Early nineteenth-century novelists had an engagingly cavalier attitude to finer points of chronology. One of Dickens’s footnotes in Chapter 2 of the 1847 reissue of The Pickwick Papers is typical of the freedoms they allowed themselves in such matters. Mr Jingle, in response to Pickwick’s observation that ‘My friend Mr Snodgrass has a strong poetic turn’, replies: ‘So have I … Epic poem – ten thousand lines – revolution of July – composed it on the spot.’ When asked, he assures the amazed Pickwick that he was, indeed, there at the event and saw the blood flowing in the Parisian gutters. Dickens adds the footnote to this exchange: ‘A remarkable instance of the prophetic force of Mr Jingle’s imagination; this dialogue occurring in the year 1827, and the Revolution in 1830.’1

Scott is equally good-natured about his chronological solecisms in Rob Roy. When Andrew Fairservice urges the hero, Frank Osbaldistone, to accompany him to ‘St Enoch’s Kirk, where he said “a soul searching divine was to haud forth”’, the novelist added the bland footnote (evidently as the result of a friend’s observation): ‘This I believe to be an anachronism, as St Enoch’s Church was not built at the date of the story [1715].’2 No more than Dickens, apparently, did Scott think of changing his anomalous text.

Scrupulosity about narrative chronology tightened up during the Victorian period, reaching a fetishistic pitch with the intricate sensation novels of Wilkie Collins. The older school of novelists were not, however, sure that they altogether liked the new orderliness about such things. Trollope voiced a typically bluff complaint in his comments on Collins in An Autobiography:

Of Wilkie Collins it is impossible for a true critic not to speak with admiration, because he has excelled all his contemporaries in a certain most difficult branch of his art; but as it is a branch which I have not myself at all cultivated, it is not unnatural that his work should be very much lost upon me individually. When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dovetailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy. The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction. The author seems always to be warning me to remember that something happened at exactly halfpast two o’clock on Tuesday morning … (Chapter 13)

Trollope’s underlying gripe would seem to be that by clock and calendar-watching Collins had deprived novelists and readers of valuable traditional liberties. In support of Trollope’s preference for the old easygoing ways, we may examine chronological cruxes in three Victorian novels of the 1850s and 1860s, Thackeray’s Pendennis, Mrs Gaskell’s A Dark Night’s Work, and Trollope’s own Rachel Ray. Closely examined, they suggest that what looks like slovenliness about chronology in Victorian fiction can plausibly be seen as an artistic device which these three novelists, at least, used to powerful effect.

Pendennis was Thackeray’s second major novel and it was, even by Victorian standards, an immensely long work (24 32-page monthly numbers, compared to the twenty that made up Vanity Fair). It took some 26 months in the publishing (November 1848–December 1850), interrupted as it was by the novelist’s life-threatening illness which incapacitated him between September 1849 and January 1850. Pendennis is also long in the tracts of time its narrative covers. The central story extends over some 40 years as the hero, Arthur Pendennis (‘Pen’), grows from boyhood to mature manhood. In passing, Pen’s story offers a panorama of the changing Regency, Georgian, Williamite, and Victorian ages.

Pendennis is one of the first and greatest mid-Victorian Bildungsromanen. The central character, as Thackeray candidly admitted, is based closely on himself. As part of this identification, Thackeray gave Arthur Pendennis the same birth-date as himself – 1811. This is indicated by a number of unequivocal historical markers early in the text. Pen is sixteen just before the Duke of York dies in 1827. We are told that Pen (still sixteen) and his mother recite to each other from Keble’s The Christian Year (1827), ‘a book which appeared about that time’. Pen’s early years at Grey Friars school and his parents’ Devonshire house, Fairoaks, fit exactly with Thackeray’s sojourns at Charterhouse school and his parents’ Devonshire house, Larkbeare. Both young men go up to university (‘Oxbridge’, Cambridge) in 1829. Both retire from the university, in rusticated disgrace, in 1830. Thackeray clinches this historical setting by any number of references to fashions, slang, and student mores of the late 1820s and 1830s, as well as by a string of allusions to the imminent and historically overarching Reform Bill.

