I often wonder what the Vintners buy One half so precious as the Goods they sell.
72. 285 Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close! The Nightingale that in the Branches sang, Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!
73
Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire 290 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits?and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
74
Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane, The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again: 295 How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same Garden after me?in vain!
75
And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass, And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot 300 Where I made one?turn down an empty Glass!
TAMAM SHUD 4
1857 1859
4. It is ended (Persian). ELIZABETH GASKELL 1810-1865
It is ironic that the writer whom contemporaries and future generations knew as 'Mrs. Gaskell' once instructed her sister-in-law that it was 'a silly piece of bride-like affectation not to sign yourself by your proper name.' Despite the wifely identity that the name Mrs. Gaskell connotes, Elizabeth Gaskell, as she always signed herself, wrote fiction on contemporary social topics that stimulated considerable controversy. Her
.
122 2 / ELIZABETH GASKELL
first novel, Mary Barton (1848), presents a sympathetic picture of the hardships and the grievances of the working class. Another early novel, Ruth (1853), portrays the seduction and rehabilitation of an unmarried mother.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was born in 1810 in Chelsea, on the outskirts of London, to a family that followed Unitarianism, a Christian movement that rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and advocated religious tolerance. Her mother died when Gaskell was one, and the girl was sent to rural Knutsford, in Cheshire, to be raised by her aunt. At the age of twenty-one, she met and married William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister whose chapel was in the industrial city of Manchester. For the first ten years of her marriage, she led the life of a minister's wife, bearing five children, keeping a house, and helping her husband serve his congregation. When her fourth child and only son, William, died at the age of one year, Gaskell became depressed. Her husband encouraged her to write as a way of allaying her grief, and so she produced Mary Barton, subtitled A Tale of Manchester Life. In the preface to the novel, she wrote that she was inspired by thinking 'how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided. I had always felt a deep sympathy with the careworn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want.' Observing the mutual distrust of the rich and the poor, and their accompanying resentments, Gaskell hoped that her novel would help create within her middle- class readership understanding and sympathy for the working classes.
Anonymously published, the novel was widely reviewed and discussed. Gaskell was soon identified as the author; she subsequently developed a wide acquaintance in literary circles. She wrote five more novels and about thirty short stories, many of which were published in Charles Dickens's journal Household Words and its successor, AI! the Year Round. The contrasting experiences Gaskell's life had given her of two ways of life, of rural Knutsford and industrial Manchester, defined the poles of her fiction. Her second novel, Cranford (1853), presents a delicate picture of the small events of country village life, a subject to which she returns with greater range and psychological depth in her last novel, Wives and Daughters (1866). In North and South (1855), Gaskell brings together the two worlds of her fiction in the story of Margaret Hale, a young woman from a village in the south of England who moves to a factory town in the north.
One of the writers Gaskell's literary fame led her to know was Charlotte Bronte, with whom she became friends. When Bronte died in 1855, Gaskell was approached by Patrick Bronte to write the story of his daughter's life. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a masterpiece of English biography and one of her finest portrayals of character. Her focus in the Life on the relationship between Bronte's identity as a writer and her role as daughter, sister, and wife reflects the balance Gaskell herself sought between the stories she wove and the people she cared for. Referred to by Dickens as 'my dear Scheherazade,' Gaskell wrote not just to entertain but also to critique society and to promote social reform.
The Old Nurse's Story1
You know, my dears, that your mother was an orphan, and an only child; and I dare say you have heard that your grandfather was a clergyman up in Westmoreland, where I come from. I was just a girl in the village school, when, one day, your grandmother came in to ask the mistress if there was any scholar there who would do for a nurse-maid; and mighty proud I was, I can tell ye,
1. Originally published anonymously in the 1 852 Christmas number of Dickens's journal Household Words; it was later republished in Gaskell's Lizzie Leigh, and Other Tales (1855).
.
THE OLD NURSE'S STORY / 1223
when the mistress called me up, and spoke to my being a good girl at my needle, and a steady honest girl, and one whose parents were very respectable, though they might be poor. I thought I should like nothing better than to serve the pretty young lady, who was blushing as deep as I was, as she spoke of the coming baby, and what I should have to do with it. However, I see you don't care so much for this part of my story, as for what you think is to come, so I'll tell you at once I was engaged,2 and settled at the parsonage before Miss Rosamond (that was the baby, who is now your mother) was born. To be sure, I had little enough to do with her when she came, for she was never out of her mother's arms, and slept by her all night long; and proud enough was I sometimes when missis trusted her to me. There never was such a baby before or since, though you've all of you been fine enough in your turns; but for sweet winning ways, you've none of you come up to your mother. She took after her mother, who was a real lady born; a Miss Furnivall, a granddaughter of Lord Furnivall's in Northumberland. I believe she had neither brother nor sister, and had been brought up in my lord's family till she had married your grandfather, who was just a curate, son to a shopkeeper in Carlisle?but a clever fine gentleman as ever was?and one who was a right-down hard worker in his parish, which was very wide, and scattered all abroad over the Westmoreland Fells.
