Elizabeth Gaskell's Early Contributions to Household Words: The Use of Parable and the Transformation of Communities through "Kinder Understanding"

In a letter written to Elizabeth Gaskell in January 1850, Charles Dickens praises Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) for its ability to produce an emotional response. Requesting that Gaskell "write a short tale, or any number of tales" for his new two-penny weekly, he comments, "I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected & impressed me)" (Letters 6:21). Dickens was correct in his forecast that Gaskell's "short tales" would invoke the kind of response he sought. "Lizzie Leigh," which ran as the lead story in the first issue of Household Words in March 1850 and continued in the next two issues, reduced him to tears (Letters 6.48). Tears were what he sought to elicit with his own fiction. As Mary-Catherine Harrison explains, he hoped that if "middle- and upper-class readers could vividly imagine the suffering they did not themselves experience … they would be moved enough to intervene" (263). Through an analysis of "Lizzie Leigh" alongside the two subsequent tales that she published in the journal, "The Well of Pen-Morfa" (Nov. 1850) and "The Heart of John Middleton" (Dec. 1850), this article explores how Gaskell extends and nuances Dickens's investment in pathos by adapting the properties of Biblical parable and by calling for a praxis that has its basis in devotional reading practices. By contextualizing the stories in Household Words, I suggest how they express the causal relationship between emotional response and social action that underlies the objective Dickens had for the journal: "the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition" (Letters 6:21).

Gaskell's fiction differs from Dickens's in its enactment of, and its approach to, the "improvement of our social condition." Whereas Dickens's fictional pieces repudiate the "iron binding of the mind to grim realities" and ask that the poor labourer free himself from "self-reproach" ("Preliminary Word" 1, 2), Gaskell's stories demand that readers confront "grim realities." Rather than drawing on the Romance tradition, they instead rework the parable's unflinching diagnosis of the hearer's response to human suffering. As I will explain, Gaskell's engagement with the genre of parable underlies her recognition of the power of storytelling to promote the type of "kinder understanding" that emerges not from the softening properties of "Fancy" ("Preliminary Word" 1) but from the interpretive capacity of the self-critique that leads to praxis.

The repeated call to self-critique in Gaskell's short fiction harnesses the reader's engagement with the intense psychological suffering of lost women, prodigal children, the poverty-stricken, and the exiled. "Lizzie Leigh" tells the story of a mother who, with her two sons, goes in search of her fallen daughter. The mother's fight to redeem her daughter from prostitution appropriates the motifs of the prodigal son and encourages readers to respond to outcasts with the recognition that, since all share one humanity, all are responsible for alleviating suffering and oppression. While this story begins on Christmas Day, the winter publication dates of the other two pieces that I focus on accentuate a concern with the benevolence associated with the Christmas season. In "The Well of Pen-Morfa," the story of maternal love is repeated but to a different effect. Here, the protagonist, Nest Gwynn, learns to overcome the bitter despair that comes after a disabling accident by taking on a maternal role caring for the "poor half-wit," Mary (208). "The Heart of John Middleton" weaves yet another story of overcoming adversity by means of self-sacrifice and empathetic identification. Through a first-person confessional narrative, John tells how his saintly wife, Nelly, enables him to replace vengeance with compassion, forgiveness, and reciprocity. The tale ends with the widowed John extending his wife's message: "I am old now … I try to go about preaching and teaching in my rough...