Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South: Social Classes, Labour and Romance

Once one has read all of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, the natural next step is generally to read Elizabeth Gaskell. She wrote more than one novel. She also wrote a biography of Charlotte Brontë — whom she knew personally. It was the first Brontë biography, and is still read today although critics now consider it to have taken great liberties with the truth. Although Cranford — a gently-paced look at middle-class village life in the 19th century — has also been filmed for TV with Dame Judi Dench and other venerable actors, North and South is perhaps her most enduringly popular novel.

Gaskell was the daughter of a preacher/tutor/gentleman farmer/keeper of records. She ended up marrying a Unitarian minister and moving from rural Cheshire — the land of Cranford — to the industrial city of Manchester. There she mixed socially with members of parliaments, bankers, and literary figures; while she and her husband also undertook many charitable projects. She published novels in serialized form, and short stories, in a magazine that Charles Dickens ran (1850-59): Household Words. The two of them had conflicts of opinion, but for example I am glad that Dickens suggested North and South as the title instead of Gaskell's suggestion: Margaret Hale.

Elizabeth Gaskell, ca. 1860
via Wikimedia Commons

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North and South begins as the heroine, Margaret Hale, returns to the countryside parsonage where her father and mother are living. As a young girl she had been sent to live with London cousins, and now at the age of around 18 she has not seen her only brother Frederick for years, and has not had the closeness to her parents that she would otherwise have had.

Her father, the minister, begins to have doubts about the Anglican Church. Out of principle, he refuses to rise in the ranks of the Church, even though his family would be richer and his wife could climb back toward the aristocratic lifestyle into which she was born. He goes even further and gives up his work in Helstone (where the parsonage lies), stepping out of the Church entirely soon after his daughter returns to the household.

Howard's Lane in Holybourne,
where Elizabeth Gaskell bought a house just before she died

Photograph by Hugh Chevalier
via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 licence

AS HIS PLACE of self-exile from everyone who knew him before, Mr. Hale chooses Milton, a northern industrial town that is based on real-life 1850s Manchester. By moving so far away, he wants to escape the blame and ignominy that he would face as someone who has 'foolishly' imperiled his financial standing and respectability by offending a major social institution. The wife, despite her long running complaints about Helstone, is aghast; and so is Margaret.

Milton is a grim home. No greenery grows except at the fringes of the expanding city, the streets are bustling, industrial pollution spreads grime through the air and onto the scene, and factory machinery that does the business of the cotton industry renders it, at times, tremendously noisy.

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading

Although I've seen that there are of course interesting new releases, I am going to read 'old' books this January.

One of these new releases is, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, by Mildred D. Taylor, whose book The Well (about children in the face of racial prejudice) I found excellent.

As the Guardian's books preview of 2020 noted, Anne Brontë's 200th birthday was on January 17th. I'm ambivalent about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so if anything I'd reread Agnes Grey. Featuring a heroine who leaves home to teach due to her family's financial position, it helps sap all of the illusions that one had about governess work after reading Jane Eyre.

Charlotte did try to adjust expectations in Shirley, but Charlotte's melodramatic vein weakens the effect of her warnings; you don't — or at least I don't — expect to find 'tiger-like' James Helstones pouncing on governesses regularly. To leap to another book, Mrs. Norris, the aunt of the heroine in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is so villainous in an unspectacular, quotidian, realistic way that she makes you shudder; I'd say that the families with which Anne's character, Agnes, stays, impress you in that way as well.

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At the beginning of the year I started with an anthology of news analysis and opinion columns from the Manchester Guardian that was published at the end of 2017: The Bedside Guardian 2017.

It was about Brexit, too, of course; the anthology was compiled the year after the hapless referendum. (The opinion columnists' wide-eyed enthusiasm about the Labour Party's chances of fixing things under Jeremy Corbyn was painful to read, although natural because of how badly the 2017 election went for Theresa May, considering what's happened with the most recent election.)

A few writers argue that Britain's socioeconomic fabric is deteriorating rapidly, apart from thriving hotspots like parts of London.

I guess that right-wing newspapers publish viewpoints that the European Union is to blame for this. But the Guardian's analysts tend to argue that British austerity measures, the 'bedroom tax' which has made living in council housing in Britain an even greater burden, financial exploitation by under-regulated industries (e.g. payday loans), and council taxes that are too low to pay for adequate community services, play a greater role.

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A deeper look at Britain's economic woes is Mike Carter's book All Together Now?, which the Guardian's books arm also published in 2017. (I received it free of charge as a reward for being a member; and read it in December.)