Switch from these early pages to the last numbers of the novel, where we are specifically told on a number of occasions that Pen is now 26. This is supported by any number of historical allusions fixing the front-of-stage date as the mid-to-late 1830s.3 Pendennis is given its essentially nostalgic feel by historical and cultural events dredged up from the past, between ten and twenty years before the period of writing. And yet, there are a perplexing string of references which locate the action in the late 1840s, indeed, at the precise moment Thackeray was writing. In the highpoint scene of Derby Day in Number 19 of the serial narrative we glimpse among the crowd at the racecourse the prime minister, Lord John Russell, who took up office in 1846, and Richard Cobden MP. Cobden did not enter Parliament until 1847. And, by cross-reference to Richard Doyle’s well-known Derby Day panorama in Punch, 26 May 1849 (a work which inspired Frith’s famous Derby Day painting), we can see that Thackeray is clearly describing the Derby of the year in which he wrote, which actually took place a couple of months before the number was published.

Thackeray, as has been said, is insistent in this final phase of his narrative that Pen is just 26 years old, which gives a historical setting of 1837. But, at the same time, Pen is given speeches like the following (one of his more provokingly ‘cynical’ effusions to Warrington), in Number 20:

‘The truth, friend!’ Arthur said imperturbably; ‘where is the truth? Show it me. That is the question between us. I see it on both sides. I see it in the Conservative side of the House, and amongst the Radicals, and even on the ministerial benches. I see it in this man who worships by Act of Parliament, and is rewarded with a silk apron and five thousand a year; in that man, who, driven fatally by the remorseless logic of his creed, gives up everything, friends, fame, dearest ties, closest vanities, the respect of an army of churchmen, the recognized position of a leader, and passes over, truthimpelled, to the enemy, in whose ranks he is ready to serve henceforth as a nameless private soldier: – I see the truth in that man, as I do in his brother, whose logic drives him to quite a different conclusion, and who, after having passed a life in vain endeavours to reconcile an irreconcilable book, flings it at last down in despair, and declares, with tearful eyes, and hands up to heaven, his revolt and recantation. If the truth is with all these, why should I take side with any one of them?’ (Chapter 42)

No well-informed Victorian reading this in 1850 could fail to pick up the topical references. In his remark on the ‘ministerial benches’ Pen alludes to the great Conservative U-turn over the Corn Laws in 1846 (in which the aforementioned Cobden and Russell were leading players). His subsequent references are transparently to John Henry Newman (1801–90) and his brother Francis William Newman (1805–97). John went over to the Catholic Church in 1845. As Gordon Ray’s biography records, Thackeray attended his course of lectures on Anglican difficulties at the Oratory, King William Street, in summer 1850 (this number was published in September). Francis, professor of Latin at University College London, 1846–69, published his reasons for being unable to accept traditional Christian arguments in the autobiographical Phases of Faith (1850). According to Gordon Ray, Thackeray was much moved by the book. Clearly Pen’s comments to Warrington only make sense if we date them as being uttered in mid-1850, at the same period that this monthly number was being written. And we have to assume that Thackeray was making his hero the vehicle for what he (Thackeray) was thinking on the great current question of Papal Aggression.

These examples of ‘two-timing’ in Pendennis are systematic features of the novel’s highly artful structure. Thackeray has devised a technique that was to be later explored and codified into a modernist style by the Cubists. Not to be fanciful, the author of Pendennis anticipates Picasso’s multi-perspectival effect whereby, for example, more than one plane of a woman’s face could be combined in a single image. Pen and his mentor Warrington in the above scene are at the same time young men of the 1830s and bewhiskered, tobacco-reeking, ‘muscular’ hearties of the early 1850s, verging on middle-age. They inhabit the present and the past simultaneously, offering two planes of their lives to the reader.

 

Mrs Gaskell first published her novella A Dark Night’s Work as a stopgap serial in Dickens’s journal, All the Year Round. (Charles Reade needed more time to prepare for his massively documented sensation novel, Hard Cash.)4 Mrs Gaskell’s tale first appeared as instalments between 24 January and 21 March 1863 in the journal and was reissued as a one-volume book later in the year. It would seem, however, that the work had an earlier origin. As the Oxford World’s Classics editor, Suzanne Lewis, notes, ‘although published in 1863, A Dark Night’s Work was, according to a letter from Elizabeth Gaskell to George Smith, begun in about 1858’.5 Lewis goes on to connect this double date (composition beginning in 1858, publication occurring in 1863) with an important dating reference in the story’s first sentence: ‘In the county town of a certain shire there lived (about forty years ago) one Mr Wilkins, a conveyancing attorney of considerable standing’ (Chapter 1). The editor notes that by simple subtraction we may assume ‘that the early events of the tale take place sometime between 1815 and 1820’.

