“there are two views often”: The Epistolary Friendship of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Gaskell

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Many thanks to the Beahl and Irene H. Perrine Faculty Fellowship at Coe College for supporting research that contributed to this article. Along with Whitney Womack Smith’s essay on Gaskell and Stowe in Transatlantic Stowe, Shirley Foster, Elizabeth Sabiton, and Jane Silvey are the only other critics to address the authors’ friendship and correspondence beyond a passing reference. In her essay on Stowe and Dickens, Laura Korobkin also briefly mentions Stowe’s and Gaskell’s correspondence.

² In fact, scholars have often discussed Gaskell and Stowe in terms of their individual (but often intersecting) friendships with other transatlantic writers. Critics interested in Gaskell’s writerly relationships have examined her largely epistolary friendship with American art and literary critic Charles Eliot Norton. See Greenwood’s essay “‘Our Happy Days in Rome’: The Gaskell-Norton Correspondence,” which examines the friendship Gaskell and Norton developed after meeting in Rome in 1857, likely during the same gatherings where Gaskell and Stowe saw one another. See also Pettit’s essay “Time Lag and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Transatlantic Imagination,” which uses Gaskell’s and Norton’s letters as the basis of her analysis. In turn, George Eliot’s correspondence with Stowe in the 1860s and 1870s is also frequently cited. Although Stowe and Eliot never met in person, their body of letters has become the standard by which scholars talk about Stowe’s British literary connections. See Rita Bode’s essay “Belonging, Longing, and the Exile State in Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot,” which documents the regular correspondence of the two writers between 1869–1880 (Bode 188). Also see Cotugno and Springer.

³ Stowe’s choice to highlight Gaskell in the chapter subtitle (“Presentation at Surrey Chapel. – House of Parliament. – Miss Greenfield’s Second Concert. – Sir John Malcom. – The Charity Children. – Mrs. Gaskell. – Thackeray”) further emphasizes the weight she placed on this initial meeting.

⁴ Weyant dates this Roman reunion as February 24, 1857 (xviii).

⁵ This letter, dated March 1, 1857, is also transcribed in Stowe’s Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals, but he notes the recipient is Stowe’s husband, not her daughters (300).

⁶ Both Hedrick and Uglow privilege this moment over others in their friendship. Hedrick entirely omits the women’s first meetings in London and later visit in Manchester. This meeting in Rome is the only mention of their friendship in the entire biography. Uglow elaborates on the other meetings and also describes how Gaskell shared her impressions of Stowe with Charlotte Bronte (Uglow 353). These choices exemplify how secondhand accounts and limited access to the letters themselves have skewed our perception of their friendship.

⁷ Hedrick and Uglow draw from two letters: one from Mary Perkins to Thomas Perkins, dated March 15–18, 1857 and the other from Catherine Winkworth to Susanna Winkworth, dated March 12, 1857.

⁸ Uglow gleans this anecdote from a letter written by Norton addressed to Mrs. Andrew Norton, dated March 15, 1857.

⁹ Gaskell’s responses to these two letters are not extant. Gaskell ordered much of her correspondence destroyed, and there are “daunting gaps in the historical record” of Gaskell’s life and career: Not only did Gaskell practice “self-censorship to a surprising degree,” but she also “habitually requested that correspondents destroy her letters,” including her children and “her professional associates” (D’Albertis 11–12).

¹⁰ It is unclear if other letters in the body of their correspondence are extant, although I believe we can assume many more letters once existed. Both Stowe and Gaskell were prolific correspondents. Fields claims Stowe “carried on such an extensive correspondence with persons of all shades and opinion in all parts of the world, that the letters received and answered by her between 1853 and 1856 would fill volumes” (204).

¹¹ Stowe also spoke at Stafford House during her 1853 English tour promoting Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an event that is often considered the tour’s pinnacle. See Lueck’s essay on Stowe at Stafford House for a more thorough discussion.

¹² “Reform enabled and sustained an array of transatlantic affiliations,” Claybaugh argues, and “reformers in one nation would ally with those in the other in order to alter both” (27).

¹³ Other recipients include Lady Hatherton and the Duchess of Argyll, both of whom “had actively welcomed the author to Britain during her triumphal 1853 tour” (Korobkin 116). These letters similarly contain an appeal on the Webbs’ behalf, recounting at least some of Mary Webb’s tragic past and applauding her “decided genius for elocution and as a Dramatic Reader” (qtd. in Waller 164). Stowe urges her correspondents to extend the Webbs professional and personal assistance in aid of the larger abolitionist cause.

¹⁴ For more information on nineteenth-century Anglo-American women writers’ engagement with Italy, see Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks by Etta Madden and Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World, edited by Beth Lueck et al.

¹⁵ Stowe says a “Mr. Lowe” shared this news with her. This is presumably her British publisher Sampson Low, with whom Gaskell was also publishing select pieces at the time.

¹⁶ Italy did not become a democratic republic until 1946.

¹⁷ “La Camorra,” another essay on the subject, was sent to Cornhill in 1863, but never published (Uglow 535–36).

¹⁸ Smith, filtering details from this letter, similarly suggests “Stowe thought so much of Gaskell and her writing that she proposed that they coauthor a travel narrative recounting their separate trips through Italy” (91).

¹⁹ Until the Berne Convention was signed in 1886, there were no international agreements on copyright, and until the International Copyright Treaty of 1891, there were no international copyright laws enforced in the United States.

²⁰ As discussed above, the Italian travelogue Stowe proposes was initially conceived of as a single-author publication, but Stowe had to leave England before securing an English copyright for it.

²¹ Lueck claims, “Stowe used her writing to buy herself out of the time-consuming labor of a Victorian housewife and mother, hiring household help with her earnings in order to devote herself more fully to her writing” (96).

²² In 1863, Gaskell pitched “‘Notes of a wanderer’ – all sorts of odd bits, scenes, conversations […], small adventures, descriptions &c &c met with during our last two journeys abroad in Brittany Paris, Rome, Florence” to George Smith (Letters 712). It eventually turned into a lengthy travel essay for Fraser’s.