Wayward orphans and lonesome places: the regional reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South

Abstract

This paper re-assesses previous accounts of the distinction between mid-nineteenth-century regional and provincial novels through an analysis of their appearances as fragmented, pirated extracts in the non-metropolitan press. Using two of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels as exemplars and drawing on digitized newspapers, it demonstrates that in order to fully understand the relationship between these two sub-genres and the relative radical or conservative politics that have often been assumed to attend them, we must look beyond the formal properties of their author-sanctioned appearances in both volume and serial form, and analyse their creative re-use by small newspapers as part of local identity-building. The paper argues that in taking into account the embedding of fragments of fiction within local, provincial and regional print cultures, we can arrive at a more nuanced reading of their politics, and understand better their responsiveness to their own historical moments.

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