“THE MUSIC OF [OUR] THOUGHTS”:  

THE ELIZABETH GASKELL JOURNAL: DIGITAL EDITION 

 

By 

 

Melissa J. Klamer 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A DISSERTATION 

 

Submitted to 

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

 

English—Doctor of Philosophy 

 

2020 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

ABSTRACT 

 

“THE MUSIC OF [OUR] THOUGHTS”:  

THE ELIZABETH GASKELL JOURNAL: DIGITAL EDITION 

 

By  

 

Melissa J. Klamer 

 

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. 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This dissertation is dedicated to my children, Lydia, Christiana, Carl, and Jakob,  

whose constant love and laughter has made the process worthwhile,  

and to my husband, Lance, whose encouragement gave me the courage to chase my dreams. 

 

 

iv 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I  wish to thank Mrs. Sarah Prince, Gaskell’s descendant, for her gracious permission to 

undertake this digital edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s manuscript journal.  In addition, I would like 

to thank my graduate committee chair, Dr. Zarena Aslami, my external committee member, Dr. 

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, and  my graduate committee, Dr. Stephen Arch, Dr. Robin Silbergleid, 

and Dr. Judith Stoddart, for their ongoing assistance and support. Any digital humanities project 

is necessarily collaborative, and this work would not have been possible without the assistance of 

many  other organizations and individuals. The  Department of English and the College of Arts  

& Letters at Michigan State University were both instrumental in providing funding that allowed 

me to undertake training in digital editing.  The members of the Digital Mitford Coding School , 

led by Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, introduced me to TEI XML and provided me with an excellent 

background and instruction in encoding methods and principles. I am also grateful to the 

Brotherton Library Special Collections at the University of Leeds and the John Rylands Library 

Special Collections at the  University of Manchester for their assistance during a research trip I 

conducted in the summer of 2018.  I am also grateful to The Association for Documentary 

Editing and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for sponsoring my  

participation in the 2018 Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents, as well as to the 

faculty under whom I received training: Dr. Ondine LeBlanc, Dr. Cathy Moran-Hajo, Dr. 

Jennifer Stertzer, and Dr. Nick Wasmoen.  Several individuals at Michigan State University were 

instrumental in the development and implementation of the project. I am grateful to Kristin 

Mapes for the initial research images of the manuscript which enabled me to begin transcription 

work, as well as guidance in developing the website. Dr.  Scott Schopieray and Dr. Kathleen 

Fitzpatrick provided invaluable insight  related to digital scholarship. In addition, Dr. Scout 

 

v 

 

Calvert, Robin Dean, and Megan Kudzia  assisted in the creation of a preservation rationale to 

maintain a copy of the digital dissertation at Michigan State University.   Stacey Triplette, Alyssa 

Argento, and Amber Peddicord, students in the Digital Humanities Program at the University of 

Pittsburgh-Greensburg, provided assistance with TEI and XSLT encoding. Dr. Diane Duffy, Dr. 

Joanne Shattock, and Dr. Jeffrey C. Witt provided additional help with research.  The site’s 

header image was designed by Amber N. Schafer. And finally, Dr. Natalie Phillips and Dr. 

Jessica Kane provided much appreciated encouragement and support throughout the process, for 

which I am grateful. I am grateful to my husband and children for their patience and support 

throughout this process, and to my parents and parents-in-law for the many hours of selfless 

childcare and assistance which made pursuing the Ph.D. possible. 

 

 

 

 

vi 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

 

 

LIST OF TABLES 

LIST OF FIGURES 
 
INTRODUCTION 
THE JOURNAL 
 

CHAPTER ONE: THE RATIONALE 

THE EDITION 
CONTINUITY WITH PREVIOUS EDITIONS: 
JOURNALS AND LIFE WRITING 
PRESERVATION RATIONALE 
 

CHAPTER TWO: THE METHODOLOGY 

MODELS AND TRAINING 
TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE: 
EDITING POLICY 
CODING PRINCIPLES 
EDITORIAL ANNOTATION POLICY 
PRESENTATIONAL RATIONALE: THE PROBLEM WITH IMAGES: 

CHAPTER THREE: THE TEI EDITION FILE 
 
CHAPTER FOUR: “MUSIC OF [OUR] THOUGHTS”:  GASKELL’S JOURNAL AND 
MOTHERING 

GASKELL’S JOURNAL AS VICTORIAN MOTHER: 
PRESERVING MOTHERHOOD 
MOTHERLESS CHILDREN, CHILDLESS MOTHERS: 
PERFECTING MOTHERHOOD: 
GUIDING MOTHERHOOD 
PAPER MOTHERS 

CHAPTER FIVE: THE ELIZABETH GASKELL JOURNAL: DIGITAL EDITION 

WORKS CITED 

 
 

 

 

vii 

viii 

ix 

1 
2 

5 
7 
12 
20 
27 

31 
31 
34 
39 
40 
48 
50 

54 

55 
60 
67 
70 
80 
95 
104 

107 

108 

 

LIST OF TABLES 

 

 

Table 1. Costs and Funding……………………………………………………………………...33 

 

 

 

viii 

 

LIST OF FIGURES 

 

 

Figure 1. Journal Cover Image……………………………………………………………….…2 

Figure 2. A Gaskell Alphabet………………………………………………………………….13 

Figure 3: Strikethrough Example…………………………………………………………...…14 

Figure 4: XML Self-Closing Tag…………...…………………………………………………36 

Figure 5: The Edition’s Toggle Switch………………………………………………………..39 

Figure 6: The TEI <choice> element………………………………………………………….41 

Figure 7a: The Edition’s Two Views (Default)……………………………….………………41 

Figure 7b: The Edition’s Two Views (Regularized)...………………………………………...41 

Figure 8: An Editorial Note…………………………………………..……………………….44 

Figure 9: Marianne Gaskell Holland: An Example xml:id. ………………..…………………45 

Figure 10: Data Results from an Xpath search.…………………………………………….…47  

Figure 11: The Original Wireframe……………………………………………………………50 

Figure 12: The Current Edition…………………….………………………………………….51 

 

 

 

 

ix 

 

 

INTRODUCTION 

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 1844, d. 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. 

 

 

1 

 

THE JOURNAL:  

          The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is an online edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 

manuscript journal, written from 1835-1838. The transcription for this Edition reproduces the 

text from the original manuscript, currently held in the Special Collections of the Brotherton 

Library, Leeds UK. Gaskell's journal is contained in a notebook, approximately 4 1/2 by 7 

inches, bound with marbled boards. The spine and corners are in calf. The 

edges of the leaves are also marbled. The paper within the notebook has 

been gathered throughout in twelves, although the first gathering has only 

six leaves. As noted by Anita Wilson and J.A.V. Chapple, some 

gatherings contain the watermark “Harris 1822” (Wilson and Chapple 7).  

Figure 1: Journal Cover Image. 
Image of the cover of the notebook that contains Gaskell’s manuscript.  
 

The journal comprises the first approximately 80 pages of the notebook; the remaining 

pages are blank. The text is written throughout in black ink. The binding of the codex is loose in 

several places, but the notebook is still in one piece. Apart from the third page in the second 

entry, from which the top third has been cut away, the manuscript is intact. Gaskell's prose is 

quite clear and legible throughout, although the ink is fading. The fading has made certain 

portions of the text difficult to read, and has particularly affected Gaskell's out strokes, 

punctuation, and the dots on characters that contain them.  

 

The manuscript has been in the possession of Gaskell’s descendants since her death. At 

Gaskell’s death in 1865, the journal became the property of Marianne Gaskell (later Holland), 

the daughter about whom much of the journal is written, and to whom it is dedicated. Marianne 

Holland and her husband (and cousin), Thurstan Holland, had seven children, of whom three — 

William Edward Thurstan Holland, Florence Holland, and Brian Holland — survived childhood. 

 

2 

 

The journal manuscript was passed on to Marianne’s oldest son, William Edward Thurstan 

Holland, born in 1867 (Prince 12). Marianne’s younger son, Brian Holland, and her daughter, 

Florence Holland, authorized the publication of the 1923 edition of the journal (Shorter). After 

William Edward Thurstan Holland, the manuscript was passed to his only daughter, Margaret 

Evelyn Averia, called “Daysie,” who married Clifford Trevor Jones (Prince 12). Margaret’s only 

daughter, Elizabeth Rosemary, received the manuscript after this. Rosemary (later Mrs. Trevor-

Dabbs) saw Gaskell begin to gain popularity again during her lifetime, and was involved in 

several key Gaskell projects,  including the formation of the Gaskell Society and the restoration 

of Gaskell’s home, as well as the publication of Gaskell’s letters (Prince 14, Chapple xii). It was 

Mrs. Trevor-Dabbs who placed the journal on permanent loan to the Brotherton Special 

Collections, and authorized the 1996 print edition, produced by Anita Wilson and J.A.V. 

Chapple, as well as the 2006 edition by Joanne Shattock. After Mrs. Trevor-Dabbs’ death in 

2010, the journal became the property of Mrs. Sarah Prince, by whose gracious permission this 

new digital Edition has been authorized.  Mrs. Prince has written a concise version of the 

journal’s provenance in a 2010 article in The Gaskell Society Newsletter.  

 

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 

 

3 

 

tool employed for shaping a socially acceptable selfhood for Victorian mothers and daughters 

alike. 

 

 

4 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE: THE RATIONALE 

       

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition stands as a testament to the possibilities 

presented by textual encoding and opening the dissertation process to new media forms. Patrick 

Sahle claimed that “Scholarly digital editions are scholarly editions that are guided by a digital 

paradigm in their theory, method and practice,” and the use of TEI encoding provides the basis 

for such a paradigm in The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition. The added value of the 

digital scholarly edition lies in its ability to move beyond the confines of a codex presentation, 

and in the production of multiple reading views and interactive features. The Elizabeth Gaskell 

Journal: Digital Edition employs digital encoding to provide viewers a choice between a default 

diplomatic view and a normalized reading view — a choice that would remain minimally 

plausible, but significantly more challenging and costly to replicate in a print format.  

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition provides a new transcription encoded in 

eXtensible Markup Language (XML), an international standard for editing documents in the 

humanities and history, as defined by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and utilizing their 

current P5 guidelines. The TEI was founded in 1987 “to develop, maintain, and promulgate 

hardware- and software-independent methods for encoding humanities data in electronic form” 

(https://tei-c.org/about/history/). TEI documents are written in XML, published in 1998 by the 

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (Burnard 13). The TEI Consortium was founded to write 

and maintain Guidelines, which define a broad tag set to be used in textual encoding. The TEI 

guidelines provide labels and definitions for a standard group of elements and attributes. The 

Guidelines are extensive, but also allow customization and have grown with the community of 

users and the projects being created. TEI projects customize their use of the TEI through 

 

5 

 

schemas, which declare subsets of the entire TEI to be used within individual projects and can 

also modify the usage suggested in the Guidelines to fit their own projects.  

The technical implementation of TEI and related technologies within the project will be covered 

in Chapter 2: Methodology; this chapter centers around the goals of the edition which the 

technology seeks to enable.   

Built upon the premise of a digitally encoded text, this edition of the journal is not 

reproducible in a print format, because many of its users could not read the TEI file itself. Sahle 

further writes: “A digital edition cannot be given in print without significant loss of content and 

functionality” (27).  The resulting user-friendly website and its underlying TEI edition file, 

however, together with the other technological tools used to produce this edition, make possible 

an interactive user experience that places The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition within 

an ongoing trend of new Digital Humanities projects and initiatives.   

The digital paradigm on which this edition is built embeds editorial intervention and 

methodology into the encoding file. This digital edition, while it creates a new transcription of 

the manuscript text, has been envisioned as a means of presenting the text in a way that explicitly 

reveals the editorial interventions that underlie any received text. The use of XML encoding has 

made it possible to clearly mark all editorial interventions to create transparency for the reader. 

The encoding also allows readers to choose their level of interaction with the text, presenting an 

editorially annotated view and a clean, regularized reading view simultaneously in an easy to 

toggle format, with optional notes available via mouseover. The Edition similarly presents the 

manuscript images alongside the transcription to allow readers the opportunity to evaluate the 

accuracy of the transcription themselves, and to engage in analysis of both text and its original 

appearance representation at their desired level of interaction.  

 

6 

 

THE EDITION: 

          Historically, editing has taken many forms, depending upon the sources upon which 

editions are based and the goals the editors undertake when creating them. Elena Pierazzo, in her 

Digital Scholarly Editing, explains: 

 

 

 

 

editors can edit texts preserved by only one source, hence editing ‘documents’, or editors  

can try to provide an edited text combining readings coming from multiple sources, hence  

editing a ‘text of works’. While the latter is normally called ‘critical editing’, the former  

is mostly known as ‘non-critical’ or ‘documentary’ editing. (Pierazzo 13) 

Although I have consulted previous editions, The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is 

based on the manuscript text, and in this respect, is more reminiscent of a documentary edition, 

but the addition of digital technology complicates the terminology. The challenge in 

characterizing a digital edition is grounded in the use of the encoding practices that make it 

possible. Text is a string of characters, a set of bibliographic codes. The addition of textual 

markup to these codes adds a further layer for exploration, but in doing so, complicates the 

nature of the edition that has been created. XML encoding has the advantage of encoding a text’s 

features in multiple ways. According to Pierazzo, “it is possible to transcribe the text with both 

abbreviations and their expansions, with typos and without, with unconventional spellings and 

with regularised ones at the same time; furthermore, it is possible to record features that one may 

or may not want to display all the time or at all, but use them to generate statistics or indexes” 

(26). XML tags also bear tangible witness to the history of creation of texts; in the act of 

“marking-up” the transcription, the editor marks the manuscript with their own decisions and 

choices. 

 

7 

 

 The use of encoding, as Pierazzo writes, makes traditional distinctions between editing 

practices less useful. This edition, for example, seeks to create a diplomatic view of the 

manuscript text that preserves Gaskell’s own text, but this diplomatic version can be toggled into 

a regularized reading view at the reader’s discretion. The result is that while the TEI edition file 

can create a diplomatic view, the entire edition cannot justifiably be called a “diplomatic” 

edition. Pierazzo explains that in order to classify digital scholarly editions, “we need to 

distinguish the data model, where the information is added (the source) from the publication 

where the information is displayed (the output)” (25-6). The original source of the edition is 

Gaskell’s manuscript, but the source of the digital edition is the TEI edition file. The diplomatic 

transcription is one form of output. Pierazzo offers an explanation that might have been written 

to describe The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition: “in the case of many digital editions, 

the diplomatic output is interactive and can be modified by the users, meaning that diplomatic is 

only one of the possible, unstable states of the output; we could therefore even conclude that 

these are not diplomatic editions at all, but that they are something else” (28).  

While the transcription that is provided by default in this edition is intended to be 

diplomatic, I follow Pierazzo’s conclusions in terming the edition itself to be a ‘paradigmatic 

edition,’ as the choices offered to the reader are collocated in the paradigmatic axis, the axis of 

variation” (29). The edition combines with the diplomatic transcription encoding choices that are 

more reminiscent of a critical edition, including the editorial headnotes that thematize the journal 

as a text of motherhood. The end result is a paradigmatic edition that uses digital tools to invite 

readers to participate in the choice of textual representation that is produced. Taken together, the 

edition is intended as a “generous” edition that allows exploration in many directions of 

 

8 

 

Gaskell’s text and the editorial decisions that have produced its several published versions since 

her death. 

 

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition lies at the intersection of Victorian life 

writing texts, motherhood studies, and the digital humanities. As a new Edition of a Victorian 

journal, the Edition intervenes in life writing discourse through foregrounding a reading of a 

journal text as a productive tool for identity formation. Although Gaskell positions her journal as 

a reflective text designed to preserve memories of the maternal relationship, this edition positions 

the journal as a text in which Gaskell as author actively engages the journal form as a means of 

emotional self-regulation for herself, as well as her daughters. Simultaneously, the Edition 

explores the presence within the journal of multiple voices, as Gaskell’s text is not merely a 

subjective record of her own thoughts, but rather is deliberately constructed as a text that places 

mother and daughter in conversation and traces a developing relationship.  

The Edition engages Victorian studies as a piece of social history that lies at the nexus of 

multiple discourses, including maternal practice, education, and health and medicine. Gaskell’s 

journal engages with maternal expectations, invoking tropes of maternal sacrifice and sympathy 

that were prevalent in the day. Gaskell’s own proximity to several family doctors and her keen 

sense of mortality also result in the journal’s frequent references to period medicinal remedies or 

childhood diets, and the journal can be read as a sample of maternal medical practice. Further, 

Gaskell’s position in the middle-class intelligentsia and her access to resources also leaves its 

mark on the journal in several references to period prescriptive literature, including texts by 

Andrew Combe and Albertine Necker De Saussure. This new Edition brings forward these 

discourses through the inclusion of editorial notes, allowing a deeper exploration of the social 

situation of Victorian mothers.  

 

9 

 

The Victorians’ image of the mother as a domestic “angel” were heavily inflected by 

their separate spheres ideology. As Mary Poovey writes, “the model of a binary opposition 

between the sexes, which was socially realized in separate but supposedly equal ‘spheres,’ 

underwrote an entire system of institutional practices and conventions at midcentury, ranging 

from a sexual division of labor to a sexual division of economic and political rights ”  (5). 

Victorians’ expected mothers to be the seat of virtue in the home, and described the role as 

guiding the morality of the household. Mothers were, within their “sphere”, given a heavy 

responsibility, even as within the period, women’s roles were developing. Poovey cites several 

examples, including the opening of nursing as a profession and an increasing interest in women’s 

rights, and offers a rich discussion of the ways in which definitions of womanhood were shifting 

in the Victorian period. Gaskell’s journal adds another voice to this discourse. While carefully 

employing the journal to frame her own self-determined expectations for motherhood and 

tracking her adherence to self-defined goals, Gaskell simultaneously weighs and considers the 

broader opinions surrounding motherhood throughout its pages. The journal, as a result, acts as 

an instantiation of a Victorian mother attempting to shape her own role within these shifting 

cultural norms and ideology. 

The journal exists as a text predominantly predicated on motherhood, and the Edition 

brings out this focus through the inclusion of Editorial headnotes that position each journal entry 

within easily recognized age-related child development stages. These headnotes initiate a 

discourse linking Gaskell’s historical text with contemporary mommy-blogging trends, as well as 

with current childhood milestones according to scientific and educational research. The presence 

of the journal as an online, openly accessible text also acts as a model for other similar sources. 

While the publication of women’s diaries is increasing, and several maternal diaries are available 

 

10 

 

through archives and collections, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is one of the few 

such sources to be made openly, publicly available on the web, and will ideally serve as the 

impetus for future projects aimed at increasing access to maternal life writing documents. 

My work begins in the archive and mobilizes online tools and digital technology to make 

these handwritten texts, the words meticulously penned by Victorian wives and mothers amidst 

domestic duties and often behind closed doors, the focus of critical attention in the twenty-first 

century. It is my hope that this project will reach a broad audience online, consisting of literary 

scholars as well as avid readers of Gaskell’s novels. The dual views presented in the edition 

attempt to serve the needs of both populations. I am also optimistic that as the academic 

community sees more and more scholars choosing alternative dissertation paths, my work may 

play a small role in paving the way for other scholars across fields and disciplines, as I have 

myself been indebted to the work of earlier pioneering digital dissertations.  

          The digital medium rewards sharing and open-source collaboration; as such, this 

dissertation has the potential to reshape how academia values scholarly work and contributions. 

This edition aims to be intuitive for its users, while simultaneously communicating the reasoning 

for the behind-the-scenes digital work that produced it. An offshoot of this versatility is the 

requirement for “translation” of my methods and processes for a non-DH audience.  This 

dissertation relies on many key digital humanities technologies rooted in open access, including a 

GitHub repository, IIIF frameworks for image interoperability, and TEI as an international 

standard for textual encoding. Although the manuscript at the heart of the edition is still within 

copyright, I have made every effort to make the code and apparatus with which it is presented 

available to other scholars.  

 

 

11 

 

CONTINUITY WITH PREVIOUS EDITIONS: 
          Previous editions of the journal have generally also adopted a policy of retaining the 

characteristics of the manuscript, although each has adopted some processes of regularization. 

The first printed edition of the journal, published in a limited 50-copy run in 1923 by Clement 

Shorter, was entitled “ ‘My Diary’: The Early Years of My Daughter, Marianne” by the editor. 

Shorter’s edition differs from the manuscript primarily in its handling of Gaskell’s punctuation, 

and in his decision to regularize spellings throughout. Shorter’s changes were made silently. 

Although the edition offers no statement of editorial policy, a careful reading suggests that 

Shorter’s goal was to provide a clean, reading copy which adhered to contemporaneous spelling 

and punctuation. Shorter removed commas he believes are unnecessary, for example deleting 

Gaskell’s comma from the phrase “I had no idea children at her age, made such continued 

noises” (Shorter 7). Shorter also adopted regularized spellings, for example “ankles” for 

“ancles,” and made corrections to her grammar, changing it’s to its in the dedication page 

(Shorter 1; 7). He also added commas where he deems necessary, as well as regularizing the 

datelines at the heads of each entry. Shorter’s edition italicizes the words Gaskell underlined in 

the manuscript. 

 

 The two later print editions of the journal also retained Gaskell’s own text, though both 

followed Shorter’s example in entitling it a “Diary”. The 1996 edition, Private Voices: The 

Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, edited by Anita Wilson and J.A.V. Chapple, 

similarly adhered to a conservative policy of editing which involved, in the editors’ own words:  

“making only very minor changes. Superscript letters have been lowered, some full stops or 

dashes silently added and single quotation marks used instead of double” (8). Chapple and 

Wilson similarly changed Gaskell’s underlining to italics and also regularized Gaskell’s 

abbreviation of Marianne’s name to MA. Gaskell’s few self-corrections within the manuscript, 

 

12 

 

which are usually struck through with a squiggled line, were identified in the Wilson and 

Chapple edition via endnotes.  

