Wayward Orphans and Lonesome Places: The Regional Reception of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South

This paper reassesses previous accounts of the distinction between mid-nineteenth-century regional and provincial novels through an analysis of their appearances as fragmented, pirated extracts in the non-metropolitan press. Using two of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels as exemplars and drawing on digitized newspapers, it demonstrates that in order fully to understand the relationship between these two subgenres and the radical or conservative politics that often have been assumed to attend them, we must analyze their creative reuse by small newspapers as part of local identity-building. By taking into account the embedding of fragments of fiction within local, provincial, and regional print cultures, we can arrive at a more nuanced reading of their politics, and better understand their responsiveness to their own historical moments.