A Voice for Justice: Elizabeth Gaskell
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
A wise person once said: ‘Take from the past not its ashes but its fire.’ It is sometimes – perhaps often – difficult to do just that. Sometimes – perhaps often – we Unitarians become so enamoured of our history that we forget about the present. In the US, Unitarians are fond of listing off the important people that were Unitarians. Several presidents fall into that category, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a clear favourite to lift up, as is Henry David Thoreau, author and initiator of civil disobedience. We note Clara Barton – founder of the American Red Cross, kin in a way to Florence Nightingale whom we in the United Kingdom like to claim.
When I served on the Worship Panel of the General Assembly, our national association of congregations, we had a long list of anniversaries, birthdates and death dates, and important moments in history. My colleagues on that panel and I would find people to compile worship materials so that ministers and lay people alike could lift up those important dates.
Elizabeth Gaskell was a Unitarian throughout her life; married even, to a Unitarian Minister. Known mainly as a novelist, I knew nothing of her until I came to the United Kingdom.
She was born Elizabeth Stevenson, 200 years ago tomorrow, 29 September 1810. And it seems that at her bicentenary, we should pause to remember her. She was remembered yesterday at Westminster Abbey where a plaque was placed in ‘poet’s corner’ nearby Chaucer, Dickens, and Emily Bronte among other luminaries.
What of her, though, is the fire of her past? What is it about her life and her work that makes her worth our time this morning?
She grew up solidly in the middle class but her life wasn’t an easy one. Her mother died when she was not yet a year old and she was raised by an aunt. Her brother’s death when she was 18 affected her profoundly and after returning to her father’s home for some months, he too died. She was well cared for by her mother’s family, was well travelled and educated.
It was her time in Newcastle upon Tyne that was to have the most impact upon her life. Living with the Reverend William Turner and his family, she was able to take part in the Literary and Philosophical Society, unusually for that day, a society open to both men and women. It was also through this connection that she was to meet William Gaskell. Her friend Mary (Turner’s daughter) had recently wed Gaskell’s colleague at Cross Street Chapel in Manchester and the two came together and within 6 months were engaged. Married shortly after that, they settled in Manchester.
Her life was in some ways on the boundaries of the classes. Worshipping and associating with the millocracy – the mill owners, the beneficiaries of the growing cotton mill industry in Manchester, the leaders of that community – she was also surrounded by the struggle and suffering of the workers, and in the cholera outbreak in 1832 she was out in the community helping as best she could. She saw both sides of that class divide and while a progressive in her outlook, the fashion of the day was to be an advocate for individualism, not for equality. That very lack of equality was to shape the message embedded in her fiction.
Not rich enough to ride, she walked wherever she went, and in doing so saw the condition of ordinary people, heard the lilt of their speech and the concerns of their days. She knew their condition.
Her own condition was not unusual for her time. Aside from her early griefs, she had a stillborn daughter, and lost two sons in their first years of life. Four daughters survived their childhood, Marianne, Margaret (called Meta), Florence and Julia.
She had always been a writer, composing lengthy letters to her friends, writing the odd bit of prose, often about the lives of the working class that she saw around her. It was after the death of her second son – scarlet fever was deadly for small children – that her husband recommended that she try writing to take her mind off the sadness that wouldn’t end.
And write she did. Between 1848 and 1865 – the year of her death – she wrote six novels, and published six novels, a biography of Charlotte Bronte, and nine collections of short stories and novellas – all this whilst still engaging the rigorous work of minister’s wife and mother to her living children.
Her writing, though described as non-polemical, always had a purpose and a message, if only to illumine some aspect of life that was often hidden from the larger population. As the excerpt from North-South indicates, Mrs Gaskell had a point to make through the voice of her protagonist, Margaret Hale. The mill workers and the owners were intimately connected, mutually dependent, and it was to the good of all that they communicated and worked together. Gaskell drove the story forward with the hope of the transformation of John Thornton, the mill owner, and the remediation of lot of the workers.
In all of her fiction, it seems, she put forth the values that she had learned from her father, and from the community of Unitarians that she associated with for all her life. Though woven into stories, the importance of equality (not only for the working class, but also for the invisible class of women), the need for compassion and the deep connections that exist between us all shine out of her work.
In her novel Mary Barton she says it plainly. Quoting from my colleague Margaret Kirk,
Masters and men do not regard each other as human beings. When the mill owner, John Carson, embittered after the murder of his son, moves towards some kind of reconciliation at the end of the novel, he declares he cannot remedy the evils and the sufferings that his workers endure because the masters don’t have the power to do so. Job Legh, speaking for the workers, responds gently and persuasively that it was not the want of power but the want of sympathy and inclination that they felt most keenly. And Elizabeth Gaskell contrives to end with a changed approach where ‘ the truth might be recognised that the interests of one were the interests of all, and as such, required the consideration and deliberation of all....’
Now, there’s a truth that we could use some more of in our day.
Take from the past not its ash, but its fire. That’s what we’re counselled to do. Mrs Gaskell, the minister’s wife, a respectable woman with her share of trouble and trauma, has surprising fire to offer to us in our time. Using the best tools to hand, she sought to expound her Unitarian faith and to make visible the world that she saw: the difficulties of the mill workers, the possibility of reconciliation, the strength of women, the beauty in the unexpected places, the wisdom that resides in all people.
I can’t say, honestly, if she hoped that it would change the world but I can guess that she wanted to make a difference, to improve the lot of those in her community, both those who were in grievous poverty and those who held the fate of the poor in their hands. She saw that both needed some help to find something like salvation in this life, freedom that could only be granted one to the other, freedom that grew from their mutual dependence.
She dared to speak the truth as she saw it, even though those who sat in the pews with her Sunday on Sunday might be – indeed were – sorely offended by it. It seems she didn’t shy from the truth as she best knew it, but wrote clearly and forcefully, expressing in no uncertain terms her opinions.
It is sometimes easy to point to those in the past, those who have lived inspiring lives and who have changed the world with their insight and boldness and passion, it is sometimes easy to point to them with a recognition that there is little that we could do that could match them. It is sometimes easy to point to those who lived their faith long ago, and to rest upon the good works that they did.
Elizabeth Gaskell offers to us an image, though, of one who took what she could, and without any extraordinary power or position, used her voice to illuminate some dark places in human life, to illuminate a path forward, a path that still calls to us today in our own human condition.
So let it be that we take this flame, this fire, from her and use it to see what our way forward might be this day.
Prayer
Spirit of love and life,
inspire us today.
We remember those who have
lived and loved,
those who have given of themselves
to the greater life of all.
May we offer our great thanks to those of blessed memory.
Not only the fair and famous,
but also to the everyday,
ordinary ones
those who have taken what they had
who have crafted their joys and losses
into something of beauty and worth.
We offer thanksgiving for those who
learned and lived compassion,
to those who spoke the truth that needed saying;
to those who saw the world clearly;
May we in our turn,
weave into our lives,
the wisdom of their journeys,
the power of their small and large acts,
and offer to the world whatever gift
is in our hands to give.
This we would ask this day,
and every day,
that the world we pray for
is in the making,
by what we do and give,
by what we love.
So may it be.
Amen.