Moss and Mosses in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Worlds

This year’s Joan Leach Memorial Lecture will this year be given by Dr Ingrid Hanson,

In Mary Barton, Margaret’s grandfather Job Legh has been out ‘moss-hunting’, Margaret tells Mary, and the elderly Alice, reminiscing about her countryside youth, says to the girls: ‘Eh, lasses! ye don’t know what rocks are in Manchester! Gray pieces o’ stone as large as a house, all covered over wi’ moss of different colours, some yellow, some brown’.  The poetic extract from Ebenezer Elliott that prefaces Chapter Five further suggests the variety of both kind and quality in mosses:  ‘Nor wild-flower decked the rock, nor moss the well,/ But he its name and qualities could tell.’ Chat Moss, Moss Brow, moss to keep a bouquet of flowers fresh, moss as decoration, moss marking graves: all these and more appear in Gaskell’s work, even as water-retaining moss bogs were being drained for building or farming in Manchester, and working-class botanists like Job Legh were finding, naming and discussing their local mosses. Just a little later, from the 1860s onwards, Manchester Museum began to receive and catalogue mosses from across the country and the world, as part of its extensive herbarium. In this talk Ingrid Hanson discusses the role of mosses – of which there are around 1,000 varieties (some yellow, some brown, some green, some red) in Britain today – in Gaskell’s Manchester and Gaskell’s work, tracing out some of the histories of the mossy names, places and characteristics that would have been familiar to Gaskell and her characters and that are so vital to our climate-changed world today.

Dr Ingrid Hanson is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Manchester, author of William Morris and the Uses of Violence (2014) and editor of William Morris: Selected Works (OUP 2024). She has published work on literature of violence, peace (including in relation to Gaskell), mourning, masculinities, socialism and utopia, and is currently working on a book about peace and protest as well as an interdisciplinary, collaborative project on the politics, aesthetics and histories of urban moss. She has a passion for moss and lichen and has recently discovered the joys of a hand lens