As a UU Director of Religious Education, a favorite part of my job was reading through several volumes of biographies of famous or noteworthy Unitarians and Universalists. As a UU history aficionado, I marveled at how influencial UUs have been, not only to our denomination, but to the world at large. I certainly thought I was familiar with most famous historical Unitarians and Universalists. But for a wedding anniversary a few years back, Rick gave me this book on women writers. One author, Elizabeth Gaskell, wrote in England around the time of Dickens and George Eliot, and who was totally unknown to me is described here as the daughter and wife of Unitarian Ministers.
Elizabeth Gaskell is perhaps most famous
Sometimes we UUs love to recite a litany of our prominent famous historical and contemporary co-religionists to friends and visitors. Some members of what I call our pantheon of UU saints are a little dubious -- if you're famous and attended a few Unitarian or Universalist services, we'll claim you as our own. So it is refreshing to read about an author whose Unitarian credentials are impeccable. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was thoroughly Unitarian and grew up in some exciting times for change in the faith.
Her father and mother came from staunch Unitarian families, the Stevensons and the Hollands. Elizabeth Gaskell's mother died when she was very young, and she was sent to Knutsford, a town very much like Cranford in Cheshire, and raised by an aunt very much like the women who were the heart of social life in Cranford. Her circle of family and friends included the Darwin and the Wedgewood (of pottery fame) families. Education for women was generally not a priority in England in the early 19th century, but Unitarians did a better job of educating their daughters than most. Elizabeth did learn to read from the Bible, from moral tales for children and from the classics. She learned French, Italian and German, and only as a teenager attended a school where she studied those subjects generally taught to females: art, music and dancing. As a wife of a minister who naturally, worked in the Sunday school, and mother of four daughters who grew up to adulthood, she still found time to write seven major works and numerous short stories between 1848 and 1866, travel extensively, and make friends with many influential thinkers of the day.
Unitarianism in Britain has a history separate from but parallel to Unitarianism here in America. For the most part they have a separate pantheon of "saints." Unitarian thought has always existed to a small or large degree since the beginning of Christianity. Before the Council of Nicea in 325, churchmen did debate the nature of Jesus and whether he was divine. But after the Council, the doctrines Trinity and the divinity of Christ were firmly established and to believe otherwise was heresy. With the rise of Protestantism, some began to speculate on the concept of the Trinity again, and some religious thinkers, namely Francis David, Michael Servetus and Socinus, rejected the concept, mainly because they did not find much evidence in the Bible. Some ideas, especially those of Socinus reached England in the 17th century and flourished during the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment.
Age of Enlightenment Unitarianism in Britain is best exemplified by Joseph Priestley, both a Unitarian minister and a scientist who discovered the existence of the element, oxygen. He along with other Unitarians rejected the doctrines of Trinity and the divinity of Jesus as being full of paradox, and believed that passages in the Bible were wrongly translated or corrupted. Priestley felt that since religion and reason proceed from the same God, they cannot be contrary to one another.
Unitarians of this age of rationalism also discarded corollary doctrines such as the doctrine of Atonement. If Jesus was a man, he could not volunteer to take our sins on him nor could his death atone for them. As in America, Unitarians also cast off any belief in predestination. Jesus was basically a man sent by God on a mission to show us the Way. British Unitarianism was creedless and placed primary reliance on reason. Tolerance, a conviction of the innate goodness of human nature, a concept of a loving rather than a wrathful God, and freedom of belief were also hallmarks of the faith.
Many Unitarians came out of the dissenting traditions in England. The Church of England was the established church and only a few Unitarians came from an Anglican background, so services don't reflect those traditions. Unitarians came from nonconformists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Independents, and even later on, Methodists. Despite a horror of the Unitarians' disbelief in the Trinity, as reflected in the start of a Methodist hymn: "Stretch out thy hand, thy Triune God! The Unitarian fiend expel, and chase his doctrines back to hell," there was movement back and forth between Unitarians and other dissenting religions.
Unitarianism in Britain actually received a boost when a mob burned down Joseph Priestley's home and lab and he had to escape to Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Young men of the period were attracted to Unitarianism because of Priestley's connection to political radicalism. Yet as the nineteenth century began and the Romantic movement in literature and art took hold, Unitarianism's appeal began to wane. An example of this is the experience of the poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who for a while, considered becoming a Unitarian Minister. Priestley had warned against superstition and religious enthusiasm, but by the 19th century, the faith was considered cold -- all "light" from reason but no "warmth" or feeling. Coleridge finally abandoned his idea and opined in his notebook, "O for some Sun that shall unite Light to Warmth." He felt religion needed to provide some outlet for the imagination and this was sorely missing in Unitarianism. And feelings can be an important impetus to religious thought, as Coleridge states, "I no sooner felt than I sought to understand." Some religious thinkers took up Coleridge's concerns and strove to make the faith richer, especially James Martineau who sought to combine feeling and reason and provide food for the imagination.
