VI
I shall pass the catalogue of these writings very quickly in review. The authoress of Mary Barton was hailed at that time, when novels were yet few and even poetry but beginning to recover its strength, by great men and by Dickens especially, who engaged her pen for the first number of his serial adventure, Household Words. In 1853 appeared her second important novel, Ruth (which possibly influenced Dickens’ own Hard Times, published a year later). Then in June, 1853, came Cranford, made into a book from papers contributed to Household Words between December, 1851, and May, 1853. North and South ran in Household Words from September, 1854, to January, 1855, and appeared as a book, with some slight alterations, in that year. In that year also (on March 31st) Charlotte Brontë died and Mrs. Gaskell consented, at the old father’s urgent request, to write the Biography. She gave herself up to the work and finished it in the spring of 1857. The strictures on it—truth, as Milton says, never comes into the world but as a bastard—broke her spirit for a while for all but occasional writing: and then came the cotton famine, of which I have spoken, to tax all her energies. But after the stress of this they revived. In 1863 appeared Sylvia’s Lovers, in 1863–4 Cousin Phillis in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine. In this magazine (August, 1864–January, 1866) followed her last story, Wives and Daughters, published soon after in that year as an unfinished work. So you see the whole tale of it lies within the central years of the last century, beginning with Mary Barton in 1848 and ending sharply just eighteen years after.