Lancashire and Mary Barton

This essay is by Cormell Price (1835-1902). According to an 1855 letter from Morris, Price was planning a review of Gaskell’s North and South for the first issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (Kelvin 13). If he wrote this review, he did not publish it in the Magazine.

Rather than a review, this essay, like “Unhealthy Employments” and “The Work of Young Men”, expresses Price’s a social concerns. He uses Gaskell’s novels as a vehicle for discussing poverty, overpopulation, and collective bargaining. In the last paragraph he justifies his use of Gaskell as evidence of England’s social ills: “Comparing them with authentic documents and our own experience, we can confidently assert we have never elsewhere read so veritable and unbiassed exposition of both sides of the perplexing questions introduced” (451-451).

First printed in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine , July, 1856.