SOURCE: "Cranford and the Victorian Collection," in Victorian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 179-206.

The freight of Victorian things remaining in our own century has left historians with a plentiful resource, but also with a number of special problems. One has only to pause in a recreated drawing-room, at a genre painting, or over a passage of description in a novel, to sense the abundance and oppressiveness of a famously cluttered age. In The Victorian Treasure-House, Peter Conrad elicits something of this ponderousness when he pieces together a composite picture of the Victorian frame of mind by showing how things were implicated in cultural forms, scientific practices, and middle-class domestic ideology. The emphasis he places on materiality is especially evident in both his treatment of detail—the ability to isolate, identify, and position the one thing among the many—and his exploration of the familiar texture of accretion—the jumble of furnishings, the unwieldiness of the Victorian novel, the labor of accumulation. Similarly, in Victorian Things Asa Briggs sets himself the difficult task of unearthing the "intelligible universe"—or, more properly, universes, for there was more than one—"of the Victorians" (31). Briggs acknowledges this difficulty and prefaces his study with a prolonged reflection on the procedural problems generated by a history of things. He is concerned not only with artifacts themselves, for instance, but with "crucial aspects of categorization": "What were the things that Victorians listed, and what constituted a laundry list or a shopping list. . . ?" (34). Among the many "category questions" which the subject invites, Briggs asks, "Which were specifically women's things? Which men's?" (34). This interleaved inquiry about gender, however, suggests a further question: can we distinguish not only between the categories of things special to women and men, but between the modes of categorization that were brought to bear upon those things? Gender, I would suggest, while it clearly shapes the design and use of Victorian things, also shapes their definition and description.

One central, if loose, mode of categorization was the Victorian collection. A concern with aggregation—organizing individual things into groups of things—informs the domestic handbook, the emporium, the natural sciences, the public museum, statistics, genre painting, and the Victorian novel. These public forms were also paralleled by the private pastime of collecting. It is therefore worth inquiring whether the very notion of the collection differed between the sexes, as it differed amongst classes and races, and whether this difference becomes apparent in writing about collections, and in the assumptions about collecting that underwrite such cultural forms as painting and prose fiction. Briggs's book, itself as much a collection as a history, articulates in its very structure the tension in Victorian culture between systems of meaning, particularly historical systems, and things. It is a tension that surfaces in the development of realism in the arts, in the concerns and methods of the natural sciences, and in the rise of sociology. Taxonomies, statistics, universal expositions, and multiplot novels attest not only to a passion for order, but also to an obstinate disorderliness of things and an anxiety of agglomeration exemplified in the domestic interiors, dustheaps and curiosity shops, and in the populous and unruly plots, of Charles Dickens.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1863)—no loose, baggy monster, let us admit it—is not the book that comes to mind when we invoke the Victorian novel. Though it is dominated by things in a way that few novels are, even Victorian novels, it recalls collections of a very particular kind. By this I mean that it is associated with that variety of Victorian objects produced by middle-class feminine work—needlework, decorative crafts, domestic arrangement—and is most often characterized as a female collection: a bunch of flowers, a potpourri, or a "ladies' museum." It is a woman's book about a woman's place, and its universe of things encompasses "bonnets, gowns, caps, and shawls" (169), personal mementos, old letters, muddled memories, and above all, stories.

"Our Society at Cranford" first appeared in Household Words on 13 December 1851, some two months after the close of that most celebrated Victorian collection, the Great Exhibition. On the face of it, the two events are scarcely comparable: the Crystal Palace is an enduring emblem of Victorianism, and Cranford an enduring article of Victoriana. For the historian of Victorian material culture, the Great Exhibition was a key episode, and to popular history it represents the very image of the age. While it gestured toward a coherent account of culture by placing "everything" under one roof, the effort of categorization necessitated by this inclusiveness was, as Briggs explains, doomed to fail (53-56). But the glass structure itself was the triumphant symbol of a massive simplicity of design capable of containing even the irresistible Victorian machinery of progress. It is perhaps this image of the containment of energy, the bounding of the incoherent, that makes the Crystal Palace so favored by critics in search of a symbol for the massive, complex organism that is the Victorian novel. The Great Exhibition, like the novels of Dickens, may have been an indifferent whole, but it was a whole nonetheless.¹

The marriage of Paxton's formal simplicity (an architectural gesture toward transparent continuity between collection and world) with the insistent materiality and even gorgeous redundancy of the exhibits struck many visitors with a sense of other-worldliness. A spare transparent structure accommodating an exotic plenitude, while it may now be very suggestive of Victorian experience, was then equally suggestive of its antithesis. Owen Jones's Alhambraic scheme for the decoration of this palace, though it was never fully realized, is an example of the deliberate orientalism of the spectacle, an orientalism also underscored in the comparisons consistently drawn between the Exhibition and the East. Writing to her father, Charlotte Brontë expressed delight and wonder at this "Verdopolitan" spectacle:

