SOURCE: “Cranford (1853),” in Elizabeth Gaskell, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, pp. 97-108.

[In the following excerpt, Easson considers the sources and episodic structure of Cranford, Gaskell's skill in rendering emotion and character in the work, and the novel's enduring qualities.]

If stationary men would pay some attention to the districts in which they reside, and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects that surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county-histories, which are still wanting in several parts of this kingdom …

Gilbert White, ‘Advertisement’, The Natural History of Selborne (1789)

The germ of Gaskell's best-known book (at one time, for most people, her only book) was a story-article, ‘The Last Generation in England’. Published in the American Sartain's Union Magazine (July 1849) and not reprinted until Elizabeth Watson's edition of Cranford (1972), it has affinities in its close observation and delight in social detail with her early ‘Clopton Hall’, with a letter of August 1838 to Mary Howitt describing Knutsford customs of her youth (28-30)—sand pictures for weddings and rejoicings, well-dressings, ‘riding stang’ for scolding women (a form of Skimmerton ride)—and with the later sketches ‘Company Manners’ and ‘French Life’.¹ She begins ‘The Last Generation’ by referring to an Edinburgh Review article, ‘in which it is said that Southey had proposed to himself to write a “history of English domestic life”’.² Gaskell, regretting the loss of Southey's own book, stated her wish to record details observed by herself or handed down by others, ‘for even in small towns, scarcely removed from villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing’, change hinted at in Cranford by the railways and by Drumble, the manufacturing town.³ In ‘The Last Generation’ Gaskell vouches for the truth of what she describes and claimed in a letter to Ruskin (February 1865) that she had seen the cow with its grey flannel waistcoat and drawers and knew the cat that swallowed the lace, adding an extra Cranford anecdote about a new carpet and a new housemaid (747-8). In the article and in the expanded fictive form of Cranford, the sense that she is writing a ‘history of English domestic life’ helps make the work distinctive.

‘The Last Generation’ suggests a social spread considerably narrowed in Cranford, where society's upper reaches are the daughters of large landed proprietors of very old family. Violence, of a kind only imagined during the Cranford panic (ch. x) or set outside in the story of the pedlar's pack (p. 111), flashes out in ‘The Last Generation’ amongst

a set of young men, ready for mischief and brutality, and every now and then dropping off the pit's brink into crime. … They would stop ladies returning from the card-parties, which were the staple gaiety of the place, and who were only attended by a maidservant bearing a lantern, and whip them; literally whip them as you whip a little child …

(pp. 162-3)

This violence, a useful reminder of Gaskell's own toughness,⁴ is curbed in Cranford by omission, and apparently no place was found for the individuality of the lady who would drive out ‘with a carriage full of dogs; each dressed in the male or female fashion of the day, as the case might be; each dog provided with a pair of house-shoes, for which his carriage boots were changed on his return’ (p. 163).⁵ Eccentricity in Cranford it is to be no longer an end but the means to an analysis of manners and feeling.

I have claimed that Cranford is distinctive in kind, and a brief comparison with an obvious forebear, Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855),⁶ based on Swallowfield, near Reading, may help to bring out that particularity. After a preliminary description of the village, Mitford traces through a year from January to November, the focus being the narrator's observation on her walks or small expeditions, alone or with a friend or with Lizzy, a child of the neighbourhood; her only constant companion is May the greyhound. The narrator's character (almost identical with Mitford's) and the chronology are the only structural elements. The society is small (nothing like the township of Cranford); the social observation is not of manners; and social distinctions are very little regarded—in the end, it is true, social distinctions do not rule Cranford, but their very presence is necessary to feel the strength of goodness in breaking them: an important characteristic of Miss Matty or even Miss Jenkyns who display, by an eventual disregard of taboos, the heroism which Mrs Jamieson, for instance, is never able to find. The occasional anecdote of Mitford's reminds us of Cranford: the whimsical man who, thinking the lime trees darkened his rooms

had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun. Nature revenged herself, in her own sweet and gracious manner; fresh leaves sprang out, and at nearly Christmas the foliage was as brilliant as when the outrage was committed.

