@Mary13 that thesis was interesting and helped me appreciate Lois more fully - I have to admit that reading the book felt a lot like homework! And I’d forgotten how much I enjoy Dickens’ word play - I hadn’t read the book since I was a child. I wonder what Dickens thought about the story, as it first appeared in a publication he edited?
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Yes, I really hated Prudence. She seemed quite evil and was fine with doing whatever she wanted, with no consequences. It seemed the whole household had mental illnesses.
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That’s for sure. Manasseh was actually a more interesting character than our protagonist Lois because he was so. very. strange. He’s holding it together when he first meets her, then gradually goes off the rails.
Manasseh’s dire prediction about his and Lois’ fate if they do not marry comes true, making him…something of a witch. (“If I wed not Lois, both she and I die within the year.”)
His name (an Old Testament king) is significant::
Manasseh practiced witchcraft, used divination, practiced sorcery, and dealt with mediums and spiritists. He did much evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him to anger.
2Chronicles 33:6
Manasseh seems to be well aware of his namesake:
“Why wonder you, mother, that I of all men, strive to learn the exact nature of witchcraft, and for that end study the word of God?”
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There definitely appears to be a hereditary line of mental illness in the Hickson family. The mom seems quite aware of it.
I’m not ready to get on board the Prudence was faking it train. It is possible. She did come across as a brat, but Prudence’s reaction when Faith called Lois a witch seemed genuine to me. She was raised to fear God and Satan. I don’t think it would take too much to convince her that Lois was a witch. Faith, on the other hand, knew exactly what she was doing.
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Just finished “A Christmas Carol” a few minutes ago. This is one of those times when schedules for several of my Book Clubs overlap. I have a RL Book Club meeting tonight --although we’re still on Zoom.
ANYWAY, there wasn’t much I liked about “Lois the Witch,” and join others in appreciating how short it is. I’m always a sucker for a happy ending, but somehow knew from the beginning there wouldn’t be one in this book. Prudence was just evil, Manasseh was not in his right mind and Faith was crazy jealous of Lois. Quite the family!
I really enjoyed “A Christmas Carol.” I’ve seen several movie versions (anyone else remember the Muppets take on the story?) but had never read the original. My Kindle edition had footnotes to explain the unfamiliar terms and events, which was helpful.
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I think there is something wrong with Prudence beyond routine childhood brattiness or oppressive cultural influences. She lacks normal empathy:
Then Prudence crept softly up to Lois’s side. This strange child seemed to be tossed about by varying moods; to-day she was caressing and communicative, to-morrow she might be deceitful, mocking, or so indifferent to the pain or sorrows of others that you could call her almost inhuman.
At first, I thought she was a bit like Pearl in the Scarlet Letter–a child “tossed about by varying moods”–but unlike Pearl, Prudence intends to do real harm (and succeeds).
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I have a freakish amount of Gaskell material in my possession, so I can give you the answer to that. Lois the Witch appeared in three parts in October 1859 in All the Year Round. After the final installment, Dickens sent a note to Elizabeth Gaskell: “I cannot write these hurried words without telling you that Lois the Witch has moved me to the highest admiration.”
That was around the time their relationship was hitting a rough patch, and Dickens did not want to lose her as a contributor. Gaskell did not like serializing her work. She had trouble with deadlines and felt serialization made the work choppy. Dickens tried to exercise control over her stories in order to fit his style of ending an installment at a suspenseful point, once telling Gaskell, “When we come to get a little of it into type, I have no doubt of being able to make such little suggestions as to breaks of chapters as will carry us over all that easily.”
Gaskell wasn’t really on board with that. Just a few months earlier, she had written to another author, “Your letter has put me so out of heart about my story ‘Lois the Witch’. I know it is fated to go in this new Dickensy periodical and I did so hope to escape it.”
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Despite their editorial tug-o-war, Dickens and Gaskell shared common interests, both writing about “the grim realities of 19th century working class life”, with sympathetic portrayals of those experiencing extreme poverty and hardship. I’m paraphrasing from the University of Manchester site that has their correspondence: Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens
The writer of the essay posted earlier notes that Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing “subversively advocates for resisting the oppression of patriarchy.” Charles Dickens was ahead of his time in that regard, publishing stories that were particularly sympathetic to the plight of women. Per historian Annette Hopkins:
…the earliest letter from Dickens to Mrs. Gaskell, dated January 9, 1850, is in reply to her request for his assistance in getting an unfortunate girl off to Australia. And the earliest story of Mrs. Gaskell’s published by Dickens, “Lizzie Leigh,” is on the theme of the unmarried mother, with a solution that, for the Victorian Age, was advanced.
