He goes on to declare that women have no place in the business of literature. Queen Victoria assumes the throne of England.

1838   Charlotte resigns from her teaching position at Miss Wooler’s school. Dickens’s Oliver Twist  is published.
1839   Charlotte works for the next three years as a governess, first in Lothersdale and later in Rawdon. 
1840   “Clopton Hall,” a short essay recalling a visit to Clopton House during Gaskell’s school days, is included in William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places.  Thomas Hardy is born.
1842   A daughter, Florence, is born to Gaskell. Charlotte and Emily Brontë travel to Brussels to study at Pensionnat Heger, where they read, among other things, works by French and German Romantics. They stay less than a year, returning to Haworth because their aunt Elizabeth Branwell has died. 
1843- 1844   Charlotte spends a second year at the Pensionnat in Brussels honing her French and German language skills. She develops a strong emotional attachment to her married employer and former teacher, Constantin Heger. Charlotte returns to Haworth in January 1844. A son, William, is born to Gaskell in 1844. 
1845   While on family vacation in Wales, the infant William contracts scarlet fever and dies. Gaskell distracts herself from her grief by focusing on her writing. Friedrich Engels’s Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England)  is published.
1846   A daughter, Julia Bradford, is born to Gaskell. In February, Charlotte sends a manuscript, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (the pen names of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, respectively), to the London publisher Aylott and Jones. The poems are published in May at the sisters’ expense; only two copies are sold. In June Charlotte completes her first novel, The Professor. By the end of the year she has begun work on Jane Eyre. 
1847   Gaskell’s “Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras” appears in Howitt’s Journal, published by fellow Unitarian William Howitt. While Charlotte’s manuscript for The Professor is rejected by various publishers, her sisters’ novels—Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Wuthering Heights—are accepted for publication by Thomas Cautley Newby. Charlotte approaches another publisher, Smith, Elder, with Jane Eyre,  which is published in October to instant success, overshadowing the publication in December of her sisters’
   novels and surpassing them in acclaim. All three sisters are still publishing under their “Bell” pen names. 
1848   Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of a Manchester Life, is published anonymously, although the author’s identity is immediately uncovered. The sympathetic portrait of mill workers and their unbearable living conditions infuriates Manchester factory owners. Amid growing rumors that there is only one “Bell” writer, Charlotte and Anne travel to London to prove otherwise. Charlotte’s publisher, George Smith, learns the truth of the Brontës’ identities but is sworn to protect their secret. In September, Branwell Brontë dies after a sustained bout of depression, alcoholism, and drug use; in December, Emily dies of tuberculosis. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto) is published. Major rebellions take place in France, Austria, Prussia, and other European countries. William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair  is published.
1849   Gaskell’s writing finds many admirers, and she meets Dickens, Thackeray, and Wordsworth, among other well-known authors. In May, Anne Brontë dies of tuberculosis. Charlotte’s novel Shirley  is published by Smith, Elder. In November, Charlotte travels again to London, this time as a successful author. She, like Gaskell, meets one of her literary idols, William Makepeace Thackeray.
1850   Charlotte returns to London. In August, she travels to Windermere, where she and Elizabeth Gaskell meet for the first time. The two will become close friends. In December, Charlotte writes the prefaces and biographical notes for her sisters’ novels; she reveals the true identities of the “Bells” and works to protect the posthumous reputations of Emily and Anne, who have received some criticism for their “coarse” and “nihilisbtic” writings.