Biographers From England

"Now, we are agreed, I and my destinies. The total world, — Above, below, whate'er is seen or known, And all that men, and all that gods enact, Hopes, fears, imaginations, purposes; With joy, and pain, and every pulse that beats In the great body of the universe, I give to the eternal sisterhood, To make my peace withal! And cast this husk, This hated, mangled, and dishonour'd carcase Into the balance; so have I redeem'd My proper birthright, even the changeless mind, The imperishable essence uncontroll'd."

"The mighty Jove did love us. Did? He does. There is a spell of unresisted power In wonder-working weak simplicity, Because it is not fear'd."

"We have winning wiles and witcheries, Such incantations as thy sterner wit Did never dream of. Time hath been ere now That Jove hath listen'd to our minstrelsy. Till wrath would seem to drop out of his soul Like a forgotten thing."

"He left an estate of eleaven thousand pounds per annum. Sir John Danvers, who knew him, told me that he had heard one say to him, reflecting on his great scraping of wealth, that his sonnes would spend his Estate faster than he gott it; he replyed, They cannot take more delight in the spending of it than I did in the getting of it."

"His insatiable passion for singular odds and ends had a meaning in it; he was groping towards a scientific ordering of phenomena; but the twilight of his age was too confusing, and he could rarely distinguish between a fact and a fantasy."

"He was a shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased."

"This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart."

"Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition: Being demanded, whether a good Spirit, or a bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and most melodious Twang. Mr. W. Lilly believes it was a Farie."

"His Comoedies will remaine witt as long as the English tongue is understood, for that he handles mores hominum [the ways of mankind]. Now our present writers reflect so much on particular persons and coxcombeities that twenty yeares hence they will not be understood."

"His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech."

"Sir Walter, being strangely supprized and putt out of his countenance at so great a Table, gives his son a damned blow over the face; his son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face of the Gentleman that sate next to him, and sayed, Box about, 'twill come to my Father anon. 'Tis now a common used Proverb."

"His manner of Studie was thus…About every three houres his man was to bring him a roll and a pott of Ale to refocillate his wasted spirits: so he studied and dranke, and munched some bread; and this maintained him till night, and then, he made a good Supper: now he did well not to dine, which breakes off one's fancy, which will not presently be regained: and 'tis with Invention as a flux, when once it is flowing, it runnes amaine: if it is checked, flowes but guttim [drop by drop]: and the like for perspiration, check it, and 'tis spoyled."

"He was a learned man, of immense reading, but is much blamed for his unfaithfull quotations."

"I remember about 1660 there was a great difference between him and Sir Hierome Sanchy, one of Oliver's knights…The Knight had been a Soldier, and challenged Sir William to fight with him. Sir William is extremely short sighted, and being the challengee it belonged to him to nominate place and weapon. He nominates, for the place, a darke Cellar, and the weapon to be a great Carpenter's Axe. This turned the knight's challenge into Ridicule, and so it came to nought."

"Sciatica: he cured it, by boyling his buttock."

"He pronounced the letter R (littera canina) very hard – a certaine signe of a Satyricall Witt."

"His complexion exceeding faire – he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College."

"Dr. Kettle was wont to say that Seneca writes as a Boare does pisse, scilicet by jirkes."

"The parliament intended to have hanged him, and he expected no less, but resolved to be hanged with the Bible under one arm and Magna Carta under the other."

"He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more then his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have knowne no more than other men."

"How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe."

"There is to some men a great Lechery in Lying, and imposing on the understandings of beleeving people."

"Arise Evans had a fungous nose, and said, it was revealed to him, that the King's hand would cure him, and at the first coming of King Charles II into St. James's Park, he kissed the King's hand, and rubbed his nose with it; which disturbed the King, but cured him."

"Both Carlyle and Charles Dickens were admirers of Mrs Gaskell and Mary Barton. For although there had been "social realist" novels before, there had been nothing quite like this... Nothing escapes her steely attentiveness: the gin palaces, the open sewers, even the sad little patches of wild flowers hanging on to scraps of dirt amidst the smoke and grime. For the first time, too, in the pages of Mary Barton the polite middle-class reader in Herne Hill or Bath could hear the voice of working-class Manchester... "Clemmed" – starved – is the word that strikes like a hammer blow over and over again in Mary Barton."

