Adapting Gaskell : Screen and Stage Versions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction [1 ed.] 9781443853354, 9781443851411

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Adapting Gaskell

Adapting Gaskell: Screen and Stage Versions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction

Edited by

Loredana Salis

Adapting Gaskell: Screen and Stage Versions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction, Edited by Loredana Salis This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Loredana Salis and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5141-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5141-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................................................. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ ix FOREWORD.................................................................................................. xi Loredana Salis CHAPTER ONE .............................................................................................. 1 Elizabeth Gaskell and her Publishers Alan Shelston CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................... 17 (Un)intellectual, Social, Feminist, or Canonical Writer? Reading Gaskell in the Twentieth Century and in the New Millennium Raffaella Antinucci CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................ 33 Adapting Mary Barton: History, Research, Possibilities Thomas Recchio CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................... 51 The BBC’s Decade of High Culture: Cranford (1972) as “History Reconstructed” Brenda McKay CHAPTER FIVE............................................................................................ 77 Anxious Journeys and Open Endings: Sexuality and the Family in the BBC’s Wives and Daughters (1999) Katherine Byrne CHAPTER SIX.............................................................................................. 97 From Page to Stage: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South as Musical Theatre Marcia Marchesi and Patricia Marchesi

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CHAPTER SEVEN ...................................................................................... 123 Remediating Gaskell: North and South and its BBC Adaptation, 2004 Loredana Salis BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 149 CONTRIBUTORS ........................................................................................ 161

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS1

FIG. 1

Betsy Barker at home.

FIG. 2

The town comes out to view “poor Peter”, cross-dressed. Cranford, by Joan Hassal (London: George Harrap & Co., 1940). Courtesy of Thomas Recchio.

FIG. 3

Betsy Barkers’s cow as visual symbol (BBC, Cranford, 1972).

FIG. 4

Thornton and Margaret – the ball scene.

FIG. 5

Thornton and Margaret – final scene.

FIG. 6

John Thornton.

FIG. 7

Margaret Hale.

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Photos 4, 5, 6 and 7 by Quade Smith, Quade Smith Photography (www.quadesmithphotography.com).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who saw me through this book; to all those who provided support, talked things over, read, wrote, offered comments, and assisted in the editing, proofreading and design. More especially, I wish to thank all of the contributors for their scholarly work, their enthusiasm and reliability, their friendly advice, and patience throughout. My gratitude also goes to my mentor, Giuseppe Serpillo, and my friend Clare McCotter, who read and made invaluable comments on an early draft of my chapter. I owe my gratitude to Professor (Lulli) Paci, who first introduced me to Gaskell’s North and South; to my old-time friend Tom, who shared his insights into British politics of the 1990s with me and often contributed to my understanding of things; to my friends and colleagues at the University of Ulster, Eamonn O’Ciardha and Phillip McDermott; to Lucia Angelica, for her encouraging feedback on sections on this book; to staff at CSP, my publisher, to Quade Smith, who gave permission to publish photographs from North and South. The Musical, and to Dominic, my proofreader. Without them all, this work would not be as it is; any flaws and weaknesses that it may have, only I am responsible for. The idea for a volume dedicated to adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s work first came to me in March 2011. At the time, I was on a ten-day teaching exchange program at the University of Ulster, campus of Coleraine, where I had been a student in the past, and where I was to deliver a few lectures on Victorian literature to undergraduate students of English. Gaskell’s North and South was to be the main focus of my addresses, and on one occasion I planned to screen the 2004 version of that novel by the BBC. Katherine Byrne, their lecturer, joined me for that class and took part in the discussion with the students. Later that day, I invited Kate to contribute to a volume of which I was going to be the editor. Mine was not a formal, academic approach, but it worked nevertheless, as she accepted with no hesitation. The same occurred with the other scholars involved in this project, whom I approached shortly afterwards and in a more or less casual manner. To my surprise (and huge delight), they all took up the challenge, showing, from the start, great interest and devotion. Being their editor was never a hard task for me, and this I am bound to acknowledge especially in this context.

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Acknowledgements

Coleraine was where this book was first conceived and it was also there and then that I decided that I would dedicate it to a special, dear person, Bob Welch, and to his son Egan, who had died in 2007. Bob passed away earlier this year; I like to think that he has gone to the place where Egan is. This is in memory of them.

FOREWORD

Elizabeth Gaskell has been accorded her due place among writers of literature in English only in recent years. Things appear to have changed significantly for her towards the end of the past century, in fact, and she has now and finally reached a central position in the British canon. This is well reflected in the approval of both academics and readers worldwide, and, symbolically it is confirmed by the fact that a window panel is dedicated to her among writers in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. Such an achievement, the attainment of what may be termed as literary celebrity, both at home and abroad, has various reasons, which will be discussed at length and from different perspectives in the seven chapters of this collection. The relatively recent recognition of Gaskell’s literary status from scholars as well as people working outside academe, but with an interest of some sort in her work, is inextricably linked to the emergence, production, and circulation of numerous TV and theatre adaptions of her fiction. Following her success on screen and stage, the need to make Gaskell’s stories accessible also to non-Anglophone readers has consequently resulted in the translation of her major works into other languages; meanwhile, back home, in her native Knutsford and her adoptive Manchester, the heritage tourism market has also developed significantly around her literary persona. This volume investigates the enduring appeal of Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and works and how this is attested by the reworking of some of her stories for TV and theatre productions, mainly in the UK, but also in the USA. Scholars and practitioners contributing to this collection present their valuable insights into Gaskell’s worlds, and thereby demonstrate that, though her stories are rooted in Victorian culture and values, they can be, in fact, they are also well at home in our present time and with contemporary audiences worldwide. The critical paradigm followed here is essentially analogical as opposed to categorical; it explores and focuses on the prolific and effective interaction between visual and verbal forms of representation, and the extent to which one’s knowledge of a medium can contribute to the analysis of another. Adaptations are seen like metaphors looking back to their source text as a way of remaining faithful to it while at the same time

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allowing translators/adapters the possibility to reinterpret and innovate Gaskell’s texts.1. The adaptation or transposition of canonical texts is the staple of much modern and contemporary literature: standing on the shoulders of giants, writers have traditionally emulated, imitated or copied their predecessors. In this respect, Amedeo Quondam’s observations on plagiarism in classical and modern literature equally apply to the work of contemporary cultural operators adapting Gaskell. The Italian classicist recalls Seneca’s letter to Lucilius in which the Roman writer insists on the moral obligation to imitate bees – “apes debemus imitari” – a notion that has since extended from ethics to aesthetics, and thereby been used to explore modes and aims of creativity in literature. In other words, writers must do as bees do, and like them they ought to gather the best from the ‘flowers’ they pluck (namely, the literature they read). Once this has been done, writers should make the most of their experience and creatively turn it into something different, a new type of food for the mind which is as good and nourishing as honey is for the body. The practice of plagiarism can be seen under a different light, indeed it becomes necessary for the artist whose work has a responsibility towards the past and tradition, while also seeking to address and please contemporary audiences.2 The “apes debemus imitare” approach rethinks adaptation work as the carrier of good values which ought to be preserved; it also repositions the cultural value of new versions of canonical texts in the face of poststructural and postmodern theories on authorship, originality and the capacity for language to be a viable means of expression of human experience. These are on-going debates in our day and age, especially among academics and artists, who constantly address the question of the persistence of myths, as well as the necessity and use of intersemiotic and intrasemiotic translations. Thus, it is one of the objectives of this study to participate in current discussions on the validity, the significance and the politics of representation in adapted texts. Each chapter presented here explores and seeks to assess the work of contemporary authors and how these mediate between our past, the canon, and present audiences. More specifically, it looks at the way in which some stories by Elizabeth Gaskell have been rewritten for theatre and television productions, and what the outcomes of extant adaptations are. It should be noted that for clarity and for simplification reasons, the terms ‘adaptation’, ‘transposition’, ‘version’, ‘reworking’, ‘recasting’ are used interchangeably in the various chapters, unless otherwise stated, and they indicate film and theatre forms of representation of Gaskell’s fiction.

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The first two chapters introduce the cultural and literary context in which Gaskell began her career as a writer and where she became attentive to the requirements of the fast growing and always changing literary market and public. Chapter One charts Elizabeth Gaskell’s reputation and gradual professionalization as a literary author and how these aspects have been exploited by publishers and adaptors of her work. Gaskell’s history as a writer runs parallel to the history of publishing in mid-nineteenth century England: Alan Shelston relates the communications revolution and the development of Victorian publishing to show how the availability of a faster and more efficient postal service helped facilitate contact between writers and publishers. In Gaskell’s case, this relationship became at times personal and problematic. Dickens, for instance, determined the publishing history of North and South, which first appeared in serialised form in Household Words, and certainly suffered from the editor’s frequent advice on matters such as its title and narrative development. The same holds true for Cranford and other pieces which Gaskell published for Dickens, so that the initial dispute gradually led to a fracture between the writer and her editor. This was a rupture that would have probably occurred sooner or later however, since Gaskell’s career was to reach a turning point in the late 1850s, when she turned from popular and exclusive fiction to ‘a more leisured middle-class readership’. Special attention is devoted to the use of illustrations as these appeared in the various editions of Gaskell’s work: these, as Shelston argues, are to be seen as adaptations proper, since they propose and represent interpretations of the text in their own right. Furthermore, Gaskell’s place in the publishing arena of the time shows her entrepreneurial skills; it reflects her work’s openness to adjustment, and this is a crucial aspect for our understanding of the adaptability of her novels and stories for theatre and TV–the fact that new versions are ‘the ultimate expression of a process’ and they can easily adapt to new audiences with priorities of their own. Gaskell’s literary reputation and the author’s multiple identities–a ‘great number of mes’, which include an (un)intellectual writer as well as a social, a feminist, and a canonical Victorian novelist are the focus of Raffaella Antinucci’s investigation in the following chapter. Gaskell’s complex, fascinating personality are unveiled here through an in-depth analysis of the long process of revision which has characterised both the writer’s work and her public profile. Changing perceptions of her have shaped the perception of her work, and thus they help to explain the reception of Gaskell’s fiction across time. Antinucci begins by providing a meticulous evaluation of the nature and content of academic work produced both in the UK and overseas as waves of popularity and oblivion

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of Gaskell followed one another; she then concentrates on the criticism published from the 1950s onwards. This careful excursus takes into account the crucial roles of the Gaskell Society, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the BBC in the refashioning of Gaskell’s literary persona. Academic and non-academic works have subsequently and mutually influenced one another, and this has led to the demand for and dissemination of new editions and new translations of Gaskell’s novels, along with criticism spreading through disparate fields of research and a host of commemorating events and special publications to mark the bicentenary of the writer’s birth in 2010. All of this has converged in her formal canonization that year, when a dedicated window panel was added to the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. The history of Gaskell’s reception and her aptness to appropriation and adaption suggest that new readings of her work will inevitably continue to be proposed. The adaptability of Gaskell’s work is central to Thomas Recchio’s analysis in Chapter Three, which considers the sparse history and scholarship of stage and screen versions of Mary Barton3 before it proceeds to explore how the fear of class violence and the exploitation of sensational, personal violence is reproduced in stage adaptations of Gaskell’s debut novel. Changes in representation reflect changes in Gaskell’s priorities, so that here too the shift from working-class to middle-class entertainment is seen as pivotal to the reworking of Gaskell’s tale of Manchester life for the stage. Recchio addresses the gap in scholarship by tracing a history of dramatizations of Mary Barton which includes literal adaptations as well as ‘adaptations in disguise’. The latter were produced both during Gaskell’s lifetime and after, up to the celebrated stage version by Rona Munro in 2006 (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester) which provided a visual and vocal memory of the past as it echoed the effects of economic austerity for the needy and helpless people of the day. The uneven history of televised versions of Mary Barton is Recchio’s focus in the second part of his study, which highlights current, often insurmountable obstacles for scholars who wish to do research on this topic and have to face the unavailability of material apparently gone missing or partially accessible. A new film adaptation is now needed which recreates that sense of community and of shared humanity at the heart of Gaskell’s first novel. The BBC has played a crucial role in the emergence and development of period drama. An important vehicle of culture, the British national television company has contributed to introducing contemporary audiences to the work of Elizabeth Gaskell and thus to reinstate her value as a creative writer. These aspects are investigated in Chapter Four, which

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reflects upon the cultural impact of works reinterpreted and with a particular agenda in mind. Brenda McKay argues that literature is often used as a template for good manners and in the most unlikely places such as the American mid-west, for instance, and her native South Africa, but also any culture which has looked at English literature as a linguistic model and has been inspired by its depiction of a social etiquette for young ladies. Adaptations also reflect nostalgia of a fading or idealised past. In this respect, the use of ‘received English’ by the BBC was crucial to early televised versions of classical literary works. The 1972 adaptation of Cranford by Michael Vosey is thus read against the backdrop of a proliferous decade, the 1970s, which saw the flowering of dramatizations of fiction by Austen, Dickens, the Bröntes, George Eliot alongside Dostoevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, Henry James and Sartre. Largely conservative and dated, Vosey’s Cranford is nevertheless defined as a radical, modern symbol: compelling in its attempt to relate nineteenth-century culture to twentieth-century analogous issues, the film deals with gender issues such as sexual liberation and cross dressing, all of which can be found, though obliquely at times, on the page, but find their place also on the screen where Gaskell’s all-female community is given a more optimistic representation. In 1999, the BBC presented a dramatized version of Wives and Daughters, largely considered to be Gaskell’s greatest literary achievement. In Chapter Five Katherine Byrne argues that the production contributed to saving Elizabeth Gaskell from popular, if not literary, obscurity and certainly paved the way for later adaptations of North and South and Cranford by the BBC, and also for the creation of a Gaskell industry in recent years. A distinctive trait of the 1999 production of Wives and Daughters (the second BBC version of that novel) is its contemporariness, and the pursuit of a modern relevance for Gaskell’s plot. The BBC authors focussed on the changing nature of family life following remarriage, and the negotiation of the complicated parent-child and sibling relationships. Anxiety about sexuality is pervasive and the family is seen as a preferable alternative. Byrne maintains that his adaptation expands and foregrounds Gaskell's suggestion that the really important love stories are between family members as she further explores the adaptation’s feminist agenda, thereby suggesting how movement and freedom are made explicit and visually contrasted to confinement and domesticity. Unlike the novel, the film reinterprets the female protagonist as a post-feminist heroine who finally exchanges the claustrophobia of provincial life for travel, and unlike conventional heritage drama, the 1999 BBC Wives and Daughters

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does not see marriage as the only reward for its heroine, but one of many options for a woman who finally sets off towards modernity. Chapters Six and Seven are both dedicated to the adaptation of North and South, first published in serialised form and later adapted by Gaskell for a two-volume edition in 1855. Marcia and Patricia Marchesi provide their insiders’ view on the theatrical reworking of the novel for a musical first produced and staged in the USA in 2008. The dilemma of a teacher who tries to render literature of the canon palatable for young generations of students is not altogether different from the dilemma of a playwright and a musician seeking to reach or shape a contemporary theatre audience. The Marchesi project poses questions of adaptation and adaptability of the page to the stage, and of the way in which the written word gives way to music and dialogues. Changes are an integral part of adaptations, since theatre does not, and cannot, develop characters, plot, and themes in the same way as novels do. The novel is necessarily placed in a new frame by way of alterations to its plot – the dialogues may be shortened, sections could be omitted, and conflict is made more visible on the stage so as to enhance the relationship between characters. The key to a successful musical theatre version of North and South lies in the adaptors’ full understanding of what the novel evokes and of the adaptation’s capacity to evoke the power of its source. Along the same lines, the concluding chapter also reflects on the relationship between Gaskell’s prose and its reworking for fruition for a contemporary audience. The chapter looks at the transition of the artwork from one medium to another: firstly, it recalls Gaskell’s embryonic works–the original short stories that appeared in Dickens’ Household Words–and how these were adapted by Gaskell herself into a full-length novel which was published later in 1855. Gaskell was thus the first to adapt her own fiction, prompted by the need to ‘remediate’ the defects of her first version of the tale, which suffered from the editor’s demands and the genre’s requirements. The notion of remediation is replicated in the chapter and applied to the analysis of the transition of Gaskell’s story from its novel status to the screen, when the BBC commissioned and broadcast a new version of North and South in 2004. The double significance of a theory of remediation allows for the comparative study of two or more texts and of their different cultural contexts; it helps to explain how translation works when different media are involved and also reminds us that, though something inevitably gets lost in translation, something else is equally gained. In the spirit of remediation, this is what makes a work of literature always appealing, suggestive and relevant to new audiences. The BBC’s North and South is a distinguished and successful work of adaptation which modernises the

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conventions of heritage drama, and which relies on the compression of the plot, as well as additions and other minor alterations, but never betrays the essence of Gaskell’s tale. A story of cultural encounters thus easily adapts itself to the present; it echoes and interacts with it while also entertaining a public of TV viewers somehow nostalgic of the past, who are, perhaps, also partial to the looks and manners of a well-designed cast and plot. Adaptations transform existing stories. That is simply what they do. When they are good works of adaptation they aim to find potential new meanings for an old tale so that it can speak to, entertain and nourish different and contemporary audiences. In this respect, Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction clearly provides raw material for the artist who will handle dense plots full of characters and strong emotions to mould a matter of infinite value. At least that is the case where the transformed stories considered in this volume are concerned. The hope remains that film and theatre authors will not break Gaskell’s enduring spell. Loredana Salis Sassari, June 2013

Notes 1

The debate between the categorical and analogical approaches has traditionally shaped the course of Adaptation studies. See, in this respect, Kamilla Elliot, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 2 Amedeo Quondam, ‘Note su imitazione, furto e plagio nel Classicismo’, in Furto e plagio nella letteratura del Classicismo, edited by Roberto Gigliucci, Roma: Bulzoni, 1998 (373-400), p. 380. Seneca’s citation: ‘Apes, ut aiunt, debemus imitari, quae vagantur et flores ad mel faciendum idoneos carpunt, deinde quickquid attulere, disponunt ac per favos digerunt’ is taken from Letter 84 (Seneca Lucilio suo salutem). 3 What Recchio observes in relation to Mary Barton equally applies, and sadly so, to other works, as scholars conducting research on lesser known texts, often unavailable or poorly documented know all too well. In this respect, Bolton’s inventory represents an invaluable reference and research tool. See especially the section dedicated to adaptations of Gaskell’s fiction in H. Philip Bolton, Women Writers Dramatised. A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900, London: Mansell Publishing, 2000 (pp. 206-210).

CHAPTER ONE ELIZABETH GASKELL AND HER PUBLISHERS ALAN SHELSTON

Elizabeth Gaskell’s literary persona went through many adaptations during the course of her career, and it is appropriate to introduce the essays in this volume by considering her publishing history. During the years from the completion of her first novel, Mary Barton in 1847 up until her death in 1865, with the remaining pages of Wives and Daughters still to be written, the Victorian novel established itself as the major literary form of its time. For novelists it was a time of both experiment and accomplishment, and Gaskell, who has come to be so readily defined as the proponent of industrial realism, or alternatively of the “elegant economy” of the ladies of Cranford, is arguably the most diverse of the earlier Victorian novelists. She is also the novelist who “adapted” most readily to the contemporary publishing culture, and this is reflected in her dealings with her publishers. At that time, the novel was a form with flexible traditions and without rules: as Henry James was to write in 1889, “every sort of mind will find what it looks for in it, whereby the novel becomes truly multifarious and illustrative … Give it its head and let it range.” 1 These comments are not inapplicable to the process of adaptation. Furthermore, her post-mortem reputation was both reflected in and influenced by the tendency of publishers to produce elegant and sometimes illustrated editions that have reinforced that title of ‘Mrs’ that was always given to her, and that even now has not been shaken off. Both publishers and adaptors of her work have had a common interest in exploiting this aspect of her reputation. Here I shall approach Gaskell’s work primarily via the question of its publication, and throughout I shall consider the related question of adaptation, since both involve matters of presentation that have affected the way in which her work has been read.

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Chapter One

The publishing context Gaskell, who was in her late thirties when she published Mary Barton, was to become one of the pre-eminent literary Victorians. But we are mistaken in thinking of her as exclusively Victorian: her formative experience, like that of Dickens, born two years before her, and who outlived her by just five years, was very much pre-Victorian. The novelists available to her as a young woman would have been eighteenth century figures like Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, or the long forgotten Selina Davenport, a resident of Gaskell’s Knutsford, whom she tried to help when she fell on hard times in her old age. 2 Jane Austen wrote most of her fiction in the first decade of Gaskell’s life, but there is no reference to her in Gaskell’s early correspondence. When she came to writing her own novels, Gaskell had very few predecessors of her own generation to appeal to. What is equally to the point is that, when she was taken from London to Knutsford as a baby, she endured a three-day journey by stagecoach; as a young married woman living in Manchester, she would experience the transformations that followed the coming of the railways. In Mary Barton, the heroine’s life is transformed by her train journey from Manchester to Liverpool: in the 1830s Gaskell herself would have been an early passenger on the new Manchester-Liverpool line. The communications revolution of the early nineteenth century was a major factor in the development of Victorian publishing. The expansion of the railway network facilitated distribution and made possible a fast postal service, enabling rapid communication between writers and publishers. Furthermore, the invention of new machinery for the production of paper together with faster printing facilitated the processes of publication.3 All of this made possible the production and distribution of books and journals, many of them reprints, in large numbers. Charles Knight, a contemporary observer, gives these figures in his book, The Old Printer, published in 1856: “In the eleven years from 1792 to 1802 there was an average publication of 372 books per year”; in the years from 1800 to 1827, according to Knight’s calculations there were 15,888 new books published, giving an average of 588 per year, and this excluded the rapid rise in the publication of journals and magazines; formats very significant for the publication of fiction.4 Knight’s account in The Old Printer begins with a biography of William Caxton, whose introduction of the printing press to England he saw as establishing British freedoms, and it is dedicated to Charles Dickens, “one of those earnest labourers in that popular literature that elevates a people.” Caxton became an iconic figure for the Victorians,

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as indeed did Dickens: Knight’s linkage of ancient and modern was in that sense entirely appropriate. Nineteenth-century fiction saw the development of three popular formats: volume publication, serial publication in journals, and monthly part publication. Knight himself was somewhat critical of what he called the “number-trade”, which, however, proved to have considerable financial advantages. It was calculated that Pickwick Papers, when first published in monthly numbers in 1836-7, gained £14,000 for Dickens’s publisher. Forster, in his biography, testified to the unpredicted speed of Dickens’s success: “Of part one, the binder prepared four hundred, and of part fifteen his order was for more than forty thousand.”5 Knight dates the publication and circulation of cheap literature as having started in 1827, the year of the foundation of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with its “Library” series. Richard Altick is more circumspect, although in general terms he confirms Knight’s assertion that the 1820s was a significant decade. The publications of religious and other improvement societies were instrumental in the spread of literacy. When “useful knowledge” was seen to lose its attraction, it was replaced by “entertaining knowledge”, but as Altick suggests, “entertaining” is a comparative term. At about this time, “printers”, a term signifying the technicalities of production, increasingly came to call themselves “publishers” (as indeed did booksellers like Chapman and Hall, Dickens’s first publishers), while these “publishers”, once traditionally distributed amongst the provinces, came to consolidate themselves as major citybased operations, and to amalgamate as they detected the possibilities of financial advantage. We can get some sense of how the literary culture changed if we consider Gaskell’s own experience, both as a reader and a writer. Jane Austen’s novels in their first printings ranged from 750 copies in the case of Sense and Sensibility, to 2,000 (Mansfield Park, Emma) at the height of her fame: as far as we know, Gaskell did not read Austen until later in her life. In a letter of 1831, she wrote from Knutsford to her friend Harriet Carr that she had “not a book but which we have all read hundreds of times.” The only fiction she mentions in her early letters is that of Bulwer Lytton. 6 We can set that against the profusion of the Victorian novel: 30,000 copies printed of the opening number of David Copperfield in 1849 and scarcely a month going by between the early 1840s and Dickens’s death in 1870 without a part or an instalment being issued of one of his novels, or Trollope’s vast output of nearly forty novels in thirty years, leading to his calculation in his Autobiography that “I have made by literature something near £70,000”.7 Dickens, whose popularity Trollope

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Chapter One

regarded with suspicion, earned considerably more in the same period, although given the proliferation of editions of his works, exact figures are difficult to calculate where he is concerned.

Beginnings: Mary Barton and Chapman and Hall The first time Gaskell saw herself in print was in a short poem she wrote with her husband, “Sketches among the poor”, published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1837. She referred to its authorship with the plural pronoun: “we once thought of trying to write sketches among the poor”8 and it is not possible to tell how much of the poem was hers, and how much her husband’s. We then have her unacknowledged contribution to William Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places, published in 1839. Howitt included an account of Clopton House, an old manor house in Warwickshire, which is always attributed to Gaskell, although it is not clear how much of the writing is hers. Howitt and his wife Mary met the Gaskells on their visit to Heidelberg in 1841 when the Howitts were living in Germany. They were important literary contacts. Quakers, if of a very flexible kind, they were strong advocates of the provision of suitable reading matter for working people. They produced, and sometimes distributed an enormous number of titles of their own on subjects as diversely improving as history, natural science, geography and the like– every kind of “useful knowledge” in fact. William specialized in topography and popular history; Mary wrote poems and novels and translated fiction not only from German but from Swedish and Danish sources as well. As well as works by Hans Christian Andersen, Mary translated the writings of the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer and arranged for their publication in England. All of this literary activity, which resulted in over a hundred titles between them, was prompted by the highest motives. This was “literature that elevates a people” in their own terms. Given her own pace of output, it is perhaps ironic to find Mary Howitt complaining about poets and novelists who “hurry out their trashy volumes before the ink of the manuscript is fairly dry.” She continues “thus it is a thousand books are published, and nine hundred and ninety are unreadable.”9 By Mary Howitt’s account, her husband was instrumental in the publication of Mary Barton. There were publishing houses in Manchester that a little known writer living in the city might have been expected to approach, but Gaskell had given William Howitt the manuscript of the first volume to read and he was so enthusiastic that he immediately passed it on with his recommendation to John Forster, reader and negotiator for the

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London publishers Chapman and Hall. This was a propitious connection to have made: Forster, who was a lawyer, was an ally and friend of Dickens, and his concurrence with Howitt’s enthusiasm meant that Mary Barton was published in October 1848, albeit anonymously. It was an overnight success and Gaskell’s larger career was launched. Mary Barton ran to four editions by 1850, at which point Dickens recruited her for the opening number of Household Words. 10 The result was another Manchester-based story, Lizzie Leigh. Stage adaptations of both Lizzie Leigh and Mary Barton were produced in London in 1850 and in 1851, the latter with its full title, Mary Barton, a tale of Manchester life. A later adaptation of Mary Barton, by Dion Boucicault, was produced at the Lyceum Theatre under the title The Long Strike in September 1866, the year after Gaskell’s death.11 Mary Barton was published in the United States by Harpers just two months after its first appearance in England, and all of Gaskell’s major works–and most of her minor ones–would be published there almost concurrently with their English publication. Indeed where her work appeared serially, as in the case of North and South, Cousin Phillis, and Wives and Daughters, the American volume publication actually preceded the English, the texts being taken from the serials. When “Lizzie Leigh” was published in America, directly after its appearance in Household Words, it was attributed there to Dickens since all of his contributors remained anonymous, and it was assumed there that he had written it. Mary Barton thus provided Gaskell with her breakthrough in various ways. She was fortunate with her publishers and the networks they provided. Forster quickly became a friend and influential confidante. Chapman and Hall can be said to exemplify aspects of the publishing boom in the early nineteenth century. Edward Chapman was a literary man; Edward Hall was a business man: this became something of a pattern for the division of labour amongst publishers. Hall’s great stroke of business had been to recruit the young Dickens in the mid-1830s. The unforeseen success of Pickwick Papers effectively established Chapman and Hall, and from then until Dickens left the firm in 1844 after a rancorous dispute, his sales did much to establish them. Gaskell thus came to Chapman and Hall at a propitious moment: she was not Dickens, but Mary Barton had a topical success which ensured that it was very extensively reviewed for a first novel. Reviews were an influential part of the literary culture, and works on topical themes, like Ruth and North and South, both published by Chapman and Hall, also attracted extensive notice. From the outset then, Gaskell was drawn into a world of commercial values, and also into a world where adaptability was a condition of

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survival. Correspondence between Gaskell and the Chapmans reveals some of the ways in which Victorian publishers worked. Titles were important to the publisher; they were after all the main opportunity to brand the book. Dickens, with his commercial instincts appreciated this, and the records show that for his novels he invariably prepared lists of alternative titles, especially where they were thematic. Gaskell too was very conscious of the significance of titles: this was an issue that would contribute to the difficulties which later came between the two novelists. She always considered John Barton to be the protagonist of her first novel but Edward Chapman, perhaps more aware than she realised of Barton’s ultimate exclusion from the story and the way in which the narrative increasingly comes to revolve around its heroine, advised a title that would identify her by name. In this case the sub-title was changed as well–“A Manchester Love-story” became “A Tale of Manchester Life”. It was first published anonymously, but its successors were advertised as being “by the author of Mary Barton”, in itself a sign of its success. Gaskell was certainly aware of the advantages of topicality: in April 1848 she writes to Edward Chapman “I think the present state of public events may not be unfavourable to a tale, founded in some measure on the present relations between Masters and work people” and requests “an immediate answer”. She follows it up with an expression of “fear” of Chapman’s delay in answering her letter that “you have thought it desirable to defer the appearance of my work”.12 Comparative novice she may have been, but from the start, she recognized that she would have to be firm with her publishers. Following Mary Barton there was the little illustrated Christmas book, The Moorland Cottage. Again, there was a preliminary dispute over the title. This was followed by Ruth, then Cranford, and then North and South, both of the latter having first been published in instalments in Household Words. Ruth was Gaskell’s first work in the more prestigious three-volume format and she seems to have found herself still completing the third volume while its predecessors were being printed. In November 1852, she is anxious about the reception of Ruth. She writes: “I hate publishing because of the talk people make”; nevertheless Ruth “is done–utterly off my mind and gone up to the printers” in the week before Christmas. Ruth was published in the New Year in 1853”.13 Gaskell, who once remarked that heaven was a place without books, rarely completed a work without difficulty. All this suggests considerable speed of production: the pace at which Victorian publishers worked could be remarkable. It also shows Gaskell as an author open to all the various opportunities offered by Victorian publishing, while struggling with the pressures involved.

Elizabeth Gaskell and her Publishers

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Cranford appeared at irregular intervals in Household Words while Ruth was being completed, and in the case of North and South she would have just three months to make substantial revisions to her Household Words text for the volume publication. As both a perfectionist and a very busy woman, Gaskell almost invariably found herself battling against time with her major works; furthermore, the relationship between publisher and author could become an extremely personal and sometimes problematic one. The parties usually acted in direct contact with each other; but these were the days of the publisher as personality; men like the Chapmans, and later George Smith, made themselves figures of considerable public substance. Publishers needed to treat their authors with understanding, but also with firmness over matters like deadlines and payment; equally there were occasions when authors needed to stand up to them. Contractual arrangements could be complicated. Initially authors were usually paid on some version of the copyright system, whereby the publisher would retain the copyright and thus be entitled to all the profits accruing from the work, including profits arising out of reprints. With an author who was frequently reprinted, like Dickens, this system obvious benefited the publisher, and the only recourse for the author was to buy back the copyright, as both Dickens and Gaskell on occasion tried to do. In 1856 Gaskell wrote to George Smith listing her published works, and enquiring about their present status: “Mary Barton & Ruth were I know sold out, and North and South was sold by the edition … Should I enquire as to the number remaining? Or would you? Or would it be worth while?” The questions suggest both uncertainty and anxiety, and she continues with similar queries about the disposal of her stories.14 Relationships between author and publisher were close, but disputes could be frequent. When Gaskell found “her dearest child, Cranford ‘worth gold being out of print’”15, she jumped to the conclusion that Frederic Chapman was somehow deceiving her. In fact this turned out not to be the case, but oil was needed for the troubled waters. To redress the imbalance that the copyright system of payment created, a “halfprofits” system of payment developed, whereby publisher and author shared the profits, and this led ultimately to something similar to the present day system of royalties, where the author is paid an agreed percentage of the profit from sales.

Charles Dickens: the weekly periodical The publishers of Household Words were Dickens’s new publishers, Bradbury and Evans, but Dickens was the commissioner, editor, copy-

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Chapter One

editor, and ultimately paymaster, so it is reasonable to think of him as the effective publisher. Gaskell’s involvement with Household Words began propitiously with her story “Lizzie Leigh”, which was given pride of place at the head of the opening number, published on 30 March 1850. However, North and South, appearing from 2 September 1854 to 27 January 1855, was to prove problematic. On the opening page of his new venture, Dickens declared that his aspiration with Household Words was to “live in the Household Affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts of our readers.” In what is a clear marketing statement, he appeals to that positive, if somewhat sentimentalized, notion of family and home that we find in his Christmas Books: he is thinking here of the Cratchits of A Christmas Carol rather than the Higginses of North and South. The families Dickens wants to appeal to are the literate working class–“the hardest workers at this working wheel of toil.” The tone was to be of the upbeat kind that would inspire the Great Exhibition in the following year: “We seek to bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders.”16 Anne Lohrli, in her study of Household Words, lists the kind of subjects that found their way into the magazine: “natural history, articles on science for the layman medicine, physics physiology, astronomy, geology … natural resources … inventions, trade, commerce, business, descriptions of cities, towns, localities” as well as material on the colonies abroad, and prisons and punishment at home.17 Fiction actually played a smaller part in Dickens’s plan: apart from his own Hard Times and Gaskell’s North and South there were no full-length novels of any significance in the magazine. Household Words: “A weekly journal”, was printed cheaply in double columns and without illustrations. Its contributors were paid one guinea (twenty-one shillings) for a two-column page. Gaskell, received £20.00 for “Lizzie Leigh”; since her story ran to twelve pages, this was slightly above the usual rate. From the outset Dickens treated Gaskell as a privileged case: he said that there was no-one he would rather recruit for his project. His admiration for Cranford when it appeared in Household Words was unbounded, as he made clear when Gaskell had to put it to one side in order to finish Ruth, for which she received a full £500 from Smith and Elder. Dickens was perhaps less generous where North and South was concerned, although he sent her the sum of £50.00 in addition to the two hundred guineas (£210.00) for the copyright contracted at the outset of the instalments.18 He followed this with a further £50.00 as a generous gesture probably aimed at regaining her goodwill. Dickens could be astute as well as generous in financial matters. She later received a payment of £100.00

Elizabeth Gaskell and her Publishers

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from George Smith of Smith, Elder in respect of the copyright of North and South when he proposed to reprint it. Dickens was an obsessive task-master. He would frequently offer advice about titles, narrative development and endings–it was only advice, but his contributors were expected to remember who was giving it. If they didn’t, they would find their material revised, sometimes completely rewritten, when they actually found it in print. Gaskell didn’t suffer that, but she did get the advice from time to time, and she tended to resist it. Their differences over North and South reflected a disagreement about priorities. North and South is a novel with a dual narrative: whereas Dickens had expected a novel with an industrial theme to follow his own Hard Times and her Mary Barton, for Gaskell the industrial material was more a matter of context for a story about a young woman growing into adult responsibilities. It was Dickens who gave her work its title, taken from a speech by one of the book’s working class characters, whereas during the writing process Gaskell invariably referred to her novel as “Margaret”. The differences between them came to a head over the book’s ending. Once the industrial material was concluded, Dickens wanted the novel finished as soon as possible, whereas Gaskell needed more time to substantiate the development of the relation between Margaret and John Thornton. When North and South was published in two volumes a few months after it had been completed in its instalment form, it included an additional long chapter, devoted to the heroine’s return to the scene of her childhood, together with some adjustments anticipating the ending. It also carried a rather sharp explanation that previously it “was obliged to conform to the requirements of a weekly publication” and had had “to confine itself within certain advertised limits.” To describe a publication as “weekly” was to make a social distinction as well as one of format: to this effect it is to the point that, according to Gaskell, she “seldom” saw “the Households Words”; this was in May 1853, while she was contributing the final instalments of Cranford.19 She would later define Cranford as her favourite work, but the implication must be that, while she would write for Dickens’s journal, she rarely read it. Gaskell’s troubles with North and South continued after its conclusion in Household Words at the end of January 1855. In the haste of production of the first volume edition (26 March 1855), substantial errors were made, and these had to be corrected for the second edition, issued just three months later.20 The publishing history of North and South shows the instability of fictional texts in the mid-nineteenth century. This is reflected too in the publication of Cranford, with its uneven gaps between the appearance of the Household Words instalments to accommodate the writing of Ruth, and

10

Chapter One

its ultimate appearance in a single volume, again with alterations. Despite increasing differences between them, Gaskell continued to write for Dickens and surprisingly, in a letter to an unknown editor who had approached her a few years after Household Words had closed down, she wrote “I am not in the habit of writing for periodicals, except occasionally … except as a personal mark of regard & respect to Mr. Dickens. But half a dozen papers in H.W. are all I ever wrote for any periodical.”21 This is very odd–more than that, it simply isn’t true. She had altogether twenty titles in the journal by this time; leaving aside Cranford and North and South–if we include their individual instalments she appeared in the journal on more than fifty occasions. Furthermore, in 1863, she published a long novella, A Dark Night’s Work in the successor to Household Words, All The Year Round, which she had first offered to George Smith. She also published for Dickens an article on the Neapolitan Camorraņa somewhat unlikely topic.22 What the dispute with Dickens had identified was that Gaskell was at a turning point in her writing career. She had come to the fore as a writer of social problem fiction, who seemed to fit ideally into the philanthropic literary culture of Dickens and the Howitts. But as Gaskell discovered herself as a writer, she increasingly took as her subject the social and psychological histories of her heroines– Mary, Ruth, Margaret, later Sylvia, Phillis and Molly, those “‘frail vessels’ who have borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection” as Henry James, citing George Eliot, puts it in one of his prefaces.23 Or to put it another way, she moves, as indeed the Victorian novel moved in its preoccupations, from the world of Dickens to the world of George Eliot, whose early work Gaskell admired. In the last analysis there is a status dimension to all of this. I mentioned earlier the division between popular literature and the exclusiveness of more elevated forms of fiction, and it can be argued that in the later 1850s Gaskell was moving from the kind of readership aimed at by Dickens and the Howitts to a more leisured middleclass readership–the readers not of weekly magazines but of three and on occasion two or four volume novels, set in the provincial world which she knew from childhood. In a letter of 1860 to Frederic Chapman she wrote, “how excellent & good & clever Framley Parsonage is.ņI never read anything in the way of fiction so true and deep!”24 This was the kind of territory she now wanted to occupy herself.

