Who the Dickens is Mrs. Gaskell?

I wish I had come up with that pun, but it’s actually the title of a BBC documentary about Elizabeth Gaskell that came with the collection of three Gaskell miniseries my husband bought me for Valentine’s Day. 

            As a reading teacher, I encourage my students to preview a text.  Find out what you can about the author and the book before hand.  My first introduction to Gaskell was the BBC miniseries North and South.  Upon deciding to read one of her books, I did some quick research about the author.

            The quick answer to the above question is Elizabeth Gaskell is an English novelist and short story writer from the Victorian era.  Her books are not as well known as other Victorian authors, such as the Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, though she knew both of them.  This reinforces my believe that apparently everyone in Britain knows each other. 

            Elizabeth Gaskell was the daughter of a Unitarian minister and later married a Unitarian minister.  (From my understanding, Unitarians solve the question of the Trinity by pretending those passages don’t exist.  Otherwise, they seemed like nice enough people).  In 1834 her infant son William died.  As she dealt with her grief, her husband seemed to encourage her to write.  This was the inspiration for her first novel Mary Barton.

            Gaskell became a contributor to Charles Dickens’ Household Works.  Many of her books, such as Cranford  and North and South were published episodically in this magazine.  Dickens referred to Gaskell as “Scheherazade” in private letters between the two of them saying that she had 1001 stories to tell.

            Like Dickens, she was interested in matters of social justice.  In fact, Harriet Beecher Stowe was among her personal acquaintance.  However, her works contain more subtlety than Dickens in addressing these issues.  She is known for strong, dynamic female characters, often reminding readers of Austen.  However, unlike Austen, she deals with characters of all levels of society.  This makes her particularly interesting to social historians.

            Do I need to know all of this before reading one of her books?  Maybe not.  And yet every good hermeneutics student in Bible college learns quickly the importance of historical context when interpreting a passage.  If I’m going to dive into a book 150 years old, I want as much historical context as possible.  

           It is my personal believe that being a student of the Bible has made me a better student of literature and being a student of literature has made me a better student of the Bible.  But that sounds like another post for another day.