In 2016 Carter travelled on foot between Liverpool and London, 'reliving' a labour rights march that his father took in the early 1980s. He explains his fraught relationship with his father, meets strangers and pre-arranged interviewees as he goes, records the battered socioeconomic order in the towns and cities through which he walks, and analyzes the causes.

Marie Curie Through Her Daughter's Eyes

Madame Curie
by Ève Curie, transl. Vincent Sheean

Radium Girls
by Kate Moore
Simon & Schuster UK
2016
(E-Book: 480 pp.)

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In the poor household of a teacher, a mother who had died of tuberculosis as her children were still young, and five children, in Varsovian houses in a Poland considered as a property of the Tsar's Russia, Marie Curie grew up in conditions that were unlikely for a Nobel Laureate. Women could not study at the official universities in Poland in the 1880s, and the academic culture was stifled by Russian political control.

Warsaw: Orthodox Church (1890-1900)
"Postcard showing a 19th century view of the Orthodox Church of
the Holy Trinity in Warsaw. Today the church serves as
the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army."
Marie Curie lost her faith after her mother
and one of her sisters died, early in her life.
via Wikimedia Commons

Even as Marie grew older, poverty vexed her as well as the lack of academic opportunity. Her family had made ends meet by renting out rooms to boarders, and through the teaching salary of the father. But the four remaining children (the eldest child died from a childhood illness) soon had to earn wages to educate, feed and shelter themselves.

Marie became a governess. Her job in the Polish countryside ended badly as she and the older brother of her charges fell in love; they were forbidden to marry by the young man's parents, and although she kept earning money there until there was another job for her, she felt her own intellectual development and self-education becoming sluggish. She fell into what I suspect was a depression. Marie had decided with her elder sister Bronisława (Bronya for short) that Bronya would study in Paris, that Marie would send her money that she could spare from her own expenses and her father's, and that as soon as enough money had gathered, the younger sister would study at the Sorbonne. At present she was just at the stage of earning and sending money.

But at last it happened. Paris brought Marie Skłodowska the ability to study as much as she wanted. She earned the best grades of anyone in her classes at the Sorbonne, I think. She also met Pierre Curie, when she was looking for more resources for her research. It was, it seems, the happiest period of her life in unpromising circumstances. Her apartment was dreadful and so unheated that one winter she piled all her clothing and even a chair over herself so that she could sleep; she barely ate anything and became ill; and she wore the same clothing for ages. Apparently Pierre Curie was her soulmate in this aspect too — appalling self-neglect, but also their idealistic and disinterested love of science, seemed to draw them together — and it seems charming, even if this reader at least spent many pages of Madame Curie (the biography first published in 1938 by her daughter Ève) trying to mentally reach through time to tell them to 'Eat something nourishing, for the love of God!'

It's difficult not to become misty-eyed at the portrait of the Curies' romance. It was at first complicated to keep the relationship going as Marie Sklodovska, loyal to Poland and very worried about her father, doubted whether to really marry a French citizen and bind herself to building a life that would keep her away from Warsaw and her family. But Pierre Curie's determination pulled them through, and Marie Curie never seems to have regretted it, although later in life she was — her daughter tells us — a cynic about love.

Pierre Curie liked going on endless walks without any predetermined goal, and Marie Curie enjoyed rambling and loved gardening until she died. So they shared a fondness of nature, too. Their honeymoon sounds beautiful and characteristic: they went on a bicycle tour (I wonder if bicycles were still enormous pennyfarthings in the 1890s?) through the French countryside. It turned out that their families got along well, too. There had been a de facto reunion around the time of the wedding, and Marie had finally been able to see relatives whom she had left behind in Poland, and with whom she'd only been able to talk by letter.

When the married pair returned from their honeymoon, they hoped in vain for a large, weatherproof laboratory space, as well as equipment and any paid staff. Their lab environment was so dusty, etc. that it had been contaminating their materials. It was worse for the Curies because they hated self-advertising and they were bad at actively snaffling paid positions and honours that would finance a better laboratory. Also, intrigues and academic politics ran against them. Prejudices existed against women and foreigners like Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences voted against admitting the Curies, and the Sorbonne dragged its heels for years before it finally offered Pierre Curie a professorship and refused even a little longer to pay for a laboratory or laboratory assistants. So, although the École Normale Supérieure was friendlier, offering Pierre a cheap laboratory and offering Marie employment, often the Curies had to finance their own research as they could.

"Rue Lhomond, Paris, 1913"
The street on which the Curies' 'cheap laboratory' stood.
From the Bibliothèque nationale de France
via Wikimedia Commons

Marie Curie chose to write her doctoral thesis about uranium, specifically an effect that Henri Becquerel had observed, i.e. that it can create black prints on photographic paper even though it isn't phosphorescent.