The Old Nurse's Story

Gaskell’s fiction repeatedly brings working-class characters to life for a predominantly middle-class readership, countering the stereotypes that she feared her readers held about their poorer neighbors. As a narrator, Hester seems to focus her story on the titled Furnivall family and the ghosts that haunt them. However, readers learn in the first few sentences that when she was younger she stood out in the village school as a “steady, honest girl, and one whose parents were very respectable, though they might be poor” (1). Beyond embodying the middle-class virtues of honesty and hard work herself, Hester comes from a family that has maintained their respectability despite poverty. For Gaskell, poverty never equates with moral failure, although fiction and social commentary at the time often made that equation. Instead, even when some of her economically disadvantaged characters reveal ethical failings, most of them also embody virtues that her readers across the social strata would admire.

Hester is somewhat unusual in Gaskell’s corpus because she inhabits a rural setting rather than an urban one; this is probably to align with the traditional folkloric pattern of the rural narrator and setting for ghost stories. Throughout novels like Mary Barton and North and South, Gaskell’s characters include factory laborers, domestic servants, seamstresses, and other working poor people whom Gaskell herself had come into close contact with in Manchester. Her attention to characters’ actions and aptitudes deepens her readers’ sense of their humanity. The group of Furnivall Manor servants, whom the story treats as real people, reflects the comfort and stability of rural domesticity, and portrays the reality of life in a large country house at the time, populated mostly by servants. Arguably this characterization is typical of Gaskell’s subtle subversion of literary and social structures: In making the servants more rounded characters than their employers, she overturns the expectation that servants are mere functionaries—in life and in narratives—and that moral superiority is allied to social superiority.

Hester exemplifies these virtues. The youthful Hester’s ability to embody a strong sense of rationality—as when she initially scolds a “naughty” Rosamond for “telling tales” of the specter child in the snow—speaks to both her intelligence and respectability; she can be trusted to come to thoughtful conclusions. Likewise, her choice to go to church as the only holiday we see her taking from her work testifies both to her sense of Christian duty and her work ethic. More than once, Hester remarks on her own courage in the face of eerie circumstances, and then she shows her readers how her bravery influenced her actions. Rather than becoming prematurely emotional, she develops the rational explanation for the night-time music that it must have been Miss Grace playing. Only when she discovers that the workings of the organ are destroyed beyond function does her “flesh [begin] to creep a little” (14). Hester’s previous ability to enjoy the organ and to find a certain companionship in the music indicates her emotional sensibility and a form of artistic taste. In short, Hester repeatedly models moral character even under constraints that would be unfamiliar to her middle-class readers, and she does so with a sense of pride in her working-class, Northumberland heritage.