Victorian social science and Elizabeth Gaskell's literary strategy, versus the Bronte sisters


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Abstract. This paper speculatively proposes that Elizabeth Gaskell used the social science of her time to gain an advantage over the Bronte sisters. Victorian evolutionist anthropology said that societies go through stages of development, though some societies are at an earlier stage still. Sequences of stages were specified, such as primitive promiscuity, matriarchy, and then patriarchy. My proposal is that Elizabeth Gaskell's advisers, if not she herself, would have predicted industrial revolutions in other countries: making her fiction on the industrial revolution highly relevant there.
Draft version: version 3 (30th July 2026; v2 16th October 2025)
Note: accent removed from Bronte, owing to computer display problems.
PDF available at: https://www.academia.edu/144486113/Victorian_social_science_and_Elizabeth_Gaskells_literary_strategy_versus_the_Bront%C3%AB_sisters

This is no dream
A dialogue such as this must have been


There must have been some competition between Elizabeth Gaskell and the Bronte sisters, even though Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the first biography of Charlotte Bronte. I speculate that Gaskell has used the social science of her day to gain an advantage. Here is a fictional dialogue.


GASKELL: What am I going to do about the Bronte sisters? The reading public is forever expanding and uncultivated readers are sure to prefer the flashy works of the sisters. Also the family have only been in literature since the father published some poems. Readers from families new to literature will relate to them and embrace them as their own.
EAGLEFOX: Don't worry, Elizabeth. Write about industrialization in Manchester, the birth place of the industrial revolution. I have got a plan.
GASKELL: What is your plan?
EAGLEFOX: There is a theory in the new field of anthropology according to which there is a sequence of stages which a society goes through before it reaches our own stage, but some societies are in earlier stages to ours. Some are even in the earliest stages still.
GASKELL: So?
EAGLEFOX: The academics use this theory to explain why one society and another share a ritual, for example. They are in the same stage and having that ritual is part of that stage.
GASKELL: Like, for example, like, burning widows as the Hindus do. Don't tell me that there are other peoples who do that? O recall those lines from the ill-fated Hudibras: Like Indian widows gone to bed / Flaming curtains, to the dead. 
EAGLEGOX: What we predict is that some time in the late twenty-first century countries such as India and China will experience industrialization. And your works will be in vogue there.
GASKELL: Amongst such large populations? But will they not have their own authors on industrialization?
EAGLEFOX: The scholars there will surely pore over your texts and be keen that their authors not repeat your own efforts.


References
Butler, Samuel. 1663. Hudibras. Available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4937/pg4937.txt
Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1857. The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Volume 1. Smith, Elder, and Co. Available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1827/1827-h/1827-h.htm


The example in the abstract of primitive promiscuity, matriarchy, and patriarchy comes from the Swiss scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen. I have not read his original texts, but found a volume 3 of one overall text.


Bachofen, Johann Jakob, abridged and translated by David Partenheimer. An English translation of Bachofen's Mutterrecht (Mother right) (1861): a study of the religious and juridical aspects of gynecocracy in the ancient world. Available at:
https://archive.org/details/englishtranslati0000bach