Birth of Mrs Gaskell

Sept 29th 1810

A blue plaque at 93 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, which in 1810 was still a village on London’s outskirts, marks the birthplace of a writer whose work is admired not only for its literary qualities, but as social history. Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born a Unitarian and was closely connected with Unitarianism all her life. Elizabeth was her mother’s name, Cleghorn the name of a family friend.

The baby’s father, William Stevenson, a Treasury official, had contributed articles to magazines and written essays for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Her mother, Elizabeth Holland, from a prominent Unitarian family in Cheshire, died in October 1811. Despite his mastery of useful knowledge, her husband could not cope with a one-year-old child and the baby was sent to Knutsford in Cheshire to her mother’s older sister, Aunt Lumb. Knutsford would be the model for Cranford in her best-known novel.

Hannah Lumb was separated from her husband, who had gone insane, and lived with her disabled daughter, Marianne, in what is now Gaskell Avenue in Knutsford. Marianne died in 1812. Elizabeth would later call Aunt Lumb ‘my more than mother … my best friend.’ Other members of the family lived close by, but her own daughters later thought Elizabeth’s childhood had been lonely.

Elizabeth’s father married again, but Elizabeth and her stepmother did not get on and she recalled that the few visits she paid them in Chelsea made her ‘very, very unhappy’. Meanwhile, Unitarians believed in education for girls so she was sent away to a boarding school in Warwickshire until she was 15. Here she seems to have begun writing stories, encouraged by her older brother John until, in 1828, he disappeared without trace during a voyage to India. Her father died the following year.

In 1831 Elizabeth met William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister in Manchester, and they were married in Knutsford in 1832. The bride was a lively, talkative and attractive 21, the groom was 27 and they would have a solid marriage. They lived in Manchester, where she helped him with his work and raised their children. It seems to have been another family tragedy, when their only son William died of scarlet fever in 1845 at ten months old, that propelled her in her desperation to write her first novel, Mary Barton. Set in Manchester, it came out in 1848 and its grim picture of working-class life led to her writing for Charles Dickens’ weekly, Household Words, in which Cranford began appearing in 1851. She continued writing novels and short stories, as well as a biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, until her death of heart failure in 1865 at the age of 55.