Global Gaskell, Manchester, and the Abolitionist Struggle

This chapter considers Gaskell's engagement with the question of American abolition in fiction and non-fiction, arguing that her usual insistence on seeing both sides of a story leaves her strangely equivocal on the question despite considerable evidence of her support for the Unionist cause. It sets her work in the context of a wider Unitarian conversation about abolition and makes links with the campaigning work of contemporary Black abolitionists identifying some of the ways her work intersects with, holds back from, contributes to and amplifies their campaign for justice, peace and freedom. The chapter examines Gaskell's representations of and engagements with the abolitionist cause in the context of the American abolitionist movement and its advocates in Britain, particularly in Gaskell's own city of Manchester. The cause of abolition was particularly actively supported by William Gaskell's fellow Unitarian minister and long-term friend, John Relly Beard, who wrote an authoritative biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture and took part in meetings and rallies with Black American speakers to promote the abolitionist cause. Drawing on Beard's writings, newspaper reportage about the reception of free-born Black American abolitionists and formerly enslaved Black Americans in Manchester and its environs, and on the letters, fiction and non-fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, the chapter argues that Gaskell's analyses of individual moral choices and her fictional dramatisations of questions of conscience, liberty and community suggest that justice and social change can be achieved through small-scale, persuasive, sympathetic interactions rather than mass movements. Her form, style and voice, the chapter suggests, draw on contemporary events and contemporary texts while retaining an intertextual polyvocality that insists on conversation rather than revolution.