Cranford. By

Cranford is one of the better-known novels of the 19th-century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published, irregularly, in eight instalments, between December 1851 and May 1853, in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens. It was then published, with minor revision, in book form in 1853. The first instalment (in Household Words), which became the novel's first two chapters, was originally published "as a self-contained sketch", and the "irregular way" the further seven instalments were published suggests that it took Mrs Gaskell time to think of making this into a book. She was during this period busy writing the three volume novel Ruth, which was published January 1853. Cranford has been described as "practically structurelesss", and given the irregular nature of how it was first published, it is not surprising that it lacks unity. A. W. Ward describes the novel, as a "brief series of sketches, strung together with easy grace". The small country town of Cranford corresponds to Knutsford, Cheshire, where Elizabeth Gaskell had spent much of her childhood and where she returned after she married. However, the story's narrator comes from the nearby industrial city of Drumble, which corresponds to Manchester, where the author lived when writing the novel. There is no real plot, but rather a collection of satirical sketches, which sympathetically portray changing small town customs and values in mid Victorian England.[9] Harkening back to memories of her childhood in the small Cheshire town of Knutsford, Cranford is Elizabeth Gaskell's affectionate portrait of people and customs that were already becoming anachronisms............... Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, (née Stevenson, 29 September 1810 - 12 November 1865), often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography about Brontë. Some of Gaskell's best known novels are Cranford (1851-53), North and South (1854-55), and Wives and Daughters (1865). Gaskell was born Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson on 29 September 1810 at 93 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. She was the youngest of eight children; only she and her brother John survived infancy. Her father, William Stevenson, was a Scottish Unitarian minister at Failsworth, Lancashire, but resigned his orders on conscientious grounds and moved to London in 1806 with the intention of going to India after he was appointed private secretary to the Earl of Lauderdale, who was to become Governor General of India. That position did not materialise, however, and instead Stevenson was nominated Keeper of the Treasury Records. His wife, Elizabeth Holland, came from a family from the English Midlands that was connected with other prominent Unitarian families, including the Wedgwoods, the Martineaus, the Turners and the Darwins. When she died 13 months after giving birth to her youngest daughter, [1] she left a bewildered husband who saw no alternative for Elizabeth but to be sent to live with her mother's sister, Hannah Lumb, in Knutsford, Cheshire. While she was growing up Elizabeth's future was uncertain, as she had no personal wealth and no firm home, though she was a permanent guest at her aunt and grandparents' house. Her father married Catherine Thomson in 1814 and they had a son, William (born 1815), and a daughter, Catherine (born 1816). Although Elizabeth spent several years without seeing her father and his new family, her older brother John often visited her in Knutsford. John was destined for the Royal Navy from an early age, like his grandfathers and uncles, but he had no entry and had to join the Merchant Navy with the East India Company's fleet.....