Elizabeth observed these social tensions and used what she saw in her novels Manchester was at the centre of great political change and much radical activity. In such houses only inhuman, degraded and unhealthy creatures would feel at home. In 1844, Friedrich Engels described the homes of the factory operatives in The Conditions of the Working Class in England: ‘ The workers dwellings of Manchester are dirty, miserable and wholly lacking in comforts. It was at the forefront of the new industrial age, but this rapid growth, as well as generating much wealth, also led to uncontrolled urban development and appalling squalor. The Gaskells’ Manchester was a great cultural and intellectual centre, boasting institutions like the Literary and Philosophical Society, the Mechanics Institute and the Athenaeum. She had already had a few short stories published and her husband suggested that she wrote a novel as a distraction from her grief. In 1845, Elizabeth’s only son, William, died of scarlet fever at the age of nine months. Their daughters Marianne, Margaret Emily (Meta) and Florence were born in 1834, 18, and later that year, the family moved to a larger house at 121 Upper Rumford Street, nearby. During the early part of their married life, the Gaskells lived in Dover Street, just off the busy Oxford Road in the Chorlton-on-Medlock district. They settled in the city and she helped with his work, offering support to the poor and teaching in the Sunday School, where reading and writing were taught, as well as scripture. He was the assistant minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester at the time. It was this lively and attractive young woman who married William Gaskell in 1832. He painted the famous portrait of Elizabeth in 1832 (pictured, left). Her father had remarried when she was four, and her stepmother, Catherine Thomson, was a sister of the Scottish miniature artist, William John Thomson.

Knutsford, a small country town, later became the inspiration for Cranford, and also for Hollingford in Wives and Daughters.Įlizabeth also spent some time in Edinburgh and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Their house, then named The Heath but now Heathwaite House, still stands on what is now called Gaskell Avenue. Mrs Stevenson died on 29 October 1811, and so at the age of just 13 months, the baby Elizabeth (later known as Lily) was sent to Knutsford in Cheshire to spend her childhood with her mother’s sister, Aunt Hannah Lumb, whom she was later to describe as her ‘more than mother’.

She was the daughter of William Stevenson – a treasury official and journalist – and his wife Elizabeth Stevenson (née Holland). “To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood…” Wives and Daughters (1866) (Chapter 1)Įlizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-65) was born on 29 September 1810 in Lindsey Row, Chelsea, at the house which is now 93 Cheyne Walk.

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