What’s the Story? How Oasis and Elizabeth Gaskell taught the world to speak Manc
Posted
4th July 2025
in blog, Blogs & News, Gaskell House Blogs, People
I’ve often joked to myself about the comparisons you can draw between two Mancunian legends who are close to my heart – Oasis and Elizabeth Gaskell. It was the announcement of the longed-for Oasis reunion that made me think I’d waited long enough and that I needed to jump on the bandwagon like the rest of Manchester!
After tickets for the reunion tour went on sale, the 1990s Harry Enfield and Cathy Burke sketch about two teenagers, Kevin and Perry, appeared on my social media feed. The premise was that following a visit to Manchester, the character of Perry, played by Burke, comes home to the south speaking Manc, in imitation of Noel and Liam Gallagher. As a 90s teenager I think it’s a near perfect summation of that era, as I cringingly remember using the phrase ‘our kid’ fairly regularly when I was at college. I know I wasn’t alone in this.
As someone who grew-up in Greater Manchester, the summer of 2025 is a reminder of how the nation (and the world) turned its head to admire ‘cool’ Manchester and how suddenly the northern accent was given status and pride. Back in the mid-90s it really did feel like Oasis were giving us northerners a champagne supernova moment and we really were ‘mad for it’. The northern accent suddenly had kudos and respect.
So, what’s Elizabeth Gaskell got to do with Oasis?
Writer, social reformer and radical, Elizabeth Gaskell lived in Manchester from 1832 until her death in 1865. Although not Manchester born, she went into meticulous detail to describe her characters and the world that they occupied, even using Lancashire dialect in the dialogue. Where previous writers made their characters’ dialect speech into satirical caricatures (sorry Dickens, I’m thinking of you here), Elizabeth saw the use of regional dialect as an opportunity to showcase the rich history and sentiment of her own county. She gave it a dignity and pride that compares in my mind to what Oasis did in the 1990s.
Elizabeth’s first novel, Mary Barton – A Tale of Manchester Life, published in 1848, was so painstakingly accurate that it was said ‘to have pricked the conscience of the nation’ and it’s through this novel that readers all around the world were introduced to words like ‘nesh’, (meaning weak or feeble), ‘warch’ (ache or hurt) and ‘clem’ (starve).
In comparison to the 75 million records sold by Oasis worldwide, Elizabeth Gaskell’s sales are a more modest number of millions but she is still being published and read nearly 175 years later. Not quite achieving the Oasis ambition of living forever but not doing too badly, eh?
As evidenced by the translated editions of her novels (German, Russian, French and Japanese to name a few) within the collection at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, we know she is also read worldwide. The nationalities of the visitors to her House confirms this, and I’m sure there will be a lot of people coming to Manchester in July 2025 from across the world in anticipation of hearing Wonderwall sung loudly in Heaton Park.
And just like the double act that is Liam and Noel, Elizabeth wasn’t alone in her linguistic efforts. William Gaskell, her husband, also had a very keen interest in dialect, giving lectures and writing articles on the Lancashire dialect and even including his own notes within an 1854 edition of Mary Barton.
Along with her husband, Elizabeth was a pioneer of abolishing language prejudice. By using dialect in her novels, she was able to share Mancunian (or Lancastrian as it would have been then) with the world; very much as the Gallagher brothers did, although perhaps without the swagger and the arguments!
Like Oasis, some might say there’s also a bitter-sweet relationship between Elizabeth and Manchester. Despite being described by the press after her death as ‘one of the greatest female novelists of all time’, Elizabeth Gaskell is relatively unknown to many Mancunians. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve told people where I work and they look at me blankly. The city region that she wrote about so passionately and accurately has largely forgotten her; she’s not taught in Manchester schools or adapted for TV as regularly as Austen and Dickens.
In a similar way, I don’t think we Mancunians hero-worship the Gallagher brothers quite as much as before they ‘sold out’, moved down south, and adopted dynamic ticketing. We like our Mancs authentic, as Elizabeth Gaskell very well knew, but we certainly won’t be looking back in anger.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
Director at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Elizabeth Gaskell’s House is open every Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. The latest exhibition – I’ve Never Read Elizabeth Gaskell is open from 6 July until November 2025. For more information
