The methodology of natural history emphasizes close observation of the common or everyday, to better understand how the particular fits into the broader rubric of nature. Likewise, the novel studies or observes Molly and the inhabitants of Hollingford to better understand the broader category of human nature. This scientific-like observation of Hollingford is one way of understanding the rhetorical conceit behind the novel’s subtitle (“An Every-Day Story”); the author and the natural historian share a common perspective and commitment. As a biographer notes, “Gaskell claims simply to look, like Roger Hamley, into a pool which others might pass by: the everyday life of families in a country district. But she knew that her dull-looking specimens would turn out to be rich and rare” (Uglow, p. 585).

Roger Hamley is the character most profoundly associated with the study of nature: “He had been out dredging in ponds and ditches, and had his wet sling-net, with its imprisoned treasures of nastiness, over his shoulder” (p. 115). The study of nature comes indoors as well, where the primary tool of the early-nineteenth-century scientist is employed:

That evening he adjusted his microscope, and put the treasures he had collected in his morning’s ramble on a little table; and then he asked his mother to come and admire. Of course Molly came too, and this was what he had intended. He tried to interest her in his pursuit, cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely everyday speech. Molly had come down to dinner wondering how the long hours till bedtime would ever pass away ... But prayers and bedtime came along before she expected; she had been refreshed by a new current of thought, and she was very thankful to Roger (pp. 121-122).

Here the study of natural objects is represented as palliative, for Molly had been deeply upset by the news of her father’s remarriage; the scene also captures the first moment that Molly values Roger. He had found her outside crying earlier in the day, a scene in which his innate tenderness is demonstrated through a plant and in which he sees Molly (as if for the first time) while looking out for a particularly rare specimen:

He did not see Molly as he crossed the terrace-walk ... when, looking among the grass and wild plants under the trees, he spied out one which was rare, one which he had been long wishing to find in flower, and saw it at last, with those bright keen eyes of his. Down went his net, skilfully twisted so as to retain its contents while it lay amid the herbage, and he himself went with light and well-planted footsteps in search of the treasure. He was so great a lover of nature that, without any thought, but habitually, he always avoided treading unnecessarily on any plant; who knew what long-sought growth or insect might develop itself in that which now appeared insignificant? (p. 115).

Of course it is Molly whom he cannot see as he searches out the rare specimen, which the attentive reader will recognize as a narrative forecasting of his future relation to her.

Natural history in Wives and Daughters is more than a provider of analogies for love plots. The value natural history places on “observation” is mirrored by the novel. One of the best examples of this mirroring occurs in chapter 33, when Gaskell’s own observational powers and commitment to the description of natural detail appear side by side with the letter awarding Roger the scientific travel fellowship. The letter says that he had “great natural powers of comparison and classification of facts; he had shown himself to be an observer of a fine and accurate kind” (p. 364). The scene Gaskell describes invites the same kind of praise, and bears citing:

It was one of those still and lovely autumn days when the red and yellow leaves are hanging-pegs to dewy, brilliant gossamer-webs; when the hedges are full of trailing brambles, loaded with ripe blackberries; when the air is full of the farewell whistles and pipes of birds, clear and short—not the long full-throated warbles of spring; when the whirr of the partridge’s wing is heard in the stubble-fields, as the sharp hoof-blows fall on the paved lanes; when here and there a leaf floats and flutters down to the ground, although there is not a single breath of wind. The country surgeon felt the beauty of the seasons more than most men (p. 362).

The observer (here, Dr. Gibson) is present in the scene, and the details that are enumerated reveal a sensitivity to the process of observation familiar to a naturalist. In Wives and Daughters, those people who are strong observers are distinguished from those who cannot see the truth. It is no accident that Roger Hamley’s great error of judgment manifests itself as a failure of observation, one in which he cannot see the truth about a woman, but rather only a series of trite poetic images: She was a “a polar star, high up in the heavens, and so on, and so on; for, with all a lover’s quickness of imagination and triteness of fancy, he called her a star, a flower, a nymph, a witch, an angel, or a mermaid, a nightingale, a siren ...” (p. 368).