Mr. Frederick Greenwood added a tenderly written eulogium at the end of Wives and Daughters which has been published along with the novel, and it formed a beautiful and fitting close to the story. “What promised to be the crowning work of a life is a memorial of death. A few days longer and it would have been a triumphal column, crowned with a capital of festal leaves and flowers, now it is another sort of column—one of those sad white pillars which stand broken in the churchyard.”
Wives and Daughters was issued in book form in 1866 by Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., and was extremely popular, partly because of the tragic death of the author, but more so for the beauty of the story. To those who know the little Cheshire town of Knutsford, it is interesting to locate the Cumnor Tower and the Park gates through which Molly Gibson drove when attending her first garden party from Church House, formerly her uncle Holland’s home, now known by the picture postcards as Molly Gibson’s House. The home of the Hamleys is to be identified with one of the old halls in the district, but the charm of the story is its naturalness and the characters are so well balanced. When putting down the book one involuntarily says, as Mrs. Gaskell wrote of Charlotte Brontë, “If she had but lived.” This novel displays her as a writer grown to maturity, and as one who had advanced from simple, didactic, domestic stories for the Parish Magazine, to novels which charm a very much wider circle and are acceptable to all classes of society.
Mrs. Gaskell is buried in her beloved Knutsford, in the old Unitarian burial ground around the church, where a simple granite cross marks the resting-place. On her grave is often to be found a wreath or bouquet as a tribute of grateful homage from one of her many admirers. Her writing was done in the spirit of true helpfulness, and it is impossible to read her stories without feeling the better for their perusal. She brought a well-trained mind to her work, and whatever she did was done conscientiously. Her life was not an eventful one, but it was crowded with good deeds.
The revival of the Gaskell cult is helping to familiarise the present generation with her beautiful stories of the mid-Victorian period. It is noticeable that although she spent many of her holidays on the Continent, France, Germany, and Italy being her favourite holiday resorts, all her novels tell of English life, for she was careful never to get out of her depths. She wrote of what she had experienced and of what she saw in the daily life of those around her. Future generations will read Mrs. Gaskell’s novels and feel that she was a keen observer of humanity, and she had not only the desire but the capacity to comprehend it.
The outstanding qualities of her novels are individuality, truthfulness, and purity. The power of entering into the feelings of her characters is almost unique, as Mary Barton, Ruth, Sylvia’s Lovers and Wives and Daughters prove abundantly. Those of a past generation could best testify to the truthfulness of her stories. They were real word-pictures beautifully conceived and true to life, and there was an absence of exaggeration—one of Mrs. Gaskell’s pet aversions.
The purity of her writing is proverbial. There is no author who has excelled her in that quality, and her novels are all free from dross and censoriousness. Hers was a spirit that made for the morning and heralded a purer day, and the immortality of her name rests on the Pauline injunction, “Whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
Esther Alice Chadwick.
West Brae, Enfield, Middlesex,
August 25th, 1911.