Tristram Shandy's Reviews > Cranford

“’It is very pleasant dining with a bachelor,’ said Miss Matty softly, as we settled ourselves in the counting-house. ‘I only hope it is not improper; so many pleasant things are!’”

Unfortunately, a lot of pleasant things are considered either improper, or unhealthy (I cannot help wondering if “unhealthy” may not have become our new “improper” in an age where people require new bogeymen to be made to toe the line) but in the microcosm of Cranford, the fictitious small town Elizabeth Gaskell created in her eponymous novel that appeared in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853, propriety was circumscribed even more narrowly and scrupulously than it may have been in other, larger places in England at the same time. In this country town, where time has come to a standstill, it is a circle of widowed or unmarried elderly ladies who call the shots, namely Miss Debora Jenkyns, the eldest daughter of the late rector, her sister Matilda, who stands in great awe of Debora, the gossip Miss Pole, Mrs. Forrester, a major’s widow, and the fat and phlegmatic Mrs. Jamieson, who is not only the daughter of a governor but also the widow of a born-and-bred baron and is therefore, despite her lack of conversational or intellectual power, considered the absolute court of appeal in questions of social etiquette. It is on the grounds of Mrs. Jamieson’s verdict, for instance, that another of the ladies in Cranford, Mrs. Fitz-Adam, is not admitted into the genteel circle because Mrs. Fitz-Adam may now be a wealthy widow but her husband’s money was accumulated in trade and after all, she is the local doctor’s sister, whose name is Hoggins, which, to Mrs. Jamieson’s ears, is rather plebeian a name.

If you now think that at the centre of this tale there is a bunch of haughty, snobbish and self-complacent women, you have jumped to conclusions because most of the characters described by Elizabeth Gaskell, and viewed through the eyes of the narrator Mary Smith, a young woman living in the industrial town Drumble but a frequent guest in the Jenkyns’ house, here are actually very likeable beneath their shell of quaintness. Take Debora Jenkyns, for example: On the one hand, she is utterly prim and proper, highly opinionated and always ready to impose on her sister, but then she also has a clever head on her shoulders. This is how the narrator sees her,

”I secretly think she took the Hebrew prophetess for a model in character; and, indeed, she was not unlike the stern prophetess in some ways, making allowance, of course, for modern customs and difference in dress. Miss Jenkyns wore a cravat, and a little bonnet like a jockey-cap, and altogether had the appearance of a strong-minded woman; although she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior.”

Or take her sister Matty, who is sometimes a little addle-brained and even more under the spell of her sister’s notions and principles after Debora’s demise than she was before – and yet is as kind-hearted as they come. The same goes for the, sometimes, annoying scandal-monger Miss Pole, who, when later financial disaster befalls her friend Miss Matty, is among the first ones to offer her help.

To call Cranford a novel is a bit like stretching a point in that there is no real through-going plot but we have, instead, a number of episodes linked with each other, most of which are quite humorous but often seem to stress the obsession with old-fashioned social mores prevalent among the ladies of Cranford. And yet, there are signs of change even in this quiet and sleepy little country town, for when Mrs. Jamieson’s sister-in-law Lady Glenmire – whom she tried to shield from any contact with her friends on account of her relation’s nobility – falls in love with and eventually marries Dr Hoggins, the dismayed Mrs. Jamieson fails to get her friends’ support in ousting Lady Glenmire, now Mrs. Hoggins, from genteel society. Another sign of a more modern approach to society, for instance in comparison with the novels by Jane Austen, where nothing ever happens apart from genteel ladies’ problems being seen to, is that in Gaskell’s tales about Cranford, the town that sets so much store by class distinctions, the so-called lower classes also get a lot of room and sympathy, as for instance with Miss Matty’s maid Martha, who goes out of her way in order to help her mistress go through hard times.

There may not be a lot of suspense in these cosy little tales about Cranford, but they provide a good impression of what rural life must have been in the first half of the 19th century, and they doubtless will often put a smile on your face or even make you laugh out loud, as for instance, did Miss Pole’s admonitory words on men to me, with which I am going to conclude this at times sesquipedalian (a word I learnt from this novel and urged to put to use) review,

”’[W]ell, Miss Matty! 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.’”