"A wise parent humours the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and adviser when his absolute rule shall cease."

"Were all men equal to-night, some would get the start by rising an hour earlier to-morrow."

"Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant."

"In private life Mrs. Gaskell was distinguished for a large-hearted but unobtrusive benevolence, which secured her sympathy for any good cause, and led her to devote much time and strength to personal and helpful intercourse with her poorer neighbours. It was doubtless in this manner that she acquired the intimate acquaintance with the life of the lower, middle, and working classes, which gave much of their peculiar interest to her writings. Her conversational powers were very remarkable, and her society was much sought in some of the highest and most cultivated circles of London and Paris. Few persons could leave behind them a larger number of attached friends."

"Mrs. Gaskell...may be claimed as belonging to this town, during her infancy and early life up to the time of her marriage. There is one work of hers, Cranford, which in my judgment, while depicting life in almost any country town, is especially descriptive of some of the past and present social characteristics of Knutsford. I know that the work was not intended to delineate this place chiefly or specially, but a little incident within my own experience will show the accuracy of the pictures as applied to our town. A woman of advanced age, who was confined to her house through illness, about three years ago, asked me to lend her an amusing or cheerful book. I lent her Cranford, without telling her to what it was supposed to relate; she read the tale of Life in a Country Town; and when I called again, she was full of eagerness to say:—"Why, Sir! that Cranford is all about Knutsford; my old mistress, Miss Harker, is mentioned in it; and our poor cow, she did go to the field in a large flannel waistcoat, because she had burned herself in a lime pit." For myself I must say that I consider Cranford to be full of good-natured humour and kindliness of spirit."

"Men and women could always claim her sympathy; but her gentle heart went out to the underfed, overworked girls. Them she received at her home, always ready to listen to their troubles, advise, or teach the rudiments of education to such as could be persuaded to devote the time necessary for the acquisition of such elementary knowledge. To the end of her life she was always ready to assist, and when the great cotton famine of 1862 caused such endless misery, it was she who thought of the plan, afterwards publicly adopted, of sewing-schools to give relief and employment to the women mill-hands."

"In Manchester, of course, it [Mary Barton] was the topic of the hour, and practically all the readers in that city were divided into two camps: those who thought the book realistic, and those who regarded it as unfairly exaggerated. The employers of labour complained of the way in which they were portrayed in its pages; and it cannot be denied that they had a grievance, for the sympathies of the authoress were so obviously with the workmen. She looked at the social problem entirely from the point of view of the poor; and, while she did not omit to indicate the faults of the lower class, she could not bring herself to depict the merits of the other. It was heart against head with her, and at this time, if she saw life largely, she did not yet see it whole. The employers seemed well-to-do and happy, and she did not endeavour to penetrate beneath the surface. The employés were poor, discontented, uncertain of work, poorly paid; they had miserable lives and terrible dwellings. What wonder she wrote with bitterness? What wonder that the woman who accompanied some real Barton and Wilson to the "home" of the miserable Davenports lost, temporarily, the sense of proportion?"

"If in Mary Barton the bias is in favour of the working classes, it must be conceded that in North and South (published seven years later) the other side of the picture is shown. Mrs. Gaskell was still as full of sympathy with the labourer, but experience had taught her much. Still puzzled by seeing "two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own," she realised that the manufacturers, as a class, were not mere bloated capitalists, but level-headed, hard-working men, fighting against heavy odds for their livelihood. Also, she saw more clearly that the misery of the labourers was sometimes brought about by improvidence, and that much unhappiness was caused by the tyranny of the trades-unions of that day."

"All the other novels were written with the consciousness of power, and it is easy to see that the authoress had no misgivings. They will all live long, but Cranford will never be allowed to die. Admirable as are all the rest, Cranford stands out unique, individual, not only as the masterpiece of the writer, but as an acknowledged masterpiece of English literature."

