Editing Elizabeth Gaskell (section)

===Dialect usage===
Gaskell's style is notable for putting local dialect words into the mouths of middle-class characters and the narrator. In ''North and South'' Margaret Hale suggests ''[[wikt:redd|redding]] up'' (tidying) the Bouchers' house and even offers jokingly to teach her mother words such as ''[[wikt:knobstick|knobstick]]'' (strike-breaker).<ref name="Ingham">Ingham, P. (1995). Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of ''North and South''.</ref> In 1854 she defended her use of dialect to express otherwise inexpressible concepts in a letter to [[Walter Savage Landor]]:

{{blockquote|...&nbsp;you will remember the country people's use of the word "[[wikt:unked|unked]]". I can't find any other word to express the exact feeling of strange unusual desolate discomfort, and I sometimes "[[wikt:potter#Etymology_2|potter]]" and "[[wikt:mither|mither]]" people by using it.<ref name="Ingham" /><ref name="Letters">Chapple JAV, Pollard A, eds. ''The Letters of Mrs Gaskell''. Mandolin (Manchester University Press), 1997</ref>}}

She also used the dialect word "[[nesh]]" (a person who feels the cold easily or often feels cold is said to be 'nesh'), which goes back to [[Old English]], in ''Mary Barton'':

{{blockquote|Sit you down here: the grass is well nigh dry by this time; and you're neither of you nesh folk about taking cold.<ref>{{cite book | last = Gaskell | first = E. | year = 1848 | title = Mary Barton | url = https://archive.org/details/marybartonbyecg01bartgoog | chapter = 1}}.</ref>}}

also in ''North and South'':

{{blockquote|And I did na like to be reckoned nesh and soft,<ref>{{cite book |title=North and South |last=Gaskell |first=Elizabeth |year=1854–55 |publisher=Penguin Popular Classics |isbn=978-0-14-062019-1}}</ref>}}

and later in "The Manchester Marriage" (1858):

{{blockquote|Now, I'm not above being nesh for other folks myself. I can stand a good blow, and never change colour; but, set me in the operating-room in the Infirmary, and I turn as sick as a girl.
}}

and:

{{blockquote|
At Mrs Wilson's death Norah came back to them, as a nurse to the newly-born little Edwin; into which post she was not installed without a pretty strong oration on the part of the proud and happy father; who declared that if he found out that Norah ever tried to screen the boy by falsehood, or to make him nesh either in body or mind, she should go that very day.<ref>{{cite book | url = http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15252/15252.txt | series = Victorian Short Stories | title = Stories of Successful Marriages | publisher=The Project Gutenberg}}.</ref>
}}