Joanne Shattock’s 2006 edition, published in Volume 1 of the Pickering Master’s Edition 

of Gaskell’s works, is the most accurate transcription of Gaskell’s original manuscript. Shattock 

used the title “Diary” and retained Gaskell’s superscripts, punctuation, and spellings. Shattock 

regularized Gaskell’s abbreviation for Marianne to M.A. and has also changed underlining to 

italics. Shattock used symbols to denote Gaskell’s deletions, insertions, and gaps, and employed 

brackets to mark her own editorial alterations within the manuscript. 

 

This edition’s transcription of the journal was hand-encoded from photographic images 

of the manuscript obtained through the gracious generosity of Kristen Mapes, Assistant Director 

of Digital Humanities at Michigan State University. Transcription work was begun with the 

creation of a Gaskell “alphabet” — a table of representative samples of Gaskell’s handwriting for 

each character, drawn from the journal itself, now available on the website — which was used as 

a tool to assist in transcribing difficult to read words.  

Figure 2: A Gaskell Alphabet.  
A section of the Gaskell “alphabet” created by the Editor to assist in transcription. The table includes for 
each letter examples of the capital form, the letter used at the beginning of the word, in the middle, and at 
its conclusion, in order to help clarify Gaskell’s use of out strokes and other unique attributes.  

 

13 

 

Overall, Gaskell’s chirography is remarkably clear and quite consistent, however in the 

event of unclear characters, consultation was supplemented by comparison with the high-quality  

Figure 3: Strikethrough Example.  
An excerpt of the journal manuscript showing the text under discussion. The strikethrough appears at the 
end of the second line.   
IIIF images made available through the Brotherton Special Collections site, and additionally 

through in-person scrutiny of the manuscript during a research trip to the UK made in the 

summer of 2018. Where doubt remained, I have adopted a policy of submitting to the wisdom of 

previous editors and have found no reason in such cases to substantially change the transcription 

offered in these editions. In nearly every case, this new edition agrees with the faithful 

transcriptions made in 1996 by Anita Wilson and J.A.V. Chapple and in 2006 by Joanne 

Shattock. The rare occasions in which this transcription differs from previous editions have been 

noted in “Editing Policy”.   

 

In one case I have disagreed with the transcription provided by Wilson and Chapple in 

their 1996 edition. Shortly before the cut-away leaf in the second entry (August 4, 1835), a word 

occurs which is struck through. Wilson and Chapple note this word as “we,” changed from “I”. 

On close inspection of the manuscript, however, it is apparent that the strikethrough, which 

Gaskell usually writes as a horizontally squiggly line, is passing through “we” rather than “I”.  

In this case, I concur with Joanne Shattock in determining that Gaskell changed “we” to “I”, 

writing: “If weI could but consider a child properly, what a beautiful safe-guard from evil would 

it’s presence be” (Journal, August 4, 1835). Notably, this change is consistent with Gaskell’s 

 

14 

 

introspective writing throughout the journal; she critiques herself frequently, and comments on 

the responsibility which weighs heavily on her as a mother. Changing the pronoun to “we” 

would have been an uncharacteristically public gesture, given the context and tone of the rest of 

the journal.  

In three respects, this digital Edition does differ markedly from previous editions: in the 

provision of digitally enabled multiple reading variants; in my decision to preserve Gaskell’s use 

of underlining throughout the manuscript, in contrast to the previous editors’ policy of rendering 

all underlined text in italics, and in my choice to retain Gaskell’s own terminology of “journal.” 

The representation of the journal complete with its own idiosyncrasies has been the central 

driving principle of this edition.  

 

The digital medium makes possible heretofore impossible levels of comparison between 

the manuscript pages and the transcription of the journal. XML encoding has also enabled the 

edition to allow multiple reading variants for the text, to allow the reader to toggle between 

viewing archaic characters and normalized spelling, for example. The choice to maintain 

Gaskell’s underlining is twofold: first, it preserves Gaskell’s own handwriting; second, it 

provides greater clarity for reader comparison between the transcription and the manuscript 

images which are offered for the first time in this digital edition. The decision to return to 

Gaskell’s own use of the term “journal,” which has been made in contradistinction to all previous 

published editions of the text, is intended first and foremost to adhere as much as possible to 

Gaskell’s own textual choices.  

 

Gaskell never titled her manuscript, although she refers to it within the text as a 

“journal,” or as a “book.” In 1923, Clement Shorter made the decision to publish the journal with 

the title “My Diary: the Early Years of My Daughter Marianne.” Shorter’s choice to include only 

 

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Marianne’s name, and not Meta’s, may have been made for brevity, or may have been influenced 

by the fact that two of Marianne’s children, Brian Holland and Florence Evelyn Holland, were 

the owners of the copyright at the time. Shorter’s decision, however, has become established 

practice in all print editions since his own. In 1996, Anita Wilson and J.A.V. Chapple entitled 

their edition Private Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland. Joanne 

Shattock, in her edited volume, which contains Gaskell’s “Journalism, Early Fiction and 

Personal Writings,” continues this policy, choosing simply “The Diary” as a title. 

 

When Gaskell began recording her daughters’ development in March, 1835, she chose to 

call her text both “this book” and “my little journal” (Journal Dedication, March 10 1835). 

Scholars of diaries and journals have discussed the distinction in terms often, and without a 

universally clear solution. Prominent diary scholar Philippe LeJeune, in his essay, “The Practice 

of Writing A Diary”, offers a summation of linguistically based terms: “For the moment, let’s set 

aside the French expression journal intime (a diary). In German, it is simply referred to as 

Tagebuch. In English, it is either a diary or a journal. In Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, it is a 

diario” (Ben Amos & Ben Amos 27). English is the only language for which readers are given a 

choice; LeJeune actively avoids discussing the relative merit or applicability of the two terms, 

and simply delegates the choice to his readers in an ongoing refusal to fix meaning.  

 

Throughout history, life writing scholars have attempted to theorize the distinction 

between journal and diary but have failed to produce a generally accepted terminology. The most 

thorough discussions of the scholarly distinction between the terms diary and journal have been 

given by Cinthia Gannett in her Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse 

(1992) and more recently, by Rebecca Steinitz in her Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-

Century British Diary (2011). Steinitz traces the discourse back to early scholars, including 

 

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Fothergill and Ponsonby, to the present moment. Gannett cites the earliest critical study of 

diaries, Richard Fothergill’s Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (1974), stating that 

“the journal or diary as we know it today evolved from the ‘coalescence of a number of pre-diary 

habits into a form that exceeds its component elements’” (105). These forms of writing include 

“public journals, travel journals, journals of conscience or spiritual journals, and journals of 

personal memoranda” (Gannett 105). According to Gannett, “both journal and diary come from 

similar Latin roots meaning day or daily,” and “Diary was used synonymously with journal for 

hundreds of years” (107). In an ambiguous position that echoes that of LeJeune, Fothergill takes 

a similar position, writing that the “usage” of diary “appears to be indistinguishable from that of 

‘journal’” (Steinitz 8). His comment is echoed by Arthur Ponsonby, who wrote, “as it is, the 

words are used quite indiscriminately” (Steinitz 8).  

 

Although they have similar roots and histories, however, scholars have insisted at times 

on distinctions. Twenty years after Ponsonby, William Gass wrote that a diary “should be filled 

with facts, with jots, with jogs to the memory,” and a journal lets “facts diminish in importance”; 

they are “replaced by emotions, musings, thoughts” (Steinitz 8). Gass’s assessment suggests that 

the journal is more reflective. Gass’s opinion appears reversed by William Matthews, who 

claimed that “the “dull” journal has a plan, purpose, and audience, while the diary is personal, 

unsystematic, and much more interesting” (Steinitz 8). The purpose and audience Matthews 

ascribes to the journal might be partially explained by its having been a more inclusive term 

historically; according to Gannett, “the term diary has perhaps not been used to cover quite as 

wide a range of public and commercial writing practices as the term journal,” since, she 

explains, “journal” had been often used to “refer to bookkeeping and daily ledgers” as well as 

“transactions by public bodies” (107).  Expanding on her thorough research into the terms’ 

 

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history, Gannett herself connects the term diary with the feminine, writing of the term: “diary, 

which is denotatively similar, but which has come to be associated with connotations such as 

overly personal, confessional, trivial, and as I will argue, feminine” (Steinitz 8) Gaskell’s journal 

has historically been published by its editors as a “diary.” Although it bears some of the 

decidedly feminine traits that Gannett associates with the form, Gaskell’s journal also bears 

many of the reflective and descriptive traits of journals. In practice, I suggest that Gaskell’s use 

of the term “journal” most closely aligns with the more recent distinction made by Alexandra 

Johnson: “For purists, a diary is a daily factual record, dated and chronological. A journal is kept 

more fitfully and for deeper reflection. One records, the other reflects” (Johnson 13). 

Throughout history, the term “diary” has been taken to align more closely with regularity, 

and has been more narrowly and specifically defined as a document of the self, while journals 

have been used to record not only personal reflections, but also financial and club transactions, 

or travel descriptions. While the terms bear many similarities, the journal tends to be viewed as a 

flexible form, which rewards variations of thought and purpose. I take diary to refer to a genre or 

sub-genre of autobiographical writing characterized by the recording of regular, often daily, 

observations, while a journal refers to a sub-genre in which the author writes regular 

observations with a greater sense of self-reflection, as well as greater flexibility with regard to 

expressed intentions or content. To this end, this edition preserves Gaskell’s use of the term 

“journal,” and in doing so, emphasizes the varieties of purpose for which writers have used the 

practice of keeping a personal writing habit, as well as the complex set of aims and voices at 

work within Gaskell’s text. 

 

The increasing popularity of autobiographical writing, and more especially, the variety it 

takes on within the Victorian period, also reflects important changes in Victorian ideology, 

 

18 

 

beginning most obviously with the focus on the liberal individual. The immense production of 

life writing in the period suggests that Victorians were no longer content to let others write—and 

thus shape—the stories of their lives. Rather, through their engagement in life writing across 

forms, Victorians were claiming agency in crafting their own posthumous reputations and 

legacies. The function of the diary as a regulatory tool has most recently been brilliantly 

theorized by Anne Marie Millim, who writes “the diary, which functions as a site for self-

examination and as a tool for self-management, allows the selected diarists to construct and 

assert their authorship before the publication of their work” (Millim 2) The same impulse to use 

the diary to shape a public self has been noted by many scholars of diary, in texts that comprise 

individuals of all genders and classes. Indeed, rather than merely accepting the notion which 

predominates in Victorian literature, of the diary existing as “my second self, in this book, if I 

have no one else to hear me,” Victorians seemed to be increasingly aware that by engaging in 

any form of life writing, they were actively crafting a narrative that might reach a far broader 

audience than only their second selves (Delafield 1). 

In this regard, Gaskell’s choice of “journal” seems the most apt, and in keeping with the 

Editing policy of maintaining the integrity of the document, this edition has elected to retain her 

own terminology as well. Gaskell’s journal is written in starts and pauses over several years. 

Taken together, the entries average out to about one every four months. The journal is also quite 

capacious in content: encompassing Marianne’s physical and emotional development, Gaskell’s 

own fears and choices as a mother, as well as family events as they occurred. The journals are 

lengthy and reflective, rather than cursory and factual, as Gaskell herself notes: “I have written a 

great deal tonight, and very unconnectedly” (Journal 10 March, 1835). The choice of “journal” 

 

19 

 

for this new Digital Edition is meant to emphasize the “fitful” and ‘reflective’ nature of the text, 

and to invite new conversations surrounding Gaskell’s life writing.  

JOURNALS AND LIFE WRITING: 

 

While scholarship has long recognized the ubiquity and importance of letters and diaries 

to Victorians, the study of these materials has frequently reduced them to a source of 

information. Letter scholar Liz Stanley writes: “until relatively recently letters have been used 

mainly as a resource and treated as referential of a person’s life and its historical and relational 

context, with the focus on content and its recording of factual information” (“The Epistolarium” 

211). Scholarship has typically focused on letters, and diaries as well, as sources of contextual 

information often about a single public figure. Such study often occurs as part of research for a 

biography or article. The tendency to view life writing as an untapped mine of information is 

long established. Even within the Victorian age, life writing was employed within fiction itself as 

a plot device for sharing information, as Kym Brindle writes: “unearthed and exposed, letters and 

diaries disclose documentary ‘evidence’ to avidly awaiting audiences” (22). Brindle’s text 

underscores the ways in which the letters and diaries of Victorian fiction prefigured assumptions 

about these forms that have influenced scholarship, even as it marks a move within life writing 

scholarship to reexamine such texts on their own terms. Along with Brindle, recent scholars 

Laura Rotunno and Kate Louise Thomas have penned excellent studies focusing on letters within 

fiction. Catherine Golden and Karin Koehler, in turn, have contributed accounts of the progress 

of technologies associated with letter writing and the postal system in the Victorian age. 

Throughout this material, although letters and diaries are primarily discussed as devices within 

other, more obviously “literary” texts, there is a marked attention to the particular characteristics 

of the life writing genres, and their ability to stage subjectivity. 

 

20 

 

Life writing scholarship is taking a new direction that emphasizes the ability of these 

forms to actively create and drive discourses, rather than merely recording life as it passes. 

Stanley recounts: “over the last two decades or so, the emphasis has been on the performative, 

textual and rhetorical aspects of letters'' with the result that “greater attention has… been given to 

the ways that letters in a correspondence construct, not just reflect, a relationship, develop a 

discourse for articulating this, and can have a complex relationship to the strictly referential” 

(211). This project seeks to foreground the same complexity of life writing texts that Stanley 

recognizes within letters, at work here in Gaskell’s journal in the way that Gaskell uses her 

journal to shape her relationship with her daughters within the broader discourse of Victorian 

motherhood expectations.  

The edition intervenes in the ongoing trend of life writing scholarship by bringing to light 

a journal that stands on its own as the focus of scholarly work. Gaskell’s journal also invites 

scholars to view the text as an instantiating nexus of the discourses in which Gaskell was 

involved, including motherhood, Unitarianism, health and education. The Victorian period 

marked a novel, globally networked culture with an evolving mass readership, new 

communicative technologies and media, and new ways of engaging in social relationships 

through the use of these forms, as Rotunno and Golden have noted. Within the Victorian period 

the rise of literary celebrity conflicted with domestic ideologies and challenged the identities of 

authors who found themselves writing in dual spheres, simultaneously composing texts like 

novels intended for publication as well as letters and diaries, texts which were most often 

associated with domestic life, but were increasingly becoming a site of public interest. Gaskell, 

in her position as a middle class, educated woman who would go on to have a prolific 

professional career, was establishing her role as a mother within a changing culture, viewed and 

 

21 

 

scrutinized from her position in Manchester, and her journal exists as a piece of social history 

from the period. 

 

This is not to say that Gaskell offers a straightforward account of her life in Victorian 

Manchester; on the contrary, life writing texts are notoriously complex. Felicity Nussbaum 

explained, building on her study of narrative, that journals are “representations of our imagined 

relation to reality, mediated by a narrator and reader” (xiv). The complexity of the journal results 

from this imagined relationship, which is created by the writing situation of the genre itself. In an 

oft-cited essay, Walter Ong writes of the journal’s particular problem of subjectivity: “The 

audience of the diarist is even more en-cased in fictions. What is easier, one might argue, than 

addressing oneself? As those who first begin a diary often find out, a great many things are 

easier. The reasons why are not hard to unearth. First of all, we do not normally talk to 

ourselves-certainly not in long, involved sentences and paragraphs” (20). Ong explains that 

although we assume diaries are written to ourselves, the truth is less clear, and the self who is the 

recipient of the diary is always fictionalized:  

 

 

 

 

Second, the diarist pretending to be talking to himself has also, since he is writing, to  

pretend he is somehow not there. And to what self is he talking? To the self he imagines  

he is? Or would like to be? Or really thinks he is? Or thinks other people think he is? To  

himself as he is now? Or as he will probably or ideally be twenty years hence? (20) 

Although she certainly follows the convention of “long, involved sentences and paragraphs,” 

Gaskell’s audience in the journal is complicated. She simultaneously takes on Nussbaum’s roles 

of narrator and reader, as she shapes a narrative that is both written for her daughter and for 

herself: “To my dear Marianne I shall dedicate this book” she writes at the outset. Gaskell asks 

that the journal be preserved for her daughter should she not live to ‘give it her myself’, and we 

 

22 

 

recognize that her audience is the grown Marianne. Yet Gaskell also writes for herself, 

admitting: “I sometimes think I may find this journal a great help in recalling the memory of my 

darling child, if we should lose her” (Journal 7 February 1836). From the moment of its 

beginning, Gaskell writes for a reader that is simultaneously herself and her grown daughter, and 

it is clear throughout that although begun for Marianne, Gaskell uses the journal to regulate her 

own identity.  

 

Ong writes “The case of the diary, which at first blush would seem to fictionalize the 

reader least but in many ways probably fictionalizes him or her most, brings into full view the 

fundamental deep paradox of the activity we call writing, at least when writing moves from its 

initial account-keeping purposes to other more elaborate concerns more directly and complexly 

involving human persons in their manifold dealings with one another” (20). These “manifold 

dealings with one another” that Ong mentions lie at the heart of Gaskell’s journal, and center on 

the relationship between mother and daughter. Beneath the veneer of worries for her daughter 

and treasured recollections, the ‘account-keeping’ nature of a text which presents itself as a mere 

observational record, is a deep vein of self-crafting that brings the fictionalization of Gaskell as 

mother figure into sharp relief. 

          Making the Gaskell Journal available online opens new discussions surrounding 

motherhood studies. Gaskell’s journal is manifestly preoccupied with her maternal choices, and 

with her children’s development. The journal acts in one respect as an article of social history, a 

testament to the maternal practices and expectations that surrounded Gaskell in her time. On 

another level, the journal offers insight into historical child development trends; Gaskell was 

writing before the compulsory education movement, yet she made the choice to send her 

daughter to school. More poignantly, the journal offers insight into the shifting of thought 

 

23 

 

required by motherhood. Gaskell’s journal offers a model of life writing meant to represent not a 

single consciousness, but two complementary individuals in a close proximal relationship. The 

journal juxtaposes observation and confession, metacognitive analysis and sentimental reflection, 

and this multilayered portrait of feminine subjectivity in the Victorian age is instructive.  

 

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is important to scholarship as an example 

of a specifically maternal journal. While others have been identified, and in some cases 

published, motherhood journals are not widely available. Cynthia Huff has published a 

descriptive bibliography of British Women’s Diaries; of the 59 she identifies and describes, only 

twelve include descriptions of childbirth or child-rearing, and some of these are written by elder 

siblings who engaged in childcare, rather than by mothers. Margo Culley’s collection of 

American women’s journal and diary writings, A Day At A Time (1985), similarly publishes only 

excerpts. Culley writes: “I am conscious in the extreme of the limits of diary excerpts and every 

choice represents a compromise with other possible choices. My hope is that these brief 

examples of women’s periodic life-writing will stimulate sufficient interest that the reader will 

use the bibliography to seek out these diaries and others in order to experience the integrity and 

power of entire texts” (xiii). Culley’s explanation is a poignant comment on the situation of 

women’s diaries more broadly. Many archives hold mother’s diaries, but few of them have been 

digitized, resulting in a requirement for in-person access that limits their use. As a case in point, 

the Ontario Ministry of Government and Consumer Services offers an exhibit of late 19th 

century women’s diaries, which like Culley’s text, provides only excerpts. Similarly, the British 

and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries Archive offers the collected documents of over 500 

women, but the archive is difficult to search, requires a library subscription, and offers a 

fragmented presentation in which diaries are not easily read as continuous text. The creation of 

 

24 

 

the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition provides one small step toward the increasing 

availability of such texts.  

 

Gaskell’s journal stands apart among her other written legacy as an instructive text, 

which offers her prescriptive maternal advice, veiled in the trappings of memory keeping. This 

text stands out among Gaskell’s written output in that she requested that most of her life writing 

not be made public following her death. Gaskell knew firsthand the attention that was paid to 

authors’ documents after her experience writing Charlotte Brontë‘s biography. Gaskell had given 

her daughters explicit instructions that they would publish no biography (Eason 158). A prolific 

correspondent, she also made several requests over the years to her recipients that her letters be 

destroyed. She wrote to Marianne in March 1854: "Pray burn any letters. I am always afraid of 

writing much to you, you are so careless about letters,” and ends the same letter with another 

emphatic postscript: “Burn this,” (Letters 274). A mere two months later she wrote to John 

Forster: “Oh! Mr. Forster if you do not burn my own letters as you read them I will never forgive 

you!” (Letters 290) In a later letter, to George Smith, Gaskell explains her reasoning behind 

these requests: 

Now to business; only please when I write a letter beginning with a star like this on its 

front [drawing of a star], you may treasure up my letter; otherwise please burn them, & 

don't send them to the terrible warehouse where the 20000 letters a year are kept. It is like 

a nightmare to think of it.” (Letters 426) 

I have found no mention of such a warehouse actually in existence, and suspect Gaskell meant to 

add a touch of humor to her epistle. One might suggest, however, that libraries come perilously 

close to fulfilling such a function with their shelves bearing the published collected letters of 

multiple nineteenth century public figures. We might suspect that Gaskell would have gladly  

 

25 

 

given up her place on the shelf, in this case.   