The earliest events told in the tale are Mr Wilkins’s courtship of his wife which, thanks to a reference to the state visit of the allied sovereigns (Ch. 1), we can locate as taking place in the months directly following June 1814, when the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia were entertained in London. Mr Wilkins is subsequently widowed very young and left with his daughter, Ellinor, as his only consolation (a younger daughter dies a baby, soon after her mother). At fourteen, as we are told, Ellinor makes a friend of Ralph Corbet, who is studying with a clergyman-tutor nearby. And, four years or so later, the two young people are deeply in love. Meanwhile, Mr Wilkins has conceived a huge dislike for his obnoxiously efficient chief clerk, Mr Dunster, and his conveyancing business is going to the dogs.

Already some of the time-markers in A Dark Night’s Work are beginning to go astray. As Suzanne Lewis notes, Ellinor, at some point shortly before 1829, is described visiting Salisbury Cathedral, where she earnestly discusses ‘Ruskin’s works’ with the resident clergyman, Mr Livingstone (Ch. 6). Nothing of Ruskin’s would have been available until decades later, and certainly not The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and its extended discussions of the beauty of Salisbury Cathedral, which is what Mr Livingstone and Miss Wilkins are evidently supposed to be discussing.

Events crowd on quickly, driven by Mrs Gaskell’s penchant for melodrama. In one of his drunken rages, Mr Wilkins strikes out and kills Dunster. In their ‘dark night’s work’, Ellinor, the loyal servant Dixon, and Mr Wilkins bury the clerk’s body, allowing it to be thought that he has stolen money from the firm and decamped to America. Under the strain of complicity, Ellinor falls ill; the engagement with Ralph Corbet is broken off; Mr Wilkins declines into chronic drunkenness and dies soon after, shattered by remorse and guilt. Ellinor is left virtually penniless, and goes to live a retired and self-punishingly religious life at East Chester. The narrative specifically dates the heroine’s illness (and thus all the circumambient events) as 1829 (Ch. 12).

Ellinor remains at East Chester ‘sixteen or seventeen years’, before the long feared calamity occurs. Surveyors, prospecting for a new railway line between Hamley and Ashcombe, discover Dunster’s body and an incriminating knife belonging to Dixon. Ellinor is at the time of the exhumation in Italy, and is unable to get back before the loyally mute Dixon is sentenced to death. The telegraph, we are informed, is not available to the heroine (as Suzanne Lewis notes, although introduced in the 1830s it did not come into general commercial service until the late 1850s). Ellinor eventually does hurry back, by steamship and railway train, the bustle of which is graphically described.

The central chronological problem in A Dark Night’s Work is explained by Suzanne Lewis, in a note to the ‘1829’ reference to Ellinor’s illness:

That Ellinor was, in fact, nineteen at the time of the dark night’s work is confirmed at the beginning of Chapter 12 where we are told ‘her youth had gone in a single night, fifteen years ago’ and that she is now ‘only four-and-thirty’. There would seem, therefore, to be a decade or more’s slippage in the main events of the narrative, according to where in the text one is reading.

And then there is the strange business of characters’ ages. After the murder, and the disposal of Dunster’s body, while Ellinor is still recovering from her illness her accomplice, the lugubrious Dixon, is made to say to her:

‘Ay! … We didn’t think much of it at the time, did we, Miss Nelly? But it’ll be the death on us, I’m thinking. It has aged me above a bit. All my fifty years afore were but as a forenoon of child’s play to that night.’ (Ch. 8)

By which we suppose that he was born in 1829 minus fifty years, that is, in 1779. But later on we are told that he solemnly takes Ellinor to the grave of his first love, ‘Molly, the pretty scullery-maid’. The tablet over her grave reads: ‘Sacred to the Memory of Mary Greaves, Born 1797. Died 1818. “We part to meet again”’ (Ch. 12). ‘I put this stone up over her with my first savings’, Dixon tells Ellinor. Now clearly Dixon was not supposed to have been twenty years older than Molly, nor did he have to wait until he was 39 before he had sufficient savings to pay for a simple gravestone. Gaskell has created two Dixons, an old Dixon and a middle-aged Dixon – both of whom uneasily cohabit the narrative.

