Liz Ackerley, Ruskin, and Sketching Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
To celebrate John Ruskin’s 200th birthday, on the 8th of Febuary we had the pleasure of hosting another workshop with the incredibly talented Liz Ackerley. Liz is an urban sketcher with a background in science and landscape design, which has influenced her
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Spring Cleaning with our Volunteer Housekeeping Team
On Monday, a few volunteers gathered in the servant’s hall at Elizabeth Gaskell’s house for one of our regular sessions of conservation cleaning. Most of the objects, books and furniture in the house are more than a hundred years old (and some
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Isabella Beeton: managing Household Commotion!
Isabella Beeton's A Book of Household Management was published in 1861 and we have a copy of it in the dining room underneath the portrait of Mrs Dimmock, William Gaskell's mother. The recipes in the book draw on the cookery column Isabella
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Knowing John Ruskin
This is Charles Eliot Norton writing to his mother, Mrs Andrews Norton, on July 2 1857 'One day as we were travelling in Italy, Mrs Gaskell and her daughters and I were talking about the books we would choose if we were
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10 things you might not know about Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
1. Elizabeth lived at the house from 1850-1865 with her husband, William, and four daughters. William and their two unmarried daughters, Meta and Julia, continued to live in the house after Elizabeth’s death. When Meta died in 1913 the house and its
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