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Abstract
This article argues that Elizabeth Gaskell’s historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) uses nostalgia as a literary aesthetic and historical context to articulate a narrative of disorientating epochal change. Gaskell’s novel draws on nostalgia’s roots as a psychosomatic disease afflicting soldiers displaced by international conflicts to reassert the traumatic roots of a familiar feeling often understood as superficial and insignificant. Nostalgia began as a disease brought on by migration and only later came to be thought of as a type of sentimental memory; first home was far away and then it was long ago. Gaskell’s novel incorporates both, mingling longing for a place with longing for a past. This double distancing articulates an experience of transition within her historical novel. She draws on an eighteenth-century trope used by figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth, repurposed for the demands of prose fiction. The homesick soldier who was the first sufferer with pathological nostalgia is cast as the central protagonist of historical transformation and an emblem of uneasy transitions. Sylvia’s Lovers has received scant critical notice to date and, perhaps for this reason, its explicit allusions to nostalgia, and the role they play in Gaskell’s historical imagination, have been left entirely unremarked.
Notes
1. According to the Historical Dictionary of the French Language – reported by Barbara Cassin in her Dictionary of Untranslatables (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) – the word was not invented by Hofer but by another Swiss-German doctor, Jean-Jacques Harder, in 1678.
2. Johannes Hofer, ‘Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688’, trans. by Caroline Kiser Anspach, Institute of the History of Medicine, Bulletin, 2 (1934), 376–91 (pp. 382–83).
3. See, for example, Linda M. Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Tamara Wagner, Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004); and Ann C. Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
4. Jourdain Le Cointe, The Health of Mars, quoted in Jean Starobinski, ‘The Idea of Nostalgia’, trans. William S. Kemp, Diogenes, 14 (1966), 81–103 (p. 96).
5. Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016) discusses both the medical and classical roots of nostalgia in considerable depth.
6. For an account of eighteenth-century literary nostalgia (in poetry in particular), see: Aaron Santesso, A Careful Longing (Newark, NJ: University of Newark University Press, 2006); Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972); Jean Starobinski, ‘Rivers, Bells, Nostalgia’, trans. by Richard Pevear, The Hudson Review, Translation Issue, 61 (2009), 603–17 and ‘The Idea of Nostalgia’.
7. Camilla Cassidy, ‘A Hitherto Unpublished Poetic Draft by Thackeray’, Notes and Queries, 63.2 (2016), 244–48.
8. Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Complete Dictionary of Music. Consisting of a Copious Explanation of All Words Necessary to a True Knowledge and Understanding of Music (London: J. Murray, 1779); Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, trans. by W.F. Mainland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Friedrich von Schiller, ‘Essay on the Connection between the Animal and the Spiritual Nature of Man’, in Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology and Literature, ed. by Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves (Oxford: Sandford, 1978), pp. 253–87; George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. by A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 119. Starobinski’s ‘Rivers, Bells, Nostalgia’ compiles examples of French poetry that use nostalgia as a touchstone image.
9. Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet Major, introduction by Barbara Hardy with notes by Laurel Brake and Ernest Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 58.
10. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1989), p. 24.
11. Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 23.
12. Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia’s Lovers, ed. by Francis O’Gorman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 268. Subsequent references in parentheses.
13. Monkshaven’s geographical inaccuracies were noted by a contemporary correspondent and partially – not very accurately – corrected by Gaskell. The novelist seems to have been almost as inattentive to geography as the heroine of her novel. See Frances E. Twinn, ‘Unpublished Letters and Geographical Errors in Sylvia’s Lovers’, Notes and Queries, 48 (2001), 149–51.
14. ‘O Cruel Pressgang’, Roud number: V1839 <http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>. Strikingly similar themes can be found in ‘Nancy’s complaint for her sweetheart Jemmy’, ‘Sweet Poll of Plymouth’, and ‘Mary Ann of Aberdeen!’ among many others (Roud numbers: V7413, V5400, and V541 <http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>).
15. Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. by Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 68.
16. Daniel James Ennis, Enter the Press-Gang: Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 16, 24.
17. Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell’, in Sylvia's Lovers, ed. by Marion Shaw (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), p. x.
18. Starobinski, ‘The Idea of Nostalgia’, p. 86.
19. Johann Georg Zimmermann, Von der Erfahrung in der Arzneikunst (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1787), pp. 555–56.
