Sylvia's Lovers

SYLVIA'S LOVERS

ELIZABETH CLEGHORN GASKELL was born in London in 1810, but she spent her formative years in Knutsford, Stratford-upon-Avon and the north of England. In 1832 she married the Reverend William Gaskell, who became well known as the minister of the Unitarian Chapel in Cross Street, Manchester. For the first sixteen years of her marriage, she combined the activities of motherhood, the management of a busy household and parish work in an area notorious for its poverty and appalling living conditions. She also travelled and started to write. Mary Barton, her first full-length fiction, published in 1848 and set in industrial Manchester, was an instant success. Two years later she began writing for Dickens's magazine, Household Words, to which she contributed fiction for the next thirteen years, her most notable work being another novel of Manchester industrial life, North and South (1855). In 1850 she met Charlotte Brontë, who became a close friend until the latter's death in 1855. Soon after this, Gaskell was chosen by Patrick Brontë to write The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a carefully researched and sympathetic account of this great Victorian novelist. Gaskell's situation as a minister's wife and as a successful writer gave her a wide circle of friends, from both the professional world of Manchester and the larger literary world. She was a committed and uncompromising artist, as Dickens discovered when, as editor of Household Words, he unsuccessfully tried to impose his views on her. She proved that she was not to be bullied, even by a man of such genius as he. Her later works, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), Cousin Phillis (1864) and Wives and Daughters (1866), are usually considered to be her finest, revealing developments in narrative technique and subtleties of character portrayal. Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865 at Alton, Hampshire, in the house that she had bought with her literary earnings.

SHIRLEY FOSTER was born in north London and educated at the universities of London, Michigan, Yale and Liverpool. After teaching at Hull University, she went to the University of Sheffield, where she is currently Reader in English and American Literature. She has published widely in both these areas, most particularly on Victorian women's fiction and nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel writing. Her most recent publications are An Anthology of Women's Travel Writing, with Sara Mills (Manchester, 2002), and Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2002).

ELIZABETH GASKELL

Sylvia's Lovers

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
SHIRLEY FOSTER

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First published 1863

Published in Penguin Classics 1996

Reprinted with new Chronology and revised Further Reading 2004

14

Introduction, Notes and Appendices

Copyright © Shirley Foster, 1996, 2004

Chronology copyright © Laura Kranzler, 2004

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192198-3

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Further Reading

A Note on the Text

SYLVIA'S LOVERS

Notes

Appendix 1: Sources

Appendix 2: Dialect and Textual Changes

Chronology

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My production of this work owes a debt to a variety of people. Foremost is Andrew Sanders, not only because his excellent World's Classics edition provided an invaluable basis on which to build, but also because he most generously lent me his own (rare) copy of the fourth edition of Sylvia's Lovers, the text for this edition of the novel. I am very grateful to the librarian of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, Harold Brown, who devoted much time to searching for information for me, and also to the librarians of the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, the Portico Library, Manchester, and the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, all of whom gave me considerable help. I should like to thank, too, Tony Bennett of the Music Department, University of Sheffield, and John Widdowson of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language at the University of Sheffield, who knows almost all there is to know about Yorkshire dialects and customs. Alan Shelston, Jane Mills and John Chapple encouraged and assisted me in many ways. And I received constant help, advice and materials, as well as much personal kindness, from Geoffrey Sharps, the repository of information for all Gaskell enthusiasts.

INTRODUCTION

I

When Elizabeth Gaskell visited Whitby with her two daughters, Meta and Julia, in early November 1859, she probably had no intention of basing a novel on the place; indeed, there is no evidence to validate Henry James's claim that she had gone there ‘for impressions preparatory to “Sylvia's Lovers” .1 The trip was made primarily for Julia's health (she is described as having ‘outgrown her strength‘);2 and in fact although they were there for nearly two weeks conditions were not propitious for extensive expeditions and observation, as Gaskell explains later in a letter to James Dixon, who had pointed out topographical inaccuracies in her text:

I was only there once for a fortnight… in such cloudy November weather that I might very easily be ignorant of the points of the compass if I did not look at the map.3

Nevertheless the place seems to have made a considerable impact on her; not only did she go out walking every day, but she also engaged in conversation with a wide range of Whitby inhabitants, learning from them facts of local history and customs which she would subsequently incorporate into her fiction.

The idea of writing a story about Yorkshire appears to have been in Gaskell's mind for some time, however. In the Preface to the first edition of Mary Barton (1848), she refers to a tale, ‘the period of which was more than a century ago, and the place on the borders of Yorkshire’,4 which she had already begun earlier. More immediately, she had been engaged with researches for her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), and although for this her explorations had been in the West rather than the North Riding, the crucial influence of the environment on isolated and close-knit communities must have struck her in both regions. This, compounded with her own experience of the north-east coast during her residence in Newcastle from 1829 to 1831 plus her family's marine background (several of her male relatives had been in the Royal Navy), may have encouraged her to take up her former idea and develop it into a full-length novel. In terms of plot, too, Sylvia's Lovers reworks certain themes prominent in Gaskell's previous work, most notably that of temporary disappearance or loss. The mysterious way in which people can vanish and then later reappear is treated in her story ‘Disappearances’, written for Household Words (June 1851); and, more pertinent to this novel, ‘A Manchester Marriage’ (Household Words, December 1858) deals with a woman unknowingly married to two husbands simultaneously but spared the distress of enlightenment by the decision of the returned first husband not to reveal his identity.

Whatever ideas were fermenting in her mind already, then, were clearly brought into focus by the Whitby experience. It is quite clear that Monkshaven in Sylvia's Lovers is the coastal town of Gaskell's brief but intense acquaintance, although what she saw in 1859 was in several respects different from the period of her story, nearly sixty years earlier. The row of houses in one of which she lodged, a Mrs Rose's at 1 Abbey Terrace, had only just been completed as part of a development on the town's West Cliff, purchased by George Hudson in 1848. The existing swivel-bridge over the Esk, linking the two halves of the town, had in 1835 replaced the old drawbridge erected in 1766. Whitby itself had become far more in touch with the outside world: the horse-drawn railway between Whitby and Pickering was opened in May 1836, and was soon superseded by a steam line in 1845, part of George Hudson's Railway Company; stage and mail coaches started running in 1795 and by mid-century there was an extensive network between Whitby and Leeds, York, Sunderland, Shields, and Stockton.