SOURCE: “Mrs. Gaskell and the World of Cranford,” in Review of English Literature, Vol. 6, No. 1, January, 1965, pp. 68-79.

[In the following essay, Wright defends Cranford’s merits as a novel, arguing against its detractors who see it as Gaskell's “reminiscences thinly disguised as fiction.”]

‘Every schoolboy knows’ that Cranford is Knutsford, the small country town where Mrs. Gaskell was brought up, and critical comments on her work all make this point. They seem to mean by this that Mrs. Gaskell draws on her knowledge of Knutsford and her memories of its inhabitants for her detail; its topography, its customs and traditions, its stories and incidents, even its characters are used. But when all is said and done Cranford is a fiction, however much its components are based on a reality. Nor is all of Knutsford represented by a long way; the details used are selected, and Henry James has reminded us that selection is a prime element of art. Cranford is an interpretation made through the medium of the art of fiction, and we have to ask what this interpretation is; what, in other words, Cranford represents as Mrs. Gaskell has described it.

Knowing also that Cranford (to use it as a generic name) re-appears in her work under many guises, just as the Manchester of Mary Barton reappears as Drumble (in Cranford), Milton, etc., we have further to study its varying manifestations. For Cranford represents certain attitudes and standards in a way of life conveniently given substance by being embodied in the life of country-town society, although that society is itself subject to modification. Throughout Mrs. Gaskell's work these attitudes and standards are opposed to those represented by the new, vigorous, urbanized and grimly industrial society epitomized in Manchester. The opposition is inherent rather than methodical; only in North and South did she attempt some sort of deliberate balance-sheet. But it can be said as a rather over-simplified summarization that she abandons the ‘Manchester world’ after North and South (1855) and that her final achievement in Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters is a re-affirmation, in a far more complex and comprehensive way, of Cranford attitudes and standards alive in a changing society.

If we wish to know what these are, the best approach is obviously through a study of Cranford itself. It will be necessary to say something first about the origin, development and general nature of the novel, and to deal with one objection which might be raised to treating Cranford as an interpretation. The objection—it is inherent in most of the not very satisfactory studies of Cranford that have appeared—is that it is not a novel, and is hardly to be ranked as fiction; that it is a set of reminiscences thinly disguised as fiction, rather like Conrad's The Mirror of the Sea but carried slightly further in its method. How far it is a novel will be discussed when the development of Mrs. Gaskell's technique is discussed. That it is fiction should be obvious as we follow the story line of each episode and the gradual linking of episodes into a larger structural unity, while increasing our acquaintance with the relatively few characters round whom and through whom Cranford grows. Anecdotes and incidents, such as the story of the piece of antique lace swallowed by Mrs. Forrester's cat, are taken from life or local legend, but Mrs. Gaskell has no hesitation in altering facts and re-shaping events to suit her purpose. An example of this is the first episode, originally written without thought of a successor. In this story, published in 1851, the climax worked up to is the death of Captain Brown when he is run over by a train. Yet the railway did not come to Knutsford until 1862; Mrs. Gaskell invented the story, and since a railway was required for it, a railway there was.¹ But this is standard practice with most writers, and such a commonplace needs emphasizing only because of an attitude that seems to have developed towards this particular book.

Cranford began as a self-contained story (now the first two chapters of the book) published by Dickens in Household Words on 13 Dec. 1851, the story using material from the original short essay ‘The Last Generation in England’ which was published obscurely in Sartain's Union Magazine in America during 1849. It concentrates almost entirely on the social setting, which is firmly presented as feminine, middle-aged to elderly, genteel, and sharing a ‘general but unacknowledged poverty’—although this poverty is interpreted in the light of maintaining the modest standards of gentility summed up in the phrase ‘elegant economy’.² The setting once established, the story is woven round the arrival of the elderly widower, Captain Brown, and his two daughters as newcomers to Cranford, and their reception by the ‘Amazons’ who are won over by the frank and natural behaviour of the Captain—even though he is a man. The elder daughter is ill and finally dies; just before this happens the Captain is himself killed by a train while saving a child. A faithful admirer returns to marry the younger daughter.

The story of this first episode is slight, simple and unoriginal, a mixture of pathos, mild melodrama and happy ending. Yet the unobtrusive and undemanding nature of the story is its virtue; it is admirably suited to permit the narrative of daily incident and custom which carries it along and provides the real interest. The central figure is not, in fact, Captain Brown; it is Miss Deborah Jenkyns, the rector's daughter and admitted arbitrator of Cranford manners.