"It is a wonderful place—vast, strange, new, and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created, you find there. . . . It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created." (qtd. in Wise and Symington 3: 243)²

The Exhibition demonstrated to Brontë a magical power which "gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth" and "arranged it thus" (243), but though the effect was Eastern, the power was not. This "assemblage of all things" was controlled by England, and the Great Exhibition represented to its patrons an emblem of the supremacy of national over international progress. Nowhere is this smugness more evident than in an article written by Charles Dickens and R. H. Horne in Household Words on 5 July 1851, "The Great Exhibition and the Little One" (Stone 1: 319-29). Dickens and Home sarcastically dismiss the Chinese Gallery in Hyde Park Place and the Chinese Junk at Temple Stairs, both showing simultaneously with the Great Exhibition, as the material testimony of "a people who came to a dead stop" (322). As Stone notes in his preface to the article, this is "a view of East and West that Dickens, along with most of his contemporaries, regarded as self-evident" (319), and it is a view implicitly endorsed by Mr. Holbrook when he recites Locksley Hall in Cranford. John Stuart Mill, for instance, in On Liberty, cites "the warning example" of China (88) in his appeal for a rigorous individuality to contest the tyranny of a uniform, uncritical public opinion in England: the Chinese "have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners" (89). Significantly, though, in the light of Cranford's treatment of orientalism, both the view of China "shutting itself up, as far as possible, within itself (Stone 322) and "the Chinese ideal of making all people alike" (Mill 90) also describe Cranford. The conventional association of men and orientalism in Gaskell's novel is challenged by an association of the feminine and the Eastern that is indicated in the dormancy and homogeneity of the Cranfordians. The conflation of the feminine and the oriental is also, I shall argue, implicated in the idea of the female collection, an idea that is central to Cranford's exploratory form.

Cranford presents an ironic reversal of Locksley Hall. The poem's relevance to the town is summarized by Miss Matty's snooze during its recitation: whatever does become of Victorianism, it is not at Cranford. The poet's desire for a renewal of creativity at "the gateways of the day" (where he imagines he will "take some savage woman" to rear his "dusky race") is a longing to step outside the tumult of history, outside the "heavens [filled] with commerce":

There methinks would be enjoyment more
than in this march of mind,
In the steamship, in the
railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind.

The poet-speaker's Cathay is outside history because Europe is history. As Dickens and Horne complain: "Well may the three Chinese divinities of the Past, the Present, and the Future be represented with the same heavy face" (Stone 322). The Chinese Exhibition, like Tennyson's Cathay, is illegible within the narrative of human progress because its exhibits do not, as in the Victorian museological imperative, stage a comprehensive history of development. Chinese things are merely curious, displaying what Dickens and Home scorn as the "essential" quality of "always doing the same thing" (328). It is an incoherence that confounds the imperious and coercive narrative inherent in the Great Exhibition.³

The image of the Crystal Palace as a bazaar calls to mind not only the Chinese Exhibition nearby, but other bazaars operating in London at that time. Extending the argument of Gary Dyer, who has traced the history of the ladies' bazaar in early nineteenth-century London, I would like to consider a mid-century image of the charity sale. At the Bazaar was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857 by the onetime Pre-Raphaelite James Collinson. . . .

The ladies' museum, . . . at the center of Collinson's At the Bazaar, frustrates our efforts to ascribe public meaning—some convention of narrative, commercial, or scientific order—to its displaced collection of objects. The authority missing from the bazaar and the woman's collection is dramatized by the very absence of a male reference point within Collinson's painting. Of the thousands of modern life pictures painted during the period, many described the private domestic experience of women: there were countless images, by painters of both sexes, showing women preparing to go out, playing music, sewing, talking with sisters and friends, and being with their children. But many of the most powerful images of women present them in relation to a dramatic situation outside the frame, to be inferred by the viewer. These are images of separation and waiting, correspondence and death; and images of women "lost" in thought, memory, or reverie (see ). In these works, the single figure of the woman most commonly enters into narrative in relation to an absent man. That the image equated the faraway hero and the public world is evident from two examples. In John Byam Shaw's picture The Boer War, 1900, a "public" meaning is present only in the explanatory title, and in Joseph Clarke's The Labourer's Welcome the reflected figure of the workman returning home appears precisely where the viewer should be. In At the Bazaar, though, no such absence can be inferred. The central figure and the objects arrayed around her do not consolidate into the readable plot of a foregrounded heroine and an offstage hero. They tell no story about her and she tells no story about them. She is neither protagonist nor narrator. She is outside the proper context of her identity, her home, and presides over a drama of superfluity.

