Interestingly, Gaskell made the Scoresby connection by way of an earlier literary endeavour, her Life of Charlotte Brontë. While staying in Dunoon, Argyllshire, with her half-sister, Catherine, in September 1855, through a mutual acquaintance she met Scoresby, now an Anglican clergyman and vicar of Bradford; on this occasion he told her ‘many curious anecdotes about the extraordinary character of the people round Haworth' (letter to Ellen Nussey, 25 September 1855), but it is possible that he may have also mentioned his former whaling exploits. However the link was made, the records of the Portico Library, Manchester, show that on 21 May 1860 William Gaskell borrowed Scoresby's work; for the next three days they were in the Gaskell household, for her consultation.
Apart from the general background to the whaling industry, including the best-known vessels, the duties of the various crew members, and the procedures of whaling itself, An Account of the Arctic Regions furnished Gaskell with details of the voyages, accounts of which form the substance of Chapter IX of Sylvia's Lovers. A substantial part of the adventures of Robson and Kinraid replicates Scoresby's material, sometimes almost identically. So Robson's statement that ‘There's three things to be afeared on' echoes Scoresby's ‘Those employed in the occupation of killing whales, are… exposed to danger from three sources' (11, p. 341). Robson's description of falling into the icy water is a rewriting of Scoresby's illustration of these dangers, as is Kinraid's story of the destruction of the fast-boat and the attached whale by a huge iceberg, rendered thus in Scoresby:
they had not rowed many fathoms from the place, before a tremendous crash of the berg ensued, – an immense mass of ice fell upon the boat they had just quitted, and neither it nor the fish were ever seen afterwards. [11, p. 342]
Similarly, Robson's tale of being stranded on a whale's back and having to cut himself free from the harpoon line is a retelling of an incident in Greenland in 1660, described by Scoresby, in which the famous Dutch harpooner, Vienkes, suffered a similar fate. Only Kin-raid's account of the flames burning inside the ice is not drawn from Scoresby and would seem to be an instance of the marvellous in seamen's tales.
The careful reproduction of secondary sources here is a further example of Gaskell's desire for authenticity, but more significant is the effect of her rendition. In reproducing Scoresby's details in the vernacular speech of Robson and Kinraid, she makes the exploits come alive, showing her sensitivity to oral narrative as a means of revealing character.
THE SIEGE OF ACRE
Kinraid's involvement in the Napoleonic wars after his impressment is linked with two of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's campaigns in the 1790s: his destruction of French ships in Toulon harbour in December 1793, followed by his capture and imprisonment; and his courageous defence of the Syrian town of St Jean d‘Acre in May 1799, which defeated Napoleon's plans for domination of the Middle East and forced him to return to France. For the facts of Smith's exploits Gaskell turned to her staple source for much of her historical material, the Annual Register, whose 1799 volume recorded the siege and reproduced Smith's dispatches from it. She may also have consulted Edward Howard's Memoirs of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith KCB (1839) and John Barrow's The Life and Correspondence of Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith GCB (1848). In addition, as Uglow points out (p. 524), St Jean d‘Acre was the title of a popular patriotic ballad celebrating the siege current in the mid nineteenth century, and so the story itself would not have been unfamiliar to many of the novel's readers.
The particulars of Smith's campaigns which Gaskell rehearses here closely adhere to those detailed in Barrow's two-volume biography. She not only incorporates into her text the account of his manoeuvres at Acre, but also makes good use of his earlier activities – his attack on the French fleet and his escape from the Temple prison in Paris – to which Barrow devotes considerable attention. In her version of these events, the ‘daring adventure off the coast of France' related by the landlady in Chapter XXXIV, Kinraid becomes a central participant, fighting with Smith, captured and imprisoned with him and Westley Wright, Smith's secretary, and escaping with him, helped by Colonel Phelypeaux (the ‘Philip somethin'’ to whom the landlady refers), a royalist officer of engineers who later took part in the Acre siege.
The stages of the siege itself similarly follow closely the historical events as recorded by Barrow and others. Smith, now commanding the Tigre, and accompanied by the Theseus, undertook to defend St Jean d‘Acre from Napoleon's troops, who had begun to besiege it in March 1799. On 7 May, Turkish reinforcements were sighted, encouraging Smith to land men on the beach and enter the town through the breached walls. The strategy, underpinned by the arrival of the new Turkish troops, saved the town, despite the doubts about it expressed by the governor, Djezzar Pacha, the fictional description of whose actions replicates Smith's own dispatches (‘The energetic old man, coming behind us, pulled us down with violence, saying if any harm happened to his English friends all was lost' (Barrow, I, p. 287), appears in Gaskell as ‘with his own hands, and with right hearty good-will, he pulled the sailors down from the post of danger, saying that if he lost his English friends he lost all!’). The sighting of Napoleon, surrounded by a semicircle of French officers, is also recorded in the source material, as are the ‘headless corpses' left lying in the Pacha's garden.
