[6] I should mention here, by the way, on Sir Adolphus Ward’s authority, the virtual certainty that before writing her own novel she “had remained quite unacquainted with both Coningsby and Sybil.”
She did not go on to exploit that success, that effect. She had said what she had to say; and having found, in the saying of it, her gift as a writer, she passed on to other things. A very beautiful necklace of novels was the result. But this serene indifference to what might with others have meant a very strong “literary” temptation implied no failing devotion to the poor whose woes the book had, once for all, championed. Some eighteen years later, in 1862–3, a time of trouble came over Manchester and South-west Lancashire in general, which
called forth one of the most notable, and certainly one of the best-organized efforts of goodwill and charity which this country has ever seen. In the long struggle between masters and men, the times of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, due to the outbreak and continuance of the American Civil War, brought about a protracted truce, in which the kindly feelings inspired by the self-sacrificing efforts of many leading employers of manufacturing labour cannot but have counted for much.
I am quoting from Sir Adolphus Ward:
Mrs. Gaskell, whose name had so good a sound among the Lancashire working classes that we hear of an Oldham man regularly bringing his children to gaze upon the house in Plymouth Grove where dwelt the authoress of Mary Barton, gave many proofs in these times of trouble of her readiness to help suffering in every way in her power.
The relief problem, in short, claimed her almost entirely during that long tribulation of her people. “We were really glad,” she writes to a friend, “to check one another in talking of the one absorbing topic, which was literally haunting us in our sleep, as well as being our first thoughts in wakening and the last at night.” In organising, superintending, working sewing-rooms, providing dinners, she would work for six or seven hours of her day.
The shadow of these and other industrial troubles recurs, indeed, in some of the later novels, particularly in North and South: but always you see that with her there is no political axe to grind, nor scarce a consciousness of there being any such thing: and this disinterested charitableness leads her, as it were, imperceptibly into regions of which Disraeli, with all his genius, never won ken. The first incentive, I have tried to show, operated on both. But whereas he went off into a life of action—great and powerful action, let all admit—to return in his old age to revisit with Endymion the glimpses of the moon and his boyish dreams, this unambitious Victorian lady, having found her literary talent, went on to employ it with a serenity unmoved to worship any idols of the market. Glad of course she was to enjoy and use her gift: very modestly glad (as what true woman or man is not?) of the recognition it brought, but following the path to the end to bequeath to the world several noble novels and three shining masterpieces. Of these, of course, the Life of Charlotte Brontë is one and Cranford the second: and for the moment I leave you to guess at the third. For the moment I wish you to picture this woman. In her writing, as in her daily life, she had no mannerisms. She copied neither Disraeli, nor Dickens, who also championed the poor and was moreover her encourager and editor; nor the Brontës, for all the spell of their genius; nor Trollope, nor George Eliot; though all were great and flattered her with their admiration. Past them all we see her quietly keeping the tenor of her way. Now and again she seems to falter and ask herself—herself, mind you—Is this trouble to speak the simple truth as best I can, without heat, really worth its reward as set against the heat and acrimony it provokes? The strictures passed on her Life of Charlotte Brontë gave her, for a time, a distaste for it all. But she wrote on, after a little, and on Sunday, November 12, 1865, killed of a sudden by a pang of the heart—carried away, as her epitaph at Knutsford (which is “Cranford”) says, “Without a moment’s warning”—she left her writings all just as clean and bright as the bunch of her household keys.
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that, and the action, fine.