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Abstract: In his picturesque writings and Forest Scenery (1791), William Gilpin visited and viewed sites of arboreal and aesthetic significance. Moreover, his examination of the New Forest defined responses to this terrain, and trees and woodland more generally, well into the nineteenth century. Using Gilpin's ideas as a starting point, this study close reads Elizabeth Gaskell's narratological conceptualisation of the New Forest in North and South (1855), and it scrutinises how far it could be conceived to be a 'picturesque' novel in its choice, associations, and mediation of location. Gaskell depicts Margaret Hale's fictional transplantation from the woodscapes of the New Forest to the 'smoky air' of Milton; and in the process of this uprooting, Gaskell charts the intertwined changes in the heroine's physical surroundings and psychological state. The following discussion explores how far Gaskell's narrative form employs textual strategies akin to Gilpin's aesthetic framework, as well as how mobile its 'picturesque' perspective is, in relation to the different rural and urban environments that the heroine encounters in the course of the novel.
Alexander Ross suggests that '[no] artistic movement has had so much impact upon the English novel as that associated with the picturesque'; he puts forward the idea that William Gilpin's 'scenic prose' served as 'the prototype of hundreds of settings which novelists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prepared for their readers'.1 Undoubtedly, it would be reductive to say that every author implemented Gilpinesque scenes deliberately into his/her work, but the picturesque certainly played a pivotal role in shaping wider, long-standing, and on-going cultural attitudes towards environmental perception. Authors used the textual strategies employed by Gilpin (consciously and unconsciously) to create their own literary landscapes. There are a number of multi-author studies that identify the relevance of the picturesque afterlife in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, including Ross's The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1986) and Eithne Henson's Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy (2016).2 However, despite the varied topographies of her novels, Elizabeth Gaskell has never been amongst the authors examined in these circumstances.
It is therefore surprising that in a discussion of Gilpin's cultural inheritance, Francesca Orestano identifies North and South in the tradition of writings influenced by...