James Martineau, from a long-time Unitarian family and younger brother of feminist and social reformer Harriet Martineau, opened up Unitarianism to the possibilities of mysteries in faith and hypothesized a moral, rather than physical divinity of Christ. Another thinker, Francis William Newman, brought a spiritual dimension to Unitarianism but thought Jesus was just a man. Newman, the brother of Cardinal Newman (you see Newman Centers for Catholic students in most colleges and Universities in England and America) started out as a strict Calvinist. But after a disastrous mission of trying to convert Moslems in Baghdad, he started questioning Calvinism, and became a radical Unitarian thinker. The influence of other dissenting religions and even the American Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing furthered the growth of Unitarianism as a vibrant religion.
Elizabeth Gaskell knew Martineau and Newman, became friends with some American Unitarians, and definitely embraced the spiritual side of Unitarianism. She thought Priestley's brand of Unitarianism was cold and hard. Jesus, though not Christ, was a living presence, and the Bible remained an indispensable book. But Elizabeth Gaskell was also of the social reform school of Unitarianism, in company with Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale in England, and Theodore Parker and Dorothea Dix in this country.
Elizabeth's husband, Rev. William Gaskell, co-minister of the Cross Street Chapel in Manchester, encouraged his wife to write after the death of their only son in infancy and was always supportive of her career. She had a reputation as a great story teller, and her husband thought that writing would help relieve Elizabeth's grief. Her first book, Mary Barton, presented the problems of the poor, working class from their point of view, hoping that knowledge would help promote communication between the working class and the mill owners. Cross Street Chapel was home to a thriving congregation, including many of the more enlightened mill owners in Manchester who wanted to disassociate from the land-owning class prominent in Anglican churches. Most mill owners, even the enlightened Unitarians, were outraged by Mary Barton. Just as many conservatives today have moved so far to the right that they can't tell Nixon from a liberal, the mill-owners proclaimed Elizabeth Gaskell a socialist or a communist. She was, in fact, a religious liberal who believed that the interests of the mill owner and the worker were basically the same, and that communication, understanding, and Christian love could bring them together to work toward common goals.
Gaskell was writing at a time when the mill owners struggled against a social system in which the landowners were paramount and often charged exhorbitant rents to the industrialists. Thomas Malthus direly predicted that population would soon outstrip food supply. Utopian socialists planned alternative, cooperative societies. And Frederick Engels presented his dark picture of the situation in Manchester in "The condition of the Working Class in England." Gaskell's writing seems to us far from radical, and those on the left found her solutions paternalistic. But hers was a paternalism of aiding adult children and watching them become independent agents rather than the "Father Knows Best" paternalism prevalent at the time. In both Mary Barton and North and South she shows the folly of mill owners refusing to inform workers of even good reasons for their actions and assuming that workers wouldn't understand or had no right to know, anyway. Gaskell was one of the few writers with some sympathy for workers's unions. In North and South, she envisioned union leaders acting in an advisory capacity in the affairs of the mills.
Charles Darwin, a distant cousin of Elizabeth Gaskell, published On the Origin of Species, in 1859 and evolution was the center of the public debate throughout the 1860s. Unitarianism still was primarily the rational and scientific religion of Joseph Priestley despite the move toward more spirituality, and Unitarians welcomed the theories and as usual loved discussing Darwin's concepts. At the time, Oxford and Cambridge only allowed Anglican students, and studies concentrated there on ancient languages, literature and history. Science, as a discipline for study, was not valued. Gaskell, in Wives and Daughters illustrates the attitude with a vignette of two sons. The parents hail the eldest, a student of poetry, as the genius of the family, while they view the younger son, with a keen interest in science and nature, as slow-witted. Unitarians studied at other Universities, such as in Edinburg, that may not have been as prestigious, but had great science departments. They were among the Theory of Evolution's staunchest defenders in the early confrontations between science and religion. The Gaskells had two liberal Anglican friends at Oxford, Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison, who were charged with heresy for embracing Darwinism and denying the existence of hell. I'm not sure which outraged the Anglican establishment more, but a conviction of heresy was overturned on appeal.
