appeared in 1853 ; North and South, in 1855 ; The Life of Charlolfc Bronte, in 1857 ; Round the Sofa, in 1859; Right at Last, in 1860; S3/lvia’s Lovers, in 1863 ; and Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters, in 1865. During these years——years of increasing worldly pro- sperity and literary distinction——Mrs Gaskell often went abroad, chieﬂy to Paris and Rome, but once for a long visit to Heidelberg, and once also to Brussels, to collect infor- mation about Charlotte Bronte’s school-days. In Paris her genius was warmly appreciated ; and, while she was a guest among them, Guizot, Montalembert, and Odillon Barrot vied in doing her honour. Of her visits in England some of the pleasantest were to Oxford, where she counted among her friends Mr J owett and .Ir Stanley (dean of Westminster). At other times, when she was busy writing one of her novels, she would leave home with one or two of her children, and carry her manuscript to some quiet country place, where she could write undisturbed. When she was at home, although she was enthusiastically interested in the political questions of the day, and her warm, impulsive nature made her ready at any time to give personal help and sympathy where it seemed to be needed, Mrs Gaskell refrained from taking active part in public movements or social reforms, if we except, indeed, the great sewing—school movement in Manchester at the time of the cotton famine in 1869. Her life was thoroughly literary and domestic. She read much : Goldsmith, Pope, Cowper, and Scott were the favourite authors of her girlhood; in later life she admired Ruskin and Macaulay extremely, and delighted in many old French memoirs of the time of Madame de Sévigné, whose life she often planned to write. It is remembered of her that one day, when she was reading George Eliot’s ﬁrst and anonymous story Amos Barton, she looked up and said, “I prophesy that the writer of this will be a great writer some day.” The prospect of the awful cotton famine in Manchester in 1862 set Mrs Gaskell anxiously thinking what could be done to relieve the coming distress, and she decided, “without any suggestions from others, on a plan of giving relief and employment together to the women mill-hands, which was an exact prototype of the great system of relief afterwards publicly adopted, namely, the sewing-schools.” When these were formed, Mrs Gaskell “ merged her private scheme in the public one, and worked most laboriously in the sewing—school nearest her home.” This was but three years before her death. Still busy writing her novel Wires and Daughters, she was staying with her children at Holybourne, Alton, in Hampshire, a house which she had just purchased as a surprise and