Another thing we may be permitted to notice, because it has a great and general significance. It may be true that this is not exactly the place for criticism, but since we are writing of Osborne Hamley, we cannot resist pointing out a peculiar instance of the subtler conceptions which underlie all really considerable works. Here are Osborne and Roger, two men, who, in every particular that can be seized for description, are totally different creatures. Body and mind they are quite unlike. They have different tastes; they take different ways: they are men of two sorts which, in the society sense, never ‘know’ each other; and yet, never did brotherly blood run more manifest than in the veins of those two. To make that manifest withoutallowing the effort to peep out for a single moment, would be a triumph of art; but it is a ‘touch beyond the reach of art’ to make their likeness in unlikeness so natural a thing that we no more wonder about it than we wonder at seeing the fruit and the bloom on the same bramble: we have always seen them there together in blackberry season, and do not wonder about it nor think about it at all. Inferior writers, even some writers who are highly accounted, would have revelled in the ‘contrast,’ persuaded that they were doing a fine anatomical dramatic thing by bringing it out at every opportunity To the author of Wives and Daughters this sort of anatomy was mere dislocation. She began by having the people of her story born in the usual way, and not built up like the Frankenstein monster; and thus when Squire Hamley took a wife, it was then provided that his two boys should be as naturally one and diverse as the fruit and the bloom on the bramble. ‘It goes without speaking.’ These differences are precisely what might have been expected from the union of Squire Hamley with the town-bred, refined, delicate-minded woman whom he married; and the affection of the young men, their kindness (to use the word in its old and new meanings at once) is nothing but a reproduction of those impalpable threads of love which bound the equally diverse father and mother in bonds faster than the ties of blood.
But we will not permit ourselves to write any more in this vein. It is unnecessary to demonstrate to those who know what is and what is not true literature that Mrs. Gaskell was gifted with some of the choicest faculties bestowed upon mankind; that these grew into greater strength and ripened into greater beauty in the decline of her days; and that she has gifted us with some of the truest, purest works of fiction in the language. And she was herself what her works show her to have been—a wise, good woman.
ENDNOTES
Chapter 1
1 (p. 6) the little town of Hollingford: The town in which Wives and Daughters takes place is based upon Knutsford, a town in Cheshire where Elizabeth Gaskell was raised from the age of thirteen months by her aunt, Hannah Lumb. Elizabeth Stevenson, Gaskell’s mother, had died in London in October 1811. Gaskell’s aunt would take the mother’s place, and Knutsford would become a fertile source for Gaskell’s novels, including Cranford, in which the town of the title was also based upon Knutsford.
2 (p. 6) Five-and-forty years ago: Gaskell is setting the action of the story back in time, with the main action of the novel occurring in the late 1820s through the early 1830s.
3 (p. 6) It was before the passing of the Reform Bill: The novel is set before the 1832 Reform Act, an act that brought a broader share of power to the middle classes and that redistributed parliamentary representation from small electoral boroughs to the nation’s growing industrial centers. It is thought to have saved England from the kind of unrest and revolutionary action that occurred on the Continent. As a result of the act the number of enfranchised men was extended from 435,000 to 813,000-but this was out of an adult male population close to 6 million. Nevertheless, this was a significant piece of reform, mostly because it inaugurated a political shift from power based solely on rank, birth, and land ownership to one based on wealth and capital; it set a precedent that would be followed up on in the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884-1885.
4 (p. 6) Whig family ... Tory family of Cumnor: Gaskell here switches the political parties of these two families, which we will learn are central to the novel. The Cumnors are actually more enlightened and align themselves with the Whigs, a party that in the eighteenth century thought of itself as progressive, having defended constitutional monarchy against Stuart Catholicism. Later in the novel Gaskell refines the political distinctions between the two families by making the Cumnors into Whigs and alluding to the “Toryism” of Squire Hamley. This is an inconsistency in the novel that Gaskell did not have the opportunity to change prior to her death.
5 (p. 7 ) a school of the kind we should call “industrial”: The aims of the school that Gaskell describes are self-serving in that the education it of fered to children of the working class prepared them to be servants. Gaskell’s take on education for the poor “nowadays”—that is, in the 1860s—makes it seem as if standards had changed more than they actually had. It was not until 18 71 that public education was established, and before then elementary education for the lower classes was voluntary and geared toward achieving only the most basic levels in reading, writing, and math.
Chapter 2
1 (p. 1 S) greenhouses and hothouses.... Lady Agnes had a more scientific taste: Lady Agnes’s interest in botany is not meant to be understood as an eccentricity, as the nineteenth-century saw a burgeoning fascination with the study of plants and flowers. Botany from the late eighteenth century was also considered an acceptable intellectual pursuit for young women. Although the study of plants was not only an upper-class endeavor, here the allusion to a “long glittering range” of greenhouses and the fact that Lady Agnes is a collector of plants, including rare orchids, is a clue to the wealth of the Cumnors.
2 (p. 22) Molly had never read the “Three Bears”: “The Three Bears,” of which Molly is ignorant, was and remains a common fairy tale. The question of whether fairy tales should be part of a child’s reading was a fraught one in the nineteenth century; one opinion had it that they were dangerous for children in that fairy tales did not conform to reason or fact. Lord Cumnor goes on to joke about her as “Sleeping Beauty,” of whom Molly also seems ignorant.
3 (p. 24) Lodge’s Portraits: Mrs. Kirkpatrick is showing Molly a work by Edmund Lodge entitled Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain (4 vols., 1821-1834).