This suggests that images of waiting women make explicit the impossibility of coherent domestic narratives without men, just as the bazaar and the female collection are commercial and scientific enterprises bankrupted of authority and coherence by the absence of a male point of reference. The presence of a man authenticates a "feminine" domestic drama, but what of the reverse? The woman must impose domesticity on the marketplace if her presence there is to be at all comprehensible (as Bathsheba must in Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd).¹⁰ Images of commerce in which women feature are not common in Victorian contemporary genre painting: when they do appear (as in Hicks's Dividend Day at the Bank of England [fig. 6]), it is frequently a scene in which men confer upon them special attention and courtesy, and in which a point is made about the humanizing influence of the feminine visitant. The formal design of domestic fiction must be brought into question when a woman cannot alone constitute her own story. What formal qualities would such a novel display? What does such a book look like? These issues are at the heart of Cranford.

My argument, in brief, is that Cranford' s narrative form, loosely episodic, is reminiscent less of a conventional Victorian novel than a woman's collection. Two passages in Cranford describe two special kinds of "texts" which are also domestic appurtenances, and they might also be describing the novel itself. In Mrs. Jamieson's drawing-room,

There was another square Pembroke table dedicated to the Fine Arts, on which were a kaleidoscope, conversation-cards, puzzle-cards (tied together to an interminable length with faded pink satin ribbon), and a box painted in fond imitation of the drawings which decorate tea-chests. (122)

Later, Miss Matty recalls how

"My father once made us . . . keep a diary, in two columns; on one side we were to put down in the morning what we thought would be the course and events of the coming day, and at night we were to put down on the other side what really happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives." (158)

Cranford, as I will explain, is organized like a collection of anecdotes printed on cards and bundled together;¹¹ its miscellaneous form, however, is also one response to the diary in two columns. The poignancy of passing time is expressed in Matty's sudden recollection of hopeful expectancy; the blank of forgetfulness calls back the blank of a future that day by day is not to eventuate. This fitful history records most faithfully the handing over of the past simultaneously to remembrance and oblivion. (The memorialization and annihilation of each of Matty's ancestors is dramatized in the slow reading through and burning of letters.) There is no bygone voice which answers or accounts for anything; only the charm of a preserved collection, and the shuffling of tales into multiple histories. These histories refuse to affix themselves to anything "public," and are detached from the historical background that is so germane to other more formidable Victorian novels. Cranford asks what it means to write imaginative histories of private life and to place them, as Cranford is placed within England, like an enclave within the larger narrative of history. While its form is not entirely discontinuous, it privileges formal discontinuity as part of its experimentation with an appropriate form for this history of private life.¹² Its thematic concern with things and their collection in a world without men is connected with this exploration of stories and their collection in a world without beginnings, middles, and ends.

This is not to say that Cranford rejects conventional literary modes, along with men, in a zeal of feminist revisionism. Its sentimental allegiances are to its maiden ladies, but the moral new world promised by its old-world values is severely tested by the keen pathos of its discontents: its poverty, rancor, competitiveness, loneliness. The novel shifts, "vibrates" (like Mary Smith), between a vision of the singularity and the triviality of its subject, and between apotheosis and critique. This alternation is registered textually in shifts between pastoral, social realism and social comedy, and utopianism. Nina Auerbach describes Cranford as "an organic community rooted in the past and containing the future" (89), but its temporality is explained not through historical but through literary modes. The sense of the past is fixed to the pastoral, the present impinges in the form of the realist and the comic, and the future exists only as an expression of the Utopian.

What Cranford takes from pastoral is that mode's sense of melancholy relinquishment, the poignancy of presiding over a residual world. Gaskell first experimented with the ironical juxtaposition of pastoral and social realism in Mary Barton's holiday opening. This juxtaposition attempts to re-educate the (middle-class) reader's eye, to banish the complacent distance of the picturesque and magnify the laboring classes from pastoral fixtures to fully-realized characters. Cranford, however, is more complex. Its mood of reminiscence and regret is tempered but not negated by the penetrating irony of Mary Smith's narration, and the pathos of privation is never entirely demeaned by the magnitude of Cranfordian snobbery. Unlike Mary Barton, Cranford does not propose social realism as the necessary corrective aesthetic to an indulgent nostalgia.

