Inaugural Lecture - Professor Mary Hammond Event

‘Wayward orphans and lonesome places’: the reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels in the English regional press, 1848-55.

This lecture investigates the regional reception of Manchester writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) by examining their strange appearances in the form of short unauthorised extracts published in local newspapers countrywide. It will argue that this common but hitherto critically neglected practice – which took excerpting way beyond the well-established forms of literary reviewing – may have played an important role in the rise and shaping of the increasingly powerful provincial press during this period. Finally, the lecture suggests that a close analysis of the subtly strategic deployment of fiction extracts in the press can provide new ways of thinking about the contested and highly political distinction Victorianists have made between ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’ novels.

This lecture will be chaired by Professor John McGavin, Emeritus Professor in English.

Each of the Inaugural Lectures in Humanities will have an end of lecture collection for the speaker's nominated charity. For her lecture Professor Hammond has chosen to support Cancer Research UK.

Please note the booking deadline for this event is 6pm on 13 November 2017.