Cranford (Gaskell, 1853)

Elizabeth Gaskell. Cranford. Pub. 1851-3. Ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson and Dinah Birch. Oxford World's Classics, 2011.

serialized in Household Words Dec 1851-May 1853, whilst Bleak House (1853) was being published
good for: material culture (esp. ch. 5 but also everywhere, 111); performance of class (5); 110 transformation of serialized short fiction into a novelistic fiction while in process; 10 "vulgarity" of serialization vs. Rasselas; 35 Tennyson and Blackwood's; 59 Deborah becomes her father the rector's secretary (reading, writing, copying) as Casaubon wants Dorothea to do, but here more limitedly, in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)

General

Forster a fan (Intro)
4 positioning the audience as urban: "Have you any red silk umbrellas in London?"
also not talking about money and the class contrast with commerce and trade prefiguring North and South (Gaskell, 1855)
5 vulgarity, "elegant economy" keywords
6 protesting against the train - modernity
69 the old arbiters of gentility struggling with forms of address
76 the poorness of the peeress Lady Glenmire reassures them
83 the range of superstitious beliefs when Brunoni the magician comes (which registers for Marty in not calling the drips of candle wax "winding sheets" but "rolley-polleys")
- persistence of oral, old culture: Walter Benjamin#Storyteller, St Clair 2004
105 Miss pole: "it argued a great natural credulity in a woman if she could not avoid getting married"
106 Matty's sad, diffident monologue about what could have been
110 by this point you really get the novel-ization of the disconnected stories
122 interesting - Matty a shareholder in a bank that might go bust - makes me think of Trollope probably, or the Holmes story with the captain and the son trying to prove his banker father wasn't a fraud
140 the loss of caste involved in the plan for Matty to start selling tea
141 Lady Glenmire's change of caste as Mrs Higgins too
the conclusion is doubly satisfying because we have the emotional return of Peter but he's not the feud ex machine: the women collectively figured out a solution for Matty that worked before he came

10-11 scene in which Capt Brown reads aloud from Pickwick and Miss Jenkyns dismisses it as not as good as Johnson's Rasselas: "I consider it vulgar, and beneath the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers." St Clair 2004
14 Ms Deborah Jenkyns's letters "stately and grand, like herself"
18 Capt Brown is struck and killed by a train whilst reading, presumably a new number of Pickwick?
23 Galignani's newspaper for English men abroad brings Maj Gordon home to propose to Jessie Brown
33 Mr Holbrook's messy library
35 he quotes Alfred Tennyson and went to buy his book after reading a review in blackwood's
43ff reading and sorting old letters
46 the Jenkyns's father the Rector having his sermon printed
50-1 Peter Jenkyns's "awful preparations" with dictionaries and lexicons when studying with his father
59 Deborah becomes her father the rector's secretary (reading, writing, copying) as Casaubon wants Dorothea to do, but here more limitedly, in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
72 making candle lighters from old notes and letters
74 the women pay quarter shares for the St James's chronicle, and the footman Mr Mulliner bogarts it and aggravates Miss Pole
84 reading from the old encyclopedia
117 the importance Matty and Mary set by getting letters in the post
127 narrator imagining the "familiar" letter being tossed on the sea on the way to india

cross ref with Schaffer 2011 on handicraft
so. Much. Fabric.
42 string vs rubber bands
the whole of ch 5 is framed through object relations/economy
78-9 amazing story about a cat eating Mrs Forester's lace collar
111 memory inhering in objects, as Ms Pole remembering Peter being seen in India. Excuse of her Indian Muslim gown from the same year
129 what Matty would have to do not to "materially lose caste" when she loses her money

14 plumed wars Othello
33 Mr Holbrook's apt quotations from shakespeare and Herbert (the narrator compares him at least twice to Don Quixote)
63 narrator "my prophetic soul" hamlet
110 "as somebody says, that was the question" Hamlet - when they're wondering if Aga Jenkyns is Peter