The professional author During the next decade we see Gaskell increasingly professionalizing herself as a successful author. She negotiates the financial terms and looks

Elizabeth Gaskell and her Publishers

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for new outlets for her work. She has disputes with Chapman and Hall over delayed payments, and decides to recover her copyrights from them. She approaches publishers overseas, completing a transaction with the German firm of Tauchnitz, publishers of paperback novels for railway reading, and she has her novels translated for the firm of Hachette in France, which also paid her to recommend other English authors for translation. Translation, while itself a form of adaptation, had its pitfalls. Gaskell records that a French “translation” of Jane Eyre contained its first volume only, and had been published under a facetious pseudonym; she took care to have her own work translated by a translator that she approved of. 25 Hachette’s lists and Gaskell’s advice show the range of Victorian fiction below the peaks. Jane Eyre, she admits, is “remarkable” but she has misgivings–she always did–about Wuthering Heights, and recommends works by Charles Reade and Geraldine Jewsbury. There is also “a young writer, a friend of Mr. Dickens,” whose “style is very good [but] I do not admire his books myself [although] many good critics do.” It is Wilkie Collins. (His first novel, Basil, is dismissed in a word– “detestable”).26 During this time, she produced collections of her stories with a London firm, Sampson Low, thus profiting from their appearance in volume form, but she had no new novel immediately in mind. All this reflects an increasing awareness of her status. She had difficulties with her publishers in America, but nevertheless was led to consider the improbable strategy of writing exclusively for the American market, although how she thought that might help is difficult to tell.27

George Smith of Smith Elder Five days after the publication of North and South on 31st March 1855, Gaskell’s “dear friend” Charlotte Brontë died. Gaskell was in Paris, taking a deliberate break from the stress of work–this was a habit she was to cultivate–but on this occasion she returned immediately to begin her research for a possible memoir of her friend. This brought her into contact with George Smith of Smith Elder, whose great coup, some years earlier, had been the publication of Jane Eyre. It was Gaskell who first contacted Smith, with a letter from Charlotte’s father Patrick recommending her, and it was Smith who offered her a contract to write a full scale biography. He offered her £600; she asked for a further £200 to cover, as she said, the expense of her research, and she got it. The episode was pivotal for Gaskell, and to a lesser extent perhaps for Smith, as The Life of Charlotte Brontë, despite the furore over the first edition, was one of his most successful productions, running into five

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Chapter One

separate editions in the first three years of its publication. Of these the first two had to be abandoned under threat of legal action. The third edition was “revised and corrected” with the alterations that can be seen in her husband’s hand, amongst others, on the manuscript.28 The fifth edition was a one volume “popular” edition, bound in orange cloth, which Gaskell referred to as “my orange Charlotte Brontë”. 29 The American edition, printed from advance sheets and published simultaneously, did not have to be revised, the laws of libel not crossing the Atlantic. Smith was a publisher who liked to establish personal relationships with his authors. He not only recruited the Brontë sisters, he cultivated them, offering Charlotte in particular hospitality and entertainment. Smith’s extensive correspondence with Gaskell shows him as a sympathetic but nevertheless business-like character. Where Gaskell’s biography was concerned, there had been less than two years from commission to publication, and she had again found herself writing against the clock. The speed at which the revised edition was ready, just five months after the appearance of the first, is another indication of the speed at which Victorian publishers could work. Considering what they had to decipher from their author’s manuscripts their skills seem even more remarkable. They had a product which they needed to get into the market place, and speed could be of the essence. Smith selected his authors with care and paid them well. Gaskell’s first novel for him was Sylvia’s Lovers, published in three volumes in 1863: it was both historical and provincial in subject-matter. Gaskell had been approached by a publisher, Sampson Low, whom she did not entirely trust with an offer of £1,000 for the work, including profits from the American sales, but she wrote to George Smith offering it to him: “I would much rather have £800 from you than £1,000 from them.” Smith complied, and a receipt exists showing that Gaskell received £1,000 for the completed work.30 At the last minute Gaskell wrote to Smith asking him how many pages he needed to complete the final volume, but while the novel had a long gestation period its production seems to have been reasonably trouble free.31 The back cover of the “orange Charlotte Brontë” carries an announcement about Smith’s new venture, the Cornhill Magazine, to be edited by “W. M. Thackeray”: this was to be the vehicle for fiction by the most distinguished writers and illustrators of the 1860s. Thackeray was paid generously for services that he soon became reluctant to undertake. Smith gave George Eliot £7,000, a quite astonishing sum, for Romola, which began in the Cornhill’s opening number. Other early contributors included Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and of course Elizabeth Gaskell;

Elizabeth Gaskell and her Publishers

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later there also would be Henry James, while Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin provided serious-minded non-fictional ballast. The Cornhill, issued monthly, cost one shilling an issue–a far cry from Household Words at 2d a week. Smith took great care with the appearance of his books: he ensured that they were attractively bound, with elegant decoration impressed in the cloth on the front and back covers, and lettering in gilt on the spine. The 1860s were a flourishing decade where illustration was concerned, with a new generation of artists who had moved on from the style of Cruikshank and Dickens’s “Phiz,” and Smith called on this pool of talent to illustrate the novels that he published, again paying well: Millais for Trollope, for example, and Du Maurier for Gaskell. In Gaskell’s case Smith published a sequence of separate illustrated editions of her novels to run alongside her individual novels. These could be seen as the first approach to a uniform set of her work, and the influence of these early illustrations can be traced in modern dramatic adaptations. 32 It is one of the limitations of the electronic book that it rarely reproduces quality illustration: for that we have to go back to hard copy, and often to the original editions. The best of Gaskell’s last novels and stories all appeared in one form or another under the Smith Elder imprint: Sylvia’s Lovers, in three volumes at the standard price of 31/6d; Cousin Phillis and other tales and finally Wives and Daughters in instalments in The Cornhill. By all accounts Smith promised her £ 2,000 for Wives and Daughters: she may not have been aware of his largesse to George Eliot, but she certainly knew that Wilkie Collins was to receive £5,000 for a Cornhill novel, which turned out to be Armadale, published in 1866, and she would not have been pleased. 33 Wives and Daughters was published in America ten days in advance of the English edition with paper sheets for covers; by contrast the English edition was of two volumes in a very rich deep red binding costing twenty-six shillings, an indication both of the market sector that Smith aimed at, and of the distance Gaskell had come from her Manchester beginnings.

Afterwards Elizabeth Gaskell’s was a remarkable career. She was a late starter, but from then on she more than made up for it. The history of her work linked past and present, and in a sense it can be said to have anticipated the future, not only where she herself was concerned, but for what her story reveals of a critical moment in the history of publishing. During her lifetime she saw what historians of publishing have come to call the commodification of the book. This involved its commercial presentation as an object within an

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Chapter One

economic system, with special attention being paid to matters of illustration, covers and binding, all acting as supports to its literary content. The remainder of the century saw these developments increase; witness the many different reprints of Cranford that followed Gaskell’s death, the most notable of them being the one published in 1891 by Macmillan, with Hugh Thomson’s illustrations–with a superior version in colour and with a lavishly decorated binding, if one could afford it. This can justly be referred to as an adaptation of Gaskell’s original: its illustrations effectively redefine her as an artist suited to an anticipated taste, and the edition can be said to have been a major influence on her historical reputation. In 1906 there was the elegant “Knutsford” edition in eight volumes, bound in deep red with Gaskell’s signature embossed in gold on their covers. It is books like these, beautiful as they are, that have prejudiced the reputation of Gaskell ever since. Where Cranford in particular is concerned, this tradition of presentation has made it iconic, and it has carried over into recent television adaptations, thus reinforcing its reputation for many readers as the representative Gaskell work. In the early years of the twentieth century, dramatic adaptations of Cranford proliferated in the United States as well as in Britain, becoming particularly popular with amateur and small theatre groups. 34 Thomas Recchio has identified as many as eighteen published dramatic adaptations from this period and offers evidence of many more.35 In our day, television and film adaptations are the ultimate expression of the process: works designed to target a new audience with priorities of their own. These may well deviate from the originals, but as I have argued, Gaskell’s novels and stories have been open to adjustments from the start. They should be considered in their own terms, and not as distortions of sacred texts.

Notes 1

Henry James, “The Great Form”, reprinted in The House of Fiction, essays on the novel by Henry James, pp. 46-47. 2 See Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds. John Chapple and Alan Shelston, pp. 4950; 67-68. Page references to Gaskell’s correspondence are given to this volume, identified as FL, and to The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, eds J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, is identified as GL. 3 See Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader, passim, for a detailed account of these developments. 4 Charles Knight, The Old Printer and the Modern Press, 238ff. 5 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Book 2, Part 1, np. 6 FL, p. 9.

Elizabeth Gaskell and her Publishers

7

15

For figures for Dickens’s publications, see Robert L. Patten, Dickens and his publishers. The figure for Trollope is taken from his Autobiography, published posthumously in two volumes and frequently reprinted. 8 GL, p. 33. 9 Mary Howitt, An Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 220. 10 For details of the publication of all of Gaskell’s works during her lifetime, see Walter E. Smith, Elizabeth Gaskell: a Bibliographical Catalogue. Smith has excellent illustrations of bindings and title-pages, and records American as well as English editions. 11 On these early adaptations see Andrew Maunder, “Mary Barton goes to London: Elizabeth Gaskell, stage adaptation and working class audiences”, Gaskell Society Journal, pp. 1-18. 12 GL, p. 55. 13 GL, p.218. 14 GL, p. 484. 15 GL, p. 719. 16 “A Preliminary Word”, Household Words, no 1, (30 March 1850), 1-3. Household Words and All The Year Round can now be accessed via the Dickens Journals online initiative, organised at the University of Buckingham, www.djo.org.uk. 17 Anne Lohrli, Household Words, a weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens, p. 5. Lohrli catalogues the contents of Household Words from its inception to its closure in 1859, and includes detailed commentary. 18 Figures for North and South are not entirely clear. Lohrli, p. 128, gives £210.00 as the sum paid on conclusion, and cites Dickens’s letter to Mrs Gaskell, 1 Feb 1855 for the further £50.00. It is not clear whether any further payments were made for the appearance of the novel in instalments. A receipt is recorded for £250.00 for the copyright of the first volume edition of 1855. See GL, p. 967. 19 FL, p. 87. 20 Correspondence between the two authors showing the differences between them is reprinted in my “Norton Critical Edition” of North and South, pp. 399-394 21 GL, p. 699. 22 All the Year Round, 21 May 1859. See Alan Shelston, “From Cranford to the conspirators of Naples”, Gaskell Society Journal, pp. 104-111. 23 Henry James “Preface” to The Portrait of a Lady, Norton edition ed., p. 9. The edition cited reprints the ‘New York’ edition’s text of the novel and its preface. 24 FL, p. 214. 25 FL, pp. 126-129, and 187-188. 26 FL, p. 129. 27 Letters written for Gaskell by her daughter, Meta, give details of her dealings with American publishers at this time. In 1859, Meta Gaskell wrote to Charles Eliot Norton: “Privately speaking I am so glad that she should thus give up the resolution she formed in 1857 of publishing for the future in America.” See Irene Wiltshire, ed., Letters of Mrs Gaskell’s Daughters, pp. 194-198.

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28 The manuscript of The Life of Charlotte Brontë is held in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. It shows that not only did Gaskell’s husband assist her in the copying of text, but so did her daughter Meta, and various Gaskell friends. 29 GL, p. 593. 30 GL, pp. 558, 967. 31 GL, p. 697. 32 Clark S. Northup, pp. 163-263, gives a detailed listing of all of Gaskell’s editions and reprints up to the time of writing, and also of her dramatic adaptations. 33 GL, p. 772. 34 Northup lists over sixty reprints of Cranford in the first decade of the twentieth century. Of these, seven were dramatic adaptations, and a number were school texts. At least twenty-five were American productions. 35 See Thomas Recchio, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: a publishing history, Ch. 4, 183-232, passim.

CHAPTER TWO (UN)INTELLECTUAL, SOCIAL, FEMINIST, OR CANONICAL WRITER? READING GASKELL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM RAFFAELLA ANTINUCCI

Elizabeth Gaskell’s literary reputation has ebbed and flowed. Now established as a Victorian classic, her novels have received mixed reviews from her death in 1865 throughout the twentieth century, when waves of popularity and oblivion followed one another. It seems that Gaskell’s versatile personality, of which she was certainly aware–“I have a great number of mes” she famously wrote in a letter–,1 has generated an equal number of critical appraisals and personae: “domestic” Gaskell, “industrial” Gaskell, “feminist” Gaskell, “celebrity” Gaskell, etcetera. As the scope and size of invaluable annotated bibliographies by Jeffrey Welch, Robert Selig, and Nancy Weyant2 indicate, it is possible to discern different phases in the composite arc of modern Gaskell studies, the first of which spans from the Fifties to the Eighties. Before then, Gaskell was either ignored or captured in the persistent image of a delicate and unintellectual Victorian novelist, “Mrs. Gaskell”, handed down in scholarship for almost fifty years. It took until the 1950s for critics to begin to reconsider Gaskell’s books in a new light, with an emphasis on the social dimension identified by Raymond Williams in his Culture and Society (1958), and on account of the concomitant advent of Victorian literary criticism. A new spurt of interest ran through the NineteenEighties and Nineties, when Gaskell’s life and work were being continually reassessed from different perspectives determined by shifts and changes in contemporary theoretical criticism. In particular, the final decade of the century saw the rise of a new popularity, among scholars and non-academics alike, fostered by the activity of the Gaskell Society and

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the release of the BBC television adaptation of Wives and Daughters in 1999. The proliferation of film and stage versions of Gaskell’s novels and short stories at the dawn of the new millennium, which constitute the subject-matter of the present volume, further testifies to the on-going process of revision of Gaskell’s works and public profile that has eventually won her a due place in the canon of English literature. 1. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of two important collections, Clement Shorter’s Novels and Tales of Mrs Gaskell (11 vols., 1906-1919) and the Knutsford edition of The Works of Mrs Gaskell (ed. A.W. Ward, 8 vols., 1906-1911), complemented by the first full-length review of Gaskell’s life and works, Mrs Ellis Chadwick’s Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories (1910). Although both Hugh Walker, in The Age of Tennyson (1914), and Oliver Elton, in A Survey of English Literature 1830-1880 (1920), paid tribute to her novels, her figure quickly faded into oblivion until the end of the Twenties, when three biocritical studies came out within a few months: Gerald de Witt Sanders’s Elizabeth Gaskell (1929, with a comprehensive bibliography by Clark Northup), Archie Stanton Whitfield’s Mrs Gaskell, Her Life and Work (1929), and Elizabeth Haldane’s Mrs Gaskell and Her Friends (1930). Nevertheless, Gaskell’s reputation in the first half of the twentieth century was severely affected by Lord David Cecil’s condescending judgment of her, in Early Victorian Novelists (1934), as being “all a woman was expected to be; gentle, domestic, tactful, unintellectual, prone to tears, easily shocked”.3 The aspect Cecil chiefly stressed was Gaskell’s “femininity”, hence her incapacity to create convincing male characters or manage social themes. In his view she was at her best in the “domestic” fiction exemplified by Cranford, but nevertheless was a “minor author”. Although Cecil’s assessment was attuned to the scalding criticism towards Victorian writers characterizing the inter-war period, it must be noted that his study appeared after a decade in which Gaskell’s name had gone almost completely forgotten: Jeffrey Welch’s bibliography of Gaskell rarely records more than two or three entries in the years 1929-49. As a result, Cecil’s image of Gaskell as “a dove”, epitomising “the typical Victorian woman” deeply influenced the academic response to Gaskell’s writings in the years to come. It is significant that, notwithstanding her rebuttal of Cecil’s arguments, in 1948 novelist Rosamond Lehmann still deemed Gaskell “an intensely feminine” author in her introduction to “a neglected Victorian Classic” like Wives and Daughters.4 Indeed, her name would generally appear in comprehensive histories of English literature or be set side by side with Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot in studies

(Un)intellectual, Social, Feminist, or Canonical Writer?

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devoted to women writers, often announced by telling titles like “feminine novels”, “lady novelists”, “ladies in literature”, “literary women”. Such labels testify to the persistence of a critical tendency that originated in the Victorian period and apprehended literature in terms of gender categories. The underlying belief was that men’s writing was naturally connoted by emotional control and learning, whereas the so-called “female literature” had to represent the realm of feelings, more “congenial” to women. Not surprisingly, together with adjectives such as “sympathetic” and “humanitarian”, “feeling”–in phrases such as “fidelity to”, “novels of”–is one of the most recurring terms used by critics of different schools to describe Gaskell’s style and narratives. Yet Cecil’s assessment did not go unchallenged. As early as 1938, Batho and Dobrée expressed admiration for Gaskell’s “dangerous and subversive” novels (to Victorian eyes),5 while in 1941 the British writer and critic Victor Pritchett praised Gaskell’s social novels in response to Cecil’s censorious essay,6 setting a new tendency in Gaskell studies that was taken up seven years later by Annette Hopkins in her “Mary Barton, a Victorian Best Seller”.7 The re-evaluation of Gaskell’s industrial fiction thus led to the emergence of two main critical trends encapsulated in Edward Wagenknecht’s theory of “two Gaskells”.8 According to him, a “lesser” Gaskell wrote purpose-novels, whilst the “greater” Gaskell wrote domestic fiction, Cranford and especially Wives and Daughters, almost unanimously recognized as her masterpiece. This perspective was to be completely reversed in the following decade, when critics began to shift their attention away from the provincial life stories favoured by Cecil toward Gaskell’s social problem novels and the issue of “the woman question”, the latter confronted by Aina Rubenius in the pioneering The Woman Question in Mrs Gaskell’s Work (1950). Scholars such as D.S. Bland, Walter Allen, and Annette Hopkins–author of the insightful Elizabeth Gaskell, Her Life and Work (1952)–, commended Mary Burton and North and South for their historical accuracy and unprejudiced portrayal of several aspects of industrial life. In her chapter on Mary Barton, in Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1955), Kathleen Tillotson similarly focused on the “condition-of-Englandquestion”, even if she emphasised Gaskell’s “feminine” compassion and sympathy. In 1958, Marxist critics Arnold Kettle and Raymond Williams examined at length Mary Barton and North and South as social documents, outstanding examples of what they respectively termed “social-problem” and “industrial” novels. Remarkably, Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) was pivotal in adding context and a political edge to critical appreciations of Gaskell’s oeuvre.

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Despite the unfavourable view offered in 1960 by Miriam Allott’s survey of Gaskell’s life and works that underscored the ‘limitations’ of her intellect and imagination,9 in the Sixties the need grew, as the American James Barry put it, “for an overall critical study of Mrs Gaskell’s fiction and a reassessment of her position both within Victorian fiction and within English fiction as a whole”.10 In this respect, 1965 marked not only the centenary of Gaskell’s death, but also a turning point in Gaskell’s criticism, with sixteen entries recorded by Welch, among which two seminal monographs stand out: Arthur Pollard’s Mrs Gaskell Novelist and Biographer, and Edgar Wright’s Mrs Gaskell: the Basis for Reassessment, both highlighting the richness and many-sidedness of Gaskell’s output. Concomitantly, Gaskell’s life and copious correspondence led to the publication of bio-critical studies and editions of her letters that shed light on the complexity of her personality and literary achievement. Notably, John Chapple and Arthur Pollard’s monumental edition of The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966) for the first time made available for readers and scholars a wealth of information about Gaskell’s private life and professional activity, which stimulated further research. To borrow from Barbara Brill’s essay title, readers and critics were in the process of “getting to know Elizabeth Gaskell”.11 What the correspondence surprisingly brought to light was the lively portrait of a Victorian woman leading a hectic life in her different, if not conflicting roles of wife, mother, community worker and published author, an indefatigable letterwriter weaving a wide social network and, more importantly, a great chronicler of her age. Gaskell’s correspondence contains allusions to contemporary events, social and religious attitudes, details and trivia of everyday chores that give a very realistic idea of what life was like in Victorian Britain. Moreover, the affectionate and humorous tone characterizing her epistolary style has contributed significantly to the enduring image of the “superlative story-teller”12 brimming with ideas and feelings. The critical response to Gaskell’s novels remained ambivalent, though. If the social novelist was certainly the most favoured “version” of Gaskell in the Sixties, as testified by John Lucas, Raymond Chapman, John Chapple and Patrick Brantlinger’s extensive analyses of Mary Barton and North and South, in Margaret Lane’s opinion Gaskell’s approach in Mary Barton was anyhow “feminine”,13 while for Margaret Ganz she remained an “artist in conflict”14 albeit essentially a “domestic” writer. Revealingly, in 1967 “Mrs” Gaskell featured in an overview of “Minor British Novelists”15 edited by Charles Alva Hoyt, a study plainly perpetuating the place F.L. Leavis had assigned to her in his authoritative The Great Tradition (1948).

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Another prominent aspect of Gaskell’s fiction that emerged in the Sixties and was fully addressed in the Seventies and the Eighties pertained to “the woman question”; that is to say, the ways in which Gaskell represented and challenged the place of women in Victorian society, usually in connection with the complex and partly auto-biographical figure of the working woman. According to Hazel Mews and Françoise Basch, Gaskell’s books for the first time brought to the fore female labourers, but in so doing they exposed, too, all the dangers awaiting the heroines– portrayed throughout as “frail vessels” and “relative creatures”16–when trespassing on the male-dominated sphere of work. In the same years, Susan Gorsky, Jenni Calder and Nina Auerbach17 from different angles called attention to Gaskell’s recurrent representation of unorthodox families that strongly defied all traditional notions of marriage. As pointed out by Angus Easson, Gaskell was endowed with a unique capacity to raise questions only matched, in his view, by an equally strong inclination to leave them unanswered.18 Such a “questioning” attitude somehow accounts for the proliferation of new areas of research that flourished in the Seventies to include a wide range of fresh subjects, notably social change, education, Unitarianism and the import of communities, especially female ones, explored by Auerbach and Bergmann.19 The decade also registered a shift in comparative studies involving Gaskell. In the previous fifty years, her name had been mainly linked to those of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. Her friendship with the Brontës and the wavering editorial relationship with Dickens had been the subject of several articles that only indirectly dealt with her writings and personality. In 1970 Gaskell must have been still primarily known as the author of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, if John Jeoffrey Sharps decided to sub-title his monograph (Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention) “A Study of Her Non-Biographical Works”. Her association with Dickens was undergoing a similar revision, with the publication of Norman Page’s article in Notes & Queries stressing the impact that the reading of Ruth had on Dickens during the composition of Hard Times.20 Essays devoted to Gaskell’s tribute to or influence on diverse British writers such as Alfred Tennyson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Henry James and William Makepiece Thackeray came out in the ensuing years. Additionally, Gaskell’s output began to be examined in the broader cultural context of Victorian Britain and within the hermeneutic framework of literary genres, particularly the provincial novel, the “novel of social crisis”, and the historical novel. As regards the editions of Gaskell’s books in the period 1929-1975, the inventory provided by Welch shows that the publishers’ choices and readers’ taste did not necessarily follow critical reception. If the majority

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of academic studies evenly focused on domestic and social novels, Cranford and the Life of Charlotte Brontë held their own, being by far the most re-issued works. Strangely enough, Wives and Daughters, often described by scholars of various kinds as “perfect”, counted only five editions, three of which were concentrated in the Sixties. Gaskell’s last and unfinished novel was almost without exception considered her finest work, eulogized for its “splendid” construction and psychological insight. 2. Female friendship and family ties, principally the relationship between mothers and daughters, sisters and siblings, became fashionable topics in the Eighties, a time unquestionably dominated by feminist criticism. Gaskell’s exegetic trajectory provided a fitting example to expose what Elaine Showalter called “the double critical standard”21 to denote the gender bias informing previous and contemporary critical inquiry. In keeping with Showalter, Anna Walters viewed Gaskell scholarship as emblematic of what can happen to an authoress “when women’s reputations are in male hands”.22 Accordingly, Gaskell was slowly but steadily “appropriated” by feminists who irrevocably dropped the tag of “Mrs”, which, for more than a century, had been attached to her name. As argued by Susan Morgan, she was “not only a Christian novelist, but a feminist historical novelist”.23 Thanks to comprehensive reappraisals such as Coral Lansbury and Patsy Stoneman’s,24 Gaskell studies boomed under the spur of an unprecedented explosion of publications. The focal point of most contributions revolved around the figure of the fallen woman, first and foremost the protagonist of Ruth, but also Esther in Mary Barton and the namesake heroine of the short story “Lizzie Leigh”. While Nina Auerbach and to a lesser extent Beth Kalikoff25 traced the “rise” and the artistic exploitation of this type of heroine in nineteenth-century art and fiction, other commentators concentrated on Gaskell’s treatment of this controversial topic. Laura Hapke26 underlined a distinguished feature of Gaskell’s fallen women, namely the active role they play in their own process of moral redemption, registering its absence in the male fiction of the period. In her keen analysis of the social implications of unchaste femininity, Sally Mitchell identified the theological question of “the fortunate fall”27 as the most original element Gaskell contributed to the Victorian rhetoric of “fallenness”. Ruth, for instance, in George Watt’s opinion embodied “one of the first feminine saviour figures in Western literature”.28 As summarised by Merryn Williams, Gaskell’s narratives contravened Victorian proprieties in suggesting “that the fallen women can lead useful lives, that marrying the man is not always the best solution and that the illegitimate child has a right to exist”.29 Along with the fallen

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woman, problems of female identity were tackled through a close scrutiny of liminal female groups like maid-servants, spinsters and governesses, often in connection with Gaskell’s stance on education. In this regard, Linda Costic, Wendy Craik and Hilary Schor30 lay stress on Gaskell’s denunciation of the inadequacy of classic education in the task of forming the mind and personality of nineteenth-century men and women. Discussions of her social novels and short stories pointed to her uniqueness as advocate of a more inclusive curriculum, which would encompass “scientific” subjects like politics and economics. Gaskell was not alone in her worries over the reform of the educational system and in asserting the necessity of learning for women and the working classes; the issue plagued many politicians and social novelists too. The compass of comparative studies was thus enriched by a number of articles that drew analogies with Carlyle, Kingsley, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Stone, George Eliot, Scott and Wordsworth. Themes already explored in the previous decade–family, change, Unitarian values, Manchester’s urban setting– received more attention. Nonetheless, the overriding new element introduced into Gaskell studies in the Eighties was without doubt an incipient interest in her shorter fiction, engaging a substantial group of scholars that included Enid Duthie, Pauline Nestor, Maureen Reddy, Anthea Trodd, Geoffrey Tillotson, and Edgar Wright. For the first time whole articles and book chapters were devoted to single novellas or short stories, with critics either transferring hermeneutic patterns and approaches adopted in the handling of the major novels or developing new critical threads. The accent on shorter fiction entailed a concurrent review of Gaskell’s experimentation with different narrative forms and genes, ranging from the pastoral and the idyllic, down to the Gothic, the ghost story and the sensational. At the same time, it gave impetus to a general re-consideration of her attitude towards serial publications, with essays focusing on her collaboration with The Cornhill Magazine and relationships with some illustrators like Du Murier and Foster. Furthermore, a major role in reviving the enthusiasm for Elizabeth Gaskell was played by the Gaskell Society, founded in 1985 on the model of other associations promoting a specific writer. In this respect, the launch of the Society meant the first official step towards Gaskell’s inclusion in the echelons of British literature. With the regular publication of a newsletter and a Journal, the periodical organization of meetings and sundry cultural events, the Society was instrumental in bridging the gap between scholars and general readers, thus advancing both Gaskell’s popularity and scholarship. The resurgence of interest in Gaskell’s life and

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works was not confined to England and English-speaking countries, though. As Francesco Marroni and Yuriko Yamawaki showed in their critical overviews,31 Gaskell’s studies were flourishing in such distant cultures as Italy and Japan, where translations of Gaskells’ work, especially her short stories, began to appear.32 The international reputation of Gaskell continued to grow in the last decade of the century, thanks to the creation of websites and electronic resources that have made research easier for both scholars and bibliographers. Of special note is “The Gaskell Web”, designed by the Japanese scholar Mitsuharo Matsuoka; besides comprising dedicated sections and links to scholarly articles and auxiliary online resources, it provides open access to the digitized versions of the majority of Gaskell and other Victorian writers’ books, thereby making them available for stylistic and philological analysis. Even so, in the “Preface” to her annotated bibliography of English-language sources covering the period 1992-2001, Nancy Weyant illustrated the several difficulties she still had to face in locating valuable scholarship by means of old tools and new electronic databases such as Project Muse, Academic Search Premier, Periodical Abstracts and WorldCat. Despite inevitable omissions, in comparing the entries between her up-dated and previous bibliographies, Weyant noted that “the number of books, book chapters, journal articles and dissertations published in the last decade are almost double the number between 1976 and 1991”.33 The dramatic increase in the sheer volume of scholarly contributions and paperback editions of Gaskell’s books, itself the by-product of a coeval revival in Victorian studies, both encouraged and was stimulated by an ever-growing knowledge of Gaskell’s private life and working environment. In the Nineties, the body of her correspondence was integrated with the publication of newly found single letters and with the reprint in 1997 of Chapple and Pollard’s 1966 edition. This was to be complemented in 2000 by Further Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, a collection of 270 additional letters edited by John Chapple and Alan Shelston. Moreover, the public printing of Gaskell’s diaries and fullscale biographies such as those of Felicia Buonaparte (1992), Jenny Uglow (1993), Anna Unsworth (1996), and then John Chapple’s (1997),34 added extra details to Gaskell’s eventful life while revealing unknown facets of her character. In its turn, the multifariousness of Gaskell’s corpus and persona made her virtually inexhaustible as a subject, opening up new directions for literary analysis that reflected a number of critical standpoints, ranging from feminism to new historicism and post-colonialism, including psychoanalytical, Bakhtinian and Lacanian approaches. Feminist studies, centring

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25

on subversive and resisting women, further debated issues of gender, female sexuality and “fallenness”, motherhood and sisterhood, the new woman and philanthropy, while widening their scope with a growing discourse on domesticity and domestic space expressly addressed by Susan Johnston and Elizabeth Langland.35 Apart from the complex trope of the fallen woman, the gallery of feminine typologies was supplemented with an eclectic series of feminine representatives: seamstresses, unwed mothers, female teachers, medical women, female adolescents, aunts, Welsh and Irish women, witnessing women, widows, visitor women, women writers, servants, and female saviours with their variants of lowerclass angels, missionaries and nurses. Most importantly, the Nineties saw the emergence of a novel area of inquiry that directed the attention to Gaskell’s portrayal of manliness and masculinity, and to her response to the cult of self-help. Critics began to look at figures of brothers and “fraternal deviants”,36 sailors and military men, working-class heroes, self-made men and doctors. The latter were also part of an advancing debate sparked off by Athena Vrettos, Francesco Marroni, and Gemma Persico37 on the theme of illness and representations of death, which pinpointed Gaskell’s preoccupation with infant and adult mortality. A second salient drift in Gaskell scholarship can be detected in critiques considering her fiction within the epistemological framework of Victorian scientific culture, for the most part in relation to Darwinism and theories of evolution.38 Concurrently, the rising wave of cultural studies prompted investigation in the fields of print culture39 and object studies that disclosed unexplored sides of the nineteenth-century publishing market and material culture in which Gaskell operated. In this connection, Gaskell’s correspondence and the remarkable bibliographical work carried out by Angus Easson and Walter Smith40 greatly helped to clarify her relationship with the periodical press, while bearing witness to her keen interest in commodities and materials as reflected in the ubiquitous presence of clothes and fabrics, disposable items and collections of trinkets featuring her fiction.41 These studies have run alongside, and to some extent have been the outcrop of, the transformation in academic attitudes to Gaskell, particularly with regard to the short stories, which were largely dismissed by critical opinion in her lifetime. “Cousin Phillis” and “My Lady Ludlow” were the most favoured by Gaskell specialists in the last years of the century, while Sylvia’s Lovers was arousing a similar critical appeal. Gaskell’s more “radical” voice and social agenda similarly held the stage with analyses of Chartist discourse and images of machines conveyed in her books. Other issues discussed include the Gothic, the supernatural,

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satire and humour, Orientalism, folk music, nostalgia and national identity, storytelling, witchcraft, shame, lying, floral symbolism, spinsters and food, emigration and imperialism, ethnicity, theological topics, representations of idiocy, Gaskell’s use of colour, her allusions to Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, Wordsworth, Dante, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and influence on Yeats and Dostoevsky. The decade also greeted the publication of two influential monographs by Jane Spencer and Kate Flint,42 and the collection Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context (eds. Francesco Marroni and Alan Shelston, 1999). Gathering scholars from England, Italy, South Africa and the United States in the attempt to “revisit” the Gaskell canon and suggest new critical paths, the latter volume attests to the crucial involvement of the Italian “Centre for Victorian and Edwardian Studies” (CUSVE) based in Pescara, which joined hands with the Gaskell Society and its Japanese branch in boosting academic research and exchange through conferences and publications. Over the years its review of Victorian Studies (RSV– Rivista di Studi Vittoriani) has established its reputation and complemented the Gaskell Society Journal as a major outlet for Gaskell scholarship. Still, the most consequential occurrence in Gaskell public reputation at the turn of the century remains the 1999 BBC dramatization of Wives and Daughters, written by a not-yet renowned Andrew Davies and directed by Nicholas Renton, which ushered in a period of unprecedented popularity for Gaskell’s fiction and persona. 3. The TV adaptation of Wives and Daughters, whose impact is outlined in this volume in Katherine Byrne’s chapter, had momentous consequences on Gaskell’s literary reputation, since it instantly introduced Gaskell’s name to the general public and implicitly put its novel on a par with other masterpieces of English literature that had been previously transposed into film, such as Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice. Besides, the enormous success of the series resulted in the subsequent BBC project of filming North and South, originally intended as part of a triad of dramas set in the North to be released in 2004. Although poorly publicized, North and South was so well received by television viewers, that they ended up crashing the BBC website with enthusiastic comments on the fascinating character of Thornton and on the social issues addressed. Parallels with the triumphant 1995 Pride and Prejudice were drawn, thereby adding to Gaskell’s literary prestige and paving the way for the succeeding dramatization of Cranford, directed by Simon Curtis two years later. By virtue of a stellar cast and an excellent script that weaved together Cranford, “The Moorland Cottage”, “Mr Harrison’s Confessions”

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and the essay “The Last Generation in England”, this “multi-threading drama” was nominated in sixteen categories for the 2008 BAFTA awards, which persuaded the BBC to produce a two-part equally acclaimed sequel, Return to Cranford (2009). Releases of the DVD version of the two series ensued, with different stage adaptations of Cranford touring England at the same time along with Rona Munro’s celebrated Mary Barton (2007). Beyond any analysis of the cultural implications of theatrical and television vogues, what is important to observe is how the transposition of Gaskell’s writings on the screen and on the stage in the last decade has been integral to the re-fashioning of her figure and literary profile as a preeminent Victorian novelist both inside and outside academia. Cranford is a case in point of the process of mutual influence between popular and critical reception. Publishing houses like Penguin and Bloomsbury issued new covers showcasing the leading actors of the TV series, and in some cases collected in a single volume all the stories meshed into the script (Bloomsbury and Random House). The television success, on the other hand, engendered a significant increase in the sales of Gaskell’s books that was not confined to Cranford, and even led to the publication of a Bloomsbury hardback volume about the behind-the-scenes of the TV drama, The Cranford Companion, co-authored by co-creators Sue Birtwisle and Susie Conklin.43 Likewise, Gaskell scholarship has benefited from contributions in the form of articles, reviews, and papers covering this new domain of research that the present volume intends to assess in a systematic way. Being produced under the aegis of the BBC prestigious trademark, the film transpositions have bestowed “canonical” stature upon Gaskell while inscribing her fiction in the conservative genre of “heritage”, often criticized for presenting wistful cultural fantasies. Lined up alongside Austen, Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, Gaskell has gradually come to represent quintessential “Englishness”, notwithstanding the fact that the latest adaptations, as reviewers and scholars have noted,44 depart in many ways from the traditional costume drama. It is undeniable that all the films are imbued with the nostalgic evocation of a dying and partly imaginary past; even so, they are clearly inflected by present concerns and anxieties apparent in the great emphasis put on the issues of science, rapid change, class division, industrialism, economic depression and gender roles. In this respect, they seem to correlate with recent trends in scholarly investigation that, as corroborated by Weyant’s latest supplement to her 2001 bibliography,45 similarly debate narratives of community and their social values, print culture and Victorian publishing history, Gaskell’s early reviewers and shorter fiction, commodification, materials and dressing

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codes, scientific thinking and economics, imperialist discourse, the construction of nationhood and British identity. The latter has been lately explored by Patrick Parrinder, who in Nation and Novel thus foregrounds the cultural value of Gaskell’s fiction: “We may say that Elizabeth Gaskell, six years older than Brontë, introduced the portrayal of the northern industrialist, as well as the Manchester working class, into English fiction”.46 In recent years, Gaskell scholars have also been gifted with two indispensable and long-needed resources. The first complete critical edition of Gaskell’s corpus thoroughly collated and annotated has appeared under the editorial direction of Joanne Shattock (Pickering and Chatto, 2005-2006), while Graham Handley’s Chronology (2005) draws on a range of sources to detail the quotidian progress of Gaskell’s life.47 By supplying accurate and meticulously dependable information, both works have proven to be essential reference guides for the specialist and general reader alike. From a strictly critical perspective, the official acknowledgement of Gaskell’s literary standing was sanctioned in 2007 with the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell edited by Jill Matus. In its final chapter, “Gaskell Then and Now”, Susan Hamilton mentions another relevant side of “celebrity Gaskell”, commenting on the central place she now holds within the industry of Cheshire literary tourism48. Promoted by the Gaskell Society in concert with the English Heritage Society and the Manchester Historical Buildings Trust, the successful bid to restore and recognize Gaskell’s Manchester home at 84 Plymouth Grove as a heritage site has further strengthened her rank among other British “classics” and her role as a cultural icon. In addition, Pamela Corpron Parker49 has aptly shown how the emergent academic interest in literary tourism–spreading through disparate subjects such as literary and cultural studies, tourism and heritage studies, cultural and literary geography–could be of service to Gaskell scholarship, by fostering multi-disciplinary approaches in which different strands of investigations converge. Since Hamilton’s 2007 critical outline, Gaskell’s reputation has continued to gain ground in the wake of commemorating events and publications occasioned by the bicentenary of her birth. After having been considered in turn as an unintellectual, social, and feminist writer, Gaskell was being reconsidered from a range of different critical perspectives, which are gradually turning her into a “classic”. Collective volumes such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture and the Art of Fiction: Original Essays for the Bicentenary (ed. Sandro Jung) and Elizabeth Gaskell and the Art of the Short Stories (ed. Francesco Marroni, Renzo D’Agnillo and Massimo Verzella), came out in 2010, both the offspring of two

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conferences, together with Alan Shelston’s biography of Gaskell written for the Hesperus series Brief Lives, and the reprint of Chapple’s Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years. It is noteworthy that Gaskell has been included in the selection of authors singled out in 2009 for The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists,50 whereas only four years before, she had been completely overlooked by Terry Eagleton in his overview of the English Novel.51 2010 also marked the crowning moment of Gaskell’s literary “canonization” with the dedication ceremony that took place in Westminster Abbey on 25 September, when a memorial window panel was unveiled in Poets’ Corner, the Valhalla of British literati. So, once Gaskell’s high standing in English literature has been ultimately acknowledged, the main question critics are left to face has been recently phrased by Alan Shelston, “Where Next in Gaskell Studies?”52 In spite of the manifold standpoints embraced by literary criticism, Shelston identifies possible areas for future research, both in the fields of publishing history, giving priority to Gaskell’s translations and short stories as cultural objects, and of biography, urging a deeper examination of Gaskell’s “adult” and “last years”–in the footsteps of Chapple–and of her relationship with her daughters. More importantly, he calls for a “theoretical Gaskell”, claiming that Gaskell’s variety of genres, themes and personal experience demands “theoretical criticism with a wider cultural dimension”.53 The latter aspect is specifically voiced by the editors of Elizabeth Gaskell and the Art of the Short Stories, who maintain that, for all its merits, traditional critical studies have not always done justice to Gaskell’s complexity and cultural compass, hence the need for multi-disciplinary frameworks aimed at “detecting the dialectic play in her novels between text and context”.54 What is certain is that at the dawn of the new millennium Gaskell’s work can be accessed through a vast range of different modes and media– books and e-books, websites and electronic resources, TV transpositions, stage dramatizations, audiobooks, literary tourism–that stand as a living testament to its exceptional aptness to “appropriate” and be “appropriated”, “adapt” and be “adapted”, and that will inevitably bring forth new readings and new “Gaskells”.