The journal, however, is a text which Gaskell meant to survive her. Explicitly dedicated 

to and written for her daughter, Gaskell intended the journal to be received and read by her 

descendants, and hoped that it would be instructive for the grown Marianne: “she will perhaps 

like to become acquainted with her character in it’s earliest form” (Journal Dedication). One 

new feature of this edition which aims to prioritize the maternal texture of the journal is its 

contextual headnotes. At the beginning of each entry, I have provided readers with the ages of 

Gaskell’s daughters, the time elapsed since the last entry, and the length of the entry, as well as a 

contextual note detailing the context of the entry and key concepts that Gaskell is engaging with. 

These headnotes serve to underscore the reading of the journal with Gaskell’s own role as 

mother. These headnotes highlight the infrequency with which Gaskell wrote, and the length of 

time that she devoted to the entries that she created. A far cry from the typical daily journal 

method, Gaskell’s entries are widely spaced, but deeply introspective and reflective. The 

inclusion of the children’s ages also adds a dimension of familiarity for contemporary mothers, 

who are deluged with reminders to evaluate their own children according to developmental 

milestones, weight-for-age ratio charts, and similar standardization measures. 

 

The journal is a brief text, but it is hoped that this new edition will invite conversation 

surrounding the study of life writing texts, and in particular of those written by mothers. 

Gaskell’s journal is a highly introspective account which reveals links between motherhood, 

responsibility and deep-seated doubt. As “mommy-blogging” and social media continue to 

proliferate, consideration of historical motherhood practices and expectations opens a venue for  

comparison and study.  

The Gaskell Journal Digital Edition seeks to be transparent in its editorial treatment of the  

 

26 

 

text and aims to preserve Gaskell’s own manuscript’s individuality while rendering it available 

for others to read and study. At the same time, this digital edition provides a critical apparatus 

which foregrounds the maternal in Gaskell’s text, and simultaneously calls attention to the 

interpretive work of editing, and the ability of digital technologies to invite new and various 

interpretations of a single text. As a mixture of coding, writing, and design, the Elizabeth Gaskell 

Journal: Digital Edition seeks to open the leaves of Gaskell’s life writing to a new field of 

inquiry. 

 PRESERVATION RATIONALE:  

As this dissertation will be the first digital dissertation in the English Department at 

MSU, it was necessary to create a plan for preserving the digital portions of the site in a 

meaningful way. I have worked with several individuals with expertise in data, archiving, digital 

humanities and digital preservation to formulate the following plan for preservation of the 

website and coding files. The preservation plan for the digital portions of the dissertation is four-

fold, consisting of a video walkthrough of the site’s user experience, a time-bound capture of the 

site using Archive-it software, the submission of a PDF copy with a zipped digital file containing 

the Edition code via ProQuest, and a GitHub Fork to preserve the code at the time of final 

submission.  

Although digital content allows for broader access, the rate at which applications, digital 

formats and software changes means that digital data and products can quickly become out of 

date or be lost. As Elena Pierazzo writes, “Digital is fragile, ephemeral and mutable, all 

characteristics that are ill-suited for a medium used to convey scholarship” (4).  The ideal 

preservation plan for the digital portions of the site would be to simply direct readers or guests to 

a still-working version of the site itself, with all its commensurate parts. The reality, however, is 

 

27 

 

that the dissertation site will eventually lose functionality or be updated. As such, the 

preservation plan is based on two assumptions.  First, this preservation plan assumes that the site 

will continue to be updated and new content will be added in time. Second, the plan assumes that 

the website will eventually lose some functionality due to age, maintenance issues, or the 

obsolescence of technology, requiring either updating or a new site entirely. The plan put in 

place attempts to create a record that will allow later users to come as close as possible to the 

experience of using the original site.  

In terms of preservation, the project will benefit from the longevity of the TEI. Many 

older archival projects have recently adopted XML, as traditional files like Word and Pages are 

proprietary and are less useful for cross-platform legibility. Encoding the Gaskell Journal’s 

Edition file in TEI XML will enable the content to be quickly updated for use online as needed. 

In addition, the TEI Council continues to maintain and update the TEI Guidelines, ensuring the 

continued applicability of the technology. Another advantage is the ability to use XSLT identity 

transformations to update the TEI file. When changes to online standards occur, XSLT can be 

designed and run to make subtle changes in the original transcription, outputting the remainder 

of the text as-is, so that a single tag, for example, can be changed in one action throughout the 

text without impacting the rest of the file. XSLT can likewise be used to generate new html 

pages for the site, thereby making changes and updates simply and quickly. Additionally, the 

structure of XML embeds metadata into the file, which can be used to generate bibliographic 

citations or data for other systems, like MARC or Dublin Core. These technologies will ease the  

burden of keeping the site current.   

First, the user experience of the website itself will be preserved through a recorded 

walkthrough of the site. For this I will use Camtasia or a similar software to record a video 

 

28 

 

showing the screen as a user clicks through the site, with a voiceover. This video recording will 

save a record of the interactivity on the site at the time of submission, so that later visitors to the 

site will still be able to experience it the way it appeared at the final submission. 

 

Second, a final submission version of the site will be recorded through the use of 

Archive-It. Formed in 2006, Archive-It is self-described as “the leading web archiving solution 

for a wide range of organizations, including academic, federal, state or local libraries, archives, 

and other cultural heritage institutions” (“Archive-It”). The use of Archive-It, which provides 

services for “capturing and preserving web-based content,” will allow the creation of a 

searchable, interactive snapshot version of the site at the time of dissertation submission. The 

Archive-It capture will be produced by MSU librarians, under the guidance of Robin Dean. 

The MSU library has an established protocol for the submission of Electronic 

Dissertations as a PDF file through ProQuest. ProQuest submission also allows the inclusion of 

digital files. The written portion of the dissertation will be submitted in the usual format as a 

PDF file containing links to the dissertation website and GitHub repository. Additionally, the 

submission to ProQuest will include a zipped file of the code files for the project. This will allow 

the MSU repository to have an inclusive version of the dissertation that represents the digital as 

well as the written content. The ProQuest file will be linked to the Archive-It capture.  

 

Finally, I will create a GitHub release to preserve a version of the code at the time of 

submission. A release is a “deployable software iteration” that can be made available for 

download and use (“About Releases”). GitHub releases “mark a specific point in [the] 

repository's history” (“About Releases”). GitHub tracks the version history of the code files. By 

creating a release, the specific version that was submitted as the dissertation will be easily 

identified without the need to search through the entire commit history. The use of a release also 

 

29 

 

allows for the addition of documentation to explain the release and the code at that point. The 

dissertation PDF will contain a link directly to the release on the GitHub repository. The end 

result of the preservation plan will be a tightly cross-linked set of data and description that will 

be searchable from multiple directions.  

The Editor will also maintain a reference link to the original Dissertation release and 

documentation of the updates to the project on the main website, which will continue to be 

maintained through the Reclaim Hosting account. I will personally fund continued purchase of 

the domain name, so that the site remains available as it is updated. These measures should 

ensure that a reasonably complete version of the dissertation at the time of submission, given the 

current available tools, remains available for scholars for years to come. 

 

 

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MODELS AND TRAINING: 

CHAPTER TWO: THE METHODOLOGY 

          The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition presents the work of a first-time digital 

editor, so the dissertation required, in addition to research and writing, extensive training and 

study. As part of the process of creating this edition, it was necessary to learn XML, Xpath, 

XSLT, HTML, CSS, JavaScript; the roles of these languages in creating the project are further 

detailed below. The website files were coded by hand, as was the Edition file containing the 

transcription and markup. The transcription was also verified in a two-step process with 

volunteer readers to ensure accuracy. I have adopted standard practices in scholarly editing, as I 

have learned them through my training through the Digital Mitford Project as well as training at 

the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents.  

This digital edition is primarily modeled on The Digital Mitford Project  

(www.digitalmitford.org). The Editing policies I have adopted were developed based on my 

training in TEI at Digital Mitford Coding School, and my training as an Editor in using the 

Digital Mitford Codebook. The alternate view input box and interactive notes function of the 

Edition were created through adapting the code which creates similar features on the Digital 

Mitford site. The Edition’s design draws upon the scholarship and presentation of multiple other 

Digital Editions, including The Shelley-Godwin Archive, The Jane Addams Papers Project, and 

The Washington Papers. This new digital edition of the journal makes Gaskell’s journal — and 

for the first time, facsimile images of the manuscript pages — available together for an online 

audience, with scholarly notes and annotations, as well as contextualizing materials. 

          As a digital dissertation, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition models a range of 

digital humanities skills as well as literary analysis. The project, as is true of all DH work, is 

immensely collaborative. While the encoding, research and writing has been created by a single 

 

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Editor, the scope of the Edition has required seeking out additional models and collaborative 

relationships. The DH community at MSU provided me with a broad base of training in Digital 

Humanities methods. I received my initial training in TEI encoding through the Digital Mitford 

Coding School, led by Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg in 

2016. I am indebted to Dr. Beshero-Bondar for her tireless hours teaching me encoding 

principles and practices, and to her students who assisted me in some of the more difficult steps 

required to create the website and its files. I also received training in Documentary Editing 

through the 2018 Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents, sponsored by the Association 

for Documentary Editing (ADE) and the National Historical Publications and Records Council 

(NHPRC). Additionally, I have benefited from the example of other digital dissertation scholars, 

in particular Dr. Amanda Visconti, whose work and immense archive of digital dissertation 

resources has provided inspiration and methodical processes that have proved invaluable.    

 

SCOPE OF THE PROJECT: 

This small-scale digital edition was designed to fulfill dissertation requirements within 

the temporal, financial, and educational constraints that accompany graduate education. 

Gaskell’s journal currently resides in the Brotherton Library Special Collections at the University 

of Leeds, Great Britain, and is a brief manuscript, at 78 handwritten pages. Given the expected 

two-year time frame for dissertation completion, the journal was judged to be small enough to 

allow for completion of the edition, including time to obtain the appropriate training, and yet 

lengthy enough to justify in-depth analysis.  

In addition to the time constraints, the project was designed to accommodate the limited 

financial resources available. While this project has received generous funding in the form of a 

Student College Research Abroad Monies award (SCRAM) through the MSU College of Arts 

 

32 

 

and Letters to support on-site research in the UK, two Research Enhancement Awards from the 

Department of English at MSU and a stipend from the ADE (Association for Documentary 

Editing) to support travel to training institutes (Digital Mitford Coding School and the Institute 

for the Editing of Historical Documents), the project was otherwise individually funded by the 

Editor. Costs included the purchase of the XML Editing software: oXygen, as well as 

maintenance upgrades, and purchase of the domain name wherein the Digital Edition resides. 

The total costs of the dissertation were $6,281; $6000 of these costs were covered externally by 

the funding sources above, with the remainder paid by the Editor, as indicated in the table 

below.  

Table 1: Costs and Funding. 
The following table lays out costs and funding required to produce the Digital Edition. 

Amount:  Date: 

Funds Required For: 

Funds Supplied by: 

$600 

May, 2016 

Training: 
Digital Mitford Coding School 
(registration & travel) 

Research Enhancement 
Funds Award,  
MSU English Dept. 

$125 

$43 

December 8, 
2016 

Purchase of Oxygen XML Editor 
with one-year maintenance  

Editor 

December 8, 
2017 

Renewal of Oxygen  2-year support 
and maintenance  

Editor 

$1200 

June, 2018 

Training:  
Institute for the Editing of Historical 
Documents (IEHD) 
Hotel & per diem, 6 days 

Research Enhancement 
Funds Award,  
MSU English Dept. 

$1200 

June, 2018 

Training:  
IEHD 
Travel to Olympia, WA 

Stipend included in 
acceptance to Institute; 
Sponsored by NHPRC, 
ADE 

 
 

 

Table 1 (cont’d). 

 

33 

 

 

Amount:  Date: 
$3000 

July 28- August 4, 2018 

Funds Required For: 
Research (on-site):  
Flight to UK, hotel & 

Funds Supplied by: 
SCRAM Award 

food, transportation 

in-country (7 days) 

(Summer College 

Research Abroad 

Monies); MSU 

College of Arts & 

Letters 

$15.00 

February 23, 2020 

Purchase of Domain 

Editor 

Name for Edition 

website 

An additional $1200 in originally projected costs were rendered unnecessary in the later stages of 

the project. The Brotherton Special Collections’ digitization of the manuscript files made it 

possible to import their high-quality images into the project without the need to obtain copies. I 

am deeply grateful to the many people who have made this project possible, and who are 

mentioned by name on the acknowledgements page of the website.  

TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE:  

Multiple digital tools were utilized to store, track and build the digital Edition file and the 

website that presents it to the public. A list of tools and software used is available on the 

dissertation website: http://elizabethgaskelldiary.com/gde-projecttoolspage.html. The code files 

were written and developed using Oxygen XML Editor text editing software.  

The files for the digital edition are stored and version-controlled through a GitHub 

repository, available online: (https://github.com/MKlamer/Motherhood-Journal). In addition to 

tracking the project through maintaining a record of changes through the Git version-control 

 

34 

 

system, the GitHub repository simultaneously allows a venue for the online publication of the 

code underlying the project, participating in a movement that enables the free sharing and 

remixing of encoding structures and examples to enrich further online projects and data models. 

 

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition lives online at 

www.elizabethgaskelljournal.com. The domain was purchased by the Editor personally and has 

been mapped to the msu.domains account held by the Editor through MSU.  The domain space 

“elizabethgaskelldiary.com” has also been purchased and set up with a redirect that will lead 

users to the digital edition site. The website is hosted via a Reclaim Hosting account provided to 

the Editor by MSU, which will continue to be available until August 2021. Reclaim is a 

commercial hosting service contracted by MSU “to provide its graduate students and faculty 

with a full commercial web hosting package and domains that they control in order to build 

online spaces for professional portfolios, digital projects, and more” (“Invited”).  At the end of 

the MSU-provided hosting period, I will migrate the hosting service to a personal account where 

I will continue to run the site and update the project, adding additional modules as I am able.  

 

According to Digital Humanities expert and practitioner, Lou Burnard, “An XML 

document consists of a sequence of human readable characters, with no special additional codes 

or binary data. The characters < and > are used to mark the start and end of tags within this 

sequence” (14). XML uses these sets of tags (or elements) around or within portions of the text 

to “mark” them as containing structural or semantic metadata. Most tags are paired, consisting of 

an opening and a closing tag, which surround the text they mark. Syntactically, XML tagging is 

hierarchical; an XML document “is said to be well-formed if it respects the syntax… with start- 

and end- tags both present and correctly nested” (Burnard 15). The exception to this is milestone 

tags, which are self-closing, and do not occur in pairs. Self-closing tags are used to balance the 

 

35 

 

need to encode visual and semantic moments in the text which would normally break the XML 

hierarchy. For example, a paragraph is often marked in XML by placing <p> tags around the 

text. When a paragraph, however, flows from one page onto the next, the milestone tag <pb/> 

which is self-closing and does not require pairing, can be inserted within the paragraph tags. 

Without milestone elements, markup for each individual page and paragraph would overlap, 

breaking the hierarchy. 

Figure 4: XML Self-Closing Tag. 
XML from TEI Edition file, showing the self-closing page beginning element (in purple) nested within the 
paragraph tags. 
 

An XML prosopography index which gathers information on all the relevant people, 

places and texts within the journal was produced simultaneously with the transcription file. This 

prosopography assigns unique xml:ids to each entity within the journal (as well as several others 

referenced in the contextual documents produced as part of the edition), which are tracked and 

validated through the schema to ensure consistency across project documents. The 

prosopography gathers relevant detail about these entities that can be used to provide annotations 

and indexes, and can be mobilized in later stages of the project to connect Gaskell’s social 

network to those of other prominent figures in the period, and to create data visualizations to 

support the project. The visualizations can be developed through the use of data obtained from 

the edition file. Xpath, a query language used to select nodes of an XML document, can be used 

 

36 

 

to read quickly through the XML hierarchy to determine, for example, how many times each 

individual within the text is referenced. The resulting data could be organized into a table and 

output as a cluster visualization depicting the relative frequency with which Gaskell refers to 

each in the journal.  

In addition to the core transcription, the digital edition of the journal makes use of an 

ODD file. The journal's ODD file governs the code through setting rules and structures against 

which the transcription is validated. This ODD validation ensures that the code conforms to a 

correct, hierarchical TEI structure, while also ensuring the project's own consistency in the usage 

of uniquely assigned xml:ids and designated subset of TEI tags. The project also implements 

XSLT (extensible stylesheet transformations) which transform the XML transcription into a 

machine-readable html file for display on web browsers. 

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition also implements XSLT (extensible 

stylesheet transformations) which convert XML into a machine-readable HTML file for display 

on web browsers. The “Key People” page of the Edition website was produced via an XSLT 

transformation of the prosopography file. The edition’s core HTML digital edition page uses 

XSLT to seamlessly combine the TEI edition file with data from the XML prosopography file, 

enabling users reading the digital edition to mouseover and see notes about key people, which 

are drawn from the prosopography. XSLT was also used to create the HTML table of contents 

that begins the edition. The well-formedness of XML, together with XSLT, also allows the use 

of identity transformations, which can be written to make simultaneous adjustments throughout 

the code file, should updating be necessary. Additional website pages have been encoded using 

HTML and the entire Edition website is styled with a single CSS file. JavaScript has been added 

to the Digital Edition page to create an input box, which allows users to select between annotated 

 

37 

 

and simple reading views of the text. 

 

I am grateful to the Brotherton Special Collections, whose investment in the long-term 

availability and sustainability of the manuscript, currently in their possession, produced the IIIF 

images which the edition imports. The Brotherton images of the journal pages are facilitated and 

implemented through IIIF technology (International Image Interoperability Frameworks). 

According to the IIIF website,  

The IIIF standards are a set of shared application programming interface (API)  

specifications for interoperable functionality in digital asset repositories. Using  

JSON-LD, linked data, and standard W3C web protocols such as Web Annotation, IIIF  

makes it easy to parse and share digitized materials, migrate across technology systems,  

and provide enhanced image access for scholars and researchers. (https://iiif.io/)   

 

 

 

 

IIIF (recently amended to IxIF to allow flexibility in promoting openness for multiple media 

formats) makes images available using a universal API (application programming interface), 

which locates the files at a persistent link. The advantages of IIIF are twofold: first, the images 

are merely displayed through the API, which means they do not have to be stored on the site; 

second, the images are provided in a high-resolution format. As IIIF makes its materials 

available without requiring users to have their own copies, it does not require explicit copyright 

permission. The IIIF image links were obtained through the IIIF manifest JSON file, available on 

the Brotherton Special Collections website. This JSON file was searched and collated by the 

editor into a dataset, now available on the GitHub repository, which provides a linked open data 

list of all the IIIF images of the manuscript produced by the Brotherton Special Collections.  

The resulting Digital Edition is built on the understanding that the use of these digital 

tools makes available to the reader the methodological and editorial decisions that underlie the 

 

38 

 

presented text of the journal. The complete TEI edition file is available on the site through a link 

to the GitHub repository. The digital medium also offers the option of allowing readers a choice 

between a simple reading view of the text and an annotated version. Throughout, the policy of 

this edition has been to adhere to Gaskell’s own choices; the XML markup, however, makes it 

possible to simultaneously encode a regularized alternative to obscure spellings or chirography 

(as in the case of Gaskell’s “long s” usage), which enables the reader to engage with the text at a 

level they are comfortable with. The use of encoding also makes possible new levels of analysis 

through digital tools that can provide insights into Gaskell’s social network.   

EDITING POLICY:  

 

The editing policy, in keeping with the goals of producing a strictly diplomatic 

transcription in the default view, has been to preserve Gaskell’s own spelling and punctuation as 

it exists in the manuscript, while encoding regularized versions simultaneously in the TEI edition 

file to allow for multiple reading views. The project’s use of the TEI currently makes possible 

two views for readers: a default diplomatic view and a simplified reading view. The alternate 

views are made possible because both variants are encoded side by side within the TEI file and 

output as HTML. A combination of JavaScript and CSS are used to make only one variant 

appear at a time. The Digital Edition displays the diplomatic transcription by default, but site 

users have the option to select a ‘normalized view’ by clicking a toggle switch.  

 

39 

 

Figure 5: The Edition’s Toggle Switch. 
 A view of the toggle switch in the Digital Edition, which enables users to toggle to the normalized view 
by clicking the checkbox or its tan label. 
 
CODING PRINCIPLES: 

  

Structural Markup: 

 

The journal has been encoded as a single TEI XML file. Journal entries, together with 

their respective headnotes, are enclosed within TEI <div> tags, which are designed, according to 

the TEI, to “contain a subdivision of text” with an attribute of @type="journal" (Guidelines). 

These <div> elements are numbered and have been assigned unique ids for linking online. Each 

individual headnote and entry is further delineated using <div> elements using type="headnote" 

and type="entry" attributes accordingly. The initial dedication page is encoded using the same 

structure with a “dedication” value on the “type” attribute. Each <div> has been provided with a 

number attribute for easier identification. Within each headnote, the text is preceded by a set of 

encoded TEI <head> tags which include the date of the entry, the ages of Gaskell’s daughters at 

the time of writing, the time elapsed since the previous entry, and the approximate length of the 

entry, counted in manuscript pages.  

 

Within the <body> of the file, the XML encoding is used to mark the structure of 

Gaskell’s text. This markup includes TEI <p> tags to denote each paragraph, <lb/> elements to 

 

40 

 

mark new lines, and the TEI page beginning element, <pb/>, for new page breaks. This structural 

markup allows the site to render the transcribed lines directly alongside the manuscript lines as 

they appear in the original. Pagination has been applied by assigning page numbers in sequential 

order beginning with the first blank page of the journal in which the manuscript is written. 

Gaskell quotes once (unattributed) from a poem; these lines have been encoded using the TEI 

<lg> (line group) and <l> (line) elements accordingly. 

