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‘some dismal ghost story’ to Charlotte Brontë ‘Just before bed-time. [Brontë] shrank from hearing it, and confessed that she was superstitious’ (Elizabeth Gaskell,
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1997), p. 406). Interestingly, however, Gaskell also appears to have had some reservations about the appropriate audience for her ghost stories; in a letter to an unknown correspondent dated 27 July [1855], she describes the publication of a collection of her stories, but she fears that ‘one or two of the [
Household Words
] stories might not so well do for young people. One is an unexplained ghost story for instance’ (
Letters
, no. 260, p. 365). The ‘unexplained story’ she refers to isprobably ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, and it may be the depiction of a diabolically seductive phantom-child in the story she is particularly concerned about.
    4 [Elizabeth Gaskell], ‘Clopton Hall’, in William Howitt,
Visits to Remarkable Places: Old Halls, Battle Fields, and Scenes of Striking Passages in English History and Poetry
(London: Longman, Orme, Browne, Green, & Longmans, 1840), pp. 135–9.
    5 Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., ‘Life in Manchester. Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’,
Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress
, 1 (June 1847), pp. 310–13, 334–6, 345–7; Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., ‘The Sexton’s Hero’,
Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress
, 2 (September 1847), pp. 149–52; Cotton Mather Mills, Esq., ‘Christmas Storms and Sunshine’,
Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress
, 3 (January 1848), pp. 4–7. See also Uglow,
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
, p. 172, for further discussion of the implications of Gaskell’s pseudonym.
    6 Gaskell,
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
, p. 259.
    7
Letters
, no. 68, p. 106. In the same letter Gaskell asserts that ‘If Self is to be the end of exertions, those exertions are unholy, there is no doubt of
that’
(p. 107). She seems to be suggesting, then, that the ‘cultivation’ of art for the sake of the
artist
, rather than for the sake of
others
, is not only inappropriate, but ‘unholy’. See also Letter no. 515, written to an unknown correspondent, dated 25 September [? 1862] where, in the midst of a bracing discussion of laundering techniques, Gaskell advises the would-be woman writer that ‘one should weigh well whether this pleasure [of writing] may not be obtained by the sacrifice of some duty’ (p. 694). Finally, it is also worth considering Gaskell’s summing-up of Charlotte Brontë’s priorities when she writes, in reference to Brontë’s marriage to Arthur Nicholls, ‘we lose all thought of the authoress in the timid and conscientious woman about to become a wife’
(The Life of Charlotte Brontë
, p. 416).
    8 Uglow, ‘Introduction’,
Curious, if True
, p. ix.
    9 Letter to Eliza Fox, [? April 1850], in
Letters
, no. 69, p. 108.
    10 See, e.g., John Geoffrey Sharps,
Mrs. Gaskell’s Observation and Invention: A Study of Her Non-Biographic Works
(Sussex: Linden Press, 1970), p. 119.
    11 For Gaskell’s love of gossip, see Uglow,
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories
, pp. 48, 255, and 628 n. 4. Further evidence of Gaskell’s mixing of fact and fiction can be found in a letter to George Smith, 27 December [1859], in which she refers to her story ‘The Ghost in the Garden Room’, later renamed ‘The Crooked Branch’, as all true, as she heard it herself from Justice Erle and Tom Taylor in 1849 (
Letters
, no. 452, p. 596).
    12 William Maskell,
Odds and Ends
(London: James Toovey, 1872), p. 77. See also John Collinson,
The History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset, Collectedfrom Authentick
[sic]
Records
, 3 vols. (Bath: R. Crutwell, 1791), vol. 3, pp. 460–61;