This paper focuses on Public Health Discourses, Class, and Gender in Elizabeth Gatskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth”’
Public Health Discourses, Class, and Gender in Elizabeth Gatskell’s
Public Health Discourses, Class, and Gender in Elizabeth Gatskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth”’
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Elizabeth Gaskell’s Unitarian upbringing instilled in her the importance of taking action against injustice. She used her fiction writing to highlight the plight of the industrial poor. Exploring themes such as class conflict, gender roles, prostitution and drug addiction. Her books inspired heated debate and moral outrage but ultimately contributed to social reform.
In 1832 Elizabeth married Unitarian minister William Gaskell and also the couple moved from leafy Cheshire to Manchester, a vast, smoggy industrial sprawl. Elizabeth’s charity work, including prison visits, and teaching maths and literacy to mill workers, gave her an insight into issues faced by the city’s poor.
A keen diarist and letter writer, in 1845 a grief-stricken Elizabeth turned her hand to fiction writing to try and occupy her mind following the death of her infant son.
Elizabeth was horrified by the social injustice she witnessed around her. Her compassionate portrayals of vulnerable, marginalized people were based on the people she encountered in her voluntary work. She wanted her well-to-do readers to realise that workers didn’t strike for the sake of being difficult. But out of desperation to put food on the table for their hungry kids.
Her first novel Mary Barton was publish anonymously in 1848. It was an immediate success, receiving criticism from some quarters for its positive portrayal of the working class, but praise from others – Charles Dickens became a huge fan, and serialised a number of her subsequent novels and short stories his magazine, ‘Household Words’.
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