Paradigmatic Markup: 

          The choice of views is made possible by the use of the TEI <choice> element, which  

according to the TEI guidelines, “groups a number of alternative encodings for the same point in 

a text.” The <choice> element wraps both the diplomatic form, which is itself wrapped in <sic> 

tags, and the regularized form, wrapped in <reg> tags. I have adopted a policy of applying 

<choice> elements to markup any instances where Gaskell’s word choice differs from 

contemporary usage. 

 

Figure 6: The TEI <choice> element. 
An example of the TEI <choice> element from the project, wrapping both Gaskell’s usage of a 
nonstandard form of “any thing” and the regularized form.  
 
The case above depicts the encoding of Gaskell’s use of split words which are commonly 

compounds in contemporary usage: in particular “any thing,” “every thing,” and “any one.” Use 

of TEI <choice> allows the edition to maintain Gaskell’s own usage, as well as provide a 

normalized rendering. On the resulting Edition page, the default view displays Gaskell’s text as 

written; when the user selects “normalized view”, the regularized form “anything” appears. 

 

41 

 

  
Figure 7a: The Edition’s Two Views (Default) 
Figures 7a and 7b demonstrate Gaskell’s use of “any thing” in the two views offered by the Edition. 
Figure 7a above shows the Edition’s default view (Gaskell’s own text). 
 

Figure 7b: The Edition’s Two Views (Regularized)  
Figure 7b above shows the Edition’s regularized form, “anything,” which appears when the user selects 
normalized view via the toggle switch. 

The <choice> element is also used to highlight Gaskell’s occasional use of the long s 

 

character for double medial s patterns throughout the journal. In order to render this visible to the 

reader, Gaskell’s long s characters have been encoded using the Unicode character #383&. The 

long s, where it appears, is also wrapped in a <choice> element using <sic> to indicate the long s 

as written and <reg> to indicate the regularized spelling. The long s appears in the default view 

and is replaced by “s” in the normalized view. 

 

Gaskell tends to write words which break across the line in her journal entries. In nearly 

every case, she inserts an equal sign on both sides of the break, as in the following example:   

 

 

 

 

“affect=  

=ions”.  

Within the edition file, my policy has been that all new lines are denoted in the markup with the 

use of a TEI line beginning element: <lb/>. According to the TEI, “<lb> (line beginning) marks 

the beginning of a new (typographic) line in some edition or version of a text” (TEI Guidelines). 

The <lb> element is a self-closing tag, meaning it can be placed within any element without 

breaking the TEI hierarchy. Line beginning elements which occur during a split word have been 

encoded with the additional @break attribute with a value of "no" to indicate that the line does 

 

42 

 

not begin with a new word as in other places of the manuscript. The equal signs stand outside of 

this markup, and thus appear as part of the text in the Edition. There is one exception to this 

policy. In the second journal entry, the top third of one page is missing — the very straight edge 

of the gap indicates it was cut away at some point. On the recto side of this gap, an equal sign 

followed by a partial character appears, indicating that this section of the page did contain text 

before its removal. As this symbol appears without context, it has not been encoded. Instead, the 

equal sign is mentioned as part of the editorial note identifying the gap in the manuscript. 

         This cutaway page in entry two is the most significant alteration in the manuscript; on the 

whole, Gaskell’s text is very cleanly written. She has changed or struck through the text in only a 

dozen or so places; she marks each strikethrough with a squiggled line. The large cutaway is 

marked with a TEI <gap> element. Any obscure or difficult to read text has been marked with a 

TEI <unclear> element. In cases where the <unclear> text is legible, I have included it within a 

TEI <supplied> element, and have followed the tagging with an editorial TEI <note> containing 

a @resp attribute which explains the origin of the supplied text and, if applicable, justification 

for the addition.  

One unusual feature of the journal is Gaskell’s frequent use of lengthy spaces within the 

text. These spaces occur mid-line within the text and are approximately the same width as 

Gaskell’s paragraph indentations. Encoding these spaces was complicated because they 

inconsistently function as either a terminal gap, which appears to fall between two topically 

different paragraphs, or simply as elongated spaces. In an attempt to avoid imposing editorially 

inflected order upon the text, I have encoded these with TEI <space> elements, with a @type 

attribute that designates, to the best of my knowledge, whether each gap functions as a terminal 

stop or merely a sentence-level  pause. According to the Guidelines, “<space> indicates the 

 

43 

 

location of a significant space in the text” (Guidelines).  The long spaces are rendered in the 

HTML output through the use of the HTML non-breaking space character. 

 

On five occasions, where it appeared desirable to improve the clarity of the text for the 

reader, closing parentheses, one closing quotation mark, and some periods which Gaskell 

omitted were supplied as part of the encoding, with a TEI <supplied> element surrounding the 

punctuation that is not original to the manuscript and an editorial TEI <note> element 

which  indicates the extant state of the manuscript as well as the editorial addition. Notes are 

accessible to readers by hovering over the note number regardless of the view they have selected. 

In each case of editorially supplied material, I have denoted editorial responsibility by enclosing 

my own initials in a @resp attribute.  

 

Figure 8: An Editorial Note. 
A view of the website, showing the numbered editorial note (in red), and the note which appears on user 
hover or click. The note also shows the content of the @resp attribute, denoting the editor’s responsibility 
for the supplied quotation marks. 
 
Diplomatic Transcription: 

 

The transcription within this edition reproduces Gaskell’s own spelling, punctuation, and 

capitalization. In addition to my use of the <choice> element to mark the archaic long s character 

and Gaskell’s occasional spellings, I have included an editorial <note> tag offering further 

information to the reader at times; these additional notes primarily concern Gaskell’s references 

to obscure foods or medicinal remedies, and the previously mentioned instances of clarifying 

illegible text or editorially supplied punctuation. Superscript, which appears primarily in 

 

44 

 

Gaskell’s datelines, as well as Gaskell’s changes, which appear as strikethroughs, have been 

encoded with a TEI <hi> element with a @rend attribute.  

 

The unique entities named in the journal have all been given individual xml:ids. The TEI 

@xml:id attribute “provides a unique identifier for the element bearing the attribute” 

(Guidelines). Each unique entity in the journal — person, place, or text — is given an xml:id that 

is unique throughout the TEI file. There are nineteen individuals named within the text. Xml:ids 

have also been provided for several individuals who are not named or referenced in the journal, 

but who played a significant role in Gaskell’s life and are therefore frequently mentioned in 

editorial headnotes and other contextualizing information. Similar structuring has been employed 

to assign names to these individuals. For people, places, and texts named within the manuscript 

or included in the encoded editorial notes, I have applied TEI <persName>, <placeName> and 

<title> tags. These are all assigned @ref attributes which hold the unique xml:ids so that these 

entities are accurately tracked throughout the file.  

 

The methodology used in naming these entities is as follows; xml:ids have been created 

to assist in human readability of the code. Assigned xml:ids begin with the name that Gaskell 

most commonly applies within the journal and are followed with an underscore and the last 

name. In the case of married women, the first name is followed by underscores and the maiden 

name, followed by the married name of the individual. In this way the xml:ids are connected 

both to Gaskell’s usual notation and to the individuals’ legal names in an attempt to aid scholars 

approaching the code from multiple angles. Where last names are not known, another descriptor 

is applied; this is particularly true of servants, whose surnames are in most cases unknown. For 

servants, the word _household has been added for additional clarity. Where multiple names are 

used throughout the journal for the same individual, the shortest form has been adopted. This 

 

45 

 

xml:id naming methodology is used throughout the text.  

 

The xml:id naming conventions are illustrated by the name assigned to Marianne. Gaskell 

refers early on to her daughter Marianne, the primary subject of the journal, by her full first 

name. Later in the text, Gaskell begins referring to Marianne frequently by only the first two 

initials: MA; this shorthand has become common usage among previous editors of the journal. 

Marianne Gaskell eventually married after her mother’s death, becoming Marianne Holland.  

Thus the xml:id chosen for Marianne Gaskell Holland, MA_Gaskell_Holland, reflects each of 

these names. In this way, the id links Marianne both with Gaskell’s shorthand for her, while still 

identifying both the name by which she is known throughout the time of the journal (Gaskell) 

and the name by which she became known to history as her mother’s heir and executor 

(Holland). It is hoped that these measures make the names in the text as human readable as 

possible, while also making the distinctions between multiple individuals with the same name as 

clear as possible without consulting the prosopography file.  

Figure 9: Marianne Gaskell Holland: An Example xml:id.  
A screenshot of the TEI edition file, showing Marianne’s name wrapped in a <persName> tag with her xml:id as the 
@ref attribute. 
 

 

ISO standard date forms were used wherever possible. ISO, or the “International 

Organization of Standardization” in English, is “an independent, non-governmental international 

organization with a membership of 164 national standards bodies,” which sets international 

standards that assist in the sharing of knowledge (ISO 8601). Standard ISO 8601 is an 

internationally accepted way of presenting dates and times. Full dates are given in the headings 

 

46 

 

of each entry, using the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD. Within the text of entries, complete or 

partial dates are often given, and are encoded within TEI <date> elements using the @when 

attribute.  

 

In addition to the advantage of adhering to an established standard, the use of ISO dating 

also allows for computer processing of dates used within the manuscript. As an example, when 

the date markup of the journal entries was complete, I was able to use the Xpath query language 

to automatically pull out the dates and create a computer-generated list in a standardized format. 

The resulting string of data also served a research purpose, in that Xpath allows a chosen output 

method. In this case, the search asked for the output to include computer-generated dates days of 

the week, even in cases where Gaskell had not included them in her entries.  

The use of ISO dates automated supplying the additional information. ISO 8601 also allows for 

the use of partial dates, containing for example, only a month and year. As Gaskell often referred 

back to the events of previous months not recorded in the journal with these partial forms, i.e. 

“last July” etc., the ISO date is given as completely as possible.  In cases where a complete date 

is not written within the text, but can be logically determined through comparison to other 

entries, letters, or the like, and an editorial note is encoded within the text to indicate the means 

through which the superadded date was supplied by the editor. In each case, the encoding also 

includes the xml:id of the responsible editor through a @resp attribute.  

Figure 10: Data Results from an Xpath search. 
The string-joined data results of an Xpath search over the TEI edition file, giving full ISO dates of each 
diary entry in chronological order. The highlighted text represents the data Gaskell omitted, which was 
supplied by the search. 

 

47 

 

EDITORIAL ANNOTATION POLICY:  

          The annotation applied to the Digital Edition is facilitated using an XML prosopography 

file, which lists all people, places, and texts referenced within the journal. The prosopography is 

built as an index, using a TEI <listPerson> element, which is defined by the guidelines as 

follows: “<listPerson> (list of persons) contains a list of descriptions, each of which provides 

information about an identifiable person or a group of people, for example the participants in a 

language interaction, or the people referred to in a historical source” (Guidelines). The 

prosopography file includes within the list, a <person> element and assigned @xml:id for each 

unique individual. These xml:ids are cross-checked for validity within the Edition file using the 

schema, which declares the valid forms of each xml:id. Within each person entry in the 

prosopography, I have encoded a <note> which contains a brief annotation identifying the person 

and details relevant to the context in which they appear within the journal or their role in 

Gaskell’s life. These note elements are encoded with a @resp attribute denoting my editorial 

responsibility for the note. Places, texts, and their authors are similarly identified, encoded, and 

included in the prosopography with a unique identifier and a note containing a @resp attribute. 

The schema validates all xml:ids for places and texts as well, ensuring that identification of these 

entities is consistent.  

 

I have also added editorial notes, which are embedded into the Edition file immediately 

following the content they reference using the <note> element. Editorial notes have been used to 

denote content that may be unclear for a contemporary audience, such as references to period 

texts and authors, or in some cases, Gaskell’s health remedies. Editorial notes have also been 

utilized to identify editorial interventions in the text, such as the supplying of missing 

parentheses, and the identification of the cutaway section of the manuscript, always with a @resp 

 

48 

 

attribute. As the entire edition has been produced by a single editor, these attributes function less 

to distinguish between multiple scholars and instead to identify any information within the 

edition that has been editorially supplied beyond the original content of the text. 

 

Another aspect of the edition file which has been editorially supplied is the inclusion of 

markup surrounding Gaskell’s prayers. I have used the TEI <seg> element, which marks 

arbitrary segments of a text, with an @type attribute (value of "prayer") to markup the moments 

in the text where Gaskell’s text shifts into a direct address to God, written as prayers for herself 

and for her daughters. Religious journals were a conventional genre in the eighteenth century and 

Gaskell’s Unitarian faith is well established; thus marking up the places where the text bears a 

resemblance to the former genre allows for scholarly comparison with other women’s religious 

self-analysis and reflection, in addition to calling out a thematic element in Gaskell’s journal. 

          Headnotes have been provided for each journal entry to allow readers greater 

contextualization. These headnotes begin with a set of identifying characteristics that are applied 

to each entry, identifying the ages of Gaskell’s daughters when the entry was written, the date of 

the entry, the time elapsed since the previous entry, and the approximate manuscript length of the 

entry. Headnotes also include short paragraph-length information which gives information about 

the content of each entry, and places them in the context of preceding or following entries and 

contemporaneous historical events. Headnotes are styled in italics within the Edition HTML file 

to distinguish them from the journal content. 

          All contextual information contained in the Edition is drawn from the TEI Edition file 

and the TEI prosopography file. The notes for individual people and places are contained within 

the TEI prosopography file, while headnotes and editorial notes are contained within the XML 

transcription file. The content of the online digital edition page has been produced by an XSLT 

 

49 

 

transformation which combines the content of both files and outputs their content in the edition’s 

HTML format. Embedded notes are made visible within the Digital Edition page through 

JavaScript and are styled with the project’s CSS file.   

 PRESENTATIONAL RATIONALE: THE PROBLEM WITH IMAGES: 

          This project was initially conceived with the aim of providing images of the manuscript 

pages in a clear, side-by-side format with transcriptions of the original manuscript pages.  

Figure 11: The Original Wireframe.  
A screenshot of the original wireframe showing the imagined appearance of the Edition page in a side-by-
side layout with navigational links above. This design was abandoned in favor of the current scrolling 
appearance in order to maintain the text’s structure.  
This early wireframe was modeled on the appearance of the Shelley-Godwin Archive. During the 

 

process of building the digital edition, a new visual model was devised which presents the 

edition not in individual boxes, but in a continually flowing container on the left side of the 

object window, with the images that correspond to each section of the manuscript floated on the 

 

50 

 

right in approximately the same location. This decision to change the page structure was not 

taken lightly and is the product of much deliberation regarding the semantic structure of the text 

and of the project itself. 

Figure 12: The Current Edition. 
The new edition page structure, with the text in a continuous scroll on the left and the IIIF images floated 
to the right using CSS.   
 

       

The structural markup that has been applied to the manuscript transcription clearly 

delineates Gaskell’s own paragraph structure and adheres closely to her semantic choices. This 

edition does not alter Gaskell’s punctuation; I have chosen instead to allow the paragraphs to run 

as long as she chose to continue them. This careful markup is intended to present the text as a 

fluid whole, without artificial divisions introduced by the page breaks. At the same time, one 

goal of this edition was to represent the manuscript pages, which are unavoidably linked with the 

codex form in which they are physically bound, to audiences without requiring a journey to the 

Brotherton Special Collections to view them.  

    

A conflict arose when considering how best to structure the text and images so as to view 

them together. During the encoding stage, line beginning elements had been applied so that the 

text could be matched effectively with the manuscript images. In designing the website structure,  

 

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however, it became apparent that an attempt to line up the text alongside each image prioritized 

the codex form by invoking it as a structural hegemony for the transcribed text. In order to 

smoothly allow a page-by-page structure that presented images and their transcription side-by-

side, priority would have to be placed on the page beginning elements in the code. Page breaks 

are self-closing elements that do not need to adhere to XML’s hierarchical structure and sit 

outside of the regular syntactical relationship between entries and paragraphs. In order to create 

digital synchrony with the images, it would have been necessary to “flatten” the paragraph-based 

markup structure that had been applied to the text, in effect, “breaking” much of the code.  

 

XML is a hierarchical language, meaning that most tags which are used to bracket, and 

thereby “markup,” the text need to occur as nested pairs. The paragraph elements, for example, 

are like a “box” placed around a section of the text, which cannot be broken. Other elements 

paragraph must either fit completely into the box — as in the case of tags that both open and 

close within the paragraph — or must exist as a larger box that completely surrounds the 

paragraph, effectively opening and closing or wrapping around it. Because the physical 

manuscript pages have beginnings and endings that do not regularly coincide with the beginnings 

and endings of paragraphs, it would have been necessary to change the paragraph-level markup 

by replacing the paired “opening” and “closing” tags with self-closing elements. Self-closing 

elements are used individually, rather than in pairs, allowing them to sit at any point within the 

textual hierarchy, which can be quite helpful, but the result is that the semantic effect of the self-

closing element is quite different from paired tags: since self-closing elements cannot wrap 

around a portion of the text, they act as milestone markers instead. Self-closing elements cannot 

be identified with a portion of text, but only with a specific place within it, much like a period.  

          While changing the paragraph-based markup would have been possible, it would have 

 

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fundamentally altered not only Gaskell’s journal, but also its readability. Flattened paragraphs 

would have falsely divided the text, through effectively “chunking” it up and separating the text 

based on arbitrary page break divisions. In addition, the loss of the paragraph tags would render 

the XML text nearly unsearchable. One of the primary values of an XML transcription is that the 

nested hierarchy allows for easy searchability through Xpath, searches that can be built on and 

productively mobilized through XSLT. Without the paragraph markup, Xpath would be required 

to look through nearly the entire manuscript for any instances of individual text or structures, 

instead of being able to follow a clear path down the XML tree from major sections to 

subsequently smaller elements to reach the desired result. “Chunking” the text to align with 

arbitrary page breaks similarly alters its human readability, by dividing the text into divisions 

that do not correspond to Gaskell’s semantic choices.  

         

I have therefore chosen to alter the initial design structure in favor of one which will keep 

the journal text intact, while providing internal links for easy navigation by users. The images 

will be presented in a relative location to the portions of the text they represent, allowing users to 

view and study both per the goals of this new Edition. A future goal, after the dissertation stage, 

is to further refine the site presentation in such a way that the text is prioritized and unaltered, 

offering the contextual notes and information that this edition is intended to provide, while also 

producing a secondary, image-based viewing option. Possibilities for viewing the images include 

separating the transcription from a IIIF based image presentation which allows in-depth 

examination, including zoom capability, which is not presently available in the edition, or an 

image-first page which subsequently opens the appropriate section of the transcription file for 

users who seek direct comparison of the transcription with the original manuscript. 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER THREE: THE TEI EDITION FILE 

The core and central deliverable of the digital edition is the TEI XML edition file. To 

view the TEI file, please visit the project’s GitHub repository, available via direct link from the 

digital edition website. The repository is available at: (https://github.com/MKlamer/Motherhood-

Journal).  

 

 

  

 

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CHAPTER FOUR: “MUSIC OF [OUR] THOUGHTS”:  

GASKELL’S JOURNAL AND MOTHERING 

In the penultimate sentence of her journal’s opening entry, Elizabeth Gaskell evokes a 

powerful metanarrative description of her journal’s creation that foregrounds the mother-child 

bond that was its catalyst. Gaskell recounts writing her journal while listening to her sleeping 

daughter, Marianne, “whose regular breathing has been the music of my thoughts all the time I 

have been writing” (Journal, March 4, 1835). In this moment, Gaskell the writer and Gaskell the 

mother are inextricably intertwined, and both take their impetus from the sleeping Marianne, in 

whose presence the text is written, and without whom it would not exist. Marianne and her 

mother are bound together in this moment, and Gaskell draws out this connection with her 

musical metaphor, wherein her own musings and her daughter’s restful breathing combine to 

create a peaceful harmony. It is this image of the maternal relationship as music that sets the tone 

for the entire journal as a text that records, reflects on, and mourns motherhood, while taking on 

a mothering role itself.  

The oft-cited fact that Gaskell's maternal loss propelled her into a writing career creates 

the temptation to neatly — but falsely — separate Gaskell's life into distinct periods of 

mothering and writing. In the preface to Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton, Gaskell herself 

famously wrote: “Three years ago I became anxious (from circumstances that need not be more 

fully alluded to) to employ myself in writing a work of fiction” (3). The circumstance Gaskell 

alluded to was the loss of her nine-month-old son, who had succumbed to scarlet fever while on 

a family trip. The link Gaskell forges in this preface between her maternal loss and her 

authorship has been perpetuated by biographers for over a century, leading to an assumed 

separation between her roles as mother and author. Angus Eason, for example, wrote in 1979: 

“Whatever part the children played in [Gaskell’s] writing… only one seems responsible for 

 

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starting her writing, and that, tragically, her only son, William […] who died in August 1845, 

within a year of birth” (Eason 36). Eason’s emphasis on this causative relationship between 

Willie’s death and Gaskell’s authorship continues in contemporary scholarship. More recently, 

the brief biography of Gaskell provided by the British Library’s online resource, Discovering 

Literature, makes a similar claim: “Shattered by the death of her infant son in 1845, [Gaskell] 

turned to writing for solace” (“Elizabeth Gaskell”). Admittedly, these critics are correct in 

observing that Gaskell’s novels postdated the births of her children. In their use of absolute 

terminology however, like “started her writing” and “turned to writing”, they suggest a marked 

change or shift toward a writing career that misrepresents Gaskell’s long standing commitment 

to writing during the early years of her motherhood. Her authorship, according to these 

assessments, appears to have begun suddenly, as an escape from the trials that come with 

motherhood. Gaskell, however, had been writing for many years; Willie’s death, far from 

inciting a new career trajectory, merely shifted the balance of her responsibilities more strongly 

toward intentional, professional writing. 

