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Cranford (1851-53) by Elizabeth Gaskell is a collection of interconnected sketches, originally published in Dickens's Household Words, about the fictional small town of Cranford in the English Midlands — a town dominated by the 'Amazons,' a community of middle-aged and elderly women of limited means who maintain a strict code of gentility and support each other through the changes that the Victorian railway age is bringing to their world. The narrator, Mary Smith, visits Cranford from her home in the larger town of Drumble (Manchester) and observes the lives of Miss Matty Jenkyns and her sister Miss Deborah, their neighbors, and the whole small social world of the town. The book is simultaneously warmly comic (the ladies' genteel economies and social strategies are gently observed) and quietly moving (the novel's later sections, in which Miss Matty faces financial ruin and is saved by the community's collective generosity, are among the most affecting passages in Gaskell). It is the most beloved of Gaskell's works and one of the most unusual small masterpieces in Victorian fiction.
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Cranford (1851)
Complete Cranford Book List
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Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell·1851
Cranford — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Cranford a novel or a short story collection?
Cranford was originally published as a series of eight sketches in Charles Dickens's journal Household Words between 1851 and 1853, and then collected into a single volume. It has the structure of linked sketches — each section is relatively complete in itself — rather than a continuously plotted novel. The unity comes from the narrator (Mary Smith), the setting (Cranford), and the recurring characters (Miss Matty, Miss Deborah, Miss Pole, Mrs. Forrester, and others). Most readers experience it as a novel because the characters accumulate so vividly across the sections, but its origins in serial magazine publication give it a looser structure than Gaskell's formally plotted novels North and South or Mary Barton.
What is the relationship between Cranford and Dickens?
Gaskell published Cranford in Dickens's journal, and their relationship was both collegial and occasionally tense — Dickens was a demanding editor who sometimes altered her text without permission, and Gaskell found this frustrating. Dickens also serialized North and South in Household Words (1854-55) and objected to Gaskell's pacing. But his journals were important publishing platforms for her, and the Cranford sketches fit perfectly with the journal's emphasis on accessible, entertaining writing. The gentle comedy and emotional warmth of Cranford are related to but distinct from Dickens's own sketches of English social life.
What happens to Miss Matty in Cranford?
Miss Matty Jenkyns loses most of her savings when a bank fails — the colonial bank in which she has invested is ruined. The community of Cranford women rallies to support her: Miss Pole and others contribute from their own small means, and Mary Smith writes to her brother in India (who had lost his first love to Miss Matty's family's disapproval years ago) and he returns enriched and restores the family fortune. Miss Matty, meanwhile, opens a small tea shop in her drawing room to support herself — and the novel's portrait of her dignity, her gratitude, and the community's love for her in this episode is the emotional center of the book.
What other Gaskell novels should I read?
Gaskell wrote six novels: Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851-53), Ruth (1853), North and South (1854-55), Sylvia's Lovers (1863), and Wives and Daughters (1864-66, unfinished at her death). North and South is the most widely read of her full-scale novels — an industrial social novel organized around the contrast between the industrial North and the rural South, with one of her most interesting heroines in Margaret Hale. Wives and Daughters is considered by many critics her finest achievement — a rich, warm novel about provincial English life that was left unfinished and that is sometimes compared favorably with Middlemarch in its social comprehensiveness.
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