Cranford
Elizabeth Gaskell 1851
This novel follows the daily lives of women in a small English town. Miss Matty's tea shop reveals a shopkeeper more worried about her customers than her profits.
259 pages 5h 2m reading time
- One of the best-loved English novels about small-town life, and a classic of gentle Victorian comedy.
- Shows a town run almost entirely by women, who keep up careful rules of manners and pride to hide how little money they have.
- Suggests that kindness and loyalty among neighbors matter more than wealth or social rank, as the town's women quietly rally around a friend in trouble.
- Its picture of a quiet community facing a changing, industrial world has made "Cranford" a byword for old-fashioned English village life.
- It has stayed popular enough to inspire stage versions and a widely watched BBC television series in 2007.
Dickens changed a joke
Charles Dickens, editing the first episode, swapped out praise of his own "Pickwick Papers," which annoyed Gaskell.
Meant as one story
Gaskell first planned a single short sketch, then kept adding new episodes over the next two years.
Came out in pieces
It first appeared bit by bit in "Household Words," the weekly magazine Dickens edited, before becoming a book.
Based on her hometown
Cranford is modeled on Knutsford in Cheshire, the small town where Gaskell grew up with her aunt.