(p. 14)

And certain of the characters, glimpsed briefly, have pathos and humour. There is John Evans, the gardener, who, becoming insane on his wife's death, was ‘sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured; but his power was gone and his strength; he could no longer manage a garden, nor submit to the restraint, nor encounter the fatigue of regular employment’ (p. 20); and again, Miss Sally Mearing, who scorned the new ways of agriculture, and lives out her days at one end of a bluff bachelor's farmhouse ‘untempted by matrimony, and unassailed (as far as I hear) by love or by scandal’ (p. 85). The most extended sketch of character, of Hannah Bint the young dairymaid, who supports father and siblings by her efforts, is still essentially anecdotal, not carried beyond the moment. The landscape's progress is more fully charted and the importance of natural observation over figures suggests that Mitford's affinities are more with Gilbert White in The Natural History of Selborne than with Gaskell. She does not have White's scientific curiosity (testing a theory, for example, why cuckoos do not hatch their own eggs—Letter xxx), but she can observe a kingfisher by a frozen stream with the precision that gives pleasure (pp. 36-7).

One of the great powers of Cranford is Gaskell's handling and control of emotion, but Mitford never extends and hardly reveals her persona's feelings, beyond delight and wonder in the glory of God's creation. Her own life had been a difficult one and she no doubt felt it proper to conceal it. Even when she touches on points of entry into the past, Mitford tends to make them vaguely general: she rambles to the house where she lived for eighteen happy years, but though ‘three years ago, it nearly broke my heart to leave’ (p. 54), she never tells us the reason for leaving; and when she lies upon the bank of violets it is to call up an idealized past and experience: ‘What a renewal of heart and mind! To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is again to be fearless, gay, and gentle as a child. Then it is that thought becomes poetry, and feeling religion’ (pp. 67-8).

Our Village harks back to the periodical essay; its Regency prose reveals affinities with Lamb and Leigh Hunt; and is given coherence by its common landscape, narrator, and the progression of the seasons, rather as the characters of the Spectator link the separate papers. It is good and Gaskell probably read it. In contrast, Cranford, despite its sporadic production, is essentially fictive and might be called a novel; character and action combine to produce climax. Interestingly, it was one of the books George Eliot read while writing her first fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), and to Gaskell later she wrote of an affinity that suggests she saw the links of craft between them as novelists.⁷ Mitford's place is with the earlier essayists, Addison, Goldsmith, Leigh Hunt, perhaps with Gilbert White, though his scientific rigour, an intellectual toughness absent in Mitford, makes him distinctively a professional. Gaskell's is with George Eliot, since both are concerned with fictions, with telling stories, and it can only mislead, perhaps lower our idea of her, if we compare, as Anne Thackeray Ritchie does, Cranford with the Essays of Elia, though she is right in seeing that the book is imbued with the ‘force of sentiment’.⁸ Mitford turns aside from people to landscape, whereas in her Keatsian feeling that ‘Scenery is fine—but human nature is finer’, Gaskell has an avidity for people. Mitford gives little sense of the connective feelings of past and present, and she lacks a controlling tone. She says that

There are moments in life when, without any visible or immediate cause, the spirits sink and fail. … They who have known these feelings … will understand … why even needle-work, the most effectual sedative, that grand soother and composer of woman's distress, fails to comfort me today.

(p. 125)

We may wonder whether this is not simply a painful truth that Mitford like most of us has experienced, rather than the complexities a Gaskell narrator can hint at, of changing attitudes, of learning, and of growth. When rumours fly in Cranford, Mary Smith says ‘it seemed to me then that there was every reason to believe’ (p. 109); and the word ‘then’ controls our sense of her ability to look forward and back within the structure of the work, rather than nakedly out from the world beyond the book.

Martin Dodsworth, in a perceptive essay,⁹ insisted that ‘the fundamentally serious concerns of her book have been neglected for a belle-lettristic study of incidental detail’, and while I query his suggestion that we should treat the novel as symbolic of a conflict within the mind of the author, I do want to argue for a serious concern with the pattern of behaviour and feeling, for the pathos which (along with evident comedy) lies in the book. Without invoking too direct a comparison Cranford and Twain's Huckleberry Finn both offer an accepted surface of society's beliefs, challenged by the reader and eventually defied within the story. When Huck declares, ‘All right, then, I'll go to hell’ (ch. 31), he ironically still accepts society's laws, yet finds he cannot live by them; Miss Jenkyns, Miss Matty and the other ladies all find at some time or other that though they had rather not openly break society's rules, human nature will keep breaking in. Cranford often has a sense of deep loss consequent on this doubleness that is akin to the tragic idea.

