I have listened Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford on BBC Sounds, read by the brilliant actor Carolyn Pickles and produced by Julian Wilkinson, with bliss and devotion. My love for radio drama is boundless and the BBC’s adaptations and serialisations of ‘Eng Lit Classics’ amounts to a treasure trove of brilliant interpretations and realisations which offer heartstopping glimpses into the home thoughts of the most powerful industrial nation state and most brutal colonial power of established early capitalism.
This serial is described as: ‘Mrs Gaskell’s much-loved portrait of life in a small town and its female inhabitants’. Why is Elizabeth Gaskell called ‘Mrs Gaskell’? What is it sold as a kind of soft-hearted sop to self-styled gentility? And why does the description not refer to the searing social satire of the book, not to mention its critiques of racism, transphobia, investment banking, social inequality and finance capital?
The serial was first broadcast at the end of 2019 and is available to play for the next year or so here. The wording in the app listing, surely, is aimed at appealing to BBC Radio 4’s mainly middle-class, middle-England. In the mid-nineteenth century in England, the idea of women writing novels of any seriousness or social importance, was challenging. The role and status of middle-class women in British society was changing with the growth of bourgeois dominance and the expansion of business and the business class, with its reliance on the labour of factory and mill-workers, especially in the north. Women could become people of substance and property, with influence in industry and finance. But this shift sent shock waves through cultural production. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë used the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot and is still known by this name, even though ‘everyone’ knows she was not actually a man. None of these women novelsts married. Elizabeth Gaskell was married to a Unitarian minister, William, and published under the name ‘Mrs Gaskell’. She got away with her husband’s name, adopted as her own through marriage and used as a matter of socio-literary taste. My maternal grandfather, James Seller, loved literature (Pepys and Dickens were his favourites, but I never got to love them until I saw them on the TV or heard them on the radio, sadly) and had all her books. He tried to recommend them to me, but his faded old book-club editions, combined with the title ‘Mrs’ put me off completely. Without any further thought, I put her in the category of the cookery writer Mrs Beeton and never bothered further. I thought she couldn’t be serious. When I first went to university I heard her referred to as ‘Elizabeth Gaskell’ but the prejudice had stuck and while I went on to devour the Brontës, I never read Cranford, North and South, Mary Barton, Cousin Phyllis or any of her other books. That’s going to change.
Novels of the nineteenth-century which explore and reflect on the effects of increasing and intensifying industrial production offer an often searing fictional illustrative narrative which echoes of the findings of Friedrich Engels’s ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’, published in 1845. This meticulously researched account, by the political activist, writer, philosopher and collaborator of Karl Marx, exposed the horrendous living and working experiences of people forced by the necessities of survival to work long hours in the mills and factories of Lancashire. The Factory Act of 1833 had made it illegal for very young children in the factories, but it was still permitted for children of nine years and upwards to be put to work in what were highly dangerous environments. The average life expectancy in 1850 was 40 for men and 42 for women.
Gaskell’s books were written in the upheaving Lancastrian industrial landscape and contributed to a critical literature of social reform. She was no revolutionary, however, and welcome the advent of ‘combinations’ or trade unions, only insofar as they protected people from the most excessive abuses and provided a kind of welfare community. As a thoroughgoing member of the bourgoisie and literary scene, she believed in the basic decency of honest bosses and ‘the great and the good’.
So why has the BBC harked back to the outdated pen-name and made a social satire sound like a comforting piece of steamed pudding? My guess is that revealing the historical material contents of a ‘much-loved’ classic period novel might bring it into critical question as a novel about exploitation and inequality. It might make listeners uncomfortable to connect the horrendous suffering of the past to the grotesquely shapeshifted mills and factories of today: the grinding phone centres, Amazon warehouses, production-line universities and fear-driven delivery routes.
