Brief Encounters: Street Scenes in Gaskell’s Manchester

Urban crowding in the nineteenth century had a profound impact on the genre of the novel. It provided new opportunities for stories of human interaction, but it also placed pressure on the desire for social inclusivity, which was both a liberal ideal and a novelistic convention. This essay explores the utility of Bahktin’s chronotope for understanding street encounters in Victorian fiction, specifically in Elizabeth Gaskell’s two industrial novels, Mary Barton and North and South . While other critical models of the narration of urban life single out its spatial aspects, this essay argues that the temporal element is equally important to the mediation of urban life into fiction. Street encounters in Gaskell’s novels are a chronotope of imbalance, their spatial quotient of density and expansivesness at odds with their temporal quotient of brevity and speed. This predicament moves Gaskell to explore ways of maximizing the intimacy of the random street encounter; she does this by investing these encounters with valences of mourning or sexuality. Apprehensions of death and sex connect strangers, but in ways that reveal a contradiction between industrial modernity and Victorian liberalism: such intimacy can only last for a moment, because the forces of property and class prohibit its duration. In this way, the temporal quotient of Gaskell’s street chronotopes are a problem for the coherence of her texts, albeit one that implants in her novels a reality outside her fictional vision.