Improving Ears: Elizabeth Gaskell's Charitable Listener and the Social-Problem Novel

Abstract

This article discusses how mid-Victorian social-problem novelists revised charitable visiting and Bible reading practices (aiming to "improve" England's poor) in order to define their own fictional improvement projects, projects aiming to reform the inattentive ears of the nation's wealthier classes. Through the case study of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854-1855), this essay examines a figure central to the social-problem genre, the charitable listener, an attempt to adapt certain tenets of the domestic Bible mission for the purposes of social-problem fiction and, in Gaskell's case, redefine the role of the middle-class woman (and the middle-class woman author) in programs of social reform. While literary critics have argued that Victorian novelists figured themselves as charismatic speakers or oral storytellers, I contend that Gaskell worked to portray social-problem writing as an act of charitable listening. Placing Gaskell's fiction in conversation with the period's philanthropic practices, cheap Bible sales, and debates about women's preaching (and "preachiness"), I interrogate how social-problem writers placed the bourgeois woman's sympathetic ear at the center of social reform efforts.