The enthusiasm of Dickens and his readers prompted Mrs. Gaskell to provide further episodes, and with these episodes she made important changes. The dominating Miss Jenkyns has died; her quiet and unassertive sister, Miss Matty, becomes the central figure. It is around Miss Matty that the episodes develop until they have finally limned her history and character in a narrative that accumulates unity as it proceeds. And all the time the delicate nuances of behaviour in the circumscribed society and its small country-town are being described in incidents that, whether trivial or major within the narrative, keep proportion to the social scene. Miss Matty's muted early love affair, the youth and disappearance of her brother, the stir caused by the marriage of an ‘aristocratic’ Cranfordian to the local surgeon, the loss of her small income and the return of the missing brother are the main threads which take us back and forwards in time as the dialogue and narrative quietly build up an acutely observed and detailed study of a way of life.³

Cranford makes its initial impression by its tone and by the sheer felicity of incident and dialogue. The narrative attitude is one of humour, a humour based on sympathy and affectation laced with common sense and a nice eye (or ear) for observation. It admits that life can be serious, but the narrative viewpoint is just sufficienty detached to keep events in proportion, and to refuse to act as though a recognition of what is serious necessarily involves solemnity or joylessness. The observation is shrewd; it notes what is amusing without poking fun. Above all it is the sort of humour that is possible only in an environment in which the general run of events is pleasant and the inhabitants are free from the continual presence of hardship and the daily evidence of man's inhumanity to man. Given such surroundings, it is possible to concentrate on the minor details of life—one's own and one's neighbours'.

Cranford life is securely built on an accepted order of behaviour. When Jessie Brown insists on going to her father's funeral, Miss Jenkyns firmly pronounces:

It is not fit for you to go alone. It would be against both propriety and humanity were I to allow it,⁴

and in saying this she has mentioned the two principles—propriety and humanity—which directly control Cranford conduct. The book is a portrayal of a community where these principles govern action; there may be argument on the interpretation of propriety (never about humanity) but it is unthinkable that any other bases of conduct can exist. It is because of this that Cranford is in its essence, not simply in its background and detail, different from the Manchester stories, in which propriety and humanity are present but can also be conspicuously absent. Drumble, the great manufacturing town only twenty miles from Cranford, is mentioned just often enough to keep us aware that other attitudes exist. It is at Drumble that the Town and Country Bank in which Miss Matty's small savings are invested stops payment, an impersonal attitude to obligations which Miss Matty quietly refutes by changing Farmer Dobson's now worthless note into sovereigns.⁵

It may be considered that Cranford, in its assumption of the unquestioned acceptance of such principles, is an idealization, but we are kept aware of other attitudes. When Miss Matty is set up in business selling tea, her guilelessness never leads to loss. This is incredible to Mr. Smith, the business-man father of the narrator, Mary Smith, and we have the quiet irony of her comment from the Cranford viewpoint:

But my father says “such simplicity might be very well in Cranford, but would never do in the world.” And I fancy the world must be very bad, for with all my father's suspicion of every one with whom he has dealings, and in spite of all his many precautions, he lost upwards of a thousand pounds by roguery only last year.⁶

Cranford is not out of this world, the eager pursuit of the latest fashions by its inhabitants shows that; it merely prefers to stick to its own ways of doing things. There is even an air of modest triumph as of having trapped a rare specimen, in the query which concludes the story of Betsy Barker's cow—‘Do you ever see cows dressed in grey flannel in London?’⁷ But while we are allowed to smile at the ludicrous picture, we are invited to admire the practical and humanitarian intention which can defy the ludicrous and be understood.

Drumble is the newer, commercial world; it contains the drive, energy and knowhow represented by the narrator's father, who spares a day to come and advise about Miss Matty's future. Yet how much does he really do? The old-fashioned ladies acting according to their lights have already raised a fund; the loyal maid has hustled her bewildered fiancé into marriage to provide a home, even the tea-selling scheme has been suggested by Mary. The implication all the time is that clear notions of duty and behaviour can achieve all that is necessary—if everybody acts by them. Cranford ultimately arrives at the same conclusion as Mary Barton, but it starts from the opposite direction.

Because of its assumptions there is no need to preach; we are given the illustration without the sermon. A third and vital principle, Religion, on which all else is based, is not discussed because it is accepted and acted on. It appears therefore only where it is natural to find it, at the death-bed of Miss Brown for example, taking its place without strain or emphasis in the dialogue of people whose Christianity is so native to them that they would be surprised, and rather shocked, at any suggestion of a need to proclaim it, let alone defend it. And being natural, it can be treated with the same humour as any other aspect of human conduct.