The informal title "The Cranford Papers" also places the novel within the Victorian comic tradition of Pierce Egan, Robert Smith Surtees, and Dickens. Like the Pickwickians and the heroes of other sporting novels, the ladies of Cranford are members of a kind of gender-exclusive club. The difference, of course, lies in the fact that the adventures of gentlemen's clubs, almost always of the gallivanting kind, rely upon mobility, whereas the "adventures" of Cranford derive their comedy from the almost complete inertia, indeed the very sleepiness, of the spinsters. This comic aspect of the book is critical (especially given Captain Brown's fatal fondness for Dickens) to the dispute over Boz and Dr. Johnson. As Hilary Schor has convincingly argued, the relationship between Rasselas, Cranford, and Pickwick Papers is as much about female authorship as it is about a precise moment of literary-historical transition. To read the death of Captain Brown as the symbolic submission of the age of Dickens to the age of Johnson and Jane Austen, as Valentine Cunningham does (142), is surely mistaken. Indeed, to read it as anything but Pickwickian is to overlook the debt Captain Brown owes to Sam Weiler (see ). Nor does the Captain's demise spell the end of the matter by any means, as the arrival of another Sam and another Brown—Signor Brunoni—makes clear.

Cranford is also nowhere. It is not simply an escapist provincial idyll, but, in the tradition of Utopian discourse, a nexus of the social, the political, and the imaginary. The town can hardly be said to provide an exemplary existence, however. Its comic and sentimental elements intercept any genuinely prescriptive utopianism with their emphasis on the town's ineffectualness and indulgence. Cranford is an ironical utopia in which the optimism vested in an imaginary future—in fact, futurity itself—is played off against the eternal senility of its inhabitants and the impossibility of procreation. As Miss Pole wryly observes:

"As most of the ladies of good family in Cranford were elderly spinsters, or widows without children, if we did not relax a little, and become less exclusive, by-and-by we should have no society at all." (109)

Cranford is a fantasy of the social and political empowerment of women alone and it is at the same time a caricature of (comfortable middle-class female) everyday life in Victorian England, devoted to the filling-in of time. It is a utopia of the superfluous. This idealism, problematic at the very least, contributes to an effect of incoherence and open-endedness, and to the impression that such a place cannot be sustained, such a text cannot be satisfactorily concluded. There is no future in Cranford. When in North and South (1855) John Thornton confesses to Margaret Hale that commercial ill-fortune has made of his middle age a "starting-point which requires the hopeful energy of youth" (528), Gaskell is providing the convenient stimulus to matrimony without which that novel cannot end. But what is to happen after the end of Cranford? There, the future is so empty of promise that it represents only a return to "the old friendly sociability" (218). As Mary Smith notes of her return to the town in Chapter Two, there "had been neither births, deaths, nor marriages since I was there last. Everybody lived in the same house, and wore pretty nearly the same well-preserved, old-fashioned clothes" (52). Cranford stands still in Mary's absence, in a state of perfect preservation, like a tourist destination. Indeed, she is something of a tourist narrator (as Hilary Schor notes, "we are reading her holiday self [299]) and she animates by her narratorial presence the waiting town. Thus, Cranford can claim none of the roundedness of the pastoral tale: the spinsters' unfinished sentences and imperfectly-realized tales suggest a trailing off, and the novel's ending, far from delivering any sort of resolution, simply ends. Gaskell's own long silences during the protracted serial publication, when she was engaged with the writing of Ruth, indicate that she, like Mary Smith, was often unavoidably delayed in Drumble on business. If Cranford must end, it does so in the service of other weightier matters, of which North and South was perhaps the weightiest.

But the concerns of social realism are not entirely absent from Cranford, in spite of critics' claims that the "retreat to Cranford is an escape from the city, atheism, Dissent, the age of railways, the present" (Cunningham 142). The novel does not depict a sentimental preindustrial existence, a golden age. This may be "the last generation of England," but it is placed alongside Victoria's generation, the generation of North and South. Pastoral, history, and social realism are all complicated by the geographical propinquity of Cranford and Drumble. The rigorously excluded historical "present" which abuts the present of Cranford represents an entire world of commerce, manufacture, engineering, and imperialism, all of which are gathered under the masculine. This is the muscular Victorianism of Mr. Holbrook's Locks ley Hall with its conception of the machine of progress fuelled by sexual distrust, class anger, and racial superiority. But fear of the foreignness of men in Cranford also finds its way into a kind of sexual xenophobia: the exoticism of the gender, and, by extension, of Victorianism, is registered as orientalism. This oriental exoticism is adumbrated in Captain Brown, acted out by Signor Brunoni (who was "like a being from another sphere" [134]), and literally realized in the brown-skinned Aga Jenkyns ("like dear Captain Brown" [94]) and others of his tribe. The threat of the irruptive, oracular male is constantly posited and deflected.¹³ On meeting the major, Matty is reminded of Bluebeard, and on meeting Signor Brunoni, Miss Pole is reminded of the heroes of popular romances: "He spoke such pretty broken English, I could not help thinking of Thaddeus of Warsaw, and the Hungarian Brothers, and Santo Sebastiani" (130). The speech and writing of men, often characterized as "cabbalistic," places them at the furthest remove from occidental Cranford. Inscriptions on tea-chests merge with Signor Brunoni and the Aga Jenkyns to symbolize this inscrutable foreigner. As Miss Matty nervously admits: "They are very incomprehensible, certainly!" (145). The panic (a threat of violent male incursion) subsides without incident, though, and Signor Brunoni turns out to be not a gypsy thief but an ailing Englishman. The colorful orientalism of his imperfect speech merges with the more general menace of men dressed as women, but both dissolve into benign feminine incapacitation. The ineffectual heroism of the male is also enacted in Mr. Holbrook, who looks like Mary Smith's "idea of Don Quixote" (73).