Historical accuracy here is matched by credibility of character. Kinraid's involvement in these risky exploits is appropriate to his brave and reckless spirit, as well as allowing the means of reconciliation between himself and Philip in a gesture which vindicates the latter and promotes the novel's theme of forgiveness.
APPENDIX 2: DIALECT AND TEXTUAL CHANGES
Gaskell's desire for accuracy in Sylvia's Lovers was not confined to topographical and historical detail. The realism of her story also depended on linguistic authenticity, especially since it dealt mainly with lower-class characters speaking a regional dialect. As much of her fiction demonstrates, Gaskell was particularly interested in dialectal speech, an interest perhaps encouraged by William, whose two lectures on the Lancashire dialect were appended to the fifth edition of Mary Barton; a letter of 22 May 1854 to Walter Savage Landor, to whom she had sent the lectures, discusses differing speech forms in Cheshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire and Yorkshire. When she came to write this novel, however, she was conscious of having less direct knowledge or familiarity than was the case with her Lancashire fiction (though clearly she listened very carefully to how people spoke in Whitby). On this matter, too, then, she consulted General Perronet Thompson, who apparently corrected any dialectal expressions in her work which seemed to reflect Lancashire rather than Yorkshire speech. The accuracy of her final version is attested to by the fact that Joseph Wright used Sylvia's Lovers in compiling his English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), sometimes citing its vocabulary as an instance of first usage. Her attention to detail in this respect is also noted in G. DeWitt Sanders's Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘A Note on Mrs Gaskell's Use of Dialect‘, and in J. G. Sharps's Mrs Gaskell's Observation and Invention, Chapter VIII, section II, and Appendix V
The main linguistic changes between the various versions of the novel occur from the manuscript to the first edition, and from the first to the second. Other changes from the second to the fourth editions (the third is a direct reproduction of the second) are concerned largely with factual inaccuracies rather than dialectal variants. The most notable changes in the manuscript itself seem designed to emphasize the vernacular nature of the dialogue, appropriate to the characters' social status. Thus, ‘that will’, is replaced by ‘as'll’, ‘ing' becomes ‘in'’, ‘the' becomes ‘t'’, ‘not' becomes ‘na'’ ‘, ‘taken' is replaced by ‘ta'en’, and ‘you' becomes ‘thee‘, although these changes do not occur in every case. The changes from manuscript to first edition are more directly concerned with removing distinctive Lancashire speech forms and replacing them with Yorkshire ones. Thus words such as ‘right' and ‘night' become ‘reet' and ‘neet’; ‘dunna' ’ (or ‘does na' ’), ‘canna'�
�, and ‘were na'’ become ‘don't' (or ‘doant’), ‘can't’, and ‘weren't’; ‘ne'er' and ‘e'er' become ‘niver' and ‘iver’; ‘than' becomes ‘nor’; ‘welly' becomes ‘a'most’; ‘hoo' becomes ‘she’; ‘han' becomes ‘have’.
The changes from first to second editions continue this process. Some, such as the alteration of ‘never' and ‘ever' to ‘niver' and ‘iver’, were already begun earlier, as has been indicated; others are new. For example, ‘catched' becomes ‘cotched’; ‘ye' becomes ‘yo’; ‘where' and ‘there' become ‘wheere' and ‘theere’; ‘father' becomes ‘feyther’; ‘Daniel' and ‘Sylvia' are often shortened to ‘Dannel' and ‘Sylvie’; ‘yes-treen' becomes ‘last neet’; ‘of' becomes ‘o’’; ‘would' becomes ‘’ud’; ‘I' becomes ‘a’. The overall trend in all these changes is to ensure regional and social verisimilitude, although, as has already been noted, Gaskell was not wholly consistent and several different variants of the same word or phrase can be found in any one edition.
