SOURCE: “‘Cousin Holman's Dresser’: Science, Social Change, and the Pathologized Female in Gaskell's ‘Cousin Phillis,’” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4, March, 1998, pp. 471-89.

In the following essay, Pettitt uses “Cousin Phillis” to probe Elizabeth Gaskell's views of science and contemporary scientific culture.

Gaskell completed her novel Sylvia's Lovers, the “tiresome book” that had taken her three years to write, in January 1863.¹ It is a novel in which will and desire seem impotent over the development of narrative and history, and, despite the fact that no scientists appear in its pages, there is evidence within the very narrative structure of Sylvia's Lovers that Gaskell is engaging with scientific discourses and the much-discussed theories of unconscious development that were current in the 1860s.² It is impossible that Gaskell, living through the 1850s and 1860s in Unitarian, middle-class Manchester, related by marriage to Charles Darwin, and in contact with many of...