Soon however, the scientific theory caught on among England's educated classes, and evolutionary change and progress replaced Divine Providence as the prevailing metaphor for the mid-Victorians. In America, Social Darwinism redefined "survival of the fittest," and became the upper class' rationale against social change to improve the lot of the poor. In Britain, it became the rationale for the empire. Historians looked at all aspects of Britain's heroic past and acclaimed Britons had evolved through natural selection as the leaders of the world. A history of England, written at the time put forth the view that England's present greatness was due to a unique national character evolving from a Saxon love of freedom, strengthened by Roman discipline and imperial command and cultivated by Norman refinement. The mid-nineteenth century was a time when national stereotypes abounded, and many Britons perceived their near neighbors, the French as feminine or weak, and other national characters hadn't their pedigree. Also, Britons considered a target of imperialism, the Africans, as a separate, enfeebled race. British rule was imperative, they felt, for the Africans' salvation. Before the mid-nineteenth century, it was acceptable for British men to cry or show emotion. But with the emphasis on an imperialist mission, British manhood of the upper classes had to be rational, practical, physically and morally strong, and had to keep that stiff upper lip. And always, their superiority of nature and intellect had to be contrasted with the lower natures and intellect of Africans, Asians, women and the lower classes in Britain, even if they had to force the definition.
The imperative to build the empire, based on this kind of social Darwinism was well established between 1859 when Origin of Species appeared and 1864, when Gaskell began her last book, Wives and Daughters. On the surface, this appears to be a quintessential woman's book, showing a young girl's coming of age, falling and love, and relating to those in the world around her. But the underlying context of the book is a battle against the imperialist male's definition of women. Elizabeth Gaskell was never strident, and mainly pokes fun at society's infantalization of women. The heroine Molly's father, while a very benign and loving man, is hampered by his inability to consider his daughter as even a potential rational, intelligent woman. As the reading about Molly's education shows, he wanted to ensure that the male definition of superiority stayed intact. His pronouncements that "I know my little Molly, my silly little goosey - better than she knows herself," and his insistence that he doesn't need to give her a reason because she wouldn't understand it anyway, are all designed to keep intact this male myth. But it backfires on Mr. Gibson and the other male characters. Women, without any meaningful occupation, tended to wither and die once their children were grown. Communication among men and women was impeded. Not only is women's wisdom and experience disregarded, but women take the men's lead and keep their reasons secret, too.
The importance of communication and the bringing together of disparate viewpoints, whether between women and men, or workers and mill owners, remained Elizabeth Gaskell's major theme. She had no argument with the science of Darwinism. Scientists remained the heroes and hope of England's future throughout Wives and Daughters. Yet Molly could understand and discuss the scientific books she read, and England would be all the stronger if women were as learned as men.
Elizabeth Gaskell in other novels, made many of the same arguments in regards to the working class of Britain as she did for women, as the reading about the working class naturalists shows. Although she was well traveled, she does seem to share some of the prejudices of her time and place -- in North and South the Irish workers are perceived as inferior to the English -- but whether she truly believed this or played to her audience is uncertain. I always get the picture of an author walking on a balance beam or tightrope. She wanted to get her point across without being offensive and losing her audience. She hoped to start the process of change by making a chink in her audiences' rock-solid beliefs and presenting a Christian alternative (Christian in the sense of Jesus being a moral leader). Keeping an eye on her audience, primarily middle and upper class Anglicans is perhaps the reason why the Unitarian religion is only portrayed obliquely in her writings. Margaret Hale remains Anglican even though her father resigns from the ministry and becomes a dissenter. Yet Margaret will marry the man who respects her fathers decision and not the one who ridicules it. Many readers did find Gaskells' books edgy despite the tightrope walk. She presented, Ruth, a fallen woman in the book of that name, in the most sympathetic manner possible, educating readers as to how a nice girl can unwarily fall. Should she be condemned forever because of one lapse? Elizabeth Gaskell thought no, but many in England said resoundingly, "yes." Even in the relatively innocuous Cranford the main characters' father banished the brother because of cross dressing.
In my reading group, we often discuss what makes a book a classic. Elizabeth Gaskell is considered by critics today to be at the top of the second tier of Victorian British writers, highly regarded but not "classic," below George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Why is this? Her Unitarianism may have inadvertently played a part in consigning her to the second tier. Because Gaskell believed in inherent goodness, there are really no bad characters or villains in her book. The mill owners and the workers may have a lot of faults and Gaskell does not hesitate to dramatize them, but they are basically good people. Margaret Hale in North and South has working class friends and middle class associates, and her goal is to get them to communicate. People who do wrong and harm others often do so because of their circumstances and not because they are bad people. But her books lack the interesting, well-drawn, though slightly unreal villains of Dickens that act as a personification of evil, and make worthy opponents for the hero. And she does not quite have George Eliot's panoramic view of history and the power of ideas. But Gaskell was a great story teller. To the modern reader, her books, with thirty pages of end-notes may seem daunting. But those who love Jane Austen will enjoy Cranford and Wives and Daughters. And for readers interested in social history, Mary Barton, North and South, and Ruth offer social commentary from the Unitarian viewpoint.