I thought of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered and wrinkled, and I wondered if her mother had known her in the courts of heaven.

reflects Mary, reacting spontaneously to the incongruous comparison between the elderly reality and the fond mother's early hope that she would be ‘a regular beauty’; her continuation is equally natural and logical:

and then I knew that she had, and that they stood there in angelic guise.⁸

Propriety is not offended, any more than it is by Peter's traveller's tale of shooting a cherub by accident from the top of a mountain. In the Manchester stories religion carries implications too serious to be joked about, in Cranford security of belief permits laughter.

The impression we are more or less encouraged to get of Cranford is of an old-fashioned place a generation ago, though clear indications—such as the reading of the current number of Pickwick and the passage of time after that—show that the calendar time is roughly contemporary. But the narrative threads move back to the late eighteenth century, and Cranford is shown as a continuity, a surviving as well as a present reality personified particularly in Miss Matty. Yet in a hundred little touches—the popularity of Dickens in spite of Miss Jenkyns's defence of Dr. Johnson is one—change is suggested. Cranford is not static, it has to accept interference from the outside world. Its whole tenor indicates, for example, a gradual shifting of the social balance; ‘dubious’ members such as Betty Barker, Mrs. Fitz-Adam and the ‘vulgar’ Mr. Hoggins are admitted, as their worth is accepted. The point is that the values of the traditional outlook are maintained. If one half of propriety deals with trivialities, the other half comprises fundamental and proven standards of conduct; the two aspects are so intertwined that the trivial helps support the total fabric and is part of the pattern of stability. When customs and opinions wither they may be allowed to drop away, but often they are alive with the values they grew in.

It is too easy to accept Cranford as a nostalgic idealization, though to some extent it has this quality. Yet only to some extent; in spite of its lightness of treatment it is informed by a serious concern for known and trusted standards, and this has supplied part of its strength to survive. Nor is life itself idealized. Its characters suffer, life is unfair to them. (Ruskin felt this so strongly that the first time he tried to read Cranford he flew into a passion at Captain Brown's being killed and wouldn't go any further.)⁹ They have the imperfections of other people, and one at least, Mrs. Jamieson, is not particularly pleasant. But in the major principles they are representatively firm. It is disconcerting to find that Mrs. Gaskell herself has anticipated this sort of misinterpretation when she makes Miss Jenkyns say:

People talk a great deal about idealising now-a-days, whatever that may mean,¹⁰

but it is less difficult, on re-reading the book, to see the qualities in it which made George Eliot—and no one has ever accused her of a lack of serious purpose or of superficiality—say that ‘my feeling towards Life and Art had some affinity with the feeling which had inspired Cranford and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton’.¹¹

It is important to remember that the book is told in the first person by Mary Smith who identifies herself with Cranford although she lives in Drumble.¹² She remarks towards the end:

For my own part, I had vibrated all my life between Drumble and Cranford.¹³

And in ‘vibrating’ she was exchanging one kind of reality for another and showing a preference. What she chose was more than a social system, it was also an environment, one moreover penetrated for Mrs. Gaskell with associations of childhood and home. Then again, it was a present reality, not some distant and now dream-like paradise lost. Cranford, I repeat, is not Knutsford, but there is a good deal of Knutsford in Cranford, and Knutsford was a neighbouring locality where friends lived and her daughters went to school. It provides a solid element of normality for imagination and memory to bite on.

Morally then, Cranford represents a set of values and beliefs resting firmly on tradition though capable of gradual change. Socially, as has been shown, it is associated with stability based on these values. Its attitudes are not rigid, but they are conservative to change. In all these aspects it is in contrast to the new industrial towns or to London, where conditions promoted a personal and social struggle for existence, with the ‘cash nexus’ competing against the old ties of humanity, religion and class obligation for supremacy.

We now have to consider Cranford as a place. Physically, as an environment for living, it had the charm that Manchester so conspicuously lacked, and which is a marked feature of the Cranford world. The physical charm had already been described in two stories that preceded the first Cranford episode, ‘The Moorland Cottage’ (Christmas 1850) and ‘Mr. Harrison's Confessions’ (Feb.-April 1851); the significance of the quietly restful and stable environment she describes is of major importance in her later work.

