The purpose of The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is to create an online, openly accessible edition of a single Gaskell text, Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal. This new edition provides a new transcription of the text, fully encoded in TEI-XML. Images of the journal's manuscript pages have been facilitated and implemented through IIIF frameworks. Additionally, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition offers contextual information including a scholarly Introduction, annotations, editorial notes, as well as a full prosopography identifying important individuals, texts, and geographic locations referenced in the journal.
This Edition and The Gaskell Journal
Readers should note that this digital edition reproduces Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal, written to record the early years of her eldest two daughters, Marianne and Margaret Emily (Meta). Previous editions of the manuscript have been published using the title "Diary," and are described in detail in the Previous Editions subpage of this edition. The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition departs from this historical trajectory and preserves Gaskell's own terminology of "journal" to describe her manuscript.
The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is distinct from The Gaskell Journal, the "peer-reviewed scholarly publication dedicated to disseminating the most authoritative, dynamic, and agenda-setting research in Gaskell Studies," which has been published annually since 1987. The peer-reviewed The Gaskell Journal has recently been made available on JSTOR and via Victorian-studies.net.
A Dissertation
The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition has been undertaken as a fulfilment of dissertation requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in the English Department at Michigan State University. This digital edition of the journal aims to make the text and facsimile images available to a broader audience, both scholars interested in Gaskell's life writing, and fans of her work who wish to delve more deeply into her writing beyond the novels.
Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal has been placed by Gaskell's descendants, the holders of its copyright, in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library in Leeds, UK. The journal is approximately 80 pages in length, written when novelist Elizabeth Gaskell's eldest surviving daughter, Marianne, was between the ages of six months (March 1835) and four years old (October 1838). I am grateful to Mrs. Sarah Prince, Gaskell's descendant and the copyright holder, for her gracious permission to reproduce the journal in this new digital edition.