Gaskell wrote even in the early years of her motherhood, both for public audiences and in 

her journal, as a way to consciously shape her own maternal practice. By the time of Mary 

Barton’s publication, Gaskell had been writing poignantly about her motherhood — in poems, 

letters, and in her journal — for nearly fifteen years, beginning in 1834. She had also been 

writing for publication since 1836, and possibly sooner, though no evidence has survived. 

Writing, far from being an escape, was a core activity of Gaskell’s life, and of her motherhood, 

although the two pursuits frequently interrupted each other. Gaskell wrote in 1862 to an aspiring 

author whose name has not been identified about the challenge of balancing writing and 

motherhood: “When I had little children I do not think I could have written stories, because I 

 

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should have become too much absorbed in my fictitious people to attend to my real ones” 

(Letters 695). Within this letter, Gaskell suggests that mothering took priority over her writing in 

the years before Mary Barton. The level of care she put into her fictional “people” led her to 

consciously prioritize her own children. Yet she did write — in spite of her assertions in this 

letter — even while her children were ‘little’.  

 

The roles of mother and writer were, for Gaskell and for many other women, never 

mutually exclusive, and instead, were intrinsically connected and mutually productive forces. 

Gaskell’s first publication, a poem entitled “Sketches Among The Poor”, was co-authored 

with husband William and appeared in print in January 1837, in Blackwood's Edinburgh 

Magazine (volume xli, p. 48-50). The publication of this poem suggests that as early as 1836, 

when fifteen-month-old Marianne was their only daughter, the Gaskells were already engaged in 

writing professionally. Margaret (called “Meta”), the Gaskells’ second daughter, was born in 

February 1837, a month after “Sketches” was published. Around the same time, the journal 

began to bear signs of Gaskell’s professional writing aspirations; Gaskell refers to one late entry 

in 1838 as a “chapter”. The following year, in 1839, William Gaskell published Temperance 

Rhymes anonymously; Elizabeth Gaskell recounts in an 1841 letter to an American Unitarian 

minister, John Pierpont, that the volume had been praised by Mary Howitt and Wordsworth 

(Further Letters 24). Gaskell was silent on the subject of her own success in the same letter, 

although she too, had been published again. By late 1839, when the Gaskells’ daughters were 

five and two, William Howitt had published an excerpt of one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters in 

his Visits to Remarkable Places, and a second excerpt appeared in another work in 1840 

(Handley 37). These published excerpts were drawn from letters written in 1838, at the same 

time she was keeping the journal about young Marianne and Meta. Mary Barton was begun after 

 

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Willie’s death in 1845, when the Gaskells’ third daughter, Florence, was only three. At the time 

of its publication in 1848, Marianne, Meta, and Florence were aged 14, 11, and 6, and Gaskell 

had yet another toddler at home: her youngest daughter, Julia, who had been born in 1846 

(Handley 46). Although she claims that fiction would have taken her attention away from her 

daughters, Gaskell’s publication history shows that writing was never far from her mind, even 

during the earliest years of her motherhood. 

   

Scholars frequently comment on the detail Gaskell brings to her depictions of others, a 

descriptive subtlety that also marks her journal. As Anita Wilson claims in her introduction to the 

1996 version of the journal: “without sentimentality or condescension, Gaskell chronicled the 

pleasures and dilemmas of daily life with a keen sense of observation, sympathy, curiosity, and 

humour – the qualities which would later characterize her fiction” (26). While claiming that “[the 

diary] has not received the scholarly consideration it deserves,” Wilson suggests the journal is 

amateurish: “a foreshadowing of her development as a novelist” (11). Wilson similarly claims 

that Gaskell’s “emerging roles as new mother and apprentice writer are mutually illuminating as 

she recounts her experiences with the challenges, dilemmas, and rewards of Victorian 

parenthood” (26). This identification of Gaskell’s journal as the work of an ‘apprentice writer’ 

effectively subordinates Gaskell’s unpublished works to her better-known novels.  Yet Gaskell’s 

depictions of ‘the pleasures and dilemmas of daily life’ begin in the journal not as inferior 

sketches, but as fully realized observations that mirror the careful, thoughtful writing that would 

enliven her novels, and which William Howitt had already recognized in her 1838 letters’ 

descriptions of Clopton Hall and the local custom of “sanding” the doorstops of homes with 

poetry verses on the morning of a friend’s wedding (Letters 292). Wilson’s categorization of 

Gaskell's early writing as developmental is surprising, given her call for greater attention to the 

 

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journal. Gaskell’s ‘powers of observation' are not limited to the novels, but in fact are present in 

the majority of her extant writing. The journal displays not only a keen 'receptivity to detail', but 

a tendency to meticulously analyze the choices inherent in daily life for their eventual outcomes. 

Within the pages of her journal, Gaskell carefully weighs and considers both Victorian ideals and 

her own decisions in light of them, paying careful attention to how her plans affect her own and 

her daughter's future.  

 

Previous editors of Gaskell’s journal have read the manuscript as a rehearsal of the rich 

characterizations and keen observation that mark Gaskell’s fiction, rather than as a text which 

demonstrates that her introspective description and detailed, nuanced storytelling were well 

established even in her early years. Most Gaskell scholarship has focused on the last 15-20 years 

of her life, the years in which she was writing novels and journalism prolifically. Scholars have 

described Gaskell’s writing as possessing a “subtle delicacy” (Eason). Even scholars who take 

into consideration the variety of her output still ground their analysis in their perception of her 

attention to minute detail, as in this assessment by Shelston: “was she best considered as the 

delicate provincial ironist of Cranford or the sympathetic if soft-hearted chronicler of urban 

realities” as in Mary Barton (xviii). These descriptions of Gaskell’s artistic skills suggest the 

work of a miniaturist in their emphasis on detail and delicacy. While the journal manifestly 

demonstrates the same attention to detail and careful sensitivity to the subtleties of individual 

emotion that mark the novels, it does not follow that her writing about motherhood must be taken 

as a precursor or preparation for novel writing. Rather, I seek here to foreground the ways in 

which, on the contrary, Gaskell's writing had always been carried out during motherhood, and 

often born of it. 

 

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The majority of Gaskell’s extant work before Mary Barton consists of life writing which 

demonstrates Gaskell’s intense interiority, and the journal in particular manifests the role that 

writing played in Gaskell’s decision making and self-regulation. Though twenty-one letters 

survive which predate 1838, when the journal was abandoned, the journal is her earliest 

sustained piece of writing. While already engaged in writing for the public, Gaskell also actively 

wrote in her journal as a means of mothering. Gaskell wrote out of grief, not only the novel Mary 

Barton, but also as early as 1836, in a poem recalling her first daughter, stillborn in 1833. She 

wrote out of confusion, using the journal pages to evaluate and determine the best maternal 

practices for raising her daughters. She wrote through anguish and fear over Marianne’s frequent 

illnesses. Above all, she wrote to preserve her maternal relationship beyond the deaths which she 

feared and expected. Writing, for Gaskell, was a means of shaping her own identity as a mother, 

and a means of mothering not only her daughters, but herself, preparing her to provide her 

daughters with the constant ‘tender sympathy’ that she recommended to her authorially 

ambitious unnamed correspondent. 

GASKELL’S JOURNAL AS VICTORIAN MOTHER: 
         

 Gaskell’s journal brings motherhood forward, drawing attention to the fact that the 

author does not leave her motherhood behind to write, but rather sacrifices her time for creative 

pursuits to serve her daughters, even using her writing as a means to shape her mothering. The 

early descriptive moment in which Gaskell describes herself writing the journal at Marianne’s 

bedside at a first glance seems to relegate Gaskell’s maternity to a background position: 

Marianne is there while she writes, breathing quietly as a backdrop to the scratches of the pen. 

Yet, instead of requiring a “room of [her] own”, Gaskell penned her text at Marianne’s bedside, 

still consciously acting in her mother-role even while she engages in creative expression. 

Gaskell’s journaling occurs in quiet moments within the broader concerns of motherhood; the 

 

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vast majority of entries that give a time of writing mention “Evening”. One might expect that 

writing here is fragile — accomplished in stolen moments and capable of being shattered in an 

instant by the mother’s response to her child’s cry. Gaskell herself wrote about prioritizing her 

children in the journal: “I think it is the duty of every mother to sacrifice a good deal rather 

than  have her child unnecessarily irritated by anything” (Journal March 10 1835). Her 

insistence on maternal sacrifice, taken together with her advice to her unknown correspondent, 

emphasizes that although Gaskell was writing before 1838, the choice to prioritize her 

motherhood was a deliberate one. 

 

Gaskell viewed motherhood as imparting an intense responsibility and used the journal to 

hold herself to a high standard. Contemporaneous American author Lydia Maria Child wrote in 

her 1831 Mother’s Book wrote that “The first and most important thing... is, that the mother 

should keep her own spirit in tranquility and purity; for it is beyond all doubt that the state of a 

mother affects her child” (4). Gaskell journal demonstrates that she felt compelled to strive for 

this level of self-regulation; she expresses this ideal prayerfully at the conclusion of the third 

entry: “Oh Lord strengthen my good purposes & preserve a due sense of my holy trust” (Journal 

October 4, 1835). Gaskell’s invocation of motherhood as “holy” betrays the depth of importance 

she placed on her own maternal practice, viewing it as an inherently moral responsibility with 

far-reaching consequences for her daughters. Later in the century, Victorian mothers would be 

held to the ultimate standard of holiness: that of an “angel in the house”, a term deriving from 

Coventry Patmore’s famed poem (1854). Gaskell’s journal depicts her efforts as the “strong 

sense of responsibility which I now feel” to attain such a standard while engaging in the practical 

day-to-day tasks of raising children and running a household. According to Elizabeth Langland, 

Victorian ideology prescribed careful management to women not only of children, but also of the 

 

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home, and ultimately, of the family’s social status: “The domestic sanctuary overseen by its 

attending angel can be decoded as a theater for the staging of a family’s social position, a staging 

that depends on prescribed practices” (291). Victorian mothers, particularly of the middle class, 

had many models to turn to for such practices.  

Gaskell makes clear in the journal that she turned to multiple models for her maternal 

practice. Such a decision was not uncommon. In her 2003 article on the journal, Lesley Maroni 

writes: “Anxious mothers everywhere will turn to ‘professionals’ in their desire to ‘get it right’, 

but then, as now, there was so much conflicting advice that it often led mothers to become even 

more confused than before” (60). For Maroni, the journal is telling in its depiction of maternal 

observation, in particular as it traces the formation of Marianne’s character: “One of the more 

fascinating elements of the journal is the insight the modern reader is given into the forming of a 

conscience (in the personal sense of the word) in the Victorian era” (67). This establishment of 

conscience was vital for Gaskell, and it is built upon Victorian expectations, drawn from the 

books Gaskell consulted.  

Although it postdates the journal, the work of Lydia Maria Child and Sarah Stickney Ellis 

models the prescriptive norms that Gaskell aspired to. Ellis’s popular The Women of England 

was published to great acclaim in 1838, the year in which Gaskell’s journal ends.  In her Mothers 

of England (1843), Ellis further emphasized the intense moral responsibility of Victorian women 

to ensure their children’s development, health, and morality, themes that echo in the journal. 

Child too, begins her text by underscoring the impact motherhood can have from the first 

moments of life: “Few people think the management of very young babes has anything to do 

with their future dispositions and characters; yet I believe it has more influence than can be 

easily calculated” (2). This emphasis on “influence” and impact was a core factor in many 

 

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maternal decisions, and it was understood to have inestimably far-reaching consequences. Ellis 

wrote: “what is done by a mother is of infinite importance to her children, because a single fault 

indulged on her part, may impart its character to their whole lives, and spread through circle after 

circle of influence, widening on, and still extending, long after she herself has been gathered to 

her last earthly home” (385). Ellis’s words underscore the belief in maternal influence that 

underpinned Victorian ideals of motherhood. Victorians viewed maternal responsibility as 

shaping not only the individual sons and daughters of England, but the entire fabric of society. 

Gaskell’s journal was on one front a form of intervention, seeking to assist her to shape her 

motherhood not only in life, but in a way that would last beyond her death. 

In the same 1869 letter to her unnamed correspondent in which Gaskell advised that she 

could not have written while her children were little, Gaskell demonstrates how closely she 

connected motherhood with emotional self-regulation. She advised in her letter: “I think you 

would be sorry if you began to feel that your desire to earn money, even for so laudable an object 

as to help your husband, made you unable to give your tender sympathy to your little ones in 

their small joys & sorrows” ( Letters 695). This intentional availability which Gaskell requires of 

mothers is intense, and echoes Mrs. Child’s claim that “the mother should keep her own spirit in 

tranquility and purity” (Child 2). Gaskell mobilized the journal as a means to maintain her sense 

of tranquility, for the explicit purpose of being emotionally present for her daughters and 

offering them the same ‘tender sympathy’ that she associates with her high standard of 

motherhood. 

 

This regulatory function of the diary, recently brilliantly theorized by Anne Marie 

Millim, offers a lens through which to read Gaskell’s journal as a text of mothering. Millim 

writes “the diary, which functions as a site for self-examination and as a tool for self-

 

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management, allows the selected diarists to construct and assert their authorship before the 

publication of their work” (2). Millim focuses on authors’ diaries, and building on both Victorian 

and contemporary psychology, claims that these diarists engage in ‘goal-oriented processing and 

moulding of emotional excitability’ through their diary keeping practice (3). She designates this 

work of self-management in the diary as ‘emotional labour’, a term “first coined by the 

American sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild in her 1975 study The Managed Heart: 

Commercialisation of Human Feeling in order to thematise the ‘artificially created elation’ and 

warmth that airline cabin crew are paid to display and spread” (3). According to Hochschild, 

“this labour requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward 

countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (7). Millim extrapolates this 

concept of emotional labour to define what she views as the goal of diarists to “wield[] meta-

emotional self-control in order to function within cultural conventions of expression” within the 

accounts they created (Millim 3). Millim’s use of “emotional labour” explicitly excludes “the 

aspect of manipulating others’ emotions”; she chooses to focus on the self-regulatory function of 

diaristic writing (3). Drawing on Millim’s use of “emotional labour”, it is clear that Gaskell’s use 

of the journal participates in a similar form of emotional labour as she seeks to control her 

maternal emotions and regulate her choices within cultural expectations. In effect, Gaskell seeks 

in the journal to mother herself. On a secondary level, however, Gaskell’s journal does what 

Millim’s chosen diarists do not, by expanding the task of emotional labour to include the 

manipulation of others’ emotions as well. Gaskell is mobilizing her journal to control not only 

her own mothering, but to control her daughters’ characters and emotional states, in the hope of 

preparing them to fit the Victorian mold prescribed by Mrs. Ellis and her predecessors.  

 

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As an act that often appears lived in the background — motherhood as a way of life, 

separate from and perhaps subordinate to women’s “real” or professional work — mothering 

becomes not only the catalyst, but the central subject of the journal. Marianne’s “regular” 

breathing underscores that for many Victorian women, like Gaskell, motherhood was 

“regular”— a daily constant over and above which any professional or commercial pursuits, like 

writing, would be achieved. Yet Gaskell pours her energy into her journal; its pages track her 

emotional labour to regulate her maternal emotions to produce effective maternal practices, and 

ultimately, to deliberately mould her daughters’ characters for life as Victorian women and 

mothers themselves.  Ostensibly created to record Marianne’s life and accomplishments, the 

journal acts more poignantly on multiple levels to shape, preserve, and guide Gaskell in her 

maternal efforts, and later to instruct Marianne and other future mothers in their efforts to raise a 

new generation of women. The journal in effect mothers multiple generations of women, 

enabling a form of maternal emotional labour that constructs a maternal legacy passed on from 

generation to generation, the voices of centuries of motherhood wrapped in an unassuming 

marbled cover.  

          Gaskell’s depiction of herself writing the journal, in which the mother writes against the 

background of an infant daughter’s breathing, is a powerful moment of intersection that speaks 

to the maternal  journal as a productive force, and invites a reexamination of the subject of such 

mother-journals. The “I” of Gaskell’s journal is in fact a “we,” as she consciously shapes herself 

and her daughter intermittently, but always connectedly, throughout the text. Previous editions of 

the journal, entitled “My Diary” and “Private Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and 

Sophia Holland,” have highlighted Gaskell’s subjectivity as an individual. This edition seeks to 

foreground the multiplicity of voices that Gaskell captures in her text: to emphasize that the 

 

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stories and thoughts of Marianne, Meta, and Gaskell herself are woven together in an intricate 

tapestry that reflects Gaskell’s intense observation of and attention to her daughters, and to the 

mothers that would follow. Richly detailed maternal observations are juxtaposed with sharp, 

often critical self-reflection and cool, analytical interpretations of Marianne’s and Meta’s 

motivations and thoughts. In each of these moments, however, the mother and daughter’s roles 

and voices play against one another, not in dissonance, but in a unique sort of textual polyphony 

that creates a music all its own. The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition seeks to 

foreground the relationships at work in the journal, presenting the text as not only the record of 

“my” thoughts, as Gaskell wrote, but of “our” thoughts, the thoughts of generations of mothers 

and daughters, themselves the result of  years of careful emotional regulation. Gaskell’s journal 

begs readers to reimagine the journal genre as capable of presenting a rich intersubjectivity of 

voices, of mothers and daughters, speaking for and through each other across generations as life 

is lived both on the page and beyond it. 

 

Gaskell had several purposes in mind when she penned her journal: perfecting her own 

motherhood, preserving the maternal bond with her daughter, and guiding her daughters’ in their 

own eventual motherhood. Each takes priority throughout the text at different times, but from 

beginning to end, the journal is conscious of itself as a text that records and shapes motherhood. 

Gaskell and her eldest two daughters, Marianne and Meta (Margaret), are the key players, all 

brought to life on the page through Gaskell’s own voice, and yet all shaped to fit into expected 

molds as well. Like separate melodic lines coming together to form cohesive harmonies in a 

musical composition, these subjects and their unique “voices” — whether sentimental, analytical, 

doubtful or resigned - work together as Gaskell orchestrates her daughters’ early development, 

her own consciousness and practices as mother, and as she carefully records both in an effort to 

 

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guide and shape the motherhood of future generations, which echo faintly as harmonic overtones 

of the original composition. In the pages of the journal Gaskell not only mothers her daughters, 

but she simultaneously writes her own motherhood, inscribing a paper surrogate for her 

daughters and other women in the face of inevitable mortality.  

PRESERVING MOTHERHOOD: 

Elizabeth Gaskell’s maternal journal is, at its heart, a story of loss. Gaskell begins with a 

dedication, not merely inscribing, but bequeathing her journal to her daughter, Marianne “if I 

should not live to give it her myself”. Thus the journal, undertaken “as a token of [a] mother’s 

love and extreme anxiety in the formation of her little daughter’s character,” begins with a 

disturbing premonition of the mother-daughter relationship severed by an unassailable mortality 

(Journal, Dedication). On its surface, the journal is an engaging record of Marianne’s early 

development, but this is paired with the deeper undercurrent of Gaskell’s own implacable 

maternal anxieties, her doubts of her own success as a mother, and ultimately, her fears of the 

loss of her relationship with her children, through their death or her own. This preoccupation 

with loss becomes the framework through which Gaskell approaches her journal, and her 

characterization of motherhood in her later fiction — it is time-bound, ephemeral, fragile, and 

precious.  

 

Many of Gaskell’s novels contain a plot element familiar to the heroes and heroines of 

many Victorian novels: the loss of the mother. As Carolyn Dever writes, “Victorian novels 

almost invariably feature protagonists whose mothers are dead or lost, swept away by menacing 

and often mysterious outside forces” (xi). Several of Gaskell’s own novels feature this absent 

mother, including Mary Barton, North and South, and Wives and Daughters, in the latter of 

which the lack of a maternal figure is made even more prominent through its pronounced 

 

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absence in the title: wives and daughters there are, but no mothers. The loss of motherhood 

echoes through Ruth as well. In Ruth, as the narrative crisis approaches, references to Ruth as 

“motherless” begin to pervade the story. Ruth longs for the comforts of home, and, the reader is 

constantly reminded, lacks a guiding influence when faced with the charms of Mr. Bellingham. 

Ultimately, motherhood becomes Ruth’s redemption, as she pours all her energy into caring for 

and protecting her son, yet even in her selflessness, Ruth too succumbs to the plight of the 

Victorian mother, dying of illness after caring for the ill Mr. Bellingham, and leaving her own 

Leonard to make his way through life as a motherless son.   

          Dever, writing on the connection between the Victorian trope of maternal death and 

Freudian psychology, makes intriguing arguments about the necessity of beginning—both novels 

and the development of individual subjectivity—from a position of maternal loss. Stating “the 

Victorian novel conventionally opens with a scene of family rupture,” Dever underscores the 

prevalence of “motherless” heroes or heroines in Victorian novels (1). The loss of the mother, 

Dever claims, “enables mid-Victorian writers to consider complex questions of female 

subjectivity and sexuality” (2). Earlier in the century, Jane Austen similarly invoked the 

paradigm of the lost mother, in Emma and Persuasion.  Austen also writes maternal figures who 

have not yet succumbed to death, such as Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice and Lady Bertram 

of Mansfield Park, as afflicted with various forms of inadequacy. Drawing connections between 

early psychoanalysis and Victorian fiction, Dever connects this prevalence of the loss of the 

mother with the need for fictional protagonists — and humanity more broadly — to mature and 

develop apart from maternal influence:  

the narrative mode through which Freud structures normative psychoanalytic 

development is itself a direct reflection of mid-Victorian tropes, with similar 

 

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representational and ideological investments in maternal loss. In fact, Victorian concern 

with maternal loss offers psychoanalysis its most basic vocabulary for human 

development: in psychoanalysis, maternal loss simply shifts from a representational motif 

to a psychological mandate, as all permutations of mature subjectivity and sexuality 

emerge from the negotiation of the predicament of “abandonment.” (3) 

In her reading of maternal loss in Victorian novels, Dever determines that the loss of the mother 

provides the conditions for subjectivity and identity formation. Based on her claims, we might 

assume that successful motherhood rarely appears in novels, not because of the reality of 

maternal loss through childbirth, but because the loss of the mother provides the best scenario in 

which a protagonist can mature. 

