Although Whitby's population had remained fairly static (according to F.K. Robinson, around 1790 it was between ten and eleven thousand, and this figure had barely altered in 1860),5 the chief source of its livelihood – and liveliness – was no longer the whaling industry, which had ceased at least thirty years before, but the growing number of visitors for whom it was an increasingly popular resort.

In other ways, however, there had been little change since the beginning of the century. The parish church, in its prominent position overlooking the estuary, the open sea and the ruined abbey, on a headland 199 steps up from the town, was basically as it was in the 1790s: apart from a new porch, now the principal entrance, added in 1823, an extension to the north transept in 1818, and the removal of the 1778 pulpit to a side-aisle in 1847, what little ‘modernization' that had occurred had been carried out in the mid eighteenth century. As Robinson explains, the church largely escaped the zeal of contemporary ecclesiologists for restoration:

It will be seen, that the repairs and extension of the structure have taken place when old church arrangements had not the position in the public mind which they now occupy.6

The interior which Gaskell describes in Chapter VI (she calls the church St Nicholas, not its real name, St Mary), with its florid wall memorials and lack of ‘wood-work' as she denotes it7 (the medieval rood screen across the chancel arch had been removed) is thus in the main that in which the real-life model for Darley, the whaleman killed in the press-gang riots, received funeral rites in 1793.

Many streets were unchanged, too. Sylvia and Molly Corney come to sell their butter and eggs in the market-place, although it was not exactly where Gaskell describes it, but slightly higher up High Street. The Butter Cross mentioned in the text did not exist as a market site – perhaps Gaskell had in mind the old mutilated cross on the Abbey Plain – but in 1793 there was a Town Hall or Tolbooth here (built in 1788 and still in good repair today), between whose pillars prospective sellers set out their wares. The shop and bank run by two Quaker brothers, Jonathan and Joseph Sanders, the originals of the Foster brothers in the story, was still to be seen – as it is now. Likewise, although the actual ‘Randyvowse' inn in Haggersgate which was attacked in the 1793 riots was not standing by 1859, there were plenty of similar buildings in the old town which could serve as models. The surrounding countryside would of course have been even less changed, and the two farms, Haytersbank (Robsons) and Moss Brow (Corneys), which are the focal points for much of the novel, are clearly based on existing structures. Mrs Chadwick states that ‘the old farms are still there‘,8 affirming that both have their originals in agricultural homesteads on the West Cliff – Straggleton Farm and High Straggleton – a claim that has been supported by later investigators. A. W. Ward, however, in his introduction to the Knutsford edition, argues that ‘the site of Haytersbank farm was on the way to Robin Hood's Bay to the south-east of Whitby‘,9 topographically a less convincing suggestion. Both claims remain disputable in any case, since Gaskell herself stated that she had no specific originals in view when she described the two farms. As she explains in a letter of November 1863 to James Dixon:

I did not intend Haytersbank for any particular place, or if I had some faint recollection of a farm house like it, it must have been a place near Sunderland where I once stayed for a couple of nights.10

Whatever its source, the composite recollection contributes to the realism of the narrative setting.

The verisimilitude of Gaskell's portrayal of the locale is attested to by the history of the illustrated (fourth) edition of the novel. When, in late 1863, George du Maurier was asked to undertake the illustrations for a new edition, he drew on sketches of Whitby made by Henry Keene, the brother of Charles Keene the actor, because these seemed to capture so well the town as it was described in the fictional text. Only later did he discover that Monkshaven and Whitby were one and the same.

Once inspired, Gaskell started to research in order to guarantee the historical and regional accuracy of her text.11 The progress of the novel itself, however, was erratic. Two days before Christmas 1859, she wrote to her publisher, George Smith, to say that she had three pieces of writing currently under way, the third of which was ‘The Specksioneer in 3 vols' (this was her first title for the work), ‘not far on, but very clear in my head, and what I want to write more than anything’;12 four days later she told him that she would try to send the whole three-volume novel to him in ‘September next’.13 References in March 1860 to investigations being made on her behalf by her husband, William – who consulted the Annual Register for details of press-gang activities in the north-east – and by people in Yorkshire suggest that she had begun work. In late March, she apparently read to her London friends, Emily and William Shaen, ‘a good deal of her new story’,14 and a few days later she told Charles Eliot Norton that with most of the family soon to be away, in ‘the comparative quiet of the house I mean to write very hard at my story; which ought to be done by Septr but… won't I fear’.15 But like all Victorian writing women, she was still dogged by the multifarious demands of domestic life. Though by early May she had written 117 pages of 570, in June Marianne, another daughter, became ill with suspected smallpox, and after Gaskell had nursed her and organized a subsequent holiday in Heidelberg for herself and three daughters, most of the summer had gone.

Similar delays and interruptions continued for the next two and a half years. Two volumes were finally completed by early December 1861 and sent to Smith; in mid March 1862 she was well on into the third volume and was discussing the title with him. And yet in late August she was apologizing to W. S. Williams, the publisher's reader, that she dare not promise the completed manuscript ‘before the end of January’,16 although she had already corrected and returned the proofs of the first two volumes. She sent a rather more defensive and irritable apology to the publishers, Smith, Elder and Co., in early September:

I should like to remind you that I never named any positive time for the completion of the book, and only yielded to Mr Smith's request that the printing might be commenced because I believed it to be convenient to him, and also because he stated that this beginning to print need not hurry me.17

Finally, Gaskell, now keen to get on with another unfinished piece (probably ‘A Dark Night's Work’), managed to draw the book to a close in Eastbourne in September 1862, and it was eventually published in February 1863, over three years after its inception.

This prolongation suggests not only the unavoidable constraints upon Gaskell's time and energy, to which she so often refers in her letters, but also the seriousness with which she thought about her writing. The debates about the novel's title – earlier possibilities included ‘The Specksioneer' (too difficult to pronounce); ‘Philip's Idol' (too open to wilful misreading); ‘Monkshaven' (‘very stupid‘) – show this. The irregularity of composition inevitably had some effects on the text itself. There are, as J. G. Sharps18 and others have pointed out, many internal inconsistencies, especially in dates and names; the actual manuscript reveals the lack of continuity of the writing – words are crossed out, changed or left blank, and in one place Gaskell actually asks the editor to remind her of the names she has decided on for the owners of the shop.19 And yet these are merely the mechanics of the novel, minor mistakes which in no way detract from it as a whole.