"You have contributed to our literature one of the best of Biographies, and have proved the membership of your friend to the divine family, of which such as Burns, Chatterton, and Keats are representatives."

"I like Mrs. Gaskell. Why do we always call her Mrs? Elizabeth. She wrote Mary Barton. I think people are very familiar with that book. But North and South is really a very fine piece of work. A lot of North and South has that whole awful industrial growth in it, and she does naturally a lot better by her ladies than Dickens does, so it's really worth reading for that. There's a funny book called Cranford that has a lot of short things in it, but one of them is this scene where everybody is rushing down to get the paper which the next serial of either Hard Times or Bleak House is in. I felt like she must have felt a little annoyed about all that. But I like her an awful lot, and if you haven't read North and South, do."

"I have just been reading Cranford out to my mother. She has read it about five times; but, the first time I tried, I flew into a passion at Captain Brown's being killed and wouldn’t go any further—but this time my mother coaxed me past it, and then I enjoyed it mightily. I do not know when I have read a more finished little piece of study of human nature (a very great and good thing when it is not spoiled). Nor was I ever more sorry to come to a book's end."

"That kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations."

"It is odd enough to see how the entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women calms down the little discordances and the disturbance of mood."

"Thinking more of others’ happiness than of her own was very fine; but did it not mean giving up her very individuality, quenching all the warm love, the true desires, that made her herself? Yet in this deadness lay her only comfort; so it seemed."

"It was his general plan to repress emotion by not showing the sympathy he felt."

"I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent."

"People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues."

"Economy was always "elegant", and money-spending always "vulgar and ostentatious"; a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied."

"A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly."

"I'll not listen to reason…Reason always means what someone else has got to say."

"I finished reading Mary Barton last night, my feelings having become so interested in the narrative that I could not lay the book down until I had read to the end. You have drawn a fearfully true picture: a mournfully beautiful one also have you placed on the tables of the drawing rooms of the great, and good it must there effect; good for themselves, and good also I hope for the poor of every occupation. You are a genius, of no ordinary rank; I care not what the critics say, nor will I flatter you, if I know it, but truth, such as it appears to me will I dare to express, with whomsoever I may differ about it. It seems to me that you have begun a great work and I do hope you will not be discouraged from going on with it. You have opened and adventured into a noble apartment of a fine old dwelling house and on one of the English oaken pannels [sic] you have worked a picture from which the eyes cannot be averted nor the hearts best feelings withdrawn. A sorrowfully beautiful production it is, few being able to contemplate it with tearless eyes—I could not, I know."

"Some errors may certainly be detected in the details of your work [Mary Barton], but the wonder is that they are so few in number and so trifling in effect. The dialect I think might, have been given better, and some few incidents set forth with greater effect, but in describing the dwellings of the poor, their manners, their kindliness to each other, their feelings towards their superiors in wealth and station their faults, their literary tastes, and their scientific pursuits, as old Job Legh for example, you have been very faithful; of John Bartons, I have known hundreds, his very self in all things except his fatal crime, whilst of his daughter Mary, who has ever seen a group of our Lancashire factory girls or dress makers either, and could not have counted Mary? Nor is Jem Wilson, and I [am] proud to say it, a solitary character in the young fellows of our working population, noble as he is, but my heart fills as I write, and I cannot go on."

"She is a very kind cheery woman in her own house; but there is an atmosphere of moral dulness about her, as about all Socinian women."

"I do not know what your literary vows of temperance or abstinence may be, but as I do honestly know that there is no living English writer whose aid I would desire to enlist in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton (a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me), I venture to ask you whether you can give me any hope that you will write a short tale, or any number of tales, for the projected pages... I should set a value on your help which your modesty can hardly imagine; and I am perfectly sure that the least result of your reflection or observation in respect of the life around you, would attract attention and do good."

"Let me congratulate you on the conclusion of your story [North and South]; not because it is the end of a task to which you had conceived a dislike (for I imagine you to have got the better of that delusion by this time), but because it is the vigorous and powerful accomplishment of an anxious labour. It seems to me that you have felt the ground thoroughly firm under your feet, and have strided on with a force and purpose that MUST now give you pleasure."