“The ‘century of praise’ which it would not be difficult to compose from
the tributes, public and private, paid to the genius of Mrs. Gaskell
by eminent men and women of her own generation, need hardly be invoked
by its successors, to whom her writings still speak. Such a list would
include, among other eulogies, those of Carlyle and Ruskin, of Dickens,
who called her his ‘Scheherazade,’ and of Thackeray, of Charles Kingsley
and of Matthew Arnold, of whom his sister, the late Mrs. W. E. Forster,
drew a picture in his own happy manner, ‘stretched at full length on a
sofa reading a Christmas tale of Mrs. Gaskell, which moves him to tears,
and the tears to complacent admiration of his own sensibility.’ Lord
Houghton, John Forster, George Henry Lewes, Tom Taylor, were among her
declared admirers; to whom should be added among statesmen, Cobden and
the late Duke of Argyll. Among Mrs. Gaskell’s female fellow-writers,
Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Mrs. Beecher
Stowe (_facies non omnibus una_) were at least alike to each other in
their warm admiration of her. To these names should be added that of one
whose praise came near home to Mrs. Gaskell’s heart—Mrs. Stanley, the
mother of Dean Stanley. Among French lovers of her genius Ampère has
already been mentioned, and with him should be named Guizot and Jules
Simon.” (Introduction to _Mary Barton_, Knutsford Edition, 1906.)