Chapter 50
1 (p. 532) my dividends: Mrs. Gibson’s former brother-in-law manages the money from the inheritance left by Mr. Kirkpatrick, Mrs. Gibson’s first husband. The money he sends her would be interest on a small property; we know it was not enough to make her independent, as she accepted Mr. Gibson so that she might give up teaching.
Chapter 56
1 (p. 598) like the Faithful John of the German story... to keep it from breaking: Cynthia is confusing two fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm. Their Kinderund Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories, generally known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales; 1812) includes one entitled “The Frog Prince,” which approximates the story Cynthia tells here, with the exception that the servant’s name is Trusty Henry. Another Grimm’s fairy tale is entitled “Faithful John.”
Concluding Remarks [by the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine]
1 (p. 645) Here the story is broken off, and it can never be finished: The final chapter of Wives and Daughters is written by Frederick Greenwood, the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, which was the journal that was publishing Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel in serial form. The final chapter outlines what the reader already has good reason to believe: that Roger will return from Africa, will marry Molly, and will become an important scientific figure. The reason for the editor’s remarks is that Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly, her final novel not quite finished, in November 1865. The novel was published in monthly installments from August 1864 to January 1866, with the final installment written by the editor.
INSPIRED BY WIVES AND DAUGHTERS
Some stories are best told in installments, and some were specifically intended to be told in this way Though written for serial publication in the Cornhill Magazine, Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters is not necessarily such a tale. As Amy M. King describes in the Introduction, Gaskell often defied the commercial demands of serial publication. For example, at one point she rankled at the request of Charles Dickens, who edited her work for one of his magazines, that she end her installments with dramatic plot moments, and in the end she wrote and paced her novels as she, and not her editors, wanted.
In the modern television miniseries, or even serial television dramas, we might find serial publication’s equivalent: the impetus to narrate beyond the confines of individual installments, which results in a format uniquely suited to stringing audiences along with a good yarn. The four-episode Wives and Daughters (1999), produced by ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theater and directed by Nicholas Renton, is an exemplar of this updated form of serialization, dramatizing Gaskell’s story of stepmothers, betrothals, and gossip with competence and grace. That the format of choice for the adaptation was a television mini-series, rather than film, is canny, for the effect replicates in part the experience of serialization that the novel’s first readers would have experienced.
While Renton’s film, full as it is with realistic scenery and beautiful, ornate nineteenth-century dress, may not feel to us like an “every-day story” (as Gaskell had originally subtitled her novel), it nonetheless insists that the modern viewer be reminded of an “everyday” that is now past. Moreover, it impresses the modern viewer with its dramatic sweep, convincing performances, and evocative sets, which are well employed in this depiction of the lives of early-nineteenth-century “wives and daughters.” Renton (Far from the Madding Crowd, 1998) enlists a cast that comprises a stable of period-drama regulars, among them Justine Waddell as an often silently expressive Molly Gibson, Bill Paterson as Mr. Gibson, Francesca Annis as Mrs. Gibson, Keeley Hawes as Cynthia Kirkpatrick, Anthony Howell as an earnest Roger Hamley, and Michael Gambon as Squire Hamley
But the secret to this Wives’s success is its screenwriter, Andrew Davies. Primarily known as the author of the Bridget Jones screenplays, Davies has produced an adaptation both faithful to Gaskell’s text (many of the film’s scenes are peppered with lines taken directly from the book) and refreshingly unadorned; the dialogue is crisp and naturalistic rather than overly affected and distracting. Readers looking for the satisfaction of a proper ending to Gaskell’s unfinished novel will delight in the film’s dénouement. Rather than a mournful good-bye at the windowsill reprising the famous engagement scene, Davies has Molly promptly run after Roger; the end is a reunion that gratifyingly relieves hours of carefully crafted tension, which may satisfy readers denied the pleasure of a final installment written by Gaskell.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
CHARLES DICKENS
You may perhaps have seen an announcement in the papers of my intention to start a new cheap weekly journal of general literature.
I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of “Mary Barton” (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages.
—from a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell (January 31, 1850)
HENRY JAMES
We cannot help thinking that in “Wives and Daughters” the late Mrs. Gaskell has added to the number of those works of fiction-of which we can not perhaps count more than a score as having been produced in our time—which will outlast the duration of their novelty and continue for years to come to be read and relished for a higher order of merits. Besides being the best of the author’s own tales-putting aside “Cranford,” that is, which as a work of quite other pretensions ought not to be weighed against it, and which seems to us manifestly destined in its modest way to become a classic—it is also one of the very best novels of its kind. So delicately, so elaborately, so artistically, so truthfully, and heartily is the story wrought out, that the hours given to its perusal seem like hours actually spent, in the flesh as well as the spirit, among the scenes and people described, in the atmosphere of their motives, feelings, traditions, associations. The gentle skill with which the reader is slowly involved in the tissue of the story; the delicacy of the handwork which has perfected every mesh of the net in which he finds himself ultimately entangled; the lightness of touch which, while he stands all unsuspicious of literary artifice, has stopped every issue into the real world; the admirable, inaudible, invisible exercise of creative power, in short, with which a new and arbitrary world is reared over his heedless head—a world insidiously inclusive of him (such is the assoupissement of his critical sense), complete in every particular, from the divine blue of the summer sky to the June-bugs in the roses, from Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her infinite revelations of human nature to old Mrs. Goodenough and her provincial bad grammar—these marvellous results, we say, are such as to compel the reader’s very warmest admiration, and to make him feel, in his gratitude for this seeming accession of social and moral knowledge, as if he made but a poor return to the author, in testifying, no matter how strongly, to the fact of her genius. -from an unsigned review printed in The Nation (February 22, 1866)