Cranford
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Summary
Cranford is narrated by Mary Smith, a young woman from nearby Drumble, the manufacturing city Gaskell modelled on Manchester who visits often enough to become a fond, slightly amused observer of a small Cheshire town run almost entirely by women, most of them widowed or unmarried and practising what the book calls "elegant economy," the art of appearing to have more than they do. At the centre is Miss Matty Jenkyns, gentle, unworldly and financially fragile, whose story threads through the book's loosely connected episodes: the disruption caused by the arrival of a plainspoken army officer, Captain Brown; the return of Miss Matty's long lost brother Peter from India, adventures and all; and, most seriously, a bank failure that wipes out Miss Matty's savings, met by the town's women quietly organising to support her rather than let her fall into real poverty. There is no single plot pulling the book forward; instead Gaskell builds a portrait of a community through its habits, its gossip and its small rituals, and the effect accumulates into genuine warmth rather than mere charm.
Readers expecting incident should recalibrate: Cranford's pleasures are in its voice and its precise social comedy rather than in event, and it rewards being read slowly, a chapter at a sitting, closer to how its first readers received it. Gaskell wrote from close knowledge of her own hometown of Knutsford, and the town's specificity, its shops, its rules of visiting, its women's practical solidarity, is drawn from lived observation rather than invention.
It appeared originally in scattered instalments over roughly eighteen months, with an eight month gap partway through, before Gaskell was persuaded, by her editor, to extend it into the fuller book now read.
Historical Context & Significance
Serialised in Household Words, the magazine Charles Dickens edited, from December 1851 to May 1853, Cranford was not widely reviewed on first publication, but Dickens himself encouraged Gaskell to keep returning to the material and expand what began as a single story into a longer sequence. It found its wider readership later, gaining popularity from the 1890s onward through illustrated editions that emphasised its nostalgic, gently comic portrait of a vanishing provincial England.
The BBC produced a four part television adaptation in 1972, and a more elaborate 2007 dramatisation, combining Cranford with material from three other Gaskell works, brought the book to a much wider modern audience, followed by a two part sequel, Return to Cranford, at Christmas 2009. The novel is now read as a quiet but serious study of how a community of women without husbands or much money sustained itself and each other, a subject Gaskell treats with far more social observation than its comic surface first suggests.