After his death, Elizabeth visited a variety of cultured and interesting family members, and met William Gaskell, an assistant Unitarian preacher in Manchester, whom she wed in 1832.

Although the Industrial Revolution thrummed in the background of her childhood, it was William’s Manchester congregation that first put Gaskell in touch with the grim realities of factory work. Cotton mills dominated the labor force in the city, and filthy shanty towns housed thousands of exploited, undernourished mill workers. William and Elizabeth were kept busy by their congregation and by their efforts to address the social problems that plagued the booming industrial city of Manchester. Although she had written only personal diaries, and was also busy raising her own family in the early years of her marriage, Gaskell’s community work inspired her to collaborate with her husband on the narrative poem “Sketches Among the Poor, No. 1,” which was published in 1837.

Gaskell’s happy, busy life was interrupted by tragedy in 1845 when her infant son died of scarlet fever while on a family vacation. Overcome by grief, Gaskell followed her husband’s advice and became absorbed in her writing. The result was her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of a Manchester Life (1848), which earned her instant success—and hostile criticism from the cotton mill owners whom she so unsentimentally portrayed. Gaskell, a prolific writer, went on to write six other novels: Cranford (1853), Ruth (1853), North and South (1855), Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), Cousin Phyllis (1864), and Wives and Daughters (1866). She also wrote numerous short stories, as well as a famous biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). Much of Gaskell ’s short fiction appeared in popular literary journals, and several of her novels were serialized in those publications. Gaskell’s works were popular during her life and esteemed by the critics. Friendships with literary giants of the day—including Charles Dickens, who also published her work in his journals—aided her career, and frequent travels throughout Europe gave her material for her writing and eased the strains of an extremely busy life. Gaskell had six children, four of whom, all daughters, lived to be adults.

In 1865 Gaskell bought a country house in Hampshire as a surprise for her husband’s retirement. By then her last novel, Wives and Daughters, was being serialized in the Cornhill Magazine. Physically exhausted, and yet to complete the final installment of her novel, Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly on a visit to the house on November 12, 1865. Although never completed, Wives and Daughters is considered by many to be a study in character on a par with the novels of George Eliot and Jane Austen. Elizabeth Gaskell was buried at Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford.

THE WORLD OF ELIZABETH GASKELL AND WIVES AND DAUGHTERS

1799-1800British legislation, the Combination Acts, makes trade unions illegal.
1800The Napoleonic Wars begin
1810Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson is born on September 29 in London to Unitarian parents. She is her parents’ eighth and last child.
1811Her mother dies, and Elizabeth is taken in by her mother’s sister, Hannah Holland Lumb, in the town of Knutsford in Cheshire. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is published.
1812Charles Dickens, future publisher and friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, is born.
1814Elizabeth’s father remarries. Elizabeth remains in Knutsford with her aunt.
1815Anthony Trollope is born. A new Corn Law imposes duties on foreign crops as a measure to protect British farmers, but the protection is unpopular, as bread prices rise. The Napoleonic Wars end with the Battle of Waterloo.
1816Charlotte Brontë is born; Elizabeth Gaskell will later write her biography.
1817Weavers and spinners in Manchester organize a “hunger march” to London to seek aid from the government in response to Manchester’s failing cotton trade.
1819Victoria, the future queen, is born. Novelist George Eliot (pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) is born. John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is published.
1820Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is published.
1822Elizabeth enters the liberal-minded Avonbank School at Stratford-on-Avon, where she spends the next five years absorbed in her studies. She receives an excellent education, unlike many girls in her generation.
1824The Combination Acts are repealed.
1828Tragedy grips the Stevenson family when John disappears on a trip with the East India Company to India. Elizabeth travels to London to nurse her father, whose health is deteriorating.
1829William Stevenson dies, and Elizabeth lives with a distant relative, Unitarian minister William Turner. She is exposed to a socially progressive and intellectual way of life that will inform her fictional works.
1830Modern rail travel begins in England.
1831On a trip to Manchester, Elizabeth meets her future husband, William Gaskell, an assistant minister at an important Unitarian center, the Cross Street Chapel.
1832Elizabeth and William Gaskell marry in Knutsford. After their honeymoon in Wales, they reside in Manchester. The First Reform Act redistributes parliamentary seats and extends voting rights for the middle classes.
1833Elizabeth suffers the stillborn birth of her first child. The British Factory Act limits the number of hours a child under eighteen can work in a textile factory and allows inspections to enforce the law. Slavery is abolished in the British Empire.
1834A daughter, Marianne, is born.
1836She writes the poem “On Visiting the Grave of My Stillborn Little Girl, Sunday July 4th, 1836.” Chartism, a British working-class movement to reform Parliament, is founded.
1837The narrative poem “Sketches Among the Poor, No.