Gaskell shares these concerns with George Eliot, who in Middlemarch especially explores how social mischance and errors of judgment can get in the way of human aspiration. Gaskell is interested in these themes in Wives and Daughters but is much less likely to project the cause and effect through a tragic lens. For instance, in Wives and Daughters, when the often-absent Dr. Gibson happens to intercept the ridiculous Mr. Coxe’s missive of love to Molly, the web of effects that drives the story is set in motion, while in Middlemarch there is nothing ridiculous about the determining accidents (the meetings of Dorothea and Casaubon, and Lydgate and Rosamond) that drive their failures and compromises. In Gaskell’s novel certain significant errors of judgment—in particular, errors of judgment about whom one loves—are ameliorated by mischance before an irrevocable step is taken. Like Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters places the most serious errors in judgment squarely in the hands of the men of science. Roger Hamley wins repute by publishing a scientific paper responding to French theorists, while Lydgate’s ambitions to discover a primary tissue also derive from contemporary preoccupations in French medicine. Middlemarch, which was published six years after Wives and Daughters, charts the destruction of scientific ambition by bourgeois marriage. And the grand error in judgment resides with a woman, as it does in Wives and Daughters, with the key difference that Gaskell allows Roger to make a mistake and then rebound from it. As such, one might say that, like Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters meditates on the human capacity for self-deception and compromise, but unlike Eliot’s novel, Gaskell’s novel is less interested in tracing the irrevocable outcomes of a wrong choice. The woman Roger will eventually marry will not impede his scientific aspiration, but rather further it. In this and other ways the register of Wives and Daughters is “comic,” not in the sense that it is humorous but (as in Shakespeare’s comedies) in the sense that it promotes resolution and social harmony. The scientific men who are prone to making poor judgments in Wives and Daughters are not presented in a buffoonish light; on the contrary, the men of science in the novel (including Roger Hamley, Lord Hollingford, and Mr. Gibson) are clearly the most appealing and respected men in the book. The novel is imbued with references to natural history and contemporary (to the 1820s) scientific concerns, including the two-year journey of exploration and natural-history collection in “Abyssinia” that Roger Hamley pursues. As Deirdre D’Albertis suggests in Dissembling Fictions, Roger is patently modeled on Charles Darwin, who when young was a naturalist on the Beagle and who was Gaskell’s relative; Gaskell, in a letter to her editor George Smith, connects Roger’s travels with Darwin’s. Africa (specifically, the east coast of Africa that Roger follows) should be understood as a point in the novel’s triangulated geography: England, France, and Africa are implicated in the novel’s deepest concerns, even though the narrative’s focus does not leave Hollingford. To the denizens of the town, and especially Squire Hamley, France functions as the resented and feared “other” to England’s steady centrality; clearly, the specter of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars (1800-1815) is still present, for there are repeated unfavorable references to the French, including references to “boney” (Napoléon Bonaparte) and “Johnny Crapaud” (an early version of the slur of the French as “frogs”). The great secret that Osborne keeps from his father has to do with France, for Squire Hamley’s aversion to the French is no secret. The resolution to which the novel ultimately comes suggests that social progress and the casting off of national prejudices are concomitant with each other. Africa, however, is not granted the same status, but rather functions symbolically in the novel as the opposite of Hollingford’s civilization.

When characters leave Hollingford, the narrative does not follow them on their journey; neither Roger, who traverses the east coast of Africa, nor Cynthia, who spends weeks in London, is present in the narrative when away, except through the occasional letter. Africa functions in the novel’s geographical triangulation as the imagined absence or emptiness, the place where one is “away” rather than a location in its own right. This geopolitical nearsightedness is underscored by Roger’s scientific pursuits while there: He is a natural historian collecting “unknown” specimens and “discovering” new places, which are then duly presented to the Geographical Society via letters and in person, when he returns. That Africa conjures up frightening associations for the women of Hollingford is probably a correct presentation of English cultural attitudes; lurid descriptions of Africa (especially of cannibalism) would have been familiar from newspapers and journal reports from the early decades of the nineteenth century through mid-century, when John Speke and David Livingstone made their storied journeys. One of the most jarring aspects of the BBC film version of Wives and Daughters (1999)—replayed in the United States on the PBS ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre series—is the choice that was made to show Roger Hamley occasionally in the landscape of eastern Africa. The visual interruption of the English country scene with the sublime scenery of Africa is one that the original novel does not make; the reader is never even privy to Roger’s letters, which are not reproduced within the narrative nor read aloud by the neglectful Cynthia, so Africa never gets represented in any meaningful or evocative way. Instead, Africa stands in for absolute absence, the place from which one returns.

The scientific exploration that Roger is sent on is but part of the broader discourse of science in the novel. Moreover, Roger’s scientific interest in the natural world, which Molly then adopts, seems to provide an analogy for the work that Elizabeth Gaskell is performing in her narrative. One way of understanding Wives and Daughters is to think of it as an analysis of people in their particular environment—a kind of “social ecology” in which the observation of a single person or specimen in its environment teaches one about general patterns or truths.