Cranford's sense of unity only came through hindsight. The initial story, ‘Our Society at Cranford’, was published in Household Words, 13 December 1851.¹⁰ Many years later Gaskell wrote that the ‘beginning of Cranford was one paper in “Household Words”; and I never meant to write more, so killed Capt. Brown very much against my will’ (748);¹¹ this may strictly be true, but the second paper, ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, was published so soon afterwards (3 January 1852) that it is clear they were conceived at much the same time. The first is, however, complete in itself and establishes a pattern for most of the parts that followed as well as the larger structure; the plot lies in suffering, quiet heroism, death, and a projection forward into happiness, though this is necessarily qualified by what went before. Captain Brown's rescue of the child even at the expense of his own life (the more poignant because he was not making a gesture of sacrifice) and his daughter's death are relieved by their own value and by the happy ending in marriage for Miss Jessie. Yet if this serves as a model for the structure of individual units and for the novel's whole, an important development between the first episode and the rest of the narrative is a shift of relationship between the Jenkyns sisters.

In ‘Our Society’ Deborah, in attitude and manners, sets a pattern of rectitude happily broken through in her response to Miss Brown's situation. After Deborah's death, she stands as the revered exemplum to whom Miss Matty tries to conform, yet whose standards are constantly challenged, both by what we learn of her (Deborah's part in preventing Miss Matty's marriage, for instance, or her bank investment) and by Matty's need to find ways of acting for herself. There is a shift in Gaskell's attitude to Deborah after ‘Our Society’, unfair perhaps, but finely exploited in Miss Matty's gradual breaking from her sister's leading strings. The pattern established, Gaskell in time saw her way to make episode dependent upon episode and so to form an interdependent narrative. The meeting between Miss Matty and her old suitor Mr Holbrook is followed by his death and Miss Matty's ability to defy the shade of her sister in allowing Martha a follower, so that a sense of life and possible happiness leads us on to a suggested future larger than Miss Matty's could be, yet in which Miss Matty shares by helping create it. The loss of Peter, the great mystery of the third story, ‘Memory at Cranford’ (13 March 1852), is resolved in the final episode with the Aga Jenkyns's return. Gaskell could look back as the stories continued to be produced and integrate new material by retrospective reference and development.¹² Miss Matty's frustrated marriage is remembered again by the reader (part of the power is our sense of sharing secrets with certain characters) when she defends the wedded state against Miss Pole's aspersions (pp. 127-8) and Peter wonders that she is not married (‘I could have sworn you were on the high road to matrimony when I left England’) (p. 187)), while Mrs Fitz-Adam unwittingly recalls the part Miss Jenkyns played in frustrating the match when she remembers Matty's kindness of long ago in the midst of sorrow:

she was looking down at some primroses she had gathered, and pulling them all to pieces, and I do believe she was crying. But after she had passed, she turned round and ran after me to ask—oh, so kindly—about my poor mother.

(p. 167)

We perceive more than Mrs Fitz-Adam can; in a minor key it is like the comedy of ‘Curious if True’, where we have to supply the connection between what we are told and what we are to understand. The retrospective development of Martha is also a sustaining thread, though one easier to develop: Martha's story is never complete since so much of her life is before her; Gaskell has to make later detail about Miss Matty and Mr Holbrook fit into an already completed pattern, though the rejection of Deborah is a forward development. Martha is allowed a follower, but the kiss heard by Matty at the end of the third story is more subtle than the renewal at the close of the second; not only does it assert life, it also brings home to Matty, as already felt in reading the letters, what she has missed. Its comedy is qualified, made complex by the pathos of the listener, whose apparent failure to understand is counteracted by the reader supplying understanding from experience of the whole knot.