This feminization, a domestication of the foreign, only further undermines any fixed point of masculine-occidental authority. Additionally, the Cranfordians, with their "love of the marvellous" (155), are equally "oriental" (or Amazonian) to their distant male antagonists: "words that [Matty] would spell quite correctly in her letters to me, became perfect enigmas when she wrote to my father" (186). Moreover, when Peter returns from India with "more wonderful stories than Sinbad the Sailor" (211), he does not realize just how Cranfordian he is. Part Aga and part Amazon, he is a curious embodiment of the ladies' defeated aspirations. His youthful female impersonations are so unnerving because they represent two extremes of the woman who is defined outside the home: the independent bluestocking passing through (94), and the fallen woman. These pantomimes are punished with Peter's expulsion, but it is an expulsion that takes him to the place he belongs. Unlike Ruth Hilton, whom he might also be impersonating, Peter is, one might say, cast in. When he returns to Cranford he assumes control of the novel's story-telling and the town's social diplomacy, earning only Mary's reproach: "he laughed at my curiosity, and told me stories that sounded so very much like Baron Munchausen's, that I was sure he was making fun of me" (208). In his bravura performances, still calculated to give the ladies something to talk about, he becomes only another taleteller in a novel so notable, as Nina Auerbach has argued, for embellishment and deceit. He divides his stories into the fantastic and the factual strictly along the lines of gender: "when the rector came to call, Mr. Peter talked in a different way about the countries he had been in" (211). His gesture to the Cranford historian—"[d]on't be shocked, prim little Mary, at all my wonderful stories" (217)—is surely ultimately Mary's victory over his autocracy of the tale, for he cannot know the centrality and power of story in the lives of these women.

The double expulsion from Cranford of men and "the world," obscuring as it does distinctions of gender, race, and class, correspondingly obscures the opposition between private and public. Novels, like museums, imply that the materials of privacy can be made publicly available. Yet both also imply certain (clearly or obscurely defined) prohibitions upon that availability. Prohibition, as Lefebvre writes, "is the reverse side and the carapace of property"; and "the symbol of this constitutive repression is an object offered up to the gaze yet barred from any possible use, whether this occurs in a museum or in a shop window" (319). In reversing the spatial prohibition imposed on women which restricts them to the home. Cranford's exclusionary space, and its critique of the usefulness of domestic things, accentuates the hinge between the home and the world which operates in Victorian fiction at large.

The relationship between private lives and historical forces, then, which social realism formally invokes and which Gaskell makes the overt thesis of North and South, is under suspension in Cranford. The "condition of England" novel is anxious to demonstrate how public issues are susceptible of treatment (and I intend here also the therapeutic sense of that word) by the domestic romance. This is perhaps best exemplified in the most memorable incident in North and South, the encounter between Margaret Hale and John Thornton on the steps of his house. Critical to this scene is the heroine's emergence from the house, which puts into dramatic shorthand the function of the street door in any representation of the passage of the woman into public life. The transition from the domestic interior (here literally a sanctuary against chaos and destruction) to the mob outside is a disturbingly immediate transition from the sphere of private relations to the sphere of public experience. As more than one critic has remarked, the confrontation is a problematic one, and its consequences for the fate of the novel's romantic plot are far-reaching (see ; and ). Most disturbing is Gaskell's inversion of the relationship between domestic romance and history. Instead of momentous public conflicts finding their way into the parlors of fiction on the boots of the men, as it were, the woman steps out from the parlor into history. It is a bold move on Margaret's part, certainly, but the image of emergence is also fraught with sexual confusion and threat. The threat is to the workers, who respond to her misplacement by protecting her from themselves; and the confusion is experienced by Thornton, who construes Margaret's unconscious motives as personal (that is, as romantic). Yet for all its radicalism, the only real effect of Margaret's actions is the advancement of the romantic plot. As Barbara Harman argues, "Margaret's act is particularly acute in light of the fact that on one reading she reverses the conventional understanding of gender relations (in which men take public stands on behalf of women, not women on behalf of men) and on the other she reinstates it (women convert even political events into romantic ones, public events into private ones)" (368).

