Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell 1851

I was born in 1956; Elizabeth's gently comic tale of a village mainly populated by ladylike but hard-up widows and spinsters is not historically remote. Miss Matty, Miss Pole and the rest practise 'genteel economy' employing 'one little charity school maid' and serving bread and butter thinly cut at their card-playing socials because they can't afford to bake loads of cake. When exciting events arrive, like the magician's performance at the Assembly Rooms, they splash out at the milliner's and order a new cap.

They are mainly kind and friendly, helping one another out when need occurs although there is a silly snobbery about social standing. Elizabeth's tone of good-humoured satire  combined with her very real empathy for the restrictedness of the ladies' lives hits the spot and apparently Cranford has its basis in Knutsford where the author was sent when young to a branch of her extended family when things fell apart at home. Her time there was largely happy.

Those limited lives. Women who did not know how to read a Phillips atlas or use a Phillips screwdriver, how could it have been different? Nineteen years later the Education Act of 1870 is passed. It became compulsory for all children between the ages of 5 and 13 to attend school. Where I live people are in no great hurry to get round to anything. Our first Council School opened in 1878.

Comments

Really enjoyed this Elsie. Very fond of Cranford and what the heck happened for eight years? 

 

Heck Vera I don't know!
 

I've never read the books, but I did watch a bit of Cranford. Can't say I was paricularly enthralled, but I'm sure the books are better, lives of quiet desperation.

 

I don't remember Cranford on TV though I could have easily missed it, CM. I remember Lark Rise to Candleford. Flora Thompson's trilogy was a lot better than the far too long TV series. Some quiet desperation with both authors and it sits unobtrusively behind the everyday matter of fact storytelling.
 

I loved those books of Elizabeth Gaskell's that I've read.  North and South being my favourite, Cranford and I think it was Imelda Staughton and Judi Dench who were the main characters in the TV series of that name.  I've also read Mary Barton, but I can't seem to remember much about it but that is no indication of the quality of the book more the quality, or lack of it,  of my memory. What always intrigued me about this author is that she is more often referred to as Mrs Gaskell. As far as I am aware the only female author referred to in this way.

Moya
 

 

Your comments are interesting, and the thought you've given to the book.
I'm often struck with the thought people gave at that time to what they had to say, and the authors to conveying so much of the situation, and indicating how they think around characters and actions. Of course they had so much more time! but it is so easy these days to rush off words with little thought about their accuracy or their intelligability to the listener or with little care about emptiness or ambiguity!  (esp thinking about the internet commenting on news stories, sadly!)

Rhiannon

 

Denzella, Mrs Gaskell was interesting! I liked North and South too, she tackled 'trouble at t'mill' with a real awareness of how exploited and angry poor people 'up North' often were. I think that a lot of women writers of that era were called Mrs if that was their marital status.  Jane Austen is more part of the 'literary canon' but her obsession with marriage to the right type of middle-class man as the ultimate reward for good conduct is an irritation, I prefer reality! Rhiannon you are right about people sometimes having more time in the old days to be good to one another.