There is a similar dualism in the character of Miss Monro, Ellinor’s governess, and another important secondary character in the tale. After Mr Wilkins’s death and the news that there is no longer enough money in the household to employ her, Miss Monro rouses herself pluckily. She declares, ‘I am but forty, I have a good fifteen years of work in me left yet’ (Ch. 8). But, when we encountered her on her first arrival at Hamley, some ten years before, Miss Monro is described as ‘a plain, intelligent, quiet woman of forty’ (Ch.1). Either she is gallantly lying when she tells Ellinor that she has fifteen years more of work in her or, more likely, we have another chronological anomaly: a character who does not age with the passing of time.

These anomalies in A Dark Night’s Work seem to be genuinely irreconcilable. Nor, as with Pendennis, can one weave them into some artistic effect, aimed at by the author. They seem rather to belong to a broadbrush historical scheme of the ‘before and after’ kind in which the only thing that matters is whether something roughly succeeds or roughly precedes a threshold event. It would seem that Mrs Gaskell began A Dark Night’s Work with a vivid donnée – the preparatory excavations for the railways churning up the beautiful English landscape, and discovering a murdered body. This donnée had social significance as well as directly personal implications for Ellinor. As Humphry House argues in The Dickens World (1941), the coming of the railways in the early years of the 1840s marked for the Victorians the passing of the old, ‘innocent’ England and the arrival of ‘modernity’, with all its woes. As a narrative (covering as it does some thirty years) A Dark Night’s Work is divided into two halves, the world before the railways – a world of horses and sleepy country towns; and the world after the coming of the railways – marked in Gaskell’s novel by joyless European tourism, frenetic rush, and the London where Ellinor has her fateful interview with Ralph Corbet.7 The description of Ellinor’s journey to Judge Corbet’s house in Hyde Park Gardens to intercede for Dixon gives a vivid impression of the hectic pace of London life in the 1840s:

It was about the same time that she had reached Hellingford on the previous night, that she arrived at the Great Western station on this evening – past eight o’clock. On the way she had remembered and arranged many things: one important question she had omitted to ask Mr Johnson; but that was easily remedied. She had not inquired where she could find Judge Corbet; if she had, Mr Johnson could probably have given her his professional address. As it was, she asked for a Post-Office Directory at the hotel, and looked out for his private dwelling – 128, Hyde Park Gardens. (Ch. 15)

Ellinor sends a hotel messenger to the judge’s house, but he is not at home, so she orders a cab for seven the next morning. All this hyperactive toing-and-froing belongs to the hightechnology world of the 1840s and 1850s. In the 1820s and 1830s (when the first half of A Dark Night’s Work is set) Ellinor would have had to lumber up to London by stage-coach and might have taken days tracking down Corbet by personal inquiry and trial and error. The Great Western Railway link referred to in the above passage was (as Suzanne Lewis notes) only completed in 1841. The Post Office Directory was, in the early 1840s, a recent innovation, which came in with Rowland Hill’s reforms in the late 1830s. The fast and efficient metropolitan communication system (couriers and cabs arriving promptly at appointed hours) are all features of modern London, a London that has only recently come into being, we feel. In short, what Mrs Gaskell is aiming at in A Dark Night’s Work, and what she succeeds in, is a novel divided historically into ‘then’ and ‘now’, with the arrival of the railway marking the point of division. It is a powerful effect, and one that lingers in the reader’s mind.

 

Rachel Ray has one of the simplest of Trollope’s plots. A young girl in an evangelically strict household receives a proposal of marriage from a young man. He is eligible in every way, except that he earns his money from brewing beer and has the reputation (ill-deserved) of being a ‘wolf’. Torn between the moral anxieties of her widowed mother and widowed sister, Rachel neither accepts nor rejects Luke Rowan. She seems to have lost him by her vacillation, but finally he proves to be true.