Compare this incident and the moment when Miss Matty Jenkyns realizes she may have to confront the directors of the lately collapsed Town and County Bank in Cranford This scenario is only entertained for its comic incongruity, of course. Idealizing the notion of shareholding, Miss Matty imagines the corporation as a group of individuals like herself. Yet her duty to honor the stranger's valueless bank note at Mr. Johnson's, while it reveals both her integrity and naivete, also represents her assumption of a public role. Her loss of property in the collapse of the bank is figured as a sentimental loosening of the "bonds" of the world. The decision of the ladies of Cranford to meet and take responsibility for Miss Matty's financial welfare is central to the town's installation of its own versions of the public institutions that violate its borders. Like "the great Cranford parliament," the first annual general meeting of the genteel shareholders and Miss Matty's foray into "trade" are both examples of the Republic of Cranford's appropriation of the notion of "joint stock."

The ambivalence of Margaret Hale's appearance on the stage of industrial relations, which debases public intervention into a masquerade of romance, resurfaces as a central problem in Cranford. A man may be "so in the way in the house" (39), and Cranford is after all a kind of vast house, that his absence empties the domestic space of all its potential as a point of convergence of public and private. As Mr. Smith's attitude to the tea-shop Miss Matty opens makes clear, hers is only a toy institution:

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. (201)

Likewise, the Cranfordians have their adventures, but they are only pretend adventures, without real villains or heroines. Under the hegemony of the drawing room, a hegemony of privacy, women in the novel play at politics, finance, and trade. Mary Smith's assessment of Mr. Holbrook's inhospitable parlor holds too for Drumble: "It was the smarter place; but, like most smart things, not at all pretty, or pleasant, or home-like" (74). Cranford's "incorporation" of public affairs and commerce by domesticity is simultaneously a drama of their devaluation by the home-like. Cranford's autonomy is finally achieved in its independent economic order, but the sacrifice of an acknowledged hierarchy of public and private (in effect Cranford's sacrifice of its men) reduces its institutions to tea parties and its commodities to trinkets.

Its collection of trinkets, however, is precisely what makes Cranford so radical a novel. Far from being limited to the function of setting or local color, objects enter the narrative-historical dimension of the novel in two ways. Each object is described with special attention to its historical moment, so that the history of the town is related to the acquisition, relinquishment, and recollection of material tokens. And secondly, narration and materiality are fundamentally affined in Cranford Mary Smith collects anecdotes and gathers them into the text like the little hanks of string "picked up and twisted together, ready for uses that never come" (83). No article is of so little value that it cannot be saved, or adapted to another use, or refashioned, and everything is precisely and individually accounted for by narration, observation, comment, chatter: "I had often occasion to notice," Mary remarks, "the use that was made of fragments and small opportunities in Cranford" (54). Fragments and small opportunities do not constitute the novel's background, but its very structure. The most valued possession is story itself, exchanged with a reverence for the magic with which it bestows the power of dispensing with event. So little actually happens in Cranford that its most valuable currency is language, and "happenings" become important only in their exchangeable form, as stories. Discourse displaces experience in episodes of reading and writing, talking and listening, recalling and recounting. That property can be vested not in houses but in what is material and potential—bodies, things, and voices—is also made clear in Gaskell's industrial novels. In Mary Barton, as Gillian Beer points out, Gaskell "uses individual speech-styles, Manchester songs, life-narratives, in ways that suggest she is trying to make her middle class readers hear and pay attention to living working class speech" (243). Writing novels about "these dumb people" (as Gaskell calls them in the author's preface to Mary Barton) presented the Victorian reader with something strikingly novel: "things nameless" (Beer 243).