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Notes  1

Elizabeth Gaskell to Eliza Fox, April 1850, in The Letters of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, p. 108. 2 Robert L. Selig, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Reference Guide; Jeffrey Egan Welch, Elizabeth Gaskell: An Annotated Bibliography, 1929-1975; Nancy Weyant, Elizabeth Gaskell. An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Sources, 1976-1991; Nancy Weyant, Elizabeth Gaskell. An Annotated Guide to English Language Sources, 1992-2001. 3 Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation, p. 198. 4 Rosamond Lehmann, “Introduction” to Wives and Daughters, pp. 5-15. 5 Edith Batho and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Victorians and After, 1830-1914, p. 284. 6 Victor S. Pritchett, “Current Literature: Books in General”, p. 630. 7 Annette Hopkins, “Mary Barton, a Victorian Best Seller”, pp. 1-18. 8 Edward Wagenknecht, “The Two Mrs Gaskells”, pp. 251-260. 9 See Miriam Allott, Elizabeth Gaskell. 10 James D. Barry, “Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell and Charles Kingsley”, p. 257. 11 Barbara Brill, “Getting To Know Elizabeth Gaskell”, pp. 227-233. 12 Graham Handley, Sylvia’s Lovers, ed. W.H. Mason, p. 76. 13 Margaret Lane, “Introduction” to Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, A Tale of Manchester Life, pp. v-x. 14 Margaret Ganz, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict. 15 Charles Shapiro, “Mrs Gaskell and ‘The Severe Truth’”, pp. 98-108. 16 My reference is to Hazel Mews, Frail Vessels: Women’s Role in Women’s Novels from Fanny Burney to George Eliot, and Françoise Basch, Relative Creatures: Victorian Women in Society and the Novel 1837-67. 17 My reference is to Susan R. Gorsky, “Old Maids and New Women: Alternatives to Marriage in Englishwomen’s Novels, 1847-1915”, pp. 68-85, Jenni Calder, “The Uncommercial Marriage”, in Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, pp. 68-81, and Nina Auerbach, “Beyond the Family: Idyll and Inferno”, in Communities of Women, pp. 77-113. 18 See Angus Easson, “Introduction” to Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, pp. ixxviii. 19 See Helena Bergmann, Between Obedience and Freedom: Women’s Role in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Industrial Novel 20 Norman Page, “Ruth and Hard Times: A Dickens Source”, p. 413. 21 Elaine Showalter, “The Double Critical Standard and the Feminine Novel”, in A Literature of Their Own…, pp. 73-99. 22 Anna Walters, “When Women’s Reputations are in Male Hands – Elizabeth Gaskell and the Critics”, pp. 405-413. 23 Susan Morgan, Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in 19th Century British Fiction, p. 126. 24 Coral Lansbury, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell. 25 Nina Auerbach, “The Rise of the Fallen Woman”, pp. 29-52, and Beth Kalikoff,

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 “The Falling Women in Three Victorian Novels”, pp. 357-367. 26 See Laura Hapke, “He Stoops to Conquer: Redeeming the Fallen Women in the Fiction of Dickens, Gaskell and Their Contemporaries”, pp. 16-22. 27 Sally Mitchell, “The Social Problem”, in The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Readings, 1835-1880, p. 35. 28 George Watt, The Fallen Woman in the 19th Century English Novel, p. 38. 29 Merryn Williams, “Elizabeth Gaskell”, in Women in the English Novel, 18001900, p. 113. 30 See Linda Costic, “Elizabeth Gaskell and the Question of Liberal Education”, pp. 50-60, Wendy Craik, “Lore, Learning and Wisdom: Workers and Education in Mary Barton and North and South”, pp. 13-33, Hilary M. Schor, “Affairs of the Alphabet: Reading, Writing and Narrating in Cranford”, pp. 288-304. 31 See Francesco Marroni, “Gaskell Studies in Italy”, Gaskell Society Journal, pp. 41-47, and Yuriko Yamawaki, “Gaskell Studies in Japan”, pp. 96-98. 32 The collection edited by Marisa Sestito in 1988, Storie di bambine, di donne e di streghe (Stories of Little Girls, Women and Witches, Firenze, Giunti) was soon followed by three volumes of single or collected short stories edited by Francesco Marroni––La donna grigia (Chieti, Solfanelli, 1988), Il fantasma nella stanza del giardino ed altri racconti (Roma, Lucarini, 1989), and Mia cugina Phillis (Venezia, Marsilio, 1993)–, two versions of The Old Nurse’s Tale edited by Rosario Berardi (Solfanelli, 1990) and by Riccardo Reim (Roma, Newton Compton, 1993), and by the publication of Mariaconcetta Costantini’s Il signorotto di campagna e altri racconti (The Squire’s Tale and Other Tales, Napoli, Danilo, 1996). In Japan the first attempt to publish the complete works of Gaskell in a language other than English was launched in the same years, although the first volume, comprising Cranford and other eight novellas, only appeared in 2000 (Osaka, Kyoiku Tosho). The edition was completed in 2009 with the publication of the two volumes (VIII and IX) of Gaskell’s short stories and nonfiction. 33 Nancy Weyant, “Preface” to Elizabeth Gaskell. An Annotated Guide to English Language Sources, 1992-2001, p. vii. 34 Felicia Buonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon; Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories; Anna Unsworth, Elizabeth Gaskell: An Independent Woman; John A.V. Chapple, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years. 35 Susan Janet Johnston, Women and Domestic Experience in Victorian Political Fiction, especially pp. 83-134; Elizabeth Langland, “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Angels with a Twist”, pp. 113-147. 36 My reference is to William J. Hyde, “‘Poor Frederick’ and ‘Poor Peter’: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fraternal Deviants”, Gaskell Society Journal, 9, pp. 21-26. 37 Athena Vrettos, “Body Language and the Poetics of Illness”, in Semantic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, pp. 19-47; Francesco Marroni, “Cousin Phillis: Illness as Language”, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, pp. 39-64; Gemma Persico, “The Language of Illness and Death and the Silencing of Truth in Wives and Daughters”, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, pp. 267299.

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38 Dorothy Mermin, “Science”, in Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830-1880, pp. 127-140; Clare Pettitt, “‘Cousin Holman’s Dresser’: Science, Social Change, and the Pathologized Female in Gaskell’s ‘Cousin Phillis’”, pp. 471-489; Mariaconcetta Costantini, “Evolutionism as a Mode of Narration: Gaskell’s Experimentalism in North and South”, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, pp. 111-146. 39 See seminal studies by Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial; Hilary M. Schor, Scheherazade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel; and Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, Victorian Publishing and Mrs Gaskell’s Work. 40 Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage; Walter E. Smith, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Bibliographical Catalogue. 41 On this topic see Tim Dolin, “Cranford and the Victorian Collection”, pp. 179206, and Christopher Lidner, “Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell’s Industrial Novels”, pp. 379-396. 42 Jane Spencer, Elizabeth Gaskell; Kate Flint, Elizabeth Gaskell. 43 Sue Birtwistle and Susie Conklin, The Cranford Companion. 44 On this aspect see Katherine Byrne, “‘Such a fine, close weave’: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford (2007)”; Chris Louttit, “Cranford, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Adapting the Victorian Novel for Television; and Raffaella Antinucci, “Filming Gaskell’s Shorter Fiction”, in Elizabeth Gaskell and the Art of the Short Story, ed. Marroni, D’Agnillo and Verzella. 45 Nancy Weyant, A Bibliographic Supplement: Gaskell Scholarship 2002-2011, retrievable at http://www.nancyweyant.com/gaskell-pdf/BiblioSupplementGaskell-July-2011-Additions-NancyWeyantCom.pdf. 46 Patrick Parrinder, Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, p. 208. On the figure of the northern industrialist, see also Raffaella Antinucci, “North and South: an Industrial Version of the Victorian Gentleman”, in Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction: Original Essays for the Bicentenary, ed. Sandro Jung, pp. 131-142. 47 Joanne Shattock (ed), The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell; Graham Handley, An Elizabeth Gaskell Chronology. 48 Susan Hamilton, “Gaskell Then and Now”, in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 178-191. 49 Pamela Corpron Parker, “Elizabeth Gaskell and Literary Tourism”, pp. 128-138. 50 Brigid Lowe, “Elizabeth Gaskell”, in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, pp. 193-209. 51 Significantly, in the preface Eagleton specifies that he has confined himself to those authors “whom students are at present most likely to encounter in their work” (see Eagleton, The English Novel, An Introduction, p. ix). 52 Alan Shelston, “Where Next in Gaskell Studies?”, Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction …, pp. 1-11. 53 Ibid., p. 7. 54 Marroni, D’Agnillo and Verzella, “Introduction” to Elizabeth Gaskell and the Art of the Short Story, p. 8.

CHAPTER THREE ADAPTING MARY BARTON: HISTORY, RESEARCH, POSSIBILITIES THOMAS RECCHIO

The history of stage and screen adaptations of Mary Barton is sparse and uneven, a fact reflected in the limited scholarship on adaptations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel. As Andrew Maunder has argued in his recent study of the first stage adaptation of Mary Barton performed at the Victoria Theatre in 1851,1 “the extent to which her novels found their way into popular theatrical culture has received scant attention. This is surprising [...]—he writes—[because] Mary Barton [...] can be positioned as part of a practice of adapting fiction for the stage that flourished at midcentury” (2). When one considers, however, that there were only three adaptations done between 1851, three years after the publication of the novel, and 1863 (the second adaptation is dated 1861), and that the next adaptation with the name, Mary Barton, in it was not produced until 1964 in a teleplay in four parts written by Elaine Morgan for BBC television, the scarcity of scholarship is less surprising.2 Nonetheless, scholarship on stage and screen adaptations of Mary Barton has rich potential for increasing our understanding of not only the role adaptation played in the way “Victorian audiences viewed subjects like Mary Barton” and the “ways in which different social classes were fed her stories,”3 but also how the narrative form and moral concerns of the novel became absorbed into popular culture more broadly. Through performances in a range of venues from working class theatre in the nineteenth-century to regional and commercial theatre around the turn of the twentieth-century to the mass media of mid-century and a new stage version in the twenty-first, adaptations of Mary Barton have contributed to the on-going process of the re-accentuation of the humane social vision of Gaskell’s fiction by way of generic mutation from novel to drama, through a process of narrative fragmentation and thematic dispersal.4

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Not only are the history and scholarship on adaptations of Mary Barton sparse and uneven, so are the materials for writing that history; a fact that poses a challenge to organizing those materials. But let me try. I would divide stage adaptations into three groups. The first group, already mentioned, comprises the three plays written and performed in Gaskell’s lifetime. Drawing on Maunders’s analysis and the playbill he re-produced in that analysis, I would suggest that adaptations for working-class theatres enact one of Gaskell’s explicit fears in the novel that the working-class would give vent to its grievances through violence. Then, drawing on Judith Flander’s brief but suggestive reading of two of those scripts in her The Invention of Murder,5 I will juxtapose the fear of class violence with the exploitation of sensational, personal violence, the two analyses recapitulating on the stage the novelistic tension between class violence and personal violence, a tension that has been central to some classic criticism of the novel. 6 The second group, beginning with Colin Hazlewood’s 1862 play Our Lot in Life, comprises plays that draw on the narrative materials of Mary Barton but whose titles do not refer to Mary Barton directly, if at all. Those plays we might think of as adaptations in disguise with more affinities to appropriation than to adaptation.7 I include in that group Dion Boucicault’s The Long Strike (1866), J.P. Weston’s The Lancashire Strike (1867), George Sims’s The Last Chance (1885), and Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1909). While Boucicault’s and Houghton’s plays are readily available in published form, Hazlewood’s, Weston’s, and Sims’s are not. Traces of those latter plays can be found in the odd newspaper reference, and in the scripts housed in special collections departments of university libraries in the UK. The last group is not a group at all, but a single play, Rona Munro’s Mary Barton, written for the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester and first performed on 6 September 2006 and subsequently published in London by Nick Hern Books (2006). In what follows, I will tease out the history of Mary Barton adaptations, which can be inferred from the combination of scripts, critical material on those scripts, playbills, and newspaper accounts of performances of unpublished scripts. Such a history can only be partial, so one of my goals is to suggest a research agenda for a later date or for others to follow. I will then speculate about the 1964 BBC television fourpart adaptation serial production, which, though considered lost (both the script and the videotapes), may be hidden in the depths of a BBC storage room in London or Glasgow (the BBC production was done in Glasgow). And I will close by projecting the possibility of a new serial adaptation that would take advantage of the production qualities of digital technology

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that were so apparent in the recent television adaptation of Gaskell’s Cranford. “Mary Barton/A Tale of Manchester life/in Three Acts” reads the title page of the 1851 Victorian Theatre production; the playwright according to Bolton’s bibliography is unknown but Maunder identifies him as John Courtney, a well-known playwright who had done an adaptation of Jane Eyre also for the Victoria Theatre.8 The playbill, which lists characters and cast, proclaims just under the title, “Written expressly for this Theatre, and founded on the truly powerful novel of the same name.”9 The show ran from 17-22 February, then from 24-27 February, and finally 1-2 March. As Maunder has shown in some detail, the play “builds upon elements present in the [novel] ... deliberately incorporating a view ‘from below’ into the depiction of events. ‘We are,’ Barton announces on behalf of the workers —those in the audience as well as on stage—‘left to the mercy of our masters & heaven help us’. Such exchanges represent conscious and significant dramaturgical uptake from the novel; they are gestures from a working-class stance.” 10 Rather than Gaskell speaking for the working classes, one of her explicit goals articulated in the novel’s “Preface”—“to give some utterance to the agony ... which convulses this dumb people”11—the voices in the play emerge from the working-class itself, from their neighbourhood, within their culture with what appears to be less authorial mediation. Maunder makes the point as follows: “In the heated atmosphere of the Victoria, Barton’s experiences and his desire to feed his family become specifically those of a working-class man in London in the early 1850s.” 12 The generic mutation from novel to drama turns the solitary act of reading to a dialogic act of community expression. The extent to which the play was absorbed into working-class culture, through the close identification of the audience with the actors and plot of the play, is deepened by the play’s exploitation of other forms of workingclass entertainment, most notably music. Maunder notes that “Musical entertainment and comedy is added via a new character, Augustus Badger, a professional singer from ‘the great metropolis, London.’” 13 Unlike Margaret Jennings from the novel, who brings traditional English music into the story, the “new character” in the play performs in minstrel shows. The playbill provides the following description: “Augustus Maxie Badger, (Principal banjo of the Ethiopian Serenaders nightly performing at the Potatoe [sic] and Mousetrap Saloon) Mr Forman.” The presence of blackface minstrelsy, whose origins are deeply American and whose practices were deeply racist in a “condition of England” play is perplexing and fascinating, ripe for future research.14 When one considers that this play was written in 1851, a year before the publication of Harriet Beecher

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Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and thus before the explosion of Uncle Tom minstrel shows in the US and the UK in the mid to late 1850s, minstrelsy, surprisingly, must have had a broad appeal for working-class audiences before then.15 If we place the minstrelsy thread from within the play next to the other musical elements announced on the playbill, we can get a sense of how the more volatile political valence of the play is muted by musical practices that both permeate and frame the performance. The playbill explains, for instance, the major scenes with supplemental actions associated with each scene. One scene is set in “OLD STREET in the Outskirts of MANCHESTER / Mary Renounces her Wealthy Suitor—A Few more Words and –The Allies Parted. / A NEW DUET, to old Airs, by Miss BARROWCLIFF & Mr FORMAN.” The dramatic action, it seems, was paused, the emotional content muted, aestheticized by a song, that, we can presume, amplified it in ways akin to the modern American musical, the words in the “new duet” drawn perhaps from the dialogue in the play and further familiarized by being sung to “old airs”. The bottom of the playbill, just below the line “Thus Ends the [sic] The Tragedy of a Poor Man’s Life”, announces: “During the Evening the Band will perform (First Time)/ THE NEW GRAND ‘BELPHEGOR’ QUADRILLES”. From Barton’s death to dancing figures, the juxtaposition is jarring, musical sentiment, comedy, and dance clamouring for attention in a kind of aesthetic tension against “the tragedy of a poor man’s life.” So not only can readers today learn something about how Gaskell’s novel was refracted for the working-class through dramatic adaptation, we can learn something about the hybrid quality of working-class entertainment itself. Producing such a play in conformity with its original qualities would make a challenging project for a university historical theatre group. Mixed in with the political concerns of the three working-class adaptations of Mary Barton were two other staples of popular stage entertainment: murder (and the related elements of detection and trial) and sensation scenes that depended on “special effects and new technology.”16 Judith Flanders notes, for instance, that although readers of Mary Barton most likely had forgotten the details of the 1831 murder near Manchester of a mill owner’s son Thomas Ashton, the popular press had fanned such an interest in murder by mid-century that texts about murder were devoured with a voracious appetite. 17 She then connects both sensation and murder in her description of Mary Barton, or, The Weavers’ Distress, performed according to Bolton for only one night (11 November) at the Grecian Theatre London in 1861. Flanders writes: The high point was the sensation-scene in which the workers set Carson’s mill alight, and Jem roars in to rescue the trapped Henry. Then Mary has a

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dramatic speech—‘I see naught but Jem, a dying man on the gallows. I hear naught but his groans ringing in my ears’—Will arrives in the courtroom on cue and the drama ends with a rousing speech from the judge—‘I tell you, that you are bound to give the Prisoner the full benefit of the slightest doubts you may have in your minds, such is the Law of England, such is the Law of humanity ...’—and Barton’s revelation that it was not he who killed Carson after all, but another character who never appears in the play, and is anyway dead: a murder with no one to blame.18

As in the novel, we witness the heroism of two working-class characters, with the added irony in the play of Jem rescuing from the fire the man he is later accused of murdering. That change in detail emphasizes how dependent the industrial middle-class was on the working-class, and it highlights not just Jem’s physical heroism but his moral integrity as well. The dramatic move also suggests that fears of class violence (or the impulse towards violence in the name of class solidarity) can be sublimated within interpersonal conflicts (as in men fighting for a woman’s love) or projected onto singular acts of political violence on the stage, turning the potential for real action into symbolic representation. Whether such representation becomes a stimulus for subsequent action (as the “Examiner of Plays” must have feared since he “scored through all political references” in the 1851 Courtney version 19 ) or whether, as Aristotle’s model of catharsis would have it, symbolic representation would purge the impulse to action through pity and fear is always an open question. I would suggest, however, that the exploitation of sensational effects (i.e. spectacle) emphasized the audience’s role as spectators, muting the political edge of the adaptations, theatrical conventions of advertisement and staging highlighting the centrality of entertainment in the experience of theatre as we see in the title of the third working-class production, The Life’s Adventures of Mary Barton, which de-emphasizes the political and suggests a kind of picaresque stage narrative (although we cannot know that the play does the same since the script has not survived). According to Bolton, the playbill for that latter play identifies it as a “domestic drama, in three acts, depicting real life, which occured [sic] in Manchester some few years back.”20 The play was produced in 1863 and played from 16-21 March at the Effingham Saloon, London. It implicitly marks a shift in adaptations from working-class entertainment with a political edge to middle-class entertainment that appealed through the recycling of familiar narrative material at some remove from its original charged context. Most of these are what I have called above, adaptations in disguise.

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The first such adaptation may have been Colin Henry Hazlewood’s four-act drama Our Lot in Life, which debuted in 1862. Though known today primarily for his adaptation of Mary Elizabeth Bradden’s Lady Audley’s Secret,21 Hazlewood was a prolific adapter of “recently published novels and serializations” for the Surrey Theatre and City of London Theatre in the 1850s and 60s. “Thirty of his works were printed in T.H. Lacy’s Acting Edition of Plays,” 22 but unfortunately only two of those thirty-one are reproduced in the Victorian Plays Project online; Our Lot in Life not being one of the two. The play ran for quite some time in London and in provincial theatres throughout England. The Era as late as 1 May 1886, for example, printed a notice of a production under the listing “Birmingham ... The Grand Theatre” in its “Provincial Theatricals” section. “A drama in four acts and sixteen tableaux entitled Our Lot in Life, the leading incidents of which are taken from Mrs Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton has been produced here during the week,” the notice begins. “The piece is of the extremely sensational kind,” it continues, “and is illustrative of Lancashire ‘black country’ life. It is full of thrilling ‘situations’ and harrowing incidents. There is a lockout and strike, the arrest of Mary Barton’s lover on a false charge of robbery, an escape from prison, and a desperate encounter between the warders and the convicts, a murder in the dark, and an explosion of fire damp. These incidents elicited the enthusiasm of that section of the theatre going public who relish highly spiced theatrical diet.” The play must have been quite a spectacle given the sixteen tableaux, the escape, the fight, the murder, and so on, incidents that involved “no less than twenty-eight characters in the piece.”23 There is evidence of other versions of the play. 24 The Era, on 25 September 1870 printed a notice of a three-act production of Hazlewood’s Our Lot in Life with Acts One and Two set in England and Act Three in Australia. 25 Then again on 5 October 1895 in its section of London Theatricals The Era reviewed a “revival of C.H. Hazlewood’s Romantic Drama” Our Lot in Life. That review describes a play that has little resemblance to Mary Barton. Set in the 1790s, “the plot deals with the misfortunes of Farmer Somers, whose two sons serve King George the Third, the one in the army, the other in the navy.” The heroine, the review remarks, “prefers the bitter crust of poverty to wealth,” which suggests a plausible if vague connection to the novel. Might Hazlewood have written two or even three plays with the same title? Given how prolific he was, perhaps he did. Dion Boucicault’s The Long Strike, another sensational drama based on Mary Barton, in contrast is readily available, with a copy reprinted in the 2008 Norton Critical Edition of Mary Barton. 26 The play opened in

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London in 1866, and the last paragraph of a long description of the play in the Penny Illustrated Paper of 22 September 1866 made the connection to Mary Barton despite the less than revealing title. “Those who have read Mrs Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ will at once perceive that the story of ‘The Long Strike’ is mainly derived from that celebrated novel. But the piece is by no means a mere transfer of a book from the library to the stage; and the interest it creates is attributable less to the story than to certain situations and bits of character which we have already indicated. Indeed, the most exciting scene belongs to the play alone.” That scene is the celebrated telegraph scene, when the Mary Barton character (Jane Learoyd) with the assistance of her lawyer Mr Moneypenny, sends a telegraph to the Will Wilson (Johnny Reilly) character’s ship and waits with trepidation against the odds in the hope that the telegraph reaches its destination. (It does.)27 The play was so identified with Mary Barton that a “Theatrical Memo” in The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post on 2 September 1882 announced a production of The Long Strike in Brighton as “‘Mary Barton’ A Drama by Dion Boucicault.” There were also, from 1867 on, productions of a play called “The Great Strike,”28 which played in Manchester on 23 February and in Hull on 17 March 1867; it was revived in Sheffield in 1871, in Walsall in 1880, in London in 1882, and finally at the Gaiety Theatre (Manchester) on 20 October 1900. According to the Manchester Times, the “drama was adapted from Mrs Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton.’”29 Based on the newspaper accounts, the characters are drawn directly from the novel (Mary Barton, Mr Carson, and Job Legh all have parts) with some others added for, at times, comic effect. Will Wilson, for instance, becomes Willie Sankey, an Irish sailor full of quips and quibbles. That same year The Era records “a new sensation drama” called simply The Strike, which played in Plymouth and whose actors were “much overworked” because the play was such a “very busy piece.” On 12 May 1878, “The Strike” was staged in Ashtonunder-Lyne, the review noting how it “depicts miseries brought upon the factory operatives by dissensions between capital and labour.”30 The Era also records on 3 March 1867 that “Mr. Weston ... reopens this evening (Saturday) for his spring dramatic season with his own version of The Lancashire Strike founded on Mrs Gaskell’s popular novel of Mary Barton.” J.P. Weston apparently managed the Theatre Royal in Bolton, but that is about all I have been able to learn about him. He is not in the Dictionary of National Biography, nor have I found him or a play called The Lancashire Strike in any indexes on nineteenth-century theatre history. “Miss Florence Cook appear[ed] as the leading lady” in the season opening production, and there are references to other The Lancashire

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Strike performances in The Era on 16 July 1876, 4 August 1878, and 15 April 1893. Given the fact that the newspaper reviews identify the play’s characters with characters from the novel (Margaret Jennings and John Barton are singled out), Will Wilson becomes Will Rooney in The Lancashire Strike, Irish to be sure but probably no Willie Sankey. A play called The Lancashire Long Strike staged in Northampton on 12 Mat 1867, “being,” The Era reports, “a dramatized version of the late Mrs Gaskell’s work,”31 may have been the source of Weston’s effort or a borrowing from it. For surely there was intense cross-fertilization among these adaptations of Mary Barton, which all, it would seem, kept the political edge of the London working-class adaptations alive in Manchester and in provincial theatres more widely, while exploiting technical innovations for sensational purposes. Even though Boucicault is the most prominent of the Victorian dramatists to adapt Mary Barton for the stage, and even though the stage history of The Long Strike extended through the latter half of the nineteenth-century, playing regularly on both sides of the Atlantic,32 his adaptation has received little critical attention in relation to its source. The only article-length study is Richard D. Altick’s “Dion Boucicault Stages Mary Barton” 33 which, though insightful in relation to Boucicault’s theatrical practices, is marred by what could most kindly be characterized as a paternalistic attitude toward Gaskell and her novel. Lamenting what he calls Gaskell’s neglect “of the dramatic potential of the murder”34 in the novel, and praising Boucicault for his “unerring sense of effects proper to gas-lit melodrama,” Altick argues that “Mrs Gaskell’s weakness ... lay partly in the slackness of her narrative ... [and] in her handling of pivotal scenes, especially those laid outside the home.” What troubles Altick is the fact that Gaskell is a woman. “Simply as a woman,” he asserts, “she was less at liberty to realize the full dramatic effects of certain situations than Dickens, Reade, or Collins would have been. She was limited furthermore, by her own temperament.”35 His comparison of the novel and its dramatic adaptation leads Altick to judge the novel deficient as a novel because “it suffers most from its author’s lack of a dramatic sense.”36 He concludes with this formal judgment: “The Long Strike is much more satisfying as a demonstration of the special art of the sensational play than Mary Barton is an example of serious fiction.”37 Even though enough critical water has flowed under the bridge to debunk Altick’s critical bias, 38 his formal emphasis elides a potential critique of the loss in content in the transfer of the novel to the stage. Maunder supplies some of what was lost in his comparison of The Long Strike to the Victoria Theatre production of 1851. “Unlike the Lyceum version [Boucicault’s], which some critics thought

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gutless, the Victoria’s adaptation is willing to say that laissez-faire capitalism is the real villain, more destructive and cruel than any seducer.”39 The earliest adaptations, though accompanied by the musical accoutrements of the popular theatre, nonetheless retain, even heighten the political content of the novel through the close identification of workingclass audiences with working-class characters who seem to be speaking for them. Boucicault’s draining of political content from the novel solidified a current in dramatic adaptations of Mary Barton that combined the social realism from the performances in working-class theatres with the sensationalism and sentiment of melodramatic middle-class popular entertainment. George Sims’s 1885 melodrama The Last Chance marks a change where we move from relatively unambiguous stage adaptations of Mary Barton, in ways that were readily recognizable by theatre critics if not theatre audiences, to plays that appropriate narrative material from the novel in contexts at some remove from the labour struggles in Manchester from the 1840s through the 1860s; romance in defiance of class barriers and labour unrest due to unemployment are the two narrative threads.40 Here is how The Era review from 11 April (the play opened on 4 April) describes the romance: “The curtain rises upon the grounds of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, in the neighbourhood of which live Richard Darryl, a distinguished civil engineer turned squire, and a quondam companion of his youth, now his deadly enemy, a broken down tippler, James Barton. We soon learn that young Frank Darryl and Barton’s daughter Mary have got themselves secretly married before the rise of the curtain.” 41 In addition to the echo of the names (John Barton, father and Mary Barton, daughter), we have a rough parallel in the Carson/Barton social positioning from the novel (Carson began as a working man and rose, Barton remained a worker and degenerated through disappointment, drink, and opium) and the Darrly/Barton social positioning in the play. In addition, the lower-class daughter in both novel and play is romantically connected to the upper-class son; in the novel the romance is more potential than realized, while in the play it is fully realized. Through a series of elaborate, melodramatic plot manipulations, which involve the return from America through the intervention of John Barton of the elder Darryl’s wife, long thought to be dead, 42 Frank is disinherited and becomes a working-man, who, like the working-men in the novel, suffers from a lack of employment.43 On the brink of starvation and despair, Frank goes to the London docks in search of work, and then, the reviewer writes, “comes the great scene of the play. It is the dawn of early morning outside the Dock gates. Round the gates are lying groups of starving, pinched, and

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miserable men, in every attitude of feverish hope or listless despair, the dead silence broken only by the measured tread and, now and then, the rough banter of the policeman, whom daily use has made callous to the misery around him.” Clearly moved by the staging of the scene, the reviewer’s prose swells to its task: “At the clang of a bell an officer steps quickly into his box, and the whole multitude leaps into life, a jostling, seething mass of human beings, human, yet fighting like wild beasts for bread. Every man’s gaze is fixed with almost wolfish glare upon that quiet figure in blue and gold, upon whose beckoning finger hangs the chance of work, and life, and hope for every man there—for many a poor wretch ‘the last chance.’”44 Such staging evokes the hunger of the Manchester operatives rendered in such detail in the novel, realism so vivid so as to suggest the sensational. The reviewer’s evaluation of the sensibility of Sims’s play (and Sims as playwright) carries echoes of contemporary criticism of the novel as well, which emphasized the novel’s bifurcated sympathies between the “romance” of Mary’s love narrative and the “realism” of her father’s suffering. Mr Sims, the reviewer writes, “is a ‘barometer playwright.’ His work furnishes an accurate index to the social questions of the hour. To the hairbreadth escapes, persecuted heroines, and the rest of the stock-in-trade of the old-fashioned melodramatist, he adds something of his own—the element of actuality, the purpose to show the very form and pressure of the time.”45 Whereas Gaskell was charged with layering romance over a core narrative of nearly documentary realism, Sims is charged here with layering realism over the heightened emotional simplicities of stage melodrama, the proportions inverse, and the narrative ingredients akin. Sims’s The Last Chance, then, while not clearly identifiable as an adaptation of Mary Barton as such, does have a place in this history since it illustrates how the thematic, narrative, and descriptive qualities of Gaskell’s novel slowly lost their association with the original text and took on a cultural life of their own, animating the work of others. Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1913), the most well-known and critically successful play of the Manchester school of playwrights, is arguably one of the most fully realized adaptations “in disguise” of Mary Barton. In that play, Houghton integrates the romance plot and the realities of Lancashire factory life seamlessly in order to extend and ultimately consummate the novel’s resistance to the narrative logic of the fallen woman. Like Sims, Houghton emphasizes the working-class origins of the factory owner and the worker, the Carson and Barton figures. In Hindle Wakes, however, the owner and his employee remain friends, and that friendship is put to the test when the worker’s daughter and factory

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owner’s son go off on holiday together. Once their escapade is discovered —the woman judged as fallen—the assumption of both fathers that the only way to set things right is through marriage drives the action. The daughter, however, defies them all; she refuses marriage and relies on her own ability to work as the basis for building a future for herself. Female integrity in a world where a woman’s whole life would not be determined by youthful, singular, sexual choices—the same integrity granted to men— is implicit in the Aunt Esther fallen woman plot and in Mary’s motives for wanting to marry out of her class. That integrity is given powerful, dramatic expression in Hindle Wakes.46 Hindle Wakes excepted, dramatic adaptations of Mary Barton “in disguise” or otherwise are hard to document after the turn of the nineteenth-century. We might call the first sixty years of the twentiethcentury a fallow period for dramatic adaptations of Mary Barton. Adaptations of Cranford, the first in 1898, kept Gaskell’s fiction on stage during those years in village, community, and amateur theatre, however.47 It was not until 1964 that Mary Barton returned to a stage of sorts, and that was as a four-part television series written for the BBC by Elaine Morgan and starring Lois Dane as Mary Barton, George A. Cooper as John, Cyril Luckham as Mr Carson, Barry Warren as Jem Wilson, and Patrick Mower as Harry Carson. (The cast was comprised of twenty-six actors.) The British Film Institute database comes up empty on Mary Barton, but the Internet Movie Database (IMDb, an open access database created by its users) has entries on the series, each of its four episodes, and on the writer, director, cast, and crew. Under “Plot Keywords” it states: “Lost TV Series.” Each episode ran for thirty-five minutes from 20 June through 11 July. With no plot synopsis and no surviving visual record, it is difficult to work out the tone and conceptual centre of the series, but since we do have the episode titles, we can make some guesses. Episode One: “Fire.” Episode Two: “Violence.” Episode Three: “Murder.” Episode Four: “Trial.” Each episode, it would seem, focused on a sensational aspect of the plot—the mill fire when Jem displays his heroism in saving his father and the other trapped worker, the labour unrest and its associated violence such as when a worker throws vitriol in the face of a knobstick (strike breaker), the shooting of Harry Carson, and, of course, Jem’s trial, all potential high points that would challenge the stagecraft of the most skilled Victorian director of stage melodramas. I have been unable to find any record of another adaptation of Mary Barton after the 1964 television serial until 2006 and the quite wonderful Rona Munro adaptation called, simply, Mary Barton. Directed by Sarah Frankcom, it was staged to mark the 30th anniversary season of

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Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre, and it ran from 6 September until 14 October. 48 There is no record of its having been performed since, although the play has been published by Nick Hern Books, a theatrical publisher in London who has published six other plays, translations, and adaptations by Munro, a Scottish writer whose credits also include episodes of Doctor Who (1989). The adaptation was reviewed by The Guardian and The Independent (both on 14 September 2006) and by three local Manchester theatre and entertainment websites. One website, The Stage.co.uk offers this summary: “Set in Manchester, in the very square which now houses the theatre, the story of the seamstress who worked there a century and a half ago opens with a flurry of raw cotton falling like snowflakes, while another victim of the trade is buried, and it ends with spools of the finished product spinning in the light.”49 That sentence nicely captures the close connection between Manchester, the novel, and its adaptations with its emphasis on the proximity of the theatre to the main setting of the novel; it also evokes something of the quality of the 2004 BBC television adaptation of Gaskell’s North and South in the image of cotton fluff pouring down like snow toward the factory floor (and carrying death for the power loom operatives).50 Finally, it gestures towards one of Munro’s fundamental interpretive moves in the adaptation: her emphasis on how much the death of children drives the narrative.51 “The victim of the trade” the review alludes to is, in fact, the young son of John Barton, Tom, his death and burial serving as the keynote to the adaptation in contrast to the novel, which begins with working-class families and friends sharing a holiday in the fields outside the city before returning to the city where Barton’s wife soon thereafter dies while giving birth to a still-born child. That death is the second of Barton’s children to die, the first having been eight-year-old Tom, whose funeral opens the adaptation. Given the number of child deaths in the novel, (the Wilson twins’ deaths are described in great detail), the memory of the dead children figuratively permeates the events of the novel. Consequently, despite the BBC Manchester website reviewer claiming to find “the frequent apparitions of young Tom’s ghost a bit twee,” 52 the apparition is an apt symbolic presence that visually connects Mr Carson’s lament for his dead son Harry to John Barton’s anguish over his dead son Tom: “It is against nature to see your own child dead ... as I saw Harry. And he looked so much ... smaller ... helpless. As if he was a boy again and I could pull him in my arms and hold him safe ... I should have kept him safe. I’m his father ... I can’t bear the shame of it” (ellipses in the original).53 Those words render Harry, who is an adult when he is shot, always a child, small, helpless, in need of a father’s protection, and they render the father ashamed of his

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powerlessness to prevent the death, precisely a description of Barton’s reaction to the death of his son at eight years old, the apparition that haunts the stage. The Guardian reviewer takes the point even farther, noting how both the adaptation and production “are haunted by the ghosts of thousands of poor who expired for the want of enough to eat. The dead son of John Barton ... stalks the stage [something more, in this interpretation, than an apparition], and Liz Ashcroft’s effective design ensures that the living sip tea while perched on coffins, and every step they take is over the graves of the dead.”54 Given the location of the theatre, literally on the ground where the mill operatives in the 1840s worked, lost work, starved, died, and struggled to renew themselves, the audience can be said to be in the same position as the actors, sipping their tea or wine or beer at the interval (or as the audience did on press night after the show, “enjoying cake and champagne”)55 over the graves of the dead. In this light, we can read the adaptation as a reminder of a social history that must be remembered, as it recounts a time of economic austerity whose effects, as is always the case, fall most heavily on the unemployed, the needy, and the helpless. The power of Munro’s adaptation, particularly in relation to the time and place of its performance, results from how the play provides a visual and vocal memory of a chapter in working-class history that, as The Guardian review emphasizes, “transform[s] the most disparate bunch of theatre-goers into a community.” One of the challenges of Munro’s adaptation, a nearly insurmountable one that results from the very ubiquity of visual narrative in our culture today, is an audience expectation that an adaptation of a novel can provide the comprehensive vision of its source text. As the reviewer for The Independent notes, one of the most difficult things to achieve on stage “is the panoramic sweep of the narrative, for which,” she argues, “we’re often left to rely on our own wide-angled lens. Wilson’s bravery in the mill fire, for example, or Mary’s desperate rush to Liverpool and her frantic pursuit of a ship out to sea, all suffer from being cramped in description and delivery.”56 For nearly a century now our visual wide-angle lens has been trained in movie theatres and since the 1950s in our own mini-theatres (increasingly not so mini these days) in our homes. We can easily image the montage possibilities of the rush to Liverpool, the hallucinatory qualities of Mary’s pursuit of Will Wilson’s ship, and the quick shifts in camera angle and focalization to capture the fire rescue from the point of view of both rescuer and observers (even the rescued). Those facts, in addition to the rousing success of relatively recent Gaskell television adaptations—Cranford (2008), Wives and Daughters (1999), and North and South (2004)—suggest that the time is right for a full-out

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film/television series adaptation of Mary Barton. And given the current economic troubles in the UK, EU, and the US, a fearless, morally earnest exploration of labour management relations would seem once again to be in order. When we fold in the current increases in unemployment in relation to the accumulation of wealth among a relatively small class of people, those with the resources and expertise to produce such an adaptation should feel a moral compulsion to do so. Given the history of community building in theatrical culture (commercial and noncommercial) and an analogous building of communities of interest through radio, television, and digital media, a film adaptation of Mary Barton would bring the narrative power and ethical vision of Gaskell’s first novel back into constructive social dialogue.