Trollope chose to set Rachel Ray in Devon. The provincial setting has plausibly been ascribed to his admiration for George Eliot’s recently published (and highly successful) Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). But Devon suggested itself for two other reasons. First, because it was historically a stronghold of evangelicalism (something that Trollope refers to in the novel on a number of occasions). Secondly, because Devon was a county Trollope knew intimately. Since childhood, he had spent holidays in Exeter with relatives. And in August 1851, on being transferred back to England from Ireland by the Post Office, he had been assigned to a roving mission to the West Country. ‘I began in Devonshire’, he records in his Autobiography, ‘and visited, I think I may say, every nook in that county’ (Ch. 5). Trollope loved Devon, and came to consider it the most beautiful region in England.

Rachel Ray vividly recalls Trollope’s first impressions of Devon when he returned in the baking heat of summer 1851. He describes it with an uncharacteristically sensuous turn of phrase:

in those southern parts of Devonshire the summer sun in July is very hot. There is no other part of England like it. The lanes are low and narrow, and not a breath of air stirs through them. The ground rises in hills on all sides, so that every spot is a sheltered nook. The rich red earth drinks in the heat and holds it, and no breezes come up from the southern torpid sea. Of all counties in England Devonshire is the fairest to the eye; but, having known it in its summer glory, I must confess that those southern regions are not fitted for much noonday summer walking. (Ch. 2)

Peter Edwards, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics Rachel Ray, points out that for much of the manuscript Trollope wrote ‘Kingsbridge’ for ‘Baslehurst’ (where the Rays are supposed to live). The significance of the original name is that Kingsbridge is an actual town in South Hams, Devonshire. Trollope’s diary records that Kingsbridge was virtually the first place that he visited when he came to the county, staying there on 9 August 1851. Coming as he had from cool, damp Ireland, he evidently remembered the heat of that summer week all his life.

One of the most distinctive features of Trollope – ‘the lesser Thackeray’ – is that unlike his master, or Dickens, or George Eliot, he did not normally antedate the action of his fiction. His best-known novel for posterity is probably The Way We Live Now (serially published in 1874–5, set in 1873) and the title could describe most of the Trollopian oeuvre. When he died in 1882, obituarists noted that if later generations wanted a ‘photogravure’ image of the Victorian age, they might consult Trollope’s novels.

Rachel Ray would seem to deviate from the Trollopian norm in this respect. It is clear that in creating the novel’s little world Trollope drew on his recollections of South Devon in August 1851. A number of cues in the action mark the action – or portions of it – as taking place well before 1863, the date of publication. So too does the generally sleepy atmosphere of Baslehurst. But at other points in the narrative Trollope specifically alludes to current events and even, at one point, seems to indicate a time-setting of August 1863 (which would be in line with his ‘the way we live now’ practice).

To summarize some of these chronological contradictions: in Chapter 4, we encounter the following, by way of introduction to the ‘low’ clergyman, Samuel Prong:

Edwards adds a note:

the division of parishes such as Dr Harford’s was carried out by the Ecclesiastical Commission, which was instituted in 1835 and was guided by a series of church-reform acts passed in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

The ‘Ecclesiastical Estates Commissioners’ (set up, as Edwards notes, in 1835) had sweeping powers to equalize and rearrange dioceses, parishes, and clergymen’s income. The re-parishioning referred to here must have taken place in the early 1840s at the latest, since the point is clearly made that Dr Harford has held the living for nearly forty years before the division and for just over forty years altogether. We must therefore assume the date of the narrative here also to be in the early to mid-1840s.

This date is confirmed by another reference, at the end of the same chapter, in the scene where Luke Rowan shows Rachel the beauty of the clouds at sunset. The narrator notes, sympathetically enough, that Luke ‘was not altogether devoid of that Byronic weakness which was so much more prevalent among young men twenty years since than it is now’ (Ch. 4). The ‘twenty years since’ reference would also give a setting of the 1840s, which actually ‘feels’ right for this idyllic chapter.