         

If Victorian novels often begin from a position of maternal loss, then they structure the 

creation of subjectivity as rooted in the loss of the maternal ideal, while yet inscribing this ideal 

in the expectations of female subjectivity. The loss of the mother often occasions a substitution, 

which is the plot on which many Gaskell novels turn. Mr. Gibson attempts to give Molly a 

stepmother in Wives and Daughters, in order to fill the breach left by her early loss. Yet 

Gaskell’s portraits of motherhood — lost, isolated, or visibly failing as they are, in fact are 

perfectly aligned with what Caroline Dever reads as a trend in Victorian fiction to write mothers 

as failures in order to reinscribe maternal tropes and models. The mothers in Gaskell’s novels fall 

prey to illness, to selfishness, and even to death. In Wives and Daughters, the maternal figures 

(who are, nonetheless, present) are not women to be imitated. Molly Gibson’s mother has died as 

the story opens, and it is her father’s deeply caring but rather clumsy attempts to fill the maternal 

role that drives much of the action of the story. The other mothers in the story are failures as 

well: Lady Cumnor is ill and cannot be in London to assist her daughter through the “season”; 

 

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while Mrs. Hamley’s petting of Osbourne is ill-placed and causes her much grief. Drawing upon 

the ideas advanced by Child and Saussure, the influence of the mothers in Wives and Daughters 

are lacking, and the effects are widely felt. 

When Gaskell wrote the biography of her friend and colleague Charlotte Brontë, she 

framed the narrative of her friend’s life around the loss of Brontë’s mother. The first chapter, 

which opens with a sweeping, descriptive portrait of the countryside near Keighley and Haworth, 

ends its tour at the gravestone that recounts Maria Brontë’s death, and afterward, the deaths of all 

six of her “motherless children”. The Brontës’ story, and especially Charlotte’s, begins with their 

mother’s death. Left without a model and guide, Charlotte must establish her own identity in the 

world in much the same way that Victorian heroines did. Gaskell’s description of the gravestone, 

with the names engraved on the plaque that marks their deaths, is a telling choice for the first 

mention Gaskell gives of the Brontës in her biography: they are marked by their mother’s death. 

They gain readers’ empathy, as well as a place in the biography, through their loss. It was a 

situation Gaskell knew only too well. 

MOTHERLESS CHILDREN, CHILDLESS MOTHERS: 

Gaskell grew up understanding that motherhood was fragile and treasured the few 

mementos of her mother that she had. Her childhood experience consisted of more than one 

mother who could not raise her, and her subsequent experience surrounded by a large circle of 

extended family in Knutsford left her with a keen awareness of what motherhood really meant. 

Gaskell’s own mother, Elizabeth Stevenson (nee Holland), died in October of 1811, when young 

Elizabeth was thirteen months old. Later in life, Gaskell was given some of her mother’s letters 

by George Hope, and she responded warmly in an 1849 letter:  

I will not let an hour pass, my dear sir, without acknowledging your kindness in sending 

me my dear mother’s letters, the only relic of her that I have, and of more value to me 

 

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than I can express, for I have so often longed for some little thing that had once been hers 

or touched by her. I think no one but one so unfortunate as to be early motherless can 

enter into the craving one has after the lost mother. (Letters 796) 

By the time she received these letters, Gaskell’s career as an author and her motherhood were 

both already established. Gaskell had approached this role from a place of grief, and her early 

loss of her mother was not the only one she would experience. Three other women stepped in to 

take the role of mother in Elizabeth Gaskell’s life, and Gaskell was to experience the loss of a 

mother still twice more.   

          As Gaskell’s mother, Elizabeth Stevenson, lay dying in 1811, nursed by her sister 

Hannah Lumb, Hannah’s daughter, Marianne Lumb, wrote a letter in which she promised to 

“perform the part of a mother to little Elizabeth to the very best of [her] powers” (Letter, M.E. 

Gaskell to Clement Shorter, Brotherton Special Collections, Archive File: MS 19cGaskell / 16). 

Sincere and generous as the offer was, Gaskell’s second “mother” stands out as a surprising 

maternal figure within the Victorian era: crippled, young, and unmarried, Marianne Lumb is not 

the type of woman one would expect to eagerly seek to raise a motherless child (Chapple 88). 

Marianne’s story, however, is from beginning to end one of profound maternal love. Elizabeth 

Gaskell’s maternal grandparents, Samuel and Anne Holland, had nine children, including three 

sons and six daughters. Hannah (Holland) Lumb and Elizabeth (Holland) Stevenson were the 

only two of these daughters to marry, but Hannah had been granted a separation from her 

mentally unstable husband and moved back to Knutsford to be near her family years before 

Elizabeth Stevenson’s death (Chapple 94). She lived with her daughter, Marianne, whose story, 

as told by Gaskell’s grown daughter, Meta, begins: “As a little wee child, she suddenly leapt out 

of her nurse’s arms, thro’ an open window, in her joy at seeing her mother coming up the garden-

 

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path and in her eagerness to reach her, she fell on the hard ground, and was maimed for life!” 

(Archive Letter: BC MS 19cGaskell / 16). Marianne Lumb’s entire existence is thus marked by 

her love for her mother; physically maimed through her joy in the maternal bond, she later 

sought to become a mother to young Elizabeth. The portion of this letter which survives is 

transcribed in Meta’s hand in a letter to Clement Shorter, an early would-be biographer of 

Gaskell, who edited her journal but never completed his biography. Meta’s letter goes on to 

explain: “It has always been said that Aunt Lumb conceived the idea of adopting little Elizabeth 

for the sake of Marianne — but this letter, to her mother in London, shows that the first thought 

was Marianne’s”  (Archives, BC MS Gaskell-16).  

          Marianne Lumb, however, would mother Gaskell for less than a year before Gaskell lost 

her too. Marianne’s letter laying out her plan for raising Elizabeth was written in early 

November. The following March, Marianne Lumb died in Halifax (Chapple 111). After 

Marianne’s death, the childless Hannah Lumb and the motherless Elizabeth became each other’s 

family. After sharing in two painful losses within only six months — of sister and mother, of 

daughter and mother — Hannah Lumb took on the role of mother to Elizabeth herself. The 

generosity of her choice must have been made even more plain to Elizabeth when in 1814, her 

father remarried a woman named Catherine Thomson (Chapple 160). Through Catherine, 

Gaskell’s father had two more children, who became her stepbrother and stepsister (Chapple 

162). By all accounts, Gaskell had limited contact with them during the years that followed and 

was never close to her stepmother (Chapple 163). In the end, it was Aunt Lumb who Gaskell 

came to know as her “more-than-mother”.  

          From an early age, Gaskell had been confronted with the truth that motherhood was often 

associated with painful losses. Gaskell’s own mother, Elizabeth (Holland) Stevenson, according 

 

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to tradition, lost six of her eight children in infancy, leaving only Elizabeth and her oldest 

brother, John, surviving (Chapple 84). Elizabeth corresponded with her brother, a trader with the 

East India Company throughout her childhood, who encouraged her to keep a journal in his 

letters. By the time of her marriage, she had lost her brother too. In 1828, at the age of 30, he 

traveled on a voyage to India, and she never heard from him again (Handley 19). Several of 

Gaskell’s relatives had experienced similar losses. Her uncle, Peter Holland, lost three children 

in infancy as well as his first wife (Chapple 442). Another uncle, Samuel Holland, lost a teenage 

son seven or eight years after her arrival at Knutsford, and her youngest uncle, Swinton Holland, 

had similarly lost a daughter in infancy (Chapple 443). Nevertheless, Gaskell saw her Holland 

relations frequently, and undoubtedly observed her aunts mothering her large set of cousins. 

After her early childhood losses, Gaskell grew to womanhood surrounded by the warm 

family atmosphere of her Holland relations, but throughout her life, loss followed close on her 

heels. In July of 1833, just eleven months after her marriage, Gaskell gave birth to her firstborn: 

a stillborn daughter (Handley 27). The loss of this first daughter was clearly a poignant 

experience for Elizabeth, and one that marked her experience of motherhood years later. In 1836, 

after the birth of her first surviving daughter, Marianne, Gaskell penned a poem entitled “On 

Visiting the Grave of my Stillborn Little Girl.” The poem emphasizes Gaskell’s determination to 

remember her lost daughter:  

         

I made a vow within my soul, O child, 

          When thou wert laid beside my weary heart, 

          With marks of death on every tender part, 

          That, if in time a living infant smiled, 

          Winning my ear with gentle sounds of love 

 

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In sunshine of such joy, I still would save 

          A green rest for thy memory, O Dove! (qtd. in Wilson and Chapple, 121) 

The intensity of the emotion in this poem is representative of the melancholy tone that pervades 

the journal and even many of Gaskell’s letters, as she frequently reflected on mortality and loss. 

Gaskell also deepens her experience by writing it. She observes her dead daughter not once, but 

twice, through reimagining her loss and reconstructing it as a poem, layering the “marks of death 

on every tender part” by marking them again on a page through the composition of her poem, 

and on her own heart. Like her journal, Gaskell quite likely read the poem again in later years, 

reliving again her first experience of motherhood, marked by death. Her experiences of 

motherhood — both as daughter and as a mother herself — began with loss, and that loss casts a 

long shadow over her life and the maternal journal that recounts it. 

          Gaskell’s journal is rooted in her experience and her fear of loss, and this fear drives the 

preoccupation with preservation that marks the journal from beginning to end. In her dedication, 

Gaskell is preoccupied with her fears of losing her daughter. This carries throughout the text as 

well: many of the entries end with a prayer, pleading for Marianne’s or Meta’s health and well-

being. The journal is conceived through these losses: Gaskell plans and writes her journal as an 

intervention, should her greatest fear occur, and the maternal bond be severed. The journal acts 

as a corrective to her fears; as she records her anxieties, Gaskell is creating an ink-and-paper 

surrogate to act as a mother should her fears become reality. In a deliberate written act, Gaskell 

is inscribing the pages of the journal with marks — of life, but quite possibly of a death that has 

not yet happened — marks that she fervently hopes will outlive her.  

          The practical result of this loss-driven writing is the journal’s preoccupation with bodily 

health. Throughout the journal, we read about Marianne’s feeding practices, informed by 

 

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medical opinion and her own careful habits of observation. Drawing on her reading of Combe’s 

Physiology, Gaskell carefully attended to her daughters’ physical states and made connections 

with their emotional states. She writes: “It is quite astonishing to see the difference bodily 

feelings make in Marianne’s temper & powers of endurance. I was in great measure prepared for 

this by Combe’s Physiology, but I had no idea how every change of temper might be deduced 

from some corresponding change in the body” (Journal, October 4, 1835).  Gaskell claims that 

others who laugh at mothers “for attributing little freaks of temper to teething &c… [can’t] have 

had much to do with children,” although she admits, “I used to be one” (Journal, October 4, 

1835). The calm rational analysis Gaskell applies to evaluating her daughters’ physical health is 

punctuated throughout with her emotional response to her fear of loss. She continued to seek to 

instill in herself and her daughters the rational thought that flowed from clear headed 

observation. 

From the opening of the journal, Gaskell closely links bodily strength and physical, 

mental, and emotional development. While cheerfully recounting examples of Marianne’s “self-

government” and her improvement in patience, Gaskell also actively seeks to reduce physical 

causes of impatience. She plans to dress Marianne warmly and keep her indoors during the 

winter, due to her perceived fragility. Shortly after her first birthday, Gaskell has stopped feeding 

Marianne milk, believing that thickened broth is a more “strengthening” food (Journal, October 

4, 1835) Gaskell claims early on that she has no desire for Marianne to walk early, wishing 

instead that she develop this skill at her own pace, rather than being pushed into it or helped by 

her parents or the servants (Journal, August 4, 1835). Gaskell often links Marianne’s bodily 

complaints to her poor health, claiming that teething, for example, causes her discomfort, or that 

she “regains” strength after her teeth have come through. In multiple entries, Gaskell worries 

 

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about Marianne being ill with croup, both describing her worrisome symptoms and her own and 

William’s actions to resolve the problem. In each of these instances, Gaskell’s first recourse is to 

weigh a decision and commit to one, a step that she often takes or recounts within the pages of 

the journal. The journal acts as a sounding board to evaluate — and in some cases celebrate — 

Gaskell’s parenting choices and commitments. It is a place to write down rules which she has 

determined to follow, to make justifications for these choices, and to remember and celebrate the 

accomplishments and development of Marianne, and later Meta, should they succumb to her 

ultimate fear, and die while still young.  

When she began her journal, Gaskell had not yet received her mother’s letters from 

George Hope. Her only memories of her mother likely were passed on to her through her 

Holland relatives. Gaskell is therefore, through the composition of the journal, not only recording 

Marianne’s childhood and reflecting on her own motherhood, but also actively preparing a 

legacy for Marianne so that her daughter will not be left without what she later received: a 

possession bearing the marks of her mother’s own hand. In doing so, Gaskell’s forward thinking 

proved to be rather surprisingly accurate; not only was Marianne the only one of her four 

daughters to have children of her own, but Gaskell’s sudden death in 1865 occurred before 

Marianne’s marriage, making the journal the only source of Gaskell’s maternal advice Marianne 

had to look to in her own experience as a mother.  

          Throughout the journal, Gaskell employs her journal to vividly describe and enact her 

fears of loss. In the second entry, Gaskell writes of a past illness of Marianne’s, in which she 

feared for her daughter’s life:  

“I cannot tell how I sickened at my heart, at the thought of seeing her no more here. 

         

 

Her empty crib to see 

 

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Her silent nursery, 

Once gladsome with her mirth.” (Journal, August 4, 1835) 

Although the lines of verse are not attributed or marked, Gaskell is quoting nearly verbatim a 

poem by Caroline Bowles (later Southey), which powerfully imagines the pervasive grief that 

follows the loss of a child. The poem, “To a Dying Infant,” poignantly recalls the infant’s final 

moments and soliloquizes on the infant’s passing from earthly life into the life that follows, and 

is reminiscent in its emotion and vibrant description of Gaskell’s own stanzas composed to recall 

her stillborn daughter (Bowles 124). At the time of the poem’s publication in 1821, Bowles had 

lost her parents, was unmarried, and had only recently begun supporting herself through a 

literary career that would last twenty years before her eventual marriage to poet Robert Southey 

(Blain 25). “To a Dying Infant” was widely reprinted both in the months following its initial 

appearance and in years afterward. The lines Gaskell quotes, which speak of a male infant in the 

original, are often quoted in obituaries of the time period. In spite of its popularity, the poem 

itself is not mentioned in Blain’s biography of Bowles, which focuses its attention on Bowles’ 

publication of “Ellen Fitzarthur,” a lengthy narrative poem published in 1820, and the poem 

collections that followed (Blain 27). Gaskell writes in the journal with an effort at resignation 

and an undercurrent of barely contained grief that parallels the emotion in the poem. The journal 

underscores the struggle between her determined intention to accept loss with her frequent 

expressions of her fears for Marianne.  

          The stanza Gaskell quotes emphasizes absence: the mother is taking in the furnishings of 

the nursery and highlighting the loss of the child who is supposed to occupy them: the “empty 

crib to see / the silent nursery”. There are multiple levels of emptiness here: the crib is empty, 

bereft of the child who would have been lulled to sleep within. The image of the crib likewise 

 

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calls to mind (as the poem mentions in a later stanza), the harsh reality that the lost child must be 

laid somewhere: “‘tis hard to lay one’s darling in the cold, cold ground” (Bowles 124). Beyond 

this image, however, the poem evokes the pervading loss of the marked silence: there is no child-

noise in the nursery, none of the soft breathing that Gaskell describes as “music” in her first 

journal entry. The silence here is oppressive, weighing on the soul: not only through the 

description of the “silent nursery”, but even more poignantly through the ghostly memory of the 

“mirth” that once filled it. Along with such images, the poem similarly evokes the bodily 

emptiness of lost motherhood: the empty womb, the empty maternal arms, which have been 

replaced by the grave where the child lies.  

          Bowles’ poem exemplifies the loss that Gaskell fears, and it is the loss that she attempts 

to fill, over the course of four years, with paper and ink, in the guise of the journal. Through 

crafting her narrative, thick with rules and careful self-analysis, Gaskell is building a memory 

that will not be subject to the ravages of illness or time in the way that flesh is destined to 

succumb. The journal will not be buried, and through the words inscribed therein Gaskell—or 

Marianne — can hear again the voice forever silenced by death. The journal is a surrogate 

mother — a paper memento. Gaskell writes as a means of mothering after death.  

          Gaskell’s fear of loss, and her resignation in the face of such a possibility, is colored by 

her religious beliefs as a Unitarian and accompanied by a sense of hope in a better and brighter 

future after death. The journal’s dedication ends with a Gaskell’s hope in the afterlife: “the hope 

that however we may be separated on earth, we may each of us so behave while sojourning here 

that we may meet again to renew the dear & tender tie of Mother & Daughter.” According to this 

quotation, Gaskell’s Unitarianism based the hope of an afterlife on an individual’s performance 

in life, citing “behavior” as a determining factor. This sense of divine expectations colors 

 

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Gaskell’s writing about motherhood, both in her insistence on the shaping of good character, and 

in her attempts at self-regulation. In the second entry, she writes: “I hope I shall always preserve 

my present good intentions … and then I must pray, to be forgiven for my errors, & led into a 

better course” (Journal, August 4, 1835). Gaskell’s insistence on prayer for guidance in her 

maternal role is telling: the depth of the responsibility which this indicates is far-reaching and 

has important implications for how we read her career as a writer in view of her life as a mother. 

Gaskell seems to have viewed no responsibility in her life as of equal importance with her 

motherhood.  

          Although Gaskell punctuates her journal with prayerful entreaties for the preservation of 

her daughters, her faith in life after death led to her earnest desire to accept the possibility of 

loss. The prayers in the journal reflect Gaskell’s view of God as emphasizing a subtle reliance on 

a deity to provide an afterlife in which Gaskell and Marianne would be reunited after death “to 

renew the dear & tender tie of Mother and Daughter (Journal Dedication). Gaskell seems to have 

viewed religion as a rather flexible, mutable relationship grounded in individual feeling and 

behavior. Although Gaskell quotes the Bible on multiple occasions, her doctrinal leanings are not 

clear.  Throughout the journal, Gaskell is reflective about her child’s and her own mortality, and 

in these moments she relies on a tentative faith, turning to God and asking simultaneously for 

Marianne’s preservation and for her own acceptance of the death she fears. Thus, Gaskell 

employs the journal to protect against the loss of the maternal bond, even as she uses it to 

strengthen her own resolve to face such a loss in the future. Having come to motherhood through 

immense losses of first her mother(s) and later, a daughter, Gaskell is hopeful that the journal can 

ease pain for herself or for the motherless daughters that she hoped not to create in life, though 

they frequently populate her fiction. The journal is colored by these dual purposes: while it 

 

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expects and prepares for “the change that may come any day”, as she writes in her dedication, it 

also seeks to overcome it. As the journal weaves together many aims, and many voices, Gaskell 

also has a more subtle purpose in writing the journal: to strengthen the maternal bond itself.  

Life writing as a genre encompasses a wide variety of textual modes, but throughout 

these iterations, what is at stake in life writing is ultimately loss: loss of the self, of time, of 

memories: of those things which the journal attempts to preserve through time. Writers create 

autobiographical memoirs, journals, oral histories, letters and other such documents with a view 

toward preserving memories, history, and thoughts of personal value. We write so we will not 

forget. Life writing is an intervention designed to limit loss, and as such, the enemy of life 

writing is time. Life writing and time have an uneasy association. The documents of life writing 

are indelibly marked with time. Letters and diaries begin with a chronological timestamp; 

biographies mark a chronological progression, even when read out of order. These documents 

are written to preserve our memories and our history. Gaskell invokes her journal as a sort of 

surrogate daughter to accompany her into the future: “I sometimes think I may find this journal a 

great help in recalling the memory of my darling child if we should lose her” (Journal, February 

4th, 1836).  The impulse to create a form of life that is legible beyond its allotted span of 

temporal existence is rooted in the knowledge of the inevitability of this eventual loss. Yet the 

journal also acts to make the most of time in the present, through shaping motherhood to fit 

Gaskell’s own expectations. 

  PERFECTING MOTHERHOOD: 

          Gaskell spends a significant portion of the journal ruminating on her own maternal 

practices, and seeks throughout to record, evaluate, and improve her own motherhood through a 

conscious habit of observation. Gaskell begins the opening entry of her journal with self-critique, 

 

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regretting the already lost maternal opportunities for observation of her daughter. Although 

Marianne is only six months old at the time, Gaskell writes, “I wish I had begun my little journal 

sooner, for… there have been many little indications of disposition &c. already which I can not 

now remember clearly” (Journal, March 10, 1835). After beginning, she continued her 

journal  until October 28, 1838. The entries were sporadic; there are only eleven entries in four 

years, although several of them run to over eight handwritten pages.  

