It also considers moments where architecture is directly mentioned in the novel, including the comparison between Oxford and Milton, as well as Mr Hale's lectures on Ecclesiastical Architecture, which take place at a 'neighbouring Lyceum'. Proceeding from an initial discussion of 'invisible architecture', understood as what is unseen or unseeable in the modern city, with reference to Mary Barton and the writing of Friedrich Engels and James Kay-Shuttleworth, the article contends that Marlborough Mills is central to the tensions of the novel, acting as a locus around which the dynamics of industrial Manchester are explored. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain."īuilding on previous critical accounts, this article analyses the insufficiently considered role of architecture in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and explores its relationship to the text's social, aesthetic and political concerns.
Federico, with a foreword by Jane Tompkins Access via Project Muse: "The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. From My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice Edited by Annette R. I resonate with Manchester's experience in Manchester and her deep ambivalence around privilege, geography, and the limits of narrative empathy.
While not immune to the effects of social geography herself, Gaskell’s nonetheless exposes the structural obstacles to cross-class empathy that were built into the new urban and industrial landscape. North and South anticipates and illuminates contemporary research on social geography, in particular the perceptual, behavioral, and political effects of social segregation. Despite the novel's clarion call for "loving thy neighbour" as moral imperative, Gaskell was cognizant that impediments to love and compassion inhere within the spaces in which we live and move. I write about my evolving relationship with Elizabeth Gaskell's 1854 industrial novel North and South.
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