Remarks on Forest Scenery: North and South and the 'Picturesque'

In his picturesque writings and Forest Scenery (1791), William Gilpin visited and viewed sites of arboreal and aesthetic significance. Moreover, his examination of the New Forest defined responses to this terrain, and trees and woodland more generally, well into the nineteenth century. Using Gilpin’s ideas as a starting point, this study close reads Elizabeth Gaskell’s narratological conceptualisation of the New Forest in North and South (1855), and it scrutinises how far it could be conceived to be a ‘picturesque’ novel in its choice, associations, and mediation of location. Gaskell depicts Margaret Hale’s fictional transplantation from the woodscapes of the New Forest to the ‘smoky air’ of Milton; and in the process of this uprooting, Gaskell charts the intertwined changes in the heroine’s physical surroundings and psychological state. The following discussion explores how far Gaskell’s narrative form employs textual strategies akin to Gilpin’s aesthetic framework, as well as how mobile its ‘picturesque’ perspective is, in relation to the different rural and urban environments that the heroine encounters in the course of the novel.