Going in to Dinner: Elizabeth Gaskell & W. H. Russell at Chatsworth

Gaskell entertainingly describes a visit with her daughter Meta to Chatsworth in September 1857.1 The Duke of Devonshire, learning she was in the house, invited her to lunch, provided rooms for her and Meta, and to Gaskell's amused embarrassment, extended the invitation to dinner. Since they were staying in Rowsley and had come, as they thought, only to see the house, naturally neither Gaskell nor Meta had any evening clothes with them. When on a break from his reporting of the Indian Mutiny, at the hill station of Simla, he was reading Charlotte Brontë's Villette and noting, Î wish I could know more about C.B than my good friend who edits her life tells us.'3 Yet as his diary entry for 13 September 1857 shows, Russell too was at Chatsworth and took Gaskell into dinner: 'I, leading in Mrs Gaskell, who with her daughter was one of the guests'.4 Clearly, Gaskell would be concerned to 'pump' Russell about his Crimean experiences and anything he could tell her about Florence Nightingale, whom he had supported practically and in print. Gaskell herself refers to the Duke's disability - she sat next to him at the after- dinner music: 'he can hear talking whenever music is going on so he talked pretty incessantly.5 Russell noted that during dinner, 'the servants behind the screen relying on the Dukes [sic] deafness made rather too much noise'.6 Of Gaskell and Meta, all he says is 'Mrs Gaskell fearfully blue.