Working-Class Methodism and Eschatological Anxiety in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction

This article details how Elizabeth Gaskell engages with the spiritual and political implications of millennialism, or the belief in the thousand-year messianic kingdom on earth (based on Revelation 20:1-6). After introducing Gaskell’s engagement with the increased interest in millennialism and huge growth of working-class Methodism in the early nineteenth-century, and the later burgeoning of the Methodist Unitarian Movement, I offer some analysis of four texts that she published between 1848 and 1855: Mary Barton (1848), ‘The Well of Pen Morfa’ (1850), ‘The Heart of John Middleton’ (1850), and North and South (1854-55). In each, Gaskell models different responses to understandings of millenarianism in working class communities: while some characters adopt an other-worldly hope, others use the language of revelation and apocalypse to challenge hierarchy and the ordering of society. I suggest that the tension that Gaskell identifies between these different understandings enables her to carve out a vision of radical Christianity that has at its heart eschatological ideas that carry the promise of the transformation and renewal of this world along with an urgent call to action.