Notes 1

See Andrew Maunder, “Mary Barton Goes to London: Elizabeth Gaskell, Stage Adaptation and Working Class Audiences.” The Gaskell Journal 2011, pp. 1-18. 2 For bibliographic details and some manuscript description of the 1851, 1861, and 1863 productions, see H. Philip Bolton, Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Performances from Narrative Works Published in English to 1900, pp. 209-210. 3 Maunder, p. 16. 4 For a discussion of generic mutation, see Thomas Recchio, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History, pp. 2-3. 5 See Judith Flanders, The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, pp. 86-90. 6 See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950, pp. 87-91; and John Lucas, “Mrs Gaskell and Brotherhood” in Tradition and Tolerance in NineteenthCentury Fiction, pp. 141-205, for the most influential examples. 7 For a useful distinction between adaptation and appropriation, see Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, especially chapters One and Two. 8 Bolton, p. 209, Maunder, p. 5. 9 Reproduced in Maunder, p. 6. 10 Maunder, pp. 10-11. 11 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. A Norton Critical Edition, p. 5. 12 Maunder, p. 11. 13 Maunder, p. 9. 14 The only full-length study of black face minstrelsy in England that I am aware of is Michael Pickering, Black Face Minstrelsy in Britain. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate 2008. 15 See Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. 16 Flanders, p. 88. 17 Jenny Uglow, in her biography Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, describes the response of a reader who made the connection. “One reader [of Mary Barton],

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the wife of Thomas Bayley Potter ... was the sister of Thomas Ashton, murdered during the strike of 1831. According to her son, ‘on coming to the chapter of the murder she suddenly realised that it was a description of her own brother’s assassination, and she fainted’” (216). Gaskell denied in a letter that she had Ashton’s murder in mind when writing the novel: “If the circumstance [of Ashton’s murder] were present in my mind at the time of my writing Mary Barton it was so unconsciously.” Her denial does not dismiss the connection. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 196 (Letter 130). 18 Flanders p. 89. For a suggestive discussion of the relation between melodramatic theatre and judicial practices, see Stephanie J. Pocock, “The Judicial and the Melodramatic Stage: Trial Scenes in Boucicault’s Arrah-na-Pogue and The Octoroon.” Theatre Journal 60.4 (2008) pp. 545-563. For a discussion of the concept of murder without a clear perpetrator (“no one to blame”) in Mary Barton, see Thomas Recchio, “Melodrama and the Production of Affective Knowledge in Mary Barton,” Studies in the Novel 43.3 (2011), pp. 289-305. 19 Flanders, p. 88. 20 Bolton, p. 210. 21 Available in George Rowell, ed. Nineteenth Century Plays, pp. 235-266. 22 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, accessed 11 January 2013. 23 The Era, 1 May 1886 np. 24 One wonders about the provenance of the 1886 production since Our Lot in Life debuted in 1862, and there is evidence of two other wildly different plays attributed to the same author under the same title. Neither of the scripts of Our Lot in Life that survive resembles the description of the 1886 production. See note 25. 25 The Petingell Collection at the University of Kent lists a Four-Act and a ThreeAct version of Our Lot in Life in their collection as follows: Collection Manuscripts of Colin Hazlewood Our lot in life: drama in four acts / by C.H. Hazlewood. Date: - [1862] 3 v. (24p in v.1; 44p in v.2; 52p in v.3); 24-26 cm. Play is in four acts. Acts one and two are individually bound. Acts three and four are bound together. Typewritten copy of the play. Contains typewritten cast lists as played at the Britannia Theatre in 1862 and a revival production at the Britannia Theatre in 1870. Arthur Williams added the date of the first production and brief character descriptions to the cast lists. Contains some annotations in the handwriting of Arthur Williams. Our lot in life: drama in three acts / by C.H. Hazlewood. Date: [1862] 1 v. (236p); 24 cm. Play is in three acts. Contains a handwritten cast list, added by Arthur Williams, as played at the Britannia Theatre in 1862. Contains annotations and stage directions in an unidentified hand. Therefore, it appears that Hazlewood wrote two plays with the same title in the same year. 26 Pp. 420-458. 27 For an energetic summary of the telegraph scene, see Flanders, pp. 89-90. 28 Manchester Times, 23 February 1867.

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Ibid. The Era, 12 May 1878. 31 The Era, 12 May 1867 32 For a sketch of the play’s successes in New York, see George C.D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, Vol. VIII 1865-70, pp. 140, 247, 422, and 664. 33 See Richard D. Altick, “Dion Boucicault Stages Mary Barton.” NineteenthCentury Fiction, 14.2 1959, 129-41 reprinted in Mary Barton. A Norton Critical Edition, pp. 486-497. 34 Altick, p. 494. 35 Ibid, p. 495. 36 Ibid, p. 497. 37 Ibid, p. 497. 38 For a relatively comprehensive list, see the “Monographs and Critical Studies” section of the “Selected Bibliography” in the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Barton, pp. 648-649. 39 Maunder 14. In footnote 52 on that page Maunder quotes the London Review: “The plot of ‘The Long Strike’ hardly justifies the title, as love has far more to do with the story than the struggles between capital and labour.” 40 The full script of 104 pages is held in the Special Collections at the John Rylands Library, Manchester. 41 The Era, 11 April 1885, p. 14. 42 The “Town and Country Gossip” section of the Horse and Hound: A Journal of Sport and Agriculture must have had the return of the “lost” wife in mind when it observed of the play, “’Not too much bigamy but just enough’ is the chief characteristic.” 18 April 1885, p. 203. 43 It is tempting to take this plot as a thought experiment: could Harry Carson have gone to work for his love of Mary? Would he have bungled it as Frank did, and almost starve? 44 The Era, 11 April 1885, p. 14. 45 For an account for Sims’s social work, see his DNB entry. 46 For a detailed analysis of Hindle Wakes as the consummation of the implicit resistance against the logic of female fallenness in Mary Barton, see Thomas Recchio, “Elizabeth Gaskell as ‘A Dramatic Common’: Stanley Houghton’s Appropriation of Mary Barton in Hindle Wakes” in The Gaskell Journal, 26, pp. 88-102. 47 In addition to Brenda McKay’s chapter in this volume, see Thomas Recchio, “Dramatizing Cranford” in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History. 48 I am sure I am missing a number of Lancashire productions of Mary Barton throughout the twentieth century, documentary evidence of which must be sitting in local archives. 49 Published Wednesday 13 September 2006 and accessed 11 January 2013. 50 Richard Armitage’s portrayal of John Thornton was wildly popular, spawning numerous website responses from Wikipedia, YouTube, and spontaneous fan sites. A Google search will quickly illustrate the point. 30

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51 For an analysis of the way the novel deploys the death of children to makes its larger political point, see Recchio, “Melodrama and the Production of Affective Knowledge in Mary Barton.” 52 BBC Manchester online, updated 12/09/06, accessed January 25, 2013. 53 Rona Munro, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, p. 90. 54 www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/sep/14/theatre2. Accessed 23 January 2013. 55 Review by Natalie Anglesey in www.stage.co.uk. 13 September 2006 accessed 23 January 2013. 56 Review written by Lynne Walker for The Independent 14 September 2006 www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/review. Accessed 23 January 2013.

CHAPTER FOUR THE BBC’S DECADE OF HIGH CULTURE: CRANFORD (1972) AS “HISTORY RECONSTRUCTED” BRENDA MCKAY

By the time the BBC’s fine 1972 version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) appeared, this adaptation had been preceded by a cluster of impressive dramatizations of other canonical texts that the corporation had already produced, to be followed in turn by many more of a similar high standing. Of course, since the original authors of nineteenth-century novels were for the most part no longer living, many ideas and debates were (and still are) being circulated as to how best to transmogrify these works for television and other media, without the aid of the original artists; multiple speculations which naturally shaped the final product. How far should adaptors remain true to the author’s vision? And were their screenplays actually reconstructions of history through fiction, or were they addressing contemporary issues in the guise of “history”? Doubtless the last two questions could both paradoxically be answered in the affirmative, while the first was itself open to several different interpretations; for in order to be truly effective, these hallowed works of fiction had, in their altered form, to capture a combination of a genuine sense of the past, visually and (initially) textually, while remaining synchronous with modern interrogations of social values. In short, a number of disparate materials were brought together in an attempt to homogenize them, subtly altering these creative works in the process. It was, conversely, found to be demonstrably true that an impact is often created by representations of a society in transition—as the community of Cranford certainly was with the town’s slow industrialization and increasing forms of communication. Concomitantly, Britain during the 1970s was coping with dramatic, modified social liberalization; and presently, more than ever, a new century and millennium are galvanizing

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revolutionary social change and increasing networks of human contact, therefore making these dramas relevant to us still, quite apart from their primary worth as works of literature. From its inception, the BBC saw itself as a vehicle of the nation’s cultural heritage, and it had already commissioned a version of Gaskell’s Cranford as early as the 1950s, aware that her fiction, like that of many other texts that had survived the test of time, was fertile ground for English (and, later, American) popular culture. Adaptations of her work during the 1970s certainly contributed to the rebirth of Gaskell’s reputation as a creative writer. This chapter will begin by looking at the theories that shaped adaptations of nineteenth-century novels, concentrating primarily on the 1972 production of Cranford, the most accomplished dramatization of Gaskell’s work during that decade; but we shall also compare this particular film briefly with later versions of the same novel after the end of the century. The BBC’s costume dramas, especially during the 1970s but also from the 1990s onward, have been significant culturally, not least because they encourage readers to study the original novels.

The BBC as a Vehicle of Culture Michael Voysey (1920-1987) adapted Cranford (1853) for television during a decade which was, in fact, marked by a tremendous flowering of “classic productions”, something at which the BBC’s dramatists excelled.1 The distinguished adaptations then appearing indicate the company in which Elizabeth Gaskell was placed after a period of comparative neglect. Voysey certainly played a role in Gaskell’s rising star. Obviously an admirer of the novelist, he had dramatized Wives and Daughters–a work not much read at that time–the previous year, and the success of this production encouraged him and the BBC to follow this work soon after with a new version of Cranford. Though dramas based on literary works may not be equal in stature to the original novels, the BBC adaptations are still valuable art forms in their own right–many of a high standard that also became critical interpretations of literature, written of course with a particular agenda in mind on the part of the adaptor. As Terence Hawkes puts it: “In adaptation we confront not the great works themselves… but the ways in which the works of art have been processed… as part of the struggle for cultural meaning.”2 Voysey’s was, then, the second English television production of Cranford, an earlier one having appeared in 1951, to be followed by another three versions: in 1976 (a musical for Thames Television), 2007

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and 2009 (the latter two incorporating material from other stories), totalling five adaptations of Gaskell’s most popular novel in fifty-eight years.3 The emphasis on “classics” by the BBC at this time was almost certainly also a look back to the certainties of a “great past” of the Empire and its moral codes during a turbulent decade. “Mrs Gaskell,” as the very name suggests, was also seen as “conservative and maternal”, and this may partly account for the fact that there were four adaptations of her work during a period when Women’s Liberation, “free love”, abortion, and gay and lesbian rights had become burning issues–while there had been the Stonewall Riots by homosexuals and transvestites in 1969 in America, together with the burgeoning of Black Power. 4 There were mutual interactions in particular between the British and their English-speaking “cousins” across the Atlantic. The Notting Hill race riots (unrest had begun in 1958) by West Indians in London and the Wolfenden Report (which led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults in 1967), similarly, had reverberations in the United States. These significant occurrences did not negate perceptions of Gaskell’s strength as an artist; adaptors of her novels, it seems, thought that at some level actions in Cranford could, at least as subtexts, be alluded to for the benefit of modern political ideas, though in transmogrified form; and where modern issues were actually implied on film, a visual scene could be extremely powerful as a symbol or signifier of the unspoken. The BBC had earnest ambitions to do justice to serious literature, including the European novel, and became a conduit of “high culture” on behalf of the nation. It was partly felt that interpretations of literature and engagement with great creative minds of the past might provide answers during difficult times. The BBC attempted also to capture the development of historical processes in such epic works as War and Peace (1972–3) and Vanity Fair (1967). The dramatization of Leo Tolstoy’s novel in twenty episodes (to be followed by his Resurrection (1974) and Anna Karenina (1978)) was considered “life-enhancing” and, most importantly, “courageous [and] aesthetically satisfying”, giving the BBC tremendous prestige.5 William Thackeray’s novel, too, the first marvellous BBC colour production, depicting much-loved history and spectacle, has always been extremely successful in its several subsequent incarnations. Generous cover was also given to Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and, among others, Henry James (not widely read in this period), Charlotte and Emily Brontë, but not much to Charles Dickens, for Hard Times (1977) was considered the only “good” adaptation. Jane Austen, though, was well represented. John Galsworthy’s later Forsyte Saga series (1967; published collectively as a novel in 1922)

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was astoundingly successful, with up to 16 million viewers per episode, eventually watched by an audience of approximately 160 million worldwide–more than double the population of Britain. From our later Philistine perspective, the range is astonishing. Even Sartre’s trilogy, The Road to Freedom (1970), was shown in thirteen episodes of fifty minutes each, in an attempt to get to grips with the author’s philosophy. Gaskell’s Cranford appeared at roughly the same time as War and Peace and shortly after the Sartre series. This indicates that, despite the “limitations” ascribed to her at this time, she was certainly taken seriously as an artist. A 1975 BBC version of North and South also appeared.

Gaskell and Cultural Dissemination Gaskell has been moved into the pantheon of the finest Victorian novelists during approximately the last decade. Since she is no longer regarded as an accidentally artful writer, today many critics place her oeuvre, at its best, with accomplished and magisterial narratives of imaginative sophistication, and Voysey’s dramatization of forty years ago, during a period of admirable reconstructions, is a fascinating drama that was also a vehicle for later social concerns. Not often patronized nowadays as “parodies of literature”, courses are today taught on dramatizations in university departments of communication and media. Yet there are still those who resist taking these dramas seriously. Journalist Charlie Brooker, who refers with apparent contempt to an extremely talented modern adaptor as “Andrew ‘Adaptation’ Davies”, proclaims that “there’s little surprise in a corset” 6 , and “PLEASE don’t anyone argue [that Victorian novels are] relevant to a modern audience”. 7 Brooker’s occasionally vulgar political correctness sees no value in the aristocracy and gentry—so seriously portrayed in many novels, not least Cranford and Wives and Daughters; he is uninterested in any “posho Nathan bumming about”, and dismisses the portrayal of Grandcourt in Davies’s adaptation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as simply “Lord Potato Dauphinoise of Grand Guffawing Castle”–apparently assuming that novelists like Eliot and Gaskell portray aristocrats on the basis of unqualified admiration; he seems unaware of their fun at the expense of a Lady Cumnor or an Honourable Mrs Jamieson and their insufferable arrogance. 8 Brooker’s comments are in part a misguided reaction to the English class system, which persists in subtle ways. Conversely, Cranford was frequently produced in the early twentieth century as a template for good manners and to prevent perceived slippages in caste. Outside Britain, the use of the novel from propagandist motives descended into bathos. The belief that

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Cranford buttressed “refined” behaviour, so that it became a set work in schools and was adapted for performance, took hold in the United States not long after, possibly even during, a period when slavery was practised and there was a war of aggression against native Americans. In South Africa a copy of the novel (though perhaps seldom read) was de rigueur on shelves in English-speaking homes and school libraries as a signifier of culture and “good breeding”, even sometimes by the very people who voted in a fascist government that was shooting black people or forcefully relocating them from their homes; Cranford was taught in schools as a sign of excellent English usage and writing–and as an example of ideal social etiquette for “young ladies”. As Patsy Stoneman points out, “[P]eople transform texts” and “texts transform people”; and “texts transform themselves”. History suggests “how and why transformations occur.” 9 However, earlier television adaptations like Voysey’s Cranford have almost been forgotten. Irritatingly for modern scholars, the BBC likes to keep these under wraps. Perhaps they are indeed ephemeral, needing refreshment every few decades. 10 Transposition to the screen is itself a form of cultural interpretative evaluation. The reawakening of interest in TV films from this period has led to the pirating of copies on university campuses. The digital age helps to perpetuate later adaptations, making huge sums of money for the BBC, which has rethought its position on disseminating these works, at least the more recent ones. But financial considerations were less essential in the 1970s than the need for artistic talent–until the advent of Thatcherism, with its emphasis on financial gain, dividends and a grocer-shop owner’s thrift in running government and culture, with a hawkish vigilance focused on the profit nexus. This damaged the quality of productions during the 1980s, though there were remarkable exceptions, like George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1985). Most dramatizers during our own post-1989 period feel it a responsibility to transmogrify authorial intention, and edit the relative strengths and weaknesses of codified language into a later context with accomplished novels like Cranford, in what Geoffrey Wagner calls “cinematic footnotes to the original”. 11 Even visually, compromise is needed. Thus, on a mundane level, the young draper in the 1972 Cranford has longish hair which was fashionable for men during the 1970s, but which looks incongruous today. What Maria Corte comments in another context equally applies to Voysey’s adaptation, since “[the] text continues to accumulate sign possibilities which are communicative precisely because the text is inside a system in movement”.12 One should not do Gaskell the banal disservice of seeing Cranford, or adaptations of it, in terms of early literary criticism, as her only important

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work–as the “charming”, microscopic, “sympathetic record of a life of innocent triviality”, with a merely reductive “delightful insipidity” which leaves readers “incapable of tasting the acid in her lemon drops”13; and thus the satirical bite which is part of the pleasure of authors like Gaskell and, particularly, Jane Austen, is lost–a result of critical influence in such cases, which can affect adaptors too. The controversial Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), for instance, is also arguably a major but very different achievement; it certainly inspired a worthy ITV drama, The Brontës of Haworth (1973), from which Dickens of London (1976) followed. Nevertheless, Cranford, in the multiple imitations and incarnations of it in the theatre, illustrations, etc., has gained quasi-mythic status in the arts in Britain and the United States, dealing with profound issues of the human condition. This explains how Voysey’s dramatization has its place in the history of television drama’s early productions in colour, alongside Vanity Fair. In Julia Kristeva’s view, “[A]ny text is the absorption and transmogrification of another”.14 The 1972 version of Cranford certainly succeeds in this sense in being a painstaking reconstruction of the 19thcentury novel, while also furnishing a slice of the discourses of contemporary history, enabling the past to resonate with the present. This is a reason for the success of Voysey’s series even at the present time; for an attempt simply at literal recreation of the past in such an enterprise might well have rendered this classic text sterile–a dissonant hybrid of old and new, and probably a feeble misrepresentation of the original writer’s intentions in the process of transposing a fictional narrative into a visual, audial construct, filtered through the mind of a later writer. Nostalgia does, though, tend to predominate in Voysey’s drama, which, typically of his dramatizations, is conservative in adaptation. However, there are a few modern, startling but effective twists in this production, as we shall see.

The Modus Operandi of Adaptors: Cranford Then and Now There were at this time primarily two ideas regarded as prerequisites for good adaptation: faithfulness to the original, or more radical transformation of discourses. While modern writers tend to favour the latter, Voysey predominantly falls into the first category. What was required, then, was, (1) to preserve as far as possible the integrity of a novel like Cranford, which should remain uppermost in the viewer’s mind and not be unnecessarily tampered with, since “the cultural model which the cinema represents is already treasured as a representation in another

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sign system” 15 ; and (2) the alternative method was consonant with the view articulated by the Victorian writer, John Addington Symonds, that mythical works in general, “by means of their symbolic pregnancy, are everlastingly elastic”. James Kissane spoke later of the primarily subjective origin of imaginative structures, and these should be adaptable to the “conceptions of succeeding generations”, with a “resulting enrichment by this process of imaginative transformation and elaboration”–a sentiment with which Heidi Thomas would agree concerning her recent Cranford adaptations.16 In a modern writer’s view, “the greater the text, the more we are compelled to read it through a palimpsest of other interpretations”. 17 Alexander Baron, however, who also used Voysey’s method and was roughly his contemporary, said that adaptors often read a novelist’s letters, utilizing suitable passages which helped create the feel of the author, rather than “impudently putting in bits of pastiche”. 18 The omniscient author’s comments might creatively be transposed as dialogue. Biographies helped. It was difficult to reproduce the author’s tone; but respect for the author made it necessary “not to violate the spirit” of a novel. The text and film, ideally, should “exist side by side”, without one “being a violation of the other”, since “vulgarization” could damage both.19 It is, of course, irrelevant which method an adaptor uses, as long as he successfully creates a fresh work of art. Heidi Thomas’s later version of Cranford (2008) takes greater risks than Voysey’s. It was felt by the BBC that by the 21st century, a film about a community of spinsters might have limited appeal. There was little recognition that Gaskell’s work itself took risks with public taste at a period when both spinsters and “fallen” women were despised. After a false start, this production was shelved. Petitions from the Gaskell Society20 and others led to reconsideration, and possibly for this reason “Mr. Harrison’s Confessions” (1851), “My Lady Ludlow” (1858) and “The Last Generation in England” (1849) were combined with Cranford to give an epic sweep to the drama, while retaining Gaskell’s flavour. The spectacular success of Andrew Davies’s transformation of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1994) surely influenced creative changes. Davies’s adaptation of Eliot’s novel, often regarded as the definitive interpretation of a text, depicted huge sections of a particularized community and its classes, with a doctor’s visit to patients used partly to draw together the various parts of that society, and Thomas doubtless found this sociological breadth deeply suggestive. An irony is that, with the tricks chronology plays on us, Eliot might have been influenced by the similar method of Wives and Daughters (1863), which actually preceded her masterwork (1872).

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Heidi Thomas’s TV version of Cranford too was resoundingly successful against expectation, and, like Middlemarch, her 2007 adaptation astutely makes much of the railway as a recurring metaphor for great social change and upheaval. By contrast, in Voysey’s version, trains are seldom referred to, except regarding Captain Brown’s death, which Deborah thinks is a consequence of his preference for Charles Dickens over Dr Johnson. Thomas’s sequel, Return to Cranford (2009), takes more liberties with Gaskell’s writings. Perhaps because it was written for Christmas audiences, the new version, which included “The Moorland Cottage” (1850), is infected with some sentimentality, though still delightful in parts, with an engaging scene of terrified spinsters riding on a train for the first time, a visual trope for the railway and encroaching modernity, which literally cuts its way into the pastoral landscape. But audiences were disillusioned by what seemed inferior story-telling once the dramatization moved away, occasionally completely (and fumblingly), from Gaskell’s creative pen while also utilizing stories like “The Cage at Cranford” (1863), which has never been popular; and furthermore, the depiction of Mary Smith breaking her marriage engagement because of ambitions to become a professional writer in London somehow comes across as inauthentic and phony. Thus a near-fatal blow was dealt to future “Victorian” series, and “costume dramas” have since tended to move to Edwardian times, at least for the time being. The sentimental ending of Return to Cranford indicates how the need for viewers’ enthusiasm can shape a production. American audiences notoriously dislike unhappy endings, and the gentle adumbration of romantic possibilities for Miss Matty at the conclusion is out of keeping with the novel’s end, which suggests that Matty is in the autumn of her life, sadly a time of missed opportunities. The English public was dissatisfied.21 The resurrection of prolific, distinguished adaptations after their neardemise in the 1980s really began in popular consciousness with Andrew Davies’s version of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa in 1991.22 Davies–who has given us inspired versions of such novels as the incredibly popular Pride and Prejudice (1994), Wives and Daughters (1999; and Gaskell has been generously reworked during this period also), The Way We Live Now (2001), Daniel Deronda (2003) and Bleak House (2005)–rightly asserts that adapting classics is not unlike translating verbal texts from one language to another;23 and of course, translation always partly involves reinterpretation. A visual image might, with more economy, replace two pages of dialogue in the text, creating a subtly different emphasis in a later dramatization, though Voysey seldom exploits this method. Creative engagement of adaptors with her novels is, of course, now beyond

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Elizabeth Gaskell’s control, but purists’ wish for accurate correspondences between novels and films is not possible–something brought home by the total unlikeness of the actresses who play Miss Pole in both major versions of Cranford: Imelda Staunton is short and squat, Pat Coombes is, like her character’s name, lanky. However, changing one medium for another creates issues for some viewers. Thus, for instance many viewers have complained about the (false) belief that Molly Gibson, as a traveller in Africa, shouldn’t have been wearing trousers at the conclusion of Wives and Daughters, 24 or that Richard Armitage as Mr Thornton in Sandy Welch’s version of North and South (2004) is too handsome. But, again, with the economy needful in modern productions, an attractive actor quickly establishes the sexual tension between him and his leading lady, Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret Hale–thus faithfully recapturing the spirit, if not the literal detail, of Gaskell’s “industrial” novel. Certainly, no one seems dissatisfied with Judi Dench as Miss Matty. In Voysey’s Cranford, Gabrielle Hamilton plays Miss Matty with great pathos in an excellent, understated performance.

Voysey’s Adaptation of Cranford The successful adaptor requires an analogical mind which can create a dialogic relationship between past and present, enabling the fundamental vision of the original author’s art to take wing over the gulf of historical time—in our particular instance 117 years—and stir the viewer’s emotions and laughter. Occasions are extremely rare when resonances of “perennial human nature” are alone sufficient to enthral a modern audience–perhaps the adaptor’s unlikely ideal, to which many dramatists aspire, few of them with success. There was such an occurrence in a Drury Lane production of Sophocles’s Antigone in the early 1850s, described thus by George Eliot: “The translation then adopted was one of the feeblest by which a great poet has ever been misrepresented; yet so completely did the poet triumph over the disadvantages of his medium and of a dramatic motive foreign to modern sympathies, that the Pit was electrified, and Sophocles, over a chasm of 2,000 years, once more swayed the emotions of a popular audience”. Great artistic endeavours, “fine tragedies, can never become mere mummies…”25 At such times the paradoxical dictum of an Italian philosopher–that “Every true history is contemporary history”–illuminates us.26 Thus, in most later TV dramatizations the result is positive when the utterances of the original creative artist are wedded to modern discourse, and the older vision leaks, transmogrified, into the new.

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The analogical process is repeated, or doubled, when we view the Cranford production of forty-one years ago. Voysey’s Gaskell becomes (for us) an interpretation of an interpretation, stemming from an already complex text. For dramatizations, one of Gaskell’s strengths is that she is divided and complicated, aware of the limitations of seeing things from a single point of view; she prefers to wrestle with and play out contradictory ideas and moral dilemmas in her fiction. As she wrote to her friend Annie Shaen, the nearest we can get to truth is through compromise between different positions and a negotiation of conflict: “I take the opposite side to the person I am talking with always, in order to hear some convincing arguments to clear up my opinions”.27 Because of humanity’s essentially divided nature, moral absolutes are always one-sided. Thus–and this comes through in Voysey’s production–the serious experiment with the idea of an independent female community is comically shown to cause sexual frustration and hysteria, and the idea is doomed to failure because the community will die out from its inability to reproduce itself.

Nostalgia for the Theatre Most of the factors described above are naturally relevant to the adaptations of Gaskell’s novel, and we shall now focus on issues of dramatization in relation to Voysey’s Cranford itself. Much of this series reveals not only a yearning for a slightly antiquated, fading past and the certainties of pre-war years; it also shows nostalgia for the conventions of the theatre–or, perhaps more accurately, it reveals visual fictional narrative in a transitional phase from the artificialities of the stage to the verisimilitude required for modern television. Voysey takes few liberties with the text, in keeping with the BBC’s sense of responsibility at this time to fiction considered an heirloom of the literary heritage. Wistful yearning and nostalgia, offset by astute competence as a dramatist, is at once this particular Cranford’s weakness and strength, and is true of many then current TV adaptations: a longing for what seemed a quintessentially English past, which was quickly changing its social mores in the 1970s, while simultaneously being affected by immigration, especially from India, Asia, and Africa (where Indians persecuted in Uganda and Kenya were fleeing to the “mother country”). The actors in Voysey’s Cranford are clearly trained veterans of the theatre, who project their voices well with exaggerated enunciation– drawing one a little backward over the long spectrum from Ancient Greece, Christian morality plays, thence to Shakespeare and to the bathetic melodramas of 19th century Britain and the mature sophistication of the

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Edwardian stage. Received English is spoken by all the genteel upper- and middle-class characters, however improbably in a provincial town. Although the servants talk with regional accents, these seem somewhat constrained at times by the conventions of theatre-speak. There are a few pretty outdoor scenes, a possible reminder that the opportunity to go outdoors exists, but only one scene, I think, has significant symbolic meaning. Characters tend to face the camera, which seldom zooms in on a visage or a particular scene. More naturalism would be a prerequisite of a modern production–more use of quick visual movements and flashbacks replacing lengthy verbal description. A modern director of photography, Brian Tufano, has commented too, “[T]he location [helps] tell the story. It is another character, it is another subject. All those locations we use [should be] chosen with care, because they say something about the characters that actually live in those houses”.28 Such localization is largely absent from this series, interiors apart. But despite manifest theatrical artificiality, immense pains seem to have been taken with background, domestic interiors, authentic clothing, décor, furnishing and attractive wallpaper as a result of the splendid efforts of the designer Daphne Shortman and others–to exploit the new medium of colour. Fabrics are beautifully photographed, tints and tinctures never overstated but still effectively contrasted–all difficulties of an adaptation, which one hardly thinks about while reading Gaskell’s novel. In this respect, the visual achievement of the play is an advance on Voysey’s otherwise excellent adaptation of an earlier Middlemarch (1986), in which the final love scene is unfortunately played out in the company of cheap-looking plastic flowers and what seem to be papier-mâché walls, in an apparently hastily constructed background. (I noticed a suspect “tree” at Betsy Barker’s window, which never seemed to move, and which again brings the stage to mind.) Parts of this Cranford, in keeping with its period “theme”, seem decidedly mannered and artificial, especially whenever the eccentric Betsy Barker (Hazel Bainbridge) appears, looking comical and absurd in all her multi-coloured ribbons, no doubt collected from her former trade in millinery, which was successful enough to enable her to retire and buy a house. Anxious about her status in society, she thanks Miss Pole in a shrieking voice for condescending to visit her, and at times looks about to faint. (Her cow had also recently fallen into a lime-pit.) When Captain Brown unexpectedly knocks below, the pressure mounts, with the maid running up and down the stairs, and Betsy shrieks more loudly at this surprise visit. The servant says, “He heard you wailin’–he asked if it was the cat!” Here we are not miles from the territory of farce. Such a

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mannered approach seems largely to have been abandoned in later episodes for a more realist mode. The earlier parts are arguably difficult to get involved with, but later, this production achieved its particular magic–a magic which, based on its own quaint terms, probably involves the 21st century viewer getting used to clothing which seems, predominantly, a hybrid of early 19th-century fashion together with some visual compromises with make-up, hairdos and an ambience which did not jar on the sensibilities of viewers in the 1970s. (The same will probably be true of Heidi Thomas’s version; doubtless the “period fashion” here too will also seem slightly strange a few decades hence.) Use of some early 20thcentury stage conventions was perhaps regarded as a close equivalent of “tasteful Victoriana”. One is, however, engaged by the high seriousness and humour of the adaptor, producer and director.

FIG. 1 Betsy Barker at home

Cranford as a Commodity Valued novels like Cranford would have been pre-sold commodities to a certain television audience, as they were often marketed as a vehicle for “self-improvement”, in a period when many viewers sought to be “cultured”–which has often been considered the same thing. As Jeffrey Sconce remarks: “[P]roven stories with an aura of ‘quality’ [were] ripe for exploitation”. 29 The BBC, therefore, needed to use a rather different approach to what was usual when marketing “classics”, to signify that an elite work was being presented; it was the accommodation of literature of

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cultural stature to a new medium, all filtered through the collaboration of the director, producer, adaptor, actors, musicians and set and costume designers. It was, in short, a product of what a cynic might call the “culture industry”, which Derrida in turn refers to as cultural “dissemination”, and Barthes calls “intertextuality”; it was the conjunction of two forms often thought incompatible.30 In Voysey’s case, music was only utilized as the credits rolled, in keeping with stage conventions. The attractive colour sketches of quasiArt Nouveau styled flowers on the screen as our story begins, shaped circularly like a large magnifying glass, enclose pictures of sepia-tinted houses at the opening. This reminds us by this colour/monochrome contrast that we are moving from our own world to another entrancing imaginative space, like Alice venturing toward an intriguing netherworld. It is as if we are looking at a book’s cover–Cranford, unsurprisingly by “Mrs Gaskell”. This is a variation of an old device popular in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood cinema in movie adaptations of novels such as Gone with the Wind (1939; published 1936) and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth (1934; published 1931). In many such “period” films the story commences with a picture of a book’s cover being opened by an anonymous hand. Writing appears like narrative to be read on the screen, often composed with a pen nib and ink, to condense “historical narrative” and be “objective”, or to create bridges between one sequence and another. This was a disingenuous strategy to suggest that the adaptation was “faithful to the book”, which we were reading on the screen–a “fictional” account of fiction, actually to save narrative time and production money. We then hear a voiceover as the film starts: “Cranford! That dear town where I spent my childhood. How I remember so many old friends!” Now, these words do not appear in the book, but they might well be Gaskell speaking of her early life in Knutsford. This reflects Voysey’s habit of consulting letters and biography to access the author’s “authentic voice”, instead of the “impudent” use of pastiche. The trick of conflating the author’s biography with the novel was easy to get away with, as audiences often “remember” scenes from a novel arbitrarily. When I have asked viewers which scene they remembered best in both adaptations, some replied: “The Reverend Jenkins flogging his son Peter”. Others had no “recollection” of the scene. Of course, this never actually happens at all in either adaptation, but is faithful to the book in that the incident is narrated retrospectively by Miss Matty. From this “fiction” of an “authentic voice”–of a narrator closer even to the author herself than to the storyteller–we move to Mary Smith as she begins citing from the novel itself: “…Cranford is in

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possession of the Amazons”,31 after which tea is served in Miss Matty’s drawing room, according to strict rules of etiquette.

Etiquette Another aspect of Voysey’s version of Cranford is the rather obsessive interest in class, precedence and etiquette–the unwritten (and often petty) but strict codes of behaviour which, if not strictly adhered to, could have led to social ostracism. While ostensibly escaping male control, this society is rule-bound by a “chaste” elegance in which men should be subordinate: these rules bind as well as boost their morale. In Gaskell’s novel, manners and caste are more understated and subtle than in Voysey’s re-creation–an etiquette of penury in a town of redundant women, according to Nina Auerbach. 32 (Matty gives importance to ephemeral aristocratic connections and snobbery–“how Deborah once danced with a lord” (p. 49)). In Heidi Thomas’s 2008 adaptation of the novel, etiquette only becomes important as a manifestation of Deborah Jenkins’ eccentricity, since it is no longer significant in most English lives in the present day. In Voysey’s work, concerns about how to address Lady Glenmire and etiquette in general are paramount: Miss Pole asks: “Does one say ‘Your ladyship’, when one would say ‘you’ to a common person?” And elsewhere: Mrs Forrester: My dear Miss Matty, we must fix upon what we must talk about! Miss Matty: Oh dear! Should we not talk about what we usually do? Mrs Forrester: Oh, but my dear! We must have aristocratic subjects…. I doubt that the aristocracy would eat preserves…

The attempted pea-eating episode with forks at Mr Holbrook’s dinner is exploited for comic purposes. It also indicates that being bound by rigid rules, Matty and Miss Pole risk missing the pleasurable things in life–in this case the delicious peas that fall awkwardly off the two-pronged forks provided. Mary and Mr Holbrook disregard propriety, and put their knives, covered with peas, in their mouths. Etiquette, which dominated many aspects of Victorian life, certainly was still important (though fading) in 1970s Britain, especially in the bourgeois world. In “The Last Generation in England” Gaskell jokingly refers to etiquette’s uses among the elderly women of what is certainly Knutsford in a nostalgic look to a more tolerant past: “No old lady would be so oblivious to ‘Mrs Grundy’s’ existence now as to dare to invest her favourite cow, after its unlucky fall into a lime-pit, in flannel waistcoat and drawers, in which the said cow

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paraded the streets of --------- to the day of its death” (p. 191). There is some coyness about the cow being exposed in its nakedness, without its hair. “There were many regulations which were strictly attended to in the society of ---------, and which probably checked more manifestations of eccentricity” (ibid). Gaskell deals with complex matters here, aware of these petty rules and their implications for sex and gender, and control of women in particular, typically for good or ill. An attempt to flout the rules could easily be rebuffed: “That is not etiquette!” As Mrs Beeton, in her Book of Household Management (1861), instructed: It is, however, requisite to call at suitable times, and to avoid staying too long, if your friend is engaged… During these visits, the manners should be easy and cheerful, and the subjects of conversation such as may be readily terminated.33

Heidi Thomas’s adaptation creates a more modern (and dramatic) feel by having Deborah Jenkins attend Miss Brown’s funeral on screen (which was a taboo for women and, at the time, thus very daring). Deborah’s swift, unseen death as she collapses behind a door is, similarly, a masterstroke on Thomas’s part. The Honourable Mrs Jamieson (with Fabia Drake perfectly cast in this role) regards her opinions as authoritative, and so do the others, who always defer to her because of her higher class status (though Matty admits to secretly disliking her). Pompousness and obsequiousness are presented humorously to the viewer. Mrs Jamieson’s insolence during a visit to Betsy Barker’s–like feeding her dog, Carlo, Betsy’s cream before any of the guests, and then stating that there was none left and the ladies must content themselves with milk–is played down by Thomas, though Gaskell herself certainly enjoyed a laugh at “the Honourable lady’s” expense (see Figure 2). Voysey’s careful delineations of etiquette may be a consequence of some tenderness for a less elastic but more comfortable world governed by certainty–its lack of grey areas in rules of conduct– even while exploiting its comic aspects. Precedence is strictly observed. Cherry brandy is only accepted by the other women after Mrs Jamieson signifies her eager approval of it. Uncertainty appears in the guise of how genteel middle-class women, separated from the dominant male cultural ethos, might actually earn a living, since they are dependent on small annuities inherited from men–a problem implied in both BBC adaptations. Betsy Barker as a milliner is the only self-made woman in Gaskell’s novel.

