The Rev. Travers Madge was another who worked with the Gaskells, giving up his salary as a minister and devoting his life to the poor. The Misses Winkworth were also willing helpers, as also was John Bamford, whose poem, “God help the poor,” found a place in Mary Barton. In addition to the practical help which the Gaskells gave, they both cherished a wish to wield the pen in the interests of the poor, and in 1837 they jointly published in Blackwood’s Magazine a poem, marked No. 1, Sketches among the Poor. It is really a poetical rendering of the homely life of “Old Alice,” who figures so pathetically in Mary Barton. No other poem succeeded this, though it is well known that Mrs. Gaskell frequently expressed herself in verse, and Mr. Gaskell wrote a number of beautiful hymns, some of which are still to be found in various collections. He also translated hymns from the German, and was an expert in writing in the Lancashire dialect. In addition to his other duties, he was for a time a lecturer in English Literature and Logic at Owens College, now known as the Victoria University, Manchester.
The quiet life in Knutsford and Stratford-on-Avon inspired Mrs. Gaskell with those beautiful thoughts of the country which she has so well expressed in her pastoral stories, but it was the busy city of Manchester that roused her latent talent and winged her pen in writing of “the silent sorrows of the poor.”
The death of her only boy from scarlet fever in September, 1842, at Festiniog, where she had gone for a holiday, was succeeded by a lingering illness, and it was whilst lying on her couch that she found the necessary time to write her first novel. It has been said that Mary Barton contained too many death-bed scenes, but it is well to remember that it was from a death-bed that Mrs. Gaskell drew the inspiration which enabled her to depict in such realistic colours common scenes in the lives of the poor. The complaint that Mary Barton and Lizzie Leigh were much too sad—“stories with a sob in them”—probably prompted Mrs. Gaskell to prove that she could write in a humorous vein, hence her delightful sketches of Cranford Society. Mary Barton had attracted to her many literary friends, amongst the most enthusiastic being Charles Dickens, at whose request she became a regular contributor to Household Words, which he had just started. When Mrs. Gaskell sent him her first short paper entitled Our Society in Cranford, which included chapters one and two, she meant it for a complete sketch, but Dickens asked for more and still more, and so the history of the Cranfordian Society was chronicled bit by bit and afterwards compiled to form the book which is certainly the most popular of all Mrs. Gaskell’s works. “If my name is ever immortalised, it will be through Cranford, for so many people have mentioned it to me,” said Mrs. Gaskell, and she has proved a true prophet. Wherever the English tongue is spoken, Cranford is treasured, for its quiet, sunny humour is irresistible, and it has become a classic, which stands alone for its delightful winsomeness and tender pathos.
With splendid fidelity Mrs. Gaskell kept to her inimitable style, and the sketches are, as compared with those of Dickens and Thackeray, like carefully finished water-colour paintings beside the strong, bold canvas of a Rubens or a Vandyke. Instead of uproarious mirth Cranford provokes the kindly smile, which seldom broadens into a loud laugh, but it always leaves the reader the better for its kindly influence. Cranford gives the best reflection of Mrs. Gaskell’s beautiful character. She loved to tell stories of bygone days and to whet the appetite for amusing tales, which, while perfectly true to life, bordered on the ridiculous and dealt gently with the foibles and weaknesses of some phases of society. Of these stories she had a goodly store, which with gentle satire she could tell in her own sweet way. She was fond of making a pun or asking a riddle, which would at once arrest the attention, and, like Miss Galindo in My Lady Ludlow, she believed—“When everything goes wrong, one would give up breathing if one could not lighten one’s heart by a joke.”
In 1850, a short time before Mrs. Gaskell commenced Cranford, she met her great contemporary, Charlotte Brontë, at Briery Close, Windermere.
Sixty years afterwards, almost to the day, I was invited by the kind courtesy of the owner to visit this interesting house on the shores of Lake Windermere. The cosy drawing-room in which those two novelists met and their respective bedrooms, next to each other, from which there is a magnificent view of the lake and the hills beyond, are still held sacred to the associations of that August holiday in 1850, when the shy, elusive Charlotte Brontë first met her future biographer.
One of the party who met the two novelists during that visit once told me of the marked difference in these two women. Charlotte Brontë, in her black silk dress, sat on the couch nervous and shy, “looking as if she would be glad if the floor would open and swallow her, whilst Mrs. Gaskell, bright and vivacious, looked quite at home and equal to anything.” The two great novelists became attached to each other, and Charlotte Brontë visited Mrs. Gaskell’s home in Manchester on three separate occasions, and in return Mrs. Gaskell once spent a week in the old vicarage at Haworth. This friendship bore fruit in years to come, when Mrs. Gaskell was asked by old Patrick Brontë to write his daughter’s life, to which she willingly consented and at which she worked heartily and sometimes even passionately with so difficult a task.
This admirable biography has become a classic, and is a fitting memorial to the author of Jane Eyre both as a tribute of affection from one novelist to another, and a faithful record of a noble life. “I did so try to tell the truth,” wrote the biographer, and we know how well she succeeded, though on the publication of the third edition she found herself in a veritable “hornet’s nest,” and the worry and trouble from one source and another caused a temporary distaste for writing. After a time, however, the desire for wielding the pen came back to her, and she wrote My Lady Ludlow and Round the Sofa Stories, which undoubtedly owe something to her Stratford-on-Avon days in 1824-27 and her life in Edinburgh in 1829-31.
After a holiday in the Isle of Man in 1856, Mrs. Gaskell took a new departure and decided to write a maritime story. A visit to Whitby in 1858 resulted in the truly pathetic tale of Sylvia’s Lovers, which has the quaint fisher town of Whitby for its background. Descriptions of the old seaport are beautifully and accurately rendered, and a visit to Whitby is not complete unless Sylvia’s Lovers has been read within sight and sound of the sea around that rugged coast. The farms and homesteads mentioned can be localised, and they answer minutely to the descriptions given. Haytersbank Farm, Sylvia’s old home, Moss Brow, where the Corneys lived, old Foster’s shop in the Market-place, are all still there.