The Inter-National Novel

The national novel emerged and operated within the serial form of ‘world literature’ created by the internationalism of 1848, and this chapter argues that Elizabeth Gaskell writes her first novel, Mary Barton (1848) deliberately ‘into’ a European tradition. It shows how important Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi was to her development as a novelist and how clearly she conceived of Mary Barton not, as Raymond Williams would later categorize it, as an ‘English Industrial Novel’, but as an intervention in an urgent pan-European conversation about ‘the people’. Gaskell was far more invested in the radical and international politics of labour in the 1840s than has been generally recognized. The strength of post-1848 nationalization has made it difficult for successive generations to decouple literature from nation, and so we have continued to misread and distort texts which depend on matrices of meaning that are far wider than merely national.