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Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP), characteristically spoken through most of Voysey’s adaptation, has not been called “BBC English” without reason (sometimes the “Queen’s English”, since royalty are among the last people in England to use this accent when speaking); and modes of speech are closely allied to etiquette and class. Considered the accent of those with power, money and breeding, RP’s use was de rigueur during the earlier 20th century on the stage and on the BBC after its later inception, and accomplished actors needed to learn to speak it impeccably, and were often thus referred to as “educated”, as if graduates of Eton or Oxbridge. By the 1970s, when Cranford appeared, however, tolerance of regional varieties of speech took hold, but Received Pronunciation was thought necessary in a drama representing “high culture”. Voysey and his collaborators seem to relish it, while attempting to do justice to servants’ diction as well. Certainly, in the 19th century, persons in the middle or upper classes used “Standard English” to distinguish themselves from the working classes, who spoke dialect.34 How close this “Standard English” was to 20th century received pronunciation, used by actors, royalty and what Charlie Brooker terms “poshos”, it is not easy to say, since RP has more recently been criticized as being “south-centric”, a symbol of the undeserved privilege of inhabitants of London and the surrounding southeast. Many brought up with it tried to neutralize or water it down from the 1970s, as an embarrassed repudiation of elitism. Even Queen Elizabeth II has changed her pronunciation somewhat, no longer pronouncing “land” as “lend”, for example, or “often” as “orphan”, and it is rare to hear these archaic forms of speech on the BBC any more. Mock-1950s BBC voices are occasionally used to satirize early- and mid-20th century social attitudes. Early costume dramas are of interest to linguists as a history of pronunciation in English usage; but they can also deter some viewers, since they associate the diction with snobbish persons of a certain educational and social background connected to public schools, not always accurately; this is true especially of those with left-wing political views, proud of accents more typical of the working classes; they associate RP with political power. The sociologist Raymond Williams attempted to revise the concept of culture away from what he saw as the elitism of Cambridge and the Leavisite emphasis on high culture, believing that all accents, all classes, have relevance. The phonetician Jack Windsor Lewis has described Received Pronunciation as “ridiculously archaic, parochial and [a] question-begging term”.35 Beverly Collins and Inger Mees prefer the phrase “non-regional pronunciation” to “received pronunciation”,

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which they define as the “upper-class speech of the 20th century”.36 It is perhaps ironic that RP as spoken in Cranford is closer to 19th century Standard English than the “educated” accents used in current adaptations, accents which now seem more familiar to us. Since the older manner of speech has virtually fallen into disuse, the inveterate RP speaker becomes marginalized as eccentric and out-of-touch, and can seem comic to the modern viewer, or even intimidating. This has the unfortunate effect of making Voysey’s dialogue seem unnatural and stilted, whereas when one writes it down, it seems quite colloquial–and often verbatim from Gaskell, whose naturalistic dialogue is impeccable. Gaskell herself was eager to promote the use of regional dialect and its variations in the north, and fifty years ago snobbish persons might have seen even this as “low grade”. It is unfortunate that the reader of this chapter cannot listen to examples of spoken dialogue in the earlier Cranford. Yet in his Notes on dialect in Mary Barton, William Gaskell appends the belief he shared with his wife, that dialect is culturally rich, an inheritance of the English of Chaucer, Langland and Shakespeare, with the rhythms of Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost.

Female Communities and the Women’s Movement Lady Glenmire, played delightfully and naturalistically throughout Voysey’s series by Mollie Maureen, refreshingly speaks with a Scots accent. Comfortable in her elevated status, there is the revelation that genteel pretension and etiquette invest the nobility with standards of rigid behaviour they may not necessarily possess–a deconstruction by Gaskell eagerly duplicated by Voysey, and hardly an issue, it seems, for Thomas, whose adaptation of these scenes seems rather flat. Lady Glenmire turns out to be down-to-earth and wears clothes worth no more than £10 (as Miss Pole observes with surprise); she talks blissfully about working in the kitchen, making scones and preserves, flirts shamelessly with the doctor, Mr Hoggins, whom she eventually marries (for she has little truck with Cranford’s maidenly modesty), and she is quite forthcoming about her problems with wind; she is more interested in talking about household economy, servants and sugar than going to court, and quickly puts an “upstart servant” like Mulliner in his place. This great comic character, Mulliner, is an inveterate snob, who never ceases to astonish whenever he appears in Gaskell’s novel. He is a grotesque parody of Mrs Jamieson’s snobbery. Voysey engages with this character to some extent, while Heidi Thomas excludes him from her script. In Voysey he is mentioned, besides the comic incident where he serves at a tea-party (where he keeps the

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guests waiting, it seems, while he finishes reading the St James Chronicle), as snubbing Lady Glenmire on the street after her engagement to Mr Hoggins. Lady Glenmire appears to be the heroine of Voysey’s play, disdainfully disregarding sexual prohibitions even when no longer young, and marrying beneath her. The pursuit of happiness and sexual fulfilment are her priorities. By emphasizing these aspects, Voysey suggests affinities between past and present (feminism), that is, the “present” of the early 1970s, which resonate with a 19th century novel. During the 1970s, the Women’s Movement and gay liberation were in full swing, and Voysey shows his more adventurous side in dealing, however obliquely, with these radical political movements; necessarily so, since he wouldn’t have wanted them to obtrude modernity crudely into Gaskell’s text. A generation confronted with the pill and the possibilities of sex without the risk of pregnancy would have doubtless been fascinated and bemused by Gaskell’s engagement with the furious 19th-century debates about the ability of women to thrive in all-female communities, with chastity as a choice. Cranford women present a quasi-Utopian village consisting of female householders, a privilege they could hold above married women because spinsters had the unique power of property ownership; so they were relatively empowered, having been emancipated from married women’s sole “important” occupation of household management to that of government by spinsters, as it were. (Gaskell herself signed the Married Women’s Property Act, though with doubt as to its efficacy.) In the service of sexual liberation in the 1970s, however, experimental societies were advocated, and it was a commonplace view that for both homosexual and female freedoms, liberation for all people could not come about without the abolition of existing social institutions (see, for example, Martha Shelley, Gay is Good (1970)). There appear to be coded references to some of these ideas in the sexual rebelliousness–the contemptuous indifference to public censure–on Lady Glenmire’s part in Voysey’s adaptation. Comically compared to Amazons, female warriors in Greek myth noted for their strength and fearlessness, living remotely on the borders of the known world, Cranford ladies are shown to be relatively timid, though able to rally round each other in times of need, to show loyalty and create a harmonious society of their own, despite some waspish comments when thought necessary; able to obtain “clear and correct knowledge of everybody’s affairs in the parish”; and “quite sufficient” for “kindness (somewhat dictatorial) to the poor” (p. 5). Modern feminists, despite sexual liberation (or because of it), could engage with these ideas–could disentangle them from the patriarchally-

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induced guilt, often enforced by women themselves in “conduct books” which helped fetter 19th-century females to conventionality: Mrs Beeton in her Book of Household Management (1861) admonished girls: “[S]crupulousness in domestic duty is seen not as a practical skill…, but as a moral necessity. To be slack in one’s domestic duties is for any woman to be morally vicious”.37 However, people experienced class and gender as constructs that buttressed a sense of self and identity. Cranford is a critique, however, of inflexible gender roles, which, as constructs, are therefore artificial, revealing Gaskell’s rich ambivalence: her fluidity regarding class and gender structures. The ladies of Cranford were able to disregard admonitions that, in order to live out a natural, healthy and normal life, marriage was essential– even though many in the novel, in terms of Gaskell’s fascination with moral dilemmas, seem to experience unvoiced regret at a repressed life with little money and no children or conjugal affection. There is an element of sour grapes when Lady Glenmire marries Mr Hoggins: “Hoggins? It might as well be Piggins!” cries Mrs Jamieson in the script; and the narrator of Cranford states: Mrs Hoggins! Had she absolutely dropped her title, and so, in a spirit of bravado, cut the aristocracy to become a Hoggins! She, who might have been called Lady Glenmire to her dying day! Mrs Jamieson … said it only convinced her of what she had known from the first, that the creature had a low taste. But ‘the creature’ looked very happy on Sunday at church… [with] all the becoming blushes of hers. I am not sure if Martha and Jem looked more radiant in the afternoon, when they made their first appearance. (168)

Gaskell implies that, in fact, marriage is a natural state, an implication which comes across easily in Voysey’s concise dialogue too. But the maidenly women, if satirized at times, are fundamentally depicted with respect and pathos. Their basic goodness is emphasized when they pool their resources together to assist Miss Matty into self-help. Characteristically, Gaskell undermines positive conclusions by gently intimating that lack of reproduction means that many of these elderly and seemingly independent women will be decimated. Interestingly, Voysey draws these all-female communities with more optimism.

Gay Liberation: Cross-Dressing and Homosexuality The Victorians, including Gaskell in stories like Cranford, were far more knowing about polymorphous sexualities and gender identities than

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we give them credit for. Sexual matters in general were taboo in literature, but not always in life. There was a large population of prostitutes openly plying their trade in places like the Haymarket in London and, of course, Manchester, and doubtless Knutsford too; and rent-boys and transvestites (“Mary-Annes”) were to be seen for sale in Piccadilly; pornography was available at the Strand and other places. References to sex in literature had to be coded in 19th-century fiction; and similarly, when Voysey’s adaptation appeared, homosexuality between consenting adults in private had only been de-criminalized in England for five years. The novelist Rosamond Lehman was probably the first critic to draw attention to Gaskell’s understanding and toleration of homosexual inclinations. Osborne Hamley in Wives and Daughters is androgynous; he is described as having small feet like a lady’s, and his father complains of his habit of staring in the mirror as if he were a girl. “Delicate almost to effeminacy”, he has clandestine, secret rendezvous away from home. But, Lehman concludes, despite his feminine, “emasculate” aspects–“although Mrs Gaskell stresses his girlish ways and beauty–the psychological conventions of the day exact[ed] that he should fall in love in a normal though clandestine way with a young woman”.38 Transvestism occurs, too, in more than one of Gaskell’s works of fiction. The astonishing short story, “The Grey Woman”, hiding behind the conventions of Gothic horror, has a young woman marry a “beautiful young man” with features “as delicate as a girl’s”.39 He brutally mistreats his wife, however, and she escapes with her maid, Amante (“the loved one”), apparently a seasoned cross-dresser–“she altered both the shape of her face and her voice to a degree which I should not have believed possible”.40 They live together as man and wife, and share a bed. There is cross-dressing in Cranford too: metaphorical (Deborah), literal (Peter, of whom however there is no intimation whether he is homosexual or not, though he never marries); and delusional (Miss Pole) in the hysterical fantasies of an ageing spinster. Peter is surely what we would today diagnose, or label, as having gender dysphoria–he is a compulsive transvestite, not the mere prankster he is described as in the novel–“the darling of his mother” (62), as Matty describes him: “He even took my father in once, by dressing himself up as a lady that was passing through the town and wished to see the Rector” (63). Matty confuses her genders: Peter said, he was awfully frightened himself when he saw how his father took it all in… [H]er–him, I mean–no, her, for Peter was a lady then. He told me he was more terrified than he ever was before, all the time, my

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father was speaking… He was the lady… [M]y father spoke of the lady’s excellent taste… 64) Well! He [Peter] went to [Deborah’s] room, it seems, and dressed himself in her old gown, and shawl, and bonnet…; and he made the pillow into a little … baby; and talked to it all the nonsense people do.’ (65)

Peter’s actions mock his strict, patriarchal sister Deborah, whose jockey-cap bonnet and cravat could be seen as an arrogation of the male role: “[She] altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman” (ibid., p. 18): such women were thought to be masculine in character. Ultimately, when Peter walks cross-dressed up and down Filbert Road and is exposed to many villagers, and his father, furious, tears off his clothes and publicly flogs him, Peter runs away as a result of his humiliation, causing his family great pain. A comic counterpoint to this sad story is Miss Pole’s fantasy of a thief dressed in women’s clothes intending to burgle her home. Peter’s story, though only narrated retrospectively by Miss Matty in the book as well as in both major Cranford adaptations, has impressed many. The fine artist Joan Hassall illustrated the scene of Peter dressed as his sister Debora nursing a baby in a woodcut in a 1940 edition of Cranford (Fig. 2). The picture is rather mannered with characters dressed curiously (Mr Jenkins in 18th-century clothing) but, as in Gaskell’s novel, it confounds gender expectations: Peter may have maternal instincts, or it could be (less likely) that he is simply sending his sister up. The light is focused on the onlookers of the town in this illustration, staring through the fence at Peter, and his figure in female garb is shrouded in darkness with light surrounding him, suggesting the enigmatic nature, perhaps less well understood at this time, of cross-dressing. On the other hand, much is made of Betsy Barker’s cow in Voysey’s film in a curious departure; the animal is not simply transgendered in clothing of ambiguous sex, but the animal is trans-specied as well, in human attire. This is a startling movement away from the realism of the screenplay. One assumes that there was a private joke among the adaptor and film-makers, since to the cow’s flannel waistcoat there is the addition of sexy lacy front leggings, with large and extravagant ribbons tied decoratively around the animal (Fig. 5) and its pantaloons, rather suspiciously resembling women’s stockings, are held up with suspenders. And the whole town goes outdoors to view this camp cow as it gambols about in the field–an object of public amusement and contemplation, which perhaps suggests anxieties about an aspect of the human condition about to come out of the proverbial closet. Hence the following dialogue:

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FIG. 2 The town comes out to view “poor Peter”, cross-dressed. Cranford, by Joan Hassal (London: George Harrap & Co., 1940). Courtesy of Thomas Recchio Captain Brown: I’ve seen sacred cows in India, ma’am, but never in flannel drawers! Mary: Look at those ribbons! Miss Matty (in explanation): Betsy always liked too many colours in her ribbons.

Gaskell’s amusing anecdote is here turned into a signifier, a symbol exploited by the film-makers to suggest an agenda firmly rooted in the

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1970s, intimating homosexuality as well as cross-dressing. This is the only long outdoor scene in the film. The cow’s fantastical outfit, which mocks gender binaries, is not depicted in Heidi Thomas’s adaptation, which simply shows a cow in flannels, a minor object of amusement to local children.

FIG. 3 Betsy Barkers’s cow as visual signifier (BBC, Cranford, 1972)

Conclusion Michael Voysey’s Cranford was one of a number of distinguished productions of a “classic” text by the BBC in the 1970s, and one of the earliest adaptations to appear in colour. It was also an example of attempts to translate cultural works beautifully and sometimes problematically into a visual medium, partly in the effort to relate 19th-century cultural problems in an analogical sense to contemporary 20th-century issues, and partly an act of nostalgia for certainties of a fading past in a changing century. Gaskell’s continuing relevance is demonstrated by the way in which the film is able to use Cranford as a conduit to look indirectly at current ideas such as Women’s Liberation and gay, lesbian and transgender rights; historical controversies are interestingly appropriated to the present. Despite the use of dated conventions of the theatre, with an emphasis on etiquette, class and Received Pronunciation even more pronounced than they are in the novel, the four-part series is still compelling, since it poignantly shares Gaskell’s sense of irony, comedy and drama. Voysey is perhaps more positive about feminism than Gaskell herself, often sceptical,

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is about the Woman Question. Reaching across the century, Voysey extrapolates Gaskell’s allusions to cross-dressing and difficulties with gender identity into what seems a daring, radical, modern symbol, which is also extremely entertaining.

Notes 1 Voysey’s own output as a dramatist was prolific; besides plays of his own, he also dramatized, amongst others, Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1960), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1968), Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1971), and Colette’s Cheri (1973). 2 Terence Hawkes, That Shakespehearian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process, p. 123. 3 Well over thirty stage versions of Cranford were also written from about the midnineteenth century up to 1973 in both Britain and the United States, though most specifically Victorian theatre was negligible and crude, with stock characters and loud music, until about 1880. Many of the twentieth-century plays have been scrupulously documented by Thomas Recchio in his disquisition, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford: A Publishing History. 4 Even racial anxieties are dealt with in Voysey’s adaptation, albeit briefly, in Miss Matty’s anxiety at the proximity of Peter’s dark-complexioned Indian servant, brought home from India. 5 See Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio, p. 316. 6 Guardian, 7 November 2002. 7 Here the perpetually bored and satirical but respected Brooker refers particularly to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel that arguably has had more of a shaping influence on subsequent history than any other 19th-century text. 8 Brooker apparently misses the irony of Eliot’s use of the name Grandcourt as an appalling mockery of what she sees as a largely brutal, fossilized institution. See Brenda McKay, “Review of the Adaptation of Daniel Deronda for the BBC”, p. 108. 9 Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, p. 1. 10 Only a few great, earlier adaptations such as Dennis Potter’s version of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Castlebridge (1978) are still readily available. 11 See Geoffrey Wagner, The Novel and Cinema, especially pp. 221–231. 12 Cited in Stoneman, Brontë Transformations, p. 3. 13 A penetrating attack on misreadings of the novel comes here as early as 1963, in Martin Dodsworth’s insightful “Women without Men at Cranford”, p. 132. 14 Emphasis added. Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, p. 3. 15 J. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, p. 104. See also Monis Beja, Film and Literature. 16 J.A. Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, p. 313; James Kissane, “Victorian Mythology”, pp. 18–19.

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Antony Easthope, Literary and Cultural Studies, p. 39. Interview in Giddings, Selby & Wensley, Theory and Practice of Literary Adaptation, p. 118. 19 Ibid., pp. 103, 104, 105. 20 The present writer also signed this petition, which was presented to the BBC. 21 For a defensive account of the sequel, see Chris Louttit, “The Pleasures of the Return: Cranford, the Sequel”, pp. 103-117. 22 See Giddings et al, The Classic Serial, in which the dramatization of this outstanding study of sexual obsession and identity is described as a highly successful transformation of “one of the glories of the national literary heritage”–a masterly production which was the harbinger of the age of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair (the 1999 version)–and, one hastens to add, Andrew Davies’s serialisation of Wives and Daughters, p. 84. 23 Giddings & Selby, ibid, p. 90. 24 See Patsy Stoneman, “Wives and Daughters on Television”, p. 100, note 7. Stoneman made enquiries at the BBC’s costume department, and was informed, and able to establish, that women travellers were known to wear trousers (there are illustrations extant), especially but not exclusively after 1830. 25 Thomas Pinney (ed.), “The Antigone and its Moral”, in Essays of George Eliot (261-265), p. 262. 26 Benedetto Croce, Theory and History of Historiography [1915], trans. D. Ainslee, p. 42. 27 Chapple & Pollard (eds), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Letter 57. 28 Cary Bazalgette & Christine James, “Screening Middlemarch: 19th Century Novel to 1990s Television”: BBC Educational Developments, p. 26. 29 J. Sconce, “The Cinematic Reconstitution of Jane Eyre”, in Richard J. Dunn (ed.), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre [1847] p. 515. For an interesting discussion of the strategies which are unique for exploitation by the adaptor, see also Donna Nudd, “The Pleasures of Intertextuality: Reading Jane Eyre Television and Film Adaptations”, in ibid, pp. 515-522. (These are the usual selections of essays at the conclusion of a novel, characteristic of Norton). 30 See, e.g., Stoneman, Transformations, p. 2; and Easthope, Literature into Culture, pp. 58-59 for a discussion of such terminology. 31 Patricia Ingham (ed.), Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford [1853], “The Last Generation in England”, “The Cage at Cranford”, p. 5. All references to Cranford and the other two works will be taken from this edition; page numbers will follow quotations between brackets in the text. 32 Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, pp. 79–83. 33 Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, p. 10. 34 Useful works on British pronunciation include: Bente Rebecca Hannisdal, “Variability and Change in Received Pronunciation” (unpublished PhD thesis, Bergen); J.C. Wells, Accents of English I: An Introduction; Wikipedia entry, “English Language in England”. 35 Cited from Wikipedia, “English Language in England”. 18

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B. Collins & I.M. Mees, Practical Phonetics and Phonology: A Resource Book for Students, pp. 3-4. 37 Isabella Beeton, “The Nature and Role of Women”, cited in Cranford, Appendix ii, pp. 207–208. 38 Rosamond Lehman, Introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, pp. 10-11. 39 Jenny Uglow (ed.), “The Grey Woman”, in Curious if True: Strange Tales by Mrs Gaskell, pp. 196-197. 40 Ibid, p. 199.

CHAPTER FIVE ANXIOUS JOURNEYS AND OPEN ENDINGS: SEXUALITY AND THE FAMILY IN THE BBC’S WIVES AND DAUGHTERS (1999) KATHERINE BYRNE

Wives and Daughters, Gaskell’s final and unfinished novel, has been considered her greatest achievement, “the culmination of all her artistic effort ... an enormously rich work, covering a range of thematic and generic material”. 1 It is a bildungsroman as well as a novel of English provincial life, as it follows the journey of its heroine Molly Gibson, from childhood to adulthood in a small town. Thus, it has been compared to George Eliot’s Middlemarch in its scope, but it has a Jane Austen-like focus on the marriage plot and the family, and lacks the hard-hitting grittiness of Gaskell’s social problem novels, Mary Barton and North and South. Hence, it seems an appropriate, viewer-friendly choice to be the first of the recent television adaptations of her work. Nevertheless, it was a risky one, for, although Gaskell has been reclaimed by Marxist and feminist academics over the last few decades, at the time of Nicholas Renton’s 1999 production she was still by no means a household name, described as “a relatively unknown author” and a “well-kept secret” by press coverage of the drama.2 Thus, the production team faced the task of introducing to the general public the author primarily known for the “very gentle” Cranford and placing her alongside more famous, canonical and much-adapted authors like Charles Dickens.3 For this purpose, the BBC brought together a screenplay written by Andrew Davies (hugely successful since his 1995 Pride and Prejudice for the BBC) with a wellknown cast of respected “quality” British actors, including Francesca Annis and Michael Gambon). 4 The DVD that followed the series even included a special feature entitled “Who the dickens is Mrs Gaskell”, a half-hour documentary which set out to inform and educate the viewer

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about Gaskell, describing her life and literary career. The programme invited literary figures like Margaret Drabble to comment on and praise her work, which was deliberately placed alongside Dickens’s in significance. This suggests that Gaskell’s fiction was thought to represent a fruitful vein, culturally and financially, which is ready to be tapped by the heritage industry, and that Wives and Daughters is just the first step in this process. Such a belief proved to be true. As I have discussed elsewhere, the process of adapting Gaskell for the small screen has since succeeded in its objective5: in her case adaptation has not acted, as Julie Sanders suggests it usually does, as a “marker of canonical status” but has conferred that status, establishing her as a major literary figure6. The making of the 1999 Wives and Daughters was the consequence of lobbying by the Gaskell Society, but its success–it was nominated for seven BAFTAS and won four7–has been credited with leading to the later acclaimed productions of North and South (2004) and Cranford (2007), all also by the BBC (Hamilton 2007:188). Wives and Daughters can thus be considered the “gateway” adaptation, which paved the way for the arguably more gritty and unconventional productions to come8. With its peaceful rural setting– as yet untouched by industrialisation–which “invites a nostalgic gaze”, this feels like a classic heritage production, in Andrew Higson’s muchcontested definition of the term, and with its depiction of family life, and its young spirited heroine, it was clearly chosen to capitalise on the success of the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice four years earlier9. Gaskell’s novel does, however, feel more “modern” than Austen’s, given its subtle reworking of sexual politics–as Shirley Foster indicates; it hints at “a new, progressive vision of gender roles”10–but most significantly, it is rather post-heritage in its main focus: an exploration of the extended, reconstituted, and deeply problematic family formed by a second marriage11. Molly Gibson’s main tribulation, as she approaches adulthood, derives from the difficulties caused by her widowed father’s remarriage to a poorly-chosen bride, and the subsequent arrival of a step-sister and rival. If the heritage drama is primarily about nostalgia for, and idealisation of, the past, the central focus of this novel seems neither idealised, nor even particularly “past”. A contemporary audience is probably more accustomed to the demise and reconstruction of the nuclear family than Gaskell’s readers (if more often from divorce than bereavement) and certainly more familiar with discourse about its potential problems and difficulties. There is nothing sanitised about the representation of the second family in Gaskell’s novel: Molly’s “wicked stepmother”, Hyacinth, is supremely selfish and deeply detrimental to her new daughter’s .

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happiness, and after her entrance into the home it ceases to be a proper refuge for Molly or her father. 12 Indeed, for both Mr and Mrs Gibson this second marriage is soon identified as a mistake, and remains so till the end of the narrative. In this regard at least Gaskell’s novel is too bleak to do the job of the heritage drama, “a genre understood to fulfil a palliative function for a late twentieth century British society” disturbed by the disappearance of traditional values and rapid social change13 and looking for “an escape, a refuge … from the present.”14 There is no comforting escapism, no “oasis amidst … the present” in such a cynical portrait of family life, and the only way for Molly to achieve a happy ending is to leave the home behind, rather than resolve its problems.15 In other ways, of course, what critics have identified as Gaskell’s general optimism about the gradual and positive nature of social change allows her to fit in perfectly with a heritage tradition: in terms of class and community she offers a more rosy picture of the past, as we shall see16. The contemporariness of the second family plot is a very useful way of ensuring the accessibility and relevance of this drama to a modern audience. Davies has noted that Wives and Daughters has a very modern feel because the politics of the second family are so familiar, and because viewers can identify with Molly’s experiences as she comes to terms with her new mother and stepsister. Given that the novel is already contemporary in its thematic concerns, Davies’s screenplay can be very faithful to the source text, sticking closely to Gaskell’s original dialogue throughout. With a generous five hours of screen time to play with, fidelity is easy to achieve. His adaptation, however, feels rather exceptional among other period dramas in its foregrounding of the family at the expense of the romance plot. In fact, it would not be going too far to suggest that the budding relationship between Molly and Roger Hamley is in fact secondary to the real love affair in the drama; the one between Molly and her father. The novel’s title reveals its interest in Molly’s journey from being a daughter to becoming a wife, and the BBC adaptation explores the ways in which, to post-Freudian eyes, the two are in fact closely entwined. In this psycho-analytical reading of the source text, then, Molly’s father is reconstructed as something of a romantic hero. In contrast, for modern viewers, Gaskell’s Mr Gibson is an unsympathetic, and certainly a reactionary figure, in that he has been condemned by feminist critics17 for his old-fashioned beliefs regarding women and education and his determination to keep Molly innocent–or ignorant–and pure: Don’t teach Molly too much: she must sew, and read, and write, and do her sums, but I want to keep her a child, and if I find more learning desirable for her, I’ll see about giving it to her myself. After all, I am not

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Gaskell makes it clear here that Mr Gibson is a concerned, but oldfashioned father, who prizes innocence and domesticity above personal development, and that Molly has to struggle for what education she has. This, of course, makes Roger’s willingness to instruct her in natural science all the more significant: he is the only person in her life who offers any intellectual encouragement. Hence the novel presents Molly’s progression to adulthood as a journey away from the man who holds her back, and towards the one who educates and supports her. In contrast, Renton’s adaptation, so faithful to the novel in most ways, significantly omits Mr Gibson’s views on education and instead first introduces the grown-up Molly in a scene in which she is absorbed in a book. Her literary and academic interests are thus established from the outset, but there is no suggestion here that she enjoys reading, despite, or possibly because, she has been “daunted by her father in almost every intellectual attempt” (Gaskell: 32). The adaptation does, as we will see, certainly represent Molly as a victim of early Victorian attitudes toward women’s education, but it is reluctant to implicate her father in this misogynistic ideology. (The attitude of other, less sympathetic patriarchal figures, however, is clear: Lord Hollingford, for example, dismisses her as a “simple country girl”).19 Instead, the BBC version chooses to represent Mr Gibson as seen through Molly’s eyes, constructing him as an idealised father, and the most important person in her life. The score–as Linda Troost has suggested (about Austen adaptations), the music here “tells the viewer how to interpret a character or a scene. It substitutes for the omniscient narrator”20–and careful lighting allows the viewer to understand the subtle nuances of the Freudian family romance Gaskell hints at in the novel. Molly’s key scenes alone with her father are repeated throughout the episodes, and leave the viewer in no doubt that he is the real romantic hero in the story. He first appears as a knight in shining armour, rescuing a young Molly from anxiety and abandonment at the Towers, and carrying her away on his horse. Then the viewer is shown Molly and her father, by candlelight, in front of the fire, in a picture of romantic bliss about to be disrupted forever by his marriage. Most significantly, there is a montage of happy and romantic scenes to illustrate their first time alone together following it. In comparison, Molly’s relatively few, and relatively

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passionless encounters with Roger seem almost insignificant; for example, they do not kiss at any point, not even following their marriage. However such a focus upon the family and in particular the father/daughter relationship is appropriate, given the adaptation’s preoccupation with the dangerous and damaging nature of adult heterosexual desire. Again as though the world of the drama were seen through Molly’s fearful adolescent eyes, sexuality here always has problematic consequences. This is most apparent in the relationship between Cynthia and Mr Preston, to whom she is secretly engaged. In the novel her agreement to marry him is a consequence of her youthful innocence and economic vulnerability, and in the adaptation Cynthia’s verbal description of their engagement to Molly reinforces this. However, as she speaks the viewer witnesses, as though in flashback, the embrace which reveals the true and hidden nature of their arrangement: passionate but illicit desire on both sides; sexual curiosity on hers; and predatory possessiveness on his. These early errors have severe consequences for Cynthia: the darkest aspects of sexuality become apparent when Molly, and the viewer, witness a desperate Preston harassing her and attempting to restrain her physically, in the woods (Episode 3). Sexuality is also to blame for the largely disastrous marriage between Mr and Mrs Gibson. Again Gaskell in her novel represents their union as a consequence of economic and pragmatic considerations, but the adaptation foregrounds sexual frustration instead. The audience understands the meaning of Gibson’s appreciative, contemplative gaze, and Hyacinth’s understanding and manipulation of it: immediately before his proposal she is seen eating fruit, like the Eve she represents. After their marriage they continue to enjoy the gratification of this desire–Molly sees them happily retiring to their bedroom together and closing the door–but as with Cynthia and Preston, they soon learn that sexual love fades and that a relationship based on little else is doomed to failure. And Mr Gibson and his daughter, of course, long pay the price for this mistake. Roger, also in thrall to a woman’s physical charms when he proposes to Cynthia without really knowing her, is saved by Molly from a similar fate, exchanging his youthful ardour for a more cerebral and suitable marriage. Thus their relationship remains restrained and chaste throughout the series, even during a proposal scene in which they keep several metres apart, due to the risk of infection from scarlet fever–a reminder perhaps of the pathological effects of passion for the other characters. And, in a nice touch, Roger keeps his distance because he has promised Mr Gibson he would not come close: even when they finally express their love the father is literally coming between them (Episode 4). The heavy rain in this scene seems to

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stand in for physical contact: the soaked lovers might remind us of the hero of Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy, famously emerging, dripping wet, from the lake in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Austen’s novel. Instead of passion, though, the viewer is offered a relationship based on friendship and intellectual respect. Molly and Roger’s marriage seems likely to provide a happy ending because it contrasts so fully with the other relationships in the series, and also, of course, because their love is already familial–as Roger has said only a short time before he proposes, “Molly is like a sister to me” (episode 4). The only moment of close contact and near-embrace for the lovers is, in fact, when they collide while looking down a microscope together–a significant indicator of the intellectual basis of their relationship and a foreshadowing of their happy ending to come (Episode 4). The adaptation’s anxiety about sexuality seems to offer a sense of historical authenticity: it reminds the viewer that, for the Victorian woman, desire was equivalent to risk–to one’s reputation before marriage and, given the high rates of fatality during childbirth, to one’s health and life after. Gaskell’s text itself may shy away from dealing too directly with the consequences of passion (though of course her controversial “fallen woman” novel, Ruth, concerned itself with exactly this), but any modern adaptation almost inevitably foregrounds the censored sexuality of its source text. Wives and Daughters, however, is complex in this regard, given that, as we have seen, it simultaneously highlights and polices the appetites of its characters; at once acknowledging the power of desire and yet offering family and friendship as a preferable alternative. This can be considered symptomatic of the heritage drama’s construction of an alternative to modern sexual practices, offering the viewer a fantasy world of passion held in check and heightened by its very restraint. Virginia L. Blum has written convincingly of the contradiction created by our modern belief that “sexual repression is one of the worst threats to personal fulfilment”, which leads to a liberated and sexually open society that in fact seems less erotic than the repressed past21. Thus we have a collective “fantasy of what we might recuperate via the adaptation of pre-Victorian and Victorian novels and our sense that we have lost the experience of desire that they had to repress”. 22 It is this fetishisation of “delay and abstinence” which is thought to be one of the main reasons the period drama has become so popular with its (largely female) audience. The other, who also deliberately invites and exploits the sexual interest of the viewer, is the figure who acts out the delights and difficulties of that delay for the audience–the male lead. Martine Voiret, among others, has noted how the gratification of the audience’s desiring gaze has become crucial to the

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success of period dramas in recent years. Since Colin Firth’s role in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice gave rise to “Darcymania”, it seems important that the central male character in any heritage production is someone the audience could fall in love with. For this purpose a number of Jane Austen’s other, more unassuming heroes, have been transformed into more conventionally attractive romantic leads for the screen.23 Voiret cites the casting of Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, in Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility, as good examples of the sexing up of the “bland and rather boring” characters in the novel.24 This of course has the effect of transforming Austen’s plot in the process, given that it is really about marrying the reliable and decent man rather than the most attractive one, but such an alteration is considered a small price to pay in order to give the female viewer the pleasure of the gaze. The BBC’s Wives and Daughters takes similar liberties with the male characters (as their North and South would also do with John Thornton several years later). Roger Hamley is presented in the novel as a rather “clumsy” (Gaskell, 85) and unprepossessing figure, a “strong built, cheerful, intelligent country farmer” (Gaskell, 179) rather than the picture of a romantic lead. Hence it is his “beautiful” brother Osmond, with the “Greek features”, who Molly is initially attracted to, even though she acknowledges that he, in his Romantic delicacy, is a “poetical, if not a chivalrous, hero” (Gaskell, 166). The adaptation, however, chooses to play down Osborne’s sexual appeal and highlight his physical delicacy by placing Tom Hollander in the part. Somewhat diminutive in stature, and generally known for playing subtly comic characters, Hollander is not usually cast in romantic roles, and thus seems to remove the possibility of his Osborne being a rival for Roger or an object of desire for Molly.25 By contrast Anthony Howell plays a much more conventionally attractive Roger, who is presented to the audience as an object of viewing pleasure. This is especially apparent in one scene where he is seen, in Africa, without his shirt and where the intensely contemplative eyes of the local woman watching him echo that of the viewer (Episode 3). Hence, aesthetically speaking, there is never any doubt for the viewer who is the true hero of the novel and who Molly’s choice will ultimately be.26 Such a sexualisation of the male lead may have become a standard feature of the costume drama following the success of Pride and Prejudice, “which is unashamed about appealing to women and in particular about fetishizing and framing Darcy and offering him up to the female gaze”.27 However, it results in the sacrifice of one of the novel’s moral messages, which explores the notion that character is more important than beauty–a morale which has clearly little resonance for a

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modern audience, as the adaptation’s Roger, happily for Molly, has to possess both. If Roger’s appearance needs to be changed for the screen, however, his personality and behaviour do not. Voiret has discussed how romantic heroes in such dramas must appear gentle, compassionate, and nurturing to appeal to the female viewer, and how often scenes revealing their fondness for children, or their concern for others, have been inserted to display this.28 Roger, unlike Mr Gibson, does not need to be rewritten: he provides emotional support for all the other characters and his nurturing of Molly’s intellectual interests identifies him as a new man (even if, while blinded by his own desire for Cynthia, he ignores her emotional ones). Thus his dialogue, as in the scene where he comforts Molly after the news of her father’s marriage, is faithful word for word to the novel. In fact, the main point at which the adaptation diverges from the source text is through its representation of Molly herself. Gaskell’s heroine is a devoted daughter before she is an individual, and her ultimate “fulfilment seems to be in becoming a wife” 29 . She does, however, have potential (never quite realised by the novel) to become a feminist heroine: she is self-educated, intelligent, and independently minded, unafraid to speak out to her social superiors (Gaskell, 161) and displaying moments of rebellion against the status quo. This is most apparent in her much-quoted declaration early in the novel that the dutiful self-sacrifice expected of the Victorian “angel in the house” is pointless and self-destructive: It will be very dull when I have killed myself, as it were, and live only in trying to do and to be, as other people like. I don’t see any end to it. I might as well never have lived. And as for the happiness you speak of, I will never be happy again… And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the end to which everything is sent (Gaskell, 134).

