Conflict as a Means of Emancipation: Female Agency and Resistance in ‘North and South’

‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell uses the Industrial Revolution as a catalyst to delve into questions about female agency and the themes of female resistance. Indeed, class conflict and gender dynamics are intertwined throughout the novel in order to reveal how women negotiate the oppressive structures of their society. Gaskell reveals, through the experiences of the key female characters – Margaret Hale, Bessy Higgins, and Mrs. Thornton – that, quite often, emancipation comes through conflict, where women can assert

Read more

Literary responses to the Cotton Famine in Lancashire

The Cotton Famine (1861-65) was a significant era of poverty and unemployment resulting from a blockade on raw cotton during the American Civil War, which hit Lancashire’s textile communities particularly hard. It produced a wide variety of contemporary literary responses, many of which have been under-discussed in scholarship on Victorian industrial literature. In the past decade, however, more effort has been put into archiving and analysing these responses. This is primarily seen in the University of Exeter’s open access digital

Read more

Women in the business of waking up industrial Britain

Today, most of us cannot imagine waking up at the desired hour without our alarm clocks and smartphones. Clearly, such devices add to the convenience of our lives. But how did people wake up when alarm clocks did not exist or were not affordable to ordinary people? How did people ensure that they were not late for work? The answer is with the aid of “knocker ups”. Knocker ups were human alarm clocks –they were employed by clients who needed

Read more