One of Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-known novels, Cranford, focuses on an English community of mature women, to which men seldom gain admittance. It first appeared in series form (1851–53) in Charles Dickens’s periodical Household Words and was meant only as a short sketch in the form of its first two chapters. However, it grew into a novel, well received by Gaskell’s contemporaries. Her affection for, and trust of, the country values she enjoyed as a child remain obvious in her rendering of Cranford and its inhabitants.

Although the narrator introduces Cranford as a community of “Amazons,” imagery of strong warrior women does not follow. Instead, Gaskell shapes a group of elderly, gentle women who arm themselves with custom and wear ritual like a mantle. Mary Smith, the first-person narrator, does not live in Cranford, instead visiting frequently. Thus, her point of view may be more trustworthy and objective than were she an inhabitant of Cranford. She also becomes an actor in the novel, contributing to the generous amount of dialogue that overpowers action in this character-driven story. While it depends on the pathos generated by the seemingly isolated existence of its main characters, Cranford succeeds due to the positive tone underlying Gaskell’s portrayal of a sense of community among these sisters-in-circumstance.

Gaskell introduces several figures the reader believes will be her main characters, chief among those being Deborah Jenkyns. However, Deborah dies before long, leaving her meek and admirable sister Miss Matty, or Mathilda Jenkyns, as the novel’s protagonist. Most other characters, including the narrator, reveal their personalities in relationship to Miss Matty, and the series of chapter-length vignettes rotate around her. But it is Gaskell’s affectionate, ironic tone that so effectively frames and colors each action, transforming what many might regard as the mundane existence of a group of spinsters and widows into a consistently humorous portrayal that evokes reader admiration for the women.

The narrator emphasizes from the first page that the ladies of Cranford have little money and must practice “elegant economy,” allowing the introduction of small telling details that help shape personalities. For instance, despite their sober dress, the women go to great ends to wear nice hats, always in the latest style. Headdress becomes an ongoing theme throughout the novel, used in both serious and humorous ways. Miss Matty’s only love, Mr. Holbrook, a respectful farmer rejected during Matty’s youth by her family as not worthy of the rector’s daughter, re-enters her life, only to die shortly thereafter. Here, Gaskell uses the theme of hats, not only to add a somber note to the scene but also to advance her rounding of Miss Matty’s character. The narrator notes that Miss Matty requested of the local milliner a cap “something like the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson’s.” When the milliner replies that Mrs. Jamieson “wears widows’ caps,” Matty answers absently, “Oh? I only meant something in that style.” Too proud to speak of her lifelong love for Holbrook, Miss Matty will silently mourn his passing, just as for years she keeps private her recurring dream about the child she never had.

However, Gaskell executes a neat reversal by using the same hat for comic effect, making quiet sport of the social conventions to which the community so closely adheres. In a subsequent scene, Betty Barker, former owner of a millinery, which “would not sell their caps and ribbons to anyone without a pedigree,” arrives at Miss Matty’s house to invite her to a social gathering. Miss Matty is so flustered by the early morning visit that she places her new faux-mourning cap on top of the yellow-ribboned stay-at-home cap already on her head. When Matty questions whether Miss Pole will attend Betty Barker’s social event, Betty Barker replies, “I am going to ask Miss Pole. Of course, I could not think of asking her until I had asked you, madam—the rector’s daughter, madam.” Matty next inquires about a Mrs. Forrester, and Betty Barker replies that she thought of asking her before Miss Pole, because, “although her circumstances are changed, madam, she was born at Tyrerell, and we can never forget her alliance to the Bigges, of Bigelow Hall.” Gaskell follows this remark with “Miss Matty cared much more for the little circumstance of her being a very good card-player.” Throughout the interchange, Miss Matty represents the essence of correct conduct, although she remained “double hatted.”

While many characters move in and out of Miss Matty’s circle, only a few are male. In addition to Mr. Holbrook, Captain Brown becomes a temporary community favorite, although he irritates Deborah Jenkyns by reading “Boz,” or Charles Dickens, in favor of “Mr. [Samuel] Johnson.” Although his lack of subtlety at first alienates the women, his good heart eventually wins them all over, and they mourn his passing when he dies a hero while rescuing a toddler from an oncoming train. Cranford seems to prove unhealthy for most males, but a few do survive to enjoy and challenge its rigid social structure, and all have clear effects on the community. Captain Brown’s younger daughter, Miss Jessie, who long remained single to help her father care for her invalid sister, eventually marries Major Gordon, her former love, and brings a joy to the community that it had not experienced for some time. Mr. Holbrook’s death brings Miss Matty to soften and reconsider her injunction against “followers,” or male admirers for her maid, Martha, as she recalls her heartbreak as a young woman prevented from seeing her only love.

The memory of one particular male, Miss Matty’s long-lost brother, Peter, haunts her more than any other does. Due to a family dispute, Peter disappeared decades earlier, joining the service. Following a set of realistic occurrences, Mary begins to wonder whether Peter is not still living and sets about launching a search, with the help of her father, for a man living in India whose reputation has reached her in England. The book’s climax reunites brother and sister, and the highly deserving Miss Matty finds relief from the loneliness she has suffered since her sister’s death. The novel ends with the satisfying pronouncement by Mary, the narrator, “We all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us.” The overriding theme could be stated as “Virtue is rewarded,” but that would simplify the rich texture from which Miss Matty’s portrait emerges. In one of Gaskell’s many letters, she makes clear that she had never intended to stretch the Cranford story into a novel: “I never meant to write more, so I killed Capt. Brown very much against my will.”

Gaskell’s presentation in Cranford stood in stark contrast to the activist approach she took in her first work, Mary Barton (1848). Surrounded by the tragic conditions of unemployment in the Manchester of the 1830s, including sickness, poverty, hunger, and crime, Gaskell struck out in the only way available to her, by producing protest literature. In Cranford, she revealed a more positive side and a delicate style that some found dull, particularly when comparing her work to that by Jane Austen, whose sharp wit delivered heavy blows to the social system against which none of Gaskell’s characters rebelled. Neither did it bear any resemblance to the passionate, action-centered fiction by Emily and Charlotte Brontë. Although Gaskell shared with George Eliot a focus on locality and the quotidian, she lacked Eliot’s force and demanding philosophical approach. She herself admitted to a friend that she might as well not write while books such as Eliot’s Adam Bede were available.

And yet the seductive charm of Cranford, its insistence on the importance of self-respect and acceptance of one’s station in life as respectable, causes it to remain a highly popular work, readily available in electronic-text versions. Lionel Stevenson describes Cranford as “the most placid book in English fiction,” in which Gaskell pays homage to her own childhood village of Knutsford, still extant in Cheshire; Knutsford later became a tourist attraction for Gaskell’s fans. All critics emphasize setting as the thread that brings continuity to Cranford’s series of domestic vignettes, which together evince a tranquility that proved fiction could successfully adopt serenity as a tone. The sense of a community made up of members that remain fiercely loyal to one another, through grief and joy, remains pronounced and seductively attractive in Cranford.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
French, Yvonne. “Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell.” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad. Edited by Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958, 133–145.
Stevenson, Lionel. The English Novel: A Panorama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Watson, Elizabeth Porges. Introduction to Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell. New York: Oxford, 1998.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

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