The novel was not finished when the Cornhill began publishing its monthly installments; in fact, even though Gaskell stayed months ahead of the publication schedule, she had not finished the novel by the late fall of 1865, when she suffered a sudden death. As her biographer Jenny Uglow details, Gaskell was much occupied by the outfitting of a country house in Hampshire that she had secretly purchased as a surprise for her husband. Intended as a house to retire to, Gaskell purchased the house with proceeds from her writing and with a loan from George Smith in anticipation of the success of Wives and Daughters. She died suddenly in the house in November 1865, her husband not yet aware of its existence and—for our purposes, most importantly—with the novel not quite finished. The novel is nevertheless substantially complete. You will find when you come to the end of your reading of this novel a letter from Frederick Greenwood, who was the editor of the Cornhill when Wives and Daughters was being serialized. It is the same letter that appeared in the Cornhill in January of 1866 in lieu of the final installment. In the letter Greenwood explains that the reader will already, in many senses, know what Gaskell had envisioned as the various fates of her characters. There is a marriage that is forecasted in the final chapter, and indeed no close or immersed reader of Wives and Daughters can have any doubt about its primary characters’ fates. Nonetheless, the reader does not get to see that conclusion unfold in Gaskell’s by-now-familiar narrative style; it is rather told to us by the editor. This is not disastrous, for the story does not feel incomplete, but the loss of the final chapters for the reader who has entered the world of the novel is indeed a felt loss.
Gaskell was in her mid-thirties when she first became a novelist. Although she had written various small sketches and fictional experiments, she did not begin the writing of a novel in earnest until late 1845, when she was prostrate with grief and depression from the death of her infant son William from scarlet fever. Her husband, a prominent Unitarian minister who was himself the author of various tracts, hymns, and a volume of temperance poetry, encouraged her to start the novel as a way to distract herself from her sorrow. Like many Victorians, Gaskell had a life punctuated with the effects of premature death. She herself lost her mother at the age of one. Born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on September 29, 1810, she was the eighth child of William Stevenson and his wife, Elizabeth. Although born in London, after her mother’s death in 1811 she was sent to be raised by her mother’s sister in Knutsfbrd—a small town in Cheshire that would become the model for Cranford (in her much-appreciated novel, Cranford) and Hollingford in Wives and Daughters. After her father’s death when she was nineteen, Elizabeth traveled widely in England, and in 1832 she married William Gaskell, whom she had met in Manchester, and settled there to the life of a Unitarian minister’s wife. This was not as restricting as it might sound, as Unitarians were deeply committed to various social and political causes, and as the wife of a Dissenting minister she would have been at the center of a lively and engaged community. Likewise, the Unitarian conception of marriage was understood less as a hierarchy and more of a partnership. Unitarians also believed strongly in the education of women, so it is not surprising that many of the period’s female intellectuals, including Gaskell, came from this background. Nevertheless, Gaskell’s early married life was consumed with the traditional duties of childbearing and child care. Between 1833 and 1846 she had six pregnancies, one of which resulted in a stillborn daughter; the other five produced her four girls—Marianne, Margaret Emily (“Meta”), Florence, and Julia—and the one son, William, who died in infancy.
Gaskell saw firsthand the experiences of the poor in Manchester, one of the new, booming industrial cities of the North that epitomized the new social conditions and class conflicts brought by industrialization. She always chose to live at the physical fringes of Manchester, for she was a somewhat unwilling denizen of the city, having grown up among the rural landscapes of Cheshire. From Gaskell’s observations of the Manchester poor emerged Mary Barton, one of an array of novels written in the 1830s and 1840s that brought to the attention of the greater public the terrible living and working conditions of the working classes. These “condition of England” novels contributed to the broad attempt to document the problems of industrial poverty under laissez-faire capitalism, to effect social change. Parallel attempts included early sociological enterprises such as Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (published in German in 1845; first English translation 1887) and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851, 1861-1862). Gaskell, as well as novelists such as Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Rev. Charles Kingsley, and Charlotte Brontë, contributed in immeasurable ways to the reform agendas of mid-century England. What have been called Gaskell’s social-problem fictions-Mary Barton and North and South (1855)—participated in the great era of agitation for reform in England. Unlike a number of countries on the European continent—such as France, Germany, and Italy, which reeled from outright revolution in 1848 and 1849—England for the most part kept the peace, despite the country’s considerable economic depression during what came to be known as the “Hungry Forties.” While the country experienced numerous incidents of localized violence, including riots and machine-burning, no large-scale revolutionary movement emerged in England.
Gaskell, in a sense, came of age during these rocky times and in a place where the rift between the wealthy and the poor was particularly deep. It is then perhaps not surprising that her first turn to fiction was an effort to explain to the middle classes that political insurrection stemmed from social and economic conditions. In 1832, the year that Elizabeth Gaskell moved to Manchester, there were riots born of fear of a cholera epidemic. Unitarians and Quakers—unlike members of other denominations, such as Church of England faithful, who viewed epidemics as acts of God—believed that these epidemics could be prevented by social reform, such as relief from the filth and overcrowding of the city. William Gaskell, who preferred the arenas of social and educational work to political reforms, worked for years on behalf of housing and sanitary reform, while Elizabeth Gaskell lent her pen broadly to the cause of social reformation. Although the politics of living and working conditions for poor and working-class people in England would necessarily dominate Gaskell’s experience, her politics were far from disengaged from pressing international issues. The Gaskells were visited by many American abolitionists and antislavery advocates, and Elizabeth was known for her antislavery position in a city whose sympathies were generally with the American South. (Despite her views on slavery, Gaskell deplored the suffering of the Manchester mill-workers who lost their work during the American Civil War when cotton from the American South ceased to be imported.) Mary Barton, not surprisingly, was criticized by industrialists from Britain’s North as unfair and overly broad in its characterization of the rich and poor; nevertheless, it was immediately successful and brought Gaskell fame as an author.