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EVOLUTIONARY DISCOURSE AND THE CREDIT ECONOMY IN ELIZABETH GASKELL'S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2013

Mary Elizabeth Leighton  and
Lisa Surridge
Mary Elizabeth Leighton
Affiliation:
University of Victoria
Lisa Surridge
Affiliation:
University of Victoria
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Extract

When Elizabeth Gaskell died in November 1865, she left unfinished her final novel, Wives and Daughters (1864–66). The Cornhill Magazine's editor, Frederick Greenwood, published a tribute to Gaskell with the novel's final installment. Her fiction, he wrote, pulls you from “an abominable wicked world, crawling with selfishness and reeking with base passions into one where there is much weakness, many mistakes, sufferings long and bitter, but where it is possible for people to live calm and wholesome lives . . .” (Gaskell 685–86; ch. 60). As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund observe, Greenwood shaped Gaskell's reputation for a hundred years “as an author whose work captured . . . the idyllic charm of a lost era” and took “readers away from unpleasant realities” (158). Notably, Greenwood's list of “unpleasant realities” (wickedness, selfishness, and base passions) implicitly refers to capitalism — that is, to the economic world of the 1860s from which Gaskell ostensibly encouraged her readers to retreat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 487 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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