An 'episodic' novel (constructed from linked short stories which were originally published in a series in Household Words, the magazine edited by Dickens; Mrs G made sure she plugged the editor's Pickwick Papers - perhaps her archetype: another episodic comic novel - and his Christmas Carol).
It's very gentle, making a Jane Austen novel seem rugged around the edges. Cranford is a small town whose population consists almost entirely of gentlefolk, almost all of whom are women (and most of those seem to be unmarried). There is a great emphasis on propriety: little breaches of etiquette will be gossipped about for weeks and might lead to social exclusion. Nevertheless, right from the start, there are those who through ignorance or carelessness flout the rules of civilised behaviour from motives of kindness, generosity and great-heartedness and the narrator (anonymous almost to the end) recognises that this makes the perpetrator of these social sins a better person.
The ladies are mostly caricatures, drawn with nothing like the gothic exuberance of Dickens but nevertheless subtly ridiculous. For example, Miss Matty has a horror of men and green tea; a couple of burglaries in the neighbourhood sends the entire flock of human hens into a frenzy of clucking; the perfomance of a conjuror is both exciting and scary. Nevertheless, despite the comedy, the author always has empathy for her creations: these are people, sometimes silly but fundamentally good. And when there is need, the community comes together as best it can to help.
Cranford is a microcosm of a hugely conservative society threatened by change. A railway is being built (against the nimby wishes of the ladies). Literature is changing from the Augustan elegance of Dr Johnson's Rasselas to the boisterous popularism of The Pickwick Papers. A bank fails, destroying the (unearned) income of one of the characters and reducing her to poverty and the shocking necessity of earning her living.
It is a soft book, suffused with kindness, carefully told.
Selected quotes:
- In Cranford “economy was always ‘elegant’, and money spending always ‘vulgar and ostentatious’; a sort of sour grapism which made us very peaceful and satisfied.” (Ch 1)
- “We were none of us musical, though Miss Jenkins beat time, out of time, by way of appearing to be so.” (Ch 1)
- “Correspondence ... bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plants ... do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows.” (Ch 3)
- “I have often noticed that almost every one has his own individual small economies - careful habits of saving fractions of pennies in some one peculiar direction - any disturbance of which annoys him more than spending shillings or pounds on some real extravagance.” (Ch 5)
- “Men will be men. every mother's son of them wishes to be considered Samson and Solomon rolled into one - too strong ever to be beaten or discomfited - too wise ever to be outwitted. If you will notice, they have always foreseen events, though they never tell one for one’s warning before the events happen. My father was a man, and I know the sex pretty well.” (Ch 10)
- “The old story, you know, of ladies always saying, ‘When I marry’, and gentlemen, ‘If I marry’.” (Ch 11)
- “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 had happened. It would be to some people rather a sad way of telling their lives.” (Ch 11)
- “At this charitable committee, every lady took the subject uppermost in her mind, and talked about it to her own great contentment, but not much to the advancement of the subject they had met to discuss.” (Ch 12)
- “Mr Hoggins ... creaked up the middle aisle at church in a bran-new pair of top boots ... the boots he had worn till now were the identical pair in which he first set out on his rounds in Cranford twenty-five years ago; only they had been new-pieced, high and low, top and bottom, heel and sole, black leather and brown leather, more times than any one could tell.” (Ch 12) The Ship of Theseus otherwise known as Trigger’s Broom!
- “I'll not listen to reason ... Reason always means what some one else has got to say.” (Ch 14)
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