Inhaling the Industrial City: Smoke, Trans-corporeality, and Sickly Bodies in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

This article examines the presence of industrial pollution – in the forms of smoke, coal and cotton – in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854–55). Using Stacy Alaimo's ecofeminist framework of trans-corporeality in conjunction with the Victorian theory of miasma, I argue that growing concerns about the environmental and corporeal costs of industry are made visible through ailing bodies across Gaskell's text. Through an analysis of illness, I uncover connections between the inhabitants of Milton-Northern and a wider working community of Britain and its empire, as environmental illness forges lines of connection across gender, race, and class. The increasingly polluted atmosphere of Gaskell's Manchester can be traced in the sicknesses and deaths of Mrs Hale and Bessy Higgins, alongside anonymous British coal miners and American cotton plantation workers who haunt the margins of the text in the forms of cotton dust and coal smoke. I argue that the polluted atmosphere of North and South allows Gaskell to create a trans-corporeal web of sympathy between bodies both central and marginal to her city and her text, revealing her latent environmental concerns at a turning point in the history of pollution.