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Cran Ford (changes)

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Pickwick Lookalike, begins as series of essays but then so popular they wind up to be a novel (not surprising that the economic form of writing—the one that depends on READER DEMAND for the product—is the one where STYLE and FORM are seen as the result of the movement of finance capital, like the world of capitalism is the world of Bildung, as the connected narrative, where pre-capitalism is the world of the episode. (Until capitalism can penetrate the narrative, it is piecemeal, the tempo of traditional life, determined by birth and death and meals: cycles.) Development as narrative style is the product of capital, both within the narrative and in regard to writer’s relationship to the text.

Some Characters

• Miss Jenkyns, the proper matron who goes around loving Johnson and proffering him as the perfect model, though the narrator pokes gentle fun at his “three-piled sentences” and roundabout rhetoric
• Captain Brown, one of the men whose incursions into Cranford provides a stimulus to an episode, prefers Dickens and makes Miss Jenkyns his mortal enemy by doing so. (He dies reading the latest volume of Pickwick.)
• Miss Matty Jenkyns, just another one of the old ladies until Gaskell wants there to be a plot kicked in, beginning at last third of book
• Thomas Holbrook, Miss Matty’s would-have-been suitor, but forbidden b/c of their snobbery. Visiting Paris kills him.
• Signor Brunoni, the traveling conjuror, who puts the neighborhood into a frenzy but just turns out to be a Samuel Brown by the end (he is domesticated and put into the matriarchal lineage through discovery of a wife and daughter who are put into the Cranford machine.)
• Mary Smith, the narrator, who shuttles (“vibrates”) from little Cranford to big Drumble (like Gaskell herself0

Themes

• Men: this book is about a group of Amazons, the narrator tells us in the first sentence of the book. Men are outlawed in order to outlaw the outside sociopolitical world Gaskell clearly wants a break from, but they keep coming in little by little, at tangents and always leaving again, until the true incursion of finance capital (bank failure) leads to the return of one of the book’s most notably missing men, Matty’s brother.
  • Says that eventually the domestic sphere will be DONE FOR, that we cannot ignore the outside world even though it is quainter to try to forget it.
  • How was it excluded? their pointed lack of invidious comparison, their refusal to talk about poverty and cost, leaving all the men except a doctor and a rector to go to the main town, Drumble, modeled after Manchester. They travel (Matty’s brother, Signor Brunoni), die (Mr. Holbrook, Captain Brown), stay in Drumble (Mary’s father)
  • It shows how Gaskell wants to turn back to her childhood for aesthetic inspiration, but how ultimately she will need Manchester.
    • It shows how she always has recourse to melodrama when the problems get too big for her. Melodrama solves Matty’s problem when finance capital reared its ugly head! Just like in Mary Barton.
    • Will North and South do so? Again tries to mix the middle class pastoral with Manchester by having the pastoral slash London upbrought heroine go to Manchester (Milford), but this time uses intellectual argumentation in place of melodrama and yields her best book. Even though the marriage plot does tend to make everything a little easier for Mrs Gaskell.
• Elegant Economy: 42: not allowed conspicuous consumption so everyone pretends they’re not genteelly out of funds, but instead that they prefer to walk, to have cotton gowns than silk, have less rich food; it’s about concealment
• Rapidly Changing England: the railroad is coming near, fashions are important (the scene in the shop, on their way upstairs to see the new fashions, Matty learns the bank has failed), Dickens versus Johnson
  • Old Cranford is “narrow, exclusive, indifferent” to outside world says editor, Peter Keating.
• Amazons
  • The matriarchy: mostly middle class woman
  • Eccentric individuals who know everything about each other
  • Rules and etiquette proliferate
  • Distaste for male company, which they find “vulgar” (notice this is an economic term)
• Tiny presents (the apple stuck with cloves) that Gaskell calls “fragments and small opportunities” (Miss Matty’s “spills” that look like feathers, her embroidered garters; Miss Pole’s famous bread-jelly)

Significance

• Positioned between Mary Barton and North and South, this book begins as a harmless, meaningless series of quaint vignettes about a world without consequence, but under the narrative pull of plot, the outer world besieges it and turns it into a narrative.
  • Disconnected stories of courting, birth, death, and child-rearing yield to an actual plot of struggle overcome through the incursion of finance capital (the failure of the joint-stock bank Miss Matty’s money is in, which is foreshadowed by the expected, old way of losing money: by roving gangs of robbers: which silly expectation is laughed at by Gaskell and the readers: but it soon replaced with the real form of disaster)
  • Once this occurs, melodrama sets in: the sacrifices of her maids and friends, yet also accompanied by a domesticated version of capital (Miss Matty’s tea and confit shop set up in her parlor)
  • But this is stopped by more melodrama: the rediscovery of the long-lost brother, who comes in with enough cash to set it straight
  • And then he solves the various inter-matronly disputes
• Commodities
  • Tons of them!
  • Miss Matty’s dreamed-of sea-green turban
  • Kalydor cosmetics
  • The new silks
  • Pearl necklace from India and other presents for Cranford ladies
  • Selling eggs, butter, tea, confits
  • Old lace (nun economy 125: made by nuns; can’t get it anywhere anymore)
  • Mrs. Jamieson’s delicate sugar-tongs for her tiny sugar cubes; her conversation-cards, puzzle-cards

• Quote: the maid Martha, who wants to stay with her mistress even though Matty can’t pay her wages anymore: “Reason always means what someone else has got to say” (183) (Gaskell’s typical critique of reason)