The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 4: English Lion, 1930-1933

A review of Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton, 1855-1865

Ed. with an introduction by Jane Whitehill

London: Oxford UP. 1932. Pp. xxxii + 131.

New England Quarterly, 6 (Sept 1933) 627-28

This is not a book for admirers of Norton so much as for admirers of Mrs. Gaskell. ¹ In 1857 Mrs. Gaskell took a holiday from Manchester, and paid a visit to the Storys in Rome. ² Her daughters, Marianne and Meta, accompanied her; in a letter some years later Meta recalls the first meeting to Norton:

I can see your face and smile now (as distinctly as if I were only just turning away from them) when you caught at some confetti that Mama was dangling on a long stick from the balcony − and Mama said ‘Oh look what a charming face!’ and Mr. Story (I think it was) said ‘Oh, that’s Charles Norton,’ and then there was a chorus of welcome and bidding you come up. [xix]

And later in life Mrs. Gaskell wrote to the Storys:

It was in those charming Roman days that my life at any rate, culminated. I shall never be so happy again. I don’t think I was ever so happy before. [xxvii]

Neither Norton nor Mrs. Gaskell, seventeen years his senior, was a European. The lady, as her admirers know, came from a parsonage in Manchester. Mr. Gaskell was an earnest, conscientious, somewhat humorless Unitarian pastor, writing sermons, lectures, and hymns; he never absented himself voluntarily from Manchester; he took an annual holiday at Morecambe Bay, but even that was in the same county. Mrs. Gaskell, who bore him a number of children and who devoted herself, and in the end sacrificed herself, to her husband, was entitled to take a holiday with her daughters. She could not have made a more desirable acquaintance than Charles Norton. He was a young man of the highest principles, he was engaged in learning all he could in Italy, and was ready to impart his knowledge; furthermore, he was a Unitarian. In those days sectarian differences were social differences; and Mrs. Gaskell was acutely aware of living, in Manchester, in a social enclave. In her letters there is the solemn young Mr. Bosanquet, who, but for his family’s religious opinions, might possibly have proved eligible for one of her daughters; and she complains that “here (in Manchester) the Unitarian young men are either good anduncultivated, or else rich andregardless of those higher qualities the ‘spiritual’ qualities as it were, which those mustappreciate who would think of my girls” [44]. She thinks of Norton as a brother, an elder brother, to her girls. But Norton was a Unitarian of a type unfamiliar to Mrs. Gaskell. He was rich, good, andcultivated; he had the best introductions everywhere and knew how to use them; and he had a French courier named François. There is nothing to suggest that Mrs. Gaskell had ever before met a Unitarian with a French courier named François. She had a sense of humor, timid and fluttering as it was; she had an unsatisfied love of beauty, gaiety, and civilization; she profited by her visit to Italy and by Norton’s explanations of the art of Titian; her later correspondence with Norton must have been a relief from the labors of slaving to provide for the old age of Mr. Gaskell. ³

This book, as I have said, is not an essential contribution to the biography of Norton. He seems, at thirty, rather a callow, if very estimable young man. The interesting Norton is in the later years, rising to a solitary grandeur at the time of the Spanish War. ⁴ This is a book about Mrs. Gaskell. She was not George Sand; ⁵ but the best of her writing is perhaps more permanently readable, for she is among those English (and American) writers who have known how to make a literary virtue...