20. Similarly, in ‘Gaskell and the Waterfront: Leisure, Labor, and Maritime Space in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Robert Burroughs illuminates the role the seashore plays as a liminal space separating the women left behind from their absent men: in Place and Progress in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. by Lesa Scholl, Emily Morris, and Sarina Gruver Moore (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 11–22.
21. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life. Part Second (Philadelphia, PA: T. Dobson, 1797), p. 461.
22. George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. by Carol A. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 78.
23. William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, ed. by Stephen Gill (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 79–80.
24. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), trans. by Robert B. Louden and Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 71.
25. It has been noted that there are inconsistencies in this time scheme. See Graham Handley, ‘The Chronology of “Sylvia’s Lovers”’, Notes and Queries, 12 (1965), 302–3; ‘Appendix I: Time in the Novel’, in Sylvia’s Lovers, ed. by O’Gorman, pp. 436–37.
26. Unsigned Review, Saturday Review, 4 April 1863, pp. xv, 446–47, reproduced in Elizabeth Gaskell: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Angus Easson (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 446–49 (p. 447).
27. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 3.
28. Kevis Goodman, ‘Romantic Poetry and the Science of Nostalgia’, in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, ed. by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 195.
29. Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 94.
30. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 25, 16.
31. Lukács, The Historical Novel, p. 182.
32. In A Picture of Whitby and its Environs (Whitby, 1824), George Young (an author of local history who Gaskell drew on in her research) notes that Whitby had an older name which reflected its ecclesiastical past: ‘Presteby, and not Whitby’, he says, ‘is mentioned in Domesday’ while Newcastle-Upon-Tyne had previously been known as Monkchester (pp. 83, 84).
33. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 8.
34. see note 33.
35. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 215.
36. William Gaskell, ‘Two Lectures on the Lancashire Dialect’, in Mary Barton; A Tale (1848), ed. by Joanne Shattock and Linda K. Hughes (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), pp. 329, 339.
37. Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction, 1810–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 208.
38. Dames, Amnesiac Selves, p. 208.
39. Dames, Amnesiac Selves, p. 209.
40. John Stuart Mill, ‘The Spirit of the Age’ (1834), in Mill: Texts and Commentaries, ed. by Alan Ryan (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 5.
41. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock with an introduction by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 124.
42. From the novel’s first pages, we learn about the changes these developments wrought by placing the action in a time ‘when there were no facilities of railroads to bring sportsmen from a distance to enjoy the shooting season, and make an annual demand for accommodation’ (p. 7).
43. As Marion Shaw notes, the resemblances between contemporary events and those described in Gaskell’s historical novel can also be found in the fact that the American Civil War was causing significant disruption to the cotton industry in Lancashire. Big historical movements far away were, once again, wreaking havoc in small communities with no apparent stake in the dispute. Shaw, ‘Introduction’, p. xi.
44. George Eliot, Romola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
45. Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, p. 4.
46. George Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. by Byatt, p. 119.
47. This echoes Jean Jacques Rousseau’s account in his Dictionary of Music in which he presents nostalgia, nostalgically, as something belated that belongs to a simple time that has already passed into memory. Describing the ranz des vaches, he notes that ‘This air, tho’ it continues the same, does not produce, at present, the same effects which it produc’d before amongst the Swiss; because, having lost the taste for their ancient simplicity, they no longer regret it, but when reminded’. Rousseau, A Complete Dictionary of Music, pp. 266–67.
48. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, pp. 121–22.
49. Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 17.
50. John Ruskin, ‘The Lamp of Memory’, in The Lamp of Memory (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 3.
51. Elizabeth Gaskell, Lois the Witch (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 116. Subsequent references in parentheses.
52. For a fuller examination of Gaskell’s relationship to America and its implicit representation throughout Sylvia’s Lovers, see Clare Pettitt, ‘Time Lag and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Transatlantic Imagination’, Victorian Studies, 54 (2012), 599–622. The effect of the American war on the cotton trade is commented upon by both O’Gorman and Shaw in their editions of the novel. These events coincided with the composition of Sylvia’s Lovers. In a letter to George Smith (dated September 1862), Gaskell wrote ‘let us have cotton’ so that ‘then our poor people would get work’ and also describes herself as ‘very anxious […] to finish “Sylvia’s Lovers”’. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. by J. A. V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966), pp. 697, 698.