 

Throughout the journal, Gaskell attempts to record and consciously care for Marianne’s 

physical body in a way that supports her moral development. Gaskell attempts to follow a careful 

format of describing Marianne, and later her second daughter, Meta, first physically and then 

mentally. Always an avid reader, Gaskell had by this time been scouring the prescriptive texts of 

the day, including Andrew Combe’s widely read Physiology (1834), for advice on motherhood, 

and had formed exacting ideals to which she aspired. She likely found encouragement for her 

decision to keep a journal in a text she favored, L’Education Progressive (1828-39), by Madame 

Albertine Necker de Saussure. These two texts, taken together, reflect Gaskell’s central 

observational philosophy in the journal: that “every change of temper might be deduced from 

some corresponding change in the body” (Journal, October 4, 1835). Gaskell draws the link 

between emotions and the physical body from Combe, but her emphasis, following De Saussure, 

is on Marianne’s moral and social development.  

 

Gaskell’s journal was itself a manifestation of the advice she read on child-rearing, and of 

her own tendency to self-regulation. De Saussure encouraged mothers to cultivate a habit of 

observation, stating: “the study of every single child must begin from its very birth, and on that 

account a mother only can carry it on successfully” (44). For this purpose, DeSaussure also 

advocated a journal: “in order that this task may be properly fulfilled, I would earnestly exhort 

 

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all young mothers to keep a journal in which the general progress and unfolding of their 

children’s minds may be regularly noted down” (45). Gaskell read de Saussure’s extensive text, 

in the original French no less, as the English translation was not yet available in England in 

1834. Although the texts by Combe and DeSaussure are the only two texts specifically 

mentioned in the journal, Gaskell writes “books do so differ”, suggesting that she had read 

several (Journal August 4, 1835). Her attention to Saussure’s suggestions, and her choice of 

prescriptive texts, demonstrates the level of commitment she brought to motherhood. The journal 

itself testifies to how seriously she took the suggestion to make observation of her children a 

routine part of her maternal care of them.  

 

 Gaskell deploys the journal as a tool for observation, which she viewed as a key aspect 

of human character, in line with principles that had been advocated in writing ten years earlier by 

her father, William Stevenson. Stevenson published a series of articles in Blackwood’s 

Edinburgh Magazine in 1824-5 which analyzed whether “political economy” was a “useful and 

consistent” science (Mollmann 88). His premise relied upon two central tenets: “we must, in the 

first place, find out what the general laws of nature are, and, in the next place, learn to apply 

them with propriety and effect to the extension of our knowledge and regulation of our conduct” 

(Mollmann 88). According to Mollmann, observation was the key to “Stevenson’s standard for a 

system of scientific research: it must have consistent rules derived from observations of the 

world, and it must result in a plan for operating in the world” (Mollmann 89). In order to engage 

in effective scientific inquiry, one must be a careful and meticulous observer of the laws of 

nature, and further, must apply these laws with propriety. Gaskell, Mollmann claims, 

implemented her father’s system of observation years later in her novels, in which “the most 

ethical observers are those who observe the observations of others: such attention to detail allows 

 

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one to act morally towards others and one’s self, ‘with propriety and effect to the extension of 

our knowledge and regulation of our conduct’” (Mollmann 92). The act of ethical observation, 

however, was not one that Gaskell merely assigned to her characters. While Mollmann focused 

on Gaskell’s fiction, his observations may be extrapolated also to her life writing. I argue that the 

journal illustrates how Gaskell practiced observation of herself “with propriety and effect” as a 

key principle of her maternal practice, using careful attention to shape both herself and her 

daughters. 

          Gaskell’s intensive self-observation reflects a particular application of ethical observation 

focused on the deliberate shaping of her daughters’ minds through perfecting her own maternal 

practice. The emotional labour at work in the journal becomes evident in Gaskell’s ruminations 

on her own motherhood practices. Maternal observation requires attention to many varied details, 

and the journal as a form lends itself to the record of such a variety of thinking, always cycling 

back to evaluate the choices that have been made in the light of her self-imposed rules. Gaskell 

once wrote in a letter that “the interruptions of home life are never ending” (Letters 411). This is 

motherhood. Grounded in the unending cycle of interruptions, and the day to day details of 

caring for and raising children whose needs are constantly changing at every moment, 

motherhood requires a particular kind of thinking, a sort of mental flexibility that the journal 

embodies brilliantly. Sara Ruddick has described “maternal thinking” as “a unity of reflection, 

judgment and emotion” (348).  Within the journal, we read Gaskell as not only a thoughtful 

mother, a clever writer, or a witty observer, but as a woman simultaneously engaged in intense 

thought in all these dimensions. She carefully observes her daughters, reflecting on their actions 

and achievements while judging her own responses and maternal responsibilities. Over and 

above these rational, scientific modes of observation, however, the journal is colored with firm 

 

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judgment of the daily anxieties and emotions that color and mark motherhood. Gaskell is the 

orchestrator of her own complex maternal life, rife with layers of competing thoughts and aims, 

and as such the journal displays the internal ambiguities and anxieties of Victorian motherhood.  

  

Gaskell’s careful observations of her daughters and her own motherhood, as depicted in 

the journal, appear as an early form of practicing such scientifically inflected, yet socially 

motivated careful observation. Reading within Gaskell’s novels, Wives and Daughters in 

particular, Mollmann claims that Gaskell portrays those who observe others’ observations as the 

most ethical and most effective characters, building upon her father’s system. Systems of thought 

that are not only consistent, but consistently applied, are those which are admired in the text. 

Through considering her own motives and choices, and being keen to discern not only 

Marianne’s unique personalities and traits, but how as a mother to appropriately conduct her own 

responses for each situation and trait, Gaskell applies her father’s suggestions in her maternal 

role: “I must take care to have presence of mind to remark & adopt the better method every 

future occasion,” she writes when considering her own response to Marianne’s behavior 

(Journal, August 4, 1835). Gaskell frequently sets rules and then evaluates her adherence to 

them: “I certainly think being calm oneself… & never disappointing her when unnecessary are 

good rules” (Journal, August 4, 1835). Gaskell’s self-reflection demonstrates the depth of her 

feelings of maternal responsibility to her daughters.  

 

Throughout her life, as indicated by not only her journals, but also her letters to her 

daughters, Gaskell’s maternal observations, undertaken with thoughtful scrutiny and applied 

intentionally to each daughter’s care, were key to her role as mother, and also central to her life. 

Gaskell closely watched each daughter, and the journal recounts the subtle differences she “read” 

between Marianne and Meta especially, striving to apply a similar consistent pattern of 

 

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observation and resulting action to the raising of her four daughters. According to Barbara Brill, 

both Gaskells were involved in the girls’ education: “William instructed them in history and 

natural history, Elizabeth taking them for dictation and grammar, as well as such domestic skills 

as needlework and babycare, for the older sisters” (40). The girls also received individualized 

instruction according to their interests and talents. Marianne, who loved music, attended “a 

school at Hampstead where music was well taught,’ while Meta, who had an aptitude for art, 

“went to a school in Liverpool run by Miss Rachel Martineau, and at one point had private 

lessons from John Ruskin” (Brill 41). These same considerations appear in late letters, indicating 

that Gaskell applied de Saussure’s and her father’s theories of observation to her daughters 

throughout their lives, even after the journal had been abandoned.  

        Building on her own use of observation to shape her motherhood, observant behavior is 

one of the earliest traits Gaskell deliberately cultivates in her daughter Marianne, as well, writing 

of her at six months old: "when I see her looking very intently at anything, I take her to it, and let 

her exercise all her sense upon it - even to tasting, if I am sure it can do her no harm. My object 

is to give her a habit of fixing her attention" (Journal, March 10, 1835). This "habit of attention" 

marked Gaskell's own approach to motherhood, both in the journal and in her later letters, in 

which she frequently describes her children, commenting on their unique personalities. Her wish 

for Marianne to be attentive returns frequently in the journal. She later writes sending Marianne 

to infant school "to give her an idea of conquering difficulties by perseverance", and frequently 

writes in later letters of her concern that Marianne can’t offer clear arguments to support her 

opinions. The connection here between observation of her daughters and a deliberate attention to 

characters’ individual patterns of thinking reveals Gaskell’s own interest in not only others’ 

actions, but in the consciousnesses that motivate their responses, beginning with an intentional, 

 

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intensive, and necessarily accurate awareness of and attention to the worlds they inhabit. As she 

describes her daughters’ unique characteristics and development, Gaskell simultaneously models 

in the journal the keen observation that she desires her daughters to acquire, and which she 

associates with her most moral, admired, and virtuous characters.  

 

Gaskell’s habit of observation, as it appears in the journal, is representative of the 

prescriptive manuals of the period. The habit of fixed attention she desires for Marianne is 

similar to this concept of “seeking knowledge, truth telling, and proper “method” advanced first 

by her father and later borne out in the characters she writes, and the daughters she raises. The 

encouragement of observation was a central tenet of many prescriptive child-rearing texts. Lydia 

Maria Child wrote in The Mother’s Book (1831), before Gaskell became a mother: “Too much 

cannot be said on the importance of giving children early habits of observation” (10). Gaskell 

was a keen observer, a woman whose habit of attention was focused on shaping not only her 

fictional work, but her own four daughters to contribute meaningfully to the society they 

inhabited. In later years, after her death, her grown and unmarried daughters Meta and Julia 

would capitalize on their mother’s lessons as they engaged in charitable and social work from the 

Gaskell home in Manchester.          

 

In addition to cultivating a ‘habit of attention’ in her daughters, Gaskell also sought to 

convey expectations regarding the objects of such attention; she favored books. In another piece 

of life-writing which refers to Gaskell’s motherhood, entitled “precepts for the guidance of a 

daughter” and included as an appendix to the Wilson edition of the journal, Gaskell encourages 

her daughters to devote their habits of attention to books, through reading frequently. Four of the 

eighteen listed “precepts” in this document relate to reading:  

2. Wash your hands. 

 

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3. When you have washed them, hold a book in them. 

14. Assume the power of reading, if you have it not.  

15. Hold your book the right way up. (Wilson, 122).  

Although lightly humorous—another of the precepts states “Talk German so fast that no one can 

ascertain whether you speak grammatically or no”—the precepts also undergird the importance 

Gaskell placed on cultivating habits, as the document on the whole focuses on the minutiae of 

daily living, rather than any broader, abstract considerations of womanhood. Gaskell is actively 

shaping her daughters, training them and teaching them to be the kind of young women that she 

herself admired: attentive, independent and kind. Gaskell saw her maternal role as her most vital 

one, grounded in the day to day tasks which must be accomplished. Always available to her 

daughters — these frequent interruptions are noted in her letters — she wrote while they slept, or 

early in the morning before they awoke (Lambert 38). Later in life, when her writing became 

profitable, she intended to use it to provide a home for her two unmarried daughters, 

demonstrating her popularity, her productivity, and her maternal care.  

          Gaskell’s manuscript is a journal of motherhood which foregrounds prominently the 

overpowering sense of individual responsibility Gaskell felt for her children. Maternal 

responsibility in the period, especially as forwarded by Sarah Ellis in her Mothers of England, 

was seen as an all-encompassing duty. Although Mothers of England was not published until 

after Gaskell ceased writing her journal, Ellis’s insistence on mothers’ responsibility for the 

moral character of their children echoes in the journal.  Ellis writes: “what is done by a mother is 

of infinite importance to her children, because a single fault indulged on her part, may impart its 

character to their whole lives, and spread through circle after circle of influence, widening on, 

and still extending, long after she herself has been gathered to her last earthly home” (385). 

 

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Similar sentiments underlie Gaskell’s own concerns in the journal’s opening entry, where she 

worries: “If I should misguide from carelessness or negligence!.... From ignorance and errors in 

judgment I know I may, and probably shall, very often” (Journal March 10, 1835). Insofar as 

Gaskell is working against Victorian norms through encouraging experiential learning for 

Marianne, she nonetheless feels the intense pressure of her role as a Victorian mother, and she 

keenly feels the lack of personal experience of such a mother, although she fondly remembers 

her “more-than-mother”, Aunt Lumb. The journal is a text born out of life — and life-giving — 

rather than focused on a reading public, and as such it is rife with insecurities and ambivalence. 

Far from a sentimental memory of her children, the journal betrays the level to which Gaskell 

worked to craft her own maternal persona, in keeping with her conviction of maternal 

responsibility. 

 

Gaskell’s awareness of her own responsibility appears in the marked prevalence of 

“rules” throughout the journal: “Though I keep laying down rules, I fear I have not sufficiently 

attended to them” (Journal, March 10, 1835). Gaskell confronted motherhood from a position of 

anxiety and determination, keenly aware of Victorian tropes of motherhood with their sense of 

overarching responsibility. The journal’s insistence on “rules” provides a key point of 

intersection with Millim’s understanding of diaristic writing’s connection to emotional 

labour.  Armed with evidence drawn from medical and philosophical sources, Gaskell deploys 

— and counters — many of the Victorian tropes of motherhood, as she muses over the vital 

child-rearing decisions that were the province of mothers at the time. Yet throughout, she seeks 

to govern herself and adhere to the principles and rules she has put in place for herself, tracked 

through the handwritten entries in her journal. Most importantly, Gaskell’s journal foregrounds 

the development of the mother-daughter relationship, and the challenges embedded within it 

 

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related to regulating the emotional states of her daughters and herself. Above all, the journal 

weaves a compelling portrait of the hopes and fears that mark the maternal relationship, 

rendering this form of emotional labour a more potent one than the self-regulation contained in 

the diaries Millim explores. Gaskell’s journal seeks to curb her own desires for the good of her 

daughters, and to instill in them the same mode of self-sacrifice to an overarching ideal. The 

journal is, in the tradition of life writing, born of losses, but in crafting her narrative, in giving 

voice to her own rules and strife to adhere to them, Gaskell also betrays hope: hope that her 

words and insights may live on, and the hope that her own daughter, the subject of her first piece 

of sustained writing, will successfully self-regulate in the same role that she herself cherished: 

that of a mother. 

Gaskell’s journal represents emotional labour at work in a thoughtful and carefully 

regulated motherhood. Maura Dunst recounts Gaskell’s forward-thinking raising of her 

daughters: “Gaskell’s diaries reveal an analytical and informed parenting method, which ran 

against the grain of traditional prescriptions. She allowed her daughters to develop their natures, 

rather than teaching them to fit in a mould, and gave them the tools to make moral judgments” 

(56). Gaskell’s journal reveals her meticulous attention to her children, and her carefully derived 

and executed plans for their development: “I have thought a good deal about the formation of 

any little plans, and I shall like to know their success. I want to act on principles now which can 

be carried on through the whole of her education,” she writes in the first entry, when Marianne is 

almost six months old (Journal March 10, 1835). Although the diary has had few readers—none, 

it is presumed, in Gaskell’s lifetime—it is not an isolated text, but rather shows its author in a 

richly engaged discourse surrounding children’s education, motherhood, and the Victorian 

family household: in one instance she engaged the diary as a sounding board for deciding which 

 

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of several approaches to crying — approaches which bear a marked similarity to contemporary 

“cry-it-out” or “no tears” methods — to take with Marianne (Journal March 10, 1835). Modern 

mommy bloggers would find a familiar dilemma in Gaskell’s choice between letting Marianne 

cry in the interest of learning to self-soothe or providing maternal comfort. In the same way that 

Gaskell’s novels appeal to a “wider social vision,” her mothering practice draws on and critiques 

a wide range of social opinions — drawing on far-ranging and even multicultural sources in her 

attempt to prescribe a course of motherly response to tears (52). 

 

Motherhood for Gaskell was a fraught concept. On many levels she bought into the 

Victorian ideals of maternal responsibility and influence, writing in her journal: “How all a 

woman’s life, at least so it seems to me now, ought to have reference to the period when she will 

be fulfilling one of her greatest & highest duties, those of a mother” (Journal, August 4, 1835). 

Throughout her “rules” for herself and expectations for her daughter, Gaskell seeks to shape 

Marianne’s emotional temperament, while teaching Marianne to be self-sufficient as well as 

develop at her own pace. In relevant passages, Gaskell emphasized that Marianne “goes to bed 

awake”; indicating that she has successfully guided her daughter to overcome reliance upon her 

parents for sleep — a mark of emotional maturity, and several entries mention Gaskell’s plan 

that Marianne will also learn to walk on her own, believing “that till Nature prompts this, it is 

worse than useless to force them to their feet” (Journal, March 10, 1835). Gaskell was also very 

firm in ensuring Marianne’s firm reliance on reality and limiting fanciful thinking or trust in 

falsehoods, as exemplified in her writing about promises: “There is another thing I try to attend 

to & make the servants attend to: … never to promise her anything unconditionally without 

performing it” (Journal, March 10, 1835). The overarching purport of these rules is to let 

Marianne learn self-government, while also ensuring Gaskell herself does not overstep her self-

 

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imposed limits by stepping in rather than letting Marianne learn and gain experience. Gaskell’s 

rules are prescriptive not only for Marianne and for Meta, but also for Gaskell herself.  

 

While explicitly dedicating and bequeathing the journal to Marianne, Gaskell engages in 

a strong undercurrent of self-surveillance and maternal regulation in the pages of the journal that 

emphasizes the implication of maternal practice in emotional labour. Through applying her 

philosophy of observation to her own maternal practice, Gaskell uses the journal to track and 

evaluate her own performance as a Victorian mother. These layers of observation — directed 

simultaneously at her daughters and herself — reveal Gaskell’s multiple aims in the journal as a 

tool for shaping motherhood as it is lived. Gaskell’s careful record and analytical descriptions 

served to ensure consistency in her parenting: “I want to act on principles now which can be 

carried on through the whole of her education” (Journal March 10, 1835).  The journal also acted 

as a corrective to Gaskell’s own self-described “undecided” character, through creating a space 

with which to manage her motherhood through carefully prescribed rules. In the surveillance and 

prescriptive roles of the journal we see the “reflection” and “judgment” of Ruddick’s ‘maternal 

thinking. In addition, however, Gaskell’s motherhood is heavily inflected by an attempt to 

control ‘emotion’, as the journal also resonates with a strong undercurrent of fear and doubt.  

 

In laboring to preserve the maternal bond, the journal — as many are — is enmeshed in 

time itself. Diaries and journals mark their moment in the past as they look forward to the future. 

Traditionally, diaries began with headings that record the chronological passage of time. 

Gaskell’s opening entry begins with a nineteenth-century equivalent of the metadata time stamp 

on a contemporary blog post: “March 10th. Tuesday Evening. 1835.” Diaries are more closely 

associated with these timestamps than journals; commercially, one expects products labeled 

“diary” or “planner” to include dates, while journals are blank, but both often record the moment 

 

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of writing in our conventional formats. This writing is named, inscribed with a month, a 

numerical date, a year, as though the authors were attempting to freeze in time that moment: to 

take a metaphorical photo or create a sculpture of their own writing act. Gaskell’s journal, as 

many do, uses time as a framing structure; the presence of these chronological markings, the 

writing down of its creation as a march through time, is one of the identifying traits of the genre.  

 

Gaskell’s maternal journal adds an additional layer to this time-marked structure, through 

including her daughters’ ages within the text of many of the entries, resulting in the journal 

acting as a measurement tool. In this respect, the role of the journal prescribed by DeSaussure as 

a tool for scientific observation of children’s developmental patterns is evident. As the journal 

progresses, the reader watches with Gaskell as she grows, recognizing and recording the 

significant milestones that mothers are trained to watch for: the first teeth, first steps, first words, 

first signs of recognizing others around them. This aspect of the maternal journal — the act of 

recording and time-stamping developmental achievements, mimics a maternal oral history that is 

passed down between generations. In marking the ages and stages at which Marianne 

accomplished various goals, Gaskell is subtly tracking how well she matches expectations for 

child-rearing, and also creating benchmarks for Marianne to use in her own motherhood years 

later, as she can now use herself as a guide if, for example, any of her children should be late in 

walking as she was. What appears at first to be a simple, factual record of “firsts” and daily 

occurrences becomes in practice a tracking system, and a form of prescriptive maternal 

judgment.  

 

Given this sense of measuring that occurs in motherhood, writing to Marianne in the form 

of a journal is an uncannily perfect solution for Gaskell. Having known the loss of the mother, 

and the “craving” that it occasioned in her own life, Gaskell produces a narrative that is 

 

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specifically calculated for eager acceptance: as a mother, she writes to the one person whom she 

can trust to treasure her words in the future. Imagining her own premature death may even work 

to strengthen this bond, which is rooted in Gaskell’s own reliance on Marianne’s eventual 

“forgiveness” and appreciative reading. Even in the journal’s opening sentence where she labels 

her manuscript a “token”, she envisions the value of such a text to her motherless daughter. In 

writing to her daughter, Gaskell has chosen the perfect reader.  

 

Journals are also marked with time’s absence. Even those journals and diaries which lack 

a dating structure still mark time, in each gap and space. Time is compressed into the blank 

spaces of the journal: interlinear gaps in the text mark miniscule moments of time, in which a 

hand paused to shift position, to turn a page, as well as months or years that are sometimes 

condensed into an unwritten sentence between the diarist’s periodic accounts. These spaces in 

Gaskell’s journal also bear marks of the act of reading itself. Words that curve around each other 

mark the order of composition, show the progression of thought and movement as the words 

were inked onto the paper. Insertions and strikeouts plot points of pause in the act of 

composition. These scratches and scribbles bear witness to the passage of time, and more 

importantly, act as an inscribed instance of the act of reading a journal, an act that marks the 

journal’s implication in acts of emotional self-surveillance.  

 

These moments of rereading capture Gaskell’s use of the journal to shape her 

motherhood and are suggestive of the harmonic convergence of generational voices rereading the 

journal over time. Born of a moment in which the writer is re-thinking what has been written, 

each alteration is a pause in which the writer reads, and then rethinks and re-writes the text. 

