The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England

Chapter 5: The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Name /V2007/V2007_CH05 12/19/01 06:02AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 135 # 1 5 The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South A January 1856 review of F. D. Maurice’s Lectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects addressed a topic that was by now familiar to its audience: It is plain that this whole matter of visiting among the poor, whether isolated or organized visiting be in question, is the subject of much anxiety to many of the lecturers. . . . It is no wonder it should be so. All see how dangerous a thing it would be to check these intercourses; often the sole means by which the rich obtain an insight into the struggles of the poor. Yet we are constantly made aware of other dangers arising out of visiting; and especially out of District Visiting.1 The reviewer’s language calls attention to the uneasiness that many people in mid-nineteenth-century England felt on the subject of female visitors to the poor. The position of the female visitor, as the reviewer presents it, is one of double danger: it would be ‘‘dangerous’’ to ‘‘check’’ their dealings with the poor, but these dealings are fraught with ‘‘other dangers.’’ However well-intentioned, visitors may antagonize the poor who will ‘‘come to regard themselves as the inspected’’ (150) and who may pretend to be worse off than they are in order to receive charitable Name /V2007/V2007_CH05 12/19/01 06:02AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 136 # 2 donations. Proper visitors, by contrast, can foster much goodwill among classes: Once in a while a visitor may mediate between the master and the man. So the circle widens and spreads, and who can tell the misery which that one kind woman’s call may have averted? And here it is impossible not to allude to a work most fruitful in suggestion on this subject. We mean that part of Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘‘North and South,’’ which portrays the gradually acquired ascendancy of Margaret [Hale] over the radical and infidel weaver, Nicholas Higgins. The more nearly it is examined, the more genuine and free from blemish does this picture appear. Humility and deep sympathy, on one side, meet in time with the due abatement of pride on the other: the whole coming quite within the range of ordinary possibilities. (151) As an antidote to the anxieties the figure of the female visitor posed, the reviewer proposes a novel: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, published serially in Charles Dickens’s Household Words in 1854–55 and issued in two volumes in 1855. According to the reviewer, Gaskell’s novel resolves the disturbing paradox—the double danger—of the woman visitor by portraying a model lady visitor who performs the vital function of mediating among classes with feminine ‘‘humility and deep sympathy.’’ Her visits to the poor are not dangerous because they do not jeopardize the relations they are supposed to be mediating. Just as significant, the model lady visitor, as the reviewer describes, does not threaten the position of the paid male professional; while the effects of the ‘‘kind woman’s call’’ are important, their value is incalculable and therefore outside the professional market where such services are bought and sold: ‘‘who can tell the misery which . . . may have [been] averted?’’ (emphasis added). This critic’s brief notice of North and South identifies a crucial aspect of the novel that later critics have almost entirely passed over. Although twentieth-century critics have increasingly recognized the importance of North and South as a social-problem novel, an industrial novel, and a protofeminist novel, no one has considered it in the context of the midnineteenth -century debate about female visitors to the poor—an issue it raised for contemporary readers. Critics who read North and South for its social commentary, from Louis Cazamian’s 1904 The Social Novel in En136 Gaskell’s North and South Name /V2007/V2007_CH05 12/19/01 06:02AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 137 # 3 gland to Sally Minogue’s 1990 essay ‘‘Gender and Class in Villette and North and South,’’ commonly fault Gaskell for failing to follow through with the potentially radical implications—Marxist or feminist—of the social issues she raises in the novel.2 Specifically, such critics object to the novel’s happy ending, which is almost universally read as a retreat from the...