(I just got a pop-up message from CC that chided me for writing two consecutive wordy posts. 
Point taken – I’ll try to avoid the history lessons. What can I say? I like biographies.)
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@mary13, love your posts. Don’t be daunted and please feel free to share your thoughts. You add so much context that really appreciate!
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Your last paragraph – partly why these days I’m pretty much only on CC for Book Club!
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What! Chided by CC, for wordy posts, in a book discussion thread, a book discussion group in existence for 15 ? Years.
Well, shame on them! Seriously, CC, you have terms about wordy posts? Who knew!
I learn so much here, this month about Gaskell, unknown to me until now.
Popping in to say, I didn’t read this month’s selections because I’ve been helping my 92 year old mother who had a fall two weeks ago, but I so enjoy the thoughtful, insightful and enlightening posts of all,
especially Mary13!
The book club one of gems of this site………… cc you have a LARGE DEVOTED FAN BASE HERE ,
Please DON’T MESS WITH IT !!!
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@HImom well said
Ha, thanks everyone! It was just one of those “formula” pop-ups with gentle suggestions – and without any specific knowledge of our weighty subject matter. 
Don’t worry, I could never shut up. And on that note…
- Do you see any potential autobiographical themes in the tale? Might anything in Gaskell’s experience have prompted the treatment of so dark a subject?
Gaskell lost her mother when she was very young, and Lois joins the ranks of her heroines who are motherless (in Mary Barton, Ruth, Wives and Daughters, etc.). She wrote in an 1849 letter, “I think no one but one so unfortunate as to be early motherless can enter into the craving one has after the lost mother." Her heroines tend to be very motherly themselves – especially compassionate and often immersed in caring for others.
Lois hopes to become part of a family again in her uncle’s household. She so wants to connect with her aunt, but is treated with contempt. Lois’ last vision is of her own mother:
She gazed wildly around, stretched out her arms as if to some person in the distance, who was yet visible to her, and cried out once with a voice that thrilled through all who heard it, ‘Mother!’
Lois’ exceptional “motherliness” can be seen in the prison scene with Nattee, which speaks not only to Lois’ warmth, but also her willingness to give physical comfort to an Indian servant.
…it was Nattee–dirty, filthy indeed, mud-pelted, stone-bruised, beaten, and all astray in her wits with the treatment she had received from the mob outside. Lois held her in her arms, and softly wiped the old brown wrinkled face with her apron, crying over it, as she had hardly yet cried over her own sorrows.
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Dickens of course also has a thing for orphans. While he wasn’t an orphan he went to work in a factory at age 12 when his father was thrown into a debtor’s prison. He was able to return to school three years later.
How did I not know this? Or did I just forget it? I read Hard Times as part of a British History course which surely was influenced by this experience.
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@Mary13 please don’t let CC’s guidelines stop you from writing your thoughtful and informative long posts. Those and similar posts from others in this book club are the reason that I linger here on CC. I enjoy the gently paced and thoughtful exchange of ideas that are spread out over the first few days of the discussion. It gives time for us to let our thoughts marinate and improve in flavor.
Regarding any autobiographical themes in Lois, the Witch, I think Gaskell writes from her heart about the loneliness of her childhood. While she wasn’t neglected or ill-treated she was lonely and felt the lack of a mother’s guidance in her life. I think she projected some of this into the character of Lois.
Her relationship with Faith is almost motherly in the way she tries to take care of Faith, worries about her and tries to help her get her heart’s desire. I think she quickly realizes that Grace is not motherly at all — she loves her children but it is a selfish, jealous love that is centered upon herself.
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I am glad to have read both books. I can’t say I “enjoyed” Lois the Witch because it was a grim story, but it’s been fun in retirement to read new authors and different genres. A Christmas Carol was probably a re-read, though perhaps my memories are of a movie version… great choice for December book club.