Roger has here advised her to “think of others” and keep her real feelings about her father’s marriage under control, and it is significant that Molly, despite this verbal outburst, does attempt to follow his advice. In fact, throughout the novel, Gaskell portrays Molly as an exceptional young woman with the talents to achieve great things, but whose–usually correct and wise–inclinations are ignored and whose desires are inevitably thwarted. From her reluctance to call Mrs Gibson “mamma” to her distaste for the meetings with Mr Preston, her wishes are always overcome by her willingness to be a dutiful daughter or a faithful sister. As Jane Spencer has noted, “she gives up practically everything she loves. She relinquishes her father to his new wife, and Roger to Cynthia”.30 Indeed, Molly’s angry words above almost become a prophecy towards the end of the novel: she

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nearly literally “kills herself” through self-sacrifice when she loses her physical and mental health watching over the Hamleys, and facing the village’s judgement for Cynthia’s sake. This illness reminds the reader of Mrs Hamley’s decline and death, which the novel suggests is also a symptom of a life given up to the service of her husband’s happiness (Gaskell, 40-41). Molly escapes her friend’s fate, however, and indeed it is through this brush with death that she is finally appreciated by others, as the chapter title, “Molly Gibson’s worth is discovered”, suggests. The final chapters of the novel charter a slow return to health and hint (as the ending could not be completed) at the promise of future happiness–something that she has earned through “the mobility afforded by her character and intellectual attainments”, which equip her to become the happy wife of the scientific and successful man she loves.31 Feminist critics have remained unsatisfied by Molly’s likely destiny, though. Her achievement, in the eyes of other characters at least, is simply to have become a woman “capable of appreciating” Roger’s greatness (Gaskell, 623). This is a “a disappointing goal for a young woman whose growth to maturity and moral responsibility has been so compellingly traced … Gaskell [in this novel] shows little interest in women’s word movement into the public sphere”. 32 Molly is denied the personal and economic freedom Margaret Hale obtains in North and South, for example, or indeed that Gaskell enjoyed in her own life. The production team, however, seems to set out to address such feminist reservations about the novel. In the special feature documentary, they take pains to inform the viewer of Gaskell’s feminist credentials, stressing her interest in, and support for, other women writers–most famously Charlotte Brontë33–and her movement in the public sphere. Her personal independence is, this suggests, particularly symbolised by her unconventional purchase of a new house with the profits earned from her writing, and without her husband’s knowledge, shortly before her death. 34 Given this determination to construct Gaskell as a feminist writer, it is unsurprising that the adaptation deliberately rewrites Molly as a much more positive and proactive heroine who can appeal to a modern audience. Justine Waddell portrays her not as a victim, but as a light-hearted teenager whom we see giggling, joking and, in one scene, dancing round the living room with Cynthia. She may undergo various hardships, but this contemporary Molly is more mentally resilient–her social ostracization at the hands of the village gossips is played down, for example, and swiftly resolved, in contrast to the suffering endured in the novel–and even more significantly, more physically resilient too. Davies’ and Renton’s Molly is healthy and strong throughout the adaptation, and the dangerous illness her source character

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is afflicted by is written out of the script. She becomes a modern heroine, strong and active (she is frequently shot walking or working out of doors) rather than the delicate invalid Gaskell’s Molly is in danger of becoming. A Victorian readership, accustomed to “popular views of female invalidism as fashionable” 35 would have appreciated the femininity, spirituality and desirability encoded within Molly’s physical frailty, and it is no accident that Roger first notices her attractiveness while she is still recovering (Gaskell, 619). For a modern audience, however, bodily weakness is an unlikely attribute for a heroine. This is also true of the other female characters: Aimee’s illness, which is life-threatening in the novel, is more superficial here, and Cynthia’s mental and physical malaise is removed altogether. Male physical vulnerability, in contrast, is foregrounded by the screenplay. From Osmond’s heart disease–which culminates in his death on screen–to Roger’s collapse and fever in Africa, there is no reluctance to display male suffering and ill health. The adaptation displays fidelity towards the novel’s representation of disease when it is male, but seems reluctant to engage with it in the female characters. Such a response can be read as a modern, feminist reaction against the “cult of invalidism” which gendered illness as female throughout the nineteenth-century. 36 Its most fundamental function, however, is to facilitate the adaptation’s final scenes, in which Molly not only marries Roger but accompanies him on his travels to Africa–an undertaking which would be impossible if she were not as physically able as he. This ending is probably the adaptation’s most significant departure from the spirit of the novel: as Foster notes, Gaskell, while “challenging gender essentialism” through her central characters, “would probably not have gone as far as the BBC in envisioning Molly in breeches, striding across the desert with her husband”. 37 However, the unfinished nature of the novel allows, even invites, the reader to create their own ending. The serialisation of Wives and Daughters was completed by an editorial note suggesting that Gaskell’s plan was, of course, to have Molly’s marriage close the narrative, but as Hughes notes, this “leaves the novel satisfyingly open-ended”38, inviting reinterpretation and facilitating the rewriting of Molly, by Davies’s screenplay, as a modern, feminist heroine who is her husband’s equal. Such an interpretation is the logical ending to the adaptation, given that throughout, its feminist agenda is indicated by a constructed comparison between Roger’s story and Molly’s. The viewer, in fact, is invited to compare and contrast the two lives. Scenes of Roger in Africa, experiencing both the excitements and hardships of travel (its liberating otherness symbolised by his dishevelled clothes) are interwoven with Molly’s unchanging life at home. This is of course in contrast to Gaskell’s

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novel in which Roger’s travel happens completely “off-stage” and can only be accessed through Cynthia’s brief and largely disinterested comments on his letters, so that the novel’s focus remains entirely with Molly. On screen, however, his freedom and movement are contrasted with Molly’s confinement and domesticity; his research into strange animals and exotic peoples compared with her routine of gossip and quiet needlework. This is made most explicit in Episode 3, in which Molly is positioned between the feminine world she belongs to and the masculine one she desires. In a key scene, she signals her separation from, and rejection of, the activities of conventional femininity when, in order to read Roger’s account of his adventures and discoveries, she leaves the sewing table where Cynthia and her mother are working. Marianne Camus has explored the ways in which sewing, often a “sterile and deeply boring activity” acts as a signifier of feminine passivity in Gaskell’s work, and the adaptation utilises here “the messages sent, received and decoded through needlework”.39 Surrounded by haberdashery, the women are trimming hats for themselves, but in the next shot Molly reveals that she has made a very different use of her ribbons and pins, using them to trace Rogers’s journey through Africa on a map of her own making. Her “work” and his are literally entwined here, and her carefully academic study of geography and maps is contrasted with Cynthia’s determination to “get this hat finished before I go out”. Molly is clearly set apart, by her more intellectual interests, from the frivolous preoccupations of the typical feminine day. Of course she is also set apart by a depth of genuine feeling which Cynthia entirely lacks: Molly’s anxious rereading of Roger’s letter prompts her to voice a prayer for his wellbeing which disregards her own hopes, “Oh God, let him live! Even if I never set eyes on him again! Let him come safe, and be happy!” (Episode 3). This speech, lifted almost exactly from the novel, displays the altruism that was the Victorian angel’s most desirable trait. Gaskell’s intention here is to portray Molly’s admirable–even heroic– generosity of spirit, but such conformity to a feminine ideal is problematic for a modern viewer. The adaptation reminds us of the high cost of feminine self-sacrifice, displayed in this scene by Molly’s clearly apparent pain and isolation–although it is notable that the desperate sobs which accompanied this moment in the novel have been removed, in another example of the “lightening” of Molly’s character. Davies’ screenplay has to balance its desire to portray Molly as a positive, strong heroine while still showing her to be very much a victim of a repressive patriarchal society. Mostly, however, her suffering is born of a frustration which seems as much intellectual as it is sexual and romantic. This is emphasised by the furnishings of her bedroom, which reveal that here, in her private

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sanctuary, she is surrounded by pens, books and a world atlas, but that her interests can only be indulged in solitude, and her thoughts cannot be shared with the rest of her circle. The confined space of the cluttered room in which she is sitting contrasts with the wide, unexplored world she dreams of. And any hope for a more enlightened future seems extinguished as she blows out her candle and climbs alone into her bed. Molly’s costumes throughout further symbolise her struggle with, isolation from, and even ultimate rejection of, the superficial, materialistic and feminine world Cynthia and Mrs Gibson inhabit. Molly might be appalled at being described as a “blue-stocking” by Mrs Gibson but in the adaptation she dresses like one (Gaskell, 268). Her simple, unfussy clothes and basic untrimmed bonnet for outdoors (she is bareheaded for most of the time) contrast markedly with the ribbons, bows and lace which adorn the rest of her more sartorially interested family, and reflect the simplicity and honesty of her character. In the same way as Molly’s impatience with sewing is symbolic of her rejection of domestic, passive Victorian femininity, her plain and even at times dowdy clothes indicate that she is at odds with her society (even her one attempt at fashionable dressing, with her first grownup dress, results in a tartan nightmare). Here she is directly contrasted with Cynthia, whose ability to “throw her whole soul into millinery” means that she is more glamorous than her stepsister, but also implies that she is more shallow–Molly’s “soul” is occupied with more important things, after all (453). I have been focussing on the way in which Renton’s adaptation views Molly’s character through a feminist lens, but significantly the same is not quite true of its representation of Cynthia. Indeed, in this regard, the adaptation seems more reductive and less progressive in its gender politics than the novel. One of the most important aspects of Gaskell’s text is its portrayal of the relationship between the stepsisters, which endures despite rivalries and differences to offer loving support to both parties. Such a representation is in keeping with Gaskell’s general representations of female relations: her works are usually representations of what Nina Auerbach describes, in her book of the same name, as “Communities of Women” and the relationships therein. 40 Auerbach’s comments are most directly relevant to Cranford, but Wives and Daughters is also a portrait of a dominantly female world, from the gossiping Miss Brownings and Mrs Goodenough to the Gibson household from which the doctor is so frequently absent. It is this fascination with, and assertion of the importance of, the domestic, private sphere which has been the source of Gaskell’s renaissance as a feminist author, after she had been initially disregarded by feminist scholarship, unimpressed by her angelic heroines

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and reliance upon the marriage plot, in the 1970s. She only merited a few passing references in Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own ,41 for example, despite this text’s slightly double-edged acknowledgment that she was the “heroine of a new school of motherly fiction”42. Furthermore, Gilbert and Gubar famously omitted her entirely from their seminal exploration of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, in 1979. Later critics, however, responded positively to her portrayal of a female-centric world and her stress upon the importance of relationships between women 43 . Female bonding and support is at the heart of all her novels, and biographical criticism has suggested that it was key to her own life and her personal politics as well.44 The BBC adaptation plays down this aspect of the novel, however: their reading of Molly and Cynthia’s friendship brings out the rivalry which Gaskell’s novel hinted at but generally repressed in favour of sisterly solidarity. As played by Keeley Hawkes, Cynthia is charming, but unbalanced and selfish, and it is quite ambiguous whether she cares at all deeply for her step-sister. With the removal of Molly’s illness, which in the novel provided Cynthia with a means of showing her genuine love and concern, the viewer has no means of accessing her true feelings. And, tellingly, she is not quite beautiful or sympathetic enough to be a serious contender for the role of heroine, although, as discussed earlier, she is always much more flamboyantly dressed than Molly. Gaskell, in contrast, represents her as Molly’s foil and double, and perhaps the most interesting character in the whole novel– something readers at the time responded to. Gaskell’s Cornhill editor, for example, commenting on the novel after Gaskell’s death, described Cynthia “as a more important work even than Molly”, a difficult character “portrayed fully and without flaw”, in all her complexity, by her creator (655). Instead Cynthia is side-lined, in the final episode, by a plot which sees her as her step-sister’s rival, and hence needing to be relegated to second place if Molly is to have a happy ending. Thus, once she has broken off her engagement and found a new lover, she simply fades out of the drama–she has no lines in the final section–allowing Molly to take centre stage. Even Roger does not dwell too much upon her in the final episode: unlike the source text, he here requires no last interview with her, before he switches his allegiance to Molly. Cynthia’s character seems to be marginalised by the plot as much as the unfortunate Osborne is. This production can have only one, unambiguous, heroine: there is no room, or perhaps no expectation of audience’s sympathy, for Cynthia, at once less feminist, more frivolous, and more morally problematic than Molly. Instead, the adaptation makes much of Lady Harriet, Molly’s fairy Godmother, in the final episode, and in many ways she is the foil and

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positive counterpart to Cynthia. It is her affectionate patronage which restores Molly’s reputation following the scandal with Mr Preston, and it is also she who plays matchmaker to Molly and Roger, bringing about their marriage. Cynthia is the cause of Molly’s unhappiness, albeit unintentionally: Lady Harriet is the restoring force which repairs the damage. Not only is she the only female character who helps rather than hinders Molly, she is also the most independent, feminist figure in the adaptation. It is notable that she, unlike the other female characters, never seems to sew; more often she is riding or driving a white horse, as though a reminder that she will become a knight in shining armour for Molly. Moreover, she is most usually seen conversing with men as their equal, especially during her forthright and uncompromising confrontation with Mr Preston about his behaviour. She is someone who can make men “do everything” she tells them (Episode 4), but without any of Cynthia or Mrs Gibson’s feminine wiles and manipulations. In fact, a complete rejection of conventional femininity, and of romantic and marital preoccupations, appears to be suggested by her dramatic and unconventionally short haircut in the final episode. This sacrifice of vanity, presumably for practicality, displays a difference from all the other women in the drama, as well as making clear the disinterested nature of her altruistic support of Molly. The contrast with Cynthia is noticeable. Lady Harriet is a mysterious, benevolent presence in the adaptation, at once involved–at her own instigation–in the action and at the same time outside it as observer. With all this in mind, then, it seems appropriate that it is Lady Harriet’s sarcastic words to her brother which bring the drama, and its examination of gender roles, to a close: “you men concern yourselves with the eternal verities–we women are content to ponder the petty things in life” (Episode 4). This speech (which is not in the novel, of course) is delivered with a sense of superiority (he has just conceded she was right about Molly and Roger)–which makes it ironic. Lady Harriet knows very well that there is nothing “petty” or insignificant about love and marriage, no matter what her brother might think, and that through it women concern themselves with the social and political as well as the personal. Most suggestively, however, it seems to function as an authorial voice, given that it is evocative of Gaskell’s own perspective on her own work, and could be considered a summing up of this novel or equally of North and South, or Mary Barton. Her novels tend to focus on their central romance plot, and are located within the private sphere, yet use the domestic as a means of exploring and interrogating the public realm and the “eternal verities” at the same time. In other words, as critics have discussed, the reader dismisses Gaskell as a “woman’s novelist” at their peril. As an intelligent,

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perceptive and benevolent “writer” and organiser of the lives of others, Lady Harriet stands in neatly for the absent, long-lost author. This acceptance of Lady Harriet as both fairy godmother and closing narrator may be positive in gender terms, but it is more problematic in relation to the adaptation’s class portrayals. Wives and Daughters has been considered one of Gaskell’s fullest portrayals of the middle and upper classes, in which “the gradual breaking down of rigid social distinctions is one of the major themes, driving the narrative to its progressive conclusion”. 45 Molly’s friendship with, and defence of, people from all classes is the most obvious way in which the novel recommends equality and promotes social change. We might expect Davies’s screenplay to build further on the cautiously “progressive” comments on class in Gaskell’s text, as it certainly does on the novel’s gender concerns. It does not, however, and this is especially notable given the criticism that had been directed at period dramas in the 1990s. As Higson and other critics46 have controversially but influentially argued, traditional heritage films (which Wives and Daughters, as I have suggested, closely resembles) can be regarded as conservative because they “are fascinated by the private property, the cultures and values of a particular class”, and seem to construct the past as a place of stability, and harmony, glossing over social tensions and inequalities. 47 Later critics, including Clare Monk, (and, modifying his earlier comments, Higson himself) have, however, revised this “leftist cultural critique” 48 , noting the complexity of approach and viewpoint of many heritage productions. As Paul Dave has observed, they are in fact often characterised by ambivalence: their “narratives aspiring to progressive, liberal sentiments” while they simultaneously “indulge in the spectacle of a socially conservative Englishness”.49 In its focus on, and valorising of, the personal journey of a village doctor’s daughter, Renton and Davies’s plot does have “liberal” interests, but any examination of the status quo really only begins and ends with Molly, and is mostly limited to that found in the source text. Criticism of the upper classes is confined to the portrayal of the bossy and occasionally ridiculous Lady Cumnor, and is more or less cancelled out by the heroism of Lady Harriet. The deference with which the latter is treated by the other characters, and her great wealth, are both vindicated by the good use she makes of both. She sees her assistance to Molly as a job and a social responsibility, and one she does well: “that’s a good day’s work” she says with satisfaction after Molly’s reputation is restored. The viewer is likely to accept her as a benevolent fairy, but a more cynical one might note that that is the only actual work she does in the drama, which is otherwise full of the industry of doctors, scientists, and farmers. Molly is indebted to her, however, and

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the audience, likewise, do not seem to be invited to judge her position, or resent her privilege. In this regard it is not only the idealised pastoral setting of the drama which can be viewed as a conservative sanitation of the past. It is significant, though, that Molly does not choose to follow Lady Harriet’s example by aping her life of altruistic society luxury, nor, indeed, will she mimic the affluent, urban lifestyle Cynthia obtains through her London marriage–even though, when she becomes “a fine lady” after her wedding to Roger, both are possible options for her. This is indicated by her continuing lack of interest in fine clothes, as commented upon by a disappointed Mrs Goodenough who “had hoped to see her dressed a bit grander, now she’s … mistress of Hamley Hall” (Episode 4). Miss Browning’s approving response, that “there’s no airs and graces about her” indicates Molly’s commitment to remaining middle class. Given the symbolic value clothes have throughout the adaptation, however, Molly’s lack of finery also signifies her continuing intellectual pursuits, which are more important to her than dresses. Miss Browning next compares her favourably to Cynthia, who moves fleetingly across the screen but says nothing, as if reduced finally to her ornate wardrobe and nothing more. Molly’s separation from the typical Victorian woman, as represented by Cynthia, is made concrete here. The viewer is thus prepared for the next, and final, scene of the adaptation, when we once again see Roger in Africa, but this time with Molly at his side, reaching the top of a mountain and admiring the view of the desert that stretches out beyond her. This mountain is clearly symbolic of the familial, intellectual and emotional sufferings and challenges Molly has had to endure and overcome throughout the drama. It is apparent that freedom, travel, and gender equality are her reward for retaining her integrity notwithstanding the trials she undergoes. Roger, despite his shortcomings (the chief of which, we could say mischievously, is his inability to really replace Mr Gibson) has facilitated this new life, the life which Molly has been yearning for all along. During the previous episodes we have seen repeated shots of her being left behind while others go on journeys: not only Roger, but Cynthia, and Mr and Mrs Gibson have driven or ridden away while she remains stationary, looking, often sadly, after them. It is only at the moment of her reconciliation with Roger that her luck begins to change: rather than passively waiting at home, she chases after his coach, and although she cannot catch it, he has already refused to leave without her. This reversal in Molly’s fortunes reaches completion in the final moments of the adaptation, in which she and Roger walk off, side by side, towards the horizon and away from the camera, which does not follow. Molly is no

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longer the one left behind; here she is moving towards the unknown, towards adventure and towards modernity. She leaves behind not only her past, and her problematic family, but also the conventional, domestic Victorian heroine–and indeed, the conventional ending to the typical period drama. From Pride and Prejudice to Jane Eyre, classic novels adapted for the screen inevitably have a socially successful marriage as their happy ending: for the BBC Wives and Daughters, marriage is only one aspect of Molly’s reward, and it is only the beginning of another journey–away from the home and towards personal freedom and development.

Notes 1

Shirley Foster, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life, p. 64. Andrew Davies, in interview. Masterpiece Theatre. www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/wives/ei_davies.html. 3 Davies, in interview, 1999. 4 Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (eds). British Historical Cinema, p. 178. 5 Katherine Byrne. ‘“Such a fine, close weave”: gender, community and the body in Cranford”, pp. 43-44. 6 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, p. 8. 7 See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0215364/awards for details. 8 Although they also have a marriage plot, they both seem less conventional period drama fare than Wives and Daughters: North and South is of course a gritty portrayal of industrialisation, and Cranford, although seemingly a portrait of peaceful rural life, is preoccupied with illness and violent death. Their darker subject matter is indicated by they both having a certificate rating of “12”–unlike Wives and Daughters which is certified “U”. 9 Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film’, in Friedman (ed.), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started. 10 Forster, p. 171. 11 Clare Monk, among others, has criticised traditional, Higson-led notions of the cultural conservatism of the traditional heritage film: “post-heritage” has been identified as a more appropriate way to describe the complexities of those productions which offer us a still-attractive, but not uncritical, view of the past. 12 Foster, p. 165. 13 Susan Hamilton “Gaskell then and now” in Matus, (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 188. 14 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 989. 15 Cardwell, p. 98. 16 Jane Spencer, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 139. 17 Marianne Camus has discussed Mr Gibson’s moral shortcomings and patriarchal attitude in her Women’s Voices in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 150-151, as 2

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has Forster, who notes how he attempts to “thwart [Molly’s] intellectual development”, p. 170. 18 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, p. 32. All following references to this will be cited parenthetically in the text. 19 Nicholas Renton (dir) Wives and Daughters. Screenplay by Andrew Davies. BBC, 1999, Episode 5. 20 Linda Troost, “The Nineteenth-century novel on film” in Cartmell and Whelehan (eds) The Cambridge Companion to literature on Screen, p. 78. 21 Virginia L. Blum, “The Return to Repression: filming the Nineteenth-Century” in Pucci and Thompson (eds) Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, p. 158. 22 Blum, pp. 158-159. 23 Martine Voiret, “Books to Movies: Gender and Desire in Jane Austen’s Adaptations” in Pucci and Thompson (eds), p. 232. 24 Voiret, p. 238. 25 Hollander is best known for playing such characters as the hapless vicar in Rev (2010/11), and, in other period dramas, the unattractive Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice (2005) and John Ruskin in Desperate Romantics (2009). For a fuller discussion of the “resonance of previous roles” and the “complex layering process” it produces for the viewer, see Cardwell, pp. 67-93. 26 Howell, while not stirring up the same enthusiasm among television audiences as Richard Armitage was to do in North and South, has appeared on “sexiest men on television” lists: see for example http://www.imdb.com/list/W-zgSWrngD8/ See for example Guy, 1996, pp. 161-173, and Ingram, 1996: 55-77, for further discussion of the private and public, the personal and political, in Gaskell’s fiction. 27 Lisa Hopkins, “Mr Darcy’s Body: Privileging the Female Gaze” in Troost and Greenfield (eds) Jane Austen in Hollywood, p. 112. 28 Voiret, p. 238. 29 Spencer, p. 138. 30 Spencer, p. 133. 31 Linda K Hughes, “Cousin Phillis, Wives and Daughters, and modernity”, in Jill Matus (ed), p. 102. 32 Spencer, p. 138. 33 Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, for example, was the “most important nineteenth-century biography of a woman writer” (Matus, p. 4). 34 Dunn, and see also Spencer, p. 27. 35 Athena Vrettos, Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, p. 191. 36 This downplaying of female invalidism in favour of the representation of male physical frailty was continued and developed further by the BBC for feminist effect when they adapted Cranford for the small screen several years later. This adaptation was fascinated by, and filled with, scenes depicting the damaged and sickly male body, while defining most of its female characters as much more robust and healthy than they were in Gaskell’s source text. For further discussion of this interesting departure from the novel, see Byrne p. 53. 37 Forster, p. 171.

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Hughes, p. 105. Camus, p. 245. 40 Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women. 41 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, pp. 69-71. 42 Showalter, p. 71. 43 See Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell. 44 Foster, p. 3. 45 Forster, p. 168. 46 See also Cairns Craig and Tania Woolen. 47 Higson, “National Past”, p. 114. 48 Higson, English Heritage, pp. 46-47. 49 Paul Dave, Visions of England, p. 31. 39

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CHAPTER SIX FROM PAGE TO STAGE: ELIZABETH GASKELL’S NORTH AND SOUTH AS MUSICAL THEATRE PATRICIA MARCHESI AND MARCIA MARCHESI

Those who teach literature to college students are constantly amazed at the way in which they can reinvent old texts. Something like Beowulf, for example, can seem daunting to both teachers and students: in spite of the epic poem’s fame, there are many lengthy, and often repetitive, descriptions of armour, weaponry, boats, and family lineage. Teachers find that the distance between text and audience (in this case, students) often acts as a barrier, preventing students from seeing–and caring about–the merit of the original work. Social customs strike them as meaningless if not outright ridiculous, and characters appear flat because they do not conform to current popular tastes (even though these vary considerably, most students complain that Beowulf lacks psychological depth). However, if a teacher asks students what would happen if Beowulf were watching the finals of a football match, they have no problem imagining what he would say, how he would act, and the things that would matter to him. All of a sudden, they understand Beowulf. They may still not like him, but at least they can relate to him. And why is that? Because they have adapted the story. Adapting a story forces us to engage with the text at hand, and transform it so that it has new and/or relevant meaning to us. An adaptation is, in a sense, a creative act, because by its very nature it cannot be the same as the original. Bernstein’s West Side Story is not the same as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, nor should it have to be. When it comes to adapting novels to the stage, things get even more complicated: novels, unlike plays, are written with different considerations in mind. The pace is often slower, as is character development, and the conflict may not always be obvious at first. The author can take the time to carefully establish settings through lengthy descriptions, and give his or her

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audience insight into the minds and feelings of the characters. Novels are by nature private, designed to be read individually, silently. Readers have time to absorb the complexities of characters and themes. Plays, on the other hand, are essentially public events, designed to be performed to an audience and completed within the scope of an evening’s performance. They rely entirely on dialogue and action to establish character, reveal the conflict, and move the plot along to its resolution. The trick, then, is to decide what aspect(s) of a novel one wishes to stress in a stage adaptation, and how best to do so in a medium that is inherently different in nature. Victorian novels, which still rank as favourites among many of today’s readers, seem at first to be poor candidates for stage adaptations. They are, after all, notorious for their length. Authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell published in serial format, a fact which often tended to make stories longer (a type of soap opera effect). Yet Victorian novels also contain memorable settings, characters, and conflicts, and have provided the inspiration for musicals such as Oliver!, Drood, Jane Eyre, and The Woman in White. 1 Perhaps this is because there is something raw–if understated and complex–about emotions in Victorian novels. They contain much darkness, pain, and social injustice, but they also exalt love, innocence, and the possibility of redemption (if not happiness). With the aid of music, one can capture many of these different facets. Lyrics and music, combined, can quickly and effectively establish character, mood, and themes. Such a conviction was, in any case, part of what drew us to transform Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1855 industrial novel, North and South, into North and South, the Musical.2

Why Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South Until recently, Elizabeth Gaskell was relatively unknown outside of academic circles. With the recent increase in popularity of period films and miniseries, as well as the desire to reclaim the voices of more female authors, her name has slowly enjoyed growing fame. Although few read her novels, many are now familiar with the film adaptations of Wives and Daughters, Cranford, and–more significantly in this case–North and South. We strongly felt that musical theatre was lacking in its depiction of works by women, and this was part of the appeal of Gaskell as an author. The novel, too, was relatively unknown, and so had not been adapted to musical theatre, which was an added incentive. At the same time, the tremendous success of the 2004 BBC North and South miniseries with Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe meant that any audience member familiar with the story would be bound to compare our show to

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the BBC’s treatment of the story. In any case, we felt that we had to base our adaptation on the novel, and present our own compelling interpretation, with Gaskell’s original text as our point of departure.

First Considerations The length and pace of the novel was the first challenge in our adaptation. The first sixty or so pages of Gaskell’s novel introduce us to Margaret, her life in the south, and her eventual move to the north. Much of Margaret’s routine, thoughts, feelings, and family circumstances are described in great detail. Once she arrives in Milton, the same happens as we continue to get insight into the Hales, as well as the Thorntons, the Higginses, and the Bouchers. Of the sequence of key events in the story, we see that they consist primarily of misfortunes: the Hales move to Milton, Mrs Hale dies, Bessy dies, the riot happens, Mr Thornton proposes to Margaret and is refused, Mr Hale dies, Margaret inherits a fortune, and Thornton loses his mill. They finally meet at the end, and their feelings for each other are finally–and briefly–resolved. One of the first challenges we faced, therefore, was that of abridging the story and trimming the list of characters. We decided on key events to portray, and came up with the following list: Act 1: Move to Milton Margaret’s first meeting with Thornton Margaret’s first meeting with Bessy and Higgins Margaret’s first encounter with Mrs Thornton and Fanny Bessy’s death The riot Act 2: Thornton’s proposal Mr Hale’s death Margaret’s inheritance and rise to fortune Thornton’s misfortunes and decline Margaret and Thornton’s reunion Such a list, however, did not provide a satisfactory stage plot. We felt that the sequence of events would feel episodic to the audience, and that we needed to link events by modifying some of the original settings and character motivations. We also felt that we needed two villains as contrasts to Margaret and Thornton, so we decided to change the characterization of

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Lennox and Boucher. Lennox is refused by Margaret, so in our version he feels resentful of her, and becomes jealous of his rival (Thornton). He cannot accept defeat from a tradesman, and becomes obsessed with destroying Thornton and forcing Margaret to marry him. We adapted Boucher’s character, too: in our play, he is a cynical malcontent (he has no wife or kids) who is eager to serve his own turn. Whereas Lennox belongs to the upper class, Boucher is firmly rooted to the lower, and yet they mirror each other. Boucher resents Margaret’s firmness and goodness, and, as one of the “hands,” hates “master” Thornton. Such changes were striking departures from Gaskell’s novel, but we wanted characters in addition to Margaret and Thornton who would bridge the gap and/or mirror the tension between north and south, higher and lower classes, selfish and unselfish. We also wanted more difficulties for Margaret and Thornton. When Boucher and Lennox join forces against Margaret and Thornton, for example, the two villains become a formidable force that Margaret and Thornton have to overcome in addition to their own emotions and pride. Ultimately, we had to focus on the aspects of the novel a contemporary audience would be able to relate to. In terms of themes, these were: the social conflict between “masters” and “hands”, 3 the clash between Margaret’s and Thornton’s views of the world (which reflect the differences between the north and south of England), the capacity of friendship to overcome class barriers, and the power of love to transform, heal, and unite diverse worlds. Based on all of these choices, we revised and added to the previous list:4 Act 1: Scene 1: Helston, England (South). A platform at a train station. Margaret and Mr Hale are about to leave for Milton. Lennox proposes, giving her the chance to stay. Margaret refuses, preferring to go with her father to a new beginning. The train leaves. Purpose: The first scene introduces us to the problem of the Hales: because of a recent scandal (we do not reveal what it is yet), they are moving to Milton. Mr Hale has found a pupil there, and will earn a living by teaching. We are also introduced to Margaret, who is idealistic, passionate, and romantic. She refuses to marry a man she doesn’t love, even if it means she can stay in her beloved hometown, and prefers instead to face the challenges of starting a new life somewhere else. Scene 2: Milton, England (North). The courtyard outside Thornton’s cotton mill/home. It is the end of the shift for the mill workers. Thornton and his mother watch them leave, complaining about their wages, and

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turning to union leader Higgins for help. Margaret, having just arrived in Milton, chances upon the scene. Her first meeting with Thornton is tense, and she leaves the scene in spite of Thornton’s warning that the streets are unsafe. Thornton then ponders on the effect she has had on him. Purpose: To introduce a) the conflict between Masters and Hands, b) the remaining key characters (Thornton, Mrs Thornton, Higgins, Bessy, Boucher), and c) Thornton’s immediate attraction to Margaret. In Gaskell’s novel, Thornton is immediately intrigued by her, but she is repulsed by him because of his unpolished manners and his “ungentleman-like” profession. We decided the same would happen on stage, except that Thornton would fall in love at first sight, and that the scene would take place with the backdrop of social tension. Thornton, after all, represents not only the north, but the economic forces against which the Hands are fighting. Margaret, on the other hand, represents the south, and her sympathies lie with the poor. The title song, “North and South,” is appropriately sung by Thornton in the conclusion of the scene. Scene 3: Milton, England (North). A dark street in a poor neighbourhood, with the Goulden Dragon pub on one side and Higgins’ house on the other. Later that evening. Margaret is lost, and Boucher (who is outside the tavern and a little drunk) comes on to her and then tries to steal her purse. He is prevented by Bessy and Higgins, and leaves. Purpose: This marks the beginning of the friendship among Margaret, Bessy, and Higgins. It also shows Boucher’s cowardly nature. Scene 4: Helston, England (South). The study in Henry’s house. Edith– who in our version is Lennox’s sister, not Margaret’s cousin–receives a letter from Margaret, and Henry detects Thornton’s interest in her. He is outraged at the thought that a tradesman would “win” Margaret after she had rejected him. He plans to pay off Mr Hale’s debts, of which he has been left in charge, and then have the indebted Mr Hale persuade Margaret to marry him. Purpose: Although he is in Helston, Lennox will influence the plot considerably. The scene is designed to show what goes on inside his head. In spite of being a respected lawyer, the audience sees he is petty, insecure, vindictive, and obsessed with Margaret. Scene 5: Milton, England (North). The Thorntons' house. In this scene, Mrs Thornton and Fanny talk about Thornton’s interest in Margaret. He has invited Margaret and her father to tea, and Fanny–the comic-relief character in the musical–gets the opportunity to share some of the vague gossip that surrounds the Hales’ sudden move to Milton. The Hales arrive, and the conversation is awkward. Thornton then offers to show Margaret

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and her father the mill. They all leave–except for Fanny, who decides to stay and finish the sandwiches. Purpose: The scene is important because it introduces us to Thornton’s family, and shows that he is interested in pleasing the Hales–in particular, Margaret. Scene 6: Milton, England (North). The interior of the cotton mill. As Margaret tours the mill, she finds herself impressed with Thornton’s success and work ethic. Just then, she sees Thornton fire Bessy, who is too sick to work. She is outraged at his heartlessness and they part after an argument. Mrs Thornton warns her son about the harmful presence of strangers in their life. Purpose: The scene shows the clash between Thornton’s “business” outlook and Margaret’s concern with the personal dimension of such an outlook. The scene is also important because it shows the progression of Bessy’s lung problems, as well as the bond between Thornton and his mother. Scene 7: Milton, England (North). Masters on one side, and Hands on the other. Two different meetings. The Masters talk about the unrest of the workers. Thornton says he will have to hire Irish workers if his mill workers go on strike. The other masters urge him to frame Higgins, the union leader, so that they can get rid of him. Thornton refuses to behave in such a dishonest manner. At the workers’ meeting, Boucher urges the workers to be more aggressive. Higgins warns them about the dangers of using violence. In the end, the workers leave with Boucher and decide to strike. Purpose: The scene shows the escalating tension between the two sides, as well as Boucher’s negative influence on the workers. It also shows that Thornton and Higgins, despite their differences and mutual dislike of each other, are both men of integrity. Scene 8: Milton, England (North). Inside Higgins’ house. Margaret and Bessy talk about the strike, as well as Fanny’s engagement ball. Bessy imagines how beautiful Margaret will look, and asks her to live her life for the two of them. Purpose: Bessy sings about her life, and we see how little she has actually lived–and will live. We also see how strong the bond between Margaret and Bessy has become: the two are more like sisters than friends. Scene 9: Milton, England (North). The Thorntons’ house. Fanny’s engagement ball takes place during the strike. When Margaret arrives with her father, other guests snub her. In response, Thornton asks her to dance with him. Margaret is grateful: after the dance, they talk on the balcony (love duet) and discover they have more in common than they originally

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thought. Higgins bursts into the party to get Margaret–Bessy has taken a turn for the worst. Thornton offers his carriage to Margaret (much to the outrage of his mother). Margaret and Thornton part as friends, and the guests are left to gossip.

FIG. 4 Thornton and Margaret – the ball scene

Purpose: To showcase the development of the relationship between Margaret and Thornton, who begin to understand each other. Margaret, in particular, begins to see Thornton’s good qualities, as well as his softer side. Scene 10: Milton, England (North). Inside Higgins’ house. Bessy dies. In her dying moments, she asks Margaret to take care of her father, and make sure he continues the work of improving the workers’ lives peacefully. Margaret promises to take Higgins to see Thornton herself. Purpose: To show Margaret and Higgins’ loss, and give the audience a reason for Margaret’s presence at the workers’ riot in scene 12. She has, after all, promised she will act as mediator between Higgins and Thornton. However, when she and Higgins arrive, it is too late to prevent the riot. Scene 11: Helston, England (South). The study in Henry’s house. Henry has paid off Mr Hale’s debts, and now intends to use his influence. This short scene reminds the audience that Henry has been hard at work, and will be a force to reckon with in act two.

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Scene 12: Milton, England (North). The courtyard outside Thorntons’ house. The striking workers, having found out that Thornton hired Irish Hands, come in with Boucher, determined to riot. Thornton comes out to talk to the workers. Higgins and Margaret come upon the scene. Margaret and Higgins try to dissuade the workers from violence. Thornton tries to get Margaret out of there, but before he can do so, Boucher picks up a stone and throws it at him. The stone accidentally hits Margaret instead. Higgins leaves to fetch a doctor. Thornton confronts the mob, and they leave in shame–except for Boucher, who warns Thornton that their business with each other isn’t over yet. Thornton picks up Margaret and carries her inside. Purpose: Here, all the tension of the previous scenes–social and romantic–reaches its climax with the riot. We see the interplay between protagonists and antagonists, the different forces at work, and the potential both of love (to protect) and violence (to destroy). We also see the courage of Higgins, Thornton, and Margaret.

FIG. 5 Thornton and Margaret – final scene

As the scenes indicate, there are considerable differences between the novel and our stage adaptation. In order to keep the pace, we had to omit much from the novel, and change much as well. We had to make sure there was change in pace, in mood, and in character development. In order to do

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so, we cut Mrs Hale, Frederick, Mr Bell, and Mrs Boucher and her children from the story. To make the stage production viable, we reduced the list of main characters to Margaret, Thornton, Higgins, Mrs Thornton, Lennox, Bessy, Boucher, Fanny, Mr Hale, and Edith. Our focus was on the characters who had the most agency and who moved the plot forward. In the case of Mr Bell, we thought including him would add unnecessary complications and loose ends. In our version, Margaret inherits a fortune from a distant relative.