What is unnamed in Mary Barton's Manchester is succeeded by what is unspoken in Cranford. As romantic intimacy is censured in the town, an effect of the tireless maintenance of class barriers, so "smallness" of voice is privileged. Captain Brown's first and most telling transgression is vocal: he speaks "in a voice too large for the room" (43). The distaste of the Cranfordians for personal disclosure, which results in the oppressive ritualization of speech and writing, does not, however, foreclose sympathy. Language, destitute of the power of intimacy, is redirected into communal mythologizing. The reiteration of a common voice, like the individualized voice of the working class or the voice of the fallen woman, transforms personal events into history. By standing in for each other as historians—Miss Pole narrates the history of Matty and Mr. Holbrook, Matty narrates the history of Deborah, and so forth—the ladies of Cranford are able to transcend a notion central to the development of omniscient narration in the novel and in the writing of history: that authentic utterance and private experience are only accessible to the unified self that is implicit in a consistent governing voice. The choice of narrator is crucial to this critique of narrative discourse and private life. The delimiting structure of romance is impugned by Gaskell's installation of a key figure who is able to represent both narrative authority and its revocation. That figure is Mary Smith.

Cranford's narrator, one of the novel's few mobile women, is also conspicuously without property. She lives in her father's house, or stays in any spare accommodation that Cranford can afford. Moving about between rooms, however, enables her to achieve multiple perspectives on the town: "It was impossible to live a month at Cranford, and not know the daily habits of each resident" (49). The fact that Mary alternates between Drumble and Cranford, an outsider and a native, permits Gaskell to cultivate a narrative tone of affection mingled with gentle mockery. "How naturally one falls back into the phraseology of Cranford!" (42). But there are two Mary Smiths, for each of whom a different phraseology is appropriate. We do not have the sense of two selves ironically interleaved into the narrative, as in such first-person Bildungsromane as Jane Eyre or Great Expectations. Mary develops from an unidentified narrator into a poorly-defined character. Her development, it has been argued, is made possible by the benevolent and redemptive atmosphere of Cranford unconsciously presided over by Miss Matty (see Dodsworth). But she is neither omniscient nor properly a character, and the question of what she represents as a narrator returns us to the question of where she belongs in the book (for an excellent discussion of Mary Smith's role in the novel, see Gillooly). There is no sense of an older, more mature Mary, but neither is there a sense of her immaturity; she is young, in that she represents the next generation, but she seems ageless. Finally, she is not "above" the text in the way that an omniscient narrator is, by virtue of superior knowledge of the plot's outcome; yet she can judge, interject, comment, as though she were not herself a part of the narrated world. In both senses of the phrase, she sometimes looks in on Cranford.

Yet it can also be argued that Mary does not really fall back into the phraseology of Cranford at all. In a novel notable as much for its female impersonators as for its surrogate male authority figures, Mary is perhaps its most complete male impersonator. Her educated tone and easy habit of allusiveness (most unprovincial, where provincial equals feminine) provide an ironic relief to the sometimes pompous and mostly faltering speech of Cranford. She faintly ridicules Deborah's anachronistic Johnsonian convolutions, but is herself presented with "the handsomest bound and best edition of Dr Johnson's works" (210), a prize befitting Deborah's successor. She never fails to point out Miss Matty's bad spelling (52) or her tendency to begin "many sentences without ending them, running them one into another, in much the same confused sort of way in which written words run together on blotting-paper" (128). Nor do the horizontal and perpendicular tangents of Miss Pole and Mrs. Forrester (163-64) escape her notice. But her own text is both truly Johnsonian and Cranfordian. Remembering the announcement of Lady Glenmire's marriage to Mr. Hoggins, she writes: "the contemplation of it, even at this distance of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I subdue my emotion, my spelling will go too" (165). The irony here is directed at the spinsters' reception of this "stupendous" news, but also against herself and her makeshift style. This easy compatibility is perhaps her most remarkable quality as a narrator, and it makes her abrogation of narratorial authority seem inevitable. No symptom of self-repression (as in the case of Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë's Villette) this abrogation is rather a gesture of community. Mary consistently hands over to the ladies of Cranford their own narration, relinquishing her role as historian and allowing a more radical form of history to be written. Her narrative is like the letter she sends to Peter, "familiar and commonplace," which once out of her hands has adventures of its own: "It was gone from me like life—never to be recalled" (182). As Hilary Schor has shown, the tension between the Johnsonian and the Cranfordian is a tension between an inherited masculine grammar ("My father recommended it to me when I began to write letters,—I have formed my own style upon it" [48]) and the style that Mary Smith clearly indulges, that informed by Cranford's peculiar "leisure for the delights of perplexity" (174).

Critical to the history Gaskell is proposing, finally, is the powerful ubiquity of the narrating present. The moment of recounting, of bringing into voice, imports the past into utterance with an immediacy that is startling and sometimes violent. This is what invests the "old things" of the novel (the very materiality of its story-artefacts) with the keenness of perfect preservation, as in the old Jenkyns letters: "There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away" (85). As James (in The Turn of the Screw) and Conrad (in Heart of Darkness) were later to do, Gaskell experiments with the tension between utterance and event by exploring ways of clearing a space for narration. Matty prepares to tell the story of Peter's exile by sending Martha away, locking the door, and putting the candle out (95): the tale is told in a darkness that obscures place and time. Matty's sense of the theatricality of narration, her relish of story-telling, is attested to by the very violence of the tale, at once so present and so distant. Stories are adventures.