The effect is, in its modest way, similar in principle to that which Wordsworth claimed for his ‘Nature’, the individual could be in accord with his environment and draw moral strength from it. A quiet, small country town does not however have quite the same effect as a wild Cumberland lake or mountain. As Wordsworth, having marvelled at the Alps, still turned to his smaller mountains for inspiration and meaning, knowing the effect

Of custom that prepares a partial scale
In which the little oft outweighs the great,(14)

so Mrs. Gaskell chose the retired little town she knew as her reference scale.

There can be little doubt also that part of the attitude derived from Mrs. Gaskell's sense of personal relaxation in connection with Knutsford, and this also is reflected. Neither in memory nor in contemporary visits was she on duty as the minister's wife; she could relax as a family member of a secure little group in surroundings which did not offend her senses nor nudge her moral conscience. It was a small world and a thoroughly known one. ‘We know all the people here, and they know us, and all the duties of life seem so easy and simple compared to those of a great town’,¹⁵ as she said later about another village. This freedom from the strain of moral strenuousness transferred itself to Cranford and its inhabitants. They display the mixture of virtues and failings which Mrs. Gaskell accepted as the common recipe for mankind, but the pressure on the individual was less. There was a more congenial soil for virtue, failings were rarely aggravated into extremes of conduct. In the earlier Cranford world particularly there is sorrow but little misery and no daily struggle to maintain common humanity or decency.

It is no more possible than it is with the way she uses Manchester to define in rigid and precise terms exactly what Cranford ‘stands for’, but we can see the principles and feelings which govern it. It is associated with pleasant and tranquil surroundings, a sense of security and stability, a way of life guided by order, custom and a clear vision of right and wrong in great and small things, free equally from the poverty and the desire for ‘progress’ that occupied the nervous energy and time of the new industrial society. It is a world in which there is leisure for humanity and social obligations, and sufficient means to support them. Moreover it is not a remote ideal. Cranford as a town and a society may ignore a few awkward facts, but it represents a type that existed alongside the new materialism. It was possible to make a choice.

Two further qualities which as it were tinge the Cranford world, may be referred to in rounding off this account of its essence. One has already been touched on earlier, the stability of its class structure. In Cranford the characters all know their place, and all accept without hesitation the general scheme of things. In practice we are hardly aware from the book of any section of Cranford except the genteel one—for the servants are part of the gentility, mirror-images reflecting views and beliefs, more conscious of the niceties of position than their mistresses, with the autocratic Mr. Mulliner representing Mrs. Jamieson's precedence. Jem Hearn, the joiner whose bachelor days are unceremoniously cut short so that he can set up house to provide a home for Martha's mistress, acquiesces with hardly a demur.¹⁶ This is partly, it must be admitted, out of personal respect for Miss Matty; however she in turn represents the standards of Cranford at their purest. But we must recognize that this is a very circumscribed society; Mrs. Gaskell is not yet ready to deal with Cranford values in more complex social situations and general experience.

The other quality is the presence of the countryside, which is part of the physical charm of Cranford. While it is true that Cranford is a country-town, the country is very much a background and barely mentioned. When it occurs, as in the journey out to Thomas Holbrook's farm, it is domesticated and humanized. ‘The fragrant smell of the neighbouring hayfields came in every now and then’,¹⁷ no more. Now Mrs. Gaskell can respond to the country; she shares Wordsworth's affection for Cumberland and its statesmen, she also knows the Lancashire coast. But in this aspect of nature uncivilized and awe-inspiring Cranford has no share. (In fact, Mrs. Gaskell tends to rare patches of stiffness and ‘purple writing’ when elevating her expression towards Wordsworthian ends.) ‘Descriptions of nature as such’, comments Ward, ‘were not specially in Mrs. Gaskell's way’, and his conclusion could hardly be bettered: ‘But her “walks in the country” (to borrow Miss Mitford's phrase) had for their starting-point and goal the abodes of men and women.’¹⁸

Cranford and the early stories which share its context all tend to look back, depicting a society set in its ways; it is a world of the middle-aged, and in more than one sense responds to the title of its original sketch, ‘The Last Generation in England’. In her later work the centre of interest gradually switches to the young and to the adaptable. The Cranford ethos is not lost, nor is the setting with all that it stands for, but the small section of society whose attitudes and behaviour occupy the whole of the early book has retreated into the background of Wives and Daughters, represented by the Miss Brownings. Old-fashioned, slightly comic in their rigidity of outlook, bewildered by strange patterns of behaviour and thought, they are still respected for their principles and loved for their goodness. They are the hereditary custodians of manners and ethics who need to be propitiated by all sections of society, even by the modern and aristocratic Lady Harriet, and who have handed on the principles to be adopted and adapted by the next generation. The net catches not merely a whole society but one in the process of change, evolving without discontinuity from its less complex predecessor.

