V Chapple's and J. G. Sharps's Elizabeth Gaskell: a Portrait in Letters (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1980). Also relevant is ‘Letters Addressed to Mrs Gaskell by Celebrated Contemporaries, Now in the Possession of the John Rylands Library’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xix (1935).

More general earlier studies of Gaskell's life and work include Mrs Ellis H. [Esther Alice] Chadwick's Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes, and Stories (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, 1910; revised edition, 1913), which contains valuable material but also a number of inaccuracies; G. DeWitt Sanders's Elizabeth Gaskell, Cornell Studies in English, XIV (Yale University Press, New Haven, and Oxford University Press, London, 1929) which includes a bibliography by C. S. Northrup; Elizabeth Haldane's Mrs Gaskell and Her Friends (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1930); Annette Hopkins's Elizabeth Gaskell: Her Life and Work (John Lehmann, London, 1952).

Recent biographical studies include Winifred Gérin's Elizabeth Gaskell: a Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976); Jenny Uglow's admirable critical biography, Elizabeth Gaskell: a Habit of Stories (Faber & Faber, London, 1993); and John Chapple's meticulously researched study of Gaskell's pre-professional life, Elizabeth Gaskell: the Early Years (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997). Shirley Foster's Elizabeth Gaskell: a Literary Life (Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2002) contains some of the new material made available by the second volume of the letters.

The most notable recent critical studies include Arthur Pollard's Mrs Gaskell: Novelist and Biographer (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1965); Edgar Wright's Mrs Gaskell: the Basis for Reassessment (Oxford University Press, London, New York and Toronto, 1965); Graham Handley's Sylvia's Lovers (Mrs Gaskell), Notes on English Literature series (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1968); Wendy Craik's Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (Methuen, London, 1975); Angus Easson's Elizabeth Gaskell (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston and Henley, 1979); Enid Duthie's The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell (Macmillan, London, 1980); Coral Lansbury's Elizabeth Gaskell (Twayne, Boston, Mass., 1984); Patsy Stoneman's Elizabeth Gaskell (Harvester, Brighton, 1987; Felicia Bonaparte's The Gypsy Bachelor of Manchester: the Life of Mrs Gaskell's Demon (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1992); Hilary Schor's Scheherazade in the Market Place: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1992); Jane Spencer's Elizabeth Gaskell (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1993); Terence Wright's Elizabeth Gaskell ‘We Are Not Angels’: Realism, Gender, Values (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1995); and Deidre D'Albertis's Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (St Martin's Press, New York, 1997).

For bibliographical information, J. G. Sharps's Mrs Gaskell's Observation and Invention: a Study of her Non-Biographic Works (Linden Press, Fontwell, 1970) and Walter E. Smith's Elizabeth Gaskell: a Bibliographical Catalogue of First and Early Editions 1848–1866 (University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1998) are indispensable.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text used here is that of the one-volume fourth edition, illustrated by George du Maurier and published in late 1863. As is explained in the notes and in Appendix 2, the second edition, published in March 1863, a month after the first, contained many revisions, mainly of a dialectal nature; the third edition replicated the second, but Gaskell made further revisions for the fourth after various topographical and historical inaccuracies had been pointed out to her. This last edition is therefore assumed to be the most authentic, the final version produced in Gaskell's lifetime and the one from which subsequent editions were printed. Its text has been reproduced here exactly, except for the correction of a few printer's errors and inconsistencies.