The treatment of women Part of the challenge of adapting Gaskell’s novel was transforming the way women are depicted to suit the tastes of a 21st century audience. For example, when Thornton meets Margaret for the first time, Gaskell writes the following: She had taken off her shawl, and hung it over the back of her chair. She sat facing him and facing the light; her full beauty met his eye; her round white flexile throat rising out of the full, yet lithe figure; her lips, moving so slightly as she spoke, not breaking the cold serene look of her face with any variation from the one lovely haughty curve; her eyes, with their soft gloom, meeting his with quiet maiden freedom.5 A little later, when Thornton visits for tea, he is equally fascinated by her beauty: She stood by the tea-table in a light-coloured muslin gown, which had a good deal of pink about it. She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation, but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands moved with pretty, noiseless daintiness. She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr Thornton watched the re-placing of this troublesome ornament with far more attention than he listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently, until it tightened her soft flesh; and then to mark the loosening–the fall. (80) The focus on Margaret’s physical beauty as seen through the masculine gaze of Thornton again manifests itself right before he proposes to her: Her eyelids were dropped half over her eyes; her teeth were shut, not compressed; her lips were just parted over them, allowing the white line to be seen between their curve. Her slow deep breathings dilated her thin and beautiful nostrils; it was the only motion visible on her countenance. The fine-grained skin, the oval cheek, the rich outline of her mouth, its corners deep set in dimples, were all wan and pale today; the loss of their usual

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natural healthy colour being made more evident by the heavy shadow of the dark hair, brought down upon the temples, to hide all sign of the blow she had received. Her head, for all its drooping eyes, was thrown a little back, in the old proud attitude. Her long arms hung motionless by her sides. (191) Once she has refused him, Thornton wonders whether he has been “bewitched” (a common term for Victorian novelists) by Margaret’s physical appeal: Was he bewitched by those beautiful eyes, that soft, half-open, sighing mouth which lay so close upon his shoulder only yesterday? (205) The stress on Margaret as the representation of female beauty and virtue is something that we felt needed to be updated. Thornton’s attraction to Margaret, as far as we were concerned, had to omit the lengthy descriptions of her body. In the musical, he sees her on a cold night, right as the workers’ shift ends. Tensions between workers and masters are on the rise, and everyone is on the defensive. As she walks in, unaware of such tensions, he spots her before she sees him: THORNTON: (sings) Whose is that bright and gentle face? She’s like an angel in this place!

A little later, once Margaret has left, Thornton describes his impression of her: THORNTON: (sings) And on this hell that’s white and grey [Milton] My tortured soul sought out her face – And suddenly, my world was full of grace! She stood there in the light, And when our gazes met Her eyes set fire to my soul! And close to her I felt A ray of summer hope – It melts the winter in my heart! An angel in this town of smoke and tar To show a glimpse of heaven from afar – A wishful dream of life Beyond this cold and heartless place.

Thornton does not fall in love with Margaret because of her physical beauty: rather, she represents beauty–the opposite of the “hell” he lives in. When she unknowingly stands in the light, he sees her as an angel, because she does not have the worn, hostile face of those in a manufacturing town. It’s the image of Margaret as an angel–a being from

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another world, so to speak–that impresses itself on Thornton’s mind. Naturally, the idea of “virtue”–so prominent in Gaskell’s novel–can also be attached to an angel, but we focused on Margaret’s kindness (as opposed to her virtue in the sense of chastity) as her defining trait. The incident in which Thornton believes he sees Margaret with another man at night–in reality her brother Frederick–we omitted altogether, as its purpose in the book is to give a glimpse of Thornton’s suffering as he suspects her “virtue.” We felt that such considerations should not be at the forefront of a modern musical heroine’s depiction. Instead, we chose to stress Margaret’s independence, courage, and desire for life–all qualities that are in Gaskell’s novel: On some such night as this [Margaret] remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur and sans reproche… (401). Thus, when Henry Lennox proposes to her in the first scene, we have Margaret recall a moment from her childhood in which Lennox gives her a bird in a cage as a birthday present. We invented this memory so that she could sing about her desire for freedom and love: And now I dread my life would be Just like that bird’s life in the cage: So safe and yet so sad, Wishing more was to be had, Thinking love would never set me free… That could never be the life for me! I want to spread my wings and soar In the wind… Find new horizons ahead… I will not choose to live inside And watch the world from where it’s safe: Flying high, outside, and free, I’ll embrace the clouds I see, Taste how cool and sweet the rain can be – I will choose no other life for me!

Margaret’s enthusiasm with life is somewhat tempered by experience towards the end of the play, just as it is in the book. She learns that the world is not black and white, and that her polarized views do not always do justice to reality. Again, we created a memory for her to express the weariness and somewhat sad wisdom that the more mature Margaret acquires:

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Similarly, Thornton learns that business does not have to be impersonal, or inhumane–and he learns to appreciate Higgins and be grateful for his friendship. Margaret and Thornton’s reunion at the end of the musical signifies the harmony between north and south, between different people and their ways of seeing the world.

A hero for our times: the creation of a stage Thornton Thornton’s character, like Margaret’s, had to be “modernized” in order to serve as a contrast to Lennox and capture the hearts of the audience members. The more Lennox obsesses about Margaret, the more it becomes

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clear that he thinks of her as his belonging–as the bird in the golden cage he had given her when she was still a child. Lennox does not understand love: he sees life in terms of hierarchy, exchanges of services, and monetary value. As a gentleman, he considers it degrading to lose Margaret to a tradesman, and through devious means sets out to put everything “right.” In contrast, Thornton is passionate, honest and plainspeaking, and capable of great compassion once his sentiments are geared that way. He loves Margaret from the moment he sees her, and, in spite of his mother’s stern convictions, begins to re-evaluate some of his own– especially as it relates to the conditions of workers in his mill. He develops into a forward-thinking business leader who sees the improvement in workers’ lives as something that can make his mill more humane and productive. At the same time, he is impetuous, and makes decisions that are emotional rather than logical, and yet this is when he is at his most appealing in the musical. His heart, as the audience slowly finds out, is capable of great courage and sacrifice as it considers others–and this is what Margaret falls in love with. Unlike Lennox, who sees Margaret as the torturer of his feelings and wants, Thornton regards Margaret as an “angel” who “redeems” his soul and brings out the best in him. Together, they will have a partnership based on love, trust, and mutual respect.

FIG. 6 John Thornton

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The concern with religion: As the wife of a Unitarian minister, Elizabeth Gaskell was keenly interested in matters of religion, as well as the individual’s relationship to God. As Patricia Ingram observes, “Gaskell … did not accept a tripartite God, nor Christ as God,” as the [Church of England] required its ministers to.6 In the novel, Mr Hale moves the entire family to Milton because of his “doubts” regarding some of the doctrine to which he has to subscribe. Many of Margaret’s conversations with her father, Bessy, and Higgins, deal with issues of faith. Her reaction to Frederick’s Spanish wife is also related to the larger religious concern of the play: Margaret had reason to sigh a little more before the conversation ended. Frederick himself was a Roman Catholic in fact, though not in profession as yet. This was, then, the reason why his sympathy in her extreme distress at her father’s leaving the Church had been so faintly expressed in his letters. She had thought it was the carelessness of a sailor; but the truth was, that even then he was himself inclined to give up the form of religion into which he had been baptized, only that his opinions were tending in exactly the opposite direction to those of his father. (253)

Margaret is shocked by Frederick’s religious preferences as much as her father’s. For her, it is unfortunate that Frederick had to settle in Spain, for there he fell in love with a “papist” and shaped his religious views accordingly. Margaret is, it seems, in a world where two of the key figures of her life–father and brother–opt out of the Church of England. Her father ruins the family by doing so, and her brother–already separated geographically–distances himself from the customs of worship that Margaret finds familiar and reassuring. Her father and brother’s religious deviations are filtered negatively through Margaret’s attempt to handle change, as well as loss. We did not feel that Gaskell’s concern with religious issues would fit the scope of a two-and-a-half-hour show, nor did we believe it necessary to the plot and character development. The show was, after all, not about religious identity, but about a great love story that unfolds in the midst of social unrest. We therefore changed the reason for the Hales going to Milton: in the musical, the scandal of Frederick’s mutiny is too much for them to stay where they are, and they seek a fresh start in Milton, where no one will know them.

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FIG. 7 Margaret Hale

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The music of North and South Having previously worked on a number of original musical comedies, North and South, the Musical was a departure from our style of musical writing. The highly dramatic nature of the story called for music and lyrics of equal intensity to match the events presented on stage (riots, fire, fights, threats, deaths). North and South is an epic love story, which also required deeper romantic music for the leads (as opposed to the more light-hearted romantic music comedies call for). Due to the high intensity of the drama in our adaptation, it was important to add some comic relief to the musical. We relied on a light character like Fanny Thornton for that purpose. Rather than having individual musical numbers, we also decided that we would have the musical score run through the entire show. We felt that uninterrupted music would provide the story with more depth, and allow us to mirror the emotions of the characters on stage more closely, much in the way a film score does. Even the few spoken dialogues in the show are spoken over the musical score. The story and characters are given additional depth by means of recurring thematic material linked to the characters, situations, images, or ideas. Below are a few examples of musical imagery found in the score.

Ticking Clock One of the more prominent musical images is that of the clock ticking, which appears throughout the musical. It first appears, as a recurring note, in the opening number at the railroad station. The train's departure to Milton is imminent, and Margaret's time in Milton is running out:

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It reappears in Scene Four, altered, as part of Lennox's song, while he is considering how to best pursue Margaret:

It is heard again, in a different format, when Lennox visits Mr Hale to blackmail him:

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The same "ticking" theme appears in the next scene, as Lennox and Boucher meet in the railroad station in Milton. Finally, it is heard in Lennox's last scene in the musical, just before Margaret finds out about the ruin of the cotton mill. Here, it is Lennox who is about to run out of time:

Lennox’s Obsession The chilling, repetitive figure found in Lennox's opening song mirrors his obsessive and calculating nature. We first hear a snippet of this theme when Margaret refuses Lennox's proposal in scene one. As the show progresses and his obsession with Margaret grows, the theme also increases in prominence:

Lennox's music also grows noticeably dissonant as the show progresses, representing his unbalanced obsession with Margaret, as well as his mental instability:

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"Industrial" music In order to create an industrial sound, a specific quality was given to the music related to Milton, the mill workers, and the factory. Such music displays a continuous strand of repeated sounds (notes or chords) to imitate the hammering, mechanical noises of the working machinery in the cotton mills:

Likewise, the music that showcases Milton as an "industrial" town, as well as that of the workers' anger and frustration with their situation, is similar in composition. Continuous eighth notes going against the beat emphasize both the rhythm of the machines and the anger of the workers:

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In contrast with the "industrial" component, the romantic music of the show is composed of thick harmonies comprised of parallel thirds and sixths. An example is the introduction to the love duet in scene nine:

The “carousel” theme This theme is introduced at a point in the story where most characters have suffered a major loss: Margaret has lost her father and is soon returning to Helston, Higgins' daughter Bessy has died, and Thornton's mill is on the brink of ruin. Even more important for Thornton is the realization that he has lost Margaret. The melody of “Carousel of Life” resembles the movement of a carousel, as it consists of up-and-down melodic movements. That image is further emphasized by the vocal imitation in the second half of the song:

The "carousel" theme reappears in moments of the story when major events alter the lives of characters. One such instance is right before Thornton loses everything. The audience hears the music for “I've returned to my journey's starting point again,” just as he realizes he must start his life over.

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Music as a journey: Margaret’s “New Beginning” and Thornton’s “North and South” themes As we follow the journey of these two remarkable characters, the music reflects their personal changes. When the show begins, we see a Margaret who is sure of herself and her views, and is willing to take risks and go out into the world to make her mark. Her music is accordingly daring:

In the next scene, Thornton’s “North and South” theme–immediately following his first encounter with Margaret–also displays a steadily growing energy and excitement at the realization that she has come to redeem him and Milton:

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Later in the musical, Margaret realizes the world isn’t as black-andwhite as she thought. Her music also matures to mirror her new-found understanding of life:

Similarly, Thornton’s music follows his emotional journey: the highly dissonant ending of act one, for instance, provides a glimpse into Thornton’s anguish after the stone accidentally hits Margaret at the riot, and he believes her to be dead. The music is consequently fragmented and dissonant:

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By the end of the play, Thornton is no longer the self-made entrepreneur who believes he can win Margaret’s affections. His final solo piece, in the last scene of the show, showcases his lack of hope as he realizes that he has lost everything:

The beautiful symmetry of the story, which consists of the reversal of roles at the end (Margaret comes back having bought the deed to the ruined mill, while Thornton is left with nothing), is indicated musically by using the same statement that appeared at the beginning, this time sung by Margaret:

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With the threat of Lennox gone, Margaret’s “New Beginning” theme appears side-by-side with Thornton’s “North and South” theme in a final, triumphant statement as the musical nears the end:

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Finally, a reprise of Margaret's and Thornton's love duet theme from act one brings the musical to a close.

Conclusion When we finished North and South, the Musical, we realized that we were no longer telling only Elizabeth Gaskell's story. Her ideas and characters had been transformed, their original images filtered through several prisms that are unavoidable if one wishes to change the genre (and venue) of a classic. However, we are confident that the essence of Gaskell's novel–the passion and longing of its characters, the unsolvable social injustices of the human world, the power of friendship and selflessness, and finally the capacity of love to overcome–remains in North and South, the Musical, even if many of its original facets do not. An adaptation is not bound by all aspects of the original–on the contrary, the point of an adaptation is to transform, to give new meaning to, and to reincarnate a literary work so that it will continue to delight and speak to contemporary audiences.

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Notes 1

For a brief performance history and/or more information about these musicals, please visit the following websites: http://oliverthemusical.com/, http://www.tamswitmark.com/musicals/drood.html, http://www.playbillvault.com/Show/Detail/7994/Jane-Eyre, and http://www.reallyuseful.com/shows/the-woman-in-white/. 2 Music by Marcia Marchesi. Book and lyrics by Patricia Marchesi. The workshop was staged at the Dairy Center for the Arts (Boulder, CO), in 2010. For more information, photos, and to listen to music samples, please visit http://www.northandsouththemusical.com 3 Henceforth, the terms "hands" and "masters" will be capitalized in order to indicate the two opposing forces of the play. 4 For the sake of brevity, we include here only our adaptation of the scenes of Act 1. 5 P. 64. All references to the novel are from North and South (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.) Henceforth, page numbers will follow the quotes in brackets. 6 Patricia Ingram, “Notes”, North and South, p. 428.

CHAPTER SEVEN REMEDIATING GASKELL: NORTH AND SOUTH AND ITS BBC ADAPTATION, 2004 LOREDANA SALIS

North and South first appeared in Dickens's journal Household Words between 2 September 1854 and 27 January 1855. In serialised form it was an instant success with the public, but its author adamantly maintained that the tale had been “obliged to conform to the conditions imposed by the requirements of a weekly publication”, and of an editor with whom she did not always entertain a harmonious relationship. 1 Elizabeth Gaskell felt that she had to put “remedy to [its] defects”, and thus she set out to revise the text before she could “commend it to the kindness of her reader”.2 The two-volume edition, of which no manuscript survives, appeared early in 1855. By then, Gaskell had inserted “various short passages, and several new chapters”. More alterations followed, which were preparatory to a single volume edition also to be published by Chapman and Hall, London, later that year. The reworking of those early stories may be defined as an act of remediation proper, through which Gaskell sought deliberately to assimilate and transform one text into another.3 Similarly, when the BBC decided to dramatize North and South, the result was the appropriation and transformation of Gaskell's novel into another text, one which relies on the codes and the conventions of a different medium, and which clearly takes into account the expectations of its target audience in a given context. In what follows, I compare North and South the novel with its 2004 film adaptation, and pose two questions pertaining to remediative processes in these works.4 How is the remaking of a canonical text affected by the use of “new” technologies? To what extent has the BBC contributed to changing the way in which we read Gaskell's novel today? The use of new technologies inevitably affects the way in which a literary text is received

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by contemporary audiences; in pursuing fidelity, accuracy and coherence, scriptwriters and film directors have a responsibility towards the canon and to their viewers as well. In this sense, the BBC authors have managed to capture the essence of Gaskell's novel and to make it relevant and appealing to TV audiences both in the UK and abroad. Their work has succeeded in giving visibility to the novel, which, following the series broadcast, was discovered by new generations of readers, and rediscovered by those who knew it before, but felt drawn to it again after they watched its televised version.

Remediation The concept of remediation was formally introduced by Bolter and Grusin (1999) as a way of understanding new media.5 Its “double logic” enables the study of the interactions between an “old” text and its adaptations by way of different media, usually technologically more advanced, so that both artefacts are influenced by the process of adaptation. New media thus remediate older ones, and, at the same time, older media remediate themselves in order to meet the cultural challenges of the new media. This view of a dialogic interaction between old and new media suggests that we can no longer and simply think in terms of “source” and “target” languages and texts. A novel and its filmic adaptation thus are to be considered as two different cultural products, whose meanings are mutually defined by a variety of factors, i.e. nationality, history, culture, class, geography, gender, etc. Bolter and Grusin investigate the “historical resonance” of a text and how it contributes to our understanding of contemporaneity. They maintain that a connection exists between a medium and what it represents, and therefore that all cultural practices are necessarily shaped by their context and constructed within specific contexts, as is life itself. This correspondence they call “immediacy”. The logic of remediation and its emphasis on immediacy echo Umberto Eco's notions of “coherence” and of “interpretative conjecture” on the part of the translator.6 It reminds us of Lotman's definition of a text as “a semiotic space”, capable of producing new meanings; it also recalls how a good translation adds to both source and target media. 7 Similarly, a theory of remediation provides a vocabulary through which a work of intersemiotic translation (the translation of a verbal sign into a non-verbal sign, e.g. music, image) may be interpreted, and how its intentio can be inferred and understood; at the same time, it activates a process of re-appropriation of the translated text. Remediation does not simply re-contextualise a given text, but rather relies

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on new signs and new codes to explore and reassess its cultural relevance for new generations. In this way, the translated text is reinterpreted for and made available to contemporary readers. A theory of transposition, and, in the present context, the work of filmic transposition require that we understand a literary work of art (it require, that is, that its meaning and context can be inferred) before for its translation from the page to the screen is realised.8 Thus, my analysis of the BBC 2004 version of North and South will, by necessity, propose a reading of Gaskell's novel first so as to explore and articulate its contemporary appeal. A key aspect in the comparative study of a novel and its filmed adaptation is fidelity. Speaking of the “vogue for the novels of Jane Austen”, Bolter and Grusin observe that they tend to be “historically accurate in costume and setting and very faithful to the original”. Nevertheless, [T]he Austen films do not contain any overt reference to the novels on which they are based: they do not acknowledge that they are adaptations. Acknowledging the novel in the film would disrupt the continuity and the illusion of immediacy that Austen's readers expect, for they want to view the film in the same seamless way in which they read the novels. The content has been borrowed, but the medium has not been appropriated. This kind of borrowing, extremely common in popular culture today, is also of course very old.9

The Austen films are usually taken as a point of reference in contemporary assessment of period/heritage drama as they began a trend, and probably set a standard for any film adaptation of a classic, at least within British mass culture. This certainly applies to the 2004 North and South adaptation by the BBC. Like viewers of the Austen films, those who watch a film based on a Gaskell story may not be “disturbed” by its omissions, conflations and additions, and this could be so either because they have not read the novel, or they read it too long ago to remember, or else they know the novel but they are willing to accept its “repurposing”. 10 Regardless of how much of the novel Welch and Percival actually re-use, the North and South broadcast and its aftermath suggest that it is a good work of adaptation, and of remediation too, for that matter. As a first step in the present investigation, it may be worth speculating on the appeal of North and South to the BBC producers, who presumably saw a great potential in the story of a young girl “exiled from her home ground to the ugly northern industrial town of Milton”.11 Indeed, the fact that Gaskell's novel deals with “the exploitation of the working class,

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linking the plight of workers with that of women” may have also contributed to its popularity in the 1850s. The “tale”, as Gaskell described it, was generally well received (though her treatment of the workers' protest, and the information regarding their wages was subject to critique in the local papers).12 Dickens was an early estimateur: he regarded it “an admirable story ... full of character and power”. 13 Critics considered it Gaskell's “finest novel”, 14 praising its understanding and reflection of working-class issues in mid-nineteenth century industrial England, and how it gave voice to the needs and preoccupations of the middle class at a time when American competitors and their laissez faire policy posed a serious threat to England’s international economic sovereignty. Overall, the revised volume edition gained “the author of 'Mary Barton', 'Ruth', 'Cranford' etc.”, wide acclaim, and would continue to do so in years to come.15

The tale and what it talks about North and South has been designated a "Condition of England" novel, a "social-problem novel", a "Bildungsroman", and "a romantic tale" equipped with a conventional happy conclusion in which love triumphs over all divisions and inequalities. In the novel, a man and a woman belonging to opposite parts of the country are united in the end, while, at the same time, the geographical metaphor of the North and South union affords the renegotiation and acceptance of differences (gender, social, cultural, generational, religious) 16 . Gaskell skilfully designs a narrative whose elements include sensational story as well as detective story conventions, she pays particular attention to the contemporary anxiety for scientific advancement and the dilemma of religious belief. Gaskell is also sensitive to the more universal questions of self-realisation and human compassion so that her tale lends itself to a multiplicity of equally valid readings and, by incorporating different literary categories and conventions, reaches a wider, more varied, audience. Thematic variety is one of many crucial aspects of the novel which helps to explain its unfailing popularity down through the years. As discussed elsewhere,17 the contemporary appeal of this novel is due to its depiction of conflict, which is presented by Gaskell as a necessity of human life on earth, though her strong (philanthropic) belief in human nature and its innate inclination for comradeship and compassion brings her to search and create harmony where chaos dominates. This is partly a sign of the times and place in which the author lived, and clearly reflects the religious faith that supported her throughout her life. She was married to a minister of the

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Unitarian church in Manchester; she was also a mother, and a writer, faced with the expectations of a notably patriarchal society which construed women as beings genetically inferior to men.18 Social, political, economic, moral, gender and religious preoccupations help form the dense plot of a novel, Gaskell's fourth, which would inevitably catch the attention of cultural commentators, and in recent years lead to adaptations for the theatre and the screen as well as parodies and fan fiction.19

The tale and its contemporary appeal Since the mid-1970s, the BBC has invested a great deal in Gaskell's fiction, and this is evidenced by the dramatization of a number of her stories. Special attention has been given to North and South, which was televised first in 1975, and again in 2004. The 1975 version was based on a script by David Turner and it was directed by Rodney Bennet.20 The second dramatization, four episodes broadcast between November and December 2004, was directed by Brian Percival and based on a screenplay by Sandy Welch, who had earlier written the screenplay for Austen’s Emma. 21 It cast popular actors such as Daniela Denby-Ashe, known to television audiences in the UK for her role in a popular soap opera (“Eastenders”), as Margaret Hale; Tim Piggot-Smith, who had played the role of Frederick Hale in the 1975 version, as Reverend Hale; Sinead Cusak as Mrs Thornton; Pauline Quirk as Dixon, the Hales family‫ތ‬s peculiar maid; and Richard Armitage, whose role as Milton‫ގ‬s entrepreneur John Thornton proved to be crucial to the success of the series. Good casting played an important role, but that alone does not account for the popularity of the film. Sales of the DVD were unexpected, and new translations of North and South were also published, 22 so it is well worth investigating the revived interest in the novel by readers in the UK and abroad. Likewise, it is interesting to explore what makes this BBC production so special.

The BBC North and South, 2004 The 2004 filmed version of North and South by the BBC remains largely faithful to the novel. In its re-evocation of the past it is careful to recreate the atmosphere of 1850s England–Gaskell's world–and to combine the visual representation of it with the demands and cultural codes of contemporary audiences. Viewers, in fact, will easily recognise Gaskell's “dirty old smoky” Manchester in the northern industrial town of Milton, though the Milton scenes were mostly filmed in Edinburgh and

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Selkirk.23 Similarly, the costumes we see in the screen version confirm and conform to received images of what Victorian working and middleclass people looked like, and equally the kind of English spoken by the characters confirms contemporary notions of a language spoken in a bygone age. The audience is thus directed towards a suspension of disbelief while also being fully aware that what they see is not a docu-film on Victorian England. The style of acting, photography and direction, in fact, are kept deliberately contemporary (and therefore less conventionally along the lines of period drama): the camera “works almost like another character”, 24 moving as it does among the crowds and into private dwellings with the result that the viewers are involved emotionally, their emotional response is constantly elicited. This is best seen in the riot scene, a pivotal sequence in both the novel and the film, in which the angry mob, driven by desperation, gathers outside Thornton's house to protest against poor wages and working conditions. It is a moment of high tension, which ends in violence and with Margaret being injured when “a sharp pebble flew by her, grazing her forehead and cheek” (177, and Episode II). The film follows the novel in its plot, but in transposing the incident onto the screen, it adds to Gaskell's prose making it remarkably touching and visually effective.

Remediating Gaskell 1: fidelity Sandy Welch condenses the original fifty-two chapters in Gaskell's novel into four episodes, of approximately one hour in length, which are divided into eight 'chapter points'. Brian Percival recreates the atmosphere in the script through a reshaping of the novel's point of view and focalization. The result is a highly efficacious film adaptation that skilfully reconstructs the past (as we imagine it) as well as Gaskell's narrative scope in North and South. Welch's screenplay and Percival's direction exhibit elements of a typical BBC period drama, careful to meet their audience’s expectations, thus attaining “an intelligent, moving, thought-provoking and visually striking adaptation”. 25 The version is intelligent in that it captures and enhances the essence of Gaskell's plot; it is moving in its rendition of human feelings and emotions; it is visually striking in its capacity to transpose the strength of Gaskell's words through the languages of film. And it is thought provoking in its development of a fiction whose plot, though set in Victorian times, echoes real events in recent British history. In this respect, the film remediates reality since “all mediations are both real and mediations of the real”.

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Remediation is, in fact, understood also “as a process of reforming reality”26 though where the BBC is concerned, remediation is not a case of reform but rather of a conservative approach in which political points are tendentially smothered. 27 The happy ending–a common trope in nineteenth-century narratives and in present day period drama–confirms a conservative policy aimed at asserting continuity with the past and social cohesion through positive images of cultural encounter, tolerance and compassion. The topical relevance of Gaskell's novel to contemporary issues indeed plays a significant role in its politics of adaptation. The riot scene mentioned above, for instance, may resonate with past incidents (e.g. the 1984 miners' strike, whose 20th anniversary was celebrated the year North and South was produced); the deployment of “the Irish hands” by Thornton echoes the unresolved question of Irish colonialism by the British government. Similarly, “a passionate tale of love across the social divide” necessarily focussed attention on issues of multiculturalism and intercultural encounters at a time of epochal change within the EU context, 28 a time when questions of cultural identity were being renegotiated, and geographical and conceptual notions of belonging were also redefined. Difference is a key term in the novel in which the use of a northern idiom acts as a class marker; likewise in the film, accents and regionalisms enable the representation of social inequality–between masters and servants–as well as marking the cultural divide between the southern and northern parts of the country. Gaskell’s South is depicted as a linguistic monolith where people speak with the same accent and the same register; whereas in the North people speak differently depending on rank, education, gender, and religion. The North is thus constructed as a cradle of diversity: its capacity to accept and assimilate diversity–a Darwinian openness to variation epitomised in Margaret's gradual and free acquisition of a northern identity–is what eventually guarantees the nation its progress and survival.

Remediating Gaskell 2: novel and film vis a vis Welch and Percival's remediation of Gaskell's novel involves the insertion of sequences which never betray the essence of their source, but rather affirm, retrieve and recreate meaning through visual communication. The opening scene is indicative of the way in which the film manages to affect and expand the audience's perceptual, conceptual and affective horizons beyond Gaskell's 1850s and well into contemporaneity.

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Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South opens simply, nonetheless eloquently: 'Edith!' said Margaret, gently, 'Edith!' But, as Margaret half suspected, Edith had fallen asleep (7).

The chapter goes on to describe the interiors of a London middle-class house in which Edith “had fallen asleep ... in the back drawing-room in Harley Street” (7) while Aunt Shaw, her mother, “was talking to the five or six ladies who had been dining there, and whose husbands were still in the dining-room” (8). The chapter is entitled “Haste to the Wedding”, and it takes place during a farewell dinner in honour of Edith's approaching marriage to Captain Lennox (8). After the meal, the women gather in one room and engage in conversation about weddings, wedding dresses, and their personal experience as wives, while the men entertain themselves in a separate room (8). Within the first two pages Gaskell promptly offers her readers an insight into mid-Victorian life and its social conventions. Matrimony is a key aspect of those conventions among upper middle-class people, as is the construction of the female role. Marriage is in fact where the theory of the two separate spheres29–male and female–is most strongly asserted, and it is precisely of such received notions that Margaret Hale is sceptical and critical. Later in the same chapter, in the course of a conversation with Henry Lennox, and with reference to the “weariness of all the arrangements” for the wedding, Margaret wonders whether “all these troubles [are] quite necessary”. This is “the first sign of [her] scepticism concerning 'feminine' activities and projects thought proper to middle-class women”.30 The commentary is Gaskell's own, spelled out in a note to the text which illuminates her narrative intent and focus–the representation of a section of English society to which Margaret belongs by birth-right but from which she gradually departs as she comes into contact with the industrial North, and with its middle and working classes. Gaskell, whose first notion of a title was “Margaret” or “Margaret Hale”, following the common practice of naming a novel after its protagonist, concentrates on the central female character whose construction largely reflects the changing times and which is a sign of the emerging “new woman” ideal. 31 Accordingly, Miss Hale represents the type of woman who is “womanly” in manners and poise, but is also strong-willed and outspoken. As the plot unfolds, the female protagonist turns out to be pragmatic and determined like a man would (conventionally) be expected to be. 32 Her characterization exemplifies the novel’s remediative intent, that is to say its attempt to renegotiate strict categories, and especially gendered roles, and therefore its opening up to new and diverse notions of

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femininity and of a woman's place in society, regardless of her social status. Gaskell gives Margaret the possibility to choose whether to marry or not, and, most importantly, to decide for herself when and who to marry. In doing so, the author puts remedy to–she remediates–something which she clearly considers to be at fault in her contemporary society. Marriage is central to the writer’s discourse partly because it is central to Victorian society, and partly because it is crucial to current perceptions of a woman's place in it. Aptly, Gaskell opens the novel with images of an approaching wedding, and similarly she ends the tale with the promise of a happy union. Yet, something changes in the meantime, within the novel and without it too, both in the private and in the public spheres–midcentury culture and society were clearly opening up to change, and change also affected received images of the female role. 33 While most women viewed marriage as a way to gain social and financial security, some managed to mediate between love and economic concerns, and a few succeeded in marrying the man they had fallen in love with. In the novel, changes to the costume in terms of matrimony are well articulated through the private narrative of the female protagonist, who refuses Henry Lennox's proposal (Chapter 3, 32): though she is 19, the same age as her cousin Edith, Margaret is not ready for matrimony, not because she is not in love with Lennox, but because she has not achieved sexual awareness at this stage–she cannot yet see a man other than as a friend (or a relative). She will, by the end of the tale, when she accepts Thornton's proposal.34 In her reworking of the tale, Welch condenses much of the action presented in chapters 1-3 and reformulates Gaskell's narrative according to a different order of priorities and within a different diegetic frame. Where the novel begins and ends with matrimony, as noted, the televised version begins and ends with a train journey. Episode I opens with a close-up shot of the female protagonist sitting by the window, on a train, and looking at the landscape. The image is captured from outside the window: the opening perspective is external to the world represented, and it may thus coincide with the perspective of the audience at home. The same image is repeated later on in Episode 3, following Margaret's trip to London to see the Great Exhibition, and is reiterated at the end of Episode 4, when she is seen again sitting by the train window as she travels north with John Thornton. Welch follows Gaskell's circular narrative pattern but shifts the emphasis from the social conventions in the novel to the railway and its significance in terms of cultural change and its impact on the characters' private lives. The development of a railway network in Victorian England was pivotal to progress: a symbol of mobility and mutability, the emblem of industrial advancement and imperialist power, the train revolutionised

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current notions of time and space. In the story, the train enables movement and facilitates contact between the two ends of the country–the north and the south of the title. Indeed, it acts as a catalyst of human relations and becomes a protagonist proper in the film, where change is often anticipated by and associated with a train journey (e.g. Lennox's visit to Helstone, the Hales' dislocation to the North, news of the death of Mr Bell, Frederick's expatriation, Thornton's trip to Helstone, and his proposal). Velocity characterises the Welch/Percival opening, which starts off, almost immediately, in Milton. The North is placed at the centre of the film narrative, and it is codified chromatically through the use of colours and of colour transitions which evoke Margaret's feelings and response to change. The bright green and yellow landscapes of her native Helstone, and the shiny colours of the Harley Street interiors (white, red, pink, pale blue of decorations and clothing), give way to shades of grey, which grow duller and duller as Margaret journeys towards Darkshire, nomen omen, the northern county where the Hales are to reside. Black dominates in this new place were dark-coloured clothing is in perfect tune with personality (Mrs Thornton's austere and starched dresses reinforce her characterisation as a strict and unbending woman). Dark is the sky Margaret sees from the train window, and dark are the muddy streets of the industrial town of Milton. A transposition of Manchester, the heart and soul of industrial England, Milton is where the southern girl encounters John Thornton, magistrate, mill-owner, and owner of the property that the Hales are going to rent. Here too, the semiotics of colour are advocated in the film to visually render the novel's dichotomies, and also to problematize them: connotations are disrupted and conventionally positive meanings rethought and subverted. This is the case with the colour white, which acquires a thoroughly negative value in the carding room sequence in Episode I: Margaret visits Thornton's Marlborough Mills to discuss rent matters with him directly. Having waited for the landlord to no avail, the girl resolves to go and find him. As she walks along a dark, narrow corridor leading straight into the mill, her point of view predominates (the audience is thus encouraged to engage with her and share her feelings). At the end of the gloomy corridor a door opens onto the mill's carding room, introducing her, and the viewers, into a whole new world: the air in the room is filled with soft white particles floating as if they were snowflakes. This almost idyllic image is promptly disrupted as Thornton, the master, is seen pursuing a servant and shortly afterwards he begins beating up the man vehemently. The strong sequence serves as an introduction to the male protagonist, who is rendered “as brutal as possible” to Margaret's

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eyes, but not quite so to the audience's, aware that Thornton’s behaviour, however aggressive, is not entirely unjustified.35 The scene where Margaret first meets the Milton entrepreneur is also where “first impressions” are established so that the girl is made to “naturally dislike him”.36 This is also one of the sequences in which the door image is used significantly to facilitate encounters. A study of entrances, as it may be termed, is beyond the scope of the present analysis, though it is interesting to point out the recurrence of liminal spaces (doors, windows, and gates) in the novel as well as in the film, where narrative coherence and visual transposition blends harmoniously. The camera eye is often placed behind a window, or in front of it, interiors are looked at through an open door and conversations are overheard through doors left ajar. These are moments which lead on to further and decisive actions. One such example is the balcony at Marlborough Mills, a contested space featuring a number of scenes in the television drama. The balcony–a concrete platform with a horizontal iron bar on its front–is like an emblem of the family power and rank; it is an observation point from which Mrs Thornton can control the servants; it is the vantage point from which Thornton seeks to address the angry strikers. This is also the place where Margaret “thr[ows] her arms around him” to protect him from “the fierce people” and is subsequently injured (chapter 22, Episode II). From that same balcony Thornton hopelessly watches the girl leave Milton, on a snowy winter day (Episode IV).37 This “snow scene”, another addition to Gaskell's story, visually recalls the carding-room sequence in the opening. Again, the use of colours, and the colour white in particular, helps construe a narrative whose terms are often ambiguous, and whose ambiguity viewers are invited to reconsider. White, in other words, may not always be a “positive” colour (in fact, it is associated with death and illness–Margaret's mother is distinctively pale, as is Bessy). At the end of Episode I, Margaret echoes the moments of an emotionally intense first day in Milton: images of the mill, the fluff and the shock of her first encounter with Thornton are recollected: “I have seen hell–she is heard saying–I believe it's white, it's snow white”. 38 These words she writes in a letter to her cousin Edith.

Dear ... Epistolary exchanges characterise Gaskell's tale. Edith and her cousin entertain a rather intense correspondence following Margaret's move to the North, and Edith's to Corfu, first, and back to London later on. Letters are also sent to and received from Margaret's exiled brother, Frederick, who

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lives in Cadiz, and to Mr Bell, Reverend Hale's old-time friend in Oxford. The primary private communication medium of the time, letters perform a doubly significant role within the narrative structure of the novel: they enable contact between characters who live at a distance from one another, while also allowing readers to “catch up” with events that are not recounted in detail or in the first person but only in retrospect. In the novel letters are an additional narrative voice: aside from the omniscient narrator, and the dialogues among characters, letters allow characters (especially Margaret and Edith) to “speak” in absentia. Letters thus add to the novel's main points of view–Margaret's and the point of view of the omniscient narrator. In the filmic adaptation, the voice-over technique allows Percival to simulate the epistolary exchange (Gaskell's first person novelistic approach). As a result, dialogues alternate to voice-over sequences in which Margaret or Edith are seen in the act of writing while their voices are heard narrating events which are rendered visually through the flashback technique. Letters serve multiple purposes in the film too: they allow Welch and Percival to condense episodes from the novel (summaries of which are narrated in the letters) and help articulate the protagonist's feelings and monitor her transition from an upper class southern mentality to a working class sensibility. Nevertheless, in the film, Margaret's viewpoint remains largely a dominating one, as made quite clear by the use of the camera, which will not afford “equivalence”, but rather a “warm intimate relationship” with the characters on the screen.39

Characterization The characterisation and transposition modes of literary characters deserve careful attention in analyses of filmic adaptations of fictional works. In this respect, the recasting of Margaret Hale in the BBC version of North and South is remarkable. If the aim of a work of adaptation, and of a period drama especially, is to reproduce visually what readers envision in their mind when they go through the pages of a book, Daniela Denby-Ashe comes very close to what we make of Gaskell's female protagonist. This holds true also of Sinead Cusak and her marvellous interpretation of Mrs Thornton. The exceptions are Maria Hale (a slightly less weak mother figure in the film) and Boucher, who comes across as a less marginal character in the screen version. Dixon and Higgins are additional examples of how the BBC version remediates the older text by recreating characters who are approved of, and popular with, contemporary television audiences.