In summary, then, Cranford's collection of stories and women, curios both, do not belong in the world to which the narration is directed. That commercial world, belonging to the Londoner of Chapter One and the Mr. Smiths of Drumble, ridicules the novel's and the town's seemingly valueless modes of exchange, of which the most important is the exchange of stories. The structure of Gaskell's bazaar draws attention to relationships between men and the imperative of classification and history, narrative order and development: the progress of the tale, like the progress of the hero, is explicable in terms of the related public enterprises of commerce, museology, and history. Cranford' s interrogation of gender, materiality, and history is consequently overlooked by those celebrations of its charm which finally debase both its "elegant economy" and its narrative economy. But the novel finally questions the authority of any such critical position. It carries the Victorian orthodoxy of the separate spheres to its logical conclusion by imagining a world in which sexual division is so absolute as to be experienced as geographical segregation. This enables Gaskell to interrogate imaginatively the myth of the parallel existence of the sexes precisely at the point when Victorian middle-class women were undermining it by initiating public debate on these issues. Eschewing polemic, Cranford' s nervous sexual apartheid simply explodes the rhetoric of separateness by establishing a kind of omnipotence of the powerless: the town is at once marginal and total, excluded and exclusive. It is a world which relocates "the world" on its outskirts (as the Amazons might phrase it), and allows a radical revision of the formal authority of the masculine and the occidental in the writing of private life. To return to the paradox with which I began: Cr anford is removed from the central issues of Victorianism yet, almost from the day of its publication, it has occupied a privileged place in representations of the Victorian. It is clearly not entirely an isolated and discontinuous text, but rather highlights the complex negotiations throughout Victorian fiction between private enclosures and public realms, domestic and public spaces. In this lies the significance of those scenes where the narrative lingers at the town's thresholds: Mr. Holbrook's house; the public-house "standing on the high road to London, about three miles from Cranford" (152) where Samuel Brown breaks down; and Mary's long pause at the post-box.

Notes

¹ Martin Tropp, for instance, comments that Dickens's "marvellous construction [Bleak House], like Paxton's, both contained and symbolized a world" (68).

² See Briggs on Peter Conrad on the Great Exhibition (54). Briggs also writes how "Dostoievsky found it 'astonishing.' 'You gasp for breath.' 'It is like a Biblical picture, something out of Babylon'" (59). Macaulay, too, thought it "beyond the dreams of the Arabian romances" (qtd. in Priestley 78). Jones's Eastern design is discussed in Sweetman 128-30.

³ Richard Altick discusses the Chinese Exhibition showing in London in 1841-3, and the Junk Keying, which arrived nearly three years after it embarked from Hong Kong (292-97).

⁹ Women were excluded from the anthropological enterprise at least in part because they were (again, like the Chinese) among its principal objects of study. The rise of social anthropology in the mid-century, and the social Darwinism of anthropologists such as Maine, McLennan and Spencer all forwarded the belief that, in Elizabeth Fee's words, "patriarchalism was . . . inextricably linked with the progress of civilization" (38).

¹⁰ Lewis Hyde argues that "boys can still become men, and men become more manly, by entering the marketplace and dealing in commodities. A woman can do the same thing if she wants to, of course, but it will not make her feminine" (105).

¹¹ Andrew Miller calls Gaskell a "narrative bricoleur"; as well as bricolage, Cranford's form recalls that other Victorian artform practiced by Victorian women, decoupage.

¹² "If Cranford's narrative is cohesive, its unifying principles derive more from the circumscribed stasis associated with spinsterhood than from precepts of conventional narrative linearity" (Boone 296). Andrew Miller asserts that "Gaskell carefully interweaves stories of detection and financial failure in two linear plots" which contest what he calls the "'recursive' movement of narratives of everyday life." Eileen Gillooly argues that Cranford, "strung and knotted together by the association and repetition of trope and event, loosely tied by episodic moments rather than driven by inexorable plot, stands as an attempt to connect with the lost source of nurturance, the preoedipal mother. . . . Put another way, in being preoedipal, non-linear, non-phallocentric, the narrative denies the authority of the Law that has superseded the mother's presence" (903-04).

¹³ Auerbach goes further, claiming Cranford has an "unsettling power to obliterate men" and a "corresponding gift of producing them at need" (81).

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