ch put them back in touch with their souls. In the meantime, before the end of the novel, they must content themselves with other outlets for their souls: Job Legh has an interest in natural history, Alice is an herbalist, Job’s granddaughter loves music. Contrasted with them is the Carson family that tries unsuccessfully to while away the time until tea: one sister half-heartedly copies music, another falls asleep over Emerson, and the third takes a nap. Mrs. Gaskell seems to be saying that the closer an individual is to technology, in the sense of embracing it, the farther one gets from nature and one’s soul. The things of the imagination and the senses must fight against the negative forces of drabness and dreariness.Yet for all the drabness and rootlessness fostered by circumstances, the author is forced to recognize strength and vigor and a sense of purpose in Manchester. She realizes that a new power is thrusting through and that the individual suffering that distresses her is in some way a part of the inevitable change. Job Legh’s final opinion expresses this:It’s true it was a sort time for the hand-loom weavers when power-looms came in: them new-fangled things make a man’s life like a lottery; and yet I’ll never doubt that power-looms, and railways, and all such-like inventions, are the gifts of God. I have lived long enough, too, to see that it is a part of His plan to send suffering to bring out a higher good… The new energy that overtakes Manchester seems to convert Mrs. Gaskell gradually, as though she recognized the possibility of a meeting ground between technology and nature. She comments on “an acuteness and intelligence of countenance, which has often been noticed in a manufacturing population,” and there is pride in the way she talks of the firm for whom Jem Wilson worked:One of the great firms of engineers, who send from out their towns of workshops engin...
