Elizabeth Gaskell was distantly related to the Wedgwoods and always took an interest in the family. The cascade of marriages precipitated by Fanny and Hensleigh's union in 1832 particularly delighted her. She was about to marry herself, but while she was 21 and her groom, Rev. William Gaskell, just 5 years older, Fanny was 31 when she married and 3 years older than Hensleigh. Respecting their difference in age, Elizabeth would always refer to Fanny as ‘Mrs Wedgwood’ and saw her as her metropolitan role model, taking her advice on who to call on and copying her way of leaving visiting cards. Elizabeth's trips to London, where she regularly stayed with Fanny and Hensleigh, offered a welcome break from her duties as the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester. Her husband had been appointed an assistant minister at the Cross Street Chapel (in preference to James Martineau) shortly before their marriage. Elizabeth played her part conscientiously, teaching in the Sunday School and sharing his concern to improve the lot of the poor through education and self-help, but avoiding the smoke and stink of the city by settling in comfortable houses on the outskirts of Manchester, where she could tend her garden and manage a few farm animals. Four of her six children survived, Marianne, Meta, Flossie and Julia. Both of her sons died early.

Her first novel, Mary Barton, was written in the aftermath of her younger son's death. Its unsympathetic portrait of the northern millocracy outraged her husband's congregation. Elizabeth escaped the outcry by going to London. Both she and Fanny were keen for their daughters to get to know one another. In the summer of 1849, Snow joined the Gaskells on a holiday in Skelwith in the Lake District; in 1852 the Wedgwoods and Gaskells were together at Silverdale after Meta had stayed for several weeks in London. Elizabeth had joined them there for a ‘very pleasant’ dinner to celebrate Snow's 18th birthday. Ras Darwin and his sisters, Susan and Catherine, were there, as were Effie and Hope, Lady Alderson, one of the Visitors at Queen's College and, rather oddly, A. H. Clough, then spending a miserable time as the reluctant Principal of the new University Hall, and Frederick Furnival.