There are, however, many other references in Rachel  Ray’s text which point to a present, ‘way we live now’ setting for the novel. There is, for example, an allusion to the early 1860s ‘crinoline mania’, in Chapter 7, in the description of the massed young ladies at the Tappitts’ ball.8 In Chapter 9, as Dorothea contemplates the possibility of divorce, she clearly has the terms of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, in mind. There are passing references in the text to such modernistic things as night mail trains. And Mrs Ray’s excursion by railway to Exeter in Chapter 21 clearly suggests a late 1850s, early-1860s date. Railways were relatively late to come to Devon (when he was posted there in 1851 Trollope was obliged to go about the county mainly by horse). The GWR did not offer a network service to a little town like ‘Baslehurst’ (i.e. Kingsbridge) until the early 1850s. In Chapter 21 (‘Mrs Ray Goes to Exeter and Meets a Friend’) Mrs Ray is described making a day trip to the nearby large town. Rachel commiserates with her mother on the older lady’s return, observing she must be tired: ‘Yes, I am tired, my dear; very’ replies Mrs Ray; ‘I thought the train never would have got to the Baslehurst station. It stopped at all the little stations, and really I think I could have walked as fast.’ As the narrator tartly notes: ‘A dozen years had not as yet gone by since the velocity of these trains had been so terrible to Mrs Ray that she had hardly dared to get into one of them!’. The dozen years would seem to refer the reader back to the early 1850s, when trains first arrived in the region. Finally, one may note that in the business of the election which dominates the second half of the narrative Mr Hart, the Jewish candidate, is clearly presenting himself after 1857–8, when it finally became possible for Jews to sit in Parliament.

This two-timing in Rachel Ray does not give any impression of error, or narrative confusion. It creates a subtle and pleasing pictorial effect. Trollope paints an essentially contemporary Baslehurst – a thriving little country town of the 1860s, with its modern railways, breweries, and elections. But he throws over this depiction of rural modernity a kind of nostalgic halo, or veneer. Among all the contemporaneity we catch a momentary glimpse of old Devon, as it was fondly enshrined in Trollope’s memory. For the reader of Rachel Ray it creates a peculiarly idyllic effect, like a sepia tint on a photograph.

 

In the three instances which have been examined here, structural anachronism, or the double time-setting, is not something one would necessarily want cleared up in any rationalistic spirit of standardized chronological reference. The case can be made, without excessive ingenuity, that these novelists’ two-timing practices conduce to effects of historical complexity (in Thackeray’s case), a highlighting of the major emotional divide in Victorian social history (in Gaskell’s case), and a sensuously rich and cross-embroidered narrative texture (in Trollope’s case). As Trollope insists in his Autobiography, too much scrupulosity in such matters may not always be the best thing artistically.

Notes

1. The text was published in the first serial instalment of the novel, April 1836. The footnote was added for the ‘Cheap’ 1847 reissue of the novelist’s works. See the Oxford World’s Classics Pickwick Papers, 726–7.

2. See Rob Roy, Chapter 21. For other chronological anomalies see the Everyman edition of Rob Roy, ed. J. A. Sutherland (London, 1995).

3. For instance: (1) Pen’s visit to Vauxhall in Number 15 of the serialized novel, where Simpson – who retired in the mid-1830s – still presides; (2) the rage for ‘silver fork’ novels, which Thackeray pointedly recalls as a foible of ‘that time’; (3) London excitement at the performance of Taglioni in The Sylphide in the early 1830s; (4) the huge box-office success of Bulwer’s play, The Lady of Lyons, in 1838.

4. See J.A. Sutherland, ‘Dickens, Reade, and Hard Cash’, Dickensian, 405, 81, 1 (Spring 1985), 9–10.

5. For a closely examined survey of the composition of A Dark Night’s Work see J.G. Sharps, Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention (Arundel, 1970), 353–4.

6. For further minor dating errors in the narrative see ibid. 360. Sharps concludes with something of an understatement, ‘Mrs Gaskell’s chronology was not especially accurate’.

7. In Ellinor’s Italian trip, Mrs Gaskell is recalling her own trip to Rome, February–May 1857. As with her heroine, she was recalled to England in distressing circumstances. Having made an unhuried return to Paris on 26 May, Mrs Gaskell was met with the news that publication of The Life of Charlotte Brontë had been suspended, on grounds of libel. She rushed back to London, in a state of extreme anxiety – all of which is mirrored in the account of Ellinor’s return to save Dixon’s life. See Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford, 1976), 187–8.

8. The first edition of the Oxford World’s Classics Rachel Ray (1988) had as its cover illustration one of Millais’s unused illustrations for the novel, showing Rachel dressed in an extravagant crinoline of 1860s vintage.