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- What were Gaskell’s own religious views? What would she likely have believed about the practice of condemning witches? (a form of persecution against helpless and somewhat marginalized women)
Elizabeth Gaskell was a Unitarian, as was Charles Dickens by mid-life (he was raised Anglican). Unitarianism gave them a similar worldview, another reason they connected well (in their admiration of one another’s writing, if not so much personally).
Both Gaskell and Dickens were highly skeptical of religious zeal, seeing it as a potential source of social ills rather than social advancement. In her article, “Lois the Witch: A Unitarian Tale,” Rebecca Styler notes:
Well into the nineteenth century, Unitarians were regarded by many of the orthodox ‘with alarm, horror, indignation, scorn’, as one apologist complained, their beliefs ‘the last and most perfect invention of Satan’.
Gaskell gives some of that outsider vibe to Lois, who–though not a Unitarian, as the denomination didn’t exist in the 17th century–shares the same views of a generous, inclusive God and an embrace of reason over superstition. Per Styler, “Lois demonstrates her own independence of thought, working out the truth for herself according to the Unitarian ideal. Above all, she defends a rational approach to religion, acting on the belief that God operates entirely within the bounds of natural law.”
Worried neighbours suggest that the death of Elder Sherringham’s horse, ‘wherewith he used to drive his family to meeting’, is a devilish intervention. Lois suggests that ‘Perchance … the horse died of some natural disease’. This trust in common sense renders her suspect. By denying a supernatural reading of events, she becomes the spiritual enemy. Lois’ gradual ostracism, culminating in her trial, echoes the history of persecution of Unitarians by the orthodox majority, a heritage of which Gaskell would have been deeply conscious.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens uses the Ghost of Christmas Past to give voice to his feelings about the cruelty inflicted on others in the name of religion:
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us as all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
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By the way, much of the biographical info and quotes I’ve been posting above are from various articles on JSTOR. Normally, that means no access, but my daughter is a Chicago resident and can check out articles remotely from the Chicago Public Library. So she’s been my go-to for this discussion!
There’s a surprising amount of Lois the Witch literary criticism out there, for such an obscure (to me anyway) story. My daughter sent me an article yesterday that is entirely about how the English Civil War influenced Lois the Witch (“Haunting memories of the English Civil War in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Morton Hall’ and ‘Lois the Witch’” by Deborah Denenholz Morse). I don’t know a darn thing about the The English Civil War, but for what it’s worth:
English Civil War history is essential background to Gaskell’s re-imagining of the Salem witch trials, in which she had long been intensely interested. The bitter conflicts between Royalist and Parliamentarian in the Civil War era make Lois Barclay suspected from the outset by the Puritans in Salem. Historically, her father, an Anglican clergyman and ‘a Jacobite, as the adherents of the Stuarts were beginning at this time to be called’ is an enemy - and his sins, in Salem’s view, should be visited upon the daughter.
Royalists and Parliamentarians! Who knew. I thought we were just reading a gothic horror story. 
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I know quite a lot about the English Civil War, having been a big Anglophile in high school. There were some great BBC shows and movies in that era: The First Churchills was my favorite which begins with the Civil War era. We even persuaded our favorite teacher to teach us British history junior year. Lois’s religion as an Anglican would have been more like being an Episcopalian than a Unitarian. The historical Salem witch trials occur 40 years after the English Civil War and a couple of years after the “Glorious Revolution” when the British got rid of their Catholic kings and imported a William and Mary from Holland.
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@mathmom, Fun Fact: “The First Churchills” was the very first show on Masterpiece Theatre.
I hardly remember anything beyond Charlemagne. I was probably hiding a copy of Jane Eyre inside my history textbook and paying no attention in class.
Speaking of Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a biography of Charlotte Bronte, who was a good friend:
Gaskell met Charlotte Brontë in August 1850 at the Lake District summer home of social reformer James Kay-Shuttleworth, and they instantly became friends. Charlotte wrote of Elizabeth that she was “a woman of whose conversation and company I should not soon tire. She seems to me kind, clever, animated and unaffected”.
After Charlotte died in 1855 it was her father Patrick who asked Elizabeth to write Charlotte’s biography. She delivered the finished manuscript two years later, but, although it won early praise, it caused huge problems for its author. Many of those featured in it were insulted by her portrayal of them, and, with law suits threatening, Elizabeth was forced to make many alterations to the manuscript. Elizabeth Gaskell | Bronte Parsonage Museum
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