The third and fourth stories, ‘Memory at Cranford’ and ‘Visiting at Cranford’, appeared on 13 March and 3 April 1852; a gap followed before ‘The Great Cranford Panic’, a double part (8 and 15 January 1853), and the final three episodes—‘Stopped Payment’, ‘Friends in Need’ and ‘A Happy Return’—came together on 2 April, 7 and 21 May 1853, the complete story being published in mid-1853. It is the double-length ‘The Great Cranford Panic’ which first clearly shows, in unresolved action, that Gaskell intended to extend the work and treat it as a whole. Mary Smith hears Mrs Brunoni's account of her journey through India and of the meeting with Aga Jenkyns, and determines to ‘make further enquiry’ (p. 133). There is also a hint of Lady Glenmire's marriage (only understood in the next episode) when she breaks in with doubts of Mr Hoggins's having been robbed and grows red at the implication of what she is saying (p. 127). Because of this construction, Cranford is unlike most sustained fictions, where extension of narrative determines the structure; rather, it is extension of character as Miss Matty develops from subordinate younger sister to central interest. Each episode is moved along by a plot primarily concentrated in that section, but a sense of character and manners (tied in with character) is dominant. One of Gaskell's achievements is the grasp she has on her creations, the ability to carry them through the whole work, to show while charting them that however strict the rules of manners, they are not absolute since the women of Cranford render ‘real tender good offices to each other whenever they are in distress’ (p. 1). Human nature, feeling, often clashes with custom and gains in the confrontation, the ladies usually being at their best when they ‘hypocritically’ renege on what they declare are sacred principles—a marked difference from Jane Austen, with whom Gaskell is sometimes carelessly compared, where identification of inner and outer is essential for probity of character. Gaskell's skill lies so often in her ability to surprise us because she proceeds in this work often not by analysis of feeling and crises of conscience long meditated but by a seemingly sudden description of actions that make us aware at that moment of a train of past consideration that defeats the coldness of ceremony. One such moment, unexpected yet entirely believable, was Miss Jenkyns's response to the news of Captain Brown's death.

Deborah seems to live on in Miss Matty's determination to be called Matilda and to enforce Miss Jenkyn's rules with a religious strictness (p. 30). Alterations come, though: Martha is allowed Jem as follower, while the devotion to Deborah's memory, almost remorse as at personal failure, is severely questioned when the ‘rebel’ who had dared to whisper against the living sister is shown to have had a lover who was not ‘enough of a gentleman for the rector and Miss Jenkyns’ (p. 35) and whose quiet devoted life is none the less that of a cripple, just as Thomas Holbrook's eccentricity is the outward roughness of a man, his love rejected, who yet has not soured—has crusted, rather:

with something of the ‘pride which apes humility,’ he had refused to push himself on, as so many of his class had done, into the ranks of the squires. He would not allow himself to be called Thomas Holbrook, Esq; he even sent back letters with this address, telling the postmistress at Cranford that his name was Mr. Thomas Holbrook, yeoman.

(p. 34)

He is not a misanthrope, though, and both the main terms (‘refinement’, ‘humanity’) are important when we are told he despised every refinement ‘which had not its root deep down in humanity’ (p. 34). If age has overtaken him (Mary Smith's brief romantic vision of him and Miss Matty reunited in love is dashed to the ground), his strangeness is that of Don Quixote rather than of Timon. His domestic state, with the welcoming kitchen—which might so easily have been turned into a dining-parlour—and regret for the passing of old customs in eating, is arrested, so we may take it, at that very point when Miss Matty felt obliged to give him up. A bluff man, he might have become another Squire Hamley in Wives and Daughters if he had had the wife and domestic tenderness that social rank would not allow him. His very pride in his rank is a defiance of ‘the rector and Miss Jenkyns’, who thought him too low for them, though they neither were to be his wife.

The brief encounter after so many years is enough to call up in Miss Matty all the tremulous emotion of thirty years before, which vainly (she thinks successfully) she tries to hide. The very effort at concealment of what she feels after Holbrook's death brings on ‘the tremulous motion of head and hands which I have seen ever since in Miss Matty’ (p. 48), such is the force of love.

With the second story, Gaskell had needed to reintroduce Mary Smith into Cranford society, a narrator important for the sense of the larger life of Drumble, the pattern of the advancing world, behind which Cranford falls further and further. Even Mary develops, marginally, in her contacts between the two worlds, and she mediates for the reader between his opinions, which she now holds, and Cranford's opinions, which she has shed but does not despise. Mary's observation chronicles the ‘history of English domestic life’. Mary had feared her connection with Cranford would cease after Miss Jenkyns's death:

at least, that it would have to be kept up by correspondence, which bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants I sometimes see (‘Hortus Siccus,’ I think they call the thing) do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows.

(p. 27)

So Mary may believe, yet Gaskell is able in ‘Old Letters’ to show a past age brought to light through its correspondence. Old letters may be like dried plants to those that have no key; still, read with memory and feeling they expand out like Japanese flowers into new life. Miss Matty brings out the family letters soon after Holbrook's death, as though reminded of her own mortality and the need for preparation. In her acceptance of her father's, of Deborah's, judgment on Holbrook we may see little more than the burden of the past, of convention. The reading of the letters animates that intermingling, like wheat and tares, of the love and custom which are Miss Matty's life. The ritual springs typically for Gaskell out of physical circumstances: the economy on candles, the detail of contrivance necessary ‘to keep our two candles of the same length, ready to be lighted, and to look as if we burnt two always’ (p. 50). The customs of Cranford are not quaint eccentricities divorced from human nature, but habits linked by past experience to present need. Gaskell uses these quirks to tell the story:

One night, I remember that this candle economy particularly annoyed me … especially as Miss Matty had fallen asleep, and I did not like to stir the fire and run the risk of awakening her; so I could not even sit on the rug, and scorch myself with sewing by firelight, according to my usual custom. I fancied Miss Matty must be dreaming of her early life; for she spoke one or two words in her uneasy sleep bearing reference to persons who were dead long before. When Martha brought in the lighted candle and tea, Miss Matty started into wakefulness, with a strange, bewildered look around, as if we were not the people she expected to see about her. There was a little sad expression that shadowed her face as she recognized me; but immediately afterwards she tried to give me her usual smile. All through tea-time, her talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth. Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often spoken of the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful.

(pp. 50-1)

The first impression of the letters is sensuous, the smell of Tonquin beans that Mary ‘had always noticed … about any of the things which had belonged’ to Miss Matty's mother (p. 51). The letters, yellow now with age, have in them ‘a vivid and intense sense of the present time’, so that Miss Matty's father, the Rector, whom Mary has only known ‘from a picture in the dining-parlour, stiff and stately, in a huge full-bottomed wig, with gown, cassock, and bands, and his hand upon a copy of the only sermon he ever published’ (p. 52), becomes a lover, wooing his wife with ‘short homely sentences, right fresh from the heart’, while his bride-to-be is full of clothes, particularly the white ‘Paduasoy’, which in time is material for a christening robe as marriage directs her from self to a new object of affection in the child. Gaskell never mocks, though she delights in the delicate human comedy; when, for instance, the Rector discovered that dress did mean something to his bride ‘and then he sent her a letter, which had evidently accompanied a whole box full of finery. … This was the first letter, ticketed in a frail, delicate hand, “From my dearest John”’ (p. 53). It is human because it is two people coming together in a union where there is an intellectual incompatibility, even an emotional one, and yet which can develop as a working, loving relationship, from the ideal ardour of the Rector, who dominates the early part of the correspondence, to the domestic practicality of his wife, who had workaday qualities that stand the wear of years:

But this was nothing to a fit of writing classical poetry which soon seized him, in which his Molly figured as ‘Maria’. The letter containing the carmen was endorsed by her, ‘Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. I thowt to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait …’

(p. 55)

Other letters follow—including Miss Jenkyns's own compositions—and Peter begins to emerge. After the strange joke on Deborah, all those years ago, it is Mary who first reads one of the letters returned unopened to his mother, ‘and I, a stranger, not born at the time when this occurrence took place, was the one to open it’ (p. 68). So past and present mell together: Mrs Jenkyns speaks to Mary Smith and Gaskell achieves what Southey wished to write, a history of English domestic manners, conveying the strangeness, the otherness of early times and the way such manners were articulated in the frame of human behaviour, in Miss Matty's parents and her lover and the world of candle economy.

The seriousness of Cranford lies above all in the episode of Miss Matty's greatest heroism, her insistence that as a shareholder she is responsible for the Town and Country Bank's integrity. She is put to the test partly through that model sister Miss Jenkyns, the investment made at Deborah's insistence against Mary's father's advice. The heroism (the quiet heroism of the sufferer, unperceived as something even required of her; only the observer fully understands the nature of the action) is made more poignant by the pleasure it frustrates, one significantly related back again to Deborah:

We began to talk of Miss Matty's new silk gown. I discovered that it would be really the first time in her life that she had had to choose anything of consequence for herself: for Miss Jenkyns had always been the more decided character, whatever her taste had been …

(p. 145)

The choice proves to be one of more consequence than Mary imagined. Miss Matty's qualities are pity and integrity, the heart against the head: ‘My dear, I never feel as if my mind was what people call very strong. … I was very thankful, that I saw my duty this morning, with the poor man standing by me’ (p. 151). So Miss Matty rises to the challenge and sells tea, while Martha precipitates Jem into marriage to help (well that Matty allowed her a follower) and the ladies of Cranford show their kind offices in response to real need (significantly Mrs Jamieson, the most positively dislikeable, is away in Cheltenham). Peter's return, then, after this dismissal of Deborah, is a kind of reward, but not a melodramatic release from misery by a deus ex machina. Not only has the possibility of his arrival been rumoured far off, his return does not artificially rescue Miss Matty from the consequences of her action; she has already rescued herself (indeed, she enjoys selling tea) and Peter's return is an emotional rather than material completion—though his sister's financial circumstances certainly improve immensely.

