The Victorian Scheherazade: Elizabeth Gaskell and George Meredith

Abstract

The Arabian Nights were ‘the tales of our childhood’ to Elizabeth Gaskell, and indeed the Nights in England were over a century old when the Victorian novelist was born. The great Victorian translations, Lane’s (1839–41) and Burton’s (1885), which frame the period of the Nights’ most widespread popularity were presented to a reading public steeped in Scheherazade’s lore. Already several generations had grown familiar with a tradition that included The Arabian Nights Entertainments and the numerous imitations, excerpts and pseudo-translations which had multiplied from the early eighteenth century. Weber’s unsurpassed collection of this literature was available from 1812,1 and by the mid nineteenth century an English habit of Eastern allusion was well established. The ’Story of the Eastern King’ from Petis de la Croix’s Turkish Tales (1708) mentioned in Gaskell’s North and South had long ago reached a wide audience in a Spectator essay on notions of Time (Spectator no. 94).2 The motif of ’Alnaschar-dreams’, the castles-in-the-air building of the barber’s fifth brother, introduced into Mary Barton, had, too, been excerpted by Addison (Spectator, no. 535) as an exemplum of false hopes and worldly ambition.