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"TAUGHT BY DEATH WHAT LIFE SHOULD BE": ELIZABETH GASKELL'S REPRESENTATION OF DEATH IN NORTH AND SOUTH.(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in the Novel
Date: 20000622
Author:HOTZ, MARY ELIZABETH

Literature in the nineteenth century was a discourse in which the representation of death was enormously popular. One need only remember that Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841), in which we read about little Nell's death, sold 100,000 copies on its first appearance.(1) Elizabeth Gaskell also wrote about death just at the moment when the burial reform debate reached its height in mid-nineteenth-century England.(2) In North and South (1854-1855),(3) Gaskell assuages the threat of death proposed by contemporary burial reform discourse-especially as Edwin Chadwick, Secretary ...

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