Mrs. Gaskell insists on humanity as well as propriety, and as the context of her work broadens, her insight into human nature and feeling deepens. ‘A historian’, remarked Conrad, ‘may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder of human experience.’¹⁹ No novelist, however, can deal with the whole of human experience; in the end he must select from those areas of it with which he is familiar, and then make a further choice of presentation based on personal preference and values. Her marriage had compelled her to move from Knutsford to Manchester, where she made her home for the remainder of her life. Since that move she had ‘vibrated’ like her character Mary Smith ‘between Drumble and Cranford’. But as her art and experience of life developed she had finally to choose which of the two worlds represented for her what was best and permanent. She did not reject the good qualities to be found in Manchester, but her affections and inclinations as well as her view of humanity led all one way. Mrs. Gaskell made her choice when settling for the Cranford world.

Notes

1. G. A. Payne, Mrs. Gaskell and Knutsford, Manchester (1900), p. 12, gives details about the railway. Mrs. Gaskell herself throws light on the invention of the whole story in a letter to Ruskin quoted by Ward (Cranford, p. xii): ‘The beginning of “Cranford” was one paper in “Household Words”; and I never meant to write more, so killed Captain Brown very much against my will.’

2. Cranford, p. 4. References to Cranford are from Volume 2 of the Knutsford edition, reprinted 1920.

3. The sixteen chapters of the book as we now have it (excluding the much later addition ‘The Cage at Cranford’, 1863), were originally published as 8 episodes in 9 instalments at unequal intervals between 13 Dec. 1851 and 21 May 1853. They all appeared in Household Words and were published as a book in June 1853. The eight episodes—I give present chapter numbers after each—were with minor modification ‘Our Society at Cranford’ (1-2), ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’ (3-4), ‘Memory at Cranford’ (5-6), ‘Visiting at Cranford’ (7-8), ‘The Great Cranford Panic’ in two instalments (9-11), ‘Stopped Payment at Cranford’ (12-13), ‘Friends in Need at Cranford’ (14), and ‘A Happy Return to Cranford’ (15-16). These titles show clearly the intention to describe facets of Cranford life, yet the change from the early descriptive titles to the later story titles also marks the transition to a more definite narrative structure.

4. Cranford, p. 21.

5. The bank failure incident was possibly taken from conversation with Charlotte Brontë (although such failures occurred in Manchester at that time). Its counterpart occurs in Charlotte's letters (E. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols., 1914, pp. 420-1) which describe her loss from the failure of the York and North Midland Bank, and in which the retention of the shares in deference to Emily's wish parallels Miss Matty's retention of the shares out of respect for Deborah.

   The episode of the old letters may also be a Brontë reminiscence. In 1850 Mr. Brontë showed Charlotte his wife's letters, which were of the same unexpectedly informal type as those of Miss Matty's mother. The occasion is related by Charlotte in a letter, ibid., p. 441.

6. Cranford, p. 174.

7. Cranford, p. 6.

8. Cranford, p. 54.

9. Cranford, p. xxiv—Ward quotes the letter.

10. ibid., pp. 54-5.

11. 11 Nov. 1859. The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. S. Haight, Vol. III (1954).

12. ‘Cranford’ stories are marked by this narrative of self-identification; the first person is used in ‘Mr. Harrison's Confessions’, Cranford, ‘Morton Hall’, ‘My French Master’, My Lady Ludlow, and Cousin Phillis. It occurs only in two other short stories, where it is much more the technical convenience.

13. Cranford, p. 185.

14. ‘The Prelude’, XII, 195-6. The Poetical Works of Wordsworth (1926).

15. Jane Whitehill, Letters of Mrs. Gaskell and Charles Eliot Norton (1932), p. 26.

16. The female of the species is more deadly than the male. A minor theme in all Mrs. Gaskell's work is the power of a woman to get things done, if necessary at the expense of a man. She was never a ‘feminist’ but her sketches of the discomforted male generally have a small sparkle to them.

17. Cranford, p. 186.

18. ibid., Introduction, p. xiii.

19. Joseph Conrad, ‘Henry James’, Notes on Life and Letters (1949), p. 17.