Cranford seems to have passed into folk consciousness. On my first reading, many years ago, I was intrigued to find in the tale of the pedlar's pack (p. 111) a variant of a horror story well known from my grandmother's telling: her version was of a coffin and suspicion was roused by the servant insisting ‘I see a grey eye’. Whether they have a common source, I don't know, but the power of both suggests how Gaskell could call on the art of the folk narrator.¹³ The book has been reprinted many times and it was Gaskell's own favourite amongst her works (747).

A curious pendant to Cranford is the short satire, ‘The Cage at Cranford’, published in All the Year Round,¹⁴ 28 November 1863, and set in 1856, by which time Miss Matty on a strict chronology would be in her early seventies. The focus shifts though to Miss Pole and to the ‘cage’ that Mary Smith has sent from France, in reality the support for the excessive crinoline dresses of the late 1850s and 1860s, but taken literally by Cranford to be a bird cage. Satire on fashion is the main point, and presumably Cranford was a convenient, established milieu (certainly backward in fashions) for the ridicule, where only Fanny the maid, a charity child, recognizes what the object is and she is snubbed for her offered information. The vast crinolines were much mocked (as Punch cartoons show), yet despite being the ‘ugliest fashion that ever caricatured the human form divine’ and symptomatic, as Mme Mohl's biographer saw them, of the general corruption of French society under the Second Empire,¹⁵ and despite Jane Welsh Carlyle's glum reaction to the photograph of a friend, that the ‘crinoline quite changes her character and makes her a stranger for me. I want the one that is, as I have always seen her, a sensible girl with no crinoline’,¹⁶ no mockery was to remove it and Gaskell's assault remains a good-humoured and ineffective joke.

Notes

1. Household Words, ix (May 1854); Fraser's Magazine, lxix (April-June 1864).

2. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (London, 1972), p. 161: references in text to ‘The Last Generation in England’ are to this edition; references to Cranford to Knutsford. See Southey's letter of 8 January 1833: ‘I want to write … [England's] Domestic History, that is, of manners in the widest acceptation of the word’ (Robert Southey, Letters: A Selection, ed. M. H. Fitzgerald (London, 1912), p. 475).

3. Cranford, ed. Watson, p. 161; Drumble is Manchester, as Cranford is Knutsford.

4. See the comparable violence in George Eliot's related sketches, Scenes of Clerical Life (London, 1858), ed. David Lodge (Harmondsworth, 1973), particularly ‘Janet's Repentance’.

5. Compare Augustus J. C. Hare's anecdote of Lady Penrhyn's pugs, Memorials of a Quiet Life, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1872), i, p. 10.

6. Originally serialized, then published 1824-32 in 5 vols. The surface similarity of Cranford and Our Village is emphasized by uniform editions (London, 1891; 1893), introductions by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, illustrations by Hugh Thomson.

7. George Eliot, Letters, 7 vols, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London/New Haven, 1954-6), iii (1954), pp. 198-9.

8. Cranford, intro. Ritchie, pp. vi-vii, xix.

9. ‘Women without Men at Cranford’, Essays in Criticism, xiii (1963); the quotation is from p. 133.

10. For details of publication and division into chapters when gathered, see Cranford, ed. Watson, pp. 179-83.

11. To Ruskin [?Late February 1865]. A contemporary letter (December 1861) stresses the continuity of composition: ‘I've written a couple of tales about Cranford in Household Words’ (174); she speaks as though Cranford had a real and already known existence, while ‘a couple of tales’ suggests the vein once opened ran freely.

12. There is a disturbing suggestion retrospectively that Peter's dressing up with the ‘baby’ was not only a jibe at Deborah for having no suitor (unlike Matty), but played its part in the rejection of Holbrook by Mr Jenkyns and Deborah: enforced by Peter's later comment on Matty's single state.

13. For a common variant see ‘The Long Pack’ in Katherine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales, 4 vols (London, 1970-71), B:2, pp. 254-6.

14. Dickens's successor to Household Words; reprinted in Cranford, ed. Watson.

15. Kate O'Meara, Madame Mohl: Her Salon and Her Friends (London, 1885), pp. 110-13.

16. Jane Welsh Carlyle, Letters and Memorials, ed. James Anthony Froude, 3 vols (London, 1883), iii, pp. 231-2 (31 October 1864).