The Old Nurse's Story

“The Old Nurse’s Story” is one of Gaskell’s earliest and shortest works. In it, Gaskell already reveals the literary impulses and narrative techniques that gave her later fiction such appeal for large Victorian audiences, even as she subtly subverts rigid traditional notions of class, femininity, and cultural propriety.

The choice to give Hester a frame narrative softens both the remoteness of the northern setting of her main tale and the ghost story’s eerie brutality. While those two elements heighten the thrill of reading Gaskell’s story, they also potentially endanger her moral authority with a Victorian readership. As she does with most of her fiction, Gaskell writes “The Old Nurse’s Story” both to entertain and to edify, so the frame structure she creates maintains a delicate narrative balance by offering some distance from cruel and unfamiliar incidents. This device is characteristic of Gaskell’s writing: In her later works, Gaskell drew on literary strategies such as biblical allusion and Christian typology, or a self-sacrificing heroine, to balance the more daring elements of her plots with overt respectability.

The story’s early emphasis on typically virtuous Victorian women helps to pave the way for the more morally complex and horrifying details of the ghost story, especially as it relates to the theme of Victorian Domesticity and Female Virtue. The realist opening paragraph emphasizes Hester’s industrious respectability: she is a countrywoman from distant Northumberland and has stayed in service to the same family for decades, as she narrates the tale for Rosamond’s children. In contrast to Hester, Rosamond’s young mother embodies the typical virtues of a middle-class heroine, and Hester’s recognition of those female merits testifies to her discernment, and to her modest sense of her “proper” place in society. The story’s early establishment of traditional feminine morality creates a sense of trust, safety, and credibility which allows Hester to veer into the more emotionally complex and gothic elements of her story as it progresses.

The story immediately sets up the promise of narrative tension, shock, and suspense in the eerie atmosphere of Furnivall Manor and the building hints of family secrets and scandal. Gaskell’s gothic horror reaches a peak with scenes of cruelly abandoned family members and a haunted courtyard that would lure a young orphan to death by exposure. The winter setting again has a dual or balancing structure, being both representative of the coldness, cruelty, and dread of the tale, and of the festive winter period for which it was written. The narrative’s two final reminders to practice Christian charity follow atmospheric references to holiday festivities: holly, mince pies, and a snowy walk to church. The story’s morality is supported by the theme of Working-Class Authority. One moral reminder comes from Hester as she encourages Rosamond to pray for the first time in the final paragraphs. As child specters and haunting music seem to close in on them, Hester teaches “Rosamond to pray for one who has done a deadly sin” (42), offering some hope for pardon for both Furnivall sisters. In the main moral lesson of the story, the ironically named Grace suggests a missed opportunity for charity when she dies muttering “What is done in youth can never be undone in age” (52). The aphoristic quality of this concluding moral advice follows the folkloric oral tradition of winter ghost stories, where the listeners are invited to relate the story to themselves. Gaskell’s story augments this in another traditional way: the framing narrative. The feeling of the oral story “told” to listeners is referenced by the nurse telling it to her young charges. The personal anecdote from the past is a traditional form of ghost story, emphasizing the sense of veracity created by the character-narrator’s voice. It is also significant that Victorian literary periodicals were bought and shared within families and communities, especially at Christmas. It would be common for them to be read aloud as a group activity.

At the center of the ghost story, Maude Furnivall offers a striking counterexample to the paragons of female virtue that Gaskell offers in Rosamond’s mother and in the industrious, sociable servants at the Hall. This develops the theme of Wildness as Both Danger and Liberation. Gaskell here reinterprets what some of her readers would see as irredeemable female sexual license, making the themes of the story a precursor to her 1853 novel Ruth, highly controversial for its sympathetic treatment of an unmarried but honorable mother. Although different than the persistently virtuous Ruth in her unrestrained wildness and her haughty nature, both Maude and Grace Furnivall represent a more complex and forthright portrait of female sexual agency than Victorian readers often encountered. Rather than building a morality tale around Maude’s sexuality, however, Hester names only one “deadly sin,” in her narrative (42): the cruel punishment of Maude and her baby. The context of the prayers Hester teaches Rosamond makes it as likely that she reserves that moral and spiritual assessment for Grace’s jealous pride that allows her to let the child and her mother freeze on the Fells, as for Maude’s illicit attachment to the foreign musician. As often happens in Gaskell’s later work, here she acknowledges the moral weight of Christian duty, but she refuses to label female sexual behavior as the most egregious lapse in those responsibilities. Different from the priorities for ideal femininity that she knows many of her Christian readers might tacitly maintain, she saves that critique for selfishness and greed of the kind that she saw in many of the more comfortable inhabitants of her hometown Manchester who failed to help their economically suffering neighbors.

This very early work in Gaskell’s literary career, produced as a part of a larger work imagined by her editor Charles Dickens, raises many of the same social concerns and relies on similar literary techniques that mark the novels of her later career. Variations of character and theme, as well as of narrative strategies, distinguish Mary Barton from North and South and Ruth from her unfinished novel Wives and Daughters, while Cranford stands generically and thematically on its own. At least some seed of each of these later works can be found in “The Old Nurse’s Tale,” demonstrating the development of Gaskell’s distinctive style of social fiction.