'North and South' and the Sea: Geography, Labour, and ‘Condition of England’ Fiction
Keywords:
'North and South', Elizabeth Gaskell, the sea, condition of England, mutinyAbstract
This article explores the literary geographies through which Elizabeth Gaskell negotiates ethical and social questions in North and South (1854-55). Specifically, it examines the novel’s (dis)connecting of maritime and urban spaces, characters, concerns, and languages, as well as how gendered and class identities are forged within these spheres. The industrial-dispute plot of North and South is mirrored, in complex ways, by the sub-plot concerning Frederick Hale’s mutiny on the Orion. Heroic figures succeed by applying the lessons of seafaring craft which the novel’s naval personnel seem unable to compute, or to bring to bear upon the plot. The protagonist Margaret Hale’s absorption of these heroic traits also is complicated by the novel’s conception of the gendered limitations of a female protagonist. By focusing on the novel’s ambivalent explorations of seafaring and its relevance to life on dry land, this article reveals the occlusion of maritime work from the narrative economies that formulated the Victorian ‘condition of England’. It presents a complex case study of how the Victorian realist novel assigns weight and importance to certain terrestrial contexts of labour over maritime ones.References
Anon. (1847-48) ‘Short Notice of a Cruise in the West Indies, with Some Account of a Spanish Slave Captain.’ United Service Magazine 1 (1847): 392-403; 2 (1847): 29-44, 392-406; 3 (1847): 12-25, 335-48; 1 (1848): 27-38.
Auden, W.H. (1950) The Enchaf’d Flood, or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber and Faber.
Bodenheimer, R. (1988) The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bonaparte, F. (1992) The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs. Gaskell’s Demon. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Burroughs, R. (2015) ‘Gaskell on the Waterfront: Leisure, Labour and Maritime Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.’ In Morris, E., Gruver Moore, S., and Scholl, L. (eds) Place, Progress, and Personhood in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell. London: Routledge, pp. 11-22.
Burroughs, R. (2016) ‘The Nautical Melodrama of Mary Barton.’ Victorian Literature and Culture, 44(1), pp. 77-95.
Byron, Lord G.G. (1814; 1970) ‘The Corsair.’ In Jump, J. (ed) Lord Byron: Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 278-303
Byron, Lord G.G. (1812-18; 1900) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Chicago: W.B. Conkey.
Byron, Lord G.G. (1823; 1970) ‘The Island; or, Christian and his Comrades.’ In Jump, J. (ed) Lord Byron: Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 349-366.
Campling, L. and Colás, A. (2021) Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World. London: Verso.
Carruthers, J. (2020) ‘Rough and Smooth Sands: Social Thresholds and Seaside Style.’ In Carruthers, J. and Dakkak, N. (eds) Sandscapes: Writing the British Seaside. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 125-139.
Chapple, J. (1997) Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cohen, M. (2003) ‘Traveling Genres.’ New Literary History, 34(3), pp. 481-499.
Cohen, M. (2010) The Novel and the Sea. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dening, G. (1992) Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Featherstone, D. (2012) Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. London: Zed Books.
Freedgood, E. (2022) Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fulford, T. (2003-04) ‘Poetic Hells and Pacific Edens.’ Romanticism on the Net 32-33 [Online] [Accessed 23 July 2023] https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/1900-v1-n1-ron769/009259ar/
Gaskell, E. (1851-53; 2006) Cranford and Other Stories. Ware, Herts: Wordsworth Editions.
Gaskell, E. (1854-55; 1994) North and South. London: Penguin Popular Classics.
Gilmartin, S. (2012) ‘The Great Mediterranean of Oxford Street: Nineteenth-Century Navigations of City and Sea.’ Victorian Maritime: A Symposium. Institute for English Studies, Senate House, University of London, 9 June 2012.
Harty, J. (2011) ‘Playing Pirate: Real and Imaginary Angrias in Branwell Brontë’s Writing.’ In Moore, G. (ed) Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 41-58.
Horne, R.H. (1846) ‘Glorious War!’ The People’s Journal, 1, pp. 230-232.
Horne, R.H. (1848) ‘A Soldier’s Skull; or the Murder of Discipline.’ Howitt’s Journal, 3, pp. 139-140.
Howitt, M. (1847) ‘The Deserter in London.’ Howitt’s Journal, 2, p. 162.
Jerrold, D. (n.d.) The Mutiny at the Nore. London: Thomas Hailes Lacy.
Kingston, W.H.G. (1847) ‘The Confession of a Pirate; or the Force of Conscience: The Chaplain’s Tale.’ United Service Magazine, 1, pp. 50-61, 246-54.
Land, I. (2009) War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750-1850. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lee, J. S-J. (2010) The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, M. D. (2010) ‘Mutiny in the Public Sphere: Debating Naval Power in Parliament, the Press, and Gaskell’s North and South.’ Victorian Review, 36(1), pp. 89-113.
Lutz, D. (2011) ‘The Pirate Poet in the Nineteenth Century: Trollope and Byron.’ In Moore, G. (ed) Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 23-39.
Markovits, S. (2005) ‘North and South, East and West: Elizabeth Gaskell, the Crimean War, and the Condition of England.’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59(4), pp. 463-493.
Marryat, Captain [F]. (1830; 1904) The King’s Own. London: Macmillan.
Marryat, Captain [F]. (1836; 1970) Mr Midshipman Easy. London: Dent.
Mineka, F.E. (1944) The Dissidence of Dissent: The Monthly Repository, 1806-1838. University of Carolina Press.
Morse, D. D. (2011) ‘Mutiny on the Orion: The Legacy of the Hermione Mutiny and the Politics of Nonviolent Protest in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.’ In Moore, G. (ed) Pirates and Mutineers of the Nineteenth Century: Swashbucklers and Swindlers. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 117-131.
Moynahan, J. (1960) ‘The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations’. Essays in Criticism, 10(1), pp. 60-79.
Parkins, W. (2004) ‘Women, Mobility and Modernity in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South.’ Women’s Studies International Forum, 27, pp. 507-519.
Rediker, M. (1987) Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell, G. (1995) The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815. Oxford: Clarendon.
Said, E. W. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Random House.
Schor, H. M. (1992) Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, M. (1836; 1894) The Cruise of the ‘Midge’. London: Gibbings.
Sekula, A. (2002) Fish Story. Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag.
Southey, R. (1798; 1823) ‘The Sailor’s Mother.’ In The Minor Poems of Robert Southey. Vol. II. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, pp. 157-166.
Stevenson, J. MS. and TS. letters to Stevenson (nee Gaskell), E. In J.G. Sharps Collection, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. Boxes: 30/2, 30/3, 33/16, 34/6.
Stoneman, P. (1987) Elizabeth Gaskell. Brighton: Harvester.
Tigges, W. (2003) ‘A Glorious Thing: The Byronic Hero as Pirate Chief.’ In D'haen, T., Liebregts, P., Tigges, W. and Ewen, C. (eds) Configuring Romanticism: Essays Offered to C.C. Barfoot. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 153-172.
Uglow, J. (1993; 1999) Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. London: Faber and Faber.
Viswanathan, G. (1998) Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Woloch, A. (2003) The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wootton, S. (2008) ‘The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero is Middlemarch and North and South.’ Romanticism, 14(1), pp. 25-35.
Wright, E. (1965) Mrs. Gaskell: The Basis for Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
