Manchester and Early Victorian Literary Culture

Abstract

Early Victorian Manchester is most readily identified as a centre for industrial fiction through the realist novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. Centred on the human consequences of Manchester’s industrial expansion during the 1830s and 1840s, Mary Barton and North and South engage with the all too obvious divisions between labour and capital in the city, in particular the plight of the working poor. Whilst interest in Gaskell puts Manchester on the literary map, the city’s vibrant poetic community which emerged out of unprecedented industrial development is less well known. In opening out the discussion of Manchester’s literary culture to include the emergence of the Manchester Poets, an interesting disjunction between external perceptions of Manchester’s literary potential and the reality of its creative output is revealed. For in terms of the contemporary critical response to Manchester literature in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the overriding image of the city as a centre of manufacturing and commerce obscured the city’s reality as an abundant producer of imaginative literature, as 19th-century commentators connected the growth of industry and commerce in Manchester to an absence of literary potential, or in the potential for literature produced in Manchester to be considered seriously. By exploring the ways in which both prose and poetry written in Manchester responded to, and formed, perceptions of the city during the 1830s and 1840s, this article discusses early Victorian Manchester’s literary culture through the critical response to Gaskell’s ‘Manchester novels’ and through the emergence of the community of Manchester Poets. The article discusses recent critical responses to Manchester’s literary culture and suggests possible directions for future research.