Time Lag and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Transatlantic Imagination

By the 1860s, the process of mediation had become newly visible through repeated attempts to lay the Atlantic Cable. This article considers the status and affect of historical fiction in the age of telecommunications, examining Elizabeth Gaskell’s deep engagement with American politics throughout the American Civil War in the context of her transatlantic correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton and her experience of the Cotton Famine in Manchester. The effect of a distant war on everyday life returns in what I argue is in fact Gaskell’s “American” novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, which she was writing during this period. The essay compares Sylvia’s Lovers to an earlier historical fiction, Lois the Witch, to show Gaskell’s deepening connection to America. I conclude that Gaskell’s turn to the past in her historical writing of the 1860s forms part of an examination of distance, absence, and mediation, partly born out of her long-distance friendship with Norton, and that in her novel she represents time lag as the hidden temporality of modernity.