Gaskell Service 2019
Every year, on a Sunday close to what would have been Elizabeth Gaskell’s birthday, we head to Brook Street Chapel in Knutsford to lay flowers on the Gaskell family grave […]
Samuel Gaskell – Warrington’s forgotten pioneer in the treatment of mental health
As part of the Heritage Open Days in 2019, the doors will be open at Cairo Street Unitarian Chapel, Warrington’s oldest Dissenting Chapel. Founded on the same site in 1662, […]
The Old Nurse’s Story
‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ can be found in collections of Gothic stories, ghost stories and tales of the macabre, something which might seem odd for a woman who was the […]
This Month in Writing – September
How would you then define a hero? ‘The Sexton’s Hero’, was published in William and Mary Howitt’s Journal during September 1847, the year before Gaskell ‘s first, and much-loved, novel […]
Cairo Street Unitarian Chapel, Warrington
In 1845 while scarlet fever was rife in Manchester, Elizabeth Gaskell took her young family, comprising then of three girls and a baby boy, William, out to North Wales to […]
Women in Science
The Gaskell Society recently received a question via Twitter concerning connections between Molly Gibson (Wives and Daughters) and Eleanor Omerod, an entomologist. Omerod was born in Gloucestershire in 1828, moving […]
Confessions of a Nervous Chair….
It’s hard to imagine a more nerve-wracking scenario than Newish Chairwoman organising and chairing her first conference for such a well-respected literary society as the Gaskell Society. NOT helped by […]
This Month in Writing: ‘An Accursed Race’
We all think of Elizabeth Gaskell as a brilliantly entertaining storyteller, whom Dickens addressed as ‘my dear Scheherazade’. But how many of us know her works of non-fiction? One interesting […]
The Gaskell Revival
Elizabeth Gaskell, the wife of a Unitarian minister of religion in Manchester, shared her husband’s interest in literature: they published some jointly written verses in 1837. Elizabeth became a best-selling […]