In the preparation of this current edition, the manuscript of the novel has also been consulted. The autograph manuscript of Sylvia's Lovers is held in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, which acquired it in 1986. It comprises a handwritten copy of the novel itself, accompanied by a one-sheet ‘Directions to the Printer' (in Gaskell's hand), and is complete except for the following: pp. 1–46 of Volume I are missing; pp. 1–10 and 167–80 of Volume II are missing, as are two chapters, XIV and XV which exist in the printed three-volume editions; the last seven and a half chapters of Volume III are missing, the manuscript breaking off four pages before the end of Chapter IX. The division of chapters into volumes is also different here from that of the printed editions, reflecting Gaskell's offer to George Smith to make each volume more equable in size by moving ‘a little of the second [volume] into the first' (Letters, p. 678); thus the manuscript Volume I ends at Chapter XII, whereas the printed one ends at Chapter XIV having incorporated the first two chapters of the manuscript Volume II. The manuscript contains various corrections and insertions, some clearly in Gaskell's hand, others possibly editorial; the most notable of these variants or changes (a fascinating confirmation of the intermittent and piecemeal composition of the novel) appear in the notes.

“‘ I MAY DIE,’ HE SAID ‘FOR MY LIFE IS ENDED!’”

This book is dedicated to
MY DEAR HUSBAND
by her who best knows his value

CONTENTS

I Monkshaven

II Home from Greenland

III Buying a New Cloak

IV Philip Hepburn

V Story of the Press-gang

VI The Sailor's Funeral

VII Tête-à-Tête—The Will

VIII Attraction and Repulsion

IX The Specksioneer

X A Refractory Pupil

XI Visions of the Future

XII New Year's Fête

XIII Perplexities

XIV Partnership

XV A Difficult Question

XVI The Engagement

XVII Rejected Warnings

XVIII Eddy in Love's Current

XIX An Important Mission

XX Loved and Lost

XXI A Rejected Suitor

XXII Deepening Shadows

XXIII Retaliation

XXIV Brief Rejoicing

XXV Coming Troubles

XXVI A Dreary Vigil

XXVII Gloomy Days

XXVIII The Ordeal

XXIX Wedding Raiment

XXX Happy Days

XXXI Evil Omens

XXXII Rescued from the Waves

XXXIII An Apparition

XXXIV A Reckless Recruit

XXXV Things Unutterable

XXXVI Mysterious Tidings

XXXVII Bereavement

XXXVIII The Recognition

XXXIX Confidences

XL An Unexpected Messenger

XLI The Bedesman of St Sepulchre

XLII A Fable at Fault

XLIII The Unknown

XLIV First Words

XLV Saved and Lost

CHAPTER I

Monkshaven

On the north-eastern shores of England there is a town called Monkshaven,1 containing at the present day about fifteen thousand inhabitants. There were, however, but half the number at the end of the last century, and it was at that period that the events narrated in the following pages occurred.

Monkshaven was a name not unknown in the history of England, and traditions of its having been the landing-place of a throneless queen2 were current in the town. At that time there had been a fortified castle on the heights above it, the site of which was now occupied by a deserted manor-house; and at an even earlier date than the arrival of the queen, and coeval with the most ancient remains of the castle, a great monastery had stood on those cliffs, overlooking the vast ocean that blended with the distant sky. Monkshaven itself was built by the side of the Dee, just where the river falls into the German Ocean.3 The principal street of the town ran parallel to the stream, and smaller lanes branched out of this, and straggled up the sides of the steep hill, between which and the river the houses were pent in. There was a bridge across the Dee, and consequently a Bridge Street running at right angles to the High Street;4 and on the south side of the stream there were a few houses of more pretension, around which lay gardens and fields. It was on this side of the town that the local aristocracy lived. And who were the great people of this small town? Not the younger branches of the county families that held hereditary state in their manor-houses on the wild bleak moors,5 that shut in Monkshaven almost as effectually on the land side as ever the waters did on the sea-board. No; these old families kept aloof from the unsavoury yet adventurous trade6 which brought wealth to generation after generation of certain families in Monkshaven.

The magnates of Monkshaven were those who had the largest number of ships engaged in the whaling-trade. Something like the following was the course of life with a Monkshaven lad of this class:—He was apprenticed as a sailor to one of the great shipowners—to his own father, possibly—along with twenty other boys, or, it might be, even more.