CHRONOLOGY
1810 29 September: Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson born to William and Elizabeth Stevenson in Chelsea
1811 October: Mother, Elizabeth Stevenson, dies; Elizabeth moves to Knutsford, Cheshire, to live with her mother's sister Hannah Lumb
1814 William Stevenson marries Catherine Thomson
1821–6 Elizabeth attends Byerley sisters' boarding school (school near Warwick, but moves to Avonbank, Stratford-upon-Avon in 1824)
1822 Brother, John Stevenson (b. 1799), joins Merchant Navy
1828 John Stevenson disappears on a voyage to India; no definitive information about his fate
1829 March: William Stevenson dies Elizabeth stays with uncle in Park Lane, London and visits relations, the Turners, at Newcastle upon Tyne
1831 Visits Edinburgh with Ann Turner; has bust sculpted by David Dunbar, and her miniature painted by stepmother's brother, William John Thomson; visits Ann Turner's sister and brother-in-law, Unitarian minister John Robberds, in Manchester, where she meets Revd William Gaskell (1805–84)
1832 30 August: Elizabeth and William marry at St John's Parish Church, Knutsford; they honeymoon in North Wales, and move to 14 Dover Street, Manchester
1833 10 July: Gives birth to stillborn daughter
1834 12 September: Gives birth to Marianne
1835 Starts My Diary for Marianne
1837 January: ‘Sketches Among the Poor’, No. I, written with William, in Blackwood's Magazine
7 February: Gives birth to Margaret Emily (Meta)
1 May: Hannah Lumb dies
1840 ‘Clopton Hall' in William Howitt's Visits to Remarkable Places
1841 July: Gaskells visit Heidelberg
1842 7 October: Gives birth to Florence Elizabeth Family moves to 121 Upper Rumford Road, Manchester
1844 23 October: Gives birth to William
1845 10 August: William (son) dies of scarlet fever at Porthmadog, Wales, during family holiday
1846 3 September: Gives birth to Julia Bradford
1848 October: Mary Barton published anonymously; Elizabeth is paid £100 for the copyright by Chapman and Hall
1849 April–May: Visits London, meets Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle
June–August: Visits the Lake District, meets William Wordsworth
1850 June: Family moves to 42 (later 84) Plymouth Grove, Manchester
19 August: Meets Charlotte Bronte in Windermere
1851 June: ‘Disappearances' in Household Words; visited by Charlotte Bronte
July: Visits London and the Great Exhibition
October: Visits Knutsford
December–May 1853: Cranford in nine instalments in Household Words
1852 December: ‘The Old Nurse's Story' in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words
1853 January: Ruth published
April: Charlotte Bronte visits Manchester
May: Visits Paris
June: Cranford published
September: Visits Charlotte Brontë at Haworth
December: ‘The Squire's Story' in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words
1854 January: Visits Paris with Marianne, meets Madame Mohl
September–January 1855: North and South in Household Words
1855 February–March: Visits Madame Mohl in Paris with Meta
June: Asked to write a biography of Charlotte Brontë by Patrick Brontë; North and South published
September: Lizzie Leigh and Other Tales published
1856 1 January: Signs petition to amend the law on married women's property
May: Visits Brussels to conduct research on biography of Brontë
December: ‘The Poor Clare' in Household Words
1857 February–May: Visits Rome, where she meets Charles Norton
March: The Life of Charlotte Brontë published, the first book to carry Elizabeth Gaskell's name on the title-page; it was soon followed by a heavily altered third edition.
1858 January: ‘The Doom of the Griffiths' in Harper's New Monthly Magazine
September–December: Visits Heidelberg with Meta and Florence, and visits the Mohls in Paris
1859 March: Round the Sofa and Other Tales published
Summer: Visits Scotland
October: ‘Lois the Witch' in All the Year Round
November: Visits Whitby, which provides the setting for Sylvia's Lovers
December: ‘The Crooked Branch' published in the Extra Christmas Number of All the Year Round, as ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’
1860 February: ‘Curious, if True' in Cornhill Magazine
May: Right at Last and Other Tales published
July–August: Visits Heidelberg
1861 January: ‘The Grey Woman' in All the Year Round
1862 Visits Paris, Brittany and Normandy to conduct research for articles on French life
1863 February: Sylvia's Lovers published; Elizabeth is paid £1,000 by Smith, Elder
March—August: Visits France and Italy
1864 Cousin Phillis published
August: Visits Switzerland
August–January 1866: Wives and Daughters in Cornhill Magizine
1865 March—April: Visits Paris
June: Buys The Lawns, Holybourne, Hampshire, as a surprise for William
October: Visits Dieppe; The Grey Woman and Other Tales published
12 November: Dies at Holbourne
16 November: Buried at Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford Cousin Phillis, and Other Tales published
1866 February: Wives and Daughters: An Every-day Story published (Elizabeth died without quite completing it)
Sylvia's Lovers Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Page 62
