Remnant Victorians

George Eliot, writing her novel of provincial life, Middlemarch, with its wealth of detail about "insignificant people" and "unhistoric acts", drew on a semiscientific image to describe implicitly her narrative technique. "Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions," she declared, "but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun."

Like Eliot's novel, John Chapple's biography of the young Elizabeth Gaskell until her marriage in 1832 offers a portrait of provincial life. It moves from Berwick to Manchester to Knutsford to Newcastle and it describes the lives of people outside the educational or political establishment - dissenters, Unitarians, small-time businessmen or farmers. Like Eliot, too, Chapple describes a period of transition, the years just before the Reform Act and the Victorian age when ideas of the later 19th century were presaged but when many customs and preoccupations of the late 18th century still prevailed.

Gaskell becomes once again a child of the Romantic period in Chapple's book. But, unlike in Middlemarch, there is no illumination. No candle is brought to bear on the bewildering mass of detail. There is no centre or artfulness to the book. This is partly because the book concentrates on the time before Gaskell wrote the novels for which she is famous. It is partly too because of the frustrating lack of crucial evidence about the lives of Elizabeth and her family. Time and again Chapple is forced to admit his lack of proof, thwarted by the nature of his subject, the hidden lives of women or provincial men. There is no written evidence, for example, that Elizabeth's father ever frequented Edinburgh literary salons, although a whole chapter is devoted to a description of these places. Indeed the lack of light in the book is mainly caused not by too little evidence but by too many facts. The doyen of Gaskell studies, Chapple has produced a Casaubon-type study, since he is unable to resist chasing up - and then writing - every scrap of detail, however loosely related to his central subject it may be.

The result is truly Shandean without the humour. Elizabeth herself is not even born until the beginning of the fifth chapter. There are endless digressions. We are informed, for example, of all the people related to the owners of Peover Hall in Cheshire, where Elizabeth's parents were married. We become lost in the kinship web of Elizabeth's aunt's in-laws, in the family relations of her teachers, her ministers, even her father's acquaintances.

One typical passage runs: "But Dorothy Landles (Elizabeth's father's sister) was to die not long afterwards, aged 31 on 23 February 1805; an infant daughter was buried with her in the same grave. She was survived by a daughter called Margaret. Her husband George Landles lived on until the age of 64 in 1826. Her brother Robert married an Elizabeth Wilson in 1805", etc, etc. Why did Chapple's editors not suggest a family tree at the beginning of the book? It would have saved many such paragraphs.

There are some gems in the dig. One is William Stevenson, Elizabeth's father. A talented eccentric, he gave up his positions as a clergyman at Dob Lane chapel and as classics tutor at Manchester College because of his doubts about religion and about the value of classical education. As such he probably inspired the character of Mr Hale in Gaskell's North and South, although Chapple avoids references to Gaskell's writing to illuminate her life. But as Stevenson moved from one profession to another, escaping from classics to farming at Saughton Mills outside Edinburgh, and from there to journalism in Edinburgh and the civil service in London, it allows Chapple to explore a variety of occupations and discourses in the early 19th century.

The most interesting aspect of Stevenson's career in Chapple's account is the publication of his pamphlet, Remarks on the Very Inferior Utility of Classical Learning in Manchester. By gathering together all the loosely connected work colleagues of Stevenson and digressing further to trace other published scruples about classics, Chapple has provided a telling insight into the general attitude towards education and politics among dissenters and tied Stevenson's rebellion into the wider Unitarian experience of, among others, Coleridge and Priestley.

Another striking moment is provided by the letters from Elizabeth's brother, John, mainly because it offers a hiatus of passion in an otherwise flat-toned account. John, raised by his widowed father in Chelsea while his younger sister grew up with their aunt in Knutsford, still managed to maintain a regular correspondence with his sister. Chapple, typically, quotes the letters at length but for once his prolixity pays off. John combines affection in his letters with instruction, encouraging his sister to persevere with her Italian and Latin learning and expressing hope that she would learn music. Later he provides adventure, with his accounts of storms at sea (he had joined the merchant navy). Elizabeth has been thought to have had a lonely, orphaned childhood; John's letters, with their friendliness and intimacy, qualify that idea. So when John disappears mysteriously from her life, probably dying from cholera in India, we feel the loss.

But mostly the book is very dull. Chapple quotes a remark by William James at the beginning: "You haven't to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts as I do. It is like walking through the densest brushwood." The point is more than adequately proved. Sometimes the brushwood of trivia is so dense that the main trees of the story are almost passed unnoticed. In the mass of detail about the Earl of Lauderdale, we almost miss the brief sentence that Gaskell's father was appointed his private secretary. Similarly, Gaskell's mother's death is barely sustained for more than a paragraph, despite the huge, long-lasting psychological impact it must have had on Gaskell, before we are plunged back into "Lady Stanley's gossip" about when she had "dined with Humphry Davy and Mrs Apreece". There is even a certain provocative panache with which Chapple ends the book (before the seven appendices). After mentioning that Elizabeth and William Gaskell did get married, he concludes with: William Gaskell "sensibly reduced his own subscription to Manchester College from two guineas to one".

Chapple's book is exhaustive and exhausting. Like Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, written for "the more select classes of readers", I suspect that, despite its colourful, popular cover, this volume will appeal only to a few Gaskell scholars who will appreciate the wealth of archival material accumulated but will mainly access it through the index. The rest of us would be better to stick to the livelier narrative of Jenny Uglow's recent biography, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories and not worry about the finer details of Dorothy Landles's brother's wife.

Jennifer Wallace is director of studies in English, Peterhouse, Cambridge.