Wives and Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page A

nuance and import.
    What did this near-historical past encompass? This is a broad question, but generally it encompasses a moment prior to the “Hungry Forties” and just before the political changes of the First Reform Act of 1832. When Gaskell wrote Wives and Daughters, England was enjoying a period of deep prosperity; moreover, higher standards of living for the working classes were now in place, and some of the early nineteenth century’s worst injustices had been moderated. Mid-century brought much “progress” (the byword of the time) to England, including a feverish pace of building railroads, factories, middle-class housing, churches, canals, and ships. It was a significant period of growth, matched only by England’s imperial energies, which included dominion over the vast wealth and population of India. In contrast, the late twenties in which Gaskell sets Wives and Daughters is a time “betwixt and between” England’s rural past and the coming agitations for social and political change. In 1801 most people in England lived in villages or on farms, while by 1851 more than half the population of England was centered in the cities. Wives and Daughters is set prior to the railroad, which came on the scene in 1830, a technological advance in transportation that would visibly transform not only the landscape but also—even more meaningfully, one might argue—a population’s consciousness about such basic concepts as mobility, distance, speed, and even home. The 1832 Reform Act was the first bit of legislative reform that was passed in response to the (then radical) demands of the reformists who petitioned Parliament for comprehensive change. The 1832 Act gave a wider share of power to the middle classes, primarily by partially redistributing parliamentary representation from small electoral boroughs to England’s new cities. It also extended the vote by lowering the property requirement, although the radicals’ call for universal male suffrage was not met; still, after the reform, enfranchised men in England almost doubled to 813,000—a number that seems reasonable only until one considers that the adult male population was close to 6 million, and that women were not part of the equation. Still, the 1832 Reform Act was a significant piece of legislation because it started the process of moving away from the traditional bases of power (landownership, birth, and rank). Perhaps most important, it began the process that would be continued in the century’s later Reform Acts (1867 and 1884) and that would result in the spirit of change that would give rise to various legislative acts that would improve the lives of the lower classes—including laws limiting the hours a child could work in a factory, public health laws, and reformations in the poor laws. Perhaps most important, the “Corn Laws” were repealed; these protectionist tariffs had kept the price of bread artificially high—indeed out of the reach of a laborer’s wages—and had contributed to the tragedy of Ireland’s famine in 1845 and after.
    Perhaps the most vital difference between the 1820s and 1860s for a novel entitled Wives and Daughters was the change in the social and legal status of women. England in the 1820s and 1830s was still firmly in the grip of what has become known as “domestic ideology,” a theory about separate spheres of activity for men and women (although it is important to recognize that it would have not meaningfully considered or encompassed the lives of working-class people, who had to work regardless of their gender). Sarah Ellis, in her best-selling The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839), articulated a set of widely accepted beliefs about the “natural” roles of men and women; in this formulation, men are “naturally” suited to striving in the public world to advance themselves and their families, while the “innate” moral beauty and selflessness of women make them ideally