The Old Nurse’s Story - Elizabeth Gaskell

 The Old Nurse’s Story - Elizabeth Gaskell

Gaskell’s novels, particularly Mary Barton and North and South, are among the finest of the period in which she lived. I would choose to read her novels ahead of those of Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, both of whom were her friends. Neglected for nearly a hundred years after her death, her work is now studied for its depictions of the lives of the working class, and particularly for her representations of women.

The Old Nurse’s Story was published in the 1852 Christmas edition of Household Words. As the reader might expect, Gaskell’s tale deals with issues of class and gender. It’s a powerful ghost story with a clear strong message. If it has a flaw, it is probably the use of the stereotype of the unreliable ‘foreign’ musician. I am prepared to forgive Gaskell for this, given her exploration, in this ghost story as elsewhere, of the restrictions placed on women’s lives.

The word ‘nurse’ has its typical 19th century meaning here, as the servant responsible for looking after small children, usually replaced by a governess when the children reached school age. The sense of a woman taking care of the ill or infirm was present in English from Shakespeare’s time. Just over a year after the publication of Gaskell’s story, the Crimean War would bring public fame to Florence Nightingale and the nurses trained by her. The origin of the word ‘nurse’ belongs to the sense of ‘nursing’ mothers. Both ‘nurse’ and ‘nourish’ derive from a word meaning ‘to suckle’. The bawdy reminiscences of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet are entirely in keeping with the word’s roots. The nurse in Gaskell’s story is of a very different character, though her social position is similar. Servants appear in many Victorian ghost stories. It is rare to find a servant as narrator, and Gaskell’s story is very much worth reading for that perspective.