Misstated Identity in Gaskell's 'The Old Nurse's Story'

Abstract

ELIZABETH GASKELL’s ‘The Old Nurse's Story’, already well-known to aficionados of the ghost story, is likely to become the primary work by which Gaskell is known to a much wider audience thanks to its inclusion in recent editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, as well as in various collections of Gothic and ghost story literature, such as the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories. It has not yet been remarked, however, that there is an error of identity in this important story. This error involves matters of lineage and generational relationship, for it mis-states the relationship between Grace Furnivall and the ‘present Lord Furnivall’, a notable mistake given this story's close concern with matters of class and family heritage. The story's present Lord Furnivall (the one who sends Rosamund and her nurse to live in Furnivall Manor) is a grandson of the old Lord Furnivall (he of the ghostly organ playing). We are told that the old Lord had a son who ‘was with the army in America’ (18) and it is this son who is also identified as ‘the present Lord Furnivall's father’. This clearly makes the present Lord Furnivall the grandson of the old Lord Furnivall, yet the Nurse identifies Grace as ‘a great-aunt of my lord's’ (12). It is inescapable that ‘my lord's’ here refers to the present Lord Furnivall, since it is his disposition of Rosamund that the Nurse is discussing when she makes the above reference to Grace Furnivall. This identification unintentionally inserts an additional (non-existent) generation between the present Lord Furnivall and Grace, who as the sister of the present Lord's father would simply be the present Lord's aunt, not his great-aunt. Gaskell herself affirms this when, at the end of the story's fourth paragraph, she writes of the present Lord Furnivall's plan to send Rosamund to live at Furnivall Manor that ‘my lord had thought that it would suit Miss Rosamond very well for a few years, and that her being there might perhaps amuse his old aunt’ (12).