The Gaskell Journal Digital Edition is an online, openly accessible edition of a single Gaskell text, Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal, offering an annotated and newly transcribed text side-by-side with high-quality digital images of the manuscript pages. This new edition provides a digitally encoded version of the text. The digital markup embeds metadata and editorial notes and transcription directly into a single Edition file. Additionally, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal - Digital Edition offers editorial headnotes contextualizing the journal as a text predominantly focused on motherhood, and a prosopography identifying important individuals, texts, and geographic locations that created the context within which Gaskell wrote. The journal simultaneously works as an intervention in dissertation practice, through modeling a digital dissertation deliverable which mobilizes current practices in textual encoding to create an online edition of the manuscript which capitalizes on available technologies.Gaskell's journal was written to record her motherhood. Gaskell gave birth to seven children, of whom four daughters survived childhood: Marianne (b. 1834), Margaret, called "Meta" (b. 1837), Florence (b. 1842) and Julia (b. 1846). The Gaskells also had a stillborn daughter (1833), and two sons who died in infancy (an unnamed son, born between 1838-1841, and William, born in 1845). Gaskell began her journal in 1834 to record the life of Marianne, then aged 6 months, and continued it until 1838, when Marianne was four and Meta was eighteen months old. Gaskell's daughters were her central focus and close companions for over half her life, and the beginnings of this relationship are chronicled in the journal, as are her own reflections on her role as a mother.Gaskell began her journal with the explicit intention of recording her memories of Marianne's childhood in the face of an uncertain future, but it later became a "paper mother" - a productive tool through which she mothered herself as well as her progeny. Beyond writing the journal to record and reflect on her daughters' development, Gaskell wrote in her journal in order to weigh Victorian norms and expectations for maternal practice, and mobilized it as a tool for emotional self-regulation as she sought to shape her own identity as a Victorian mother. In effect, Gaskell's journal exists as a text that demonstrates maternal life writing as a productive tool employed for shaping a socially acceptable selfhood for Victorian mothers and daughters alike.
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