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In their reflections on what makes an adaptation successful, Cartmell and Whelehan maintain that The impetus for most adaptations rests with the relationship between characters rather than the overarching themes of the novel in question, and that those characters, taken from the original context, may to some extent carve out a separate destiny.40

The “Darcy” effect in the BBC version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1995)–how it came to be that “the emotionally repressed Mr Darcy sen[t] the nation's women into a swoon”–is what comes to mind most readily.41 Thinking of the dramatization of Gaskell's tale, questions may also be raised as to whether North and South should be considered among “most adaptations” in which “the themes of the novel” are secondary to the “relationship between characters”; and, accordingly, whether here too the “visual eroticization of the male body [is] effected largely through the cut and styling of costume”,42 so as to confirm that the adaptation of nineteenth-century novels for the screen is a gendered genre, destined to and consumed by a predominantly female audience. Mention of the Darcy effect is not co-incidental. It refers to what critics and audiences were surely to observe in Richard Armitage's debut as John Thornton in the BBC's 2004 version of North and South. Interviewed on the Darcy-connection, Armitage would not admit to it, but simply regarded it as a compliment.43 He did, however, comment on the costumes and how these helped create the character as we know him. Costumes play a crucial role in the recasting of Gaskell's mill-owner as the “icy arrogant bastard” who transforms himself into a “warm and caring individual”.44 His characterization fulfils the requirements of the genre, which relies on the eroticization of the male protagonist for its success, although there is more to the Welch/Percival rendition that makes it a well-made work of adaptation. I focus on their version of Mr Thornton because it seems to me the most significant and noteworthy alteration to Gaskell's characters. Armitage's John Thornton is hardly what readers of Gaskell would have in mind when reading the novel. This is especially true of his first appearance on screen, in which Thornton is presented as a brutal man “with a temper”. The notion of the male protagonist as “a bulldog” (chapter 17: 135; Episode II) remains with Margaret and the workers, while the audience understand that Thornton can be hard and straight but nonetheless a gentle man (and a gentleman too) with good principles–a reasonable person unlike his unscrupulous fellow industrialists. Thornton's aggressive modes are (made to be) perceived as the bad side of a clearly

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ambiguous character whose ambiguity is functional to his charm and captivating manner (and sex appeal, even), none of which Margaret notices at the start. A couple of added scenes help establish the BBC Thornton in these terms. Thornton is a businessman who believes and invests in human capital: he is one of few to have adopted “The Wheel”, which clears the air of the lethal cotton fluff (see above). The device has a cost, too high a cost for some industrialists, and what is worse, its use “would make the workers hungry” since the poisoning matter acts as an appetite depressant. The differing opinions are spelled out in the course of a dinner party to which Thornton and Rev. Hale participate alongside some local mill owners (Episode I). Thornton's ambivalent position as a master is immediately recognisable: he is more often than not in accord with Rev. Hale, and this makes him a positive character. Later, in a similar sequence (Episode IV, not present in the novel) Thornton argues that a healthy working environment guarantees a better performance of his employees: “If workers eat well they will work well”, he maintains as he plans to develop a “dining-room for the men” (352) within Marlborough Mills. This is the canteen where Thornton sometimes shares his dinner with his employees (353-54) for there is “nothing like the act of eating for equalizing men”, as Mr Bell comments (354). In the film, this is transposed into a moving sequence of master and servants sitting at the same table–a representation of the unconventional good master, who is open to reforms, and a socialist with a “future oriented” outlook (Episode IV). Welch and Percival expand on Gaskell's suggestion of the caring manufacturer and recreate Thornton as a caring capitalist, a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but only apparently. They recast him as a capitalist with a socialist heart, somehow bearing a resemblance to the UK’s then Prime Minister, Tony Blair–a socialist by background, who strongly believed in a modern, dynamic economy, and whose pursuit of a “New Labour” and of a “Third Way” between conservatives, left and right, brought fresh air into the system. In the 1990s, Blair promoted a stake-holding economy in which the government would influence the distribution of income and wealth so as to reduce poverty. His progressive politics focussed on “talent and technology”, “class war”, “education”, “the National Health System” among its key points in the interest of “a knowledge-based economy, a strong civic society, a confident place in the world.”45 At the time when the North and South film adaptation was commissioned, Greg Dyke was Director of the BBC. A life-long Labour supporter and benefactor, Dyke was elected into the post in 2000, and set about introducing a more Labour-friendly corporation (to the disdain of the Conservatives, who considered the BBC as a stalwart of their policies

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and conservative Britishness).46 His policy was likely to endorse Blair's mediating approach between right wing Conservatives and left wing Labour Union traditionalists and show audiences how owners/Capitalists working in harmony with the workers/Unions produced the greater good for all. This is reflected in a remarkably “new labour” recasting of Thornton. The Milton manufacturer crosses the class divide yet again in another added scene in which he talks to one of Boucher's orphaned children and helps him read from a book (Episode IV). The BBC's Thornton is a man who “looks into the future” (Episode III) and whose values make him a winner in the end: his vision of a world of equals, a just place where there can be education and work for all, is between the lines of Gaskell's tale, but the screen remediates it and gives it a greater force. Reading the novel again after this will necessarily bring out a completely different view of Gaskell's hero. The novel owes much to the sexual tension between Thornton and Margaret and to the dilemma of a man who is painfully torn between his instincts and his repressed feelings (and repressive mother). Gaskell is generous with the long-drawn-out romance, and thus delays Thornton's realization of his feelings for Margaret (and of hers for him). The film is more immediate, though it manages to create suspense and intrigue. The tea-cup sequence below is an eloquent instance of how a film sequence remediates a sequence from a novel, adapting it to the demands and expectations of a contemporary audience, while at the same time it reinterprets the novel's narrative and its undisclosed meanings. In Chapter X, Mr Thornton is invited for tea at the Hales; Margaret is in the room while her parents converse with their guest: She looked as if she was not attending the conversation, but solely busy with tea-cups ... She had a bracelet on one taper arm, which would fall down over her round wrist. Mr Thornton watched the re-placing of this troublesome ornament with far more attention than she listened to her father. It seemed as if it fascinated him to see her push it up impatiently, until it tightened her soft flesh ... She handed him his cup of tea with the proud air of an unwilling slave; but her eye caught up the moment when he was ready for another cup; and he almost longed her to do what he saw her compelled to do for her father, who took her little finger and thumb in his masculine hand, and made her serve as sugar tongs. (81, emphasis added)

The point of view then shifts from Thornton's to Margaret's as the girl's eye is “caught by the difference of outward appearance between her father and Mr Thornton”: the girl, who, in the sequence above, “looked as if” she had no interest in the conversation (while she actually did), is now caught scrutinizing her guest:

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Chapter Seven The straight brows fell low over the clear, deep-set earnest eyes, which, without being unpleasantly sharp, seemed intent enough to penetrate into the very heart and core of what he was looking at. The lines in the face were few but firm, as if they were carved in marble, and lay principally about the lips, which were slightly compressed over a set of teeth so faultless and beautiful as to give the effect of sudden sunlight when the rare bright smile, coming in an instant and shining out of the eyes, changed the whole look from the severe and resolved expression of a man ready to do and dare everything, to the keen honest enjoyment of the moment, which is seldom shown so fearlessly and instantaneously except by children. Margaret liked this smile. (81, emphasis added)

The meticulous and visual description of “the attraction [Margaret and Thornton] evidently felt towards each other” early in the novel (chapter X) deserves careful consideration. Gaskell gives voice to two different ways of perceiving the sexual other through observation: the male gaze (Thornton's eye) actively captures the image of the woman serving tea; Margaret perceives this as “intent enough to penetrate” her. Thornton fixes her wrist (again, it is as if his eye could penetrate) whereas she explores his face, those eyes that penetrate her, and also the lips which express his “keen honest enjoyment of the moment”. Where Thornton's enjoyment is a (timid yet aware) sexual “longing for her”, her enjoyment is a reflection of his (it comes from looking at his enjoyment). Thornton's sexual awareness (his longing for her) clashes with Margaret's immaturity (the same which causes her rejection of Lennox in the Chapter 1). His gaze is like an act of patriarchal domination: Margaret feels as an unwilling slave (her hand is made to serve), and eventually she cannot fully comprehend the significance of the man's behaviour (she associates it with the “fearless and instantaneous” behaviour of children). Sexual tension is promptly established and equally repressed (in Thornton) and rejected (in Margaret), setting the stage for the novel’s first episode of misunderstanding between the two. The pretext is all but sexual: he defends his “toiling, suffering” North, in spite of the “old worn grooves” and the “careless ease” of her South (82). In the BBC version this scene is slightly altered and more immediate; nevertheless it remains consistent with the novel, mediating between its world and the contemporary world of a TV audience. The one-dimensional camera eye catches Thornton's penetrating gaze as he indeed longs for the girl, but here he gently, yet unequivocally caresses the girl's finger when she hands him a second cup of tea. Thornton's desire to have her “do what he saw her compelled to do for her father” mirrors his desire to have her, and it is actualised in his attempt to hold her with his masculine hand. The point may be raised here that Thornton sees her as someone or as

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something (an object?) to be owned, held and cared for. The audience may ignore Gaskell's view of the subjugation of women in Victorian society and indeed be sent into a swoon by the scene; however, it is difficult to overlook the fact that Margaret, though troubled by it, dismisses Thornton's gesture. This is where her dilemma is spelt out since she becomes aware of Thornton's courtship but is reluctant to see herself occupying a woman's place beside a man. That place, she knows, cannot be her place. Coherence and adequacy were fundamental to the success of the 2004 BBC North and South. In transposing Gaskell's tale, the authors pursued fidelity to the source and to the context that produced it–the Victorian world in which Gaskell lived and which shaped her view of society and of its people at the time.47 Sections (whether added, condensed, expanded or elided) contribute to the film's communicative efficacy, that is its adequacy to the contemporary cultural context and audiences.48 Episode III, ‘point 3’, offers a telling example of this methodology in the “Great Exhibition” sequence, inserted in the storyline corresponding to chapters 29 (in which Maria, now terminally ill, asks for Mrs Thornton “to come and see” her, 233) and 30 (Mrs Thornton promises: “If I see [Margaret] doing what I believe to be wrong ... I will tell her of it ... as I should wish my own daughter to be told”, 237). In the novel, a letter from Edith arrives, in which the London girl invites mother and daughter to leave the “the smoke of Milton” and visit her in Corfu: “I am sure it would be the very best thing for Aunt Hale's health” (230-31). In the film the two women are invited to go to London instead, and Margaret, who longs “for a day of Edith's life”, is eventually persuaded to accept.49 She thus travels South by train (this is also when the close-up shot of the opening scene is repeated for the second time) to see London's Great Exhibition with her cousin, Aunt Shaw and the Lennox brother. In the sequence Margaret is engaging in conversation with them while admiring the exotic goods on display (silk, carpets and spices) when unexpectedly (and with evident pleasure) she sees Mr Thornton talking to a group of entrepreneurs in the same room: Thornton: You’re all here to see this fine machinery. [Margaret's attention is caught by Mr Thornton.] Technologically, we’re the envy of the world. [She moves to stand at the back of the group.] If only there was a mechanism to enable us all to live together, to take advantage of the great benefits that come from industry. But that will be for future generations. We can bring back marmosets from Mozambique, but we cannot stop man from behaving as he always has.

Welch portrays the man as a worldly businessman (Mr Blair's notion of a future-oriented nation resounds in his words more than anywhere else in

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the film): it is a very distant image from that of the provincial Milton master Margaret has been accustomed to. The camera focuses on this elegant man, who is clearly at ease in a metropolitan southern context, but somehow becomes almost an exotic good himself, like the machinery he is advertising, as he inevitably catches the girl's attention (and here presumably sends the female audience in to a swoon yet again). Margaret, who has long been in denial, now appears to realise her prejudice and dislike of him, but the times are not ripe for her to “clear mistakes up” and “make friends” with Thornton.50 A brief exchange between the two leads to more misunderstanding: [John notices Margaret] Miss Hale here knows the depths we men in Milton have fallen to. How we masters only strive to grind our workers into the ground. Margaret: I certainly do not think that… as Mr Thornton could tell you, if he would know me at all. [Margaret turns away from the group, Mr Thornton goes through it to follow her. He catches up with her in a couple of easy strides and turns to face her.] Thornton: I presumed to know you once before and have been mistaken.

In the sequence, the two fail again to understand each other, despite (and because of) an evident mutual interest. Something else occurs to increase the tension between them; Welch displays full poetic licence as she introduces a little moment of melodrama: Margaret: Henry. Do you know Mr Thornton? Henry: [taking a look at Mr Thornton] Mr Thornton. All the way from Milton. [Mr Thornton gives a slight nod.] Henry: My brother is interested in dabbling in cotton. Thornton [disdainfully]: I’m not sure I’m the one to speak to. I’m not sure I’d know how to dabble. [Henry smirks.] Thornton: [abruptly] I must go. You may enjoy the machinery like an exhibit in the zoo. I have to go and live with it. I must get back to Milton today. [He turns away.] Henry: Give our regards to the Hales. [somewhat smugly] You must tell them how the London break is suiting Miss Hale. Don’t you think Thornton? [Mr Thornton looks back at him, with a glare.] Henry: Doesn’t Miss Hale look well? [Mr Thornton holds his look at Henry, then glances at Margaret.] Thornton: Good day. [He turns away.]

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The love rivals scene is where Margaret has a chance to compare the two men on the grounds of their gentlemanliness, values, eloquence, manner, and, one may add, looks too (ironically perhaps the male subject is reduced to an object–the female gaze now exercising full power). Margaret, whose feelings for Thornton have finally changed, defends him from Henry's mocking remarks: “You are wrong–she says–He's very interested in the world. Really, I know him to be”. Though added, this scene does not disrupt the politics of the author51: set in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, it translates and remediates Gaskell’s tale for a contemporary audience, suggesting the possibility of a different and equal dialectic between men and women. The film also acknowledges the power of the female gaze, which is here as penetrating as the male gaze.

Conclusions Gaskell concludes her story romantically with a scene that deliberately remediates the balcony episode in Chapter 22. In the closing sequence Thornton “gently disengaged her hands from her face, and laid [Margaret’s] arms as they had once before been placed to protect him from the rioters” (425). The happy ending is thoroughly coherent to both the novel and to the novel conventions, but the same cannot be said of the televised version, which transposes Gaskell's finale, but only half remediates it. Welch/Percival end their adaptation with a scene in which Thornton wins Margaret's heart and takes her “home” to Milton, after he has “defeated” his all-time rival Lennox (viewers will be reminded of the two men's first encounter in the Great Exhibition scene). Additions in the film bring little alteration to the novel in terms of plot; nevertheless transposition onto the screen tends to shift its focus onto the “happily ever after” prospect. The use of new technologies, in this case, betrays the canonical text: as a result we miss Gaskell's point, since her work is adapted but only partially, and a new, evidently target-oriented finale is recreated. There is a feeling that the politics of the BBC prevail over the politiques des auteurs: the scene at the train station does not re-mediate the novel's ending but rather proposes an ad-hoc epilogue designed to be visually striking, win the TV audience, and meet the demands of the genre. The poetry of Gaskell's finale partly gets lost in translation here, and this is something, I venture to say, that readers of North and South are very likely to notice. To conclude this study, North and South the novel was first reworked by Elizabeth Gaskell in an attempt to “remediate” the defects which had

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been imposed upon the tale by serialization. Gaskell's own intervention made it possible for her story to access a wider audience and to gain popularity among old and new readers. A similar dynamic is observed when other authors–a scriptwriter and a director–appropriate a canonical text and prepare it to be transposed into another code. The process of intersemiotic translation also turns out to be an act of remediation, as the novel is adapted by way of another media. The 2004 BBC adaptation of North and South responds to a second logic of remediation, in that it enables new readings of Gaskell's novel, disclosing its essence to new audiences and to old readers alike. Looking at the politics of remediation enacted by the BBC authors, this study has highlighted coherence, efficacy and fidelity in their use of condensed and added scenes, as well as sequences in which Gaskell's prose is rendered visually effective through a strategic use of colours, liminal spaces, narrative voices, and points of view. This shows how the use of new technologies affects contemporary readings of a canonical text: sometimes meaning is made more explicit, other times new media betray old media. In Gaskell's case, the BBC has definitely and positively contributed to changing the way in which we read her novel today.

Notes 1

Annette Brown Hopkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Her Life and Work, especially chapter 8, 'Dickens: the difficulties of serial publication'. Andrew Sanders reports of Dickens's concern with the length of the novel in relation to Rev. Hales's doubts. That, in his view was 'the place where we agreed there should be great condensation, and a considerable compression'. Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Gaskell on 20 August 1854, quoted in Sanders, 'A crisis of liberalism in North and South', p. 42. 2 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855), Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1995. All references to the novel will be taken from this edition; page numbers will follow quotations between brackets in the text. 3 The term remediation is a reference to Gaskell's own wording ('to remedy this obvious defect') in the foreword passage quoted above, and a theoretical model used here to assess the textual transformation operated by the director and the scriptwriter for the televised adaptation considered in the present study. See Bolter and Grusin, Remediation. Understanding New Media. 4 In the present context the terms 'adaptation' and 'transposition' are used interchangeably and according to Umberto Eco's definition of film adaptation as a work of intersemiotic translation which takes into account the process of representation in relation to casting, costumes, prossemics, visual and sound codes. See. U. Eco, 'Traduzione e interpretazione', pp. 91-97, quoted in Nicola Dusi, Il cinema come traduzione. Da un medium all'altro: letteratura, cinema, pittura, pp.

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120-121. Dusi differentiates the terms 'adaptation' from 'transposition', the latter being a 'global strategy of the target text within which areas of translation proper are also found'. See Dusi, p. 121. 5 References to Bolter and Grusin are taken from the Italian edition of Remediation…, edited by Alberto Marinelli, transl. Benedetta Gennaro. 6 According to Eco, 'it is impossible to say which is the best interpretation of a text, but it is possible to say which ones are wrong ... How to prove that a given interpretive conjecture is at least an acceptable one? The only way is to check against the text as a coherent whole ... [it] must be rejected if it is challenged by another portion of the same text. In this sense the internal textual coherence controls the otherwise uncontrollable drift of the reader'. Cf. Eco, 'The Limits of Interpretation', pp. 197-198. 7 Cf. J.M. Lotman, 'Tekst v Tekste' (1981), quoted in Dusi, pp. 7 and 88, and Fabbri's definition of a good translation as a translation which 'traducendo in un'altra lingua arricchisce la lingua di partenza', cf. P. Fabbri, 'L'intraducibilità da una fede all'altra', p. 62, quoted in Dusi, p. 96. Fabbri, referring to Benjamin and Peirce's theories of translation, speaks in terms of remediation: 'the translation of a poem by Mallarmè thus remediates the defects in the source text' (my translation, emphasis added). See Fabbri, 'L'intraducibilità da una fede all'altra', p. 64, also quoted in Dusi, p. 95. 8 See note 4 above and Eco, 'Traduzione e interpretazione', pp. 91-97, quoted in Dusi, pp. 120-121. 9 Bolter, and Grusin, p. 72 in the Italian edition. 10 'Repurposing' is term used by Bolter and Grusin (p. 72) to define the process of taking '"property" from one medium and re-use it in another. With reuse comes a necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media. The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can compare them'. 11 From the back cover of the 1995 Penguin edition of North and South. 12 For reviews of Gaskell's North and South see Easson ed., The Critical Heritage. Of special interest is an unsigned review appeared in the Leader on 14 April 1855 (vi, p. 346) which denies writers of fiction the right to deal with the Cotton Trade issues: 'The book is full of errors which it is inconceivable for a resident in Manchester to have made, and none which but a lady could have so made' (p. 335). For Henry Fothergill Chorley North and South is partly 'open to remonstrance ...the riddle propounded cannot be solved in fiction' (p. 331). 13 Quoted in the back cover of the Penguin edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. 14 Ibidem. See also Easson, especially pp. 330-370. 15 The novel has been reprinted in the Anglophone world over the years by different publishing houses (eg. Penguin, Harper Collins, WW Norton, Random House, Oxford University Press, Vintage, Longman, The Echo Library, NTC Contemporary Publishing Co., Tuttle, CRW Publishing Limited, Hardpress, Dover House, and various audio books and large print editions). It has been translated into French (Fyard, Points); Spanish (RBA, Alba Editorial); Italian (JoMarch,

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Principato); and Polish (ĝwiat KsiąĪk). The annotated Norton edition of North and South, edited by Alan Shelston, includes a valuable section dedicated to criticism and relevant bibliographical references. Published by WW Norton, 2005. 16 I have explored the geographical metaphor in North and South in another study dedicated to Elizabeth Gaskell's novel. See L. Salis, 'Scontro/incontro in North & South: Elizabeth Gaskell e l’Inghilterra vittoriana', in Pissarello ed., Figures in the Carpet: studi di letteratura e cultura vittoriana, pp. 163-73. 17 Salis, 'Scontro/incontro in North & South…', pp. 163-73. 18 Gender inequality and male superiority formed the staple of Victorian discourse, yet the construction of the female role differed depending on rank. See Persico, Madonne, Maddalene e altre Vittoriane, p. 25. 19 David Lodge's novel Nice Work (Secker and Warburg, 1988) parodies the 'Condition of England' genre, referring especially to Gaskell's North and South. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Lodge's novel was adapted for a TV miniseries, four episodes, broadcast by the BBC in October 1989. North and South has inspired a wealth of fanfiction in recent years: a sequel to North and South, entitled Northern Light was written by Catherine Winchester in 2011, and was followed by A Merry Little Christmas––' The story of John Thornton and Margaret Hale's first Christmas together as a married couple'. The author had already published, What you wish for, about a Gaskell reader (see Winchester's webpage, http://www.cswinchester.net/). Authors of similar North and South fanfiction also include M. Liza Marte, Trudy Brasure, Chrissie Elmore, E Journey, and Loyal Wynyard. 20 The four episodes were released in December 1975, and casted Rosalie Shanks as Miss Hale, and Patrick Stewart as Mr Thornton. 21 Sandy Welch's credits include successful literary adaptations of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, Austen's Jane Eyre and Emma. Brian Percival's credits include Downtown Abbey (2010-2012), A Boy called Dad and Gracie! (2009), The Old Curiosity Shop (2007), IMDb.com. 22 As reported in the unofficial North and South website, 'only hours after the airing of the first episode the message board on BBC crashed down and had to be shut down due to the large number of visitors. Subsequently, the DVD was released on 11 April 2005 due to the huge success'. (http://northandsouth2004.com/?page_id=786). For translations of the novel see note 15 above. 23 Other locations include Dalton Mill, Dalton Lane, Keighley, Queen Street Mill, Harle Syke, Burnley and Helmshore Mills Textile Museum, Holcombe Road, Helmshore, Rossendale (for exterior and interior shooting of Malborough Mills). The train station sequences were shot at Horsted Keynes Station, Bluebell Railway, Sussex. Details are provided in the DVD as well as the unofficial North and South website, http://northandsouth2004.com. 24 Richard Armitage, interview in the DVD of North and South. 25 A review from The Times, as reported in the DVD cover of North and South. 26 Bolter and Grusin, p. 83.

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This is with reference to John Lyttle's definition of costume drama as an 'essentially conservative, backward-looking genre' in which 'production values tend to smother political points'. Cf. Lyttle, 'All dressed up for the movies', Independent, pp. 2-3, quoted by Julian North, 'Conservative Austen, Radical Austen. Sense and Sensibility from screen to text', in Cartmell and Whelehan, p. 38. 28 The fall of totalitarian regimes across the continent and the EU enlargement resulted in large migration waves from the former Soviet bloc (and into the UK). 29 'This is fixt ... man to command and woman to obey', as Tennyson put it in 'The Princess. A Medley', a poem which is emblematic of the theory of the separate spheres but is only one of many articulations of a leit-motif in Victorian literature. See Persico, Madonne ..., pp. 7-8 and notes 3 and 4, p. 8. 30 Gaskell, Notes, in North and South, p. 426. 31 Representations of femininity and of a new woman ideal dominate the fiction of the second part of the century. An inventory of literary publications on these subjects would be too long to reproduce here, but it is worth recalling J. S. Mill's essays On Liberty, dedicated to his wife, Harriet Taylor, a well known suffragette, and On the Subjection of Women (1861), reprinted in J.S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays. Persico provides a precious account of this particular aspect in her study, Madonne ... 32 This is especially evident in the contrast between Margaret's strong personality and her father's rather weak character. Rev. Hale asks Margaret to talk to her mother on his behalf when the decision to leave the Church and move to the North has been made, later on, when Boucher's corpse is found and her father refuses to break the news to the widow, Margaret offers to take his place. The characterisation of Rev. Hale is controversial: his apparent weakness partly serves to highlight Margaret's strength and partly reflects the man's belonging to an older generation and to a system of values that has been surpassed. 33 In this respect, it is interesting to note that 'Death and variation' was another possible title for the novel, as Gaskell suggested to Dickens, using that darwinian key-term, 'variation', which certainly represents a leit motif in the text. Gaskell in a letter to Dickens, 1854, quoted in Marroni, La fabbrica nella valle. Saggio sulla narrativa di Elizabeth Gaskell, pp. 66-67, and note 30, pp. 66-67. 34 Margaret's maturation justifies the notion of North and South being a Bildungsroman on the basis of the protagonist's gradual development from adolescence to maturity. By the time she accepts to become Mrs Thornton, she has clearly achieved sexual self-awareness. 35 As Margaret will find out later in the story, Thornton's intervenes to punish a worker who was found smoking in the room. Smoking was prohibited in mills and this may cause accidental fires, and, as Thornton knew, it had caused the death of workers in another Milton mill the night before. The result is that he has a reason to be strict though his ways may seem too aggressive: 'I have a temper, sometimes' is how he justifies his behaviour, Episode I. This is clearly unacceptable to Margaret, from whose perspective Mr Thornton is indeed as brutal as a man can be.

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36 In the novel Margaret encounters John Thornton in the hotel where she and Mr Hale stop upon their first visit to Milton, in chapter VII, pp. 62-63. 37 The scene, referring to Margaret's departure after her father's death, is another addition in Welch's script. In the novel, Margaret writes a note to go with a book that belonged to Mr Hale and which she intends to give to Thornton as 'I am sure will be valued by you for the sake of my father' (p. 357). In Episode IV Margaret pays a goodbye call to the Thorntons, and on that occasion she hands in a copy of Homer to John. She then leaves the house under the watchful eye of Mr Thornton, who stands on the balcony and prays her to 'look back' at him. 38 The cotton fluff which Margaret sees is responsible for a lung infection, byssinosis, which affected mill workers, and in the novel affects Bessy Higgins' health causing her death (chapter 27, 212). Margaret's reference to 'hell' in the carding room sequence echoes Lennox's words when he visits Helstone (Chapter 3, Episode I): 'I have come to visit paradise…as you suggested'. 39 Giddings et al., Screening the Novel: the Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization, p. 14. 40 Emphasis added. Cartmell and Whelehan (eds), p. 8. 41 Decca Aitkenhead, 'Why did the emotionally-repressed Mr Darcy send the nation's women into a swoon?', Independent, quoted in Cartmell and Whelehan eds., p. 58. 42 Sonnet, p. 58. 43 Interview in the North and South DVD. The producer of North and South, Kate Bartlett, has described Thornton as an “industrial Darcy”. For Richard Armitage this is "a brilliant description of Thornton and it's fantastic to be complimented in that way. I see the similarities of the characters and the nature of their relationship. But unlike Darcy, Thornton's obviously from a working class background and he's built himself up to be an entrepreneur." Interview to Express and Star, 1 April 2005, available from www.richardarmitageonline.com. 44 The wording is Aitkenhead's in his Independent review, see note 39 above. 45 Cf. The key points of Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Perty Conference, reported by the BBC on Tuesday 28 September 1999, retrievable online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3697434.stm. For an analysis of Blair's politics in hindsight see Anthony Seldon, ‘La Place de Tony Blair dans l’Histoire’ retrievable at http://www.cerium.ca/La-Place-de-Tony-Blair-dans-l, accessed on 12 June 2013. 46 As the new Director of the BBC Dyke promptly observed how the Corporation's was 'hideously white' (its organisation's management structure was then made of 98% white people), and set to achieve, by 2003, 10% of the BBC's UK workforce and 4% of management from ethnic minority backgrounds. In September 2004, Dyke received an award for his contribution to fight racism in the workplace from the Glasgow-based organisation Empower Scotland. He resigned from the BBC in 2004, and following Blair's involvement in the war against Iraq, Dyke gave his support to the Liberal Democrats.

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47 Thus intended the adaptation of a literary text involves necessarily the adaptation of his/her author. Cf. Truffaut's 'Politique des auteurs' in Chaiers du cinéma, quoted in Cortellazzo and Tomasi (eds.), Letteratura e cinema, p. 39. 48 For the concept of adequacy cf. T. De Mauro, 'Sette forme di adeguatezza della traduzione', in Carte Semiotiche, pp. 9-22, and Dusi, p. 47. 49 Welch condenses two different moments from the novel, both associated with letters in which the Hales are invited to leave Milton for a healthier climate. The first letter is mentioned in chapter 29, as noted, and the second appears in chapter 39: Margaret 'look[s] forward towards a long visit to the Lennoxes, on their return to England, as to a point ... of leisure, in which she could regain her power and command over herself', p. 322). 50 To borrow from Gaskell, these are the titles for chapters 24 and 38 respectively. 51 See note 43 above.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

Narrative Works Gaskell, E. [1855] 2009. Cranford, edited and introduced by Patricia Ingham. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. —. [1855] 1995. North and South, edited and introduced by Patricia Ingham. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. —. [1855] 2005. North and South, edited by Alan Shelston. Norton Critical Editions. New York. WW Norton & Company. —. [1855] 2003. North and South. New York. Penguin Classics. —. [1866] 2003. Wives and Daughters. London. The Folio Society. —. [1848] 2008. Mary Barton: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Thomas Recchio. New York: W.W. Norton.

TV Adaptations Cranford. 1972. Screenplay by Micheal Voysey. Hugh David (dir.), 4 episodes, BBC. Cranford. 2007. Screenplay by Heidi Thomas. Simon Curtis, Steve Hudson (dir.), 7 episodes, BBC. Mary Barton. 1964. Script by Elaine Morgan. Michael Imison (dir.), 4 episodes, BBC. North and South. 1975. Adapted by David Turner. Rodney Bennet (dir.), 4 episodes, BBC. North and South. 2004. Adapted by Sandy Welch, Brian Percival (dir.), 4 episodes, BBC. Wives and Daughters. 1999. Screenplay by Andrew Davies, Nicholas Renton (dir.), 4 episodes, BBC. Who the Dickens is Mrs Gaskell? 29/11/1999, BBC.

Theatre Plays and Musicals ANON. 1863. The Life’s Adventures of Mary Barton. Boucicault, Dion. 1866. The Long Strike. Courtney, John (?). 1851. Mary Barton/A Tale of Manchester life/in Three Acts.

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Hazlewood, Colin. 1862. Our Lot in Life. Houghton, Stanley. 1909. Hindle Wakes. Marchesi, M. 2010. North and South, the Musical. Book and lyrics by Patricia Marchesi, directed by Timothy Kennedy. Performed by Julia Johannos and Erik Brian. Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder. Munro, Rona. 2006. Mary Barton (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester; published by Nick Hern Books, London, 2006). Sims, George. 1885. The Last Chance. Townsend, W.T. 1861. Mary Barton, or, The Weavers’ Distress. Weston, J.P. 1867. The Lancashire Strike.

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Bolter, J.D. and R. Grusin. 2002. Remediation: Competizione e integrazione tra media vecchi e nuovi, prefazione e cura di Alberto Marinelli, traduzione di Benedetta Gennaro. Milano, Guerini e Associati.1999. (original: Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA. The MIT Press). Bolton, H.P. 2000. Women Writers Dramatized: A Calendar of Performances from the Narrative Works Published in England to 1900. London. Mansell Publishing. Booth, M.R. 1964. The Acting of Melodrama. In University of Toronto Quarterly, 34: 31-48. Brill, B. 1965. Getting to Know Elizabeth Gaskell. In Library Review, 20: 227-233. Brown Hopkins, 1952, repr. 1971. Elizabeth Gaskell, Her Life and Work. New York, Octagon. Bonaparte, F. 1992. The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon. Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. Byrne, K. Winter 2009/2010. “Such a fine, close weave”: Gender, Community and the Body in Cranford. In Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2:43-64. Calder, J. 1976. Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction. New York. Oxford University Press. Camus, M. 2002. Women’s Voices in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell. New York: The Edgar Mellen Press. Cardwell, S. 2002. Adaptation Revisited. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cartmell, D. and I. Whelehan (editors). 1999. Adaptations. From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. London: Routledge. Cartmell, D. and I.Q. Hunter, H. Kaye, I. Whelehan. 1996. Pulping Fictions. Consuming Culture across the Literature/Media Divide. London. Pluto. Cecil, D. 1934. Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation. London. Constable. Chadwick, E.H. 1910. Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories. London. Pitman & Sons. Chapple, J. and A. Shelston (editors). 2000. Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Manchester. Manchester University Press. Chapple, J.A.V. 1997. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Early Years. Manchester. Manchester University Press. Chapple, J.A.V. and A. Pollard (editors) 1996. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. Manchester. Manchester University Press.

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Fabbri, P. 1995. L'intraducibilità da una fede all'altra. In Carte Semiotiche, 2:59-73. Flanders, J. 2011. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. London. Harper Press. Flint, K. 1995. Elizabeth Gaskell. Plymouth. Northcote House. Forster, J. 1870. The Life of Charles Dickens. London. Chapman and Hall. Foster, S. 2002. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life. Basingstoke. Palgrave. Ganz, M. 1969. Elizabeth Gaskell: The Artist in Conflict. New York. Twayne Publishers. Giddings, R. et al. 1990. Screening the Novel: the Theory and Practice of Literary Dramatization. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Giddings R. and K. Selby. 2001. The Classic Serial on Television and Radio. Basingstoke. Palgrave. Giddings, R., K. Selby, and C. Wensley. 1990. Theory and Practice of Literary Adaptation. Basingstoke. Macmillan. Gilbert, S.M. and S. Gubar. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven. Yale University Press. Gorsky, S.R. 1973. Old Maids and New Women: Alternatives to Marriage in Englishwomen’s Novels, 1847-1915. In Journal of Popular Culture, 7:68-85. Guy, J. 1996. The Victorian Social Problem Novel. Basingstoke. Macmillan. Haldane, E.S. 1930. Mrs Gaskell and Her Friends. London. Hodder and Stoughton. Handley G. 1968. Sylvia’s Lovers. In Notes on English Literature 24, edited by W.H. Mason. Oxford. Blackwell. Handley, G. 2005. An Elizabeth Gaskell Chronology. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan. Hannisdal, B. R. 2007. Variability and Change in Received Pronunciation (unpublished PhD thesis, Bergen). Hapke, L. 1986. He Stoops to Conquer: Redeeming the Fallen Women in the Fiction of Dickens, Gaskell and Their Contemporaries. In Victorian Newsletter, 69:16-22. Hawkes, T. 1986. That Shakespearian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London. Meuthen. Higson, A. 1993. Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film. In British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started, edited by L. Friedman, pp. 109-129. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and UCL Press.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Raffaella Antinucci is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Naples “Parthenope” and former Lecturer in Italian at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). She took her PhDs in English Studies and Italian Studies at the University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara (Italy). Her main areas of research include Victorian culture and fiction, literature and cinema, and comparative literatures. She is the author of a monograph on the literary representations of the Victorian gentleman (Sulle orme del gentiluomo: percorsi narrativi ed episteme vittoriana, 2009) and of essays on Dickens, Collins, Gaskell, D.G. Rossetti, Newman, Henry James, E.M. Forster, and Joyce. She is currently completing a study on the English fiction of Giovanni Ruffini. Katherine Byrne is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and has an MA from King’s College London and a PhD from the University of East Anglia. She taught at UEA before coming to the University of Ulster, where she teaches nineteenth-century fiction, critical theory and women’s writing. Katherine’s research interests include nineteenth century literature and medicine, Victorian women’s writing, and adaptations. She is also interested in Gothic fiction and is a reviewer for the journal Gothic Studies. She has published articles on adaptations and on neo-Victorian and neo-Edwardian studies: she is currently contributing to a book on Downton Abbey. Her monograph is entitled Tuberculosis and the Victorian literary imagination (Cambridge U. P., 2011). Brenda McKay grew up in South Africa. She migrated to Britain in 1986. She was a postgraduate student at Birkbeck College, London University, between 1988 and 1996, where she obtained an MA in Victorian Studies (cum laude), followed by a PhD in English Research. She has taught at, amongst others, Birkbeck College, the University of Hertfordshire, and St. Edward's School in Dorset. She now works primarily as an independent scholar. Specialising in Victorian culture and literature, she has lectured and reviewed widely, particularly on George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, with particular interest also in Colonialism and Gender Studies. Other subjects of her writings include Charles Darwin, A.R. Wallace, Robert Knox, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Thomas Carlyle. She

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is presently writing on Charlotte Bronte. Her monograph, George Eliot and Victorian Attitudes to Racial Diversity: Colonialism, Darwinism, Class and Gender, and Jewish culture and Prophecy, was honoured by CHOICE as one of the outstanding monographs of 2003-4. In 2009, she wrote the Preface to and helped edit the Lebanese writer Nabil Abu Hamad's collection of verse, Broken Poems. Marcia Marchesi earned her bachelor's and master's degree in Music Composition from the Music University in Vienna (Austria) and her doctorate from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Recent awards include "Colorado Commissioned Composer," as well as ASCAPLUS awards in composition. Recent CD recordings include Sounds of Spring, Marimba Moods, and Ciranda. Patricia Marchesi has a PhD degree in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She teaches English Literature at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The duo began writing and producing musicals while attending the Vienna International High School in Vienna, Austria. Previous musical theatre collaborations consist of the comedies Once Upon A Time, Dream and Reality, New Times, The Sailor's Way!, and Once Upon A Dream. North and South, the Musical is the sixth musical theatre collaboration between the award-winning composer and writer. Thomas Recchio is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is the author of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford: A Publishing History (Ashgate 2009) and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Barton (2008). His articles on Elizabeth Gaskell's work have appeared in Victorian Studies, Studies in the Novel, College Literature, Studies in English Literature (Japan), and the Gaskell Journal. His current project is a book-length study of the adult fiction and literary career of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Loredana Salis is Researcher in English Literature at the Università di Sassari, Italy. A former graduate from the University of Ulster, she worked as a Research Associate in Literary Heritages at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster, London/Derry, and there she conducted research into the migrant communities of Ireland and their representations on the Irish stage. She has also published articles on Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christopher Marlowe, the Antigone myth in Italy, the Irish Travellers, the Polish and Lithuanian communities

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in Northern Ireland, and patterns of pilgrimage in Ireland between tradition and globalisation. Her monographs include Miti antichi, storie d’oggi (Pellegrini Editore, 2009) and Stage Migrants: Representations of the Migrant Other in Modern Irish Drama (CSP, 2010). Alan Shelston is an Honorary Research Fellow at the John Rylands University Library. Until his retirement he was Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. He has edited a number of Gaskell's works for paperback editions, including Life of Charlotte Brontë, Ruth, Mary Barton, and a 'Norton Student Edition' of North and South. With John Chapple he is the joint editor of Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell (MUP, 2000). He was the first editor of The Gaskell Society Journal, to which he has contributed several articles. His current work involves a study of Elizabeth Gaskell's connections, personal, literary and publishing, with the USA.