Gaskell was her journal’s first reader, but she also addresses other future readers through the 

grown Marianne and her descendants. The journal is the ultimate palimpsest: a document that 

 

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writes the past over the present, choosing — perhaps judiciously, perhaps not — the moments 

and the version of history that will be preserved and sent into the future. Through her journal, 

Gaskell makes plans, imagines futures, contemplates past thoughts and actions. Perhaps what is 

most difficult to perceive, to grasp, is what rereading her own journal accomplishes. What is the 

work the journal does in its fleeting present — at the precise moment of writing? 

 

This is the work that is most intriguing in the Gaskell journal: its role in working out 

motherhood, and the mother-daughter relationship. We often think of journals in terms of the 

time they mark: the days, months, years that pass by in a steady and regular order. Yet more than 

this, diaries mark far more miniscule and intangible moments of time — the act of writing a 

journal inscribes pages with the moments in which life is lived; moments that move too quickly 

to be labeled in individual microseconds, the moments given not to the life the journal records, 

but to the act of keeping a journal. These are the moments that threaten to be lost, and on which 

the writer capitalizes.  In its dedication, Elizabeth Gaskell claims that her “little journal” was 

ostensibly written to capitalize on the journal’s ability to create this link between past and future 

through being “reserved” for Marianne. Yet the journal does more than record Marianne’s 

growth and development for posterity. Within the carefully detailed narratives recounting 

Marianne’s early days, Gaskell often switches modes, using the journal as a sounding board for 

her own maternal anxieties and decisions. She actively reviews her own progress as she writes: 

“I see I have generally begun my journal with describing the bodily progress she has made, and I 

will keep to the proper order of things” (Journal, February 7 1836). In this case, the rereading 

determines the writing that follows. On more than one occasion, this rereading occasions guilt: “I 

feel quite ashamed to see that more than a year has passed since I last wrote. There have been 

some sad excuses to be sure” (Journal, December 9, 1837). Prior to writing each entry, Gaskell 

 

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stops to page through her journal, to review and reflect on her motherhood. 

 

This interplay between recording and reflection gives the journal an active role in guiding 

and shaping Gaskell’s mothering. She uses the journal as a tool to assess her own development 

as a mother, in addition to her daughters’ as Victorian women. The act of writing an entry is an 

opportunity for introspection for Gaskell, and the text that results is the product of her careful 

observation of herself and her daughters, recorded for future analysis. The Gaskell journal is an 

introspective text that navigates motherhood’s landscape of blended consciousnesses across time 

through an inky address to an invisible, but all too necessary audience, elusive but constant 

through time: the journal’s silent reader. 

 GUIDING MOTHERHOOD:  

 

Gaskell’s efforts to mobilize the journal as a surrogate in the event of death results in the 

journal taking on the role of an informal motherhood conduct manual, which simultaneously 

models and prescribes proper maternal behavior. The journal thus emerges as a multilayered 

narrative which encompasses a scientifically inflected observational account of Marianne’s and 

Meta’s development, a tool for maternal self-reflection, a memory invested against eventual 

death, and a source of maternal guidance for future generations. In this latter role, the journal 

acts as a manifestation of the centuries-old tradition of passing down maternal knowledge within 

families. The journal itself becomes a paper-mother, standing in for the knowledge and 

experience of years past, while simultaneously shaping the future generation of its readers, both 

mothers and daughters alike. In this regard, Gaskell’s journal, although heralded by generations 

of editors as a “private” text, takes on an unavoidably public character, as indeed life writing 

often does through the simple fact of its own legibility.  

Elizabeth Gaskell’s journal has been identified with privacy throughout its history. The 

95 

 

 

 

first edition (published in 1923) makes this assumption explicit in its title: “My Diary”: The 

Early Years of My Daughter, Marianne. The editor, Clement Shorter, used “my” not once, but 

twice, exerting Gaskell’s possession upon both the journal and its young protagonist, insisting 

that readers enter the journal as through Gaskell’s metaphorical permission. Shorter’s version of 

the journal is presented as Gaskell’s daughter and life, and we are invited as readers to share, but 

not to own, the story it offers. Interestingly, Shorter underscores this presentational motif through 

a complete lack of editorial apparatus. The changes in punctuation and spelling to regularize 

forms are made silently in his edition. This linking of the text with the idea of private possession 

continued in the 1996 edition, which editors J.A.V. Chapple and Anita Wilson entitled Private 

Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland. From its earliest publication, the 

editors of Gaskell’s manuscript have emphasized our assumptions about the journal as a 

“private” genre — one that is personal in nature and thus, protected.  

 

Recent scholarship, however, has reinvigorated examination of the totality of Gaskell’s 

writing life, drawing links between her published works and her life writing. Joanne Shattock, 

the editor of the 2006 Pickering Master’s edition of Gaskell’s works, writes “[Gaskell’s] 

published letters… demonstrate that the two strands of her writing, the novels and the shorter 

works, which include her journalism, were much more integrated than had been previously 

thought, [and] that her writing life was a much more seamless and coherent one than had been 

recognized” (Introduction 36). Shattock’s edition emphasizes Gaskell’s journalistic output, and 

while the journal is included, it is entitled simply “The Diary” and has only a brief introduction. 

Shattock evaluates Gaskell’s journalism explicitly through the lens of her letters, stating that 

“[the journalistic writings] link the supposedly constructed persona of the periodical writer, and 

her consistent and recognizable voice, with the supposedly unselfconscious persona of the 

 

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letters” (36). Throughout her analysis, Shattock demonstrates that Gaskell’s writing indicates a 

keen perception of the literary marketplace and an awareness of her audience. Rather than 

employing a markedly different style within her life writing and her published works, Gaskell 

uses much the same voice throughout. This coherent writing life, I would argue, begins with her 

journal, wherein she was already keenly aware of her audiences: first herself, rereading the 

journal to track her own progress according to the maternal rules she had laid out, and later, 

Marianne.  

          Diaries and journals are often assumed to be “private” documents. Since they are written 

within the confines of home, and often spend most of their existence within domestic spaces in 

lieu of being sent out to publishing houses to be eagerly perused by a community readers (though 

often enough with literary writers this is the eventual trajectory for any so-called private texts 

that survive), they are perceived to have more in common with one’s possessions than with one’s 

productive work. Letters, journals, and diaries are, this practice suggests, inherently deserving of 

a sort of professional and respectful courtesy which dictates that readers are only privy to the 

works that authors have actively prepared for their consumption. The assumption of privacy 

likely draws upon our own insecurities. Surely few individuals, even in the age of digital profiles 

and Facebook status messages that allow hundreds of our close friends and even cursory 

acquaintances to have nearly constant awareness of our activities, would really want every 

personal text or document made openly available to a vast readership.  

          This historically assumed privacy intrinsically heightens the interest of a journal as a  

reading text, since in approaching it, we imagine a privileged type of access. This imagined 

access plays into the situation in which many journals and diaries are created: within the confines 

of the domestic space. The reading of a journal feels like a shared secret, which makes the form 

 

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well suited to the reception of the intersubjective portrait of the mother-daughter relationship. 

Gaskell understood that journals were not private; she explicitly wrote her journal to be read. 

From the moment of its beginning, Gaskell is carefully shaping the narrative to serve multiple 

aims, all of which require the text to be read. Intended to not only assist in Gaskell’s own 

program of maternal self-regulation, the journal was designed to provide Marianne a record of 

her early childhood, and also to offer the family a memory in the event of future losses. Each of 

these strains within the journal works to build to a polyphonic whole as the voice of a tradition of 

maternal practice; the journal was crafted to serve a broader purpose than the recording of so-

called “private” thoughts.  

 

The extant Gaskell letters, as Shattock indicates, demonstrate a similar juxtaposition of 

disparate lines of thinking into a cohesive whole. One often cited letter from 1857 displays the 

range and flexibility of Gaskell’s daily cares:  

Now in this hour since breakfast I have had to decide on the following variety of 

important questions…. What perennials will do in Manchester smoke, & what colors our 

garden wants?.... Salary of a nursery governess, & stipulations for a certain quantity of 

time to be left to herself [perhaps the employer envied the employee this luxury].... Settle 

20 questions of dress for the girls, who are going out for the day; & want to look nice & 

yet not spoil their gowns with the mud &c &c - See a lady about an MS story of hers, & 

give her disheartening but very good advice. Arrange about selling two poor cows for one 

good one, - see purchasers, & show myself up to cattle questions, keep, & prices, - and  

it’s not ½ past 10 yet! (Letters, 489-90).  

Gaskell’s writing here mimics the text of the journal: a jumble of thoughts running forward with 

a frequent employment of dashes and abbreviated “&c”s, with hardly a new paragraph to be 

 

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found. This narrative models Gaskell’s easy, stream-of-consciousness thought, paired with her 

characteristic attention to detail, and her sense of comic timing. Simultaneously, Gaskell 

demonstrates her devotion to her mothering; although she keeps in mind her roles as domestic 

manager, writer, and businesswoman, she accepts interruptions for her children, settling “twenty 

questions of dress” in less than an hour. The letter excerpt also models Ruddick’s maternal 

thinking: Gaskell, in the same paragraph, makes judgments about her daughters’ appearance and 

household finances, reflects on the family’s social appearance, and evaluates her own weary 

desire for a moment’s quiet space which she is able to offer her governess but cannot take for 

herself. The journal, in the early years before her daughters were capable of going out 

independently, served a similar purpose for Gaskell, allowing her a space in which to reflect on 

her maternal choices, judge her success as a mother, and work through the emotional burden of 

caring for her daughters. 

          Philipe LeJeune has called the diary “this intermediate space, this airlock between the 

individual and the world, this ‘heart of hearts’ where we invent a language for ourselves… the 

diary is both a retreat and a source of energy in each person’s dialectical relationship with the 

world, which [s/]he uses to construct and sustain [her/]himself as an individual” (164). LeJeune 

gives the diary an uncanny power here: it becomes not a mute recipient of ink or a copy of a 

powerful thought. Instead, the diary itself takes on agency as a “source of energy”: the diary is a 

productive force. This assessment of the diary as a source of energy, as a potential reserve of 

actual action and expendable power exposes an important facet of its work in its all too 

ephemeral present as a tool for emotional labour and self-management — one that is often 

glossed over in our preoccupation with the diary’s link to the past. LeJeune himself highlights 

 

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this as he calls the diary an “intermediate” space — a space that links chronological time, the 

past to the future.  

          Gaskell capitalized on the intermediacy of the diary form in her journal, while counting 

on the written text’s power to overcome time itself. She wrote in a dual-faceted effort to 

consciously shape and perfect her motherhood, while simultaneously sharing herself and her 

experience with her daughter(s) in defiance of the unpredictable ravages of time.  Although not 

explicitly stated within its pages, Gaskell likely also recognized the capacity of the journal to 

become a retreat — a space for outpouring excess emotion without the fear of overstepping 

social boundaries. Years later, Gaskell wrote of the effect of unburdening oneself in an 1841 

letter to her sister-in-law, Anne Robson: “I am sitting all alone, and not feeling over & above 

well; and it would be such a comfort to have you here to open my mind to, but  that not being 

among the possibilities, I am going to write you a long private letter; unburdening my mind a 

bit” (Letters, 47). This “unburdening” is one of the most poignant extant pieces of Gaskell’s 

writing related to her fears for her daughters, aside from the journal. Later in the same letter, 

Gaskell writes: “one can’t help having ‘Mother’s fears’; and Wm I dare say kindly won’t allow 

me ever to talk to him about anxieties, while it would be SUCH A RELIEF often” (Letters, 47). 

These mother’s fears take on the same morbid turn that is prevalent throughout the journal, and 

which one might suspect was a driving force in its creation.  

Gaskell’s use of the term “mother’s fears” exposes the deep undercurrent of emotion at 

work in the journal, as well as in the maternal relationship. Again facing an illness of 

Marianne’s, and plagued by worry, Gaskell uses this letter to share with her sister-in-law her 

minute observations of her daughters’ particularities of character, begging Anne to “remember” 

their individuality in the event of her own death, since, she reasons, “we all know the probability 

 

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of widowers marrying again,” convinced that no one else would be able to offer them the same 

sympathy and care that they, and Marianne especially, require (Letters , 47). In writing thus to 

Anne, Gaskell demonstrates again the use of writing as a tool for emotional self-surveillance, 

much as she had done with the journal in her children’s’ earliest years. The same worries and 

prayers for resignation that close each entry within Gaskell’s journal resurface here. What 

LeJeune’s comment glosses over as an “intermediacy”, and what Gaskell’s journal only subtly 

acknowledges, is the way in which this use of the journal as a retreat also implies a vital act of 

selfhood: the act of inscribing moments in a journal is a deliberate choice to write one’s identity 

into existence, particularly to shape that identity to adhere to an ideal. In choosing to record, the 

diarist chooses not to engage in the kinds of pursuits that are written about — the writing itself 

becomes the recipient of those minutes or hours. That Gaskell devoted the time to produce 

lengthy entries, sometimes spanning ten or more pages, bears evidence to the value she placed on 

such introspection via ink, and her commitment to the value of self-regulation that ensued. 

Gaskell’s journal allowed her to bring together the multiple strands of maternal thought 

into a productive space where she could reflect and evaluate her purposes and actions, as well as 

guide those of her future self. The use of the journal acts as a corrective to the problem she 

encountered in her attempt to narrate the life of her friend and fellow author, Charlotte Brontë. 

Gaskell’s description of Brontë attempted to carefully limn her existence as a writer within 

Victorian expectations of women’s roles, presenting her as “the daughter… whom God has 

appointed to fill that particular place,” and claiming for Brontë her readers’ acceptance. Gaskell 

recognized that domestic duties were constant; yet in her discussion of Brontë’s domestic role, 

she appears to allow a neat separation that she could not achieve for herself, insisting on a 

“parallel” construction:  

 

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Henceforward Charlotte Brontë’s existence becomes divided into two parallel currents--

her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman. There were 

separate duties belonging to each character--not opposing each other, not impossible, but 

difficult to be reconciled” (The Life of Charlotte Brontë 272).  

Neither the professional nor the domestic identity is put aside for the sake of the other; they are 

both running all the time, but they do not easily intersect. The journal belies this mode of parallel 

existence. The journal as a generic form lends itself to the representation of the layers of 

consciousness that define motherhood. The conscious processes identified in Ruddick’s 

characterization of maternal thinking as consisting of “reflection, judgment and emotion” exist in 

the journal in harmony.  

Gaskell’s journal, however, illustrates the ability of the genre to convey not only a single 

subjective record, but an intersubjective blend of voices, even in some cases, of multiple selves. 

Gaskell’s journal is a depiction not of herself alone, nor merely of herself in the moment of 

writing. Through the journal, Gaskell writes out rules that she expects her future self to use as 

checks and balances to evaluate her maternal success. Simultaneously, she offers these same 

prescriptive thoughts and practices to the aged Marianne as an uneasy alliance of sentimental 

memory and prescriptive guidelines. The journal combines the voices of mother and daughter, 

both as they were in the past and as they will be in the future, blending together in an ongoing 

narrative of maternal practice. Gaskell’s journal offers “our” thoughts to future generations. 

Within the journal, Gaskell observes, interprets, and thinks for her daughters, ascribing 

motivations and intentions to Marianne’s and Meta’s thoughts and choices. Her practice echoes a 

passage in de Saussure’s text on education, where De Saussure emphasizes the importance of a 

mother’s ability to empathize with her children: “Such a study cannot be completed in a single 

 

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examination: we can never perfectly understand these young creatures, unless we possess that 

versatility of imagination which will enable us to embody ourselves in them, — to be at the same 

time ourselves and another” (44). Marianne Gaskell (later Holland), most vibrantly exists on the 

pages of the journal, but she exists there as the product of this maternal “versatility of 

imagination” which Gaskell employed in crafting her journal. Interlineally sketched in minute 

and tender detail, Gaskell’s evocation of Marianne coexists with the unguarded portrait of her 

own maternal doubts and self-analysis, creating a multifaceted journal that models a polyphonic 

composition of the mother-daughter relationship. This is the heart of the journal: Gaskell, 

Marianne and Meta are separate individuals, but in the journal their voices sound in harmony, 

independent melodic lines, blending into, growing from, and embellishing each other as they 

grow to their final cadence. 

Gaskell’s journal builds upon LeJeune’s concept of the genre as our “heart of hearts,” 

creating a maternal instantiation of a text in which Gaskell is at the same time, “[herself] and 

another”. The journal becomes a space in which Gaskell can enact her motherhood, regulate 

it,  test it and craft it on the written page, yet it acts prescriptively to similarly shape Marianne’s 

motherhood decades later, in Gaskell’s absence, and our own, as we read the age-old milestones 

of motherhood and human experience in its pages: learning to walk, to talk, to participate in 

society. For Gaskell, motherhood could never be an isolated, one-size-fits-all proposition. Her 

journal invites scholars to examine how maternal subjectivity manifests itself within life writing 

as a genre.  

Gaskell’s journal is notably more descriptive than some other period mother diaries but 

maintains much the same content: a blend of careful observations with hints of reflection, 

responsibility and self-judgment. In their 1996 Private Voices, Chapple and Wilson chose to 

 

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publish Gaskell’s manuscript in conjunction with a second journal, that of Sophia Holland, who 

wrote about her son Thurstan in much the same way that Gaskell recorded Marianne’s 

childhood. Although she writes with a more concise tone, Sophia Holland follows much the 

same trajectory as Gaskell: “Found Swinton & himself breaking the animals of the Noah’s Ark, 

checked them at first but remembering Edgeworth’s opinion of playthings I said if you wish to 

break any more you must bring them to me & ask leave to do so. Thurstan brought some, I 

consented & heard Swin say ‘Now we will kill this one’ & talking of breakg their legs. —” (97). 

Holland, like Gaskell, is weighing her actions thoughtfully, based on her reading of child-rearing 

texts, while keeping a careful record of her child’s development. Her journal includes, as 

Gaskell’s does, frequent depictions of Thurstan’s physical and mental development. Years later, 

after Gaskell’s death, Thurstan Holland would wed Marianne Gaskell, but a similar journal does 

not exist to recount the development of their seven children. If such a journal existed, it would no 

doubt be marked with grief and anxiety as Gaskell’s was. Of Marianne’s seven children, four 

died in childhood. 

PAPER MOTHERS 

Although often approached as records of the past, as stories told to the future, the journals 

of mothers, particularly as written about their children, become more than mere records. These 

mother-diaries take a stand against memory, against mortality. They may be mobilized as 

surrogates for lost experience, or for lost loved ones. The pages become sounding boards, 

fictional confidantes and mirrors with which to evaluate one’s plans and goals, and ultimately, 

they become a means through which mothers shape ourselves, and shape the future. Gaskell’s 

journal calls attention not only to the role of life writing in her own life, but to the ability of these 

texts to record and shape the relationships of women across generations. Taken together, 

women’s journals and diaries provide insight into “our thoughts,” both in terms of the ways in 

 

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which motherhood requires, as Ruddick suggests, particular patterns of thoughts, and in the 

creation of a communal mother-knowledge that can be collected and passed on in journals. 

LeJeune’s identification of the diary’s function as a source of energy calls attention to the 

way in which a paper notebook — be it called journal or diary — plays with, shapes, and reacts 

to a life lived not in interaction with others, but in a fictionalized conversation that takes place on 

paper. The marks that a journal makes on the life — those echoes of the process of writing, 

which “would be such a relief, often” — these exist not only as marks on a page, but as choices 

lived and learned from, making women’s diaries intriguing social artifacts. The meditative work 

of writing a journal, especially as a form of mother writing is particularly relevant in today’s 

world, where life writing takes place in a vibrant online community that fundamentally shifts the 

space of life writing toward a public-facing social media presence. 

          Gaskell’s journal orchestrates the voices of mother and daughter(s) into a fluid narrative, 

one which outlived her and presumably shaped the relationship Marianne had with her own 

daughters. The journal is a rich polyphony of not only voices, but of time, blending the past, 

Gaskell’s memories of her children, and her hopes for their future, and this not merely on the 

written page. The journal becomes in effect a surrogate, a means to bridge the loss imposed by 

mortality, which ultimately severed the maternal relationship between Gaskell and her daughters 

— quite literally as she suffered her fatal heart attack while speaking to them, in a home 

purchased for them through her literary earnings. The journal, not Gaskell herself, follows 

Marianne into motherhood, and offers her advice and guidance. Gaskell left Marianne a paper 

mother, the same one that she had used in her earliest experiences of motherhood to mother 

herself. 

 

105 

 

         

 Gaskell’s journal’s final act is to enact her own maternal subjectivity, by creating and 

controlling the substitute mother that will replace her after her death. Gaskell left explicit 

instructions to her daughters that no biography be written, a fact which makes her purposeful 

crafting of the journal even more significant. The journal begins with an eye to her loss and is 

knowingly designed as an interventional substitute. This is a powerful decision on Gaskell’s part, 

and it is particularly intriguing that she chooses to prepare for her death through leaving 

Marianne a written substitute for maternal love and guidance. Gaskell’s first character was in 

fact, herself, and throughout the fiction that followed, this same caring, loving, deeply observant 

and thoughtful maternal figure does not resurface. Gaskell’s motherhood is reserved for her own 

daughters, preserved carefully in the pages of a journal that has historically reached an audience 

vastly more limited than that of the novels. Gaskell is performing motherhood in the journal, 

preventively orchestrating a course in maternal ideals that will be inherited by Marianne, and 

ultimately creating the only version of herself that she hoped to send into the future. 

         

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER FIVE: THE ELIZABETH GASKELL JOURNAL: DIGITAL EDITION 
 

 

 

The digital edition of the journal is available at www.elizabethgaskelljournal.com. 

Drawing on the XML transcription and prosopography files, and transformed into HTML using 

XSLT, the edition is a public presentation of the research contained in this document and in the 

coding files.  

  

  

 

  

 

 

 

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WORKS CITED 

 

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